Free Fall (18 page)

The uniform who did Pike grinned. “Look who it is.”

The sergeant opened Pike’s wallet, then blinked at Pike. “Jesus Christ. You’re him.”

The uniformed cop took off Pike’s sunglasses and handed them to the sergeant. Pike squinted at the suddenly bright light, and I saw for the first time in months how Pike’s eyes were a deep liquid blue. My friend Ellen Lang says that there is a lot of hurt in the blue, but I have never been able to see it. Maybe he just hides it better with me. Maybe she sees his eyes more often than I.

Micelli came back as they were finishing and I said, “Play this one smart, Micelli. There’s a detective sergeant in North Hollywood named Poitras who’ll vouch for us, and an assistant DA named Morris who’ll back Poitras up. Give’m a call and let’s get this straight.”

Micelli signed the property forms. “You got connections, that what you telling me?”

“I’m telling you these guys know us, and they’ll know we’ve been set up.”

Micelli grinned at the property sergeant. “You ever hear that before, Sarge? You ever hear a guy we’re bringing in say he was set up?”

The sergeant shook his head. “No way. I’ve never heard that before.”

I said, “For Christ’s sake, Micelli, check me out. It’s a goddamned phone call.”

Micelli finished signing the forms and glanced over at me. “Listen up, pogue. I don’t care if you’ve been hamboning the goddamned mayor. You’re mine until I say otherwise.” He gave the clipboard to the property sergeant, and then he told the uniforms to bring us to interrogation. He walked away.

Pike said, “Cops.”

The uniforms brought us through a heavy metal door and into a long sterile hall that held all the charm of a urinal in a men’s room. There were little rooms on either side of the hall, and they put Pike into the first room and me into the second. The rooms sported the latest in interrogation-room technology with pus-yellow walls and water-stained acoustical ceilings and heavy-duty soundproofing so passing liberals couldn’t hear the rubber hoses being worked. There was a small hardwood table in the center of the floor with a single straight-backed metal chair on either side of it. Someone had used a broken pencil to cut a message into the wall.
In interrogation, no one can hear you scream.
Cop, probably. Detainees weren’t allowed pencils.

They kept me waiting for maybe an hour, then Micelli and a cop in a gray suit came in. The new cop was in his late forties and looked to be a detective lieutenant, probably working out of homicide. Micelli took the chair across the table from me and the guy in the suit leaned against the wall. Micelli said, “This conversation is being recorded. My name is Detective Micelli, and this is Lieutenant Stilwell.” You see? “I’m going to ask you questions, and your answers will be used in court. You don’t have to answer these questions, and if you want a lawyer, but can’t afford one, we can arrange for a public defender. You want someone?”

“No.”

Micelli nodded. “Okay.”

“Did you call Poitras?”

Micelli leaned forward. “No one’s calling anyone until we get through this.”

Stilwell said, “How do you know Lou Poitras?”

Micelli waved his hand. “That doesn’t mean shit. What’s it matter?”

“I want to know.”

I told him about me and Poitras.

When I finished, Stilwell said, “Okay, but what were you doing down here?”

“I got a tip that a REACT cop named Eric Dees is involved with a gangbanger named Akeem D’Muere and I’m trying to find out how.”

Micelli grinned. Stilwell said, “You got proof?”

“A guy named Cool T gave me the tip. He was a friend of James Edward Washington. Washington is one of the dead guys.”

Micelli said, “That’s fuckin’ convenient.”

“Not for Washington.”

Micelli said, “Yeah, well, we got a little tip, too. We got tipped that an asshole fitting your description and driving your car was down here trying to move a little Mexican brown to the natives. We got told that the deal was going down in an abandoned building off the tracks, and we went over there, and guess what?”

“Who gave you the tip, Micelli? Dees? One of the REACT guys?”

Micelli licked the corner of his mouth and didn’t say anything.

I said, “Check it out. Twenty minutes ago I saw Akeem D’Muere put a gun to James Edward Washington’s head and pull the trigger. I’m working for a woman named Jennifer Sheridan. Akeem D’Muere has a mad on for her, and he said that she’s next.”

Stilwell crossed his arms. “Two of the dead men found in the garage were named Wilson Lee Hayes and Derek LaVerne Dupree. Both of these guys had a history
of trafficking in narcotics. Maybe you were down here to meet them and the deal went bad. Maybe you and your buddy Pike tried to rip those guys off.”

