The Judgment (49 page)

“Now, this is the important part. Number one, you got to get Mark Conroy out of the way for the next couple of days, just as far as he can legally go while he’s under indictment, someplace it’s pretty well established he’s out of the city, way out. Number two—if all this goes right, he’s got to agree to resign from the police department. If he won’t agree to that, then the deal’s off. You, understand that?”

“I understand.”

“Then see that he understands, too. Call me if he refuses. Otherwise, just be there on Wednesday. Good luck to you both.”

Ismail Carter found the right button and switched off.

This was it, what I’d waited for, all that I’d hoped for. As I dialed Conroy’s number, I thought perhaps we should meet on this. He might need some heavy-duty persuading.

I
hid out most of the time until Wednesday. I read a book cover to cover on Monday night. Then I played hooky from the office again on Tuesday and did something I’d been wanting to do for quite some time. I went out and bought a vidéocassette recorder, otherwise known through the civilized world as a VCR. It came with a booklet of instructions that seemed to have been translated quite literally from Japanese into English. Yet somehow I managed to get the thing hooked up to the television set.

I stepped into a video shop for the first time in my life, signed up, and began browsing. Talk about a kid in a candy store. I came away with four movies, the store’s limit, all but one of them from the “Classics” rack:
The African Queen, Witness for the Prosecution
, and
On the Waterfront;
I even liked the one I hadn’t seen before, a weird western with Willie Nelson called
Barbarosa.
So I spent that day and night at the movies.

Who was I hiding from? From Sue, mainly. In the course of three calls—messages left on my machine that weekend—she went from jeering to apologetic. I listened to each one, tempted each time to call her back, yet each time resisting. I was still furious at her for what she pulled on Thanksgiving—having Dominic Benda pulled in when she knew I wouldn’t be around to accompany him. I did my part, too, but she set me up. One thing I was sure of:
I didn’t want to be married to a woman who didn’t play by the rules. I’d been married to three of those before. Maybe two would be more accurate; the first one played fair. At any rate, that was my judgment, and I didn’t want to deliver it until I’d settled down a bit.

I did talk to Dominic, though. I called him on Saturday and found him in better spirits. He’d gotten his patrol car back late Friday afternoon, and had been told informally by one of the forensic team that it was clean.

“You wouldn’t have gotten it back otherwise,” I told him. “They would have impounded it.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

I tried to explain how it happened I had been unavailable. He listened without comment, then said that he understood.

“Peggy told me what you told her. I know you been through a lot lately. We all have. None of us is perfect, Charley. I’m willing to forget if you are. But you know, the strange thing about it was that Larry Antonovich just gave me a routine questioning. He took me through it a couple of times. I got in about the Drunk and Disorderly at the Dew Drop Inn the night the little girl was killed. I got that in. I think he was pissed off having to be there himself, putting his own Thanksgiving off, like.”

“It wasn’t his idea, then?”

“Oh, no, it was you-know-who.”

“Sue Gillis?”

“Yeah, but she had some backing. You know what, Charley?”

“What’s that, Dominic?”

“I think bringing me in like that, spoiling my Thanksgiving, was more about you than it was about me.”

“You’re probably partly right. But I think it was mostly about the polygraph test. She and Evola were pretty pissed afterward. They knew something was up when you came in so tired.”

“And I fell asleep?”

“Yeah, well, that was my fault, though. I put you up toit.”

“Let me tell you something, Charley. I didn’t answer one question untrue in that whole test. All that walking in those seven miles did was put me in the mood I didn’t give a shit. And that’s the way you should take those tests. I was so damned scared when they told me I had to take it, I probably would have told a lie by the machine if I said my name was Dominic Benda. No, Charley, I ain’t a bit sorry what we done.”

“You did. You had to do all the work.”

“Okay. You know …” He paused. It was as if he had something to say but couldn’t quite figure the right words to say it. “You know, what I’ve been doing, hanging around the station, keeping contact with all those guys, I don’t think I’ll do that anymore. That was my life for a long time. But I gotta get a new life now. That’s what Peg says, anyway. I think she’s right.”

“I think she’s right, too, Dominic.”

