The Disposables

by David Putnam

  “What are you talking about? What other thing?” This was an interrogation technique, throw a little out there and let the subject wonder, and out of guilt he starts to talk.

  “I can get the DA in here, but I don’t think he’ll deal on those charges when he’s got such a strong case against you on this other thing. I’m just here to get your statement if you want to give me one. The big boys from Homicide will be here in a minute.”

  “What other thing? Why is Homicide involved? What am I being charged with?”

  The nasty Mack returned, “Don’t play dumb. It’s not gonna to work.”

  “I’ll ask you again. What am I being charged with?”

  He sat back, gave the-cat-that-ate-the-canary smile. “Kidnap and murder one, multiple counts, six to be exact. And here in California it rates the death penalty.”

  I was numb. The revelation didn’t faze me. I laughed. “Who are all these folks I am supposed to have killed?”

  “Okay, we can play it your way. Ned Bressler’s one. He’s also the one who tripped you up on all the others.”

  “Ned Bressler? What are you talking about? When did I purportedly commit this heinous crime against society? Not that Bressler qualifies as a human.”

  Mack didn’t answer, a wise move when interviewing and trying to get something, anything to get a wedge into the suspect.

  “Tell me, Detective Mack, how was I supposed to commit these murders with a crack team of Sheriff’s Violent Crime detectives following me twenty-four seven?”

  “I’m not going to lay the entire case out. I’m not the fool you think I am. There is strong physical evidence you killed Ned Bressler. And, according to your employer and friend, John Ahern, aka Jumbo, you had plenty of motive.”

  “There can’t be any evidence because I haven’t laid eyes on Bressler for the better part of a week.” I didn’t want to give it to him, tell him about the train heists if they didn’t already know about them. I didn’t think it would bode well for my case. The murder rap was all smoke and mirrors.

  “So,” I said, “in the words of all the famous criminals who have gone before me, put up or shut up.”

  The light that ignited in Mack’s eyes scared me. On his flat pie-pan face a wide, ugly smile slowly materialized. He reached over to the brown accordion file, his meaty hand disappearing inside, and came out with a gun in an evidence bag.

  My mind spun trying to hook onto the possibilities. What gun could they possibly have?

  Mack kept it out of reach, “It’s not loaded so don’t even think about it. We lifted your fingerprints off it.”

  The .45. It could only be the .45 I took off Q-Ball, the one in the trunk of the root beer-brown Plymouth the BMFs had staked out. The one Vanfleet took a beating over. Sure, that gun would have my prints on it. The only gun I could think of that I had touched in recent history. But I didn’t kill anyone with it. But from where I sat, the distance, coupled with the plastic bag obscuring the black metal, it did look like Q’s .45.

  “Is that Q-Ball’s gun?”

  Mack’s smile didn’t waver. After a second, his head moved from side to side. “So you’re saying you know whose gun it is? You cop an insanity plea, they might put you in the booby hatch for the rest of your life. Shooting Ned Bressler and lighting all those folks on fire, who wouldn’t believe you were absolutely batshit?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t burn those people. I was trying to help Robby find the guy, remember?” I had broken my cool and had said far too much. Mack knew it. He leaned forward. “Robby had an idea it might’ve been you firing up those poor people, burning them to the ground with a can of gas. Think about it, you even led us on a wild-goose chase, giving us the Grape Street Crips. Looks bad, real bad. You can’t take this to the box, a jury will crucify you. Tell me now, and I’ll do everything I can to get you the booby hatch, Patton State Hospital for the criminally insane, should be a piece of cake.”

  He continued to talk. I sat back and let all the events that led up to this spin around in my head. What linked me to all of these murders? The gun in the plastic bag? How so? The others were random, no links, killed with gasoline. None of it made sense.

