The Judgment (23 page)

“Now, LeMoyne,” he said, “if you’ll just turn on the water there in the sink, we can sit right down at the kitchen table and get this meeting under way.”

While Tolliver was occupied at the kitchen sink, I stole a look out the back window as Conroy had done a moment before. I saw that the brown van had moved to the rear of the parking lot, and that it now had mounted on top a small dish antenna that was pointed straight up at us. The van was idling, great wisps of exhaust smoke bubbling out the rear, probably to keep them warm inside; or maybe they needed the motor running to power all the electrical equipment—what did I know? But what with the
Today
show coming in from the living room, WDET’s morning program blasting in over the radio, and all that sound of running water coming in from the bathroom and kitchen, I decided they would have a hard time hearing anything that was said.

Conroy beckoned me over to the kitchen table; I took my place. With all three of us seated, the conference began.

“Now, Sloan,” he began quietly, “I’m going to go back to the beginning on this. Some of it you’ll have heard before, but some of the details might interest you.”

“Details are what I’m after.”

“I’ll do what I can.” He frowned, looked up at a spot in the kitchen where the wall met the ceiling, and began
to tell his story in little more than a whisper. I had to strain forward to hear.

“When I was appointed Deputy Chief of Police, nobody was more surprised than I was. Oh, I was in line for it. I had the best record of the other possible candidates, but I wasn’t political, wasn’t in the mayor’s pocket the way the other two were. On the other hand, I’d never been in on any investigation that targeted the mayor. Of course I hadn’t. Things like that weren’t even thought of four years ago. What I didn’t realize when I got the nod was just how bad things had gotten under the chief and his old deputy. Four years ago you could hardly say that Detroit had a police department at all. It seemed like everyone was on the take. Internal Affairs was as corrupt as any other squad. I guess things were so bad that even the mayor knew that someone had to do something. He decided I was that someone. No doubt about it. I was his choice.

“What I hadn’t realized was the extent that all crime in the city was drug related. Sixty, maybe seventy-five percent of the burglaries and stickups were addicts raising money to feed their crack habit. Something like half the murders were drug burns or territorial disputes. It seemed to me that if we could put a lid on the drug trade, we’d have everything else under control. That’s when I brought the Mouse into the picture. I created a drug task force and made him commander, reporting directly to me. We’d worked together since our days on the TAC Squad, and I trusted him—then. And if our own little war on drugs didn’t get off to a great start, we didn’t blame each other. We blamed the system. We were undercut, undermanned, but most important of all, we were underfinanced.”

Conroy went on to explain that nothing much could be done about the situation until the Mouse came up with a satchel containing a hundred thousand dollars from the evidence room. A dealer, not much more than a kid, had been successfully prosecuted at Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. The cash taken at the time of his arrest was presented in evidence, along with the bags of cocaine the undercover
cop had sold him, a small transaction by local standards—the dealer was a newcomer in the trade. The Mouse had his eye on that bag of money. He hovered over it as protectively as a vulture over a dying man. He kept it within sight as it was walked back to 1300 Beaubien under guard. ‘And the moment it was returned to the evidence room, before it could be made to disappear, he presented the requisition that Mark Conroy had written out, and walked upstairs with the booty.

That was the beginning of what became known as the W-91 Fund. From it, they paid informers. Informers, as Conroy had told me once before, came high—but they proved productive. Arrests were made. Dealers were brought to trial and convicted. More buy-money was added to the fund. But just about all those who were taken down were beginners or small-time operators, those out of the loop, with no big daddies to protect them. Nevertheless, each new conviction yielded more money for the W-91 Fund. It wasn’t long before it started to add up. To paraphrase the late Senator Everett Dirksen, a hundred thousand here and a couple of hundred thousand there, and pretty soon you’re into some real money.

At this point, I interrupted Mark Conroy. He’d promised details, but I hadn’t gotten enough of them. One, in particular, interested me.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I’ve got a question.”

“All right, what is it?”

“That safe where you kept the money—where did you get it?”