I spread my hands.

Micelli said, “You own a 1966 Corvette?” He gave me the license number.

“Yeah.”

“How come there was a half kilo of crack in the trunk?”

“Akeem D’Muere’s people put it there.”

“They dumped eight thousand dollars’ worth of dope, just to set you up?”

“I guess it was important to them.”

“Eight-Deuce Gangster Boys buy and sell dope, they don’t give it away. No profit in it.”

“Maybe it wasn’t theirs. Maybe Dees gave it to them. Maybe it came from the LAPD evidence room.”

Micelli leaned forward across the table and gave me hard. “You’re holding out for nothing. Your buddy’s already come clean.”

“Pike?”

Micelli nodded. “Yeah. He gave it to us. He said you guys found a connection for the dope. He said you thought you could turn the trick with the Eight-Deuce for a little extra cash. He said that after you set the deal you got the idea that you could just rip these guys off, then you’d have the cash and the dope. Maybe sell it three or four times. Really screw the niggers.”

I gave them the laugh. “You guys are something, Micelli.”

Stilwell said, “If you don’t like our take on it, how about yours?”

I gave it to them. I told them about Mark Thurman and Eric Dees and Charles Lewis Washington. I described how I had been followed, and how Pike and I had boxed Riggens and Pinkworth at the Farmer’s Market. I told them about Dees warning me off. I told
them about the meeting with Cool T, and Cool T putting us onto the park, and the Eight-Deuce Gangster Boys lying in wait for us. Micelli squirmed around while I said it, like maybe he was bored with the nonsense, but Stilwell listened without moving. When I ran out of gas, Stilwell fingered his tie and said, “So you’re saying that Dees set you up to get you out of the way.”

“Yeah.”

“Why doesn’t he just bump you?”

“Maybe he knows that if I get bumped, guys like Joe Pike and Lou Poitras will stay with it, and he doesn’t want that. He wants to buy time so he can regain control of things.”

“But if he gets you jugged, he’s got to know you’re going to talk. He’s got to know we’re going to call him in and ask him about it.”

I said, “He knows I’m going to be sitting here with a guy like Micelli. He knows I can’t prove anything and all it looks like is that I’m trying to dodge the charge. If I’m alive, he’s still got control. If I’m dead, guys like Pike and Poitras are a couple of loose cannons.”

Micelli made a big deal out of throwing up his hands. “He’s wasting our time with this crap. I got tickets to the Dodgers tonight. I want to get there before the stretch.”

I said, “Listen to me, Stilwell. D’Muere said he’s going for the girl. Even if you guys don’t buy my end of it, send a car around to her apartment. What’s that cost you?”

Stilwell stared at me another couple of seconds. Then he pushed away from the wall. “Finish up, Paul.” Then he left.

Micelli and I stayed in the interrogation room for another hour. I would go through my story and then Micelli would ask me who was my connection and how much was I going to get for the dope, as if I had said one story but he had heard another. Then he would have me
go through my story again. The room was bugged and there were probably a couple of guys listening in. They would be taking notes and a tape recorder would be recording everything I said. They’d be looking for discrepancies and Micelli would be waiting for my body language to change. He’d keep trying out scenarios until I seemed comfortable with one, even if it was one I denied. Then he’d know he struck pay dirt. Of course, since I was telling the truth, he wasn’t going to get the body language when and where he wanted it. He probably wasn’t too concerned about that, though. Time was on his side. Maybe I shouldn’t have passed on the lawyer.

After about the sixth time through, the door opened and Stilwell came back, only this time Eric Dees was with him. Micelli said, “You been listening to this stuff?”

Dees grinned. “Yeah. He’s pretty good at this.”

Stilwell said, “You arrest the guy in the park?”

Dees nodded. “Sure. He’s down in cell four.”

“Cole said you ripped off his dope.”

Dees smiled wider. “Gathered it for evidence, duly logged and checked in.”

I said, “Come off it, Stilwell. He knew I was going to be in here. He knew I was going to be talking.”

Stilwell stayed with Dees. “You got anything going with these gangbangers?”

Dees spread his hands. “Trying to bust’m. Cole’s been nosing around and I tried to warn him off and maybe that’s when he got the idea for the dope deal. I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about an ongoing investigation in front of a suspected felon.”