  Mack’s words registered again, “Robby knew you were into those train heists. That’s why we were on you. A high-profile case with a lot of heat, a lot of pressure from the FBI, the theft of interstate cargo. It was his idea to get close to you. He just didn’t know how to approach you. Then the liquor store shooting, a perfect intro to present the ruse to get you to help him. He always said keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Not long after that, Robby started to put it together. That liquor store where you worked was right around the corner from one of the fire victim’s. Closer if you went out the back door. Nobody would know you were gone.”

  Mack violated the cardinal rule of interrogation: never give more information than you receive. I let him talk.

  “We ran the timeline with all the killings against our surveillance log. The times you lost us and went out of pocket, matched. For the most part anyway, each of the killings. We got you, man, we got you locked up tight.”

  “You don’t have me. Because I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Bullshit, you got priors. You forget what you’re on parole for?”

  “I can shoot holes in your timeline. You’re going to look like a bunch of buffoons. Your whole case is going to break down.” His timeline would in fact break down. It had to. But to do it, I would have to come clean with every place I’d been during those times. In every instance, when I went to intense countersurveillance mode, I had been en route to a criminal caper, either taking a kid out of a hostile environment or out with Jumbo on a job or, on occasion, going to the safe house to check on Dad. To clear myself I would have to implicate and damn myself to life in prison. They had me boxed tight. I asked, “Where did you find that gun?”

  “I’m not at liberty to give you that information. Homicide will be here soon.”

  Mack wasn’t supposed to be talking to me at all, not with Homicide on the way. He thought if he broke me down, there would be something in it for him.

  “What kind of gun is it and who’s it registered to?”

  Mack gave a little squirm as he tried to decide if it was worth giving it up. He knew it was a major interrogation point. He weighed the pros and cons.

  I gave him a little nudge. “You give me something, I’ll give you something.”

  “It’s an H&K .40-cal registered to Jonathon Kendrick.”

  He said the name of the registered owner with emphasis like it was supposed to mean something. It did. Back in the far recesses of my brain, I knew the name, only couldn’t pull it up. It was there and vitally important, and I couldn’t pull it up. The anger made it worse. I tried to relax. It would come to me later. I knew the way my mind worked. In similar instances, out of a dead sleep, I’d sit up in bed as the answer bubbled to the surface. I needed it right away. This information was critical to what was happening now. This time he had not mentioned the kids. Why had he not thrown them into the pot to raise the stakes? Maybe he thought too many charges would spook me into silence. Why muddy the water anymore than it was. Ned Bressler, the perfect patsy nobody would miss.

  “I gave you something. Now hold up your end.”

  “Kendrick? Who’s Kendrick?”

  “No. You said you’d give me something.”

  I needed some extra time. I needed out. Like Dad always said, never depend on anyone except yourself. And the only way to help myself was to create a little wiggle room.

  I looked at Mack and said, “It’s Tuesday, isn’t it? I need to take a piss.”

  Mack looked as if I’d slapped him in the face. He sat back, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Being an active member of the BMFs was like being in a street gang but only more organized. Robby Wicks was the leader, the brain of the operation who thought way out ah
ead of everyone else. For instance, if you were on the prowl poaching in LAPD’s area, in their low-income public housing projects, which was strictly forbidden by the sheriff’s executive staff because, “LAPD can patrol their own shitholes,” and the “shit went south,” Robby had a remedy already in place.

  If while in the projects, by an unlucky circumstance you became separated from your partner before you had time to confer on your fabricated probable cause, Robby’s rule was simple. When asked, “why the hell were you in the projects?” you’d consider the date. On odd days you followed a blue Chevy with gang members into the projects, and on even days it was a green Ford. Once inside, something else diverted your attention. Your partner would say the same.

  It wasn’t really Tuesday, and I really didn’t need to take a piss. The words were another code for the BMFs. It meant something critical had just come up. Either out in the field with an informant, in an interview with a crook, or while relating an incident to a boss, an incident with fabricated evidence that wasn’t coming out right once exposed to the light of day. The words were an absolute code red. Cease and desist until another meeting could be reconvened to straighten it out. I was no longer a member of the elite squad and had no reason to believe Mack would honor it.

