Done for a Dime (18 page)

“Mrs. Thigpen, I’m not going to lie to you. We know pretty much all we need to know about what happened, but that’s not saying we know everything about why. I don’t doubt there are some pressures in play that we’ll only find out about as time goes on.”

“He did not do it. My son did not kill Raymond Carlisle. That’s just—it’s crazy. Crazy.”

Sarina looked out the window at the empty street rushing by, the hardscrabble housefronts, the blighted yards. “Poor man,” she said quietly. Then, locking her hands in prayer, she whispered, “Dear Lord, Who knows the weakness of our natures, bend down Thine ear in pity.” Eyes closed, she continued in a hush, lips barely moving.

When she reopened her eyes, Murchison said, “I’d like to explain a few things before we get to the station, Mrs. Thigpen. Would that be all right?”

There was a chance that Arlie, upon talking with his mom, might cut his losses and confess. Even if the kid didn’t sign a waiver and talk, something might spill out as he tried to make his mother feel better—something Murchison could tie to something else, weave together, work up. This, in legal parlance, was the difference between an admission and a confession. The courts were far more willing to consider an admission reversible error. No big thing, no matter how bad you tooled with the suspect’s rights. And even if Arlie’s lawyer did end up getting it suppressed as evidence, it was still information. Prosecutors could bitch all they wanted,
Information isn’t evidence,
but the truth remained: Information could be molded. It could be handed around, like money. It could be used for bait.

“I used the word
murder
before, and that can be misleading. What we have is a killing.”

He explained to her the three main concepts involved—malice aforethought, depraved heart, heat of passion—and let the terms sink in. They were the juicy words, the ones juries loved. Then he ran down how impossible it would be for a jury to think Raymond Carlisle’s killing deserved anything but the most severe charge, the harshest penalty. Shot in the back—malice. Followed into his yard—aforethought.

“Sometimes people think they can lower the charge to manslaughter. Heat of passion. It usually means the victim did something or said something so vile, so degrading, any reasonable person would be unable to control his rage. The law is surprisingly wise in this regard, Mrs. Thigpen.” Remembering her near-silent prayer of just moments before, he added, “It recognizes the weakness in our natures.”

Her eyes flared. Bingo.

“We lose it sometimes. Work ourselves up and can’t work ourselves back down. All because some jerk pushed too far. A depraved heart is not an angry heart, it’s an empty heart. That’s why manslaughter, a crime of passion, is the lesser crime. In theory, anyway. But again, Mrs. Thigpen, nothing’s as simple as it ought to be. The law demands there not be a cooling-off period if a defendant’s going to claim heat of passion. If there’s time to cool off, any time at all, then there’s no real heat.”

“Cool off,” Sarina murmured, trying to fashion the phrase into some form of good news. Her eyes narrowed again. “Time—”

“You got time to cool off, Mrs. Thigpen, bye-bye manslaughter. You follow a man and shoot him in the back, that’s bye-bye murder two. Which pretty much boxes the thing in. Murder one. In a death penalty state.”

Sarina shook her head. “Follow? You said time—”

“Now, I admit, anything can happen. We’ve got a saying: Inside the courtroom, the rules of gravity no longer apply. And that’s true twice over inside the jury room. Only takes one juror. Feel a little twinge of doubt. Feel a little pity. The number of hung juries is up, way up. Not just that, it’s happening most in trials of young Black men, and it’s Black women who are hanging those juries. So there’s always a shot. Except, well, I feel obliged to tell you, every case where you’ve got a hold-out juror? Case gets retried and the second trial results in conviction. Hung juries just slow the process down, make it more expensive, they don’t stop it. Besides which, capital cases here draw their jury pools mostly from north county. Which means white people. I’m not saying it’s right, Mrs. Thigpen, I’m just saying that’s the situation.”

“Time,” Sarina said again, this time loudly, as though the concept hovering just outside her grasp had finally come to bear. “Cooling-off period. You said you had an eyewitness. Then you talk about time. Time between what and what? This eyewitness, what did he see?”

They’d reached the police station. Stluka pulled the car into the public lot, so they could take Sarina in through the front.

“I’m not at liberty to divulge what the witness did or didn’t see.” Inwardly, Murchison cringed at how lame it sounded. “And since time is short, there’s one more thing I need to explain to you before we go in. One more term. Not a legal term, a street term. I don’t know, maybe you already know it. The term is
juice
.”

Sarina had resumed the pose she’d struck upon first entering the car: handbag tight to her waist, small, strong hands clenching the strap. Back where we started, Murchison thought.

