by Tom Corcoran
How many minutes ago had I expounded on cops and lies of omission? The detective was right. I was guilty of horse crap.
Hayes jacked his thumb at the squad car, the motion no casual gesture, but a concise statement “We’d like you to come down to the city.”
The last thing I wanted to do was ride six blocks in a locked-cage backseat. “Meet you there in fifteen.”
He half-turned toward the uniforms. They shifted to full-huff, ready-for-action stances. Primed for action. Fullbacks made larger by Kevlar undershirts, waiting for the snap. Hayes looked me cold in the eyes. “We’d like it now.”
“I’ll ride my bicycle. You won’t have to bring me home.”
“Walk to the car, Rutledge.”
I glanced at Carmen, then peered over Hayes’s shoulder.
He said, “You lose something?”
“I’m looking for the film crew, Dexter. The lights and sound and honey wagons. I’m waiting for the ‘Bad Boys’ theme song, in full stereo.”
“Mr. Rutledge, you have the right to remain silent . . .”
They’re pissed because I haven’t told them anything. Now I have the right to shut my mouth?
The uniforms came in a hurry. Placating hand language at first, until one yanked cuffs from behind his back. The bastards spread me against the outside wall of my house, patted me down as Hayes read aloud his three-by-five Miranda card. I checked over my shoulder. Carmen Sosa stood in the porch shadows, tears in her eyes, hands to her face in silent disbelief. I asked her to lock the house and call Sam. Water the plants if I wasn’t back in a week. The suggestive power of words: I suddenly needed to urinate.
One officer—C. TISDELL on his name tag—claw-pinched my upper arm, quick-walked me to the squad car. He pushed the top of my head downward so I wouldn’t bump my skull, the move learned from a thousand newscasts and crime “reenactments.” Its best use was not in protecting a suspect from harm but in marking superiority. The molded-plastic enclosure they called a backseat stank of puke and dried shit. Urine was champ. Lysol was out of the running. In the street-lamp glow I viewed a mural of blood smears and tooth marks and stains. Cops build routine to counter intended suicide by door-edge head-banging. They never consider suffocation.
Tisdell powered a right onto Francis to make my slick-seat ride more comfortable. I skidded sideways, banged against the left-side door. They got a chuckle, I got a panic stop at Southard. I caromed forward.
He went right. I was going to Angela Street, the station locals called “the city,” instead of the Stock Island county-managed lockup. If a bad situation can show a good sign, that was it.
The cop in front of me: “Damn quiet back there.”
I said, “I’m memorizing.”
“Memorize this,” said Tisdell.
He clipped an elevated sewer-hole cover, bounced us all. I descended, ass bone to a hard seat. I wondered how many police officers, in this era of allegations and litigation, had redirected their pent-up angers to abusing equipment.
My face hit mesh grate when Tisdell braked hard in die Simonton Street parking garage. I felt a snap at the bridge of my nose, a knot beginning on my forehead. I didn’t yell in pain. If I sustained viewable injury, the only way for the boys in blue to dodge a civil rights beef would be to claim I resisted arrest That’d be another grand to a bondsman, and who knows what extra court penalties. Things get complicated quickly. A friend once tossed a glass of water in some land developer’s face, got sentenced to anger-management classes, fifty hours of community service. He was lucky he didn’t have to wear an ankle bracelet. Water’s a tough commodity in the Keys.
Sure as hell, Tisdell’s partner palmed my head as he hoisted me out. Don’t want head lumps in addition to avoidable facial injuries. Dexter Hayes had followed in another vehicle. The three men marched me through double doors. One of them with a stranglehold on my elbow. The place hadn’t been a bona fide jail for years. It still smelled of old perspiration, disinfectant, ear wax, rotten socks, and drain odors. I’d heard jail smell called the stink of humiliation.
They turned me over to a desk jockey for booking. The clerk checked out my Hawaiian shirt, sneered to telegraph his fashion opinion. Hayes spit out an array of charges. The ones I noticed most were evidence tampering, obstruction of justice, and suspicion of accessory to murder.
