Hardy hung up, looked at the darts, still in his hand, wondered where they had come from. He drank some Scotch. Halfheartedly, he opened one of the folders in front of him.
And there it was again, staring him in the face—the damning, nearly incontrovertible evidence against Cole Burgess.
Who, Hardy reminded himself not to forget, had never, not once, denied that he had killed Elaine Wager after all. At best, he’d said he couldn’t remember.
And Hardy didn’t kid himself. He thought that there was an excellent chance that Cole had in fact killed Elaine. He might be able to fashion an argument to convince a jury that his client was legally innocent. He absolutely believed that this was not a special circumstances death penalty murder no matter what. But nothing could hide the terrible fact of what had happened.
And if Cole had been prowling the alleys looking for prey—and that appeared to have been the case—and then killed Elaine because he was strung out and just didn’t quite understand what exactly was happening—then Hardy didn’t like where he was.
And the more he looked, the more he saw.
Both of the two arresting officers told essentially the same story, even if their reports had slightly different details—most notably, one of them said he heard a shot and its ricochet during the chase. But the rest of the facts were undisputed and, from Hardy’s perspective, depressing and damning.
One of the most difficult problems Hardy was going to face when this thing came to trial was the whole question of the character of the defendant. Now, the good news regarding character is that neither side could mention character in any relevant context unless the defense brought it up first. After that, though, it was open season.
So Hardy sensed that he was going to be faced with a dilemma. If he brought it up that Cole was really an okay person who just had a disease—addiction—and could supply witnesses such as high school teachers, old friends, his mother and so on to prove it, then Torrey could bring up the years of theft, petty crimes and minor assaults that were part and parcel of Cole’s history. And even if Hardy didn’t raise Cole’s character in the guilt phase of the trial, the jury would hear about the facts of this crime.
And they were particularly ugly.
The police had come upon Cole after he had picked the body clean of its jewelry. They discovered all of it on his person, in his pockets. He had ripped a heavy gold necklace from around Elaine’s throat, slicing the skin of her neck in the process. He’d pulled a half-carat diamond engagement ring off her finger, breaking the finger at the knuckle as he did so. He had ripped the earrings from her pierced earlobes. He had inflicted all of these injuries postmortem, according to the autopsy. They were the only bruises and marks, except the bullet entry wound, on Elaine’s body.
And Cole had—quite definitely—inflicted them.
He didn’t remember that, either.
He’d gone through her purse, taking the money from her wallet, leaving the credit cards, apparently realizing, even in his stupor, that no one would mistake him for an Elaine.
Which led Hardy to the whole question of Cole’s sobriety or lack of it during the commission of the crime. Everyone—the arresting officers, Banks, Glitsky—agreed that he seemed to be either drunk or stoned, but as he read over the documents, Hardy realized that there was no proof of that either. No one had given him a breath or blood test, and they’d sweated him long enough that by the time he’d been admitted to the hospital, his blood-alcohol level was about at zero. The prosecution could easily argue that Cole’s apparent unconsciousness after his arrest in the police car was an act, and Hardy would be hard put to refute it.
Especially in light of Cole’s flight when the arresting officers flushed him. His eventual crash into the hydrant notwithstanding, Cole had run swiftly and with determination away from the pursuing officer, so much so that he had been pulling away during the chase and, if not for the hydrant, nearly invisible on the dark night at street level, would quite possibly have escaped. He was not staggering, not speaking with any slur more noticeable than his usual drug-addict drawl.
After they put him in the squad car, he apparently passed out. Hardy could argue that the adrenaline had kicked in, then worn off. But it was not going to be an easy sell.
He closed the folder again, looked at his drink, which had evaporated, checked his watch. It was ten-thirty. He considered calling the hospital again, but realized he couldn’t bear to hear it tonight.
If Glitsky were dead, he’d still be dead in the morning.
The alcohol hadn’t touched him. It was time to go home.
