“I know you don’t want to.” Lauren took a step forward. “But something made you call. You said you saw a murder.”
“That was a long time ago.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Years and years ago.”
Lauren caught Rita’s eyes with hers. “If you have information about a murder, it must be weighing on you after all this time to leave those messages. Something made you call.”
Rita wiped her nose with the back of her hand, taking a deep breath. She had her other hand on the counter behind her, almost holding her up. Rita’s eyes went to Charlie’s. “When you cut me loose, I was in a bad way. Worst I ever been. You wouldn’t return my calls. I got busted a few times. Then I picked a john’s wallet, and he punched me, so I pulled a knife on him. I got arrested for robbery third. Didn’t show up to court, because I knew I was gonna do time.” Her voice got stronger as she continued to stare at Charlie. “You remember how it was. What I was into.”
“You were out of control, Rita.” Charlie’s voice was gentler now. “I couldn’t have you stealing half the drugs you bought for me.”
Nodding to herself, one of the pink plastic curlers unfurled a little, sending it spiraling alongside her face. “I know. Crack was like a demon. I had to have it, had to have it all the time. You let me go in the fall of 1991; I remember that because I got the robbery charge around Halloween. I was trying to get enough money to get down to my sister’s in Raleigh. But I smoked up every twenty dollars I made.”
She itched around the cheap lace of her housecoat collar and Lauren saw a puckered, jagged scar that ran down the side of her neck. Unconsciously, Lauren’s hand snaked to her side. Rita noticed her noticing. “Some bitch with a razor blade cut me. Twenty-seven stitches I got that time.”
“I didn’t mean to stare.”
Snapping her fingers, she pointed at Lauren’s face. “That’s where I know you. You the lady detective that’s been all over the news. You got stabbed in the back or something.”
“That’s why I need your help. You called the district attorney’s office the afternoon I got attacked. I need to know if you called the Homicide office and who you talked to.”
“Aw, shit. This is worse than I thought.” Her round brown eyes turned back to Charlie’s face. “You ain’t a cop no more. You can’t protect me. These guys will kill me.”
“I never let anybody hurt you when we worked together, and no one’s going to hurt you now.”
Waving him off, she walked over to her sad, tired-looking blue sofa and sat down. “That’s just words, Daley. This is for real. They stabbed her”—she pointed at Lauren—“and she’s a cop! What do you think they’d do to an old junkie hooker like me?”
“You keep saying ‘they’,” Lauren interrupted. “Who do you mean by ‘they’?”
“I never took care of that robbery warrant,” Rita said. “I can’t go to jail for no felony now, not at my age. That’s why I left this town in the first place.”
“The statute of limitations is long over for a robbery third,” Charlie pointed out. “They probably pulled that warrant years ago and you’ve been living like a spy all this time for no reason.”
“Do I look like a lawyer to you?” she demanded, the pink curler flopping around. “How would I know that shit?”
“You know it now.” Lauren tried the gentle voice again. “Tell us what happened.”
Rita sat, looking back and forth between Riley and Charlie, as if that would make them leave, her mouth working from side to side like she was practicing what she was going to say. The noise of the TV seemed deafening to Lauren as she waited for Rita.
“Listen to me now.” Rita put a hand over her heart like she was about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. “Because I’m only going to tell this once and only to you two right now, right here. I was trying to save money to get to my sister’s, so I was working a lot. East Side, West Side, wherever I was, I’d find me a corner to stand on. There’s always a guy to pull over. It was in late January and it was cold as hell out. I remember standing in front of the liquor store at … let me think. Allen and Wadsworth? You know the one?”
Charlie nodded. “I know it.”
“I was smoking my last cigarette, hoping some drunk would stumble out of one of the bars so I could lift his wallet.”
