“What am I supposed to do, just let him swing the damn stick?”
So that’s how Gilroy fouled up his wrist, Murchison thought. “You’re not going to rustle up bail and get right back out there. Not this time. You’ve hit it big. Uniforms are out on the street right now, gathering up your friends.”
Arlie fussed with his nose, then his lips. The Facial Touch Zone, textbooks called it. Lot of capillaries in that part of the face, and when the blood really starts to pump, the skin itches. Once or twice, his fingers strayed to the scarring around his eye.
“Maybe sooner, maybe later, we’ll hand it off to the DA, and his sole focus will be to put you away for life. Or have you executed.”
“Go ahead.” It was almost convincing, the bravado. Except the face touching, the jittery legs, the eyes. “Talk talk talk.” Arlie stuck out his hands, turned them over. “That deal they did with the Q-Tip thingies? Gonna show I ain’t shot nobody.”
The words came out with a clicking sound, the insides of his cheeks catching on his teeth. Whitish threads of dry saliva formed at the corners of his lips.
Murchison said, “Come on, Arlie, you’re smarter than that. Results come back negative, doesn’t mean squat, really. Not with the other stuff we’ve got.”
Arlie crossed his legs. Another textbook move. “Get real. Ain’t no other stuff.”
“If there’s a gun out there somewhere, tossed into the bushes or a sewer? Anywhere somebody, like a kid, could happen onto it? We’ve got a public safety problem. So I’ve got to ask you, where’s the gun?”
“You can’t
talk
to me. Said it already. Ask for a lawyer, boom, that’s it.”
Murchison shook his head. “Arlie, if I had a few hours, I’d give you my little lecture on the court rulings chipping away at
Miranda
the last thirty years. But to be brief, like I said, this is a public safety issue. I’ve not only got a right, I’ve got a duty. Time’s a factor. You toss the gun? Where is it?”
“Fuck a gun,” Arlie said, louder now. Eyes not sailing left or right, dead on. Defiant. “You think I’m stupid. Try to chump me up. Forget it. My lawyer, how many times I gotta say.”
“If it ends up we find the gun ourselves, Arlie, somebody hands up a tip, this little exchange is part of the record. It’ll come up at sentencing—you had the chance to take the public’s safety into account and refused. You with me?”
Arlie laughed. “Listen to you. Already got me beat. On somethin’ I didn’t do.”
“Arlie, I want you to listen to me.” He edged his chair another inch closer. Arlie’s legs reached out between his own. “If you didn’t kill Mr. Carlisle, why would the girl inside the house identify you as the guy who did?”
They called it the enticement question. As worded, it wasn’t exactly a lie. Get scared, Murchison thought. Come on, get scared. So I can protect you.
“There’s a thousand reasons why it could have happened, Arlie, and I can understand every single one. Did you shoot him to save face? Or did somebody say, ‘He pays, or you pay’?”
Arlie began shaking his head in violent little jags, whispering, “No, no, no….”
“You’ve asked for a lawyer, Arlie, and that’s your right. I mean, you’ve heard it before, but I’ll say it now—you’ve got a right to remain silent if you don’t remain silent anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law and you have a right to a lawyer, duh, and if you can’t pay for one, one’ll be provided.” He spun the waiver around on the tabletop so Arlie could sign. “Now—having those rights in mind, do you want to hear what I have to say?”
“That’s all I’m
doin’.
Shit.”
“You want to tell me your side of the story?”
Arlie shook his head. “This ain’t happenin’.”
“Arlie, you get a lawyer, I’m out of it. And that’s not a good thing. You get a lawyer, he’s gonna plead you not guilty as soon as you’re arraigned, and the switch goes off at that point. The papers’ll carry it, public opinion’ll turn against you, and the DA—he’s elected, remember. Meanwhile, if you get tired of the public defender constantly begging you to plead out, you’ll need a private lawyer, and you know what that means. Your mother has to take out a loan on her house. One more debt. One she can’t afford. All that because you told me to get lost.” He sat back, folded his hands behind his head. The open position, nothing to hide. “Remember, Arlie, the cops—we’re the guys out there with you, on the street. You may hate our guts, but we’re the ones who know what really goes down out there. Deal with you day in, day out. Know the shit storms you deal with, the kinds of pressure that come into play.” He paused, to make sure the next part had the proper effect. “We even know who’s going to let you go down, just to take the heat off himself.”
