Reversible Error (7 page)

"Did he cut you?" Marlene asked as calmly as she could.

"No, he just poked around the… area, just hard enough not to break the skin. Look, could I have a drink of water? Talking about this, my throat is clamping up."

Marlene poured a paper cup of water from the carafe on her desk. After the woman had drunk it down, she continued.

"While he was doing this he was insulting and threatening me, like saying stuff like, 'I should cut it out, bitch,' and 'I ought to fuck you with this, you whore.' He was really working himself up. I was concentrating on not wetting myself, that's how scared I was.

"Then he raped me. It hurt like crazy but at least it was over fast. He lasted about eight seconds. Then he stood up and grabbed my head and rubbed his genitals on the panty hose. That was it. He left."

"He didn't say anything as he left?"

"He might have. I can't remember."

"I don't guess you kept the panty hose."

"No, that was a dumb move, I realize it now. But I wasn't thinking of that at the moment. I buried them in the trash and took a shower for about an hour and a half. And then took a bunch of Valium. Which was another dumb move. I should have just gone down to the emergency room and had them take a sample. Now I know, but I, um… but I'd never been raped before."

Caputo sat silently for a moment, taking deep breaths. Tears oozed slowly from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. Marlene passed her a box of tissues, without comment. She completed her card and resisted the temptation to glance at her watch; she was due in court in a few minutes, but something was nagging at her mind and she didn't want to let it go.

She slid one of her shoeboxes across the desk. What was that woman's name? Feldman? Rosenberg? She started shuffling through the files, muttering and cursing quietly.

"What are you doing?" asked JoAnne Caputo.

"Oh, sorry. It just occurred to me that your rapist may have done it before-that trick with the panty hose. I had a woman in here a couple of weeks ago with a similar story, but I'm ashamed to say I've forgotten her name. I have them filed by name, and there are over two thousand."

Caputo leaned forward. "You don't have them cross-indexed?"

Marlene shook her head. "No, see, this is strictly amateur hour. It's a shoebox with cards. I've been trying to get some better analysis, but there's all kinds of problems…" Now Marlene did look at her watch. Almost out of time.

"Let me see the card," said Caputo.

Marlene passed it across the desk and Caputo read both sides. "I see the problem. A lot of the key information is in text fields-what he said, what he did. You'd have to input the whole field as text and then do a string search subroutine to pull matches out. SPSS could handle it, or you could write a little Fortran program."

"You know about this stuff?" Marlene asked hopefully.

"It's what I do. I told you I worked at NYU. I'm in social stat."

"I'm afraid to ask," said Marlene. "Would it be possible…?"

"Would it help to find that bastard?"

"Girl, it's about the only way there is."

"OK, give me the boxes. I'll start right away."

"You can do it? Just like that?"

"No," said Caputo, her face tightening. "I'll have to steal and lie and forge my boss's signature and do nothing else for the next week or so, but there's nothing much else I feel like doing anyway. I'll get back to you in a couple of days."

Pepper Soames's club, on the old part of 125th where it curves down to the river, was one of the last of the old-time Harlem jazz clubs. It was a relic of the days, thirty years past, when the audience for real jazz was small, hip, and almost entirely black, before stereo, heroin, integration, or rock and roll.

Art Dugman walked into Pepper's around midnight, took a table in the nearly empty room, ordered a J amp;B on the rocks, and watched his boss, Detective Lieutenant Clay Fulton, finish his set. Fulton was playing keyboard in a trio: a hotshot kid alto player and an elderly man on bass. Dugman thought they were pretty good, but he didn't know anything about jazz.

After they finished playing, Fulton came over to Dugman's table and sat down. He was holding a glass of what Dugman knew was club soda. Fulton didn't drink anymore.

Fulton said, "Why ain't you home, Dugman? Streets are dangerous this time of night."

"You said report to you. I'm reporting."

"So cop a squat, Jack. What's happening on the dealer murders?"

"Let me spin it out for you, just like we got it. See if you come up with the same bad thoughts I did."

"Bad thoughts?" said Fulton.

"Just listen up, Loo," said Dugman, and quickly recited what he and his team had learned since the night of Larue Clarry's murder: the details of the killing itself, the evidence from Clarry's apartment, their interrogation of Slo Mo, and the murder of what ought to have been their best witness, the prostitute Haze.

