“How has she neglected Steven?”
“That’s what I tried to tell her. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe she had other things she was doing, but I really don’t think it was at Steven’s expense. Look at the other kids.” He took another bite of the sandwich. “Besides, Erin’s always been very active.”
“Could it be Steven just needed more attention?”
“But how do you tell that, Rose? And how do you blame yourself for it?”
She nodded again. Nothing in the universe would convince Father that Erin Cochran had done something wrong. “Great sandwich, by the way.”
She beamed.
“But you know what I think it is, really? I think-no, I’m sure -it’s still Eddie. How do people bear with all that in one week?” He closed his fist on the table and pounded it. “Dear God, if I could just change one thing…”
She reached over and covered his hand. “Now, don’t you go blaming yourself, Father. You’ve said it yourself-sometimes God takes the cream of the crop early, back to Himself. He took Eddie, and nothing you or anybody else does is going to change that. You’ve just to pick up and go on from there. Erin’s strong, and Ed will help her.”
“Go on from there?”
“That’s all you can do, isn’t it?”
His eyes softened. The pain visibly left his face. “Thank you, Rose. You’re a gem.”
She blushed again, looking down. “Finish your sandwich,” she said. Now, she thought, would be a good time. “You know, Father, while we’re talking about Eddie… What I mean is, the reason I couldn’t sleep is I was wondering if you’d made a mistake.”
Father swallowed and smiled. “No one’s infallible but the Pope, Rose. What did I do this time?”
“Well, I don’t know you did, but…” She outlined it all for him, everything she remembered or thought she did. It took only a couple of minutes, but sure enough, that must have been what had been keeping her up, because suddenly she was exhausted.
Father had left the second half of the sandwich (had she made it too big?), and didn’t open the other beer. Maybe what she was telling him was important.
“You might be right, Rose,” he said when she’d finished. His lips were tight, the wide forehead creased in concentration. “I’d better call the sergeant in the morning.”
“I’m sorry, I just thought.”
He patted her hand. “Nothing to be sorry about. You did the right thing. Exactly. I’m sorry I cost you some sleep.”
She sat back in her chair, relieved, but only for a moment, then reached for the dish. Father held her hand again.
“I’ll get the dishes, Rose. You get some sleep.”
Chapter Twenty-six
INSPECTOR SERGEANT Glitsky answered the telephone on the first ring, his adrenaline pumping. Calls in the middle of the night meant one thing-one of his cases had come in.
He kissed Flo, who didn’t even stir anymore when the phone rang after midnight, and looked in on the three kids, two in bunkbeds and one in a crib all in the same twelve-by-fourteen room (and they did have to get moving on a new house, even if they couldn’t afford it, if he didn’t make lieutenant). In the kitchen, sucking a quick microwaved cup of mud, he called Dismas Hardy as a courtesy. The phone rang four times and then the machine clicked on and Abe said, “Hardy, Glitsky. They got Alphonse.” Then he hung up.
Now he was looking through the small hole in the door of the interrogation room at the Hall of Justice. It was, by his watch, exactly 3:11 A.M.
A familiar and therefore not ominous silence prevailed all around him. The silence was familiar, in this place normally strafed by obscenities and bedlam, because Glitsky had done this many times since becoming a homicide inspector-come down in the middle of the night to interrogate a suspect still without his lawyer and therefore perhaps likely to talk if, as was also likely, his IQ didn’t hover much above room temperature.
If he waited until the morning, even a rookie court-appointed defense attorney would tell Alphonse to say nothing, and that would be that until the trial. This was the prosecution’s one big chance to break something in any case, and if an inspector wasn’t willing to forego a night’s sleep for it, he was in the wrong job.
Alphonse slumped, maybe sleeping, at the small table. His hands were not visible-it was likely they were cuffed to the chair behind him. A deputy, hands folded, also perhaps dozing, sat at one end of the table. Glitsky knocked.
“Alphonse, my man, how you doin’?”
