A Murder of Justice

by Robert Andrews

  After another silence, Tom Kearney continued. “The stories were still pretty damn grim. But in court, they’d become just that… stories. Wasn’t until later that I realized there was a lot of very nasty stuff that never got to court. That stayed out in the streets.”

  “Kate said it teaches a lot of people they can get away with murder.”

  Tom Kearney took that in, then asked, “Ever hear of the Plimsoll line?”

  “A railroad?”

  “No. In heavy seas, a ship that rolls over past a certain point isn’t coming up again. Nothing you can do will bring it back. In the 1800s, a British member of Parliament, Samuel Plimsoll, demanded a safety limit, a load line marked on a ship to limit the weight of cargo.”

  “So you shouldn’t go past the Plimsoll line?”

  Tom Kearney nodded. “I’ve often wondered if our society doesn’t have its Plimsoll line.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning fifteen hundred murders. Fifteen hundred unsolved murders loaded onto a society that isn’t too stable in the best of times. How much more weight before we pass our own Plimsoll line? What if enough people-the people outside the courtrooms, the people in the streets-start believing the ship’s going down?”

  At home, Frank put the box of marbles down beside the answering machine in the kitchen. One message on the machine.

  “Frank, I’m at home.”

  Frank checked his watch. Jose had called fifteen minutes earlier. His number rang twice before he answered. Sheresa Arrowsmith had called him from the Hospital Center. Pencil Crawfurd was groggy, but able to talk.

  Don’t know.”

  Frank stood on one side of the bed, Jose and Arrowsmith on the other. A mound of bandages covered Crawfurd’s left shoulder, and dried saliva crusted around his mouth. The ICU was overly warm, the air heavy with the smells of ammonia, alcohol, and antiseptic soap.

  “Come on, Pencil,” Frank said in disbelief. “Somebody stood out in the street… right beside your car… opened up a shooting gallery… and you don’t know who did it?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What were you and Skeeter doing?”

  “Sittin’ there. Just sittin’.”

  “So you and Skeeter were just sitting on Bayless Place and somebody just walked up and just started shooting? And you don’t know who and you don’t know why?”

  “Tha’s it. Show me the muthafucka who did it, I take care a him.”

  “You got any guesses who?” Jose asked.

  Crawfurd rolled his head to look venomously at Jose, then Frank. “You cops hard-headed? Or hard-hearing? Tol’ you. Don’t… know. We’re sittin’ there. Skeeter talkin’ to me. All a sudden his face blows out. I don’t remember hearin’ anything. I don’t remember seein’ anything ’cept his face blowin’ out at me.”

  “Come on,” Jose prodded, “guess.”

  Crawfurd said nothing.

  “You not a guessing man, Pencil? Nobody’s name comes to mind? Nobody who’d want to take over the business you and Skeeter built up?”

  Again, nothing.

  Jose bent closer, bringing his face inches from Crawfurd’s. “Let me ask it this way, Pencil… Who you gonna watch out for when you get out? Who you gonna worry’s out there, waiting for you?”

  Crawfurd ran his tongue across cracked lips. “Take care a myself.”

  “Unh-hunh,” Jose said, “like you and Skeeter took care of yourselves on Bayless Place. Somebody caught you two badasses like sittin’ ducks.”

  Pencil Crawfurd’s eyelids closed, then opened, then fluttered. “I’m tired,” he murmured, and fell off the edge of consciousness.

  In the hallway, Frank turned to Arrowsmith. “He still need to be in ICU?”

  The doctor shook her head. “Not really. It’s a precaution I take with all gunshot cases.”

  “You keep him there another couple of days?”

  “I can… Why?”

  “Visitors have to sign in, don’t they?”

  Arrowsmith nodded. “And you want to know who?”

  In the car, Jose settled into the passenger seat.

  “Bad-nigga wannabe.” He sighed.

  “Scared bad-nigga wannabe,” Frank amended.

  “I could use some hash browns.”

  Frank started the car.

  “With a couple eggs on top, sausage sides,” Jose added.

  “It’s Sunday night.”

  Jose gave Frank his “So what?” look. “Get us a running start on the week’s cholesterol quota.”

