by Scott Turow
“I couldn’t a been more than thirteen, fourteen years old, I was done with all them in the old neighborhood. I was black whether they were gonna say so or not, and I was the baddest brother that ever would be. Only it was like I said—Uncle Erno, he was never gonna leave hold of me. I was on those streets, doin the dumb stuff I did, selling crack cocaine mostly and smokin it too, and my uncle, he’d make like he was the po-lice—he loved to do that—come pull me out of those hellholes and tell me I was wasting my life. Was my life, I’d tell him, and just go right back to it. Course, soon as the po-lice had me, I’d call Erno and he’d help me out and tell me never again.
“First adult conviction was in ’87. Erno got me in the Honor Farm. And when I came out, you know, I really meant to do good. If you mind yourself, they wipe the slate clean for you. Erno and my ma sent me to Hungary, get away from the influences, and I took my own self to Africa. When I came home, I asked my uncle for help getting into the travel business.
“In 1988, that was the happiest Erno ever was with me. I did all that stuff he was forever telling me I had to do. I went to school, and I studied, and I passed my travel agent’s exam and got a job at Time To Travel, and made the scene at work every morning. I walked past the brothers on the street I’d kicked with like I didn’t know them. And man, it was hard. It was hard. Erno, you know, he and my mom, they were always tellin me how bad they had it in Hungary—they ate squirrels and sparrows they caught in the parks, all of that—but I was workin and workin and I didn’t have money. Twenty-some years old and back to livin with my ma? When I moved up to agent, I was on straight commission at Time To Travel, and there wasn’t one of those big corporate accounts wanted to do business with any young black man. And I finally said to him, ‘Uncle Erno, I can’t make it, man, I tried and tried, but this just isn’t gonna work out.’”
Collins glanced up to see how he was being received. Molto took advantage of the interval to stand to check that their tape recorder on Aires’s desk was running. Jackson, naturally, did the same thing.
“Erno could see I was headed for backsliding and he was pretty much desperate. At one point, he had some idea that he’d shift airline business to me. One crazy notion after another. And that’s how the ticket stuff started. First off, he pretended like these were just tickets that had gotten lost somehow. How stupid was that? I figured the godown on that real soon.”
Larry cleared his throat. “Mind if I ask a few things?” He did not really sound friendly. Caught in the spell of his story, it was an instant before Collins looked up.
“Starczek,” said Collins then.
Larry’s first question was simple. Where did the tickets come from?
“Back then,” said Collins, “tickets were just startin to come out of a computer. The printers never worked—jammed, wrote on the wrong lines. Half the time, agents still issued tickets by hand and then ran them through that validating machine with their die. If you made a mistake writing up a ticket, you voided it and put the number on an error report. These tickets Erno gave me, they were blank validated hand tickets, listed on the error report so nobody was lookin for them.”
“The airlines keep telling me,” said Larry, “that sooner or later somebody flying on those tickets would get caught.”
“Probably so,” said Collins. “But wasn’t anyone that ever flew on those tickets. I turned those tickets in to cover the cost of other tickets.”
Muriel glanced to Larry to see if she’d missed something, but he, too, appeared confused.
“Suppose I had a customer,” said Collins, “who paid in cash for a trip to New York. I’d take a ticket that Erno got me, and write it up as a New York ticket for an earlier date. Validation made it look like it had been issued by hand at the TN ticket counter. Then I’d turn Erno’s ticket in to cover the cost of my customer’s ticket—as if it was an even exchange. I’d put my customer’s cash in my pocket, instead of turning it over to Time To Travel. Rather than a little-bitty piece of a commission, I got the whole price of the ticket. And my share of commission, too. Airline accounting matched the flight coupon against a validated ticket and never looked any further.”
“Smart,” said Muriel.
“Wasn’t me,” Collins told her. “Erno was the one who figured it out. He’d seen every ticket scam. Guess he finally got one in his head that would work. Probably took it as a kind of challenge. That’s how Erno was.”
“Right,” said Larry. “That’s what I’m wondering about—Erno. Why didn’t he just do what a semi-normal person would do and give you money?”
