“No. I don’t.”
“The decision doesn’t mention their names, but everybody around the courthouse knows it’s them. He took her to court about three years ago to try to stop her from having an abortion. Of course, it was thrown out. But I guess they kissed and made up. They’re still together. They say it made him suicidal, the powerlessness of it. He wanted to have the baby, but she felt she was too old to have another child. Anyway, she had a boob job right after the abortion. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard about it. I never saw his wife until tonight at the Green Room. She really is stunning. For a redhead.”
“I’d like to see Shy’s murder solved before breakfast,” I said. “He was closer to me than you realize. I’ve also got to pay attention as I drive. I’m a cop, and there’s a cop shooter out tonight.”
“Sorry.”
“When they start bringing in known cop haters and armed robbers, I’m certain Rocco would want me at least in on the interrogations. Maybe I’d better drop you off at your office.”
“Sergeant, you just can’t go around rounding up the usual suspects anymore. It’s not that way. Even suspects are now considered to be human beings, and I told you, I’m going to stick around. I’m not your date anymore tonight. In fact, I may shortly be in charge of this investigation.”
15
Two long columns of gray rubberized desks, nicked and scarred and each supporting a black telephone. A scattering of battered manual typewriters of mixed manufacture. The dicks. The big brown leather chair was gone, but not the dust. It was home sweet home. A large brown glass ashtray with cigar butts was where I knew it would be, where it had been for more than twenty years, where you could still smell Shy. There was a framed photograph of Shy and his wife, Mary, smiling on either side of Giuseppe DiStefano, Shy’s favorite tenor. Giuseppe had his arms around both of them, and they were having the thrill of their lives.
Behind the main room was the captain’s office, where Figaro, Hanrahan, and Covaletzki had had their little chitchats. I opened the door a crack. Rocco DiGiacomo was sitting in the captain’s chair.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “We’re gonna need your brain tonight.”
That felt good. Especially in front of Honey. Little Clem Augrine was sitting at a typing table, pecking away. I thought it was early to be making out reports. Honey and I walked on in.
“I’m glad you’re here, too,” DiGiacomo said to Honey. “We’re working on a search warrant.”
“I heard they found a .22 shell with an S,” she said. “What have you got?”
“Okay,” said DiGiacomo, “Tony Landis is over at Sears. He got the manager out of bed, and the guy went down and opened the store after Tony told him there’s ten large grand in reward money.”
“Carlton Cruset?” Honey asked.
“Yeah,” said Augrine without looking up, “yeah.”
“Landis called from Sears,” said DiGiacomo. “The shell is definitely theirs. Tony’s been looking through the books, and he came across the sale of a .22-caliber bolt-action single-shot and a box of long-rifle cartridges to a burglar named Harrison Lloyd. Harrison filled out the federal firearms forms about not having no felony record, but we figure he had a felony. We’re pretty sure he was a person prohibited from buying a gun under the statute.”
“How do you know it wasn’t somebody using his name?” asked Honey.
“The manager says it’s company policy to compare the driver’s license picture with the guy’s face. They copy the license number right on their ledger. It’s Lloyd’s license. We ran it through Motor V.”
“Did you type all that in the affidavit to the search warrant?” Honey asked Augrine.
“Pretty much,” said Augrine, “mostly,” as he handed her a sheet of paper with some typing on it. Honey picked a fountain pen from her handbag and began to make changes and additions. It took her at least a good precious three minutes while the rest of us watched. I said nothing. By now I knew better.
“What do you mean you’re pretty sure Harrison Lloyd has a felony conviction?” she asked finally.
“We know he was arrested for felonies by a uniformed man, Joe Janiro,” said Rocco. “Felony theft and burglary, coming out of the Shortlidge School carrying a computer, but we don’t have no disposition on our rap sheet. We called Janiro at home and he said Lloyd plea-bargained, but he don’t know what to. If we knew he went down for a felony, we could lock him up right now on the gun-purchase charge and go from there. Then the search warrant for his house would be easy to write up. But that’s where we’re stuck. We’re just not sure Lloyd went down for a felony.”
