Marcie's Murder (35 page)

Hank lived fairly close to the scene and was the first to arrive. He took charge and spoke to the responding officers about what they’d found and what they’d done to secure the scene
. He
spoke to the medical examiner, did a walk-through with crime scene
technicians
,
and began talking to witnesses before Mayburn showed up. His partner prowled around the scene for several minutes, listened to
Hank question the clerk
,
and then made his pronouncement.

“Some out
-
of
-
work loser hoping to score enough to pay off his bookie. Did we get
him
on the video?”

Hank shook his head. “Looks like he knew where the camera was and kept his face averted.”

“Well, maybe the bullet will tell us
something
. They find it yet?”

“No, they’re still looking.”

Mayburn spread his hands. “I don’t know what to tell you. These things happen all the time. Guys hold up liquor stores and never get caught. We’re wasting our time here.”

Hank wasn’t so sure. He interviewed a witness from across the street, a woman who was closing up a delicatessen directly across from the liquor store. She’d gone out to bring
in
her sandwich sign from the sidewalk and had seen the whole thing. She described how the assailant dragged Solly outside in a headlock, how he forced him to his knees, how he put the gun to Solly’s ear and fired the shot, and how he got into the back seat of a car at the curb and
was
driven away.

“He got into the car and drove away,” Hank repeated.

“He got into the
back seat
of the car. There was someone already behind the wheel, waiting for him. This
other
man drove the car away.”

“The car was directly in front of the store?”

“No, it was two doors up.”

“He got into the back seat? Not the front passenger seat?”

“
So
mething wrong with your hearing?
I told you, h
e calmly walked away from Mr. Black and got into the back seat of the car, behind the driver, on the driver’s side. When the car pulled away from the curb I saw the two of them, one in the front driving and the ot
her in the back seat behind him.
”

The street was one
way, running east to west.
Left to right, from the woman’s perspective.
The car would have pulled
up to
the curb on the driver’s side, closest to the store but two doors up so that the liquor store could be approached without giving warning to anyone inside. It
was not unusual for armed robber
ies
to be carried out by a pair, one going into the store and the other driving the getaway car, but when the hold-up guy came out he usually ran like hell around the car and threw himself into the front passenger seat
next to his partner
. Hank couldn’t recall a case where an ordinary stick-up punk calmly walked to the car and got into the back seat after leaving
the money
behind
on the counter where he’d thrown it. It suggested
that
what had happened was not a
robbery
at all but an assassination
.
A hit.

Hank
stayed with it for two weeks. The bullet was found but told them nothing. The video surveillance tape from the store confirmed that the shooter appeared to be a man in his early forties, medium height, a bit stocky, white, unhurried, calm. Hank watched the tape over and over again and decided early on that the anger with which he’d thrown the cash back down on the counter had been contrived, that the demand to see the safe had been an excuse to get to Solly
, who’d
made it easy by coming up from the back room on his own
.
In addition, t
he gunman
had dragged Solly outside onto the sidewalk
, rather than shoot him inside the store,
in order to make a public statement.

Fuck with us and this will happen to you, too.

So who
were they,
and how had Solly fucked with them?

Mayburn resisted this line of inquiry with the stubbornness of a mule, first with inaction and uncooperativeness and then by openly ridiculing Hank in the bullpen whenever
he had
an audience.
Hank took it for a while
, then
finally
lost his temper
one afternoon.
He’d pretty much wrapped up the case on his own, without
his partner’s
help, and
was trying
to fill
Mayburn
in on the details.
He’d tracked down the driver, who turned out to be a Russian with known connections to organized crime elements in the city. He’d been picked up during a raid on a club by the Anti-Gang Unit and had suddenly decided to get a few things off his chest. It seemed he had
relatives
in America and wanted to stay. When he mentioned Solomon Black during the course of his debriefing, they called
Hank
to
sit in.
The driver talked about a hit man
he’d picked up at the airport, driven downtown to the liquor store, and then
had
driven back to the airport
immediately
after
wards
. He didn’t know the hit man’s name.
He didn’t know which city he’d come from or which city he’d
departed
to
, didn’t have a flight number or even an airline.
It didn’t work that way. But he assured them that his own gang leader, a man named Urilov, had ordered the hit. Solly had apparently offended Urilov
in some way
.

“Golden Boy’s
invented a pretty story to explain why he wants to
dump it,” Mayburn
said
, playing to the
bullpen
audience.

Hank said a few things about the alcoholic fog in which Mayburn himself had lost most of their cases, Mayburn tried to take a swing at him, they got pulled apart
,
and the
captain gave
Hank
a not-so-polite
lecture
about respect for fellow officers and wor
king cooperatively with others.