“That’s an interesting point,” said Conroy. “The Mouse and I needed one in a hurry when we grabbed that first hundred thousand, so we got it from the property room. They had three of them down there. I took the one that looked like it was the strongest.”

“Did you change the combination?”

“That was beyond me—and beyond the Mouse at the time. But as we added money to that first grab, it occurred to me that if we got that from the property room, they
probably had the combination on file down there someplace.”

“Good thinking,” I said dryly.

“I’m not as dumb as I look. Anyway, I had a salesman come around, and I bought a good, strong, new Mosler safe. But the funny thing was, that was when the powers-that-be got interested in our little project. The chief came around making inquiries. I told him that the Mouse was keeping records of payouts and pay-ins in code. He seemed satisfied and gave me a slap on the back and told me to keep up the good work. Then one of the bright young attorneys from the mayor’s office dropped by and asked to be briefed on the W-91 Fund. So I did. Then the attorneys wondered if a little publicity might not help things along. He wanted to send someone from the public information office over—maybe a reporter or two. I told him that was the last thing in the world I would want. By the way, Sloan, you might be interested to know that the young attorney left the mayor’s office not long afterward and became an assistant prosecutor. Benjamin Timothy is his name.”

“Uh-huh—the guy who’s now trying the case against you.”

“That’s the one.”

“When was this?”

“Maybe two years ago,” said Conroy, “maybe a little more. By that time, it had become pretty apparent that the reason we weren’t making any real dent in the drug traffic was because the big guys, the major traffickers who bought direct from the cartels in Latin America, had the protection of the mayor. They paid for it. He got a generous cut. He was a working partner in the entire enterprise.”

“Just how did it become apparent?” I was offering him a challenge. He’d never really been specific about any of this. “There’ve been rumors about the mayor for years but no prosecutions. Even the Federal government has kept hands off.”

“Okay, I can give you a very specific instance of the mayor’s protection of one of the major players. We had an airtight case against Big Boy Duckett. You remember? About a year and a half ago?”

“I remember the case from the newspapers, but not the details.”

“All right, this is how it went. Duckett was trying something new—bringing it in from Canada. The word was out in Toronto that we were paying big bucks for hard information. And some Lebanese who was probably a small trafficker himself gave us the word that there was a metric ton of cocaine coming down the St. Lawrence Seaway on a Panamanian freighter—a metric ton!—final destination, Detroit. Maybe he was jealous none of it was coming to him. He had all the right stuff—where it was docking and when, and how the contraband was disguised, everything. We worked very closely with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on this. We had to. And if you think it was easy getting the Mounties to cooperate, well, it wasn’t. But in the end, they not only monitored the off-loading of the contraband in Toronto, they trailed the truck that hauled it west all the way to their side of the Detroit-Windsor Bridge. We picked it up on our side and followed it to a warehouse on the near East Side, down by the river, only about a mile from Manoogian Mansion, by the way. We were there waiting for it. As soon as the truck pulled in, we went after it. There was a small army waiting for us. They resisted. Shots were exchanged, maybe a few hundred rounds, total. Probably the biggest firefight in the history of the Detroit Police Department. We lost one man killed and two wounded, one bad enough he left the department on disability. But we got Big Boy’s pistol in hand, and a metric ton of evidence against him.

“Airtight case, right? Not when it came to trial. It wasn’t that Duckett had such a sharp defense lawyer. The prosecution was just completely inept—purposely, by intention. They were told to lose the case, and they did. The mayor looked after his boy.”

“Something about the search warrant, as I recall,” I put in. “Or that’s how I remember it.”

“Tennis rules! The guy who signed off on the paper was the guy who tried the case. You know who that was? Benjamin Timothy, just six months off the mayor’s staff.”

“Maybe he just isn’t a good trial lawyer. Lots of prosecutors lose cases.” That sounded pretty weak to me, even as I said it.

“He looked pretty good up there in the preliminary hearing. I think you’ll find him plenty tough.”

I sighed. “You’re probably right. I hope it never comes to trial.”

“How can that be arranged?”

