Private: #1 Suspect (12 page)

CHAPTER
55

TANDY AND ZIEGLER broke a path through the thick clots of gangbangers between the street and the chain-link fence surrounding the prison building. A guard opened the gate, Tandy spoke, and we were led through a number of checkpoints until we reached an interrogation room on the ground floor.

This small gray room was a gateway to the grand cesspool of the men’s jail, a hellhole built to hold a quarter of the eighteen thousand inmates warehoused here at any given time.

I expected to see Eric Caine waiting for me, but I should have known better. Twin Towers was a daunting, 1.5-million-square-foot maze, and defense attorneys were not welcomed here.

Ziegler closed the interview room door, blew his nose into a tissue, and lobbed the wad across the room into a wastebasket.

Tandy said, “You need anything, Jack?”

This was his good-buddy act, which was somehow more threatening than when Tandy was showing me the sadistic SOB he really was.

I said, “I’ve got nothing to say until I see my lawyer.”

“Sit down,” Ziegler said.

He shoved me in the direction of a metal chair, and as I stumbled toward it, Ziegler stuck out his foot and I went down, chin first, on the linoleum floor.

Tandy helped me to my feet, saying, “I’m sorry, Jack. Len didn’t mean to do that. It was an accident.”

Even cuffed, I could have gotten in a groin kick Ziegler would have remembered for a couple of months, but I knew what would happen to me after that.

“Sure, what else could it have been?”

Tandy said, “You’re not getting mouthy with us, are you, Jack? That wouldn’t be smart.”

Ziegler and Tandy hoisted me to my feet and angled me into the chair. I wondered who was behind the one-way glass and if Fescoe knew I was about to be worked over.

“I’ve got to admit it,” Tandy said. “We sent your lawyer on a little detour, kind of a runaround. It’ll take him a while to find you, but we did it for your benefit. We’ve got information you’re going to appreciate.”

“Ah. I get it, Mitch. You’re going to help me.”

Tandy walked behind me to a spot where I couldn’t see him. Ziegler sat two feet away from me. He cleaned his nails with his pearl-handled pocket knife. Len Ziegler was a vain man. He worked out. He dressed well. But there wasn’t much he could do about his weak chin and his little pig eyes.

“Listen, Jack,” Ziegler said. “This is as close to a slam dunk as the LAPD has ever seen.”

He listed the physical evidence they had against me, then said, “You made a phone call to your brother at around the time the victim bought it. We talked to Tommy. We leaned on him. Hard. He says all he got was a hang-up call. But here’s the thing, Jack. You established your presence at the scene.”

“Why’d you make that phone call?” Tandy asked. “That’s a mystery to me. Did you dial by mistake? Do you have a guilty subconscious?”

“I don’t understand that phone call either,” I said. “I didn’t call Tommy. As soon as I saw what happened, I called 911. Mitch, given your theory of the crime, why on earth would I have called Tommy?”

Tandy said, “Well, I asked Tommy about that. I spent a couple of hours with him. He has a good alibi and nothing good to say about you. Frankly, and I tell you this as a guy who’s been a cop for twenty years, you are so cooked, I don’t know when I’ve been happier. Len, have you ever seen me this happy?”

“I think when you hit the trifecta at Santa Anita you were over the moon, but it’s a close call.”

“One Fine Day. That was that filly’s name.” Tandy laughed at the memory, then said, “I’m just an intermediary at this point; you know that. It’s the chief who asked me to help you out.”

Ziegler folded his knife and put it in his back pocket. “Fescoe said to tell you, if you save the city the cost and trouble of a trial, if you make a statement detailing what you did, Mickey will take care of you. He said he would do that. And to remind you that he and the DA are the best of friends.”

“I didn’t kill Colleen.”

Tandy put his hands on my shoulders and tipped my chair over backward. I went down, and when my head was on the floor, Ziegler tapped it with the toe of his shoe. It was just a
tap-tap-tap,
but I felt cold all over. I thought how a kick at my head could sever my spine, what’s called an “internal decapitation.”

I wouldn’t come back from that.

Tandy was speaking to me, apologizing about the chair falling over.

“Let’s cut the bull,” I said from where I lay on the floor. “I’m not making a statement. There’s a set bail for murder on the felony bail schedule. When Caine gets here, we’re going to pay the million bucks, and then I’m leaving.”

Tandy stooped so he could look me in the eyes.

“There’s no set bail for murder with special circumstances,” he said.

“What are you talking about? What special circumstances?”

“Colleen was pregnant when you killed her, Jack. That’s special circumstances.
Murder times two
.”

CHAPTER
56

I COULD BARELY absorb what Tandy had told me.

Colleen couldn’t have been pregnant. She wasn’t showing. Besides, she would have told me. Right?

Ziegler picked up the chair. Then he and Tandy hauled me back into it.

“You’re
lying,
” I said. “Colleen wasn’t pregnant.”