Hayes wandered down a hallway, checked a bulletin board, pulled out his message pager. He turned, caught my eye and said, “Don’t think for a minute that you’re staying here, Rutledge. You’ll love your room at the county. It’s a modern facility, but it’s furnished in early-American steel. Don’t spend too much time in the showers, eh, buddy?”
“Who did I murder, Dexter? Let me in on it”
Hayes shuffled a wad of message slips. “First you ask a city cop where to find Bug Thorsby. Brilliant. Then you tell me sooner or later Bug’d get a visit from the wheel of fortune.” Dexter drew a large air circle, a wheel’s path to clarify his words. “We found Bug in the trunk of the Maxima.” He pinched his nose. “What a treat. We don’t have proof yet that you choked him to death, but we’ve got what the coroner’s investigator called ‘ocular petechiae,’ and a black Olympus camera strap in an evidence bag. Paint-ball residue on it, fingerprints, the whole magillah.”
I’d tossed the strap in my outdoor trash can.
Dexter added: “There were fresh scrape marks on the rear bumper cover of that car, like it got pushed into the ocean. We’ll get a search warrant to inspect that hot rod that’s registered in your name. Bottom line, Rutledge, you waxed his ass, or he died spontaneously of terminal bloodshot eyes.”
I’d escaped the car chase, but the action still had gone to the other guy.
Out of the quicksand, the answer to one question:
If they’d succeeded in stealing my Shelby, Bug Thorsby’s body would have been found in my trunk instead of the Maxima’s.
“You’re talking stuff that happened in the county. Why am I at the city?”
“Professional courtesy. Liska’s due here in ten.”
18
The duty grunt aimed his camera, told me to face it. I shivered in the tax-supported meat-locker air. “Stand on the damn X,” he said. “Face me.” Stupid voice tone. Vocabulary and sentence length reduced to lowest common IQ: “Look at my hand.” Bang, bang. “Point your toes at the wall. Stare at the red spot. Make this easy. Eyes open wider. Keep staring.”
He’d revoked my right to blink. The spot was orange, the twin strobes angled for least-flattering light. Let’s talk Dostoyevsky, Darkness at Noon, Native Son. What do you say we debate reasonable and prudent assumption of evidence destruction? Or circumstantial presumption of horseshit. I’ll write a book. The History of South Florida Justice. A six-page pamphlet.
Mug shots in newspapers make new jailbirds look depressed, deranged. Friends will review my expression, make comments reserved for funerals: “Doesn’t he look natural?” I recalled the blurred portrait that illustrated a Jerry Jeff Walker album cover in the early 1970s. The cut line had credited Joe Santana, Key West Jail. I asked if Joe was still around. No one answered.
Did I have a lawyer? I said the cuffs had been so tight, my allotted call would be to my doctor. They said okay. This wasn’t going to be an audition for Letterman. These people had heard it all.
A few years ago, Aperture magazine ran a feature about a historian who found antique glass-plate negatives, photos taken of prisoners in Marysville, California, from 1900 to 1908. Front shots of all, but the woman photographer had angled her subjects for three-quarter views instead of perfect profiles. The angles revealed more character than straight ahead or straight into the ear. The traits were not reassuring. Even then, felons looked guilty as hell.
A morbidly obese clerk took me to an eight-by-eight interview room next to the double-door entrance. We edged past six other handcuffed detainees waiting for paperwork. Grovelers, fist-clenching methamphetamine wrecks, indolent human skittles. One with a lumpy head, mouth
swollen shut. Two avoided eye contact. The others scoped my threat potential. One laughed to himself. We passed a notice board, a sign-up sheet for “security” opportunities—the department’s officially sanctioned moonlighting gigs—and a wall-mounted rack of message cubbyholes. I heard someone say not to bother with fingerprints. Rutledge was a department part-timer, or used to be. They already had me on file.
The clerk barked by rote: “Face the wall. Hands up to chin level.”
