The Right to Remain Silent

by Charles Brandt

  As I got out of the rented Granada, I felt the first drops of a summer rain. It smelled green and alive. I walked to the pay phone in Blayne’s parking lot. It was an outdoor, open-air phone booth that provided little shelter as the rain developed into a fine misty drizzle.

  I took out my pocket notebook, found the number, and dialed Mrs. Morris’s. The line was busy. I tried four more times, but no luck. I called the emergency operator, and she told me that nobody was speaking on the line. The phone was either out of service or off the hook. The rain stopped.

  I called dicks and DiGiacomo answered.

  I told him what I was trying to do and he told me it wasn’t necessary. He had already sent Augrine over to the Morrises’. The boy’s mother was out of control with fear.

  “He’s bound to make another mistake soon,” said Rocco. “We’ll be on him. He’ll be back for another bite out of the apple.” Rock was sure that Gandry’s lawyer had told him what everyone else already knew: The charges would never be reinstated regardless of what hope Dershon might hold out in the newspapers. No new evidence would ever be found because there was no more evidence anywhere in the world unless it came from Gandry’s mouth, and that was extremely unlikely, and nobody in authority could question him. “I love it when they announce that so-and-so is wanted for questioning like it was still 1955 or somethin’,” said Rocco.

  The Morrises were packing to spend two weeks with relatives in Baltimore. Augrine was staying with them until they got to their relatives’. “They might never come back, and we want to know where to pick up their trail if they try to disappear,” is the way Rocco explained it.

  “Partner,” said Rock. “Are you all right? You been through a dose of stress. How about we meet at the Y and hit the heavy bag and then go to a ballgame?”

  “Whatever happened to real outdoor phone booths?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Too much upkeep. Vandalism. Broken glass. Piss and vomit on the floor. Who cares? Come on, let’s go to the Y. This thing ain’t your fault.”

  “That’s what Dershon said, but I don’t believe it. Mrs. Smotz, with her weak heart, never had to be a witness against her own grandson, except for my presence in the U.S.A. I should have called you from the emergency room. No. I take that back. I should have called you that first time I was in the principal’s office. I should have had you pick up the Morrises, and I should have stayed at the school and kept an eye on Gandry. You’d have done it right, or you’d have figured out a way around these Supreme Court rules.”

  “I wasn’t around. I was out watching Mondale.”

  “I should have called for somebody. Any rookie would have known better than to do the things I did.”

  “God damn it, Lou. You’re second-guessing yourself like we all done, and I don’t wanna hear it. You just did your fucking job the way it’s supposed to be done. You went with the fucking flow. Come on, asshole, I’ll meet you at the Y, then we’ll go see them beat up on the Cubs. Hah? What? After that we’ll go to the club and get loaded. Shoot some eight ball. Make a night of it. C’mon.”

  “What about the rifle? Did you get it yet?”

  He sighed. “We had a meet, but every idea we come up with was too risky. While we was plannin’ our next move, we put a couple of undercover guys to watch Esther Vesper’s house, and then around two o’clock Tramp Lloyd shows up. Stays in the house about a half hour and then comes out with a saxophone case. We gotta figure the piece is in the case and by now it’s el gono.”

  “How can anybody just watch that man walk down the street with a saxophone case in his hand?”

  “Come off it. What are you gonna do? If one of us was there we’d a thought of something, but we wasn’t there. They were young cops. Ya gotta take these things in your stride. C’mon. We both need a break. We both lost one today. Let’s forget about it. When was the last time you went to a baseball game? We’ll get these guys. Lloyd. Gandry. They’ll be back. What goes around comes around. Let’s go to the Y. Hah?”

  “Thanks, Rock. I’ve been invited to Marian’s. It’s starting to rain again. The game’ll be rained out. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Snap out of it. This trip ain’t been good for you. Too much at once. You gotta readjust. Get a good night’s sleep. Get your sense of humor back. You hear? Hah?”