“No hard feelings, Charley.”

“None whatsoever, Dominic.”

It was late Tuesday morning when I put the call into the Hermitage. I wondered how Conroy and his wife were doing up there, or if they were still up there at all.

I called information and got the number of the hotel in Port Huron. When I got through to the switchboard, I asked if there was a Mr. and Mrs. Conroy registered there. She said she’d connect me. Mrs. Conroy answered.

“Hi, this is Charley Sloan. I just called to find out how you’re doing.”

“Mr. Sloan,” she cooed. “We are doing just great. We dressed warm so we could take walks along the river. And the food is just out of this world! How’d you hear about this place?”

“I’ve had some good meals there, and it always seemed to me like it would be a good place to spend a little time away from it all.”

“You sure got that right.”

“I met the owner and his wife, a guy named Lydecker, not long ago. His family owns the hotel and he runs it. His wife runs the kitchen. If you happen to see them, say hello for me.”

“Sure I will. But I suppose you’d like to talk to Mark.”

“Yes, if he’s around.”

I heard her identify me as she passed the phone to him.

“Hey, Sloan.” He sounded relatively relaxed. I could almost see a smile on his face.

“Hello, Conroy, I was just calling to find out how you two were doing there.”

“We’re doing fine. Allie loves it.”

“What about you?”

“Well, yeah, I like it, too.” He lowered his voice. “Al-lie’s in the bathroom now, so I guess I can talk. I was scared to death they’d welcome me back when we registered at the desk. I guess they didn’t remember me.”

“Or they were being discreet.”

“Something like that.”

“Okay, listen, it’s all set up for tomorrow morning. I go into your office at 1300 Beaubien with Benjamin Timothy, and that’s when things are supposed to start going our way.”

“After this is all over, you’re going to have to take me aside and explain to me how all this worked.”

“That’s okay, but at this point, I don’t have the answers myself.” I hesitated. “You understand the terms?”

“I know the terms. It’s not going to be as hard to quit the department as you think. Quitting won’t be hard. It’s just what comes afterward. I haven’t got the slightest idea what I can do, or where I can go. I’ve spent my whole adult life as a cop, Sloan.”

“We’ll talk about that later,” I said. “Right now we’ve just got to hope everything comes off without a hitch tomorrow.”

“There’s some danger it won’t, then?”

“There’ll have to be some tricky maneuvering to pull it off, but it can be done.”

“Okay, I understand.”

“But it’s important that you’re nowhere near Detroit. Just stay close to the hotel. If you haven’t checked your car out of the garage yet, I’d just leave it there, if I were you. Don’t come back until Thursday afternoon. You might even eat lunch there.”

“Whatever you say.” By now he sounded a little more glum than when he’d picked up.

“Come on,” I said encouragingly, “in another few days it may all be over.
Ad astra
, Conroy.”

“Jesus, Sloan. I don’t have any secrets from you, do I?”

1300 Beaubien, the address of police headquarters in Detroit, is located comfortably close to the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice and the Detention Center, and across Clinton from Wayne County Jail. So you could be arrested, locked up to await trial, be found guilty and sentenced, and then serve out your term, if it was a short one, all within the space of a single city block.

Unfortunately, all this centralization makes parking pretty damned difficult. I put my car in a lot just off Greek-town and walked the rest of the way. I crossed St. Antoine, cut over to Clinton, and saw that the hot dog wagon had already opened up for business in front of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. Lawyers and friends and families of the accused streamed in and out, up and down the steps.

I’d spent the best and worst years of my life at Recorder’s Court in the Murphy Hall of Justice. The two sentences ran concurrently. I still passed through its doors and its tight security checks—Mark Conroy had brought me inside on a couple of recent occasions—yet somehow I thought of that building as a huge relic of my past. I felt I didn’t belong there anymore. I could never again be a real Detroit lawyer.

It also occurred to me, as I turned the corner and made for the entrance of police headquarters, that although years and status separated them, Dominic Benda and
Mark Conroy were in much the same position. Each had given his life to police work. Now neither one of them had the faintest notion of what to do with the rest of his life.

