A Ticket to the Boneyard (6 page)

“I don’t care if you break her neck. I’m not going anywhere unless the gun goes with me.” I thought for a moment. I said, “Look, I’ll pick it up by the barrel. I’m not looking to shoot anybody with it. I just want to walk out of here with it.”

While he worked it out I took another two steps and reached out to take the gun by the barrel. I kept the gun within his field of vision, so that he could see it was no danger to him. I couldn’t have shot him anyway; he had Elaine positioned between us, and his fingers looked to be digging into her flesh. If she was in pain, I don’t think she was aware of it. All that showed in her face was a mix of fear and despair.

Gun in hand, I angled forward and to my right. I was getting closer to him, but moving to put the coffee table between us. It was a flattened cube, of plywood I suppose, clad in white Formica. As I walked, I said, “I got to hand it to you, you made me look stupid. How did you get past the doorman?”

He just smiled.

“And through the door,” I said. “That’s a good lock there, and she swore you didn’t have a key. Or did you? Or did she open it for you?”

“Put the gun away,” he said. “And go.”

“Oh, this? It bother you?”

“Just put it away.”

“If it bothers you,” I said, “here.” And I tossed it at him.

He was holding her arm too hard, that was his mistake. It slowed his reaction time. He had to let go before he could do anything else, and instead his hands tightened reflexively and she cried out. He let go then, snatching at the gun, but by then I had a foot out to kick the coffee table at him, and I did, hard. It caromed into his shins even as I was launching myself over it and into him. The two of us sailed into a wall—we didn’t miss the window by much—and the impact took the breath out of him. He wound up on his back and I wound up on top of him, and when I’d scrambled free he was still on the floor. I hit him on the chin, hard, and his eyes glazed. I grabbed him by the lapels and slammed him back against the wall and hit him three times in the middle. He was all muscle and all hard, but I put a lot into my punches and they got through. He sagged, and I swung a forearm and put my whole shoulder into it, and my elbow got him in the chin and put his lights out.

He lay on the floor like a rag doll, his head and shoulders propped against the white wall, one leg drawn up, one fully extended. I stood there, breathing hard, staring down at him. One of his hands lay on the floor, the fingers splayed. I remembered the look of the fingers gripping Elaine’s arm, and I had the urge to move my foot a few inches so that it covered that hand, then lean my weight onto that foot and see if that didn’t take some of the strength out of those steel fingers.

Instead I retrieved my piece and wedged it under my belt, then turned to Elaine. Some of the color had returned to her face. She didn’t look wonderful, but she looked a lot better than she had when he was holding her arm.

She said, “When you said you didn’t care if he broke my neck—”

“Oh, come on. You had to know I was setting him up.”

“Yes, and I knew you must have something planned. But I was afraid it wouldn’t work. And I was afraid he might break my neck, just out of curiosity, just to see whether you cared or not.”

“He’s not going to break anybody’s neck,” I said. “But I’ve got to figure out what to do with him.”

“Aren’t you going to arrest him?”

“Sure. But I’m afraid he’ll walk.”

“Are you kidding? After all this?”

“It’s a tough case to prosecute,” I told her. “You’re a hooker, and juries tend not to get concerned about violence toward prostitutes. Not unless the girl dies.”

“He said he killed a girl.”

“Maybe he was just talking. Even if it’s true, and I think it might be, we don’t even know who she was or when he killed her, let alone have a case against him for it. We’ve got resisting arrest and assault on a police officer, but a half-decent defense attorney would make our relationship questionable.”

“How?”

“He’d make it look as though I was your pimp. That would pretty much guarantee an acquittal. Even with the best slant on our relationship, it’s a problem. You’ve got a married cop who’s got this friendship with a call girl. You can imagine how that’ll play in the courtroom. And in the papers.”

“You said he’s been arrested before.”

“Right, and for the same kind of thing. But the jury won’t know that.”

“Why? Because charges were dropped?”

