Presumed Innocent (47 page)

In truth, my four years of investigation succeeded only because of Morgan Hobberly. The whole heroic incursion into gang life, which Stern has trumpeted before my jury on a dozen occasions, came down to one piece of luck: finding Morgan. An organization like Harukan's did not have the kind of membership who could not be bought. Dozens of them were informants for the police or the federal agencies. But Melvin was smart enough to have a few of them out there doing counter-intelligence work. We were never sure what was right, since we got, through our sources, two or three different stories at any one time.

But Morgan Hobberly was the real thing. He was on the inside. Not particularly because he wanted to be, but because the Saints enjoyed having him around. Everybody knows a Morgan Hobberly. He was born cool, given to grace the way some people are born to music, or horses, or high jumping. His clothes just hung on him right. His movements were lithe. He was not so much beautiful as composed, not so much handsome as present. Aloof was not the right word as much as magical. There was a vibration he stirred in me that somehow reminded me of my feelings for Nat. And because some moral voice that Morgan took for divine told him one morning that Harukan's ways were evil, Morgan secretly went to work for the state. We put a body recorder on him and he sat in the meetings of chieftains. He gave us the numbers of phones that we connected to pen registers and, eventually, tapped. In the seventy days that Morgan Hobberly helped us, we gathered virtually all the evidence for trials that lasted another two years.

He did not make it, of course. The good, they say, never do. It was Kenneally who told me they'd found Morgan. They had a call from the Public Forest district command, he said, and it didn't sound encouraging. When I arrived, there was already that funny scatter of cops and paramedics and reporters familiar to a murder scene. Nobody wants to talk to anybody else; nobody wants to be near the body. People were all over, shot out in different places like spores. I couldn't figure where he was. Lionel was there already, with his hands dug deep in his windbreaker. He gave me that low look of his, the varlet's eye. We fucked up bad, he was saying; and then his eyes drifted back enough for me to guess the general direction.

He had died of drowning. So Coroner Russell later determined — I would not let Kumagai near the body. He had died of drowning, the coroner found, in the waste pool of a public outhouse. That was where he was. Upside down, with his head, and his two broken shoulders, pushed through the wooden seat. Rigor mortis had set in, so that his legs were spread at a kind of scarecrow angle, and his plain twill workpants and raveled nylon socks and worn oxfords created an atmosphere of unbearably humble address. His skin — the band of flesh visible where the pants and socks didn't meet — was purple, a royal shade. I stood in that tiny wooden shack, where a fly or two still buzzed even though it was now November, where the air was rank even without the summer heat, and contemplated Morgan Hobberly's strange humor and the ether on which I always thought that he could float. I believed less then in angels and ghosts, because I had thought surely that this was one man who, as he made his way through the world, could not be touched.

Lipranzer is looking cold — not unemotional or distant, but actually cold, although the nighttime temperature in August is still verging on the seventies. His shoulders are hunched close and his windbreaker is zipped tight. I know him well enough to recognize this is a sign of discomfort, if not fright. On this turf, I am probably more experienced.

"How you doin, Charlie Chan?" I ask him as we head up the concrete staircase.

"Me no likee this one, boss," he says. "Uh-uh. No fuckee way."

In the projects, a staircase is a building's main thoroughfare. The elevators are seldom operable, and when they are, nobody will get on them anyhow, since there is no mercy for him who finds himself between floors with a carload of Saints. Instead, all commerce is transacted in this stairwell. Dope is sold here; wine is drunk here; love is made. It is near 3 a.m. and still this vertical Ganges is not completely deserted. Near floor 4 two young men are drinking something in a bag and trying to romance a young woman whose head is lolled back against the cinder blocks. "How you doin, brother?" they say to a black man who happens to be climbing up ahead of us. To Lip and me, they say nothing, but their looks are insolent and cold, and Lip, without missing a step, flips out his tin as we are going past. He does not want to be mistaken for an ordinary white man.

