The Judgment (27 page)

“We all make mistakes. Looking back, I have to say that the first twenty-five years of my adult life were one big mistake.”

He responded with a thin smile, walked on a bit, and then: “You look at me, my color—not black and not quite white—and you can see the source of my problem. Or maybe I should say the source of my confusion. My mother was white. She was tough, and strong, and capable, and she gave me a real sense of my own worth. She never told me who my father was, but she never allowed any doubt in my mind that I was welcome in her life. We got through all of that illegitimate shit better than any mother and child ever did. I really believe that. I grew up right up the river in Port Huron, but I knew she was from Detroit, had family there she never knew. It was just the two of us, but that was all the family I ever needed. She made a good living for us keeping books for one of the shipping companies up there, and she sent me to college, Michigan State, and died while I was in my senior year—cancer—and she never even let me know that she was sick.

“But out of college and with her dead,” he continued, “I headed straight for Detroit and the police academy. I had some idea I was going to investigate those relatives, find them, confront them, and give them holy hell for what I supposed they’d done to her. I found them, all right, her mother and father in Southfield and two brothers in Royal

Oak, but by that time I was getting on with my own life, and they just weren’t worth bothering with, the hell with them.”

“Good decision,” I put in at that point.

“They were just ordinary people,” he said, “and she was probably as dissatisfied with them as they were with her. But I have to say, Sloan, that the way she brought me up, good as it was for me as a boy, it didn’t really prepare me for life in Detroit.”

“Why? How do you mean?”

“I mean that she brought me up thinking that color didn’t matter and I found out in Detroit that it did.”

“That’s kind of an understatement.”

“So I guess I chose to be black, while before that I chose to be white, or maybe not consider it at all. I married black—a woman even more ambitious than I was, if that’s possible. My partners were black. And if the overwhelming majority of those we pursued and arrested were black, well, that sort of rounded out the equation.

“But then a funny thing happened. While I was on a TAC Squad operation, one night ten years ago, Ralph Smerka saved my life.”

“The Mouse.”

“Yeah. He didn’t just pull me back or push my head down, he stepped in front of me and took one in the gut, one that would have hit me, or anyone else of normal size, right in the chest. So I was his for life, which made us more or less best friends. And he was white. So I had to sort that out. Timmerman came along and volunteered his services. And then Mary Margaret turned me inside out, and … Well, you know what happened, or you must have a pretty good idea.”

Conroy was as close to sounding human as I had ever heard him. His honesty was almost unsettling.

“We’ll work out the details later,” I said.

“Betrayal is what happened,” he said, his voice firm.

“And it looks to you like a conspiracy.”

“Something like that. Call it an unorganized conspiracy.”

“Timmerman’s white?”

“That’s right. So now I’m thinking black again, and LeMoyne is my man. I do trust him, Sloan. He’s a crude, tough, mean, old-fashioned cop, just the kind I’m not—or so I’ve told myself ever since I entered the academy. But he’s on my side, and he’s come up with a way to help me out of this mess I’m in. Listen, you think I’m blind to all the difficulties with this scheme of his? Certainly it’s got holes in it. But right now it’s the best shot I’ve got, so I owe it to LeMoyne and to that cop who’s baby-sitting the pigeon to give it a try. They’ve stuck their necks out for me. I owe them.”

“And you feel I owe them, too?”

“That’s for you to say. Your presence tonight would be appreciated.”

It was my turn to remain silent for a while, quite a while, as we continued our amble down River Road. Traffic seemed to have picked up, cars whizzing back and forth in both directions, people rushing to get through their Saturday errands before the big game began. Fully half the houses in town would be shut down tight through the afternoon, their occupants settled before television sets, participating global village-style in a fall ritual, Michigan versus Michigan State.

There was a little park at the next corner. I led Conroy off the sidewalk and down a path to a bench on one side of it. This had been the only vacant lot there on River Road. A few years before, the town of Pickeral Point had acquired the property and done a little to improve it—put in grass, some playground equipment—and christened it the George Romney Memorial Park. On this raw November morning, it was empty except for two kids, about eight and nine, playing on the swings. They were bundled up against the cold, but from what I could see, they looked like brothers. Neither of them paid us any attention.

