Presumed Innocent

  Party people. The mayor’s people. Nico hurt him just by announcing. They’re saying Raymond should move over.

  She reached for another carton, and a breast fetchingly swung free when the sheet fell away.

  Does Raymond talk about it? she asked.

  Not to me.

  If he starts getting the wrong kind of vibes, will he think about it?

  I made a face. The truth was that I did not have much idea about what Raymond thought these days. In the time since his divorce, he had grown increasingly insular. Although he had made me his chief deputy, he probably confided in me less.

  If he agrees to step aside, said Carolyn, the party would probably let him decide who should be slated. He could bargain for that. They know he’s not going to just hand it all to Nico.

  That’s for sure.

  Who would he choose? she asked.

  Probably someone from the office. Carry on his traditions.

  You? she asked.

  Maybe Mac. She’d make a hell of a candidate in her wheelchair.

  No way, said Carolyn, elevating moo shu in her chopsticks. Not these days. That chair is not very telegenic. I think he’d pick you. You’re the natural.

  I shook my head. It was a reflex. Perhaps, at that moment, I even meant it. I was in Carolyn’s bed and felt I had already indulged one temptation too many.

  Carolyn put the food down. She grasped my arm and looked at me levelly.

  Rusty, if you let him know you want it, it’ll be you.

  I watched her a moment.

  You mean you think I should go to Raymond and tell him his time is up?

  You could be tactful, said Carolyn. She was looking at me quite directly.

  No way, I said.

  Why not?

  I’m not gonna bite that hand. If he wants out, he has to make up his own mind. I don’t even think if he asked my advice I’d tell him to quit. He’s still the strongest candidate around against Della Guardia.

  She shook her head.

  Without Raymond, Nico doesn’t have an issue. You pull the party people and Raymond’s people together behind somebody else, that person would walk into the P.A.’s office. It wouldn’t be close.

  You’ve really thought about this, I told her.

  He needs a push, she said to me.

  Push him yourself, I told her. It’s not in me.

  Carolyn stood up naked from the bed. Standing barefoot, she looked limber and strong. She put on her robe. I realized then she was upset.

  Why are you unhappy? I asked. Were you ready to become chief deputy?

  She did not answer that.

  “The last time I slept with Carolyn she pushed me off her in the midst of our lovemaking and turned away from me.”

  At first I did not understand what it was she wanted. But she bumped her behind against me until I realized that was what I was being offered, a marble peach.

  No, I said.

  Try it. She looked over her shoulder. Please.

  I came up close behind her.

  Just easy, she said. Just a little.

  I went in too fast.

  Not that much, she said.

  She said, Oh.

  I pressed in, remained, pumped. She arched, clearly in some pain.

  And I found, suddenly, that I was thrilled.

  Her head lolled back. Her eyes held tears. Then she opened them and looked back at me directly. Her face was radiant.

  Does Barbara? she whispered, does Barbara do this for you?

  13

  In the 32nd District the normal turmoil of a police station is concealed. About seven years ago now, while we were in the midst of our investigation, one of the Night Saints entered the station with a sawed-off in his windbreaker. It was nuzzled against his chest like a baby protected from a chilly breeze, and as a result, he merely had to lower the zipper slightly before placing the muzzle beneath the chin of the unfortunate desk officer, a twenty-eight-year-old guy named Jack Lansing, who had continued writing some report. The young man with the shotgun, who was never identified, is reported to have smiled and then blown off Jack Lansing’s face.

  Since then, the cops of this station house have dealt with the public from behind six inches of bulletproof glass, carrying on conversations through a radio system which sounds as if the signal must have been bounced first off the moon. There are public areas where the complainants, the victims, the police groupies loiter, but once you pass beyond the four-inch-thick metal door, with its electronic bolt, there is almost sterility. Prisoners are in a block downstairs, and are never permitted, for any purpose, above that level. Upstairs, so much of the usual turbulence has been removed that it feels a little like an insurance agency. The working cops’ desks are in an open area that could pass for any other large office, the guys with rank in partitioned areas along the back wall. In one of the larger offices, I find Lionel Kenneally. We have not seen much of each other since the Night Saints cases ended.