I laughed in spite of myself. “It can’t,” I said. “Look, I’m hoping for a miracle or something close to it. You’re the only one who could help yourself, and as long as you’re on suspension, you’re in no position to do that.”

“Explain.”

“All right, I don’t want to sound too pessimistic, but it seems to me that with all the pressure on you from the mayor—and I’ll concede that it looks like that’s where it’s coming from—the only way you’re going to relieve that pressure is by putting greater pressure on the mayor.”

At that, Conroy and LeMoyne Tolliver exchanged looks that could only be described as conspiratorial.

“LeMoyne and I were thinking along those same lines. We’re putting something together that we want to run past you.”

“Go ahead, by all means.”

“Okay, but more background first. After Duckett walked out of court a free man and retired to the Bahamas, it was clear that if we were to make any real impact on drugs and through that on crime in general, we would have to find some way to get at the mayor. He was the disease. The rest, all the rest, were just symptoms.”

“Maybe you’re right, and maybe not. But go on.”

“It seemed that the best way to get at him was through the Mayor’s Squad. These guys are at least supposed to be
cops, after all. Maybe we could find one who was a little digusted by what was going on at Manoogian. We looked them over, romanced a couple, and finally one found us. That seemed a little questionable at first, but he was from a cop family, all the way back to his grandfather in the days of the Purple Gang, And he had a great record before he went on the Mayor’s Squad, so we were at least interested when he approached us and said he’d had it up to here with the mayor and his scams and skims. And then he began feeding us information that proved out—led to arrests. Nothing huge, nothing that even approached the Duckett bust, but good stuff. We were finally satisfied—we had a man on the inside.

“But what I didn’t realize was that we were feeding him information, too, about our intentions and our plans. The Mouse and I were the only ones who dealt with him—and more and more, it was the Mouse who kept contact. In the process, I guess, he got turned around. Who knows what he was offered? So what I’m saying is that our man on the inside turned out to be a double agent, working both sides to his own advantage but mostly for the mayor, and on the mayor’s orders.”

“Who’re we talking about here? Timmerman?”

I surprised Conroy with that, maybe even astonished him. His mouth didn’t fly open. His eyes didn’t widen. But I knew from his silence that I’d gotten to him.

“How did you work that one out?” he asked at last.

“Give me a little credit,” I said. “When I told you that Mary Margaret Tucker had dropped that name, I could tell, even on the telephone, that it hit you pretty hard.”

“It did.”

“And besides, I heard that Timmerman was on the Mayor’s Squad—Sergeant Timmerman, right?”

“You knew he was on the Mayor’s Squad? How did you find out? Did she tell you?”

“No, all I heard from her was the name. I got his connection from what we shall call an independent source. Just because I’m up here in Pickeral Point doesn’t mean I
don’t have a few contacts back in Detroit.” He didn’t say anything to that, and so I continued: “So Timmerman served as a double agent. Maybe he planned the whole thing, too. And if he didn’t, he certainly must have put it into operation. How long has he had your ear? How long has he been working with the Mouse?”

“A year, maybe a little more. He’d been feeding me information right up to the end. It was Timmerman who told me that they had the Mouse stashed at the Whitehall.”

“Knowing that it would do us no good to talk to him, anyway,” I put in. “They must have felt they had him in their pocket after his testimony at the preliminary hearing.”

“Okay, look,” said Conroy, “maybe I’m on suspension, and I’m limited in what I can do, but it doesn’t put me out of the picture entirely. Where they’ve got the Mouse now, he
is
out of the picture. What I’m getting at is this. The task force is still operating independently, or at least some of it is. LeMoyne here brought me something big, very big, that the Mouse doesn’t know about and neither does Timmerman. It’s clean, uncompromised, and I think it’s what we need to put the squeeze on the mayor.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Not with that van down there. Come on, Sloan, let’s take a walk, just the three of us.”

He stood up and Tolliver followed. More than a little confused, I rose from the table and went into the living room after them. There Conroy pulled me close and whispered in my ear: “I’ll need a rag, something soft.”