Hire a Hangman (29 page)

A blaze of lights: two criss-crossed pairs of headlights. Shouts, a wild rattle of shots, one of them a shotgun, massive, booming. Instant warfare. And a man screaming. Vance, terrified, giving up, his silhouette sagging as he fell to his knees, screaming, “No. Stop.
Stop.
I’m shot.
Shot.”

And Canelli, lying full-length on the concrete. Face down. Motionless. Revolver still clutched in his right hand.

“Ambulance,” Hastings shouted. “Ambulance, goddammit. Officer down. It’s Canelli, goddammit. It’s
Canelli.”

1:45
AM

Wearily, the doctor stripped off a bloody pair of surgical gloves, dropped them in a refuse bin, lowered his gauze mask around his neck, drew off his green surgical beret, and shook out his medium-long, dark brown hair. Unmasked, his face was a young man’s, hardly more than thirty years old. Alert, perceptive eyes and a mobile mouth in a face as lean and handsome as a daytime TV doctor’s. His green surgical gown was blood-streaked. Burdened by fatigue, his shoulders hunched, the doctor’s arms hung slack at his sides.

“You from the police?”

In unison, Hastings and Friedman nodded.

“Well, your guy …” The young doctor frowned.

“Canelli,” Friedman said.

“Yeah. Canelli. Well, I’ll tell you …” Infinitely weary, the surgeon shook his head. “I’ll tell you, about five minutes more, and he’d’ve bled to death. One bullet punctured a lung. No problem. But one bullet ruptured the femoral artery. That’s the big one that supplies the leg. The rupture was right up near the groin, so pressure didn’t work. If those ambulance guys hadn’t done it just right with the plasma extenders, you’d be looking for another cop.”

“Inspector,” Friedman corrected. “Canelli’s a homicide inspector.”

“My mistake.” The doctor raised a hand, then let it drop, as if the effort to finish the gesture was too much. “I’ve been on duty for twenty-seven hours. As Friday nights go in ER, this one was the shits.”

“But Canelli’ll be okay,” Hastings pressed.

The doctor nodded. “Barring complications—clots, like that—he’ll be fine. He won’t be walking for a while, though. Or doing any deep breathing, either.”

“What about the other one? Vance?”

“He’s got multiple gunshot wounds, most of them superficial. What was it? A shotgun?”

“Buckshot. From about fifty feet.”

“Ah.” As if he were filing the information for future reference, the doctor nodded. “Buckshot. Yes.”

“When can we talk to them?”

“Is Vance a criminal? I gather he is, by the two guards.”

“He’s a suspect.”

“Ah.” As if he were committing another fact to memory, the doctor nodded again. “Yes. I see.”

They were standing in the corridor that led from the emergency room to surgery. A gurney and its crew came rushing down the corridor. The patient on the gurney was a young black woman whose hair was elaborately done in bejeweled cornrows. Her half-closed eyelids were fluttering, her gray lips quivering. Sections of her torso were becoming blood-soaked. The two detectives looked at the young woman, then looked quickly away. The doctor hardly looked.

“So when can we talk to Vance?” Friedman asked.

The doctor shrugged. “There’s nothing very serious wrong with him, aside from the aftereffects of shock and minor blood loss. If he were my patient—a private patient, I mean, that I felt obligated to protect, mostly for his psychic good health—I’d say you shouldn’t talk to him before, say, twelve hours, just to be safe. But if you’re willing to take the slight chance of causing him distress—bruising him, we might say, psychologically—then I’d say you could talk to him anytime.”

“Like now?”

The doctor shrugged. “Sure.”

“Good.”

2:02
AM

“Jesus,” Friedman muttered as they walked down the hospital hallway toward the uniformed guard standing at the end of the corridor. “I’m bushed. I just can’t take these late nights anymore.”

“You want to go home?” Hastings asked. “I’ll get the guard for a witness.”

Doggedly, Friedman shook his head. “No. If we can get something before Vance gets a lawyer, it’s money in the bank.” As he spoke, he nodded to the young, alert-looking patrolman standing beside the door marked
POLICE WARD
. The patrolman nodded cheerfully in return, using a key attached to an enormous plywood fob to open the door for them. Of the three beds in the ward, only one was occupied. Eyes closed, snoring slightly, Vance lay on his back. His breathing was shallow, his face white.

Just inside the door, Hastings hesitated. “He doesn’t look so good. Maybe we should come back.”