Lauren watched as her face hardened, the lines etched around her mouth becoming more prominent, as she steeled herself to tell her secret. “I was watching Culligan’s Bar, but it was dead that night. Had to be around midnight and nothing was going on. If I had somewhere to go, I would have called it a night,” she sighed at her own memory, “but I had gotten thrown out of my grandmother’s earlier because she caught me stealing from her purse. Anyway, I see Spider creeping around. He was a neighborhood kid, Somalian. His mama spoke almost no English and he was a pistol, always boosting anything that wasn’t nailed down. But he wasn’t a good thief because he was always getting himself caught. If something turned up missing in Allentown, the coppers would go knocking on his mama’s door and she’d hand over the stuff. They couldn’t charge him because he always ran and they never caught him dirty.”
“I remember this,” Charlie said.
“I’m sure you do,” she shot back at him. “You was there that night, but later, after it all went down. When every cop in the city showed up. Anyway, I see Spider—never knew his real name—and he’s poking around, looking into car windows, trying door handles. I tell him to go home to his mama, but he just says she knows he’s out. He had a very thick accent. A real skinny kid, all arms and legs. He was never nasty, just couldn’t stay out of trouble. And he was a runner. That child could run so fast and hop a fence so quick, you’d think it was just a blur.
“So I’m watching him case the cars and he finds one unlocked. He opens the passenger door and crawls his skinny ass halfway in, trying to scoop all the change out of the center console. Next thing I know, there’s this young cop I ain’t never seen before, holding a nightstick in one hand, trying to grab Spider out of the car with the other. Spider got startled, you see; he wasn’t expecting no cop to walk up on him. They always came in cars and by twos. He starts trying to squirm his way out of the copper’s hands, but the cop’s not letting him go. Then Spider hits the cop—accidently or on purpose, I don’t know—and now there’s a real struggle. The cop drops his nightstick. They’re rolling around on the sidewalk. I see the cop’s radio mic has come off his shoulder and is flying around. He can’t call for no backup. Then Spider breaks free and he starts running down Allen Street toward me. That cop pulls his gun and right there in front of me he shoots Spider in the back.” She paused to let the words sink in. Rita’s eyes welled with tears.
“I was so scared, I pressed myself into the alley, so the cop couldn’t see me. I was trapped. That young cop, he freaked out. He swore and stamped up to Spider and looked over that boy’s body. Then he looked up and down the street, threw his gun under the car next to Spider, and ran around the corner, down South Elmwood.” She paused, closed her eyes for a second, then took a deep breath.
“The people in the bars must have heard the gunshot because two guys trickled out and looked around. They saw Spider on the ground and ran back in to call the police. I was still trapped in the brick alley, freezing my ass off, scared to death. Then the police cars started showing up. First one, then two, then it seemed like every copper in the city was there. I saw you Narco guys pull up. I couldn’t let you see me, Daley. I still had that robbery warrant on me. I needed to get out of there. I pushed a metal garbage can to the back wall of the alley and threw myself over onto the next street. Then I ran like hell.”
“I remember that night,” Charlie pinched his nose between his fingers. “It was cold, like you said, and we were surveilling a house a couple blocks over when the shots-fired call came out. Everybody knew Spider. The thought was that someone tried to stop him from breaking into cars and sho
t him, but not a cop. No one ever suspected a cop.”
“So it’s a cold case?” Lauren asked.
With a grim look on his face, Charlie nodded. “Never solved. The Homicide squad put a lot of work into it, because the victim was just a kid. Spider had just turned eighteen but was still in the tenth grade because of the language barrier, if I’m remembering it right. It was Ricky Schultz’s case. He worked it hard.”
Lauren knew that name. “Ricky retired five years ago. His other brother, Vince, is still on the job, on patrol. He must have at least thirty years on.”
“Ricky was a hell of a detective,” Charlie said.
“I bet he was.” Rita pulled open a drawer in the small table next to her couch. She ruffled through some papers, then withdrew a shiny campaign mailing. She threw it down on her scratched glass coffee table. “The young cop I saw shoot Spider was this guy in the middle.” She tapped the photo. “And it says that the guy standing next to him is his brother, Richard.”
