The Shadow Man (33 page)

‘He was there. He saw the killing. He ran away. What more do you need to know, Espy? There’s your precious proffer.’

‘You mean this low-life witnessed a murder then robbed

the victim before the neighbors got there? Is that what you’re saying?’

She was unable to conceal the astonishment in her voice.

‘You figure it out,’ Alter replied with a shrug. ‘Life sure is strange.’

They were all silent for a moment.

‘Nice seeing you, prosecutor,’ Thomas Alter said. ‘You get back to me, okay? We’re not going anywhere. And now you know the score.’

Espy Martinez stared hard at Thomas Alter, letting her eyes burrow into his, until he finally let his self-satisfied grin slide from his lips.

‘You think I’d cut this piece of garbage a deal after he almost killed a cop and almost killed me? You think he’s gonna walk on those charges?’

Alter sat quietly, infuriatingly, in his chair, as if assessing both what she’d said and how angry she was.

‘I don’t think anything, Espy. All I think is that Mr Jefferson knows something that you’re gonna want to know, and the price of that knowledge is steep. But then again, the cost of enlightenment is always high. See? I can be a philosopher.’

‘That’s right. The price is right up there. You see? I’m a fucking philosopher too,’ Leroy Jefferson cackled, although the last words were twisted with a sudden twinge of pain that made the corner of his lip twitch.

‘Better not price yourself right out of the market, Tommy,’ Martinez said briskly.

‘Please shut the door on your way out,’ the public defender replied.

As usual, the summons to Abe Lasser’s office was written in red ink to underscore the urgency of the request. All of

Lasser’s summonses were urgent, she thought, whether they really were or not. She quickly flipped through her other messages, looking for one from Walter Robinson, but there were none. For a second she managed enough distance to wonder whether she was anxious to hear from her lover or from the detective working the case. She didn’t know the answer to this question but suspected that each desire hummed like a tuning fork within her, each a different tone, but equally insistent.

Lasser was standing by his window when she entered his office, staring out over the city.

‘You know, during the riots, I was standing right up here, right at this window, and I could see all the way to the tire store, the big discount one on Twenty-first Avenue. I had some binoculars and I even saw the guys set the place on fire. They were running right around the side and then they stopped and they piled up some debris and I saw them toss some gasoline on it. Like some sort of demented troop of evil urban Boy Scouts.’ He pointed and laughed, although not at anything particularly funny. ‘It was four blocks away, and it seemed like something I was watching on television.’

He turned from the window.

‘Damndest thing,’ he continued. ‘These little antlike figures way down there, scurrying about, torching that big old warehouse. Thing burned for almost two days. And here I was, chief felony prosecutor for the county, witnessing the whole rotten thing from my window and not able to do a damn thing about it.’

She nodded, thinking: There’s going to be a point somewhere.

‘Like watching an accident happen, but worse, because this wasn’t an accident, it was a crime. Much worse. Deliberate, destructive. No act of God. An act of man.’

He stepped away from the window.

‘Acts of God, we leave to higher authorities, Espy. But acts of man, those are precisely why we’re here. They’re our job.’ He smiled. ‘I sound like a philosopher,’ he said.

‘Tommy Alter said the same thing to me, barely an hour ago.’

Lasser grinned. ‘Really? Stands to reason, I guess.’

He moved behind his desk. He had removed his suit coat, and she saw that his white dress shirt was tapered to his waist, obviously tailored. She kept quiet while Lasser picked up the copy of the lie detector report.

‘I hate these fucking things,’ he said. He dropped it to the desktop as if it were infectious. The pages flapped momentarily. ‘So, Espy, do you feel like you’re standing at a window about to watch a crime take place and unable to do anything about it? If this scumbag Leroy Jefferson walks, it will be a crime. As sure as I’m standing here now, it will be just like an arson. It will be like putting a match to some flammable bit of material. Sure, he may smolder and smoke for some time. A week. A month. Maybe six months. But then he will go and do precisely what this damn report says he didn’t do: kill some harmless little old lady. You understand that, Espy?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘You’ve met Mr Jefferson. What is the prognosis for him becoming a contributing member of society?’

These last words were spoken with unbridled sarcasm.

‘The prognosis is dim, sir.’

Abe Lasser burst out laughing. ‘Dim. Yes, I’d say. More like nonexistent.’