  “Fucking Savage,” he says, “fucking Savage.” He puts out his cigarette and claps me on the back.

  Lionel Kenneally is everything a sensible person does not like about police. He is tough-talking, opinionated, downright mean, an unabashed racist. I have yet to see the situation in which I’d bet even an hour’s wages on his scruples. But I like him, in part because he is a pure form, unalloyed and unapologetic, a coppers’ cop, dedicated to the shadowy loyalties and mysteries of life out on the street. He can make out the riffs and scams of the inner city like a dog picking up a scent by lifting his muzzle to the breeze. During the Night Saints investigation, Lionel was the guy I went to when I needed someone found. He never faltered—he’d pull them out of shooting galleries or go into the Grace Street projects at four in the morning, the only hour that a police officer can safely move about there. I saw him at it once or twice, six foot three or thereabouts, pounding on a door so hard you could see it buckle in its frame.

  Who that?

  Open up, Tyrone. It’s your fairy godmother.

  We reminisce; he tells me about Maurice Dudley. I have already heard the story, but I do not interrupt. Maurice, a 250-pound brick, a killer, a cur, is deep in Bible studies down at Rudyard. He is going to be ordained. “Harukan”—the Night Saints’ leader—“is so pissed, they say, he don’t even talk to him. Can you imagine?”

  “Who said there’s no such thing as rehabilitation?” This strikes both of us as unbearably funny. Maybe we’re each thinking of the woman on whose arm Maurice, with a kitchen knife, once wrote his name. Or the coppers from this station house who swore, in the inflated lore of cop and courthouse stories, that he had misspelled it.

  “Are you passing through or what?” Kenneally asks me finally.

  “I’m not really sure,” I say. “I’m trying to figure something out.”

  “On what now? Carolyn?”

  I nod.

  “What’s the story there?” Kenneally asks. “Latest thing I’m hearing from downtown is they’re sayin it’s not really rape.”

  I give Lionel two minutes’ worth on the state of our evidence.

  “So you’re figurin what?” he asks. “The guy she’s having cocktails with is the one who done her?”

  “That seems obvious. But I keep wondering. Didn’t we have a Peeping Tom, maybe ten years ago, who’d watch couples and then go in later and take a piece of the lady himself at gunpoint?”

  “Christ,” says Kenneally. “You really are lost. You’re lookin for a law enforcement type—a cop, a P.A., a private dick—some—body who knew what he wanted to make it look like when he cooled her. That’s what I’d figure. She had any boyfriend who was with her that night, and left her alive, you’d have heard from him by now. He’d want to help.”

  “If he doesn’t have a wife to explain things to.”

  Kenneally considers that. I get something like a shrug. I might be right.

  “When’s the last time you saw her?” I ask.

  “Four months or so. She come out here.” br />
  “Doing what?”

  “Same shit you’re doin: investigatin somethin and tryin not to let on what.”

  I laugh. A coppers’ cop. Kenneally gets up. He goes to a pile of transfer cases in the corner.

  “She got some rookie to look through all this crap for her, so she didn’t chip her nails or run her nylons.”

  “Let me guess,” I say: “booking sheets on cases from nine summers ago.”

  “Right you are,” he says.

  “Did she have a name she was looking for?”

  Kenneally considers this. “I think she did, and I’ll be fucked if I remember. Somethin was wrong with it, too.”

  “Leon?” I ask.

  Lionel snaps his fingers. “La Noo,” he says. L-N-U: Last Name Unknown. “That’s what was wrong. She was playin in the dark.”

  “What’d she come up with?”

  “Spit.”

  “You sure?”

  “Fuck yes. Not that she’d much notice. She was most of the time tryin to keep track of everybody who was watchin her ass. Which was everybody in the house, as she well knows. She was havin a good time bein back here, let’s say.”

  “Back?”