Collins tipped his head back and forth as he weighed out an answer.
“Erno, you know, he was one strange kitty cat.”
“No shit,” said Larry. Collins’s narrow mouth turned down. He didn’t care for either the language or the idea of somebody else dissing Erno’s memory. Muriel delivered a look. It was probably the first eye contact she’d had with Larry since he walked in. Given the tenor of their parting last week, she might have expected defiance, but he responded with a mild nod.
“First off, Erno was cheap,” said his nephew. “That’s the truth. Once he had hold of a dollar, he didn’t care too much to let it go. And, you know, he could get grouchy about how the airline should have treated him better on one thing or another. And heck, man, that outlaw life, it can be real excitin, ask somebody who knows. Erno always pined over all he missed out on when he got tossed from the Academy. But you know, when I hold those babies of mine, I’m always tellin them, “There’s nothin I wouldn’t do for you.’ And I’ve thought on it, and I think that’s pretty much what Erno was saying to me: You try to make something of yourself, there’s nothing I won’t do to help.”
Collins bent forward to see if Starczek was satisfied. Larry made an equivocal face: Go figure with crooks. Collins went back to his story.
“Even so, I guess I felt like I was still on Erno’s string. Went overseas on vacation and scored in Amsterdam and just fell in with the drugs again. When I got taken down this time, Erno quit on me. Put his own self on the line and this was how I repaid him. That was the speech. I was in medium security in Jensenville and he didn’t come visit once.
“I didn’t really see how bad off I was until I got out in 1990. I only knew two things, really—slangin dope and travel agenting. Black and white, in my mind, if the truth be told. And I couldn’t do either. One more narcotics conviction, I was Triple X and gone for life. And I’d lost my travel license when I got convicted in ’89. Should have just moved, but young folks, you know how it is, figured I’d beat the system. Called myself Faro Cole, faked the degree information, and sat the license exam all over again.”
“Ah,” said Muriel. Collins responded with a rueful little smile.
“Got a job at Mensa Travel, strictly commission, and it was the same as before, tryin hard and no money. Well, that thing with the hand tickets had worked okay the first time. Just had to find somebody who could scratch them off the books the right way. Now, I couldn’t go over there to TN myself—Erno would have run me out—but I was hangin in the wrong place one night and in comes Gandolph, tryin like always to unload something somebody or another stole. I knew who he was. I’d worked out at the airport right after high school for a couple of months. He used to buy weed off me. By then, he couldn’t begin to reckon my name, but I figured, since he always knew if something had come loose of its owner, he might know a ticket agent out at DuSable who’d like to work something. Promised him if it cooked, we’d look after him. That’s how I got hooked up with Luisa.
“She didn’t want any part of it at first. How I convinced her finally was when I told her Erno had done the same thing. That had some traction with her. She wasn’t gonna be Erno’s fool or anybody else’s.”
Muriel asked when this was.
“Oh, we must have started in January of ’91. That’s when they all got killed, right, ’91? I’d say January, then. And it went along fine till I ran into Gandolph in that same plac
e, Lamplight, and it turned out she wasn’t givin him anything from her end. Might be she didn’t really get it that she was supposed to cover him. Man, I know I told her, but she hadn’t done it, and he went all over the airport runnin his mouth, till she finally give him her cameo, just to shut him up while she tried to get together what she owed him.”
“You’re saying Luisa basically pawned the cameo to him?” asked Muriel.
“Exactly,” said Collins. “Said it was like a family heirloom. Course it was too late, cause with Squirrel mouthin off, Erno had fallen to this now and he was trippin. Soon as he heard my name, he knew darn well what was goin down and he got up in my face. He wasn’t gonna have me stealin right under his nose, in his shop, specially not as he was the one who taught me how to do it. He told me to quit, or he’d stop it, and next I heard, he’d had Luisa searched for some phony reason —”
“Drugs,” offered Larry.
“Exactly,” said Collins. “Drugs. Said she had drugs on her. Maybe Erno thought since she was mixed up with me, that we were doin that, too. But she wasn’t anybody to treat that way. After that, man, it was on. She wanted money anyway for Gandolph, so she could get her cameo back.