Telling this
story
to Griffin, Hank felt embarrassed. He fell silent, studying the ring of foam at the top of his glass of beer.

The Quantico instructor shrugged. “
You could have handled it better. The thing about drunks you
have to
understand is that they live in a world of their own, a world with big thick walls around it. Nobody else is allowed in. They do whatever they have to do to protect themselves
and their little world
.”

“I don’t know how to deal with him,” Hank said.
“Have you ever worked with a partner like that?”

“No,” Griffin said. “However, I’ve seen a lot of cops go down that road.
I
went down that road a ways myself, a few years ago. That’s why this is non-alcoholic beer, my friend.” He sipped from his glass. “How to deal with guys like him? Some people try to help them, but that almost never works and e
ventually every
body
just ends up
leav
ing
them
the hell alone. Only
your partner
can help
himself
, and believe me,
guys like him are
already in the process of destroying
themselves, help or no help
.
Be there if he needs you, like a good partner
.
Otherwise, leave him the hell alone.
”

Mayburn ended up
taking his own life about a year later
.
It wasn’t until Hank shook Mayburn’s ex-wife’s hand in the parking lot of the
church after the funeral, and looked into the faces of his two teenaged daughters, that
his former partner’s
story
finally came
into focus.
The survivors
were three vulnerable people who
’
d fled
long ago
to save their own lives after
finally accepting the fact that
they couldn’t save Mayburn’s. His ex-wife looked older than her years and beaten down by life, even though she’d been divorced from Mayburn for nearly a decade.
S
he’d
continued to
buy his groceries for him, clean his apartment
,
and do his laundry despite having left him. Mayburn had only been
fifty-seven
years old when he’d died. He’d looked a hell of a lot older. He’d been a complete wreck. His wife had gotten the two girls out while they were still young enough, had built a new life for them that excluded their father, but had come back to do what she could to keep hi
m alive
.
She kept trying to help him, but nothing worked. T
he pressures Mayburn felt finally pulled him under for good.

To this day, Hank still
believed
there was something he didn’t do that he should have done.
P
erhaps Griffin’s advice had been focused on how Hank could help himself rather than help Mayburn, to keep him clear of the whirlpool that Mayburn was creating around himself. If Hank had waded in, would he have made a difference? Could he have pulled Mayburn out of his downward spiral? One half of his brain told him that it might have turned out that way, if only he’d forced the issue. The other half of his brain told him that
Mayburn didn’t respect him, and without that respect would never have listened to anything he’d said.
Griffin unfortunately was right
. O
nly Mayburn could have saved Mayburn.

Now, leaning against
the
car, Hank
watched Hall break eye contact and turn away, moving his hand to the gear shift.
Hank
walked around the car and got in on the passenger side
.

“What
the hell are you doing
?”
Hall demanded,
his hand
still
on the gear shift.

“Humor me. Tell me about the witness interviews.”

Hall sat for a moment. “I don’t see the point. I’m tired, Lieutenant.”

“Tell me about the interviews, Hall. Tell me what they said.”

H
all
thought about
it
, then sighed, shifted, and backed out of the parking space
.

A
s
they
drove through the parking lot and out onto the street, Hank rolled down the window to let a bit of fresh air into the interior of the car. Hall drove up to Bluefield Street and turned left. He went three blocks down Bluefield and turned right onto Chestnut Street. They were in a residential section that looked like any other town in America, lined with
brick bungalows and two-story frame homes. Hall slowed and turned left onto Booker Street. At the corner was a white frame church
. Hall drove down a long slope and turned left onto Magnolia Street. On the left was the wide expanse of lawn
behind the church and o
n the right was a
weed-covered
empty lot. Hall drove slowly up the slope
, passing
small houses on either side.
He
turned into a driveway on the right side and shut off the engine.

The house was a two-story Colonial-style structure with an enclosed front porch and
a
tiny lawn
in
front. The
gray
exterior looked like asbestos siding. The lot on which it sat was small, maybe forty
feet
by one hundred.
Hank looked out the windshield at
a
small
white garage.
It was so small that
Hank doubted it would be possible to open the car doors inside the garage
after
you
drove
in.

“This where you live?” Hank asked.

“I spoke to Dave Toler first. He was at the bar from approximately 9:20
p.m.
until it closed and Bickell threw everybody out. He told me about a conversation he had with
Debbie
Stump. He remembered that Henry Fink was there, talked to Joseph Wall briefly in the washroom
,
and noticed you, although he couldn’t describe you very well and didn’t know when you arrived or when you left. He couldn’t place anyone else there. He said he concentrates on his drinking and minds his own business. Sounds about right
, since he had no recollection of the two bikers who sat at the bar just down from him
.”