  I added, “Seriously, no bullshit, you need to hear this.”

  Mack didn’t look to the right up at the camera where his captain was watching from the other room. Mack fought the urge, and I gave him a lot of credit for it. He didn’t know what to do.

  The decision was taken out of his hands. The door opened and Homicide came in, a man and woman I had never seen before. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had nine thousand deputies. I had been out of circulation for three years. A lot could happen to an agency that size in three years: transfers, promotions, retirements, terminations.

  The woman, a thin, bottle redhead, dressed in a nice black pantsuit that reeked of nicotine, said to Mack, “Thanks, Detective, we can take it from here.” She shot him a put-on smile that really meant she was beyond angry for polluting her ripened interrogation subject and it would be addressed later.

  Mack stared into my eyes as he got up and left.

  The woman had the lead. She sat down with a notebook, held out a red box of Marlboros. “Cigarette?” It was strictly forbidden to smoke in a county building. This was another interrogation ploy, an infraction violation, that said, “See, I’m like you, I break the law.” A minor violation in comparison, but it does work. And when you were talking about a case as large and as important as this one, you tried everything.

  I stared at her and didn’t say anything. She kept the phony smile, pulled a cigarette out of the box with her subdued red lipstick lips, but didn’t light it. “So,” she said, her eyes slightly pinned as if she had lit the cigarette and the smoke now wafted up, “I understand you’ve waived your rights.”

  I weighed my options: talk to this woman and make a deal or wait to see if Mack had the guts to talk to me later.

  When I didn’t immediately say anything, she said to her partner, a bleary-eyed red-faced man in an immaculate navy-blue suit, “John, Mr. Johnson looks uncomfortable. I think we can take the cuffs off, don’t you?”

  Her partner got up to take off the cuffs.

  “Bruno, you mind if I call you Bruno? My name is Nancy Thorne, and I think you know why I’m here.”

  I rubbed my wrists and made my choice. “I would like to talk to an attorney.”

  There was no rush in making a deal. I could always do that later.

  The sheriff long ago learned to take special care of sensational prisoners. You didn’t put them in general population where another inmate with a yen for fame, a wannabe who had the desire to make a name for himself, could put a shiv between your celebrity’s ribs. There was a place in the jail called Administrative Segregation. The inmates wore green jumpsuits instead of standard blues and were labeled “Keep Aways, Escort Only.” I wasn’t put in Ad Seg because classification labeled me based on my alleged crimes. They’d booked me for everything, the torch murders, the kidnapping, and the train robberies. They threw all the charges up against the wall to see what would stick. Can’t say I wouldn’t have done any different under the circumstances. Homicide Detective Thorne and her crew had forty-eight hours to file the charges.

  The jail considered me a suicide risk. I was put on the third-floor hospital in a single room with a fifteen-minute observation. This meant a deputy came by every fifteen minutes and looked in the little square window in the hard steel door to confirm I was still breathing and log that fact on the chart.

  Maybe I should’ve been suicidal, but this whole thing was too pat and obviously set up on the fly. I knew, if given the chance, there was an outside possibility I could tear it down. What didn’t make sense was that Robby was smarter than all this. He had to know his house of cards would take a nosedive.

  I waited for hours, counting the time off in fifteen-minute increments each time I saw the on-duty deputy put his face in the window of the door. I paced the small room and tried to stay awake by counting how many looky-loos came to my window, besides the on-duty deputy. The others wanted in to see the serial killer who was lighting people on fire, the man splashed across the TV and Los Angeles Times. Jail personnel, hospital staff, trustees, all came and looked in the zoo window. Gradually, the adrenaline bled off. Four hours passed. I laid down on the bed, curled up, fought sleep, prayed that the door would open, and Mack would be there. Ironically, I now depended upon him to save me.

