Mission Flats (32 page)

‘Alright,’ I prodded, ‘we get it. No backup. Keep going.’

But before Vega could reply, a man’s voice behind the apartment door announced, ‘I don’t know who you all are, but I’m getting ready to call the police.’

None of us said anything.

The man opened the door partway and spied us. A seventyish African-American man with a formal bearing. A gentleman retiree maybe, the sort who puts on a tie every day to read his newspaper at the kitchen table. ‘This isn’t a place to hang out. What are you fellas doing out here?’

I stepped forward (I was technically the senior officer), flipped my badge, apologized for disturbing the man.

‘Nobody called the police to come here.’ He took up a guard post at the threshold.

‘Well it’s an old case. It’s nothing to worry about.’

The man did not react.

‘There was an accident here a long time ago,’ I said. ‘A policeman was killed.’

‘I know all about it. They set up that boy for it.’

Vega’s eyes swelled, a bubble of sadness.

‘That’s not necessarily what happened,’ I offered without conviction.

‘Mmm-hmm. You mind if I stay here?’

‘Yes,’ Vega blurted.

‘No,’ I overruled him. ‘No, I think it would be helpful if you stayed, Mr . . . ?’

‘Kenison.’

‘Mr Kenison. Ben Truman.’ We shook hands. ‘John Kelly, Julio Vega.’

The old man hesitated before taking Vega’s hand – did he remember the pariah’s name? – but he shook it, then returned to his post at the door like a Beefeater.

The presence of this interloper seemed to inhibit Vega. He studied the floor as if he’d dropped a coin there. ‘Anyway, like I said, I had the radio and there’s blood all over and I can hear Gittens calling the turret. I knew Gittens was going to be around because it was kind of his warrant. You know, in the sense it was his snitch’ – a glance at Mr Kenison – ‘I mean informant. Plus, he was our friend, he watched out for Artie and me. So I hear him call in and he says he’s coming up. Next thing I know, here comes Gittens up the stairs. Out of nowhere, he’s just
here.
It was like some cartoon, like “Super Friends” or something. So Gittens comes up behind me and he says, “What the fuck happened?” And I tell him, “Artie got shot through the door.” So Gittens is all pissed. He stands up and he grabs the pipe and he starts breaking down the door himself. No vest. He just jumps in front of the door and starts banging away. He kept slipping because of the blood on the floor, and he had Artie lying there around his feet. But he was going in that door no matter what. It took a while, but Gittens got through and we followed him in.’

Vega moved to enter the apartment, but Mr Kenison was blocking the door.

‘Excuse me.’

The old man stepped aside. His eyes never strayed from Vega’s face.

Vega led us into the apartment just as Gittens had led the search-warrant team a decade before.

‘We get in and it’s empty. Nothing. No shooter, no gun, no coke. Not even furniture. Just some little stuff in the cabinets, cereal, shit like that. Paper and shit all over the floor. It was dark too. The only light was from the street outside.’

Vega’s description jarred with the bright, well-scrubbed apartment we stood in. The walls were freshly painted in a creamy yellow, there were new appliances in the kitchen, even the windows had been replaced with up-to-date vinyl-sash models.

‘Did you do all this?’ I asked Mr Kenison.

‘Yes, I did.’ His tone carried the hint of a challenge.

‘It’s really nice.’

Vega went on: ‘Like I said, we’d never been inside this place. We didn’t know what the fuck it was going to look like in here.’ To Mr Kenison: ‘Excuse me, we didn’t know
anything
about what it was going to look like. Sorry. We come in, we secure it, next thing I know Gittens is running down a back staircase and everyone is running after him. We did not even know there was a back staircase. After that I’m kinda unclear. I didn’t go with them. I went back to stay with Artie.’

‘But do you know what happened?’

‘Yeah. Gittens found the weapon in the back of the apartment near the door. Big pump-action shotgun. Ballistics made it the murder weapon, fingerprints made it Braxton’s. We tore the place up, found all kinds of other evidence Braxton had been here. There was a back stairway and a back door, which was how the shooter got out. Simple case. It was Braxton, no doubt about it.’

