Chain of Evidence

CHAPTER 18

Standing inside the roadside phone booth, dialing the number, Walter Zeller experienced a parent’s anger. Stupidity, he thought, is an art form in the proper hands. He had never been a parent, but he understood a parent’s frustration well enough.

He collected his strength, preparing himself for the confrontation, annoyed by its necessity, alarmed by the degree of emotional resolve that this required, like dredging up the black muck of the river bottom to clear the way for further passage.

Traffic blew by him on the commercialized strip that could have been Anywhere, USA. Oversized plastic signs declaring DRIVE THRU WINDOW and AMERICA’S FAVORITE; cheap marketing gimmicks like giant anchors perched out front, or a lobster claw reaching for the sky like a church steeple. He felt quite above such fanfare, sick of it, disgusted by the greed, the blatant disregard of aesthetics, and the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for neon, repetitive architecture, and Low Everyday Prices! Sick to death.

Throughout his years of public service, he believed that he had concealed well his sentimentality. Only Lucky had ever seen that side of the otherwise iron-willed sergeant. Yet dialing this number and anticipating the voice on the other end flooded him with such emotions, alarming him with a vulnerability that both relieved and ashamed him. Relieved, because it reminded him of his own humanity. Ashamed, because Walter Zeller was above sniveling about the past. His blunt fingertip hesitated alongside the final digit. An eighteen-wheeler roared past, carrying behind it a train of raised dust and the stench of diesel and burning rubber. Zeller stabbed the button. Fuck it, he thought.

“Dartelli,” the voice answered.

Walter Zeller hesitated, a knot in his throat.

“Hello? I can’t hear you.”

Without introduction, Zeller asked, “Why do it the easy way when there’s a hard way?”

“Sarge?”

Zeller registered the astonishment in Dart’s voice, the fear and concern, his decades of skilled interrogation techniques not lost. “Are they suicides, Ivy?”

Silence as even the kid’s breathing stopped.

“Answer me!” Maintain the upper hand at all times.

“No.”

“Of course not. Good. Very good.”

“I’ve been trying to-”

“Don’t try-do!” he said, purposely interrupting to prevent the kid the completion of even a single thought, keeping him off balance and out of sorts. Maintain control. “They took their own lives, but they’re not suicides, Ivy. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“Don’t get sidetracked with insurance records, for Christ’s sake. What the hell can that accomplish?”

“It was you on the bridge?”

Disappointed that he’d allowed the man a complete sentence, Zeller strung together a series of thoughts and voiced them as a single spoken stream. “I’m your fucking guardian angel, Ivy. I’m watching over you so that you don’t go astray, and believe me, it’s a fucking full-time job with you. What’s happened to you? Making a huge tangle out of something so simple. Over-thinking,” he said, raising a complaint that he had voiced dozens of times. “Making problems instead of solving them. Losing track of the basics. Didn’t you retain anything? For any conviction to stick, the detective needs to be able to connect all the dots himself. That is, unless the snitch is willing to take the witness stand, and I can tell you right fucking now that that is not the direction we’re going-you and me. The basics, damn it all. Didn’t you retain anything? Shit! If the suicides aren’t suicides, and if, on the other hand, these guys all killed themselves, then what the fuck is going on here? Make sense of it, Ivy. Don’t make a mountain of confusion. What about their blood, Ivy? The basics! Sometimes the enemy is within.” He slammed the phone into the cradle, his hand still shaking, though not from the cold.

Things never went as planned, and people were as unpredictable as the weather. Walter Zeller felt the need to take the kid by the shoulders and shake some sense into him-set him straight. He stood in the phone booth looking down at his trembling hands, wondering what was happening to him. How could he let the kid get to him this way? How had he become involved in the first place? Kowalski was the one he had targeted-as dumb as stone, and yet smart enough to let a sleeping dog lie. The truth would out soon enough, all by itself.

Joe Dartelli, the pride and joy of his police career, was another thing entirely. Dartelli, with his college degree and his barnyard sense of where the rat was hiding, was proving nothing but trouble.

I’ll put him in the hospital if I have to, Zeller thought, just like they’re trying to do to me.

He glanced down the street nervously, alert for the familiar Toyota, for the cracked and bent face behind the wheel-the hired knee-breaker he had been outrunning all this time. Outsmarting. Out-thinking.

Looking down once again, he felt relieved to see that his hands had stopped shaking. He was under control again, and for Zeller, control was everything.