“Early July, she give me the word. Said she’d been real careful, but she had some tickets stashed. She wasn’t worried any about Erno, either. Said she’d hide those tickets so wasn’t anyone would find them, not to worry. Fourth of July, nobody around, she figured that was the time.
“So come to July 3rd, actually July 4th, past midnight, we had a meet at Paradise. She wasn’t in the door two seconds when Erno runs in behind her. He’d been watching her error reports, sneaking around, following her. ‘You had it now, lady,’ he says to her. ‘I gave you a chance.’ Looks at me and says, ‘You get the hell out of here. And as for you,’ he says to Luisa, ‘you hand me those tickets you got stuffed in your underwear and write out a resignation right now, or I’m calling the cops.’
“Luisa, man—she was tough. She didn’t take it from nobody. ‘F you,’ she says. ‘You ain callin no po-lice. You call the po-lice on me, I’ll tell them you did the same thing.’”
Lifting a hand, Collins shifted. The sun was straight in his eyes. Jackson stood to rearrange the blinds. Either recovering his place, or responding to the memory of what he was describing, Collins was still for a second.
“See there, when she said that to him, that was what you’d have to call the turning point. Cause Erno, it didn’t even enter his mind that I’d have let on about him. He just figured I’d turned on Luisa. But he would never think I’d tell that kind of secret. Not to somebody who wasn’t family.
“Erno—he had a temper. Get all red, eyes like saucers. And you could see right then, he was ready to kill somebody. For real. Only it wasn’t Luisa he meant to fade. It was me. If he’d had a gun in his hand, he’d have shot me dead for sure. But he didn’t. Not yet. He just started busting on both of us, screamin and what not, and Gus came over and told him to get his butt out of there, and Erno wasn’t hearin it. That didn’t go on too long before Gus came back with his pistol.
“After that, it was pretty much like my uncle said in court. Erno told Gus he wouldn’t shoot anybody, and Luisa grabbed that pistol out of Gus’s hand, and Erno went after it. I don’t think it was as much of an accident as Erno made out that he shot her. To me, it looked like he had that gun full out of her hand. But it was all so dang fast. Bang! That sound, man, it was like it was still shaking the restaurant five minutes later. And there’s Luisa, looking down at this hole right through the center of her, and smoke, smoke floating up, like it was coming off a cigarette. For a second, none of us knew what to do except stand there and look at her, it was so peculiar.
“Finally, Gus snapped out of it and went for the phone. Erno told him to stop and Gus didn’t stop and Erno put him down, like he was shootin a horse.”
“And you?” asked Larry of Collins.
“Me?”
“What were you doing?”
“Man, I’d heard all kind of woofin and carryin on, but truth is, I hadn’t never seen somebody killed. It was terrible. Truly terrible. All I was thinkin at first was, Now, how am I gonna get him to take this back? It was so crazy, I couldn’t make myself believe it was gonna last. Like things just had to snap back to normal. Then it comes to you, that isn’t gonna happen.
“After Erno shot Gus I bust out crying and my uncle, man, started in hollerin. ‘Whose fault is this, anyway, Collins? Whose fault?’ Right then, I figured I was next, and I even started lookin out the windows, tellin myself there were two shots now, somebody had to hear and call the police. But it was the Fourth of July, nobody’s thinking nothin ’cept firecrackers.
“Then Erno saw the last one. Hiding. Poor dude, he was under a table. Erno pointed the gun and marched him down to the freezer. Then I heard the shot. Didn’t sound like the first two, for some reason. Something worse about it. For Erno, too. After he came up and looked at me, all that anger, that was done. He just sat there wasted and told me what to do. We were gonna make it look like a robbery. ‘Get this.’ ‘Wipe that.’ I did it all.”
“Was he threatening you?” Muriel asked.
“He still had the gun, if that’s what you mean. But from the look of him, I wasn’t thinkin anymore he was intending to shoot me. Truth of it is that it probably didn’t ever occur to him that I wasn’t gonna do what he said, cause it didn’t ever occur to me either. It was just family,” said Collins. He stopped and took a heavy breath over that thought.
