Key Witness (32 page)

So why did it feel so bad, so shameful?

Because he didn’t love her back. In her heart she knew that, try as hard as she could to sabotage her feelings.

“A penny for your thoughts.” He was staring at her with those cold milk-blue eyes.

“I was thinking how good your cock felt in my mouth.” Which wasn’t exactly what she had been thinking about, but close enough.

“Feels good to me, too, babe.” He leaned forward and gave her an openmouth kiss. “If we’re going to fuck, we’d better get it on.”

She put her uniform back on. She had taken everything off to make love to him. It felt right that way, like real lovers, not some quick fuck in the jail infirmary, which was the truth of it. “I’d better get going,” she said, looking at her watch. “The shift changes in twenty minutes.”

He nodded. “We don’t want to get caught,” he agreed.

She tied her shoelaces, sitting on the edge of his bed. “I’ll try to come down tonight, after everyone’s left,” she said.

He moved away from where he was sitting next to her. “Maybe that’s not a good idea.”

“I’ll be careful, don’t worry. I’m not going to put you in jeopardy.”

“It’s you that should be worried,” he said. “I’ve cut my deal, they can’t fuck with me. But you could get busted, big-time. They’d fire you in a New York minute. Maybe even bar you from practicing law.”

She stared at him. “I can handle this.”

“Yeah, maybe. But if we ever did get caught, even a whiff of suspicion, that DA would have my ass up a hundred-foot pole. We’ve got to be careful, Doris, cool it a while.”

She turned away so he wouldn’t see the pain on her face; worse than pain, the shame. How did she ever get into this? How did she allow him to do this to her?

It wasn’t worth thinking about. She looked in the mirror every day.

“I’ve got it covered,” she told him. “I’ll make sure that you’re safe.”

No one saw her leave the infirmary. She rode the elevator up to her floor and signed in, taking the keys to her unit from the night watch commander.

“How’s it going, Doris?” he asked, yawning.

“Can’t complain, Willie.”

“Yeah.” He sniffed the air. “You wearing perfume?” he asked, as if that was not possible.

“A little.” Don’t blush, fool. He’s a jerk.

He grinned. “Smells nice.” He nudged her bicep with an elbow, winked conspiratorially. “If I didn’t know better …” He grinned again.

If you didn’t know I could never have a man? Is that what that means? If you only did know, for real.

She had a man. A man in a cage. A captive. But soon, he would be let out of that cage, be free to fly away.

Would she have a man then?

This shit with Doris had to stop. He’d gotten what he needed from her and then some; he was in a dangerous space now. If they found out about Doris he’d be busted, the DA might have to drop him. More importantly, it could lead to people sticking their noses in places that could be injurious to his health, like finding out he had used her computer and played some silly games with it.

He switched his thought to that lady DA. Helena Abramowitz. Now that was fine pussy, first-class. Brittle around the edges, but her meat was close to the bone, the way he liked it. Those perky little titties, those long, lean, backbreaking legs.

She wasn’t married. And she knew of his desire, she had stared right at his erection, almost taunting him to do something about it.

One thing he knew about Helena Abramowitz, with her tight Jewish-princess pussy: she wanted to win this case, wanted it bad. She would rather win this case than make five million dollars. She would do anything to get that goal. And maybe to get it she’d have to do something nice for him.

“O
H, HE WAS NOT
a bad boy. He did the job okay enough, most of the time.” The man sighed: a deep basso-profundo lamentation. “He was lazy, that was his problem. He wanted it all right away, without working for it. Like his friends, who sell their dirty drugs to little kids on the street. I see it, it happens right under your nose. I said to him, ‘Marvin, you can make money honestly. You can be proud of yourself. You can rise above your heritage, those crummy surroundings.’ ” The man spread his hands in a hopeless gesture. “He don’t want to hear that. He wanted it all right now, like his friends, without having to do honest work.”

The man passing judgment on Marvin was his former boss, Artis Livonius. He spoke with a pronounced accent, the English of one who had taken it up in his teens or later, long after he was at home in another language. He and Wyatt were in the back of Livonius’s cleaning establishment, amid the noise of the pressing tables, industrial-sized washers and dryers, and dry-cleaning machines. Livonius had a small work area tucked away in the corner, where a Macintosh computer sat on an old beat-up wooden desk. The room was steamy from all the machines running full blast; Wyatt had taken his coat off and loosened his tie.