Mr Kenison said, ‘That boy admitted he’d been here other times. So you found his fingerprints or whatever; doesn’t mean he was here that night.’ His tone was neither angry nor deferential. He was simply stating a fact, unabashed by the fact that we were police officers.

‘His fingerprints,’ Vega exclaimed, ‘were on the gun!’

‘They could have taken that gun from the boy anytime and dropped it in the yard.’

‘Oh come on!’ Vega said.

‘It happens.’

‘You really believe that?’

‘I believe it happens, yes.’

‘But do you believe that’s what happened here? We planted the gun? I mean, you
live
here, you see what goes on. Do you really believe that’s what happened?’

‘I don’t know who of you-all to believe. I don’t believe that boy and I don’t believe the police. That makes him not guilty.’

‘You think he’s innocent.’

‘I didn’t say innocent. I said not guilty. Could be he did it. But you police officers should have done a better job.’

Vega’s chest and shoulders drooped perceptibly. After all, this was the common wisdom on the Trudell case. Braxton’s guilt or innocence was almost beside the point. It had become a case about civil rights and police lying – Vega’s lying – not murder. A morality play for the masses, with Braxton the incidental beneficiary.

Vega looked around the apartment, searching for something familiar, a portal back to that night. In the kitchen, he ran his palm over the Formica counters. It was as if the refurbished apartment disoriented him. It mediated between himself and his own history. Vega had replicated the coordinates along the Y-axis of place only to find the X-axis, time, completely blocked, the grid itself inaccessible. The moment of fracture – August 17, 1987, 2:25
A.M.
– was lost.

He murmured, ‘That kid killed Artie.’

No one responded.

‘That kid killed Artie.’

Vega was drenched in remorse, and it occurred to me that he’d reached a terrible decision: He intended to kill Braxton. But it was a fleeting suspicion, crowded out almost immediately by a more pressing concern.

Framed by the apartment windows, the strobe of a cruiser’s lights glinted from the street below. I looked down to see Martin Gittens and a backup car, three cops in all. They had come for me.

34

‘Ben, we need to talk again.’

‘Am I under arrest?’

Gittens hesitated when he heard the question, and I felt compelled to make an explanatory little wave toward the two uniform cops and the strobe flashes from the cruisers’ light bars.

‘No.’

‘Then why the backup?’

‘People tend to get emotional,’ Gittens replied, ‘when things start to look bad.’

‘Is it starting to look bad?’

He gave a pained shrug. ‘I’m sure you can explain.’

The Area A-3 station was just a few blocks away. We returned to the same painted-cinder-block interrogation room where Lowery and Gittens had confronted me twenty-four long hours earlier. This time, Lowery was not there. Kurth had taken his place.

‘I want Kelly in the room.’

‘No,’ Gittens said. ‘Sorry.’

‘Then I have nothing to say’

‘However you want to play it, Chief Truman. You can just listen, if you want. Or talk. Your call.’

‘And if I just leave? Invoke my right to remain silent?’

‘Then we’ll have to wonder. Which is
our
right, Chief Truman.’

‘And what about—’ I was thinking of the fact that I was a cop and was owed a measure of professional courtesy. But something in Gittens’s demeanor warned me it was too late for that. Something behind all that elaborate courtesy, all those respectful
Chief Trumans.

‘What if Kelly watches from the glass?’ I nodded toward the one-way mirror.

Gittens considered a moment before deciding to allow it.

Kelly urged me not to participate in the questioning at all. There was nothing to be gained by it. But I felt – foolishly – there was nothing to gain by lawyerly dithering. I wanted to show my innocence; I wanted to walk the walk. More important, I had a fatal curiosity about Gittens’s continuing suspicion of me. Why me? What did he have? The whole thing was inexplicable. I had to see the evidence against me, even took morbid pleasure in it. Freud once described pleasure as the release of tension; at least now the tension caused by being kept in the dark might be released.

But when Kelly had left the room, it was Kurth, not Gittens, who took over the interrogation. The switch was disconcerting. It moved the case from a local A-3 detective to a Homicide detective. It signaled that the ball had been passed. Kurth exhibited none of Gittens’s false friendliness. ‘We just got this back.’ Kurth put a heat-sealed plastic bag on the table. It contained a drinking glass, which had been fumed and powdered for prints. The gold-leaf shield of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel was smudged with black powder.