“Wait a minute,” said Augrine. “I just thought of something. Didn’t Pascal lock Lloyd’s ass up last year on Clayton Street for some kind of assault that had to be a felony? It had to be a felony, that thing he had with Pascal.”
“He was a juvenile last year,” said DiGiacomo. “That don’t count as a felony. Janiro’s bust is his only adult record. Honey, do you think we got probable cause to search his house without Janiro’s felony?”
“No,” said Honey. “I’m glad you’re steering away from the murder because you certainly have no probable cause at all on any homicide. You’re on the right track sticking with the gun-purchase charge, but you don’t have enough to search his house there either. Purchasing the gun isn’t illegal unless he’s a convicted felon, and you don’t know if he’s been convicted of anything, much less a felony.”
“Would the AG’s office records show anything? You know, how about your office records,” asked Augrine, “would that be good enough?”
“Good idea,” said Honey. “I’ll go across the street to the main office and check.”
“I’ll walk you,” I said. “We may be dealing with a sniper.”
By sticking to Honey, maybe I could nudge this along the way she herself nudged people along. I was beginning to learn that you have to nudge before you can crawl. Things were already going too slowly for me. Whatever happened to instincts? I’d have scooped up Harrison Lloyd and questioned him the second his name came up. What’ll I do with Figaro, take him to the law library? As Yogi Berra said, you can’t hit and think at the same time.
16
A highly officious old white security guard rode in the elevator with us as an “extra precaution,” even though he knew Honey personally. I read the signs on the wall: NO SMOKING and THIS ELEVATOR IS VOICE MONITORED FOR YOUR PROTECTION. I wondered if that was legal, and whether there was another old guard somewhere in a small closet listening to us. But I didn’t say anything. We got off on the seventh floor and Honey used her key to get in. The guard turned on the lights and waited in the hall, his arthritic arms dangling like a gunfighter’s. We went to a section with small file cabinets holding three-by-five cards. Honey went to the Ls and pulled out all the Lloyds until she found Harrison, DOB 11-28-57, home address being that of his parents.
“That’s our boy,” she said. “Look at this. He pled to burglary of the Shortlidge School on twenty-six May. La-de-da. A fel-o-ny. He was definitely a person prohibited when he bought the rifle on eleven June. But uh-oh. He was on for sentencing yesterday morning. Darn! He was probably in jail tonight when the gun was used. Let’s check the sentencing lists, if I can figure out where Rosemary keeps them.”
I followed her to a desk. On it were four large stacks of files, with white sheets of paper on each stack. Honey picked up the white papers and speed-read through them.
“Pay dirt,” she said. “A bench warrant was issued at 11:30 this morning. He failed to show up for sentencing. Now, Sergeant, we can pick him up.”
17
“Dynamite. Dynamite,” said DiGiacomo when we carried the news to the captain’s office. “What’s the plan, go to his house and lock him up for not showing for sentencing? Then we can search around him incidental to the arrest and forget about the search warrant altoge
ther? Hah? What?”
When you spend your remaining days before retirement trying to break serious cases in boring ways, you overexcite yourself when you smell a shortcut.
“I don’t even know what Rocco’s talking about,” I said, “but somehow I know he’s right.”
“No,” said Honey. “We still need a search warrant to be able to search the house for the rifle. Type in the felony conviction and leave a space for my signature as affiant on what I saw in the AG’s records. It’s not going to take a half hour to an hour to get the thing typed and over to a judge, right?”
“Right,” said Rocco. “You’re the boss. We got Judge Wyrostek out of bed. He’ll wait up for us. He’s a good man.”
“Good,” said Honey. “Let’s do it.”