“They wouldn’t know even if he’d been convicted and done time for it. Prior criminal history isn’t admissible in criminal proceedings.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never understood it. It’s supposed to be prejudicial, but isn’t it part of the whole picture? Why shouldn’t the jury know about it?” I shrugged. “Connie could testify,” I said. “He hurt her and he threatened you. But would she stand up?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t think she would.”

“Probably not.”

“I want to see something,” I said, and I bent over Motley. He was still out cold. Maybe he had a glass jaw. There was a fighter like that, Bob Satterfield. He could take a punch with the best of them, but if you got his jaw just right he’d flop on his face for a ten count, so out of it he’d sleep through a Chinese fire drill.

I fumbled in his jacket pocket, straightened up, turned to show Elaine what I was holding. “This is a help,” I said. “A baby automatic, looks like .25 caliber. It’s sure to be unregistered, and there’s no way in the world he’d have a carry permit. That’s criminal possession of a deadly weapon in the second degree, that’s a Class-C felony.”

“Is that good?”

“It doesn’t hurt. The thing is, I want to make sure his bail is too high for him to make, and I want him charged with something serious enough so that his lawyer can’t plea-bargain the case down to nothing. I want him to do real time. He’s a bad son of a bitch, he fucking well ought to go away.” I looked at her. “Would you stand up?”

“What do you mean?”

“Would you testify?”

“Of course.”

“There’s more to it. Would you lie under oath?”

“What do you want me to say?”

I studied her for a moment. “I think you’ll stand up,” I said. “I’m going to take a chance.”

“What do you mean?”

I wiped the gun clean of prints with my pocket handkerchief. I got an arm between Motley’s shoulders and the wall and raised him up into a half-crouch. He was heavier than he looked, as thin as he was, and I could feel the hardness of his tissue. The muscles didn’t relax fully even when he was out cold.

I fitted the gun into his right hand, got his index finger inside the trigger guard and curled it around the trigger. I found the safety, flicked it off. I wrapped my hand around his, levered his body a few degrees more erect, and saw where the gun was pointed. I was aiming right at one of the paintings, the one that later turned out to be worth fifty grand. I swung a little ways to the left and squeezed his finger against the trigger and put a hole in the wall. I placed the second shot a little higher, and angled the third almost into the ceiling. Then I let go of him and he fell back onto the floor and the wall, and the gun dropped from his hand to the floor beside him.

I said, “He was holding a gun on me. I kicked the coffee table at him. It knocked him off balance but he did get off three shots while he was falling, and then I crashed into him and took him down and out.”

She was nodding, her face a study in concentration. If the gunshots had startled her, she seemed to have recovered quickly. Of course the shots hadn’t been that loud, and the little bullets hadn’t done much damage, just making neat little holes in the plaster.

“He fired a gun,” I said. “He tried to kill a cop. That’s not something he’ll walk away from.”

“I’ll swear to it.”

“I know you will,” I said. “I know you’ll stand up.” I went over to her and held her for a minute or two. Then I went into the bedroom and got the bourbon bottle. I had a short one before I picked up the phone and called it in, and I had the rest of it while we waited for the cops to get there.

She never did have to testify, not in court. She gave a sworn statement, perjuring herself cheerfully on paper, and she was letter perfect on that, telling an essentially unvarnished version of the truth up to the point where his gun came into play, and then laying it out for them the way we’d worked it out. My story was the same, and the physical evidence supported it. His fingerprints were on the gun, right where you’d expect to find them, and the paraffin test revealed nitrate deposits on his right hand, evidence that he’d fired a gun. It was indeed unregistered, and he had no license to possess a firearm, or to carry one on his person.

