Free Fall (24 page)

“Yeah.”

“Committing crimes.”

“Yeah.” He stared at the floor and looked even more ashamed. He was a guy with a lot to be ashamed of.

Jennifer said, “Why do you have to keep asking him about these things? He feels bad enough.”

I said, “I have to ask him because I don’t know the answers. I have to know what he’s done so that I’ll know how to help him or even if I can help him. Do you see?”

She saw, but she didn’t like it. “I thought you said that you’d help.”

“I’m deciding. Maybe I’ll help him, but maybe I won’t. Maybe I can’t.”

She liked that even less. I looked back at Thurman, and then I stood up. “Where does Dees keep the tape?”

“He’s got it hidden in his garage.”

“You know where?”

“Yeah. If he hasn’t moved it.”

“Let’s go see.”

We took Thurman’s Mustang, and Thurman drove. Joe Pike stayed with Jennifer Sheridan.

Forty-two minutes later we left the freeway in Glendale and turned onto a pleasant residential street lined with mature trees and sidewalks and the sort of modest middle-class houses that more suggested Indiana or Iowa than Southern California. Mark Thurman said, “Are you sure about this?”

“I’m sure. Which one?”

Thurman pointed out a white frame Cape Cod with a tiny front yard and a couple of nice magnolia trees and lots of surrounding shrubbery. The drive ran along the left side of the house to the garage. Like the rest of the houses on Dees’s street, it was prewar, and the garage was detached. Someone had bolted a basketball goal above the garage door, and the net was yellowed and frayed. It had been there a long time. Thurman said, “We can’t just ask him, you know.”

“We’re not going to ask him. We’re going to steal it.”

Thurman nodded and frowned, like he knew I was going to say that. “What if it’s not there?”

“If it’s not there, we’ll find out where it is, and then we’ll figure a way to get it from there.” A 1984 Nissan 4×4 sport truck sat in the drive beneath the basketball goal. One of those heavy roll bars with a row of lights across the top was mounted in the bed behind the cab,
and the suspension was jacked up about eight inches too high so the little truck could sport oversized knobby tires. “Who belongs to the truck?”

“Eric Junior. I guess he’s home from school.”

“How about Mrs. Dees? Would she be home?”

Thurman cruised past the house without my having to tell him. “She works at Glendale General. She’s a nurse, but I don’t know if she works today, or when she gets home, or any of that.”

“Okay”

“Would the kid recognize you?”

“Yeah, I think so. I’ve been here a few times, but not many”

“How about the neighbors?”

He shook his head. “No.”

We K-turned in someone’s drive, went back, and parked one house away on the driveway side. I said, “I’m going to see what the boy’s up to. You’re going to wait for my signal, then go into the garage and get the tape.”

Thurman looked nervous. “Jesus Christ, it’s broad daylight.”

“During the day, we look like we belong. At night, we look like crooks. You’re a cop.”

“Well. Sure.”

“Give me the keys.”

He looked at me, then he took out the keys and gave them over. I put them in my pocket, then got out of the car and went up the Deeses’ sidewalk to the front door. I pretended to ring the bell, though I didn’t, and then I pretended to knock, though I didn’t do that, either. If the neighbors were watching, it would look good for them.

I stood at the door and listened, and heard voices deep in the house, but they were the kind of voices that come from a television, and not from real people. The
front door was under an overhang, and there was a long brick veranda that ran along the front of the house under the overhang, and a couple of large frame windows. The windows were open to let in the light. I went to the near window and looked in and tried to see the boy and the television, but I couldn’t. The way the hall and the entry were laid out from the living room, it was a good bet that the boy and the TV were on the side of the house opposite from the garage. I went back to the edge of the porch and motioned to Thurman. He got out and went down the drive to the garage, and he didn’t look happy about it. I stood by the front windows and watched. If the boy came through the house, I could always knock on the door for real and pretend like I was selling aluminum siding. If Mrs. Dees drove up, I could pretend I was a real estate agent, and make a big deal out of listing her house, and maybe keep her away from the garage until Thurman made his getaway. If Eric Dees drove up, maybe I could run like hell before he shot me to death. There are always options.

It didn’t take Mark Thurman long.