Abe’s voice boomed in the small room. Everybody was awake now. Alphonse even managed a more or less welcome look, possibly relieved that he was getting questioned by one of his brothers, a notion Glitsky was not above using but that, all in all, he found pretty funny.
“Hey, we got you, huh?”
Alphonse shrugged. He had abrasions on his forehead and cheek, a swollen mouth, a little clotted blood under his nose. “You get caught in a door or something?” Abe asked.
“Airport cops hurt me,” he muttered. Glitsky glanced at the deputy, making a clucking sound. “We’ve got to do something about those airport cops. He been Mirandized?”
The deputy nodded. “ ’Bout five times.”
“Does he want to talk?”
“Ask him.”
“Alphonse, you want to talk to me?”
“Yeah. You wanna do something about them beating me up?”
He flipped on the tape recorder, an old, squeaking reel-to-reel. Glitsky turned back to Alphonse. “Says in the report you resisted arrest and necessary force was used to restrain you.”
Alphonse rolled his eyes. He had a way of saying “shit” that took about two seconds and didn’t end in “t.”
“Shi…”
“So why’d you run?”
“I knew you was after me.”
“Saw your picture in the paper, huh? Hey, you got your hair cut. Looks bad, man.”
Alphonse bobbed his head at the compliment.
“So why’d you have to kill her?”
“I didn’t kill nobody.”
Glitsky smiled, warm and inviting. “Oh, that’s right. Somebody planted your knife there, smeared her blood on the pants we got out of the hamper in your mother’s house.” Glitsky raised his eyebrows.
Alphonse’s brain squeaking made almost as much noise as the reel-to-reel. Finally he said, “What if I don’t wanna talk to nobody? What if I wanna see my lawyer first?”
“Then absolutely it’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna stop right now and get you a lawyer in here.”
There was a long pause. Abe waited it out. Finally Alphonse said, “I got rights.”
“No question.”
“I don’t like one lawyer, I can get another.”
“Righteous. Right on!” Glitsky gave him a sarcastic black power fist, then folded his hands on the table and just sat there. After about thirty seconds Alphonse said, “What?”
“What do you mean, what?”
“What you just starin’ at?”
“I’m just waiting. I thought you were thinking about it.” Alphonse strained, stretching against the cuffs. Glitsky, Mr. Nice Guy, turned to the deputy. “Can’t you undo those?”
Alphonse rubbed his hands together when the cuffs were off. He gingerly touched the bump on his forehead. “Thinking about what?” he asked.
Abe thought he ought to get his attention again. “You know Sam Polk’s dead, too.”
“Sam ain’t dead.”
“He ain’t breathin’.”
Abe grinned now, the tight-lipped grin that showed his scar. His eyes didn’t grin. His hands were still folded, calm, in front of him. He twiddled his thumbs, slowly, finally resting his eyes on them, his thumbs.
“Hey, I didn’t kill any Sam Polk. You not layin’ that on me, too.”
Glitsky shrugged. “I didn’t say that.”
“Who killed him?”
“I didn’t say he was killed. What made you think he was killed?”
“You just said�
��”
Glitsky shook his head. “Uh-uh. I didn’t say anything about him being killed. You did.”
Glitsky had him on the ropes. It was almost depressing, how dumb these guys were. Alphonse didn’t even know what was happening, but Glitsky knew that Alphonse understood one thing-he was in deep shit.
“Alphonse, talk to me, man. If you didn’t kill him, I’m the only friend you got.”
“Shi…”
“No shit, for real.”
Alphonse put his hands back up to his face, rubbing his eyes, craning his neck. “I didn’t kill no Sam Polk.”
“Okay.”
Abe sat there. Sometimes sitting was the best technique in the world. He looked somewhere midway between them with no expression at all on his face. He kept twiddling his thumbs. Alphonse fidgeted as though he had a hemorrhoid. “How we work something out?” he asked at last.
“We trade.”
“Trade what?”
“You tell me what happened. You didn’t kill him, I prove it and you don’t go to the gas chamber. That sound fair?” Glitsky kept smiling. It was good, he knew, to drop the old gas chamber in there. Keep the intensity at the proper level. “You know we got a new court now, Alphonse. We got judges now believe in the death penalty.”