Livonius extracted a large jar of kosher dill pickles from a small cube refrigerator tucked in between his desk and the back door, extracted one from the brine, and bit into it, taking half the fullness in one large mouthful. He held the jar out to Wyatt, who shook his head. “No, thanks. I’ve already had lunch. Looks good, though.”

“Salt,” the owner confided. “It gets muggy in here and you’re on your feet all day, you cramp up in the legs if you don’t keep your salt intake up. Better than salt tablets. It’s an old Lithuanian trick. Pickles and salted herring, the national dishes of Lithuania.”

You learn something new every day, Wyatt thought. There were definite perks to practicing law bargain-basement style. One night you’re cruising the mean streets with a teenage drug lord and another morning you’re learning about the national dishes of Lithuania.

Before coming uptown to see Livonius, Wyatt had spent the morning with Josephine, hunkered down in their own private gulag, outlining his strategy—where he wanted to go, how, and when. Josephine had sat across the desk from him, taking copious notes as he talked it out in an almost stream-of-consciousness flow.

Ticking off on his fingers: “We’re going to find this woman Marvin was supposedly with on the night of one of the old murders, if she actually exists. We’re going to talk to everyone Marvin knows, to see if anyone has a good alibi for him for some other time. We’re going to get with his employer and trace his delivery route to see how that matches up with the murderer’s timetable. We’re going to go to every one of those murder sites, to see if there’s anything there we can use. And we are going to learn everything we can about Dwayne Thompson. He’s the state’s case. If we can find something to discredit him, we’ll blow them out of the water.”

He was enjoying being out on the street, investigating on his own, which he’d never done in his life—it had always been done for him. Making his own case, meeting the people where they worked and lived, seeing it all firsthand. It felt more real doing it this way, less removed. He was connecting more.

Livonius polished off the rest of his king-sized pickle with one bite. Wiping his massive hands on his smock, he said, “So. What do you want from me?”

“You know about Marvin, of course.”

The dry cleaner shook his head sadly. “Unbelievable,” he uttered.

“What’s unbelievable, Mr. Livonius?”

“That the poor bastard’s in jail, what else?”

“It’s not unbelievable that he might have committed these crimes?”

The man snorted a short harsh laugh. “I didn’t say that. I think it’s unlikely, but …” He shrugged again. “Who knows? He was capable of robbing from me, a man who took him under his wing and tried to teach him right from wrong. But rape? Murder? I think Marvin’s out of his league there.”

Wyatt wanted to believe that, too; but he couldn’t. He had seen the tape with his own two eyes, he’d seen Marvin White try to shoot a man. If Marvin’s gun hadn’t jammed he would have, and he would be facing a murder charge he couldn’t possibly find a way to beat.

That tape was Alex Pagano’s hole card. If Pagano felt his back was to the wall—that the case was slipping away from him at some point deep in the trial—he would use it. He would take a piece of the police department down to get his conviction, without thinking twice about it.

“I know Marvin stole from you,” Wyatt said to the proprietor, “and you fired him over it, which is completely understandable. But putting that aside—if you can, which I know is asking a lot—how did you feel about Marvin? Until you caught him stealing did you like him? Tolerate him?”

The man leaned against a large dry-cleaning machine that was humming away. All around the room, women in smocks were sorting laundry, operating pressing machines, folding and bundling. Most of them looked like they were Mexican, Wyatt noticed. Probably illegal.

“I liked him okay. He’s a likable kid in some ways. Oh, he’s a slacker, a petty thief, and a punk, and like I said, he was lazy, which is the worst crime in the world in my book—but he was no fool. He could have amounted to something. That’s what I said to him, many times. ‘Marvin,’ I said, ‘you can have a career here. This is a good business, dry cleaning. You could learn the trade and someday you could start your own business. Own your piece of the rock.’ ” Another shrug. “He never listened. Long-range planning, honest work, they weren’t part of his outlook. Look,” he said, his voice becoming passionate, “I came here from Lithuania, when the Communists ran it. I had nothing, no language here, didn’t know nobody. And here I am today, I own my own business, I pay taxes. These colored kids, they have no drive, no sense of responsibility. It’s ‘gimme gimme gimme.’ They should live in Lithuania the way it was, they’d sing a different tune.” He shook his head and spat on the floor.

Wyatt flipped through his reporter-sized notebook. “He was your delivery man.”

“One of them. I got two. Too much work for one, we deliver all over the city. Private and commercial both.”

“He drove a truck?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes he took the bus, or the subway. I always gave him money for the fare,” he said quickly.