“How do you know that?” said Ziegler. “You get the autopsy report? We did. It’ll be a while before we get the DNA, but it doesn’t matter who the daddy is. She could have been pregnant by anyone. It’s still murder of her kid.”

Tandy patted my shoulder.

I turned my head to look at him.

“Jack, are you with us? I haven’t been running the video recorder, but I’m going to turn it on now. You should tell us the truth while there’s still time.”

Tandy ducked out and sure enough, the video camera in the corner of the ceiling focused with a whirr. A little red light blinked.

Tandy came back into the room with a yellow pad and a Bic.

“Ready, Jack? Because this is it. Once we say bye-bye, no one can help you. Not even Fescoe.”

He had just slapped the pad and pen down on the table when Eric Caine, my friend, a Harvard Law grad, and the head of Private’s legal department, stormed into the interrogation room.

Caine was a big man, prematurely gray, and like me, he played college football. Normally, Caine was a man of measured responses, dry humor, and self-control.

But now he was raging. And that made me feel good.

He shouted at me, “Did you say anything, Jack?”

“Nope. The detectives have done all the talking.”

Caine walked over to me, turned my head from side to side. “You’re bleeding.”

He said to Tandy and Ziegler, “Beating a prisoner is illegal. Not only is a lawsuit coming straight at you, but that beating automatically throws out anything he said.”

“He said he’s innocent,” Ziegler scoffed.

“Big barking dog,” Tandy said to Ziegler, eyeing Caine. “Woof woof.”

 “I want my client checked out by a
doctor,
” Caine said. “I mean
now
.”

CHAPTER
57

I WAS SHUFFLED between cops to the Twin Towers infirmary, where a nurse swabbed my cuts and scrapes with alcohol. She put a bandage on my chin.

I was thinking about Colleen, that if she had been pregnant, it was impossible for the baby to have been mine.

Except for our good-bye tryst a week ago, I hadn’t seen Colleen in more than six months. I mean, I would have been able to tell if she’d been six months along, right?

Still, as Tandy said, the murder of a fetus was a special circumstance when tacked on to murder. Yes, I would be denied bail. In fact, I could spend the next year in this sewer before I went to trial.

I refocused my eyes as a few feet away Tandy explained to the doctor that I had tripped and, since I was cuffed, hadn’t been able to break my fall.

“And what about the bruise on the back of his head?” the doctor asked. The doctor was a late-middle-aged white man. If he’d graduated anywhere in the top 99.9 percent of his class, he wouldn’t have been here.

“Jack is one of those masters-of-the-universe types,” Tandy joked. “Doesn’t like being detained. When I was putting him into the back of our car,” Tandy twisted his body to show exactly how I had rammed my head into the doorframe, “he bumped his head.”

The doctor asked me, “Is that how it happened?”

Saying no would have been a mistake. A few years back, an inmate had complained to an ACLU monitor that no one in his pod had been allowed a shower in three or four weeks. He was beaten. His leg was broken. The ACLU got involved, but for all I knew, that inmate was still here awaiting trial.

“It happened as the detective said. I was clumsy.”

“Duly noted,” said the doctor.

“May I have an aspirin?”

Tandy nodded. “Give him an aspirin, Doc. Our farewell gift.”

Caine said, “Shut up, Tandy.”

I wanted to seriously hurt Tandy. I hoped I would live long enough to do it. Tandy and Ziegler waved bye-bye and slithered down the hallway.

Caine said to me, “Hang in, Jack. I’m working on one thing. Getting you out. I’ve never let you down before and I won’t now.”

A nurse took my vitals, then gave me a mental-status test, checking to see if I was crazy. Or had plans to hang myself. Or commit murder.

From there, I was taken into a large open room, stripped, and given a military-style physical. I grabbed my butt cheeks and coughed on command, let the guard do a cavity check.

I was declared good to go and escorted back to intake with a young sheriff-in-training who struck up a conversation with me. He said he was hoping to get out of here by five today. He was picking up his folks at the airport.

He took my watch, phone, wallet, belt, and shoelaces. My fingers were pressed onto an electronic ten-printer. I stood in front of a height chart holding a number to my chest. I turned to my left, turned to my right, as requested by the bored man with the camera.

I did what I was told, but I was swamped with a lot of feelings beginning with the letter
D:
depressed, demoralized, degraded.

All around me, people puked, screamed, threatened, spat, and seemed to be begging to be knocked around.

I wanted to shout,
I’m not one of these guys. I’m innocent
.

It would have been like shouting down a hole that went clear to the center of the earth.

And my morning was just beginning.

CHAPTER
58

I WAS WALKED through the building to the men’s jail, where I was strip-searched again and issued a “roll-up,” a pair of orange pants and matching shirt, and plastic shoes. Then I was given a prisoner’s tour of the facilities on the way to my cell.

The jail was made up of hundreds of two-tiered pods, each with dozens of holding cells, each pod meant to hold thirty men, but as I was walked past, I could see each pod was double booked and held more like fifty living, crying, coughing, desperate men.