  “I hear.”

  27

  “As my father says, confession is one of the necessities of life, like food and shelter. It helps…it helps…eliminate psychological waste from the brain and is necessary for proper functioning of the mind and body. Catholics and psychiatrists agree, and still those in our system who should confess are discouraged by the police.”

  I could hardly believe this was my fifteen-year-old daughter talking. It sounded like catechism. At first I thought that if you grew up with a professor for a father, you learned to express yourself. But it wasn’t just the words. There was something unnerving about her. She seemed high-strung, and striving to keep it under control. We hugged naturally enough when I arrived. She acted as glad as everyone else to see me, and she sounded so grown-up I half expected her to take a drink when Carlton started pouring the twenty-five-year-old scotch.

  It was only chitchat and a raw vegetable dip before dinner, and everyone tried to pitch in and lift my spirits about the Gandry thing.

  But once dinner started, Sarah went into electric overdrive and attacked the conversation as though points were to be tallied after dessert and she had no intention of coming in second. Her demeanor resembled the large painting of Carlton’s father that dominated the dining room wall. Hard and uncompromising.

  Marian looked at me a couple of times as if to say, See what I mean?

  I put down my fork and said that I always thought that confessions were a good economic way to solve crimes, but that sometimes weirdos liked to confess to things they didn’t do and you had to be careful with confessions, and that I liked the rack of lamb very much.

  It was then that Carlton offered me a job. Nobody said thank you for my comment about the rack of lamb because nobody in the room had cooked it. I thought I’d pop into the kitchen before I left to thank the cook. I didn’t want a goddamn job from Carlton Cruset. I wanted to call Honey and meet her at the hotel.

  “What kind of job?” I asked and drained my red wine. Carlton refilled the glass.

  “Confession-taker,” he said.

  “Whose?”

  “Silent men with deadly secrets. Sirhan Sirhan. James Earl Ray. Arthur Bremer. John Gandry. Harrison Lloyd. No one in particular.”

  “I thought you were serious for a second.”

  “He is,” Sarah said suddenly and gravely. There it was. Dancing darkness in and around the eyes. High-strung out in the open. All her nerve endings plowing right through her muscles to the skin surface, her teeth and lips clenched, she defied me with her eyes.

  “I am,” Carlton said calmly.

  “What do you have, a private police force?” I asked, looking away from Sarah’s glare to Carlton.

  “Not a whole force,” he said. She was still staring at me.

  “That’s the way Hitler started out in Munich,” I said.

  “And Hitler was very kind to his German shepherds,” he said icily, “but because he was doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be kind to dogs.”

  “Hitler did not have a private police force,” Sarah said. “He had a private army, not a private police force.” She was moving way ahead of the field. I doubted I would finish a respectable second, and she had just passed Carlton.

  “Right you are, darling,” said Carlton. “Tell me, Lou, is Honey Gold Jewish?”

  I put some dessert in my mouth to keep what I was thinking from coming out. Their dinner conversation was far from what I’d expected for the evening, and they were turning me into the table liberal. The horror of the release of John Gandry was becoming the furthest thing from my
mind.

  “Really, Carlton,” said Marian, “what’s the difference what she is?”

  “Mother’s right, Daddy. You have a way of losing track of what you are doing. Lou, is it appropriate for me to call you Lou?”

  “That makes sense,” I mumbled through my chocolate soufflé. I took a slug of wine.

  “Lou, what do you think of Father’s proposal that you work for him?”

  “Delaware War on Crime?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I have a job,” I said. “I do all that now.” I drank some more wine.

  Sarah looked at Carlton as if to say, What’s the use, but you may try if you like — and turned back to her dessert. We all ate silently for a few seconds.

  “Sarah, honey,” said Marian, “wouldn’t you like to get to know Lou better?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “How about the two of you meeting for lunch sometime soon. How would that be?”