“Do you recall if he was ever in the particular areas where the murders took place, when they took place? Like he had a particular delivery to make at a certain address that was close to a murder, around the time it would have occurred?”

“He must have been. He was all over the west side every day.”

“What about night?”

Livonius shook his head. “Not during working hours. We don’t deliver at night.”

“Some of the murders—most of them—took place at night. Which stands to reason, since prostitutes work more at night.”

“They work in the daytime, too,” Livonius contradicted him. “Go outside and drive two blocks down the street. You’ll get solicited.”

Wyatt knew that was true. He had seen several hookers on his way here. “So Marvin would have had to come back to this part of the city after work, if he was going to kill a prostitute at night.”

“He wouldn’t come back,” Livonius asserted. “A kid like him, black. He isn’t comfortable hanging around somewhere that ain’t his place. He was a homeboy—didn’t feel comfortable outside his own area.” He cracked a couple of huge knuckles. “In some of these areas a black man sticks out like a two-headed baby. These krauts and Poles and other eastern Europeans that live in these neighborhoods, they don’t like black people, especially black men.” He shook his head. “If Marvin had been in those places after dark, he would have stayed after work, done what he had to do, and gotten out of there.”

That was a positive—a small one. “I’m trying to establish alibis for Marvin. Is there any way you could remember, or check up in your records or whatever, a time when it would have been improbable, or better yet, impossible for Marvin to have been in the area where one of the killings took place, when it did? Like he was home sick, or at school, on vacation, anything like that?”

Livonius frowned. “I don’t think I could remember anything that exact,” he said. “He worked after school and on the weekends until he quit school, then he worked during the regular day. People like him don’t take vacations,” he added.

“I don’t mean a regular vacation,” Wyatt said, regretting his choice of words. Of course people like Marvin didn’t take vacations. People like Marvin and Jonnie Rae could barely pay the rent—which was why dealing drugs or robbing numbers drops didn’t seem as wrong to them as it did to people in better economic circumstances: people like Livonius, and him. “But maybe he was out of town—visiting a relative, something like that.”

“No.”

This guy wasn’t much help: “What about your records? Wouldn’t you have records of when deliveries were made, and to whom? Something I could use to cross-check against the times of the murders. Maybe one of the customers Marvin delivered to on those days would have some kind of alibi for Marvin. Like he went over after work and helped move furniture or something.”
Or spent the night in one of the lady customers’ beds.

“I don’t know,” Livonius said reluctantly. “My customers aren’t going to want to be disturbed with this. It’s already hurt my business, my customers finding out that vicious killer was delivering their dry cleaning. Especially my female customers. That he was in their house with them, alone.”

He knows about Marvin’s reputed sexual escapades, Wyatt flashed. Or has a damn strong suspicion. “Did any of your female customers ever complain to you that Marvin acted inappropriately toward them. Threateningly, or sexually?”

The man looked away. I’ve touched a nerve, Wyatt thought. That story Dexter had told him, which he had taken with a large dose of salt, was starting to become more plausible.

“No,” Livonius admitted reluctantly. “No one ever complained about that.”

“Then doesn’t it make sense that if he never threatened one of your women customers, physically or sexually, that he wouldn’t do it elsewhere? If he wanted to rape and kill women, his job delivering for you would be perfect. He would be alone with helpless women, over and over. But you never had a complaint, not one.”

Livonius went through some inner turmoil—Wyatt could see it playing on his florid face. Finally, he opened up. “Marvin wouldn’t have to rape women. He had all the women he could handle. He was shtupping plenty of ladies on his route, especially the older gals who are working overtime to hang on to their looks. They call me up for delivery and they got this baby-doll little voice.” His deep voice rose in falsetto: “Oh, by the way, will you make sure Marvin does the delivery? Your other driver, he doesn’t know the area so good, I have to wait for him too much.” Dropping back into his own speech: “Like it was an afterthought, just came into their heads. My other driver, Luis, who covered for Marvin when he was a no-show, he’s a humpback greaseball with garlic on his breath, no teeth, a woman would never get twenty feet near him. But he’s an honest man, he works hard. And if Marvin was out that day they’d say, ‘It can wait until tomorrow.’ So Marvin would take over their dry cleaning and a twenty-minute delivery would take an hour and a half. And he’d have a nice, juicy tip.” His face darkened. “Which made me even madder, when I caught the lazy schwartzer ripping me off. The tips weren’t enough, he had to steal my profits.”