My cell was the size of a walk-in closet, six by eight feet, with two narrow metal slabs and a stinking, clogged toilet.

I was the fourth man in that cell.

I sat on one of the slabs.

The overhead lights glared. There was no window, no way to tell the time, but it seemed to me that at least ten hours had gone by since Fescoe’s phone call to me at Private.

A rank-smelling man, somewhere between twenty and forty years old, sat on the bench next to me.

He said his name was Irwin, and he wanted to talk. He told me he’d been in holding for five days. He’d been caught with cocaine and a teenage girl in his car two blocks from a school. Still, Irwin, I thought, had less to worry about than I did.

He had a festering wound on his arm, another on his neck. He told me about the mystery-meat sandwich for lunch and the dinner burrito, the kind you get at gas stations.

I had missed both.

He asked if I had a good lawyer. I said I did, then I leaned back against the wall. I didn’t want to attract any kind of attention. I was drowning in a riptide of despair that didn’t make total sense to me.

I’d been through marine boot camp and then a war. I’d killed people. Friends had died. My parents had died. I’d been wounded in action. In fact, I’d died and been brought back to life. All of that.

And yet the one thing I couldn’t remember feeling before was an utter lack of hope.

Nothing I said mattered.

I had no access to anyone. No moves to make.

I was at the mercy of people who wanted me put away. Even Fescoe had let me down: confess or else.

Irwin moved to the other slab, and another unwashed desperado took his place next to me. He seemed like a decent guy. Had a couple of kids, a wife, had gotten into a bar fight. Said he hadn’t been able to make bail. He had a bad cough. Sounded like TB or maybe lung cancer.

I feigned sleep. I made a mental list of people who hated me. It was a long list of guys I’d busted, thwarted, fired, or exposed.

Tommy’s face kept coming to me, and then I was awakened out of a murky dream. The lights were all on. One of my cell mates was grunting on the can. But what had awakened me was the voice booming over the public-address system, naming which people would be bused to what court.

Irwin said, “This is what they do at four a.m. Like it? Court isn’t until nine.”

My name wasn’t mentioned.

They hadn’t called my name.

I closed my eyes, and sometime later a guard hit a buzzer and the door to my cell slid open. The guard said, “Jack Morgan? You need to get dressed for court.”

CHAPTER
59

CAINE HAD ENOUGH clout to get me bumped to the front of the line, and I was transported from the jail to the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center on West Temple. I was brought into the holding cell outside the courtroom, chained to three other guys, one of whom was about eighteen years old and pale with fright.

There was air-conditioning.

It was a miracle. I thanked God.

I sat for hours as my fellow prisoners left and came back. And then I was separated from my cellies.

Caine came to meet me, put both arms around me, and held me in a hard hug. He whispered, “Remember who you are. Look alive.”

I smelled bad, like the unwashed men in my cell. I was wearing yesterday’s clothes and had numerous cuts and bruises and a day-old beard.

I said to my lawyer, “Okay. I think I can fake that.”

I followed Caine into the courtroom. It was paneled, civilized, but it still reminded me of old prints of Ellis Island, where refugees were processed after three weeks in the hold of a ship, not knowing what would become of them.

The judge was the Honorable Skinner Coffin. I’d never met him, but I knew who he was. He was in his fifties, reputed to be touchy and opinionated. Justine had once said that he excelled at “creative interpretation of the law.”

I didn’t know if that was good for me or bad.

While Judge Coffin was in conversation with his bailiff, I scanned the gallery. There was a low rumble of people whispering, shifting in their seats. Babies cried. I heard my name. I turned to see Robbie Pace, the new mayor, coming toward me.

I remember thinking how clean he looked in his blue suit, his face shining from a recent shave. He leaned close and said into my ear, “I wrote to the judge. Put in a good word. I think you’re going to be okay.”

“Thanks, Robbie.”

“No problem.”

Doors opened at the front of the courtroom, and Fescoe entered, came up the aisle. He stopped to speak to Mayor Pace, looking at me over Pace’s shoulder while they chatted. Robbie’s head bobbed in agreement, then Fescoe nodded at me and went to the back of the gallery.

The doors opened again, and Justine came through them, a stunning picture of grace, fresh as a new rose, her smile weighted with sadness. She came up to me. Stopped short of hugging me. Contact was expressly forbidden.

“We’re all with you, Jack. Everyone at Private. We’re reaching out to street contacts, sifting through everything we’ve found, and we will keep at it until we’ve got something useful. Are you all right?”

“It’s good to see you.”

“I wish I could say the same. I know how bad it is in there.”

I thought,
You can’t really know—and you should thank God for that.

I said, “So you don’t have anything?”

“Not yet. Tommy has an alibi.”

“So I heard.”

“His wife. He was home with her that evening.”

I sighed.

“We’re still digging,” said Justine.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“I know.”

Why had I slept with Colleen?

Why hadn’t I resisted that impulse?

Justine wished me luck, and then the bailiff called out a number. Caine said, “That’s us. Let’s go.”