Needles

by William Deverell

  Plizit interrupted sharply: “I want here to talk to my lawyer. I am not wanting to say a thousand times.”

  Harrison’s voice was strangely muted. “Uh, Lars, Cobb’s outside now wanting to get filled in. Why don’t you do that while I have a chit-chat with Laszlo here about some personal details not related to the investigation. We’ll fill out some of these here forms.”

  “Fine, I’ll run along.”

  “Just a minute, Mr. Nordquist,” Plizit said as Harrison’s boot, with a sharp kick, neatly popped the tape-recorder plug from the wall socket. “I don’t want to be alone here . . .” Plizit started to rise from his chair, but the door was already closed.

  Harrison lumbered toward the little Hungarian. “It’s all right, Hunkie, you ain’t gonna be alone. I’m gonna look after you. Sit down!” He took the man’s shoulders in his basketball-player hands and pushed him back onto the chair. Then he sat on the edge of the table, an arm’s length from Plizit, who could feel heat radiating from the detective’s body.

  “Now, I’m just tired of farting around, Zsa-Zsa. You and me are going to have a little heart-to-heart, and if we don’t get on friendly, I’m gonna be disappointed in you and lose control over my emotions, and I’m gonna dislodge some internal organs. Now, no more bullcock, Hunkie!” His words bounced heavily about the little room for several seconds.

  “Okay,” Harrison said, “you work for the Surgeon, right?”

  Plizit’s voice was a hollow whisper. “I think I maybe seen him around.”

  “I ain’t interested in any more bullcock, Hunkie!” Harrison thundered in a voice that rattled down the corridor outside the interview room.

  Plizit was jerking uncontrollably, and picking with his fingers at dope-bug scabs on his arms. “I seen him, yeah. I talk to him on street. Everybody knows him. No crime is to know someone.”

  Reaching out with one hand, Harrison grasped the lapels of Plizit’s jacket and hefted him a few inches out of his chair. His fist was bunched against the man’s neck, and Plizit’s face turned red, his eyes cocking wildly in opposing directions.

  Harrison lowered his voice and brought his face a few inches away from Plizit’s and rasped: “I ain’t in the mood to sit here all night and smell your lying little farts. We got enough on you to salt you, Hunkie. We’ve had a tail on you for two months, and you drive for the Surgeon, you do little runs for him, and you brown your crooked nose off him, and you kill for him. Now, I’m gonna ask you just once nicely: did he send you up there to bump those witnesses?”

  Plizit was choking and sputtering, and Harrison let go and dropped him into the chair.

  “My lawyer . . . my lawyer . . . is get you busted all way down to bylaws —” Plizit began. Harrison drifted a chop to the chest that left Plizit gasping for air again.

  “Now, Hunkie, you know I got a right to use a little force in self-defence, and it looked to me like you was gonna take a swing.”

  Plizit fixed a red eye on the detective, and hissed: “Pig, what you do here ain’t a touch what I get if I open up. I know you ain’t gonna cut me up. I know you ain’t gonna kill me.”

  Harrison was shaking with fury, and roaring again: “Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? Why, you filthy puny little lying yellow cocksucker! I’m gonna take you apart tooth and eye and nose in bite-size chunks!”

  Then there was the sound of steps running toward them in the corridor, the sound of a knock on the door, and the face of Lars Nordquist peering in the window. He opened the door and leaned in. “Let’s cool off here. His lawyer’s outside. I got him talking to Cobb. It’s a little loud, J.O.”

  Harrison groaned. “All right, take the useless little hemorrhoid back downstairs. Put him in a private cell. Clear everyone else out of the wing.”

  Saturday, the Fourth Day of March,

  at Ten Minutes Before Three O’Clock in the Morning

  Cobb sat in the detective office shaking nervously and studying Nordquist’s small pursed lips in their exquisite recitation of Laszlo Plizit’s botched efforts. Lars Nordquist was tall and skeletal; his eyes seemed to crouch far back in their sockets, and he moved and talked in a precise and even manner.

  Cobb was fuzzy, not drunk. He was down from his last fix of heroin taken many hours ago, and was suffering from the coming-down. Puffing furiously on his favorite Peterson bent, as if the fumes would clear the murk in his head, he collated Nordquist’s facts and began to rework them into a usable schema.