“You work the street, Mrs. Thigpen, like your son, you gotta have juice. Gotta know who else has it. In particular, you gotta know who among your so-called friends has it, who doesn’t, who wants it, how bad they want it.”

Sarina’s defiance melted a little. The fear returned to her eyes.

“Think about all those other young men working that street corner with your son.”

“Street corner?”

Stluka groaned and looked at his watch. Murchison said, “Your son was spotted downtown, working a corner with maybe half a dozen other young men.”

“Downtown?”

Stluka said, “Peddling them powerful powders, ma’am. As he has been known to do.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Eyewitness,” Stluka intoned, his hands thrumming a little tomtom on the steering wheel. “Hate to keep bringing that up, inconvenient and all, but—”

“You still haven’t told me—”

“The witnesses saw what they saw, Mrs. Thigpen.” Murchison was irritated—with both her and his partner. “The point I want to make before we take you in to speak with your son is this: Which one of those other young men has got juice?”

Sarina stared.

“Put yourself in their shoes, Mrs. Thigpen. We’re going to be bringing down here every single one of them. The guys working that corner with your son. Most are in trouble already, and they’re going to be trying to buy their way out of it. There’s eight times as many Black men in prison as there are in college, four times as many for drugs as whites. You think people are pissed off about that? John Q. Public, he’s delighted. Crime’s down. He thinks, Three strikes? Hell, let’s make it two. Make it one. And your son’s so-called friends, dragged in here—it’s already happening, Mrs. Thigpen, right now, this minute—they’ll know all that. If they don’t know it coming in, they’ll catch on quick. I guarantee it. And the writing on the wall, it’s gonna say: Time to get a little juice. Time to say, ‘You know that old man got popped on the hill? I may have something to say on that.’”

“On the hill. But you said Arlie was
downtown.
”

“One of your son’s pals, he’s looking at hard time, years of it. No way out. Except your son. He’s got your son to hand up.”

“No,” Sarina said, shaking her head violently.

“He’s got juice.”

“This is wrong. This is evil.”

Stluka blew out an annoyed gust of air, opened his door, and said over his shoulder, “You want evil, we’ll take you to the freezer, let you talk it over with Mr. Carlisle.”

“You can’t do this.”

“You willing to bet your son’s life on that?”

“Your son’s friends,” Murchison pressed, “they get brought in—and like I said, that’s already in play, Mrs. Thigpen—you really think they’re gonna be looking out for your son?”

Tears welled in Sarina’s eyes. She sat transfixed.

“No taint to snitching like there used to be, Mrs. Thigpen. Now it’s just one more way to look out for number one. They don’t even call it snitching anymore. They call it getting down first. Your son’s friends—maybe one, maybe more—somebody’s gonna have his ass in a jam and he won’t think twice. He’s gonna get down first. To hell with the snitch jacket. Man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. Get himself some juice and walk on out into the light of day. And your son will be what’s left behind.”

Sarina reached for the door handle. “Let me see Arlie.” She wiped her face with one hand, fumbled to get the door open with the other. “I want to see my son.”

Murchison got out, hurried to open her door. “I’m sorry if all this upsets you, Mrs. Thigpen, but I’m just trying to lay it out for you. Murder two? Manslaughter? Forget about it. Not with this set of facts. Not unless your son wants to plead out.”

“And if he’s innocent? Do you even care?”

Stluka glanced around, to see if anyone was watching. The parking lot was empty. Beyond it, the station house glowed in the early morning haze.

“Your son wants to plead,” Murchison said, “there’s always room to maneuver.”

Sarina took a trembling breath. Murchison waited. Just beyond him, Stluka stood there with arms crossed, wearing an expression that betrayed his thoughts, which were: Go ahead. Cry. Feel fucking sorry for yourself.

“I’d bet good money, Mrs. Thigpen, it wasn’t even Arlie’s idea.”

It took a second, but Sarina glanced up. She’d caught on. A way out?

“There’s somebody else,” Murchison continued, edging closer to her. “Let’s suppose. Somebody else on that corner, somebody who saw Arlie and Mr. Carlisle. They argued, Mrs. Thigpen. Nasty. Loud. Physical. Arlie got tired of Mr. Carlisle’s abuse and shoved him off the corner, told him to go home. Then this somebody else, the one whose name we don’t know, he stayed behind with Arlie and started to push. Mess with Arlie’s manhood. ‘You ain’t gonna put up with that? Settle the score. Shut him up.’ And this somebody else, he takes out the gun.”