I nodded. He attached my cuffs to a D-ring in the wall. He left me hooked up to stare at the scarred bulkhead, to guess what would come next. I stood there listening to foreign noises—cops horsing around, swapping after-hours gripes. It must have been shift-change time. Officers who stopped to pull message slips poked their heads through the open door, checked me out. Crew cut, bald, crew cut, bald. Demented-looking or baby-faced, though a few resembled male models of slight intellect. No reactions, no emotions. Each trailed aftershave. Oldies but goodies. Old Spice, English Leather, Aqua Velva. Mennen Skin Bracer prevailed. I’d figured the brand had withered out of existence after their main customer, my father, had died.
I thought, Teresa’s in the building. Does she know I’ve been arrested? Or has she been asked to steer clear? The air-conditioning began to sink in. I felt a shiver in my legs. I tasted post-nasal drip the flavor of blood.
Nothing would settle in my mind. I felt dizzy, wondered if kissing the mesh divider in the cop car hadn’t done something to my head. I knew one thing for certain. Hayes’s message on my answering machine asking me to share “knowledge about violent crimes” had been a ploy to get me downtown so they could bust me. Save the city’s time and money by having me arrive under my own steam.
A slurring drunk in the hallway pled his case to the booking personnel: “All I axed her was an explanation. All I axed, a simple esplanation. No. She don’t tell me. No, she don’t.”
“So you hit her.”
“I thought her mouth was stuck.”
I’d begun to find devil imagery in the cement-floor scrape marks when Marnie Dunwoody showed up. She wore go-to-office clothing. At least one thing had worked right. I didn’t know whether Dexter had realized it, but my asking Carmen to call Sam also had meant, “Call Marnie,” with the hope that she was up to reporting. I was innocent. I wanted an attorney. I wanted the media to know I’d been falsely apprehended in a three-against-one bust. I wanted to invoke the power of the press, the horsepower of public opinion. I wanted to leverage victimness.
Maybe it wouldn’t work that way, She looked at me like at a punk busted for shoplifting Trojans. She looked alert, not suffering from having received her weird gift twenty-seven hours earlier. “How the hell did we get into this?”
I said, “A string of weird shit? Coincidence?”
“Sam told me that in your confusion you’d grab the short straw first. He said to remind you that you don’t believe in coincidence. Especially after Teresa’s story this morning, ‘living her own Bruce Willis film.’ ”
“Thank you, Sam.”
“Then why?” she said.
“Somebody made it happen.”
“Working at the paper, I’m an easy target. What’s your excuse?”
“Who doesn’t like Alex Rutledge? I am liked. Even my ex-girlfriends still like me. I’m that kind of guy. No one wants to do me bodily harm.”
“You want to rethink that, Mr. Teflon? Sam said he had this discussion with you once before, about people wanting revenge. A loan you failed to repay. A drunk you kicked out of a bar when you worked on Duval.”
I shook my head.
Marnie pinched her nose. “I don’t come in here that often. You put every smell in a horse race, bet on piss to win. Kind of a poetic match for the paint scheme. What do they call this, burnt grapefruit?”
“They’re going to transport me to the county stockade.”
She laughed. “Commonly called the Go-to-Hell Motel.”
“The Trashmore Lodge.”
“The Felony Suites.”
“Discomfort Inn.”
She said, “You’re looking for humor in the situation.”
“I’m looking for daylight How’s your sense of humor?”
“That surprise in my car yesterday? There’s a saying in the news biz—’print paybacks’—but it means a revenge too fabricated, too small. I want honest, messy, painful revenge. I want that weasel to beg forgiveness that will never arrive.”
I said, “Please don’t repeat that to anyone here or at work.”
“Thank you for taking me at my word.”
“Where’s the press liaison officer?”
“Banished, for now. There may be procedural difficulties. No one knows I’m in here with you. I’m not supposed to be in this part of the building with a weapon in my purse.”
“Why banished?” I said. “Dexter’s personal politics?”
“Something about your not being newsworthy. And, yes, Dexter. Maybe because the Maxima belongs to his friend. Speaking of which, after the car was pulled from the water, the county never notified the media.”
“Why would they keep a lid on it?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t want to push the fact that I already knew.”
Had they tried to set me up? I could believe Dexter, but not Liska.