The cop at the reception desk stopped me and asked my business there.

“I’m here to meet with Benjamin Timothy to inspect the office of the deputy chief.”

He held up a clipboard. “Your name, sir?”

“Charles Sloan. Is Mr. Timothy here yet?”

The cop put a check by my name. “No, sir, he isn’t. Now, if you will take the elevator behind me and to your right to the second floor, then go along the hall, through the big room to the far end, you will find one or two officers waiting there for you and Mr. Timothy. You’ll see them, I’m sure.”

I thanked him for his directions, and followed the route exactly as he had laid it out for me. He was a well-spoken young man, probably on the fast track. I’m sure I must have known the layout of the building better than he did.

On the elevator I brooded a little more about Benda and Conroy. Dominic would find something—security guard, or maybe he’d pump gas close to home. His retirement pay was no longer in jeopardy. He’d get by. But Mark Conroy had a bigger problem. He’d risen so high. Where could he go? All that he knew was police work, and there wasn’t much that was like police work at his level. But then I had an idea, something that I thought might work out for him.

The “big room” mentioned by the cop at the door was fairly familiar to me. I’d made visits in the past to the department’s public information officer there, and also to Mark Conroy’s predecessor, Frank Quilty, the last high-ranking Irishman on the force until he dropped dead one night at the bar in Jacoby’s. Theirs were the big offices in each corner. The rest of the room—most of it, anyway—looked just about like what you’d find in any insurance office: a typing pool; secretaries at their desks; and, against one wall, a row of partitioned support offices.

Against the other wall, however, stood a row of desks where the real cops had set up shop. A few of them had gathered near the closed door of the deputy commissioner’s office. They leaned against one desk, jackets off, holsters exposed, drinking coffee and talking among themselves. These, unless I missed my guess, were the Mouse’s Untouchables, the special antidrug unit handpicked by him and Conroy. Then I saw that the desk around which they’d gathered belonged to none other than Ralph Smerka himself. He sat, holding court, his fingers folded over his belly, still wearing his trenchcoat and hat. He looked like he’d just come in. There was a rumble of talk as I approached, and then the group burst into loud laughter.

They fell silent when I arrived. The Mouse looked up at me without bothering to move his head more than an inch; he did it all with his eyes, a flat, cold stare.

“Why, if it isn’t Ralph Smerka,” I said, with all the false joviality I could summon. “The last time I saw you, they had you locked up in the Whitehall. Did you escape, or did they let you out?”

“Don’t be a pain in the ass, Sloan. I just got put back on the active list, that’s all. I requested it.”

“I wonder what they could be thinking of. You’re far too valuable as a witness against your old boss to be wasted on ordinary police work.”

Three or four of the Mouse’s audience had drifted away by this time. Two stuck around to listen.

“Well, maybe they figured it’s time ordinary police work got done around here.” That was said with a swaggering smile that seemed to say that he, the Mouse, was the only one who could get things done. Not the sort of remark to endear him to the Untouchables.

“I hope you haven’t lost the knack. There’s a lot of Alzheimer’s around the Whitehall, after all. It could be contagious.”

“I ain’t worried.”

I noticed one of the Untouchables looking beyond me. So I turned around and saw Benjamin Timothy coming
down the long aisle in the company of a uniformed cop.

He stopped at the desk, looked around, and shook my hand. He said my name, proving he remembered who I was, and I said his. Then he offered his hand to the Mouse, who took it without rising.

“Detective Smerka,” said Timothy, “I wonder if you’d mind coming into the deputy chief’s office while Mr. Sloan has a look at it. You, better than anyone else, could answer questions on its condition—what’s where, if any-thing’s been altered, and so on.”

The Mouse pushed his huge body off the chair and rose to his full six-feet-six. He pushed his face into a smile.

“Sure,” he said, “I don’t mind.”

Timothy turned to the cop beside him. “Officer Rylewicz, would you open it up, please?”

The cop was kind of a custodian. In his hand he had a huge ring of keys. He tried one, and then another, and then a third in the door to Conroy’s office, without success. Smiling back at us apologetically, he tried another. It was only with the fifth key that the lock turned.