Conroy gave me one of his thin smiles as we sat down
on the park bench. From there we had a close view of the river. We watched a freighter northward bound. There was something almost majestic about it—an object that big, so close, moving along so slowly. He seemed to sense it, too. We both kept quiet until it had passed out of sight. Only then did he speak up.

“Let me tell you a story, Sloan,” he said. “It’s one that you’ve heard before, read in the newspapers, but I’ve got a few comments on it you ought to hear.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

“You remember some years ago, you were still in Detroit at the time, there was a van found downtown on a riverside parking lot? Well, it wasn’t exactly ‘found.’ Nine-one-one got an anonymous call telling us it was there and that we should take a look inside. I was working late that night—I worked late a lot of nights back then—and so I went out on it with the Mouse. We weren’t the first on the scene. A patrol car in the area had been dispatched right away. But when we pulled up, the two uniform cops were still arguing about opening up the back doors of the van to take a look inside. They’d taken their time because one of them thought that what was inside might be a bomb. Not a wild idea at all. He wanted to call out the bomb squad. Well, I took responsibility. I had a hunch, and I was acting on that hunch, and since I was still playing supercop, I sent everyone back behind the patrol car and opened up the van myself. You know what I found, don’t you? You remember?”

These rhetorical halts were getting on my nerves. I signaled for him to get on with his story. But yes, he was right. I remembered what was in that van. There was no one in Detroit who didn’t.

“The doors weren’t locked.” He seemed a little obsessed, as if he had to get this out, no matter what it cost him. Cops have these stories, and they have to tell them. “All I did was give the doors a quick pull and jump back, like maybe I was afraid of a bomb, too. But there was no bomb, just a bad smell. The light was bad. I called for a
light, and one of the patrol cops shined his flashlight inside. At first, I thought it was a joke. I thought maybe somebody had stolen a butcher’s van and phoned it in as sort of a prank. It was a pile of raw meat, cut and stacked loose on the floor of the van. But then we saw the heads. Just tossed off to one side, two men and a woman. The raw meat, it was body parts—legs, arms, torsos, a pelvis separated from a torso, hands, feet.

“The cop holding the light let out a yell and dropped it. His partner threw up all over the Mouse, and me, I just picked up the flashlight and looked again. I thought I’d seen everything, but I’d never seen anything like that. And of course it got better afterward. You remember, don’t you, Sloan?”

It was a rhetorical question.

“It turned out that it had all been done with a chain saw. The woman, at least, had been shot dead first. That was the coroner’s report. We got IDs on them and knew what it was about—drugs, crack in this case. And knowing the victims, we had a pretty good idea who was responsible. It looked to be territorial—kids trying to bust into the big-time; the oldest of them was just twenty-two. But where had it taken place? Where was the butcher shop? The van was clean, stolen the night before from out in Birmingham someplace. So we had to find the crime scene. And what happened? The janitor up at the Democratic Party Club called us up and said somebody sure made a mess in the basement. That was what they’d used for their slaughterhouse.

“The Democratic Party Club.” Conroy’s voice was getting tighter. “Now, you tell me, Sloan, who is the head of the Democratic Party in Wayne County?”

“Are you going to say that the mayor was present, that he witnessed it, that he ordered it?” I asked. “That’s a very big jump. Too big. The way I remember it, the building was closed that night. Anybody with a key could have gotten in and used the basement, and just about every registered Democrat in the county had a key. I exaggerate, of
course, but there were a lot of them floating around. And who knows how many unauthorized copies there were?”

He stared at me. Then he said slowly, as if trying to reason with a child, “I’m saying that they couldn’t have used the basement of the Democratic Party Club without the mayor’s say-so. I’m convinced, I’ve always been convinced, of his complicity in this.”