Wearing his paper slippers and orange jail jumpsuit, a sullen inmate named Cullen Leon Alsop sloped into the visitors’ room in the homicide detail. He got himself arranged in his wooden chair—leaning back as comfortably as he could with his hands cuffed, a slack-jawed smirk in place. It was the middle of the night, after lockdown, and he was alone here except for the cop who’d escorted him over from the jail, a black guy he incorrectly figured to be about his age. Cullen knew he was a cop but he couldn’t have told from what he wore—a blue nylon windbreaker, black shirt with the top button loose, royal blue tie.
Across the table in the airless room, the cop adopted pretty much the same posture as Cullen, and the inmate found this disturbing. He was the one turning over important evidence in a murder case. They ought to be treating him with more respect, give him some doughnuts and coffee or something, at least get his cuffs off, and instead here’s this spear-chucker yo-yo giving him ’tude. He had half a mind to call the whole thing off, but he had to get out of here and this was the only way, so he settled deeper into the unyielding wood and waited.
The cop finally came forward with a weary exhalation of breath. He withdrew a small portable tape recorder from a pocket and put it on the table. “Sergeant Ridley Banks, Badge Fourteen-oh-two. It’s ten-thirty on Monday, Feb 8, and I’m in an interrogation room on the fourth floor of the Hall of Justice, San Fran, talking to . . .” Consummately bored, he consulted the folder in front of him. “. . . Cullen Leon Alsop, white male, twenty-five years old. Case number . . .” He rattled off a bunch of numbers.
Alsop had had enough. He’d been through this type of thing more than once, and this wasn’t feeling right to him. He interrupted. “Hey.”
Banks looked up, eyes dead. “Quiet please.”
Cullen shook his head, made some “I don’t believe this” gesture, straightened up in his chair. “Hey,” he repeated, “I got a deal going here with the D.A., and you—”
Banks reached for the recorder and snapped it off. “Did I just tell you to shut up? When I ask you a question, you answer me. Otherwise, I don’t want to hear you. Do you hear me?”
Cullen shrugged.
And Banks came forward like an attacking animal, up out of his chair, slamming a flat palm with a noise like a gunshot on the table. “THAT WAS A QUESTION! I asked if you could hear me. So if you’re smart you say ‘Yes, sir.’ Do you hear that?”
Cullen decided to be smart. “Okay, yeah. Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Banks picked up the recorder, pushed the button again, resumed in his monotone, “Now, Mr. Alsop, for the record, you’re in jail for selling crack cocaine, your fourth offense, is that correct?”
“Yeah.”
“But you were out on the street again. On probation.”
This seemed vaguely amusing to Cullen. “Three probations, man. I mean, I don’t know why you guys don’t all talk to each other or something.”
“Who?”
“All you guys. Cops, D.A.’s, the judges. Decide between you whether it’s against the law or not to deal in this town.”
“Okay, next time you’re worried about it, here’s the answer. It is.”
Cullen barked out a laugh. “So tell it to some judge. I got three convictions in the last seventeen months—I’m talking convictions, man, not arrests. The judge says, ‘Hey, cut it out, really.’ I tell him okay, I promise, and he puts me out on the str
eet that day, and tomorrow I’m back in business. Next time, it’s ‘Hey, you promised.’ So I say I’m sorry and promise again. Then the third time, same thing.”
“Well, this time it isn’t the same thing.”
A shrug. “Maybe. We’ll see. Anyway, it’s why we’re talking right now.”
“About the gun.”
“Yeah, that. The one I lended to Cole.”
“Lended?”
“Yeah. Lended. Something wrong with that?”
“He paid you money for it?”
“He was gonna. That was the plan.”
“When. After he got a day job?”
Cullen Leon Alsop conveyed his disbelief at Banks’ stupidity, but saw something in the inspector’s eyes and cut it off. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “We hang a lot together. Sometimes I get him stuff, you know, put him in touch. But Saturday he’s got no money and he needs to score. I mean, bad, you know. And I’m out, too, or he woulda done me I’m sure, friends or no friends. But I got a hold of this little popgun.”