  “It is quite well known here that Plizit is one of Dr. Au’s henchmen,” Nordquist was saying. He liked the old words. “He is an ugly customer with a very sad criminal record. He is a gunner, a professional. He will not admit to working for Dr. Au tonight.”

  “He is close to Au?” Cobb asked.

  “He is always with him. Dr. Au has many enemies.”

  “He was probably present when Jim Fat was killed? Probably one of the men in the car when Au went to pick Jim Fat up?”

  “Yes, I am sure of that. We found a corner of Plizit’s thumbprint on the carving block Not enough points for court, but enough to make it a probable.”

  A policeman came in to tell Nordquist that Brian Pomeroy, Plizit’s lawyer, was downstairs at the duty sergeant’s desk.

  “You better tell Honcho,” Cobb said. From the interview room down the hall Cobb could hear a muffled roar, and knew it was the sound of Honcho Harrison.

  Cobb tried to steel himself, but his insides felt raw. The negotiations with Pomeroy would be protracted and complex. The young lawyer was a chess player, a shrewd negotiator in the courthouse corridors where bargains were struck. Plizit, who could now afford better, kept him on because of Pomeroy’s ability to deal his client out of serious trouble.

  But Cobb was not quite ready for him.

  He went out the back door of the police station to his car, where he kept a bit of junk and an emergency kit. With the dope and his works he returned to the detective floor, bought a Coke from the soft-drink machine, opened it and took it to the men’s room, where he dumped the drink in the toilet and used the bottle cap as his cooker. He cranked the hit into his leg and had a shit.

  When Pomeroy walked into a detective office that Cobb had borrowed for the negotiations, he was dishevelled, sleepy-eyed, and grumpily complaining about a red-tape blockade keeping him from his client. Cobb greeted him expansively, arranged for coffee, and sat him down to outline the case against Plizit. When that was done, he stoked his pipe with fuel and leaned menacingly toward Pomeroy, who had backed up in his chair.

  “Let’s put it together,” he said. “He works for Au. No issue. He handles guns, used to sell them, admits possession of the forty-five. No issue. He was out on an errand for Au. We can prove that. Not an errand of mercy. A bottle of pills. We have that old front-page favorite, the drug-crazed killer. Oh, yes, there’s a silencer on the gun: trademark of the professional. Au has just found out the whereabouts of the only honest witnesses who could put him in the place and at the time of a particularly gruesome execution. The evidence of that killing goes in, relevant to prove a motive, to prove Plizit was up there with orders to bump a witness or two. You know I’m right about that, Brian.” The smoke from Cobb’s pipe settled around Pomeroy like a cloud of ill omen. “Now, I’m not saying the jury’s minds would be inflamed by evidence about Laszlo standing around in all his cherubic innocence while some guy gets his balls cut off and his tongue sliced out and his throat slit ear to ear.” He winked at Pomeroy through the haze. “You see, we can prove Laszlo was at least an attendant at Jim Fat’s sacrifice. His prints are all over the carving block. So maybe we’ve got him as a party to that murder as well.”

  Cobb paused briefly. “Okay, the jury will draw the right conclusions. Laszlo is surprised by Millie and Billy while he’s preparing to, what, drill the cop? Obviously. The silencer was fitted to the gun. Millie says he was standing there holding the gun as if he were goin
g to shoot it at someone down the hall. Good evidence of intent to kill. Laszlo is caught in the act. He’s cornered. He has to shoot his way out now. Fires at Bill, misses, hits the wine bottle. Fires a couple of times. They dug a piece of a slug out of the wall, and ballistics went on an overtime shift tonight. The machinery really revs around here when a cop gets hit. The slug came from your man’s gun, so that little bit of evidence confirms Millie’s story. Sure she’s pissed, but she’s an honest old sot who’s going to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her God. So Billy, in self-defence, goes after Laszlo. He’s going to make spaghetti out of his face with the end of a broken bottle, and Constable Moeller saves Laszlo’s life. Moeller saved his own murderer’s life! Oh, Jesus, Brian, they’re going to run him up the courthouse flagpole by the neck. Jake Moeller. Teaches Sunday school. Wife and a baby and a mortgage. The courtroom will be chock full of dads and moms and grandpas and grandmas and Uncle Karl and Aunt Helga and pastor Schmidt.”

  “Do they supply gas masks in here?”