Murchison reached into his jacket, removed a ballpoint pen, took Sarina’s wrist, and pressed it into her hand.

“And he says, ‘Are you a man or not?’ And all your son’s so-called friends are there, waiting. Like they’re banging him in. But we need Arlie to tell us that.”

He let go of Sarina’s wrist, but her arm remained fixed in mid-air, as though hung there by wire. She looked at the pen, then let it drop to the ground, lifting her eyes to Murchison. He stepped back, extending his arm as though to say,
It’s time.

“A name, Mrs. Thigpen. Tell your son what we need is a name.”

Murchison delivered Sarina into the interview room with her son. He and Stluka then went around and listened in from the monitoring box in the corridor between interview rooms. What they heard was twelve minutes of motherly pleas on one end, on the other angry protestations of innocence. They watched as, on the video screen, mother and son clutched hands, they wept, the mother prayed out loud as her son begged her not to.

Murchison took heart that most of what he’d told Sarina Thigpen had sunk in. She begged Arlie to give them a name, pass the blame to someone who deserved it, spare himself, but Arlie’s defiance was absolute. He had nothing to do with Strong Carlisle’s death and knew no one who did. Watching him, Murchison wondered at the young man’s seamless air of conviction, unable to tell if it came from the heart or just practice. Finally Arlie got up, faced the corner where the camera hung, and slapped his hands against the wall, shouting, “Take her home! Hey! Take her home!”

Once outside the interview room, Sarina turned on Murchison. “What on God’s earth have we done,” she said, “to make you hate us so?”

“Nobody hates your son, Mrs. Thigpen. I want to help him. But I can’t do that as long—”

“As long as he won’t confess to what—”

Stluka cut her off. “Your son, those scars around his eye, how’d he get those?”

Sarina recoiled from him. “What are you trying—”

“Face get pushed through a window? And where were you when that happened?”

The rest was garbled screaming, conducted while those in earshot prairie-dogged, heads bobbing out from doorways to watch. Holmes bolted out from the squad room, took one look, then stepped forward to steer Sarina away as Murchison tried to do the same with Stluka, pressing his hands to his shoulders to ease him toward the detective bureau doorway. Stluka was having none of it, not yet. Before Murchison could talk him down, though, an officer called out from the doorway leading out to the lobby.

“Detective Murchison? Someone up front. Said urgent.”

Stluka used the distraction as an excuse, finally, to collect himself. “Go on,” he muttered. “It’s over here.” He straightened his tie, shook his head in one last show of triumphant disgust, then headed into the detective bureau. Around the corner, Holmes pinned Sarina Thigpen against the wall, collecting her between his arms, his face in close as he soothed her with an onslaught of consoling words: “I understand … I know … I realize …”

Murchison turned away, headed out toward the lobby. His mind rattled with things he wished he’d said, other things he regretted saying, botched questions, bad guesses, assumptions gone wrong. That was a killing for you—one man lies dead and everyone else gets stupid or goes nuts. You really did have to wonder sometimes who had it worse.

Past the final door, he greeted two women, both middle-aged. One white, one Black. It took a moment, but he realized he knew who the Black woman was.

Murchison guessed she was forty-five, fifty tops, but she could pass for mid-thirties. Cinnamon skin, high cheekbones, almond eyes. No more than a hint of crow’s-feet edging those eyes, same at the lips. Her long hair, coarse and straight, was a coppery brown, slightly darker than her skin, swept back and tied into a high ponytail that emphasized her brow. On a white woman, the ponytail would have looked too cute, phony young. On this woman, the effect was simple and prim, like her clothes: white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, navy cardigan, gray wool skirt, modest black flats.

Felicia Marchand. Toby’s mother. Strong Carlisle’s secret sweetheart.

It was the white woman, though, who stepped forward. She was a little zaftig, but voluptuous, not matronly. Murchison felt embarrassed by his arousal. No makeup, but her skin was flushed and her eyes didn’t need it—they were a stark clear blue with thick lashes. She carried a briefcase but wore sweats and her black hair was finger-combed with renegade strands everywhere. She’d shot up from a deep sleep at the sound of the phone, he guessed, dragged herself out from under the covers, thrown on whatever lay tangled beside the bed (he pictured her hopping one-legged as she pulled on her socks). Strangely, the dishevelment made her more attractive; you could almost smell the sleep on her skin, and the next picture that came to mind was her crawling right back into bed. Luxuriant, happy, naked. The Queen of Naps.