  “She worked the North Branch when she was a P.O. She didn’t know what the fuck she was doin then, either. A real social-worker type. I never could figure Horgan hiring her as a P.A.”

  I had forgotten that. I probably knew it, but I did not remember. Carolyn worked the North Branch as a probation officer. I think about the secretary that Noel’s boyfriend mentioned. He didn’t say white or black, fat or skinny. But he did say Girl. Would anybody hang “Girl” on Carolyn, even nine years ago?

  “You didn’t like her much.”

  “She was a cunt,” says Kenneally, to the point. “You know,” he says, “out for herself. She was sleepin her way to the top, right from the git-go. Anybody coulda seen that.”

  I look around a moment. Our conversation seems to have come to an end. I ask one more time if he’s sure she did not find anything.

  “Not a fuckin thing. You can talk with the kid that helped her if you want.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind, Lionel.”

  “What the fuck do I care?” He reaches for the intercom and summons a cop named Guerash. “Why you still botherin with this thing?” he asks me, while we wait. “It’ll be somebody else’s problem pretty soon, don’t you think?”

  “You mean Delay?”

  “I think he’s got it in the bag.” In the last week, that is all you hear from coppers. They’ve never pretended to like Raymond.

  “You can never tell. Maybe I’ll crack this thing and save Raymond’s ass.”

  “God come down from Sinai ain’t gonna save him, the way I hear it. Downtown they say Bolcarro’s comin out for Nico this afternoon.”

  I chew on that one. If Bolcarro endorses Nico six days before the election, then Raymond will be no more than a political memory.

  Guerash enters. He looks like half the young men on the force, handsome in an old-fashioned way, with an erect bearing and a military order to his person. His shoes are spit-shined and the buttons on his jersey gleam. His hair is cleanly parted.

  Kenneally addresses him.

  “You remember this lady P.A. was out here—Polhemus?”

  “Nice set of lungs,” says Guerash.

  Kenneally turns to me. “See, this kid’s gonna make a copper. Never forgets a bra size.”

  “She the one that got it over by the riverside?” Guerash asks me.

  I tell him she is. Kenneally continues with Guerash.

  “Okay, Rusty here is the chief deputy P.A. He wants to know if she took anything when she come out here?”

  “Not that I know of,” says Guerash.

  “What’d she look at?” I ask.

  “She had one day where she wanted to see the bookings. She told me there’d be like sixty, seventy people booked on public indecency. We’re talking back forever, eight, nine years ago, or something. Anyway, I hauled up the boxes, right here.”

  “How’d she come up with one day?”

  “Beats me. She seemed to know what she was looking for. She just told me look for the day when there were the most arrests. So that’s what I did. I mean, it must have took me a week to go through that crap. There were like five hundred arrests for 42’s.” A 42 is a public-indecency violation.

  One day. I think again about the letter. There was nothing in the file I saw that narrowed the time frame like that. Maybe Carolyn gave up before she started, figured she’d just do a sample.

  “Did you find what she wanted?”

  “I thought so. I called her back and she came out to see it. I left her with the stuff right here. She told me she didn’t find nothin.”

  “Do you remember anything about what you showed her? Anything common about the arrests?”

  “All in the Public Forest. All guys. I thought it was probably some demonstration or something. I don’t know.”

  “Jesus,” says Kenneally to Guerash in disgust. “For public indecency? This is the faggots, isn’t it?” he asks me. “Back when Raymond got some balls for about a day and a half.”

  “Did she tell you anything about what she was looking for? A name? Anything?”

  “She didn’t even have a last name. Just a first. I wasn’t real clear on whether she knew this guy or what.” Guerash pauses. “Why do I think it had something to do with Christmas?”

  “Noel? She gave you that name?”

  Guerash snaps his fingers. “That’s it.”

  “Not Leon?”

  “No way. Noel. She told me she’s looking for Noel LNU. I remember that because she wrote it down for me, and the Christmas thing went through my head.”

  “Can you show me what she saw?”