Arlie’s eyes went stony and yet, at the same time, he yawned. Tension, Murchison guessed, not fatigue.
“Just the way of things. We know what stunts your friends will pull just for an angle. But you get a lawyer, from that point on, we do what we’re told. And we’ll get told, ‘Nail it down.’ DA’s not gonna care if you really did it or not. Close it out, that’s the plan. One of your buddies is desperate for a play, decides to point the finger at you, it’ll be your job to prove he’s lying. Not ours. By that time, things’ll be stacked against you pretty good. And because you lawyered down, I’ll be out of it. What help I can provide, I can provide now, not later. You want to clear the air, I’m gonna listen. But the chance won’t be there for long. I can understand how it might have happened. I know a lot about this guy, the one who was shot. I know a lot about you, about your crew. Waddell, Michael, J.J., Eshmont. Long Walk.”
The kid’s breathing came faster. He started blinking a lot.
“You got something you think I should know, tell me now. You’re not in this thing, fine. But you gotta tell me who is. You gotta give me a name.”
Come on, Murchison thought, knowing enough not to prod. You’ve sold him the product. Don’t buy it back. The wait drew out, the tension faded a little. Murchison sensed he was losing the kid.
“You’re not going to be the only one dealing with this, you know. Your family, they’re gonna go through it, too. Your mother.”
Arlie winced, did a little put-upon dance in his chair, and a vein in his neck fluttered.
“I’m gonna need to talk to her, Arlie. Your mother. Explain why you’re in here. There anything you’d like me to tell her?”
“Yeah! Tell her I ask for a lawyer, you don’t listen. Tell her my rights been violated.”
Murchison felt it slip away. The kid wouldn’t bend. Not without more to leverage.
“Anybody you want me to call?”
“Didn’t ask you to make
my
call.”
“You don’t want me to call your mother?”
“No!”
“What’s the problem? Your mother gonna take the news you’re in here—again—a little hard? Could be your third strike.”
Arlie shook his head in disbelief, glancing away. He looked about ready to cry. Back in business, Murchison thought. Most welcome sight in the world, a suspect ready to cry.
“I’m here to listen, Arlie. It’s all I’m here to do.”
“You gonna do what you wanna do,” the kid muttered.
Murchison leaned forward. “I didn’t hear that, Arlie. I’m sorry.”
Arlie snorted and grinned. “Go ahead, ask your damn questions. Fuck yourself up. I done asked for my lawyer.” His voice rose. “Say what you want. You see nigger in front of you, you think, Fool. Brothers know all about this shit. Got guidelines from the motherfucking DA, tell you how to talk ‘off the record’ and shit, so you can twist me up, get me to say something stupid, make sure I don’t take the stand. Well, I’m innocent. There. Off the record, on the record, on the stand, off the stand.”
He tried to clear his throat, but there was nothing there—his lips, his tongue, everything bone-dry. He shook his head and made a spiteful little laugh, then glanced down at the floor, chest trembling as he breathed.
“Ain’t gonna make no difference regardless. Only thing goes down is what you wanna go down. What you don’t wanna go down, don’t go down.”
9
S
arina Thigpen shuffled blearily through the worn, dimly lit lobby of Overlook Convalescent Hospital, heading toward the electronic glass doors opening onto the parking lot. She’d stayed late to help the understaffed relief crew as they launched the new day, lifting patients from their beds, guiding them to the closet-sized bathrooms that the old folks soiled in their blind, palsied, or delusional efforts to relieve themselves. With the patients occupied, Sarina changed the bed linens, thick with a toxic urine stench or the bitter chalky smell of sweat. If no voice called out from the bathroom, she knocked, entered, lifted the frail thin body off the toilet, wiped it clean, and guided it back to its fresh bed. Returning to the bathroom, she picked her rag out of the ammonia bucket and washed down the walls, the floors, the toilets inside and out. By the time she removed her uniform at shift’s end, it peeled away bearing unspeakable stains.
That wasn’t the worst, though. The worst was the slurs and insults shrieked or hissed in her face by white patients, their minds all but gone. An RN had explained the medical reasons once—strokes degrade the frontal regions of the brain, she’d said. The regions involved in social inhibition. “They don’t mean the things they say, any more than they mean to soil themselves.”