Less than three minutes later he came back along the driveway, and made a short quiet whistle to get my attention. When I looked, he held up an ordinary TDK half-inch VHS cassette. I walked away from the front door and got back into the Mustang maybe ten seconds after Mark Thurman.

He sat behind the wheel in the keyless Mustang with both hands on the cassette. He held it tightly. “Now what?”

We went to the motel.

The sky had turned a deep violet by the time we got into Santa Monica, and the air was cooling nicely. The room had a VCR hooked to the TV, and that’s where we’d screen the tape.

Thurman said, “Is this where you’ve been holed up?”

“Yeah.” Like we were outlaws.

When we got into the room, Thurman looked around and saw the three left over Thai beers. They were warm. “Say, could I have one of those?”

“Sure.”

“You?” He held out a bottle.

“No.”

I turned on the TV. Nightly News with Peter Jennings came on, and I loaded the cassette. Peter Jennings vanished in a flash of static, and a grainy high-angle shot of the interior of the Premier Pawn Shop filled the screen. Black and white. A muscular black guy maybe in his late twenties sat in a swivel chair behind the counter, watching a tiny TV. He wore a white Arrow shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and his hair was cut dose with a couple of racing stripes carved above each ear. Charles Lewis Washington. There was no one else in the shop.

As I watched, Mark Thurman came up behind me and drank deep on the beer. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, not fast like he had to pee, but enough to show he wasn’t comfortable. He said, “There’s a lot of this kind of stuff at first.”

“Okay.”

“We could maybe fast forward it.”

“Let’s just watch.”

He went to the machine and turned it off. “Look, this isn’t easy.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to treat me like a piece of shit.”

I stared at him for maybe ten seconds. “It doesn’t matter if I like you or not, and it doesn’t matter how I treat you or not. Whatever it is that I’m doing, I’m doing for Jennifer. Not for you.”

Mark Thurman stared at me for another couple of seconds, then he said, “Can I have another of those beers?”

I turned on the VCR and watched the rest of the tape. Mark Thurman went into the bathroom and drank.

T
he image was sort of overexposed and blurry, and not nearly as nice as your basic home video. From the angle the camera must’ve been maybe nine or ten feet up, and was mounted so that it framed the length of the shop.

The tape ran without incident for another couple of minutes before Floyd Riggens and Warren Pinkworth entered from the bottom of the frame. There was no sound. Charles Lewis got out of his chair and went to the counter, and the three of them spoke for a few minutes. Then Pinkworth took two cardboard boxes out of his pocket and put them on the counter. Each box was about the size of a bar of soap, but they weren’t Ivory. Washington opened the top box and shook out twenty rounds of what looked to be 5.56 mm rifle cartridges. Same kind of stuff you pop in an M-16. He examined the bullets, and then he put them back into the box and pushed both boxes toward Pinkworth. The three of them talked some more, and Riggens left the frame. In a couple of minutes he came back, only now Pete Garcia was with him, carrying a pretty good-sized pasteboard box. It looked heavy. Garcia put the larger box on the
counter and Charles Lewis looked inside. Whatever was there, you couldn’t see it, but it was probably more of the little cardboard ammo boxes. Washington nodded as if he were agreeing to something, and when he did Riggens and Garcia and Pinkworth were all screaming and pulling out badges and guns. Charles Lewis Washington jumped back so far that he fell over the swivel chair. Riggens went over the counter after him. Riggens raised his pistol twice and brought it down twice, and then he jerked Washington to his feet and moved to hit him again. Washington covered up and pulled away. The narrow aisle behind the counter opened into the shop, and Washington, still holding his arms over his head, stumbled from behind the counter and into Pete Garcia. Maybe you could say it looked like he was attacking Garcia, but it didn’t look like that to me. It looked like Washington was trying to get away from Riggens. Garcia hit Washington on the upper back and the arms four times, and then pushed him down. Pinkworth was pointing his gun in a two-handed combat stance, and shouting, and he stomped at Washington’s head and back. Riggens came from behind the counter and waded in beside Pinkworth. Garcia was pointing his gun at Washington’s head. Washington seemed to reach for him and Garcia kicked at his arm. At the bottom of the screen, Mark Thurman ran in wearing a tee shirt that said
POLICE
on the front and back. He stopped beside Garcia and aimed his gun, also in the two-handed combat stance. Charles Lewis Washington pushed up to his knees and held out his right arm like maybe he was begging Riggens and Pinkworth to stop. They didn’t. Washington rolled into sort of a ball, but Riggens continued to hit him. Thurman started forward, then stopped and said something to Garcia, but Garcia made a hand move telling him to stay back. Thurman lowered his gun and stepped back. He looked confused. Eric Dees ran in then, also wearing a
POLICE
tee
shirt, and stopped midway between Garcia and Pinkworth to assess the situation. Garcia shouted and pointed at Washington, and Dees pulled Pinkworth back. He tried to train his gun on Washington, but Riggens kept getting in the way. Washington was on his stomach now, trying to crawl under a shelf. The white Arrow shirt was streaked with blood. He was moving slowly, the way you might if you were stunned and unable to think clearly. Thurman raised his gun, then lowered it. He looked like he wanted to move forward, maybe do something, but he didn’t. Washington again raised his hand as if begging Riggens to stop. Riggens hit his hand. Dees grabbed Riggens’s arm and pulled him back, but Washington started crawling away again. I guess if I was hurt bad, and confused, I’d try to crawl away, too. Riggens pointed at him and shouted, and went back to hitting him, and this time he was swinging for the head. Pinkworth moved in and swung for the legs, but he needn’t have bothered. Charles Lewis Washington had already stopped moving. Dees pulled Riggens off again and Garcia moved in, gun first as if he thought maybe Washington was faking it and might suddenly jump up and mow them all down. He checked Washington’s neck for a pulse, then shook his head. Garcia holstered his gun and said something to Dees, and now he checked Washington’s wrist, but he didn’t find a pulse there, either. Eric Dees came over and checked for himself. Mark Thurman holstered his gun, leaned against the counter, and threw up. Eric Dees went to him, said something, and then went back to the body. Mark Thurman moved out of the frame.