  “Boy, I don’t know. I think I put it away.”

  “Fat fuckin chance of that,” says Kenneally. “I fuckin asked you three times. Here, help yourself.”

  He points us to the transfer cases in the corner.

  When Guerash opens the first case he swears. He picks up a clutch of loose sheets lying on the top of the file folders.

  “She wasn’t real neat, I’ll say that. These records were in nice order when I gave them to her.” I would ask Guerash if he’s sure, but there’s no point. It’s the kind of thing he would remember, and I can see the orderly ranks of the remaining records. Besides, that would be like Carolyn, to take records that other people have spent years maintaining and treat them like debris.

  Guerash out of instinct begins to sort the booking sheets and bond slips, and I help. Kenneally pitches in, too. We stand around his desk, cursing Carolyn. Each booking jacket should contain a police report, an arrest card bearing the defendant’s photo and fingerprints, a complaint, and a bond slip, but none of these sixty or seventy files is complete. Papers are missing from each and the sheets inside have been turned back to front, and at angles. The numerical order is gone.

  Kenneally keeps saying cunt.

  We are about five minutes along before the obvious strikes me—this disorder is not accidental. These papers have been shuffled.

  “Who the hell has been at these boxes since Carolyn?” I ask Kenneally.

  “Nobody. They been sittin in the corner for four months, waitin for fuckhead here to put em back. Nobody but him and me even know they’re here. Right?” he asks Guerash. Guerash agrees.

  “Lionel,” I ask, “do you know Tommy Molto?”

  “Fuck yes, I know Tommy Molto. About half my life. Little fuck was a P.A. out here.”

  I knew that, if I had thought about it. Molto was notorious for his battles with the North Branch judges.

  “Was he out here at the same time Carolyn was with probation?”

  “Probably. Lemme think. Shit, Rusty, I don’t keep a duty roster on these guys.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  Lionel ponders. “Three, four years. Maybe I run into him at a dinner or something. You know, he’
s all right. I see him, I talk. You know me.”

  “But he hasn’t been looking at these records?”

  “Hey,” says Lionel, “watch my lips. You. Me. Guerash. Her. That’s it.”

  When we are done sorting, Guerash goes through the files twice.

  “One’s missing, right?” I ask.

  “We’re missing a number,” he says. “Could have been a mistake.”

  “You book sixty faggots, you don’t exactly worry about keeping a perfect count,” says Kenneally.

  I ask Lionel, “But it could be that the file is gone?”

  “That too.”

  “There would still be a court file, wouldn’t there?” I ask. Kenneally looks at Guerash. Guerash looks at me. I write down the number. It should be on microfilm. Lipranzer will love doing this.

  When Guerash is gone, I spend one more moment with Kenneally.

  “You don’t want to say what this is about maybe?” he asks.

  “I can’t, Lionel.”

  He nods. But I can tell it grates.

  “Oh yeah,” says Lionel, “those were funny old days around here. Lots of stories.” His look lingers casually, just so I know that we both have our secrets.

  Outside, there is real heat, 80 degrees. Pushing a record for April. In the car, I turn the radio to the news station. It’s a live feed from the mayor’s office. I just catch the tail end, but I hear enough of His Honor’s blarney to get the drift. The P.A.’s office needs new blood, a new direction. The people want that. The people deserve that.

  I am going to have to start looking for work.

  14

  Tee ball. In the waning light of the spring evening, play commences in the second-grade Fathers/Students League. The sky hangs low across the open field, a meadow of landfill laid over what was once a marsh, while Mrs. Strongmeyer’s Stingers idly occupy the diamond, boys and girls sporting windbreakers zipped to the collars and baseball gloves. Dads creep along the baselines calling instructions as the dusk gathers in. At the plate, a behemoth of an eight-year-old named Rocky circles his bat two or three times in the vicinity of the rag ball perched atop the long-necked rubber tee. Then, with an astounding concentration of power, he smashes the ball into outer space. It lands in left center, beyond the perimeter of the Stingers’ shaky defense.