  “Steady on. There’s more. There’s an exchange of shots between Moeller and Plizit. Moeller finally realizes that Laszlo is the man he’s been posted there to watch out for. Laszlo gets him in the shoulder. Moeller misses with his last bullet, and he’s injured, on the floor, or on top of Millie, or somewhere. Down, anyway. Laszlo takes aim, right at his neck.” Cobb pointed his pipe stem in the direction of Pomeroy’s Adam’s apple, and clicked his trigger finger. “Bang. Perfect aim. Almost cuts his head off. Not some blind, haphazard shot. Intent to kill. Murder in the first degree half a dozen ways: planned and deliberate, a cop’s the victim. Murder in the commission of another offence, i.e., the attempted murder of two witnesses.”

  “What the hell is all this about, Fos?”

  “Hang in there. Okay. Laszlo takes the stand with some hokey lie or other. So, hey, what do we have here? A criminal record! And it’s all admissible — just to test his credibility, of course. We wouldn’t want a jury to convict him just because he’s an asshole with a dozen or I don’t know how goddamn many convictions. Bunch of firearms charges. Attempted rape. Trafficking. Assaults. Looks to the jury like this guy is a professional criminal. Also a hit man. Which is what he is, isn’t he, Brian?

  “Okay, Defences. Accident? We’ll all have a good laugh. Self-defence? They’ll send you both to jail. Provocation bringing it down to manslaughter? Good Lord, all Moeller did to provoke the man was save his life. Drunkenness? Point-zero-five reading, no way.”

  “Could be he was out of it, doing speed,” Pomeroy said. “He pops pills for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and between-meal snacks. That and the booze could make it manslaughter.” He did not sound convinced of his cause. “I’d better go down and hear his side of it.”

  “Just a second,” Cobb said. Now for the kicker. “Just a second. There are all these U.S. dollars on him. Eighty-seven hundred, I think. That’s the fee for the kill. That works out to about five thousand Canadian per hit — five for Selwyn and five for McTaggart. There’ll be expert evidence put before the jury that that’s the going reward in this town for a dead body. Why U.S. funds? God, I don’t know. Maybe Plizit worries about the stability of the Canadian dollar. So here’s our brave freedom-fighter with eight-point-seven big ones in a roll in his jeans.”

  “Now, hang on,” Pomeroy said. “That’s speculation and prejudicial to boot. You can’t tie the money in, and you know it. He’s got a right to have it released.”

  Cobb leaned back, pursing his lips, in apparent reflection. “Maybe something can be worked out about the money,” he said. “I’d want to be fair.”

  Pomeroy smiled. “What all this bullshit means is you want Plizit to give state’s evidence against the Surgeon.”

  “Yeah, Brian, I want Au. It’s that simple. I’ll recommend a murder-two against Plizit if he comes across for us.”

  “Aw, Jesus, you must have some shitty case against Au. Well, we’ll just see what it’s going to cost to buy up Plizit’s contract. I’ll talk to him. Maybe he didn’t see Jim Fat get it. Maybe he won’t be interested, being that life is a precious commodity. Mind you, he accepts my advice. I’ve done him a few good turns in his time.” Smoke was still belching from Cobb’s pipe, and Pomeroy glinted at him wet-eyed through the fog. “Now, is that old bugger Honcho Harrison in on this?” he asked. “You can get Santorini to okay something like this? Yeah, I know you can — you guys are thick as an old pot of honey.”

  “I’ll soften Nordquist and Honcho up while you’re down with your guy. It’s not going to be easy, so the whole thing could fall through. What we would want to do is charge first-degree murder. It could be dropped to murder-two if he cooperates. He has to come across on the stand. That’s the deal.”

  “And if Au gets off anyway?”

  “The deal holds if Plizit takes the stand with a good eyewitness account or something close to it.”

  “Can’t see a murder-one if he was blasted on speed,” Pomeroy said. “Pretty hard for the crown to show some speed freak with his brain on fire knew what he was doing up there. I’d say we should be talking about a manslaughter. Sounds like a pretty weird killing.”

  “Talk to your man,” Cobb said.

  Cobb would take a good hard manslaughter. The murder-two was a bargaining lever.

  Nordquist was not easy. As Cobb made his pitch to the two detectives, Nordquist just sat back impassively, his arms folded, staring at Cobb and shaking his head. He kept repeating: “He killed one of our men. He killed a police constable.” Nordquist’s eyes peered gloomily at Cobb from their caves. “A policeman, Foster. A young kid with his whole life in front of him.”