  My eyes grew heavy. The light went off and then strobed every fifteen minutes in my semidream state.

  When I woke, I’d lost track of the flashes and didn’t know what time it was, whether it was day or night outside in the real world. I went to the window and waited ten minutes before the deputy came by, looked, and then marked the paper. I had to yell to be heard through the door. “What time is it?”

  He didn’t answer and gave me the bird before he moved on. I waited. Two inmate trustees in blues pushed a noisy food cart down the hall as two others picked up empty trays. Breakfast. I’d slept longer than I thought. When I was a brand-new deputy, I only worked the hospital a couple of times on overtime and didn’t remember when chow was fed in the morning. I thought it was five o’clock to facilitate preparing the inmates for court. I went back to pacing. Dust motes hung in the air. I couldn’t help remembering that I had read somewhere most dust was particles of skin humans shed every day of their lives.

  The activity in the hall increased, then abruptly dropped off all together while everyone ate. The little horizontal slot with a locked door under the window opened and a trustee put a hot tray on the ledge. My breakfast stayed right there on the ledge well past noon and was finally replaced with a brown-bag lunch. I didn’t eat that either, though I knew what was in it: a white bread American cheese sandwich, a bag of chips, a mushy apple, and a dried-out hard chocolate chip cookie.

  Mack didn’t come until after dinner.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Mack didn’t look in the window, the key in the door rattled the lock, the door opened, and he stepped in. His face turned red and he clenched his fists. “I’m putting my ass on the line. This better not be bullshit.” He had dark half circles under his bloodshot eyes, and his hair was mussed. It looked as if he hadn’t slept. He wore denim pants, a thick brown belt, a Rolling Stones t-shirt, the one with the large tongue on the front, partially covered by a long-sleeve, tan corduroy shirt stretched tight at the shoulders and biceps. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, the blond hair hardly visible on his lantern jaw.

  I sat up on the bed and rubbed my face and looked out the open door at freedom, a sterile institution-beige hallway. “Maybe you should close the door and lower your voice.”

  He hesitated.

  I may have tried to take control of the meeting too quickly. He stomped over to the door and slammed it. I heard the solid steel door lock automatically. Deputy Mack was prone to tho
se kinds of mistakes.

  “You going to start talking or am I going to walk out?”

  “The door’s locked.”

  His face flushed red.

  I held up my hands, “Whoa. I’m sorry, really. Don’t get mad. I’m going to make you a star.”

  “Like hell you are. You got nothin’. I don’t even know what I’m doin here.”

  “If that were true, you wouldn’t be here at all. You know there’s something terribly wrong with what’s going on. More so than normal, I mean.”

  He calmed down, looked over his shoulder with a quick glance, and backed up to sit in a hard plastic chair.

  “I know you have no reason to believe me. I didn’t burn those people and I didn’t shoot Crazy Ned Bressler.”

  He opened his mouth to speak. I cut him off. “I know who burned those people. That’s why you’re here. You know it’s the truth.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “You know why?”

  He stared, thinking it over, not rising to the bait.

  I leaned forward, my hands on the edge of the bed, “Why don’t you tell me why I’m telling you.”

  His light-blue eyes were almost gray. He waited a long time, his jaw muscle knitting. Finally, he looked away as if making a confession. “I grew up in south Texas. My daddy was a lawman and so was my grandpap. I wanted to get away from being Big John Mack’s little boy and make my own way.”

  I didn’t know what this had to do with anything, but I had the time.

  “I moved out here and joined the best law enforcement organization in the world. Everything was great. I loved my job. I moved up fast, made it to the shit-hot Violent Crimes Team. At first, this job—there was nothing better. It was everything I wanted and imagined. Until about two years ago.”

  I knew what he was talking about. I’d been there.

  He paused, so I finished it for him. “Until your leader changed emotionally.”