At the top of the stairway, the eighth floor, Lip holds a finger to his lips and quietly pulls the steel fire door back. I follow him into the corridor, a typical project hallway; brightly lit to discourage intruders, trash along the sides in isolated pieces, an uncut smell of human use. About halfway down the wall, the sheetrock has been smashed out in a shape which for all the world resembles someone's head. In a hallway like this, one of Lionel Kenneally's guys shot Melvin White, the night after we returned the first round of indictments. I was outside to supervise the arrests, but it was about twenty minutes after we all heard the gunfire before the coppers would let me go in. By then the ambulance had arrived, and I went up with the paramedics. Along with the surgeons, they eventually saved Melvin's life, making way for his return to Rudyard. When I saw him, however, Harukan's chances did not seem good. They had laid him out in the middle of the hallway next to his automatic rifle. He was making a sound too labored, too desperate to be called groaning, and his stomach and his arms, which lay upon it, were painted with blood. Between his hands, a little twisted purple piece of tissue protruded. And above him stood Stapleton Hobberly, Morgan's brother, who had begun snitching for us after Morgan was killed. Stapleton had his penis in his hands. He was urinating in Melvin White's face while a number of coppers lounged against the walls and watched.

And what the fuck am I supposed to say if this guy dies of drowning? one of the paramedics asked me.

Now Lip is rapping on the door.

"Open up, Leon! Wake up! It's the po-lice. Come on, man. We just wanna talk."

We wait. The building, in a way that is almost beyond the threshold of detection, seems more silent now. Lip raps again with the flat of his palm. There is no kicking this door in. They are all reinforced steel.

Lipranzer shakes his head. And at that moment the door suddenly, silently, swings open. It is very slow. Inside, the room is totally black, no sign of light. Somehow an extraordinary adrenal rush has begun. If I were to pick out the details that key this response, I could only identify the little metal click, but even before that there is an instantaneous perception of alarm. Danger is palpable in the air, as if the threat of harm were an odor, a stirring like wind. When I hear the sound of the gun being readied, I realize that we are perfect targets, standing backlit in the bright hallway. Yet clear as the thought is, I have no impulse to move. Lipranzer, though, is going. Somewhere along he has said, "Motherfucker," and as he is on the way down, he slides in my direction and cuts my legs out from under me. I land, painfully, on an elbow and roll away. We both end up lying on our bellies on the floor, staring at one another from either side of the door. Lipranzer has his pistol gripped with both hands.

Lip closes his eyes and yells at top volume.

"Leon, I am the po-lice! This man is the po-lice! And if your piece is not out here in ten seconds, I am callin this in, they are blasting your ass away before you can say shit. Now I'm gonna start countin!" Lip gets to his knees and presses his back to the wall. He motions with his chin for me to do the same thing. "One!" he yells.

"Man," we hear, "if you are the po-lice, how am I gone know it. Huh? How am I gone know it?"

Out of his windbreaker, Lip draws his creds — the star and his picture i.d. He inches toward the doorway, then allows only his hand to cross its plane as he pitches them in.

"Two!" Lip yells. He is backing away. He points up at the lit exit sign. We are going to run for it soon. "Three!"

"Man, I'm puttin on the lights now. Okay? Okay? But I'm keepin my piece."

"Four!"

"Okay, okay, okay." The gun scutters over the tiles and lands against the molding of the hallway with a thump. A heavy black item. Until it stopped, I thought it was a rat. Light from the apartment angles out of the threshold.

"Out here, Leon," Lip yells. "Down on your knees."

"Oh, man."

"Down!"

"Shee-it." He comes knee-walking right out the doorway, his arms extended before him. He is quick and comical now. The cops, man. Always
so
serious.

Lip pats him down. Then he nods. And the three of us get to our feet. Lip snatches his creds back. Leon has on a black sleeveless T-shirt and a red headband. On the bottom, he is wearing only his Jockey shorts. Apparently we roused him. A smooth-skinned, powerfully built man.

"I'm Detective Lipranzer. Special Command. I'd like to come in and talk."

"And who's he, man?"

"He's my goddamned friend." Lip, who still has his gun in his hand, pushes Leon. "Now get back inside." Leon goes first. Lip covers the doorway; with his gun held by his face, he flashes from post to post, staring inside. Then he goes in to search. After a moment he emerges and motions me in. He holsters his pistol again, at his back, under the coat.

"Man, would we have been a headline," I say to him, my first words since this started. "If he was shooting, you might have saved my life."