“Don’t worry.” Friedman gestured, a signal that they should proceed. “By the way, was Vance given his rights, do you know?”

“I didn’t do it. And Canelli didn’t, that’s for sure.”

“It sounds like Canelli almost bought the farm,” Friedman observed. “Jesus, what’d we do without Canelli to kick around?” He went to Vance, touched the suspect on the shoulder, then gently shook him. Instantly, Vance’s eyes came open. He blinked once, blinked again, then turned to look at the detectives, who stood side by side, staring down at him impassively, implacable symbols of the law’s unyielding phalanx. Just as impassively, Friedman recited Vance’s constitutional right to refuse interrogation. When the recitation was concluded, Hastings spoke:

“How’re you feeling, Vance?” He said it coldly, clinically.

Beneath his brave guardsman’s mustache, Vance’s lips were pale as he muttered, “I hurt.”

“You almost killed Inspector Canelli. Do you know that?”

No response.

“I have to tell you, Vance, that when someone shoots a cop—almost kills a cop, like you did—he’s a marked man. Do you understand that?”

Still no response.

“This gentleman”—he moved his head toward Friedman—“he’s a lieutenant, just like I am. We’re the co-commanders of Homicide. And we’re here—both of us—to tell you that we’re going to throw the fucking book at you. Us—the DA, everyone—we’re all out to get you. Because when someone shoots a cop and doesn’t suffer for it, then the next bastard with a gun in his hand is going to pull the trigger that much quicker. So we’re going to make an example of you, Vance. You think you’re suffering now? This is heaven, compared to what’s coming.”

“The only way you can help yourself,” Friedman said, smoothly picking up the beat, “is to cooperate. Beginning now. Right now, right this minute. That’s why we’re here, to give you a chance to make it easy on yourself. Otherwise, it’s your ass. We walk out of that door, and it begins, for you. If you start to bleed, or you need a drink of water, or you have to take a crap, and you ring for a nurse, nothing will happen, not for an hour or two. But that’s only the beginning. When you get out of here and go to the county jail, where you’ll be held for your pretrial hearing, you’ll be put in a cell with the biggest, most brutal, most drugged-out sex offender we can find for you. And I guarantee you, Vance, that in about a week—a month, maybe, at the outside—you’ll have AIDS. So it doesn’t matter what happens to you in court. Because you’ll already be a dead man. If you keep yourself in shape in the prison gym, do a lot of exercises in your cell, it might be ten years before you die of AIDS. But you will die. And the way you’ll die, you’ll wish you’d killed Canelli and got the death sentence and gone to the gas chamber, quick and clean.”

“Of course,” Hastings said, “we’ll deny we said this. We’ll deny this whole conversation.”

Vance’s voice was hoarse, no more than a whisper. “I want a lawyer. I’ve got a right to a lawyer.”

“That you do, Vance,” Hastings said. “But what Lieutenant Friedman is telling you—what we’re trying to make you understand—is that if you cooperate with us, then we’ll do our best to protect you while you’re locked up. But hiring a lawyer—refusing to talk until you get a lawyer—that’s not cooperating.” Heavily, Hastings shook his head. “That’s making it harder for us, not easier.”

“Which means,” Friedman said, “that we have to make it harder for you. That’s just the way it goes.” Now Friedman, too, lugubriously shook his head.

Except to blink, Vance made no response.

Posing now as the suspect’s protector, Friedman continued in the same dire tone, “I hope you remember this, Vance. I hope you remember that we tried to help you. Because you’re different from most of the guys who wake up in this ward. You’ve never been to jail. You might not even believe me, what I’ve been telling you. But when you’re in that jail cell, getting screwed—getting AIDS—you’re going to remember this little talk we’re having here. But by then it’ll be too late. You’ll already have the virus. You’ll already—”

“I believe you.” In the early-morning hospital hush, the words were almost inaudible.

Hastings and Friedman exchanged a quick, covert glance. Was this the turning point, these three whispered words?

“Well, then?” It was a delicately asked question, delicately timed.

For a long, fateful moment the man in the bed remained mute, staring at the darkened ceiling. Then, clearing his throat nervously, he said, “It was Barbara. Right from the start, it was Barbara.”

In the moment of charged silence that followed, Friedman inclined his head slightly toward Hastings. The message: Hastings should make the next move, attack from a different quarter, while Friedman watched, waited, calculated.