“How’d that happen?”
An evasive shrug, eyes all around the room. “Somebody traded me one a few weeks ago.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Some guy.”
“For what? What did you trade it for?”
“I don’t remember. Something I had. You know, you got a big barter community out there.” Banks made an impatient face, and Cullen got back onto the point. “Anyway, so I showed it to Cole.”
“And why did he want it, the gun? To rob somebody?”
Cullen flashed an empty smile. “Hey, good, maybe you oughta be a cop. You got it all figured out.” Something in Banks’ face backed him away, though, changed his tone. “So he was gonna go score, bring me back the piece and fifty bucks on top for my trouble. But I didn’t know he was going to kill anybody with it. He wasn’t planning anything like that. That’s not who he was normally.”
“So who was he?”
A shrug. “A guy to hang with. Party. You know.”
“I don’t know, actually. I understood he lived on the street. Most of those guys don’t go to a lot of parties.”
“Yeah, but he lived with his mom. He could get his hands on some wheels when he wanted them. He just liked to party, that’s all. Score, get high for a few days. Then maybe he wouldn’t get home and crash somewhere else.”
Banks was digesting this, but not comfortably. “Okay, but you got arrested last time. When was that?”
“Maybe Tuesday morning. I don’t know. You could look it up easier than me.”
Half an hour later, Ridley Banks was at his desk. His elbows were planted on the blotter in front of him, his hands steepled at his lips. A couple of times a minute he blew into them heavily. His eyes burned with fatigue. It had been a long day in the field and then, returning to the office after nine o’clock, he’d picked up his messages and heard about Glitsky’s heart attack and also Cullen Leon Alsop, the purported source of the gun that Cole Burgess had used to kill Elaine Wager.
He hadn’t felt right since he’d gone up against his lieutenant on the Burgess confession. Then came the startlingly swift decision to put Glitsky on administrative leave, now the cardiac arrest. Ridley couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all related and part of it was his fault.
Abe had been his most ardent supporter, helping to get him promoted into homicide from robbery. Then, once he was aboard, he’d acted as Ridley’s mentor—getting him up to speed, keeping him from at least a dozen egregious errors in his first year or two. And, he asked himself, was this his payback to Abe for all of that loyalty and concern?
He hated it, hated himself.
This was why he’d seen this lowlife Cullen immediately. If at least some new evidence came to light that could make the case stronger against Cole Burgess, Ridley would be able to console himself with the fact that he was even more right than he’d been before. It wasn’t all going to come down to the confession.
He’d played that over, both on the physical tape and in his mind, almost continually since they’d busted Abe. In his career, Ridley had sweated maybe half a dozen other suspects into confessions. He kept asking himself whether he’d treated Burgess any differently than any of those. He couldn’t really say he had, except maybe for the heroin connection, the supposed withdrawal. But he’d done the same kind of thing before by simple persistence, by using whatever leverage worked. The pressure applied by a trained, relentless interrogator could be great. This didn’t make for false confessions.
In his experience, while people sometimes would confess to something they didn’t do, usually this was when they weren’t even suspects in the first place. Some lunatic would walk in or call the station and say that they’d committed some crime. Banks had once seen a man come in and confess to a murder because he’d become enamored of the published pictures of the woman who was actually on trial for the murder and he thought she’d be grateful to him for taking the heat off her, putting it all on himself. Greater love than this. And perhaps later when the guy got out of jail or acquitted at trial (because after all he hadn’t really done it), he and the woman could date or get married or something, raise little murder suspects of their own.
But Ridley believed that the Burgess confession—which he’d carefully wrung out of him—did not fall in this category. He believed that if you had a suspect at the scene of the crime when the crime was committed, with the weapon nearby and physical evidence that gave him a reasonable motive, and that person finally got persuaded to admit he’d done it, it was a virtual certainty that he had. People wanted to confess, to tell what they’d done. This was human nature, although sometimes you had to use a mental cattle prod to get down to basics.