He sat down suddenly and immediately rocked back in his chair. ‘Maybe, Espy, we’ll get lucky. Perhaps fucking Leroy Jefferson will kill some other scumbag instead of some tax-paying, God-fearing, innocent member of our

community, though I doubt it, because the slimeball seems to like robbing little old ladies, and I would suspect that he will return to that profession just as quickly as he can.’

He hesitated, then added, ‘Even if he is limping along thanks to your twenty-five caliber arrest. So, tell me, Espy, do you feel lucky? Is there some little Hispanic leprechaun guiding the Martinez family fortunes, set to deliver some good luck in your direction? Or perhaps a fairy godmother that will sing bibbidy-bobbity-boo, wave her magic wand, and send Leroy Jefferson off to kill one of his own ilk, instead of someone’s beloved grandmother?’

‘I don’t think so, sir.’

Lasser spun about in his chair. ‘Ahh, such a pity.’

He stopped and bent toward the desk, poking at the lie detector test. ‘Got to admit, fucking Tommy Alter knows what he’s doing. Gets our own man to run the fucking test. A nice touch, that. I’ve got to remember that, you know, so that the day that Tommy comes in here, hat in hand, we get a little payback. Just between us philosophers.’ He swiveled about, leaning back, placing his hands behind his head.

‘So what’re you going to do, Espy?’ Lasser asked abruptly.

‘I’m sorry, what am I—’

‘Right. What are you going to do? Your case. Your decision. I’m merely here to, uh, assist you.’

Espy Martinez felt her skin flush. ‘I thought.’..’

‘You thought I’d make the call?’

‘Yes.’

He shook his head. ‘No. Your case. Your call. I only present certain guidelines. Like this: Jefferson is charged with two counts of attempted murder for shooting at you and at that detective. Seems to me that those transactions have nothing to do with Sophie Millstein’s murder.’

‘Yes.’

‘But on the other hand, an actual murder, especially a heinous one, such as Sophie Millstein’s, well, that case takes significant precedence over a shootout, even one as dramatic as Mr Jefferson’s.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you, Espy?’

She could feel a solitary anger winding up within her, and she did not think she could control it from spilling forth. ‘I see that it is my butt on the line.’

Lasser nodded. ‘Inelegantly put, but accurate.’

She breathed in harshly. It seemed as if the office was suddenly hot. ‘If Jefferson provides us with Sophie’s killer

‘Then you’re a hero, with the headlines to prove it.’

‘But if it is all bullshit and I cut him a deal and then he goes out and kills someone …’

‘Then the news stories won’t be quite so laudatory, will they?’

‘No. They won’t’

Lasser continued to rock in the chair. ‘It would be better if Walter Robinson could make a case without Jefferson. Any chance of that?’

‘I don’t know. It’s like starting from scratch. I don’t even think he’s got a lead. We were all set to start putting Jefferson in the electric chair, when it all went to hell with that report.’

‘Nasty little device, the polygraph machine. Makes everything gray and fuzzy. Not clear-cut and pristine.’

‘So, I’m not sure what Walter can come up with.’

‘Trail is cold already. Have you ever seen the statistics on solving homicides? Every day that passes without an arrest…’

The chief prosecutor held up his hand, then, as he spoke, he started to curve it downward, like measuring the

fall off a cliff. ‘Maybe that partial thumbprint the killer left behind?’

‘I believe he’s already run it through the computer with negative results. I think he did that first.’

‘So Sophie’s killer isn’t a criminal who’s been fingerprinted recently. That’s a bad sign.’

‘Apparently not.’

Lasser continued, ‘Tough sledding, then. Of course, the converse is true for Tommy Alter and Leroy Jefferson. If Robinson can somehow, magically, get headed in the right direction, well, then the value of some murderous junkie’s testimony diminishes rapidly, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d like to see that,’ Lasser said, tilting backward, as if daydreaming, his eyes for a moment sweeping the ceiling. ‘Like to see old complacent Tommy Alter’s face when we tell him we don’t need Mr Leroy Jefferson. That would give me pleasure.’

‘Jefferson claims to be an eyewitness to the killing.’

‘He does? Ah well, would that all the witnesses in the world were saints, virgins, or Boy Scouts. That makes it sticky, doesn’t it?’

‘How so?’