Lip makes a face, meant to disparage me. "If he was shooting, you were dead by the time I knocked you down."

Inside, Leon is waiting for us. His apartment is a galley kitchen and a couple of rooms. There is no sound of anyone else, but he is seated on a mattress on the floor of the living room. He has put on his pants. A plastic alarm clock and an ashtray are by the bed at his feet.

"We want to ask you a couple of questions," Lip says. "If you're straight, we're out of your face in five minutes."

"Hey, man. You come in here three clock in the mornin. Come on, man. Gimme a break. Call Charley Davis, man, he's my 'torney, man. Talk to him, Jack, cause I'm tired and I'm goin to sleep." He leans back against the wall and closes his eyes.

"You don't need an attorney, Leon."

Leon, still with his eyes closed, laughs. He has heard that one before.

"You got immunity," Lipranzer tells him. "This guy's a P.A. Aren't you?"

Leon opens his eyes in time to see me nod.

"See, now you have immunity."

"7-7-2," says Leon, "5-8-6-8. That's his number, man. Charley Davis."

"Leon," says Lip, "about eight, nine years ago you dropped fifteen hundred bucks on a deputy P.A. to make some problems you had go away. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"No chance, man. Okay? I mean, you come bustin into my home, three clock in the mornin, man, askin me shit like that. Am I a fool, man? Huh? Am I a fuckin fool? I'm gone be talkin to some fuckin white-ass po-liceman about shit like that? Come on, man. Go home. Let me sleep." He closes his eyes again.

Lip makes a sound. For some reason I get the idea that he is going back to his gun, and I have an impulse to stop him, but instead he walks slowly over to Leon. He crouches, right at the head of his bed. Leon has watched him approach, but he closes his eyes once Lipranzer has reached his level. Lip takes his index finger and jabs Leon a couple of times in the forearm. Then Lip points at me.

"See that guy? That guy's Rusty Sabich."

Leon opens his eyes. Captain Saint Killer. Right in his living room.

"Bullshit," says Leon.

"Show him your card," says Lipranzer.

I am hardly prepared for this, and I have to empty the pockets of my sportcoat. In the process I discover that my coat is gray across its entire front with the hallway's soil. I have brought along the documents Lip obtained months ago from Leon's court file, my appointment diary, my wallet. In there I find one dog-eared card. I give it to Lipranzer, who hands it to Leon.

"Rusty Sabich," says Lipranzer again.

"So?" asks Leon.

"Leon," says Lip, "how many of your blood brothers do you think have been on his pad, huh? Twenty-five? Thirty-five? How many Saints do you think he's paid to snitch? You go back to sleep, Leon, and Rusty Sabich is gonna get on the phone tomorrow morning. He's gonna tell every one of them how you go out to the Forest to suck off white boys. He's gonna give them who and when and where. He's gonna tell them how they can find out all about this stone faggot deacon they got, name of Leon Wells. Okay? You think this is bullshit? This is not bullshit, my man. This is the guy who let Stapleton Hobberly take a piss in Harukan's face. Have you heard that story, huh? Now, all we want is five minutes of your time. You tell us the absolute truth and we're gonna leave you alone. We gotta know a couple of things. That's all."

Leon has not moved much, but his eyes are wide open as he listens to Lipranzer. There is no more play in his expression.

"Yeah, man, and next week, you need somethin else and you be bustin in the door at three clock in the mornin pullin this shit again."

"We'll tell you right now if we're ever gonna need anythin else. Just as soon as you answer our questions." What we'll need is for Leon to come down to court to testify, if he nails Molto. But Lip knows the ropes; you don't tell them that for a while. "Now don't bullshit me, Leon. Here's my first question: Did you or did you not pay fifteen hundred to make that case go away?"

Leon makes a sound. He sits up straight.

"That fuckin Eddie," he says. "You already know, man. Right? So why you be botherin me?"

"Leon," says Lip quietly. "You heard my question."

"Yeah, man. I paid fifteen hundred."

My heartbeat has become very solid now. Thump thump. I expect to see my pocket jumping when I look down at my shirt.

I speak for the first time.

"Did the woman have anything to do with it? Carolyn? The probation officer?"

Leon laughs. "Yeah, man. You might say that."