I tried consciously to slow down my body, to master the subsystems – respiration, metabolism, heartbeat. Do not blink, do not blush, do not hyperventilate, do not react in any way.

‘It’s from the room where your mother’s body was found. Those are your prints. The fluid inside tested positive for barbiturate residue.’

More staring.

‘Do you want to explain how your prints got there?’

‘Not at the moment.’

‘It’s a murder weapon.’

‘No, it’s not, and you know it.’

‘Did she drink it? I thought they were pills.’

No answer.

‘Danziger had this glass. Come on, you must have known that. Did he ask you about it?’ Kurth waited a beat. Then, ‘There’s more too. Video of you in the hotel with your mother, checking in and out. Video, Chief Truman. We haven’t done a handwriting analysis on the hotel’s paperwork yet, but it doesn’t really seem necessary at this point. You were there with her.’

I wore a cast-iron poker face, the one valuable thing I inherited as Annie Truman’s son.

‘You helped her do it, didn’t you?’ A beat. ‘You murdered her.’

‘It’s not murder,’ I said.

‘It is in this state. Did Danziger tell you that? He was going to indict you, wasn’t he? Of course he was. Why else would he go all the way up to Maine except to talk to you about it? He was going to take it to the grand jury. A cop involved in a murder – excuse me, a suicide. How could Danziger look the other way? Not on this one, not this time.’

‘I didn’t murder anyone,’ I said.

‘Why wasn’t Danziger’s file on the case with the rest of his things?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘His case file on your mother’s death, the folder, it’s missing. He must have brought the file with him when he went to Maine, since he intended to work on the case there. We had to reconstruct it from duplicates and from files he kept on his computer. So where’s the original file?’

‘I have no idea.’

He laid a piece of paper on the table.

‘Is that your signature?’

I glanced at the document with stagy blitheness, the way you might look over a day-old newspaper or a dessert menu.

‘Versailles Police Department,’
Kurth read,’
missing firearm. Nine-millimeter Glock 17 pistol. Firearm reported missing from evidence locker by Officer Dick Ginoux. Dick to follow up. Signed Chief Benjamin W. Truman. September 29, 1997.
Let me guess, Chief Truman: The Glock was never found.’

‘No.’

‘Any idea where it might have gone?’

‘No.’

‘Would you be surprised to hear that a nine-millimeter Glock 17 is consistent with the weapon that murdered Bob Danziger?’

‘Oh, come on, Kurth, I saw the body. There must be a hundred guns that would be consistent with that scene.’

‘Strange coincidence, though, wouldn’t you say? Big gun like that just disappearing from the evidence locker in a little Podunk police station like yours?’

‘Shit happens.’

‘Shit happens,’ he repeated. ‘So what did you do to follow up? Or weren’t you concerned about a nine-millimeter semiautomatic lying by the side of the road?’

‘Of course I was concerned. We searched, we investigated. We couldn’t track it down.’

‘You had access to that locker, didn’t you? You could have taken that gun.’

I didn’t answer.

‘Chief Truman, can you tell me why you went out to the cabin that morning? When you found the body, I mean. What were you doing there?’

‘It’s routine. We check all the cabins as part of our rounds.’

‘Even in winter?’

‘Especially in winter.’

Gittens broke in at this point. He sat down opposite me, rested his hands on the table and interlaced his fingers. It was a thoughtful pose. ‘Ben, why don’t you help yourself out here. Get ahead of this a little, before it goes too far down the track. All these things, you see what it adds up to, don’t you? Motive, means, opportunity. Danziger told you he was going to indict the assisted-suicide case, so you shot him, then you ditched the gun somewhere, probably in the lake. Then you took Danziger’s file.’

‘That’s your theory?’ I said.

‘That’s our theory, yeah.’

‘It’s not true. Martin, I’m not a murderer. What else can I tell you?’

Gittens shook his head mournfully. He’d wanted to hear more.

‘Gittens, are you going forward with this?’

‘That’s up to the DA.’

‘Then I’m free to go?’