Alphonse swallowed hard, touched his forehead again. He was beginning to sweat. Glitsky was, if anything, cool. The tape recorder spun around and around, squeaking, a little like the steady drip of Chinese water torture. It was the first time Abe remembered having a squeaky reel-to-reel in an interrogation, but he thought he might request one in the future. He wondered, waiting for Alphonse, whether there might be something like WD-4O in reverse-make things squeak. That made him smile again. He ran with it, the humor. “Alphonse, I got to draw you a picture or what?”
“What? What you want? I don’t know nothin’.”
Truer words, Abe thought, were never spoken. “See, the thing is, when we got multiple murders in the course of a crime, like we do here, it’s the death penalty. Special circumstances, they call it, like if you kill a cop, that kind of thing.” His eyes crinkled up. “You hear me? They find you guilty and you could fry. If you’re lucky, you go to the joint and you never get out. They don’t even talk about it.”
It was shaking him, Glitsky could tell. Whatever passed for logic in the brain of this poor sorry son of a bitch was being whacked out of kilter. “But I tole you I didn’t kill Sam Polk. An’ what crime?”
“Hey, Alphonse,” said Abe, his close personal friend. “You had a bag with like a hundred grand in it. You sell Girl Scout cookies for that? Sam give it to you?”
“Linda got it out.”
Abe shook his head. “Nobody’s gonna believe that. To a jury it’s gonna look like you stole it. You killed Linda for it, then you slammed the safe.”
“I didn’t mean to kill Linda! I mean, that was an accident.”
“You cut her throat by accident?”
Alphonse paused, maybe catching up to the fact that he’d just confessed to a killing. He shrugged as if to say “Hey, it happens.”
“So the thing is,” Abe continued, pressing his advantage, “that much money around, you’re dealing, right? You know it, I know it, so why argue about it. You didn’t kill Polk, maybe somebody else did, but it was about the dope. That’s what we want to know.”
What the hell, Abe thought, might as well go for it. They had him cold for Linda’s murder. Might as well collect some bonus points for DEA if he could, then work it around to the Cochran thing. He looked at his watch, then at Alphonse. “And I don’t got all night, okay?”
Alphonse was wrestling with the problem. The sweat was now pouring off him-Abe could smell it across the table-and his nose was running slightly. He sniffed and ran the back of his hand over his upper lip.
“I know what you’re thinking, Alphonse,” Abe said in his most gentle voice. “You’re thinking you talk and your friends find out, they’ll kill you, right?” The eyes across the table told him that’s what he was thinking. “Okay, that might happen. It might, you understand. But you don’t talk, and I guarantee- guar-an-tee-that you’re going down. No maybe, no if. You go down. We don’t get you for Sam Polk’s death, we definitely hit you for Eddie Cochran’s.”
Alphonse’s mouth just hung open.
“Now you’re going to tell me you didn’t kill Eddie. I know, Alphonse, you didn’t mean to kill anybody. Save it, though, huh, I’m tired.” Glitsky looked at his watch again. He wasn’t particularly tired, but it was closing in on four A.M. and he had his confession. He ought to go home. He pushed his chair back from the table and stood up.
“Where you goin’?”
“I said I’m tired. If you’re not gonna talk, I’m going home.”
Alphonse reached his hand out across the table. “Hey, I mean it. I didn’t kill Eddie. Sam mighta kilt him, but I didn’t.”
Abe pulled the chair around backward and straddled it. “We got your hairs in his car, Alphonse, the same ones we found on Linda. So don’t give me any more of this shit.”
“Hey, I swear to God.”
How many times had he heard this? Everybody was innocent of everything. Unknown was the man who said, “Yeah, I did that, and I did it because…” No, it was always an accident, or a mistake, or somebody else’s fault. Often, the denial got so vehement that the perp actually came to believe he hadn’t done it. And since more than four out of five were either drunk or on some controlled substance when the crime occurred, it wasn’t surprising that it might all seem like an hallucination or dream, that it hadn’t really happened.