“And it was you who dragged the bodies downstairs?” Larry asked.
“Right. Cryin the whole time, too.” Collins chucked his face in Larry’s direction. “You thinkin about those footprints?”
“That I am.” Forensics had matched Paul Judson’s shoes with the footprints trailing through the bloody drag patterns left by the bodies.
“When I come up the last time, Erno saw that my slip-ons were soaked through with blood. He said, ‘You can’t go out on the street in those. Go downstairs and see which of them dead men got shoes that might fit you.’ That was the first time it even came to me to say no to him. ‘I ain putting my foot in no dead man’s shoe.’ Can you imagine? We actually carried on about that for a while. But I finally did like he said, same as the rest of it.”
Collins pointed at Larry. “You go check those shoes that came off the third one, the businessman. Nice pearl-gray pump, I-talian. Faccione, the brand, I think. Too big for him, too. I couldn’t ever believe nobody noticed those shoes. What businessman goes round in a pearl-gray pump?”
Muriel could see something moving behind Larry’s hard expression : the shoes were clicking. It seemed to be hitting home with him that Collins was probably telling a large chunk of the truth. She hadn’t had much doubt of that for some time now.
“We were ready to leave outta there, already at the front door, when Erno snaps his fingers. ‘Hold this,’ he says. He had everything, wallets and jewelry, bank deposit, the gun, all of it wrapped up in one of Gus’s aprons. He sort of tiptoed down the stairs and when he comes back up, he’s got a johnny in his hand.”
“A condom, you mean?” Muriel asked.
“Exactly. Used, too. After everything else—”Collins just shook his head several times. “Anyway, Erno says, ‘Stuffed those tickets up her behind. Couldn’t have found them with a miner’s light, if I hadn’t seen the edge of this here.’ She had maybe fifteen tickets rolled tight in that rubber.”
Collins for the first time looked back to Anne-Marie. Behind him, his wife had sat with her mouth compressed against the heel of her palm, appearing, to Muriel’s eye, as if she was doing her best not to react. But when Collins turned to her, she responded at once. She reached out and the two sat holding hands for a second.
“You okay?” Aires asked his client.
Collins wanted water. They took a break. Everyone needed a minute. Muriel searched out Larry’s eye, but he looked funky and wrapped up in himself. Out in the hallway, w
aiting for the john, Muriel asked Tommy Molto what he thought. Molto picked with a fingernail at spots of tomato sauce on his shirt and tie, and said he didn’t know what to think. Muriel wasn’t sure either.
When they returned, Anne-Marie had slid her chair beside Collins’s and was holding his free hand. The other was still gripping his Bible. After a minute or two of fiddling with the tape recorders to be sure they were running, Muriel gave the date and time, then asked Collins what happened when they left Paradise.
“I followed Erno back to his house, and sat with him in his car. He’d been through some changes that night. We both had. At Paradise, he’d been outta-his-mind angry, then all blown away and subdued. Now he was just flat-out scared, trying to think out every angle not to get caught. He had one lecture after another for me. Make sure and mention to some folks how him and me went out for a pop last night. Don’t ever get myself inebriated and start braggin about all this to my homes or some lady I was after. The big thing on his mind, though, was how to get rid of that apron full of stuff in his trunk—the gun, the wallets, the jewelry, it was all in there. It was past three by now and both of us were just too messed up and worn out to deal. I didn’t want to have no more to do with any of this. And Erno was flat paranoid. All he could see was how we were bound to get caught, if we went to toss the apron in the river, or built a big fire and burned it all, or buried it in the Public Forest. There’d be light by five. But there was a toolshed in his backyard with a dirt floor—if we dug there, no way anybody was gonna see us. And so we each shoveled till we were halfway to China and threw that apron in there. He said he was gonna come up with a better plan when he calmed down, but I knew the both of us would be happy never to look at any of that again. Then he walked me to my car and right there on the street reached up and hugged me. That hadn’t happened since I was ten, and in the middle of all that craziness, maybe the craziest thing of all was how good that felt. Murdered three folks and hugged me. I drove off cryin like a child.