  NINE

  Monday morning, Frank and Jose sat at their desks, facing each other, Eleanor’s printout between them. Beside the desks, a battered institutional-green rolling file cabinet the size of a refrigerator held stacks of thick reddish-brown case folders.

  “Dreamed about that, last night,” Jose said. He stuck his lower lip out at the file cabinet. “Thing was suffocating me. Tried to get it off, but it was like a big octopus.”

  Yesterday at the flea market came back to Frank. His father… the Plimsoll line. He looked at the cabinet and wondered how much its files weighed. How many more could it take before everything tilted over, never to come upright again?

  He took a deep breath. “Get started?”

  Reluctantly, Jose stood, reached into the cabinet, and pulled out two folders. He offered one to Frank. “You think we’ll know when we get to the last one?”

  “The last one…?” Frank was drawing a blank. “When we get to the bottom of that stack,” he said, pointing to the cabinet.

  “No,” Jose said, “will we know when the last case comes our way-‘This is it, we’re hanging it up’?”

  Frank thought about cabinets of case folders. The cases stretching back went a long way. The ones ahead didn’t. Couldn’t. There was a first case. There had to be a last one. He and Jose were damn sure closer to dealing with the last than they were to the first.

  “I don’t know,” he told Jose. “What do you think?”

  Jose studied the folder on his desk, then looked back at Frank. “Yeah… yeah, I sort of think we will.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I think we’re close.”

  “How’s that?

  Jose sat down and patted the folder. “We ever talk about it before? The last case? Our last case?”

  “No.”

  Jose pointed a thick index finger at Frank. “See? Never talked about it before. Now… now we are talking about it.”

  Frank thought about that. A Kenny Rogers fragment ran through his head. Time to get out of the game? Time to walk? Not yet. Soon, maybe. But not yet.

  He sat there, staring at the folder before him. Alfonzo Betters. Somewhere inside his memory, a relay tripped. A small door opened into a partially lit compartment. He and Jose had helped with the canvassing.

  Betters. Was it ’99? Maybe ’98? He opened to the first page-the summary. Alfonzo Betters, resident Orleans Place, NE, DOA Hospital Center, 25 July 1995. Frank got a vague feeling of unease. Couldn’t have been almost six years ago. Seems like ’99,’98 at most. He looked through the rest of the folder-reports, interviews, neighborhood canvassing notes. He looked across the desk to Jose.

  “We get some music?” he asked.

  Jose got up. The CD player was on a file cabinet behind him. Over on his side, Frank had the coffeemaker. They had a rule. Whoever complained about the coffee got the job of making it. The last switch had been seven years before, when Frank had muttered something about the coffee needing to be stronger.

  “What you want?”

  “Gould?”

  Jose found the CD, and moments later, Glenn Gould’s rendition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations filled the small office.

  Whenever he heard the Variations, Frank imagined Bach, maybe with a glass or two under his belt after dinner, sitting down to amuse himself, composing music that didn’t have a beginning or an end. The musical equivalent of playing solitaire. Like Monet doodling or Rodin whittling. He looked at the Betters
folder. It seemed to have gotten thicker.

  “Know what I’m going to do when we retire?” he asked Jose.

  “When we retire” was a game they played. They hadn’t played it at the start, twenty-six years earlier, when they’d gotten out of the academy. They began eleven years later. After the hostage thing that had gone so badly wrong. In their game, they had ridden motorcycles through Mexico, taken flying lessons, run a deep-sea fishing charter out of Key Largo.

  “What this time?” Jose asked, obviously not enthusiastic about digging through the papers.

  Frank motioned toward the CD player. “There’s what, thirty-some of those?”

  Jose looked at the CD label on the jewel box. “Thirty-two.”

  “Well, I’m gonna memorize them. Get so I can say, ‘That’s number twenty-four.’ ”

  “Sure. That’ll win us a lotta bar bets.”

  Frank thought about it.

  “Now, the Platters,” Jose went on, “or Armstrong… if you could name everything they did…”

  Frank nodded. “Yeah. In sequence.”

  Simultaneously both men knew the game was over. Their eyes met, then went to the folders in front of them.