“You swear to God,” Abe replied wearily. “But you got a better chance of talking yourself out of Sam Polk. We got you at the scene of Eddie’s murder.” Almost, he added to himself.
“I wasn’t there!” His eyes had widened. Abe found himself forced to look closely at him. There was something about this denial that was different. “Look, I rode in Eddie’s car most days, maybe even that day, I don’t know. But you gotta believe me. I liked Eddie, I didn’t kill him.”
Abe wasn’t about to get suckered by sincerity. He shook his head, made a production out of checking his watch. “You sure as fuck did.” Then he stood up, motioning to the deputy to turn off the recorder. “Take him upstairs,” he said.
He got his hand on the doorknob before Alphonse called out again. “Hey!”
Slowly, acting frustrated and exhausted (though his adrenaline was still pumping away-he wouldn’t need any sleep the rest of the night), Glitsky turned back.
“Look, I’ll talk, okay, but I didn’t kill nobody.”
“You killed Linda.”
He waved that off. “I just thought-I got people saw me that night Eddie got killed. Like all night.”
“Yeah? Who, your mother?”
“No, man. I play basketball, City League. That was a Monday, right?”
Abe nodded.
Alphonse rolled his eyes up again, straining for the memory. “Finals were that night. We played four games. Came in second.”
“Good for you.”
“Yeah, good for me. Who came in first?”
Abe glared at him, lips drawn tight.
Alphonse smiled. “Bunch of cops,” he said, “whole team full of cops.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
THE MORNING sun cast long shadows over the Cruz parking lot. It was barely seven A.M., and Hardy had been there for over an hour, taking the chance that Cruz had told the truth about one thing-working bosses’ hours.
He’d slept at Jane’s, gotten up early and decided to find out about Arturo Cruz once and for all. He wrote Jane a note, then drove across the wakening city to China Basin, where the whole thing had begun.
And it was, he thought, a whole thing, a whole new thing. Jane was right. It could be a pattern emerging. Two weeks before, he was a bartender, he wasn’t in love (either the feeling or the attitude), he hadn’t talked to Abe Glitsky in almost a year, or walked sharks or cared about some stu
pid idea of Pico’s to get them into the Steinhart.
He wasn’t sure what was going on, exactly. But having an hour alone to think about it, on a morning they were probably shooting postcards all over the Bay, made it all very real and a little scary.
It was just a favor for Moses and Frannie, he had told himself at first, but that wasn’t washing very well anymore. It had gotten inside him, this feeling that he might be doing something worthwhile. It reminded him of why he’d decided to join the police force and then go to law school what seemed about four lifetimes ago.
And it wasn’t that he wasn’t proud of tending bar. It took a certain kind of person to be good, he knew, and there was a simple and profound art to the pouring itself, especially of something like a draft Guinness. Also, there were principles, like you didn’t put a call liquor with a sweet mix-a Jack Daniel’s and Coke, a Tanqueray and tonic. No, you explained to your patron that the finest palate in the world could not tell the difference between a $2.50 call liquor and a ninety-cent well drink when it was mixed with some sugary bubbly stuff. Then you let them see for themselves. You even gave them that drink on the house. And then if they still wanted their Remy Martin VSOP Presbyterian, you directed them to another establishment. Hardy wouldn’t pour that shit, and McGuire supported him. Hell, McGuire had trained him.
But-no doubt of it-something else had been going on since he had started digging into Eddie Cochran’s death. As Jane had pointed out, he thought about the consequences of things, and he had a hard time just now envisioning going back behind the bar rail full-time. Or even part-time. Maybe he was getting a little old to be a bartender. He didn’t think he had wasted his life or anything like that, or wish he’d done things differently for the past few years-doing them had gotten him to here.
What really knocked him out-the surprise of it as much as anything-was that here, right now, felt so good. He wasn’t worried about being hurt, or failing, or anything. He wasn’t worried about his potential. He was having fun, getting to know who he was, not who he’d assumed he had become. It was interesting. In fact, he thought, it was a gas.
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