Hastings spoke quietly. “There’s no proof that Barbara’s involved. You, we’ve got cold. The Llama you bought killed Hanchett. You didn’t pull the trigger, but we’ve got your fingerprints on the expended cartridges, because you loaded the gun. And the forty-five you bought killed Teresa Bell—and almost killed Canelli. So you’re in deep shit, Vance. But Barbara?” Projecting regret for the hapless suspect, Hastings shook his head. “There’s no proof. Nothing.”

“She planned how it would happen. She planned everything. She knew about Teresa Bell—about the Bells’ child. She—she set everything up. Those guns—she gave me the money. And afterward, when she got the insurance money and all the rest of it—all the stocks, all the real estate—we were going to live in Europe. Spain or Italy. We were going to—”

“That’s bullshit,” Friedman interrupted harshly.
“Bullshit.
You might not be the world’s greatest intellect, but you’re obviously not stupid, either. Are you telling me that you risked the gas chamber for promises? Blue sky, for Christ’s sake?”

“I did it for
us.”
Vance was speaking more distinctly now. Color was returning to his face.

“Ah.” Friedman’s irony was a masterpiece of scorn. “Ah, I see. Love. You did it for love.”

Vance looked away. His hands had been resting limply on the counterpane. Now the fingers began to twitch fretfully. His eyes began to blink, his mouth moved irresolutely, as if he wanted to say more—but feared the impulse. All promising signs.

“Christ,” Friedman said, “that trick’s older than the shell game. ‘Help me get rid of him,’ the wife says, ‘and we’ll take the money and live happily ever after.’ Usually on the Riviera.” Marveling, Friedman shook his head. “And you fell for it. So here you are, with buckshot in your ass. And there she is, sleeping between silk sheets, probably, in Pacific Heights.”

No response. But Vance’s eyes were darkening angrily. His hands were clenched, no longer fretful. As if overwhelmed with pity for the suspect, Friedman turned to Hastings. “Should we tell him?”

Also projecting a negligent, contemptuous pity, Hastings snorted. “We may as well. He’ll find out in court.” He looked down at Vance, let a beat pass. Then: “She called us this evening. Barbara Hanchett. She called me at about ten o’clock. She told me you killed Teresa Bell.”

“No.” Vance began doggedly shaking his head.
“No.”

“It came through our communications center. I’ve got it on tape. Every syllable. We’ll play a certified copy of that tape for you, with police calls before and after. She set you up, Vance. On police radio. At about ten o’clock tonight.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

9:15
AM

“T
HIS,” FRIEDMAN SAID, GESTURING
to the Hanchett town house, “is very nice. Very nice indeed. A million and a half, two million, I’d say, in today’s market. Wouldn’t you say so?”

“At least.” Hastings swung the cruiser into the Hanchett driveway and switched off the engine.

“What always intrigues me,” Friedman said, “is why they do it, these rich people. Imelda Marcos. Donald Trump. Leona Helmsley. What’re they after, anyhow? Why do they do it?”

“They do it because they want more. It’s the American way. It’s greed. Otherwise known as free enterprise.”

“Hmmm.” Speculatively, Friedman eyed his colleague, conceding, “That’s pretty good. Is that an original line?”

“No.”

“Ah.” As if he were relieved, Friedman nodded. Then: “Did you call the hospital?”

“I stopped by this morning, on my way to the Hall. He’s fine. They’ve tested him for brain function already.”

Friedman frowned. “Brain function?”

“Because he lost all that blood. If the brain is starved for blood for any period of time, there could be brain damage. But he’s fine. He’ll be discharged in three or four days.”

“I’m glad he’s fine. Let’s face it, Canelli needs all his available brain cells.”

“Hmmm.”

“I put a notice on the bulletin board, and talked to the deputy chief. I figure we’d get him a little TV. You know, a portable, with a battery pack. After we finish here, we can go by Electric City. A friend of mine runs it.”

“Wait a minute. He’s already got a TV in his room. He was watching the news.”

“Well,” Friedman countered, “he’ll have to convalesce, you know, at home. He can use an extra TV then.”

“What about flowers?”

“He’ll get flowers from his family, whatever.”

“Hmmm.”

“What about Vance?” Friedman asked. “How’s he?”

“No problem.”

“Has he got a lawyer?”

Hastings shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I just talked to the doctor.”

“After we leave here,” Friedman said, “we’ve got to go by the hospital, see if we can get Vance on tape. If he doesn’t have any money, maybe he doesn’t have a lawyer yet. We could luck out.”