  Alfonzo Betters’s folder lay opened to the first page, the Form 120. In the file cabinet, folders for Michael Darnal. Louis Fleming.

  The names went on: Frederick Hankins. Ambrose Murray. Joseph Jameson. Deshawn Simkins. James Rivers. Eight cases. Eight out of the fifteen hundred in Eleanor’s printout.

  From his desk drawer, Frank took a wire-bound steno pad, the narrow kind used by reporters. He turned it lengthwise, opened it, and penciled a horizontal line from left to right across two pages.

  He worked until ten, slogging through the Betters folder. Photographs, canvass questionnaires, sketches, phone records, the initial report, media clip files, the autopsy report, and investigator notes, notes, and more notes. Making sense out of other people’s words-brutal going.

  As he worked, he marked the line in the steno pad, ticking off events in Betters’s life and in the investigation after his death. On pages following the timeline, Frank compiled a list of witnesses and others interviewed. Just after ten, he closed the folder and stretched to ease his tightened neck and back. He stared at the closed folder. Not quite seeing it as much as looking beyond it.

  Picturing the killing of Alfonzo Betters. Imagining how the people, places, and times-like so many jigsaw pieces-fit together. He’d opened the folder and Betters was just another name.

  Now Betters-Alfonzo David Betters-had shape and substance. It was as if he, Frank, had run time backward, like a reversed videotape.

  He’d reassembled the disconnected body splayed out on the autopsy table. Reversed the trajectories of the four nine-millimeter slugs that had demolished heart and lungs. Ridden with Alfonzo as he drove his silver ’93 Lexus along the Strip on Tuesday night, July 25, 1995.

  Already weary, he turned to a fresh page in the steno pad and reached for Michael Darnal’s folder.

  Late-afternoon sun slanted through the window and onto the cork bulletin board with its yellowed clippings and curling Wanted posters. Paper plates and sandwich wrappings filled a deli carry-out box on the bookcase behind Frank.

  He was opening his seventh folder. James Charles Rivers… DOB 14 May 1973… Resident Barry Farms… DOA 17 Sept 1996… multiple gunshot wounds…

  He paused to leaf through the steno pad, reviewing the timelines. Frustration inside him was a voice screaming down an endless corridor of interwoven dates, places, names. The review board-Chief Noah Day’s review board-had the authority to close cases administratively. Department Directive 304.1 spelled out the requirements.

  And 304.1 let you close cases on stuff you’d never get into court-suppositions, conjectures, hearsay. Frank hated 304.1. You close a case that way, you feel greasy. You want to take a shower. He and Jose served once on the board. They’d balked so hard and so often and raised so much hell that Day had never picked them to serve again. And here Emerson had thrown them into this goddamn pit, and no matter how they got out, they were going to get dirty.

  “I’ll get it.” Jose spoke before Frank even realized the phone had been ringing. Jose listened, then hung up.

  “R.C.,” he said.

  Frank shook his head, trying to clear the brain-numbing fog of names, dates, and deadly dull bureaucratic police prose.

  “Says he’s got something.” Relief lightened Jose’s voice.

  Frank shut the Rivers file with a prayer of thanksgiving. You went when Renfro Calkins called. You did what Calkins said do. And in return, Calkins, the department’s forensics magician, would make fibers, dust, blood spatters, and a thousand other minute things tell stories about where they’d been and what they’d seen.

  Frank got up and followed Jose. He was at the door when he stopped. He returned to his desk and rummaged through the center drawer till he found a small cardboard box, then slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  Here.” Renfro Calkins, a wiry man in a white lab jacket, stood at a counter, a clipboard with an aluminum cover under one arm.

  In front of Calkins was a comparison microscope-actually two microscopes, side by side and joined at the hip with a single set of stereo eyepieces. Calkins motioned to the instrument and moved aside to make room.

  Jose stepped to the microscope and began adjusting the eyepieces.

  Frank reached into his pocket and pulled out the cardboard box. He handed it to Calkins.

  “What’s this?”

  “Found it at the flea market yesterday,” Frank explained.

  Calkins thumbed open a flap and shook a thimble into his palm. The overhead fluorescent flashed bars across the lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses. He turned the thimble to see the delicate carving around its base, and smiled in delight.