"Whores get killed all the time," said Fulton after a thoughtful pause.

"Yeah, but look here, we know who did it," said Dugman. Some of the girls on Haze's stroll saw Haze getting into a car with a black man about one-thirty this morning. The M.E. says she was killed between two and three the same morning. Nobody ever saw her alive again."

"You got a good make on the guy from that?"

"No, we had to shake the place up a little."

Fulton grunted. "Am I gonna have trouble on this?" Fulton understood what happened when the King Cole Trio shook the place up a little. People came flying headfirst out of shooting galleries. People found themselves hanging by their ankles from rooftop parapets. TV sets fell from windows. Normal trade shut down at the public drug markets and the places where stolen goods changed hands. The underworld got sick, heaved its belly, and spewed forth a sacrifice.

"No trouble," said Dugman, "we just hustled the mutts. Anyhow, a junkie name of Laxton shook out. Says he saw the whole thing."

"He saw the whore get it?"

"Shit, no! He saw Clarry get it. The fuck I care about some whore-he saw the guy did Clarry, and if you right about this, the guy that did all the dealers. And the whore."

"This Laxton witness the actual killing?"

"No, what he saw was Clarry's car pull up under the highway, and the guy get out, go in the back of the car for a minute, and get out again and walk away. Laxton was nodding off in a pile of trash. He jumped when he saw the guy, made some noise, and the guy spooked and got small real fast. That's probably why he left the piece on the seat of the car."

"So did he see the guy close enough to put him on the mug books?"

Dugman smiled. "No need. He made the guy right there. He knew him from way back."

"Who was it?" asked Fulton, taking a sip of his drink.

"Name's Tecumseh Booth."

Fulton let loose a great snorting laugh, spraying soda from his mouth over the table. When he had stopped coughing, he wiped his face with a cocktail napkin and said, "God damn! You got to be shittin' me, man. Tecumseh? I know Tecumseh Booth. I sent him up for armed robbery a couple of years back. He's a lot of things, but he ain't no hit man."

"Maybe he changed professions," Dugman said carefully.

"Uh-uh. Not likely. Tecumseh will hold your horse while you ace somebody. He might drive you away from the scene. But he never shot nobody in his life. Never even carried heat, that I know of."

"He was there," said Dugman.

"Yeah, could of been. Go ahead and pick him up if you want, but he won't tell you shit."

"He won't?"

"He didn't tell me shit when I picked him up, back when. Three guys shot up a liquor store, and Booth was the wheel on the job. The other mutts got loose and Booth took the fall-eight years, I recall it was. Never said shit. Boy can hold his mud, I'll say that for him."

Dugman pushed back from the table. "We'll see about that."

Fulton frowned. "Art, no roughing. I know it's Harlem, but times has changed, you dig?"

"Yeah," said Dugman, standing up. "They sure has. Teddy Wilson used to play this room. Catch you later, Loo."

Outside, Dugman cursed himself for a short-tempered fool. He knew Fulton was good-a smart and competent detective. Yet Dugman could not help harboring resentment for the other man's success, for his rocketing rise through the ranks. Fulton was the first college-educated black detective lieutenant in the history of the NYPD. If the paddies downtown ever let a brother in as chief of detectives, it would be Fulton.

No, it was not precisely resentment; it was anger at what his own life had been, a grinding rise through the ranks, nearly ten years in a blue bag before they gave him his gold tin. Now he was taking orders from a man ten years his junior.

At some level, he wanted Fulton to acknowledge that, to honor him for it, at least to credit him with some smarts. He didn't deserve a laugh in the face and a nagging about questioning suspects.

He got in his car and drove fast across town. He realized that he had not conveyed to Fulton the three points he had wanted to bring out about the rash of dope-dealer killings. What had puzzled him from the outset was the lack of resistance on the part of the victims. Not one of these people had been shot down in a hail of lead. At least one of them had opened his door to his assailant. The killings had been done almost at the leisure of the murderers, and against a group of men who were typically suspicious to the point of paranoia, well-guarded and well-armed.