The picture on the front of the glossy flyer showed three men who all resembled each other, standing in front of the County Court building. A man in his late fifties on the left side was wearing a police uniform, the younger man in the middle had on a three-piece suit and was smiling confidently into the camera, while the third man sported a solid blue golf shirt. The tagline above the photo read in bold black letters: HE USED TO PUT CRIMINALS AWAY WITH HIS BROTHERS BEFORE HE BECAME A LAWYER. NOW HE’LL PROSECUTE THEM. ELECT SAM SCHULTZ FOR ERIE COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY THIS NOVEMBER!!!
“This here is why I called the Snitch Board. I ain’t done a lot of things right in my life, but I never hurt no one that didn’t hurt me first. I didn’t know who that cop was. I ran because I was scared. I’m still scared. I thought I’d just make a phone call, tell someone what I knew and that’d be the end of it. The police would do their job, leave me out. Anonymous, ain’t that what it’s supposed to be?”
Lauren’s throat closed up so tight, she thought she’d suffocate. The Schultzes were a prominent police family. Their father had been police commissioner in the late 1960s. The brothers had juice, as cops would say, connections that went all the way to City Hall and beyond. Lauren knew what kind of favors it took back in the day to get appointed police commissioner, and patronage was often handed out like candy before entrance and promotional exams were given.
She quickly picked her brain for what she knew about the brothers. Sam Schultz had been on the job for less than a year when he left to go to law school in the early 1990s. She’d worked briefly as a detective with Ricky right before he retired a few years ago, but she’d been in Sex Offenses. The middle brother, Vince, was one of those old-timers everyone was convinced would die on the job, still in patrol humping calls.
She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the mailer. Pain seeped up from her chest as her heart began to race. That pockmarked face, that barrel-shaped chest. There was no mistaking him: Vince Schultz had been in the Homicide office the afternoon she was stabbed.
“You’re sure, Rita? This is the guy who shot Spider in the back?” Charlie picked up the picture, snapping Lauren’s attention back to the reluctant informant, who was now nervously pulling at the foam seeping from a rip in her couch cushion.
Dropping little tallow bits by her pink house shoes, Rita nodded. “I know that was a bad time for me, but I ain’t never forgot that man’s face. I thought I knew everyone in old Precinct Three, but I never saw him before, or since, until now.”
“He left the job for law school, wasn’t on but a couple months,” Charlie told her. “Probably because of this.”
“I have to get to the file room.” Lauren’s voice was tinged in panic. “If Vince manages to get back in the Homicide office and gets his hand on the original file, whatever Rita saw won’t matter.”
Starting to charge toward the door, Charlie swept her up in one of his huge arms. “Easy, Lauren. You’re going to end up in the hospital. Your face is as red as a baboon’s ass. We’ll call that partner of yours—”
“No. I have to get that file. Get it out of there. Make copies of it, right now.” She was breathing so hard, she was panting. Charlie eased her down onto the couch next to Rita. He knew how to use his size, and Lauren was no match for him in the state she was in.
“You’re going to sit, and I’m going to call Reese, and we’re going to figure this out.”
“No more cops,” Rita wailed. “They’ll kill me for sure. Look what they done to her. And she is a cop. You can’t do this to me, Daley.”
Charlie turned to Lauren. “We gotta get that file, and you gotta start working the case, however you do these cold cases now, without anyone knowing about Rita. At least until you’ve enough to make an arrest.”
Practicing the breathing techniques her physical therapist had taught her, Lauren managed to get herself under control. Her stitches throbbed under her shirt. She pressed her hand against them, doubling over a little. “No one in Homicide will know. Not even Joy Walsh, who’s been working with Reese since I’ve been laid up. There’s a leak in our office.”
Rita threw her arms up, sending the hanging pink curler across the room. “A leak, she says! No way am I saying nothing to nobody. I never seen either of you before. My name’s Virginia Robinson and I’ve lived here in this apartment for six years without any trouble. Now you two get the fuck out.”