Stilwell said, “Sure.”

Dees said, “I’ve got to go wrap it up with my guys. You need anything else?”

“That’s it, Eric. Thanks.”

Dees left without looking at me.

I said, “Jesus Christ, Stilwell, what do you expect him to say?”

“Just about what he said.”

“Then what are you going to do about it?”

Stilwell grabbed my upper arm and lifted. “Book you on three murder counts and a dope. I think you’re guilty as sin.”

T
hey took me out into the detectives’ squad room and began the booking process. Dees wasn’t around, and after Micelli spoke to a couple of uniforms, he and Stilwell left.

The processing cops had already begun with Pike and, as I watched, they used paraffin on his hands and took his picture and fingerprinted him and asked him questions so that they could fill out their forms. He nodded once and I nodded back. It was strange to see him without the glasses. He seemed more vulnerable without them. Less inviolate. Maybe that’s why he wears them.

They led Pike away through a hall toward the jail and then they started with me. A uniform cop named Mertz led me from station to station, first using the paraffin, then getting my prints, and then taking my picture. I crossed my eyes when they took the picture and the cop who worked the camera said, “No good, Mertz. He crossed his goddamned eyes.”

Mertz picked up a baton and tapped it against his thigh. “Okay, smart ass. Cross’m again and I’ll smack you so hard they’ll stay crossed.”

They took the picture again but this time I didn’t cross them.

When Mertz was filling out my personal history form, I said, “When do I get a bail hearing?”

“Arraignment’s tomorrow. One of the detectives ran over to the court to get a bail deviation so we could bind you over.”

“Jesus Christ. Why?”

“You see the crowding down there? You’re lucky they’ll arraign you by next Monday.”

When the processing was finished, Mertz turned me over to an older uniform with a head like a chayote squash and told him to take me to felony. The older uniform led me back along a hall to a row of four-by-eight-foot cages. Each cage had a seatless toilet and a sink and a couple of narrow bunks, and it smelled of disinfectant and urine and sweat, sort of like a poorly kept public men’s room. “No place like home.”

The older uniform nodded. Maybe to him it was home.

There were two black guys in the first cage, both of them sitting in the shadows of the lower bunk. They had been talking softly when we approached, but they stopped when we passed and watched us with yellow eyes. Once you were in the cells, there was no way to see who was in the next cell, and no way to reach through the bars and twist your arm around to touch someone in the next cell, even if someone in the next cell was reaching out to touch you. I said, “Which one’s mine?”

The uniform stopped at the second cell, opened the gate, and took off my handcuffs. “The presidential suite, of course.”

I stepped in. A Hispanic guy in his early thirties was lying on the lower bunk with his face to the wall. He rolled over and squinted at me, and then he rolled
back. The uniform closed the gate and locked it and said, “You wanna make a call?”

“Yeah.”

He walked back down the hall and out the heavy door and was gone. One of the black guys in the cell next to me said something and the other laughed. Someone in one of the cells on the other side of me coughed. I could hear voices, but they sounded muted and far away. I said, “Joe.”

Pike’s voice came back. “Fourth cell.”

Someone yelled, “I’m trying to sleep, goddamn it. Shut the fuck up.” It was a big voice, loud and deep, and sounded as if it had come from a big man. It also sounded about as far away as Joe Pike.

I said, “D’Muere said he’s going for Jennifer Sheridan.”

Joe said, “Dees wouldn’t go for that.”

“Dees may not know. D’Muere wasn’t talking like a guy who was worried about what Eric Dees thought.”

The big voice yelled, “Goddamn it, I said shut up. I don’t want to hear about your goddamn—” There was a sharp meat-on-meat sound and the voice stopped. Joe continued, “Maybe he isn’t. Maybe things aren’t the way we were told.”

“You mean, maybe they aren’t partners.”

Pike said, “Maybe Dees is an employee. Maybe D’Muere is the power, and Eric Dees is just trying to control him. Maybe putting us in here is part of that.”

“Only maybe while we’re in, Jennifer Sheridan gets offed.”

Pike said nothing.

The heavy door opened and the cop with a squash for a head came back pushing a phone that was bolted to a kind of a tripod thing on heavy rollers. The cop pushed it down to my cell and parked it close enough for me to reach the buttons. “You can make as many
calls as you want, but it won’t take long distance, okay?”