The second point was what Slo Mo had said when Mack braced him against the wall in that alley. The pimp knew Mack was a cop. Why had he been so frightened, and why did he so urgently want to make it clear that he didn't sell dope?

The third point was the clincher to Dugman. They had dropped Slo Mo in the alley at a quarter to twelve. They had called in the pickup request on the prostitute Haze about twenty minutes later. Within the next hour somebody had picked her off her stroll, taken her down to the docks, and put a bullet in her head.

It was indeed a bad thought, almost too heavy to hold by himself, and Dugman briefly considered turning his car around, driving back to Pepper's, and laying the burden on his superior. But something made him stop. Would Fulton laugh at him again? He didn't need that! No, the better move was to nail it down, to pick up Tecumseh Booth and make him talk, to make him reveal that the cool and casual murderer they were hunting was a cop.

Sugar Hill had fallen some from what it had been thirty years earlier, but it was still a pretty nice neighborhood, for Harlem. The apartment occupied by Tecumseh Booth was located in a still-handsome tan brick building on 149th off St. Nicholas Avenue. The class of the area was demonstrated by the brass mailboxes in the lobby, which had retained their doors, locks, and polish. Detective Jeffers read the name of Tecumseh Booth's girlfriend from one of them, and headed up to the third-floor apartment with Maus.

The two detectives drew their pistols and clipped their police identification to their breast pockets. Jeffers was about to knock on the door, but Maus stopped him and placed his ear against the door. It was the kind of hollow metal fire door that was good at transmitting certain sounds.

"Hear anything?" asked Jeffers.

"Yeah," answered the other. "Music. Earth, Wind, and Fire, I think. And a banging sound. And a kind of squealing. Maybe he's beating a dog to death with a stereo."

Jeffers placed his massive head against the door and listened. He smiled. "I think what you hearing there is Tecumseh on the job."

Maus raised his brows and pressed his ear more tightly to the door. "You think so? Making a lot of noise, ain't he?"

"You think that 'cause you unfamiliar with the sexual habits of my people. Being naturally more attune to the physical propensities of life, we get more juice out of the berry, so to speak, in the way of hump. Therefore the noises of ecstasy which we hearin now."

"Yeah, you keep telling me that, but I got to take your word for it, since I notice you haven't fixed me up with any of your sisters yet."

Jeffers laughed softly. "You not ready for that, boy. I got to bring you along slow, got to pace you."

Maus said, "1 appreciate that, Mack, I do, and meanwhile I'm working hard to overcome my objection to miscegenation. Meanwhile, what the fuck are we doing here? I'm getting horny listening to this shit."

"My plan, little man, is to wait until Tecumseh have pop his rocks and then we gonna swoop him up while he lie in the sweet afterglow. Besides, he ain't gonna be getting none of that for a long time where he goin. It's my act of Christian charity for the month."

They waited in the hall until the sounds stopped. Then Jeffers pounded mightily on the door and shouted, "Open up! Police!" He pressed his ear to the door again.

"Are they coming?" asked Maus.

"So to speak? No, I hear escapin noise. I think he's goin out the window."

"You going to take the door down?"

"Don't be funny, son. This a steel door. I go through a door like this, they better have my momma's ass on fire on the other side. No, we just gonna go downstairs again. Tecumseh ain't goin nowhere."

And indeed, when they arrived back on the street, they found Tecumseh Booth facedown on the ground, dressed only in a pair of slacks, with his hands cuffed behind him. Art Dugman had picked him up easily as he dropped from the fire escape.

Jeffers stooped and jerked Booth to his feet with a single yank on the handcuff chain. Booth yelped sharply and said, "Hey, what the fuck you want with me? I ain done nothin!"

Jeffers popped the rear door of the Plymouth open and threw the prisoner in. He got in himself and Dugman went around to the other side. Maus drove the car south toward the Twenty-eighth Precinct.

Booth sat between them calmly with his hands cuffed behind his back, waiting. He had learned, from a lifetime of arrests, the wisdom of the sages, that silence was the ideal state of being. He had also learned that cops made mistakes, and that in some mysterious way these mistakes had the power to cancel guilt, so that you could walk away from a crime that the cops and kids on the street and old ladies knew you had done, and they couldn't do shit to you. This had happened to him a number of times. The main thing was to shut up.