“You listen to me, Rita.” Charlie leaned down, hands on his knees, causing Rita to lean back into the cushions away from his face. His nose was almost touching hers. “If I found you, don’t you think they can too? What did you say when you called the office, anyway?”
She swallowed hard, and Charlie backed off an inch or two. “The man said, ‘Homicide.’ And I said I needed to speak to a detective. He asked what for, and I said I knew about a murder of a young man people called Spider. I said I seen it happen back in ’92 on Allen Street. Then he got quiet and I thought he hung up on me. I asked, was he still there? And he asked me, real serious, real quiet like, where was I now? He could come and pick me up right then. I got scared. Something wasn’t right, you know? I hung up and threw my phone in the nearest garbage tote. Then I went on with my life, until you two showed up.”
Charlie gave Rita a pat on the shoulder as he straightened up. “You did good, Rita. And I ain’t letting no one hurt you. You just need to lay low, stay here and don’t open the door for no one that ain’t me or her.” He jerked a thumb at Lauren.
Pulling herself to her feet, Lauren held onto her side as she stood next to Charlie. “I’m good. Ready to go,” she assured Dailey. She turned toward Rita, who was wringing her wrinkled hands in front of her. “Thank you. I want you to call me if anything seems suspicious. And I mean anything.” Lauren extracted her business card from the back pocket of her jeans, putting it on the coffee table. “Day or night.”
Charlie flipped a bunch of twenty-dollar bills down on top of Lauren’s card. “Don’t leave town.”
Snatching up the money and the card, Rita quickly tucked it all down the front of her housedress. “I can’t believe we back in business, Daley.”
Looking over his shoulder at Rita as he turned the doorknob to leave, Lauren heard the catch in his voice as he agreed. “Neither can I, Rita. Neither can I.”
29
Back in Lauren’s Ford, she clenched the wheel with both hands as they sat in their parking space. Shoppers, hip stay-at-home moms, and artsy types filed past the SUV. Elmwood Avenue was alive with people crowding the sidewalks on both sides of the street. The shops were in full Christmas swing. Lauren watched a woman on a rickety step ladder three shops up from their parking meter hanging another string of lights around her candle shop. “I’m calling Reese,” she told Charlie as he tried to arrange himself in her seat.
“You two can’t let anyone know about Rita yet,” he reminded her, finally getting the seat belt to click.
“Call R
eese,” she said out loud to her dashboard.
In a pleasant, canned English accent, her car replied, “Calling Reese.”
“Does this car wipe your ass too?” Charlie asked in skeptical amazement. He shunned technology as much as living in the modern world would allow.
The display on the dash showed Reese’s cell number while the speakers amplified the ring tone throughout the car. After two rings Reese picked up. “Yeah?”
“Reese? It’s Riley. You’re on speaker. I need to meet you at headquarters, but not right now; after shift change. Can you wait there for me?”
“Sure I can. What’s up? Do you need Joy to stay too?”
“No.” She hoped that didn’t come out as harsh. “I’ll meet you there at six thirty.” She glanced at the time on the dash display. It was just after noon. “I think I got something on my case. You can’t tell anyone, not even Joy, and I can’t talk about it over the phone.”
There was a long pause, then: “You sure? Just me?”
“Positive. Just you. I’ll see you at six thirty. Meet me at the police memorial.”
The Fallen Officers Memorial was just south of headquarters on Franklin Street, past St. Joseph Cathedral. A ladder of stone guided water down and into a round pool. Engraved in black lettering around the gray granite encircling the pool were the names of every police officer who had lost his or her life in the line of duty while serving on the Buffalo Police Department. At six thirty on a Tuesday, after rush hour, that end of Franklin Street would be deserted.
“Are you okay? Is everything all right?” Concern tinged Reese’s voice.
“I’m fine. I’ll explain everything. See you at the memorial.” As she clicked off, it occurred to her just how close she had come to becoming one of the names on that memorial less than a month ago.
Turning to Charlie, she put the car into drive. “I’ll drop you off. After I get into the file room, I’ll let you know what we’ve got.”
The Murder Book Page 14