Sarina knew better. In fact, as she saw it, the exact opposite was true—they meant it all too well. They’d been harboring the bile in their hearts their whole lives, and only a quirk of fate—one stroke too many—kept them from being able to keep up the pretense all the way to the grave. Every time she got called “nigger bitch,” “gorilla,” everything else imaginable—the women as bad as the men, worse sometimes—she reminded herself that this was the real them. This was the racist inside every last one of them, screaming to get out. And she would pride herself on not retaliating. No, she thought, the Lord will not have it. Vengeance is His alone. And so every last one of those nasty, ignorant, loudmouth bigots lay clean as a whistle in a spanking white bed with an immaculate bathroom waiting.
Outside, the eastern sky was cold and blue with daybreak, with night receding in the west. She searched her purse for her keys. Finding them, she looked up again to find two men in sport coats, waiting. Detectives, she guessed. How could you not tell?
“Mrs. Thigpen?”
The one who spoke was tall and thin, homely, with reddish hair. The other, she could see at a glance, was a devil. Sarina snapped her purse shut, crossed her hands in front of her. “My name is Sarina Thigpen, yes.” She cocked her head a little to one side, indulging them.
“My name is Dennis Murchison, I’m with the Rio Mirada police. We have your son Arlie in custody, Mrs. Thigpen. He asked to see you.”
It was the first time they’d come for her at work. “I suppose I got a stop to make at the bondsman,” she said, and began moving toward her car.
“Bond’s not an issue, Mrs. Thigpen. Your son’s being held in connection with a murder.”
A thread of bile slithered up into her throat. “That can’t be.”
The one who’d spoken, the one with the rust-colored hair, held out his arm, as though to guide her. “I can explain in the car,” he said.
Stluka got behind the wheel, providing Murchison the role of confidant, bearer of bad news, and negotiator. He sat sideways in the seat, the better to talk with her. She was a short, muscular woman with small, strong hands. Atop her broad neck sat a square face, with high, round cheeks and thin, almond-shaped eyes. As they pulled out of the parking lot, the light from the street lamps played across her face, dappling it with angular shadows. She sat there with her purse in her lap, gripping it to her midriff.
“As you probably know, Mrs. Thigpen, your son is up for trial in six months on possession with intent charges.”
“You said murder. I got in this car ’cause you said murder. Not drugs.”
Over his shoulder, Stluka said, “I thought you got in because your son asked to see you.”
It was out before Murchison could stop him, and instantly Sarina snarled back, “You gonna try to blame me? This country stinking with drugs, no good jobs, more jails than schools, and you wanna blame me? My God, you are the devil. Stop the car. Stop it here. I’ll walk to see my son.”
She slapped at the door handle. Murchison glared at Stluka, then reached out his hand in a calming gesture. “Mrs. Thigpen, he chose his words poorly.”
“It’s the devil in me.”
“You get your goddamn hand away from me.” She glared at Murchison. “Don’t you dare touch me.”
Murchison withdrew his hand. “I meant no offense, Mrs. Thigpen.”
“You don’t mean nothing but offense. You drag me away from my job, what are people to think? You say my son’s a killer.”
“Mrs. Thigpen—”
“I am a woman of the church. I put my faith in God, not you. Certainly not you. I have prayed for my son, and I have worked hard, but I cannot be all places at all times. I cannot save him from a street you refuse—”
She was shouting. Murchison, nerves frayed, found himself shouting back, “Mrs. Thigpen, we have an eyewitness. Nod your head if you understand.”
He regretted it, not telling her eyewitness-to-what, but he was unwilling to suffer any more sermons. Besides, deceit was permissible, that was the law. Blue lies, they were called. Sarina leaned back in the seat.
“Witness,” she said. Her glance floated from Murchison’s face to the back of Stluka’s head—right, left, then right again. “What did this witness see?”
“The victim’s name is Strong Carlisle, he’s—”
“Raymond Carlisle?” Sarina sat up straight, incredulous. Her eyes brightened. “My son has no stock in killing Mr. Carlisle. My Lord, I took care of that man’s mother up there at the hospital ’fore she passed. No, you’re wrong. You’re confused.”
“Eyewitness,” Stluka repeated. He didn’t call them blue lies. He called them weasel prods.
Sarina’s fingers kneaded the thin vinyl strap of her purse. “That can’t be right.”
Murchison took a moment to think through his next step. He saw no point in trying to convince her Arlie had done anything; it was enough she thought they were convinced. Her role in this was to bring the whole immeasurable weight of tortured motherhood to bear on her son, make him see who was going to suffer. But to make that work, Murchison had to give her hope.