  “Early-nineteenth-century scrimshaw,” he declared, eyes still on the thimble. He rotated it once more, then focused on Frank.

  “I thought it might have been plastic,” Frank said.

  Calkins grinned and shook his head. “Ivory, Frank, ivory.” His eyes returned to the thimble. “Beautiful, beautiful,” he whispered, half to himself, half to the thimble.

  “It’s yours,” Frank said.

  Calkins rewarded Frank with a kid’s smile of surprise. He reached for his wallet. “How much…?”

  Frank shook his head. “Nothing. It was in with some marbles I bought.”

  “But…”

  Frank waved him off. “Next time you buy a box of thimbles and find a marble…”

  Calkins gave the thimble another once-over, put it back in the box, and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  “Got a match, here,” Jose said, moving away from the microscope.

  Frank stepped up and bent to the eyepieces.

  A blur, silver and dark gray. He fiddled with the eyepieces. The focus sharpened. A vertical line split the image. On either side of the line, were horizontal lines like a compressed bar code. He adjusted a knob. The lines on the left moved down a fraction to match precisely those on the right. He was looking at two bullets. The horizontal lines-silver against dark gray-were the marks left by the grooves in a pistol’s barrel as the bullet passed through.

  Calkins’s dry, matter-of-fact voice came in as Frank was still studying the comparisons.

  “Slug on the right killed Skeeter Hodges, and…”

  Frank looked up from the microscope.

  “… I sent it over to the Bureau to run it against Drug-fire.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They got a match.” Calkins pointed to the microscope. “Like I said, the slug on the right killed Skeeter Friday night.”

  Calkins stopped to make certain he’d nailed this fact down with Frank and Jose, then dropped the other shoe.

  “The one on the left killed Kevin Gentry.”

  “Gentry?” Frank asked. He wasn’t certain he’d heard right. Then he was afraid he had.

  “Gentry?” Jose echoed in the background.


  “Gentry,” Frank repeated. “Kevin Gentry… Capitol South Metro station… early ’ninety-nine. January?… February?”

  “February,” Jose said. “A real shitstorm.”

  “A very high-intensity shitstorm.” Calkins slipped into his classroom tutorial voice.

  “They did a Three-oh-four-point-one, didn’t they?” Jose asked.

  Calkins nodded. “Administrative closure. Zelmer Austin ring a bell? Do you remember the grounds?”

  Getting blank looks from Jose and Frank, Calkins frowned. He took the clipboard from under his arm, flipped open the aluminum cover and found a page. “Zelmer Darryl Austin…” he said. “Fifteen April 1999… Eaton Road, Barry Farms… DOA, hit-and-run, Washington Hospital Center.”

  Calkins looked up from the clipboard. “Grounds for closing the case were Austin’s track record, and testimony from an informant.”

  Jose nodded. “Yeah. Austin… one of Juan Brooks’s enforcers. When Brooks got busted, Austin stayed on with Skeeter Hodges until they fell out.”

  Frank took that in, then glanced around the lab. He looked back at Calkins.

  “So we have the weapon that killed Gentry showing up. Does that mean Austin didn’t kill Gentry?”

  “No,” Calkins said. “All it tells us is that the weapon survived Zelmer Austin.”

  Jose shrugged. “Austin knew the business. You make a hit, you don’t keep the weapon. You do, it’s a go-to-jail card. So what we got is a scenario where Austin pops this guy Gentry. Austin dumps the weapon. Austin gets done in with a hit-and-run. Somebody inherits the piece, maybe it changes hands a couple a times. Two years later, somebody uses it to pop Skeeter and Pencil on Bayless Place. And the piece is still out there.”

  Calkins began smiling as he listened to Jose’s story. “A precise summary, Detective Phelps. May I help you fill it out?” he asked, the smile turning slightly mischievous.

  “Please do, Dr. Calkins. Be my guest.”

  “At some time or another, the weapon that killed Kevin Gentry and Skeeter Hodges was in Pencil Crawfurd’s custody.”

  Calkins leaned against the edge of the lab counter and watched Frank and Jose exchange puzzled glances.

  Frank sighed. “Okay, R.C. We give up.”