“It would seem a lot more reasonable,” I said, “that they did it there to embarrass him, to make people think exactly what you’re thinking. It looks to me like it was a clear shot at the mayor, Conroy.”

“Oh, a Republican plot—is that it?”

“Don’t be absurd.” He
was
being absurd, of course, ridiculing my effort to be rational about something about which he had become blindly emotional. I looked at him—no more than a couple of feet separated us on the park bench—and I wondered what had happened to that supremely confident man who had walked into my office at the beginning of the month. Though not exactly wild eyed, there was something altogether too intense about him. He had the squirrely look of a true believer that made you want to back away fast. It revealed what he’d kept hidden before: Conroy was a man with a monkey on his back.

“You hate him,” I said, “don’t you?”

He took that, gave it a moment’s consideration, and said, “Yes, I guess I do.” It was as if it had come clear to him for the first time. He leaned back on the bench and thought about it some more. “If I could bring the mayor down, send him to prison for the rest of his life, then I wouldn’t mind doing time myself.”

“Then you won’t deal with him? You just want to make a case against him and hand it over to the Feds?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought it through yet.” At that moment, Mark Conroy, who once carried himself like a cock of the walk, looked like a small boy who couldn’t find his mother at the shopping mall.

Getting up from the bench, he walked slowly off toward the river. I watched him go, feeling pity for him for the
first time. There was a walkway above the riverbank with a protective guardrail that ran the length of the park. He didn’t stop until he reached it. He stood with his back to me, leaning against the guardrail, gazing off across the river to Canada. Time passes slowly when you’re sitting alone like that, so I don’t really know how long I left Conroy to himself. Not long, probably a couple of minutes. The boys had left the swings for the slides; they were climbing up the slippery descent, falling back, laughing, climbing up again. At last I rose and went to join Conroy.

By the time I reached him, another freighter was moving up the river. We watched it together. It wouldn’t be long before the big boats disappeared until spring.

Conroy spoke up. “You know, when I was a kid in Port Huron I used to go down to the riverfront and just watch those big things go by. When I was eleven or twelve, I spent a lot of Saturdays like that. I used to think it’d be great to work on one of those boats. I’d go around the world and see it all.”

“A kid could have worse ambitions,” I said.

“I told my mother about it. You know what she said? ‘Not good enough. You were meant to be somebody.’”

“And so she was right. You are somebody.”

“Yeah, I’m a cop.”

He didn’t look bitter. He looked thoughtful.

“I’ve got a question for you.”

“What is it?”

“Did Mary Margaret Tucker know the combination to the safe in your office?”

He took a deep breath. “I know I told you,” he said, “that the Mouse was in charge of the safe. He kept the records, and he went into it for the payouts, though I okayed each one. So on the books, there were only two of us who knew the combination, but in practice only one of us used it. The Mouse. I don’t think I had occasion to open it up more than three or four times in as many years. Because of that, I had a hard time remembering the combination
to the safe. I guess I don’t have a very good memory for figures.”

“I’m not sure anybody could keep a safe combination in his head under those circumstances. I know I couldn’t.”

“Once or twice I had to ask the Mouse to open it for me, which was annoying, so I decided to write the combination down someplace. What I did was put it on a card in my Rolodex. I didn’t want to make it too obvious, so I put down the name Henry Mosler and entered the combination, made it look more or less like a telephone number.”

“Seems like a good idea.”

“As my secretary, Mary Margaret had access to my Rolodex, used it all the time. She must have noticed the card and figured it out because once she made some sort of reference, I forget exactly what it was. I think she said someone was as rich as Henry Mosler, something like that, and gave me a wink and a big laugh.”

“What was your reaction?”

“None. I didn’t say anything and didn’t even wink back.”

“It sounds like she knew the combination, all right, or could have written it down herself.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” He nodded. “She must have known it.” Then he dug into the pocket of his jacket and produced an index card. “But here,” he said, offering it to me, “I brought a little present for you. You can ask her about it yourself.”

I took the card. On it were Mary Margaret Tucker’s name, address, and telephone number. I was surprised. I wondered how long he’d had them.