Augrine started typing. “How do you spell ‘manufacture’?” He looked up. “Give me a spelling on ‘manufacture.’ ” Honey brushed past me, mumbling, “Excuse me,” and bent down and wrote the word out for him as he two-fingered it slowly on the typewriter.
“Damn it,” I said. “Nothing can be this technical. It’s late. There are two cop murderers we want. And the cop they killed was closer than a brother to us. We just lost an hour we’ll never see again trying to figure out whether we have the right to bring him in here, and we’re now about to lose another hour. Let’s get him. Maybe she doesn’t know it, but everybody else in this room knows it. When you’re lucky enough to get a trail, you follow it before the winds blow on it and the rains wash it away. Come on. Look alive. Get some energy back in you. When we had Lloyd’s name from Sears, everybody on the street should have been looking for him. I agree, tell him about his Miranda rights, but get him in here and find out who his partner is. Then get his partner in here and play one against the other. Last I knew, cop killers bought the farm. Eighty-eight bullets resisting arrest. And I’m not even talking about that. I’m talking about locking them up. Am I missing something?”
“Fifteen years,” said Landis, who was back from Sears. “Rest up, Lou. Grab a sandwich out of the machine.”
Everybody stared at me the way Covaletzki had at the train station, out of his right eye. Like I was crazy. I leaned against the wall out of the way.
“As I said,” said Honey, glaring her hazels at me, “we’ve got to have a warrant on the gun-purchase charge so we can search Lloyd’s house for the gun. You see, Sergeant Razzi —”
“That’s a mistake, Honey.” I glared.
She knew what I meant. I could see it in her eyes. She continued rapidly but in a softer tone: “Look, Lou, you did tell me you want to learn this stuff. If we arrest Lloyd for skipping sentencing, we can only search within his immediate reach for weapons he might grab. But if we have a search warrant, we can search the whole house until we find the gun, and that way we might accidentally come up with other evidence on Shy’s murder.” She turned from me. “But, men, if we do, don’t seize it. We’ll get another search warrant based on whatever you find that relates to the homicide. Unless it’s Whitney’s service revolver — that comes under exigent circumstances.” I laughed a short grunt. She continued, unintimidated: “I hope this is clear to everybody in this room. Now, let’s plug this felony conviction into the affidavit, and then I’ll plug some extra probable cause for a search in the nighttime.”
“Let’s not forget to put in that we’re looking for the bullets he bought at Sears,” said Augrine, “and most definitely the sales slip. That way we’ll get the right to search wallets and little places that the gun can’t fit. Who knows what we’ll find in those little teeny places. Probably drugs and shit. So we better put the sales slip and the bullets in. We’re not just looking for the gun. Get me?”
“I get you,” said Honey. “Good idea.” As the rest of us watched, she sat next to Augrine at the typewriter and began to reword the first draft of the affidavit on a yellow pad. Augrine typed what she wrote. Now I understood why Augrine wore three-piece suits. He had become the dicks’ law clerk. I wondered if he still wore elevator shoes. Landis went out to make sure the judge was awake.
I walked into dicks and looked again at the desk of Shy Whitney of Chattanooga, Tennessee, who had drifted down to Delaware when his navy hitch in Philadelphia was up because they were hiring on the cops. The least they could do now was retire his desk like Joe DiMaggio’s number. He was one brave man, and he always got his weight on the opposite foot of his punch. You stayed hit that way. He taught me that kind of leverage when he broke me in, and with his beautiful tenor voice alone in a patrol car with the windows up, he taught me to appreciate good music. But my greatest appreciation for the way Shy broke me in came when I saw how other rookies were broken in by their veteran partners. During working hours you got your rookie partner his first oral sex. You waited for him in the patrol car. As he walked down the dirty stoop of some poor woman’s place, smoothing down his jacket and wearing that pathetic boy-grin that says now-I’m-a-man, you knew you owned him. Your rookie would never report you for breaking department rules, or for anything else you did. A stunt like that never entered Shy’s mind.