‘Well, that would be a difficult explanation to make to the Millstein family and to some whore scribbler over at the Miami Herald who finds out about all this and who calls us up on the phone one day with a uniquely nasty set of questions - you know, having to admit that the state rejected an eyewitness’s testimony because he was, shall we say, unsavory? I don’t think that particular explanation would look good in print.’

‘No sir. Me neither.’

‘They will find out, Espy. You know that, don’t you? The Herald will find out. The bastards always do.’ He

cleared his throat. ‘A tricky situation, Espy. Tricky.’ Lasser glanced down at a file on his desk. He picked it up and thumbed through it almost haphazardly, as if distracted. ‘You’ll let me know what you decide to do, won’t you?’

She kept her anger under check. ‘Yes sir. As soon as I make a decision.’

‘Don’t hesitate.’

‘No sir.’

‘And, Espy, keep one thing in mind as you work your way through the minefield. One priority….’

‘What is that, sir?’

‘We find, we prosecute, we convict, Sophie Millstein’s killer. I made that promise. To a fucking rabbi, of all people. What could I have been thinking? Bad lesson there, Espy. If you’re going to promise something that may be well-nigh impossible, better make that promise to someone who doesn’t count for much either in this life and especially not in the next. So, unfortunate as it seems, I mean to keep that promise.’ He looked up from the papers on his desk quickly and jabbed a finger at her. ‘You’re going to keep it for me.’

Espy Martinez nodded, but felt only slippery black ice within.

Lasser laughed, but the sound only slightly diminished the tension in the room.

‘Lighten up, Espy,’ he said, although she realized there was nothing to lighten up about. ‘This is what makes criminal law so intriguing.’ He smiled. ‘It has a certain existential quality to it. Life gambles, I like to call them. It is sometimes like we’re caught up in a game of high-speed chicken, souped-up situations racing headlong right at each other, wondering who’s going to flinch first, played out in suits and ties, in wood-trimmed courtrooms, with rules and judges and all the trappings of civilization, but

where we’re really talking about something almost primitive, something ancient, aren’t we?’

‘What would that be?’ she asked bitterly. She felt utterly alone.

‘That would be justice,’ Lasser replied offhandedly.

About an hour after beginning to listen to the two old people tell him a story so hard to imagine that even the jaded homicide detective within him rebelled, Walter Robinson held up his hand, bringing a halt to their conversation. He realized he needed a moment to think, a moment to absorb what he’d heard, and so he suggested that he bring them all coffee, or a soft drink.

Frieda Kroner scowled. ‘We drink coffee while he plans!’ she said angrily. Rabbi Rubinstein added quickly, ‘I think we should continue.’

Robinson glanced over at Simon Winter, who had said little since they’d all returned to the Beach Homicide offices. But the old detective shook his head. Robinson stared hard at the older man, who realized in that second that he was being asked for help, and so, quickly, changed his mind. ‘Maybe a soda,’ Winter said.

The rabbi and Frieda Kroner swiveled in their seats at the sound of his voice. Frieda Kroner frowned and started to say something, but the rabbi diplomatically shushed her before the words tumbled out. ‘Perhaps coffee. With sugar and milk,’ he said, and the old woman at his side

reluctantly nodded. ‘Two sugars,’ she muttered. ‘To put sweetness back in my life.’

‘All right,’ Walter Robinson nodded. ‘Just take five. I’ll be right back.’

He left them all sitting in one of the interview rooms, walking swiftly out into the corridor. For a moment he felt an immense exhaustion sweep over him, and he leaned back against a wall, closing his eyes. He wanted to blank his imagination, but could not. For a long, spinning second, he found himself wondering what it must have been like, packed tightly into a cattle car, the press of people choking away his breath. Work Makes Free, he thought suddenly. He opened his eyes and wheezed like a man at the end of a long run.

From down the corridor he heard the sound of a young woman crying. He welcomed the distraction. It was a long, steady sound of someone slowly sliding down grief’s slope, not urgent, but desperate. He knew the case; a twenty-one-year-old mother of three small children, the oldest being five, had left them unattended in her small apartment while she went to the corner store for diapers and groceries. She was Nicaraguan, and had only been in the country for a few months - which is to say, just long enough for her husband to disappear, and not long enough to find any friends who might help her out with babysitting - and the rattrap that she lived in was a place that would never show up on any of the Chamber of Commerce’s idyllic photographs of bikinied, suntanned, happy-go-lucky Miami Beach. At the young woman’s apartment,