  Sarah looked at Carlton and he nodded approval.

  “Perhaps,” she said.

  Marian swallowed hard and fortified herself to go on with this. “Let’s set it up now, shall we?”

  More out of some unnamed pity for Marian than because I wanted to, I jumped back into the thick of it. “Let’s do it, Sarah,” I said. “It’s hard for me to plan lunch because I don’t really know what assignments I’ll be getting, but how about breakfast, say this Thursday, day after tomorrow?”

  “Great, that’s settled,” Marian gushed. “I’ll have Arthur drive Sarah to the Green Room. Will seven o’clock be fine with you? That will give the two of you almost an hour alone together, and Arthur can wait and drive Sarah home.”

  “What do you say?” I asked.

  “It would be interesting to hear your thoughts about changes in police procedure,” said Sarah. “Daddy says we are witnessing the Vietnamization of the war on crime. He says we left it up to the South Vietnamese to fight the war while America gradually withdrew. It is now left up to the citizens to fight the war on crime as the police gradually withdraw.”

  “Fine,” I said, “then it’s a deal. We’ll finish this talk at breakfast. You are some mature and knowledgeable young lady. I’m very impressed.”

  “Yes,” she said and looked back to Carlton, who smiled at her.

  “Lou,” he said. “I’d like to see you for a while in the study, if you don’t mind. I’d like your reaction to a project I’ve done some work on.”

  “Marian tells me you’re writing a novel.”

  “Not currently,” he said. “It’s in abeyance right now, but it is the project I’d like your reaction to. It’s a crime novel. I’ve suspended writing on it temporarily while I research a history I am planning on atrocities. The burning of Joan of Arc, the Spanish Inquisition, contemporary African tribal warfare, ad infinitum. The excesses of the Nazis are, after all, nothing novel in world history. Worse genocide goes on in so-called abortion clinics right now as we sit here, don’t you agree?”

  “Please don’t start,” said Marian.

  “I haven’t kept up with things,” I said. “Let me see what you’ve got on your crime novel.”

  I got up too quickly and felt a little woozy from the scotch and wine, steadied myself, and waited for him to get up. I thanked Marian for the dinner and smiled at an unsmiling Sarah.

  28

  Carlton led the way out of the dining room. He wore a dark-blue blazer, white button-down shirt, red-and-blue-striped tie, gray slacks, and stiff black loafers. New shoes. Sapatos novos. And that same .45 automatic. At home.

  “Is it true,” he asked, “that airline search dogs are trained to sniff out certain drugs by being addicted to them?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but that ain’t right. A thing like that.” Gandry was creeping back.

  I followed him into a foyer as big as the late Mrs. Smotz’s ground floor, which now, no doubt, Charlie would own outright. On each wall there were worn antique tapestries and on the floor two antique Oriental carpets that served to keep people from tracking mud onto whatever lay beyond the foyer.

  I followed him beyond the foyer to a wide gray marble staircase in the middle of a hall. To the left I could see what looked like a south parlor or a museum. He guided me to the right and we were in the study. More antique Orientals, but thicker and more ornate. Brown leather sofas and chairs. They brought back memories of the brown leather chair in detectives. It’s the only real leather chair with which I’d ever had any close contact. There were eight mahogany tables with a lighter-wood inlaid mosaic design. There were crystal glass lamps on the tables. But most of all there was an impression of books. Walls of books reaching sixteen feet into the mahogany-paneled ceiling. Collections of Dickens, Hardy, Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott in old leather-bound sets with gold-leaf lettering. Other, more contemporary books in their best-seller book-of-the-month-selection jackets, books about spies and war and crime. Rows and rows of books about crime. Novels with the words executioner and murder in their titles, with knives and guns on their spines. Beyond the crime books were what appeared to be complete collections of esoteric magazines like Soldier of Fortune, Guns & Ammo, Street Survival, Martial Arts.