I wondered if Shy had kept up with all the new procedures. He must have, but if they came down all at once, nobody could have kept up with them. Poor Shy. A chalk outline on French Street. Worse than dying, he’d have hated some punk kid getting the best of him. For more than half the hours of his short time on earth, on duty and off, he carried the weight of a loaded pistol so other people could go about their business — other people giving political speeches or going to train stations to pick up their wives or just going to the Laundromat. Mrs. Smotz would say, “That ain’t right, a thing like that.”
Finally Honey was done. Landis called Judge Wyrostek to make sure he was still up so that we could go to his house for him to approve and sign the search warrant. It was 1:33 A.M. when we arrived. The judge, a man in his forties wearing yellow pajamas and a red robe, led us into his living room. I guessed that his wife had straightened up before we arrived.
Wyrostek had half-lens reading glasses perched on the end of his nose and looked out over them to ask Honey questions that I didn’t understand. I think he asked her whether she “would agree” that some of the probable cause was “stale” for a nighttime warrant, or something like that. In the end he signed the thing.
We left Judge Wyrostek’s and everybody thanked him as if he were the cavalry. In the car on the way to execute the warrant, I nodded off in the backseat, leaning against the door.
18
Car doors slammed, and I awoke with a jolt to find myself sitting in the dark in the backseat with Honey.
“It’s your job to protect me,” she said, “in the event there’s trouble loud enough to wake you. The other guys are taking the doors on Lloyd’s parents’ house without backup support.”
An upstairs light went on. They weren’t exactly “taking the doors.” Landis and DiGiacomo were standing on either side of the front door, waiting for it to be answered. I left the car and walked up the cement path of the brick home in a familiar block not far from the one in which I grew up. The fat, burly sycamore trees that once lined the street, dropping crisp bark and what we called itchy balls, were all gone. Maybe they knew something the people didn’t know.
A fortyish black woman in a green terry-cloth robe opened the door. Landis flashed his shield and peeked in past her, gingerly. DiGiacomo held up the search warrant. She looked at it and stood aside. The steps they took through the doorway during this police emergency had about two hours of preparation invested in them. I followed.
Inside the front door was the living room. Beyond the living room was the dining room. The house smelled of disinfectant. Mrs. Lloyd seated herself with dignity at the Mediterranean-style dining room table, as if we were her guests. Beside the dining room was a small kitchen. DiGiacomo walked into the kitchen and let Augrine in through the back door. Augrine acknowledged my presence with a nod, opened a door off the ki
tchen, and hurried down to the basement with his gun drawn.
“Harrison’s not been home for two days,” she said wearily. “I knew that boy was heading for more trouble. He just don’t listen. You-all have a look for him, but he ain’t here.”
“Who else is home?” asked Landis.
“My husband and my two other boys is upstairs sleeping. They’re both good boys. What’s Harrison done?”
“He didn’t show up for sentencing,” said Landis.
The stairs to the second floor were in the living room. DiGiacomo headed for them but stopped short when a very tall and dark-skinned muscular Negro male in his forties, wearing eyeglasses, white boxer-type shorts, and a tight black T-shirt with a white Playboy rabbit on it, started down the stairs. He was followed by two skinny boys in their early teens. Both boys wore eyeglasses and were over six feet tall. They had on tan chino pants and no shirts and were wiping sleep away from their faces.
“He didn’t show up for sentencing, huh?” said the man in a very deep voice. “He ain’t showed up for a lot of damn things, but I ain’t never seen no houseful of po-lease at two in the morning.” He sat down on a gold crushed-velvet sofa. “Shit.” He lit a mentholated Benson & Hedges.
The boy who appeared the older and taller of the two opened the screen door and rushed outside. The door had no spring and he slammed it shut hard. Nobody tried to stop him.
The Right to Remain Silent Page 11