I let the tape play for another thirty seconds or so, and then I turned it off.

Mark Thurman said, “Let it play and it shows us figuring out what to do. You can see Floyd planting a gun so we could say he was armed.”

I looked over at him. Thurman was in the bathroom door. I said, “I’ve seen enough for now.”

“Yep.” He killed the rest of the beer. “When I came into it everybody was screaming. I thought maybe the guy had a gun or something. It wasn’t like I was scared, I just didn’t know what to do.” He went to the little round motel table and took another beer. Twenty-five years old, looking for a friend, and there were no friends around. “What could I have done?”

“You could have stopped them.”

He pulled at the warm beer and nodded. “Yes. I’d say that’s pretty clear. But I didn’t, did I?”

“No. That’s something you’ll have to live with. You had an opportunity to behave well, but you behaved poorly. Had you behaved well, Charles Lewis Washington might still be alive.”

He sucked down the rest of the beer and you could tell that he was living with that, too.

I said, “You’re going to have to give up Dees and the other guys.”

“I can’t do that.” There was one beer left. He went for it.

“You don’t have a choice, Mark.”

“The hell I don’t.” Angry now. Walled in by circumstances and goddamned tired of it. “Jesus Christ, I feel bad enough. Now you want me to be a traitor? You want me to sell out my friends?”

“I want you to do what you should’ve done when it began. I want you to do the right thing.”

He raised his hands like he didn’t want to hear it and he turned away.

I took two fast steps toward him, grabbed the back of his shirt, and shoved him across the little table. He said, “Hey,” and dropped the beer.

I said, “Charles Lewis Washington was living with a woman named Shalene. They had a baby named
Marcus. Now that baby is going to grow up without a father. Do you understand that?”

“Let me up.” He grabbed my wrists, trying to pry my hands off and push up off the table, but I wouldn’t let him.

“He had a brother named James Edward and a mother and a grandfather.” The muscles across my back and the tops of my shoulders felt tight and knotted. I dug my fingers into his face and neck and pressed. “You have been part of something bad. It’s unfair, and it’s ugly, and you didn’t know what you were supposed to do, but now you do, and you have to be man enough to stand up. If you don’t, Ida Leigh Washington will have lost two sons for nothing and I will not allow that.”