It was far more a cerebral endeavor than a physical one. And even on the physical plane, it hadn’t gone nearly so far as to be cruel and unusual. There was discomfort perhaps—Cole hadn’t been on a picnic up here—but Ridley’s interview, in his mind and memory, had been a true interrogation, a far cry from the pain-induced confessions of the world’s myriad torture chambers.
Even given all that, though, another link in the chain of culpability was always a nice thing, and Cullen Leon Alsop might have been just that. This was why, late as it was, tired as he was, Ridley had wanted to bring him up here and interview him right away. If he was convincing, if he had something truly substantive to add about the provenance of the gun, maybe tonight Ridley wouldn’t toss in bed until the fitful dawn broke.
Big ifs, and neither had panned out to Ridley’s satisfaction.
Which was not to say that Cullen’s evidence wouldn’t get a lot of attention. Apparently it did eliminate one of the unanswered questions in the prosecution’s case—where Cole Burgess had acquired the gun.
It also strengthened the argument for murder.
If he believed it.
He did believe in the truth of the rest of the facts in this case. That was the irony. He’d been there, sitting four feet across the table from Cole Burgess, when he’d said he’d done it after all. He was sorry. He didn’t know why. He didn’t really remember. But he did do it. He was sure of it. And Ridley had believed him, believed they’d finally come to the truth.
But now Cullen’s vague, unsubstantiated testimony, which seemed to fill a hole, but which was really unprovable testimony of the “he said, but then he said” variety. And the timing of it bothered him, the snitch appearing at such an opportune moment. It didn’t make him doubt that Cole had killed Elaine, but it did make him wonder.
A yawn overtook him and he stretched like a cat, his whole body. All right, he had to get some sleep. Enough was enough.
But the interview with Cullen hadn’t gone on for too long—maybe fifteen minutes. He should listen to the tape once through and make better notes before copying it for the D.A. They wouldn’t get the transcript back to him for at least a week, and he wanted a clear memory of what had been said.
So he rewound the tape, pushed the button an
d began listening. After his intro and Cullen’s first interruption, the next words he heard were: “I got a deal going here with the D.A., and . . .”
He played it again.
Ridley himself hadn’t made any deal with Cullen. The D.A. hadn’t mentioned a deal to him. The message from that office had been that an inmate at the jail had information on the Cole Burgess case and Ridley might want to interview him. But no one had said they had made a deal, although it seemed as though Cullen was under that impression.
One thing was for sure—Ridley was going to look into it and find out.
“Mom?”
Treya was in her tiny breakfast nook—six elongated windows in a semicircle off her slightly larger kitchen. There was one light in the nook, off now, a fan under it, spinning gently, although the night outside was cold and the house cool. She was sitting on the first four inches of her chair, ramrod straight, both palms flat on the table. She might have been trying to make it levitate.
“Mom?” Raney stood silhouetted in the dim light from somewhere in the back of the duplex. She was already taller than Treya’s five feet seven, skinny with no hips and just-budding breasts. She wore her hair shoulder length and had it tied off to one side in a kind of pigtail. Tonight she’d worn jogging shorts and a Giants sweat-shirt to bed. “Is everything okay?”
Treya had tucked her in nearly an hour before and come out here, turning out lights as she went. She poured herself a glass of tap water, sat down at the table, hadn’t moved.
“Oh, I’m fine.” Treya often thought that it was her fate to exist in a limited world with a single acceptable public posture, crisp and, when possible, cheerful efficiency. All the rest of her feelings, emotions, aspirations and opinions had best remain unspoken, unexpressed. It was safest that way, where nobody could fault you for a bad attitude, an unguarded remark. She had always most keenly felt this need for control in the presence of her daughter. In this complicated world, Raney didn’t need a role model who complained, who couldn’t cope, who might die like her dad had. Raney needed strength, all of Treya’s strength. She didn’t need to see anything else.
The Dismas Hardy Novels Page 18