  He handed me a scotch on the rocks he had poured from a wet bar along the wall.

  “I have every issue of Soldier of Fortune,” he said.

  “My partner once pitched to Carl Furillo,” I said. The scotch was that same twenty-five-year-old very smoky-tasting stuff.

  I picked up a Soldier of Fortune. I did not know they made such magazines in this country. When I left, Look was still big, with pictures of Adlai Stevenson on the cover. This cover had a color photo portrait of a middle-aged man with a jaundiced complexion, an eye patch, and a red beret. It read: “Col. Trader on Dirty Tricks.” The good eye looked like it had a one-track mind tucked behind it. I put the magazine back.

  “Do you hunt animals?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “I don’t anymore either. There’s no longer any challenge to it.”

  On a mahogany table in the far corner was a white cardboard architect’s model of what looked like an ancient Greek or Roman palace.

  “Are you planning an addition?” I asked.

  “Don’t you recognize it?” he said, punctuating the question with a sharp and surprisingly loud suction click from the left corner of his mouth, as if he were reaching up with his lower lip to snap up and suck in his mustache.

  “Well, it looks familiar, but I can’t place it.”

  “It’s the capitol seat of the domestic government of the United States of America.” He was smiling, and sort of squinting into my eyes, as if my eyes gave off a light that hurt his. And he has a seven-inch height advantage, I thought. “What is it? A building in Washington?”

  “Only partially correct,” he said. I was merely a student with an incomplete answer. He clicked a suction snap again. It had a military precision that must have taken a great deal of practice. “Can’t you be more specific?” he asked.

  “Capitol of domestic government? Is there some kind of cabinet post for domestic affairs like the Secretary of State for foreign affairs?” I was trying to be polite, and it really was a pleasure to be in such a room with brown leather chairs. But I was realizing more and more that this professor was not the Mr. Chips I had imagined over the years was taking care of my little daughter. He tapped his foot.

  “You mean you honestly don’t recognize the United States Supreme Court Building?” he said as he lifted the roof clean off in two parts. He put the pieces on a stack of typing paper on another table.

  “Come, look. These are the chief justice’s chambers and here’s the famous robing room, where the justices shake hands before going out to the bench to rule the land. Here’s the winged bench itself, with all eight associate justices and the chief in the middle, and here�
��s the main conference room across from the courtroom.”

  “Incredible. So detailed. What are these things? Metal detectors?”

  “Yes. Metal detectors. Very good. Their security is really quite primitive, you know. It is positively amazing to see Supreme Court justices milling around the courthouse with the general public. Yet no one gets into the courtroom itself unless one passes through a metal detector.”

  “What’s your interest in the court?”

  “It is the subject matter of my novel.” He pointed to the table with a word processor and a very small number of typewritten pages next to it. On an adjacent table were research volumes on the Supreme Court.

  “Do you have a name for it?”

  “Sounds of the Rude World,” he said. “It’s a line from the song ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ by Stephen Foster. What do you think of the title?”

  “Boffo. What’s it about?”

  “Very succinctly,” he said, clicking, “it is about a patriotic retired professor, of all things, named Andrew Bliss, who while headquartered at the Union Hotel in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, stages a series of raids on the members of the United States Supreme Court and ultimately attacks the court itself.” He said it very quickly, as if he had said it very succinctly many times before.

  “Harpers Ferry. Like John Brown, the abolitionist,” I said. “Didn’t he raid the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry to arm the slaves, and didn’t the government hang him?”

  “Precisely.” He glanced briefly at my eyes, looked back at my lips, and said again: “Precisely.”

  “Why is the professor in your novel doing this?” I asked.

  “Ah, motive! The detective in you beginning at the beginning.”

  “Actually, that’s not a good beginning question for a detective. I was taught to never look for a motive in the beginning. It can sidetrack you. In real life it’s mostly a waste of time to try to figure out why people do some of the things they do even if they tell you why.”