  Cobb exploded: “Goddamnit, Lars, he killed a cop — so what? I’m talking about a chance to make the Surgeon! Dr. Au, for God’s sake! We have no fucking case against Dr. Au, and you goddamn well know it. We’re down the tube, and he’s out the front door whistling ‘Dixie’ down the street, off to hack some poor slob in the Jesus knackers.” Nordquist set his lips in a prim, firm line. “Come on, Lars, you’ll take a thousand Plizits for one Dr. Au. Plizit’s five-and-dime. Let’s go for the department store. Goddamnit, the day they send the Surgeon to the slam you’ll be wetting your goddamn boxer shorts with the sweet piss of happiness, and you know it.”

  “But he . . .” Nordquist paused and glanced at Harrison. The old detective was sitting back, his eyes closed. Tired beads of sweat sat on his head.

  James O. Harrison had lost many comrades during his thirty-six years on the force: policemen on duty cut down by gunfire from bandits like Laszlo Plizit. They had shared desks, shared patrols, shared danger. Off-duty, they had gathered for fishing trips, poker parties, evenings of just getting together for stories and laughs and beer.

  But James O. Harrison had also, for the last ten years, been the self-appointed president of a one-man committee to end the career of Au P’ang Wei. He had followed Au’s trail of carnage during that time, tracking bloody footprints that always seemed to fade and disappear. He had seen most of the victims, and on one occasion had seen a man die in a vacant lot, an old junkie who had cheated Au, and whose torso had been slit down the midline, gutted like a slaughtered hog. Another time he had watched patiently while men from the coroner’s office pieced together a human jig-saw puzzle: fourteen pieces of flesh.

  Harrison opened his eyes and looked directly into Cobb’s.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Okay.”

  But when Pomeroy came up, he was shaking his head.

  “Nope, he won’t buy it. Besides, on what he tells me, there’s nothing better than a manslaughter here. Laszlo was drugged out. Not capable of the specific intent to kill. That vial of uppers was almost full when he started out yesterday. No, sorry. It can’t be swung.” He paused. “Too bad. He might have been of some help on the Dr. Au thing.”

  Cobb knew the hard bargaining was now about to begin.


  “Well, let’s find a drink somewhere,” he said. “I don’t want to let it go that easily.” He called down the hall to Harrison, who was in another office. “Honch, I know you keep a mickey hidden in your locker. We’d like to borrow it for a few minutes.”

  Harrison brought the bottle in with a couple of paper cups. “Cooler’s down the way,” he said gruffly, then left, knowing he was not to be a part of the lawyers’ manoeuverings.

  “Okay, let’s talk,” Cobb said, pouring the drinks. “Maybe we can sweeten the pot.”

  Half an hour later they were still going.

  “Manslaughter,” Cobb was saying. “That’s going to be hard to sell. These guys want Plizit by the jewels, Brian.” He shook his head. “I don’t know, I don’t know. Santorini would want at least twenty years for your guy. Anything less than fifteen I can see being appealed. Mind you, that still gets him out on parole after about seven or eight. Jesus, Brian, you drive a pretty hard bargain. I don’t know.” He bit his lower lip, sat back, and started puffing again.

  Pomeroy appeared to wilt under the smoke barrage. “We cop to a manslaughter, and you take your best shot. I don’t care. You can throw everything in except the money. I still say that’s irrelevant.”

  Cobb sat up suddenly. “Well, it’s late,” he said. “I’m tired. I’m not going to hassle. I’m against the wall. The trial starts a week Monday. Okay, manslaughter. The crown asks for a bundle. Plizit’s whole record goes in — all the gun charges, the assault bodily harm, the trafficking in meth, the attempted rape ten years ago. All the facts go in — the gun pointing at the cop, the silencer, the motive. We’ll have to tell the judge that we felt there was the barest reasonable doubt on the basis that Plizit was high on speed, incapable of forming an intent to kill at the specific time the shots were fired. Boy, we are going to look stupid in there.”

  Pomeroy smiled. “And the money?”

  Cobb sighed. “Well, maybe we can do something about that. You go back down there and scribble out a statement for him to sign. Something short, enough to commit him to give evidence for us. On Monday we can get a full, typed statement for him. And then I think I can arrange for the release of the money to you, in trust, of course.” After all, a criminal lawyer’s fees had to be paid.