A commotion began outside the door, multiple voices. An only-in-Key-West conversation: aggressive arguing, one side ninety-percent rapid-fire Spanish, the English side of it peppered with Spanish epithets. Woven into the confusion was Hayes’s unpracticed attempt at the Conch-Cuban idiom. He’d lost his touch. The two other voices weren’t giving ground.
Marnie said, “That may be your secret weapon.”
“I just heard the name of the county prosecutor.”
“When Carmen called the house, Sam asked if he should call one of the Spottswoods or Nathan Eden. Carmen said he could save you money if he called Mercer Holloway.”
Major Key West Rule: In legal matters, money saved is ground lost.
I said, “How ‘bout we call Nathan, too? For insurance.”
“You want to be rude?”
“Does this place smell like good manners?”
“I’ll make a call,” said Marnie. “See if anyone’s home.” A low-pitched buzz came from her purse. “Weird timing.” She checked the LED readout, handed me the phone. Teresa’s greeting was too civil, too matter-of-fact. She was steamed, willing to communicate the fact, but wanting to hold herself in check for the sake of information.
I said, “I should call Sheriff Liska, ask him to redefine ‘not a fugitive.’”
Marnie put her finger to her lips, told me to keep my voice down.
Teresa hesitated. She hadn’t called for criticism. She finally said, “Mercer Holloway found out about your arrest. He sent his son-in-law to the city. He had some kind of voucher, a guarantee for your bond.”
“You mean Donovan Cosgrove, right?”
“The one who’s not married to Julie.”
I said, “Suzanne’s husband is Donovan Cosgrove.”
“He’s the one.”
“If I tried to calculate the motivation for that move, my brain’d switch off like a dead computer.”
“Don’t turn him down,” she said. “Anything’s better than getting caught in the system.”
“I get out, I go to the house, some crazy man will shoot me though a window. Sam was talking earlier today about having no place to call home.”
“You buy that pessimism at Walgreen’s?”
Through the phone, a face slap that I needed. Teresa was right. Inside the slam I was powerless. If our pursuers wanted me hurt or dead, jail was the easiest place to subcontract the job.
She backpedaled: “You get out, we’ll drive to Marathon and check into the Faro Blanco. We’ll rent The Fugitive and hole up for a couple days.”
“How about we stay in town and defend the fort?”
She said, “You call it, we’ll both play it.”
“I lo
ve you, too.”
Marnie had been gone fewer than five minutes when Dexter Hayes, Jr., carried a folding chair and a thin red file folder into the cubicle. He set up the chair and sat For a minute or two he said nothing. His face told me he was pondering frustration or disgust Finally he said, “Howzit, so far?”
“Might’ve been a more pleasant ride in the dog catcher’s truck.”
“Be glad you’re inside. It’s pouring out there.”
“Like a Conch pissing on a flat law book?”
He almost laughed. He pulled the chair closer, to within three feet of me. “How could you say such a thing?”
“I wish you’d told those shitbirds in the squad car that you were only pulling my chain.”
“They wanted to give your face some street character, Rutledge. Why are you even suggesting I might play games?”
“Teresa Barga told Liska every detail of that car chase. You say I pushed the Maxima into the drink. That wasn’t part of her story. Why isn’t she in here, manacled to the wall? You say I bumped off Bug Thorsby. When the hell yesterday did I have time to do that? I spent the morning with Holloway, the lunch hour with the sheriff, and I entertained you in the afternoon.”
“Sunday night?”
“Ask Teresa.”
“You were in the Navy, right?”
“You’re saying I should’ve learned about rousts in the service?”
“Aside from enemy attack, what’s the worst can happen on a Navy ship?”
I said, “Ordnance explosion.”
“Second worst?”
“We’re having a casual chitchat while my arms are chained to the wall. You think I’d find it in my best interest to overpower you and escape?”
Hayes looked disgusted. “I go by the rules. Second worst thing in the Navy?”
“Three things are tied,” I said. “Collision resulting in a punctured hull below the waterline, a loss of power or steering in a storm situation, and shipboard fire.”
“Which an ordnance explosion would cause . . .”
“Usually.”
“So,” he said, “you’re trained to fight fires?”