He swore he’d never seen the gun before, let alone fired it. His story was that he’d come to the Fifty-first Street premises after having made prior arrangements over the telephone to engage her services as a prostitute. He said he’d never seen her before the night in question, that he’d had the opportunity to have sex with her because I had burst in and attempted to work a version of the badger game upon him, extorting him out of additional funds, and that when that failed I had launched an unprovoked attack upon him. Nobody bought any of this. If this was the first time he’d turned up in her life, why had she sworn out a complaint against him almost a week earlier? And his record might not be admissible evidence and the jurors might not be entitled to know about it, but the district attorney was damn well entitled and so was the judge who set bail at a quarter of a million dollars. His attorney protested this, arguing that his client had never been convicted of anything, but the judge looked at all those arrests for violence against women, along with a supporting statement that Connie Cooperman had been persuaded to give, and turned down a request for lower bail.

Motley stayed in a cell awaiting trial. The state brought a whole laundry list of charges against him, with attempted murder of a police officer up at the top. His lawyer took a good look at his client and the evidence against him and came around ready to cut a deal. The DA’s Office was willing to play; the case was low-profile, the public didn’t have a big emotional investment in it, and Elaine and I might come off looking pretty dirty after a round of intensive cross-examination, so why not plea-bargain the thing and save the state time and money? They reduced the main charge to an attempted violation of Section 120.11 of the penal code, aggravated assault upon a police officer. They dropped all the collateral charges, and in return James Leo Motley stood up in front of God and everybody and agreed that he was guilty as charged. The judge weighed his priors against the lack of convictions and came up with the Solomonic sentence of one-to-ten years in the state penitentiary, with credit for time served.

After sentence had been passed Motley asked the court if he could say something. The judge said he could, but not without reminding him he’d had the opportunity to make a statement prior to sentencing. Maybe it was shrewdness that had led him to hold his tongue until afterward; if he’d made the same statement earlier the judge would almost certainly have given him a sentence closer to the maximum.

What he said was, “That cop framed me, and I know it and he knows it, the pimping bastard. When I get out I got big plans for him and the two bitches.” Then he turned to his left, tilting his head to point his long jaw at me. “That’s you and all your women, Scudder. We got something to finish, you and me.”

Lots of crooks threaten you. They’re all going to get even, same as they’re all innocent, they were all framed. You’d think nobody guilty ever went to prison.

He sounded as though he meant it, but that’s how they all sound. And none of it ever comes to anything.

That had been something like a dozen years ago. It was another two or three years before I left the police force, for reasons that had nothing to do with Elaine Mardell or James Leo Motley. The precipitant, though perhaps not the cause, for my leaving was something that happened one night in Washington Heights. I was having a few quiet drinks at a tavern there when two men held up the place and shot the bartender dead on their way out. I ran out into the street after them and shot them both, killing one of them, but one shot went wide and fatally injured a six-year-old girl. I don’t know that she had any business being there at that hour, but I suppose you could have said the same thing about me.

I didn’t get any flak over the incident, as a matter of fact I got a departmental recognition, but from then on I had no heart for the job or my life. I quit the department, and around the same time I gave up trying to be a husband and father and moved into the city. I found a hotel room, and around the corner I found a saloon.

The next seven years are somewhat blurred in memory, although God knows they had their moments. The booze worked for a long time. Somewhere along the line it stopped working, but I drank it anyway because I seemed to have no choice. Then I started hitting detox wards and hospitals and losing three or four days at a time in blackouts, and I had a seizure and, well, things happened.

What it used to be like, what happened, and what it’s like now . . .

“He’s out there,” she said.

“It seems impossible. He’d have been out years ago. It bothered me at the time that the judge gave him as short a sentence as he did.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“I didn’t want to worry you. But he got one-to-ten, so he could have been on the street in less than a year. I never figured that would happen, he didn’t strike me as the type to charm a parole board or get released after serving a minimum sentence, but even so you’d figure him to be out in three or four years, say five at the most. That’s longer than most people can manage to nurse a grudge. But if he served five years that would mean he’s been breathing free air for seven years now. Why would he wait this long to go after Connie?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you want to do, Elaine?”

“I don’t know that, either. I think what I want to do is throw some things in a suitcase and get a cab to JFK. I think that’s what I want to do.”