Chain of Evidence

CHAPTER 8

When Abby Lang signaled Dart over to her car window, he immediately sensed that she was bringing new trouble, and began plotting to avoid whatever it was that she wanted of him. And yet, at the same time, he felt a need to monitor her. He didn’t want her wandering too far afield.

She told him, “Kowalski’s witness has agreed to talk to me.” She handed him the address. Perhaps it was the combination of her blond hair and blue eyes, or her flawless skin that took a decade off her age, but she emanated an eager, youthful enthusiasm that rumbled from within her like a pot boiling. To others it might have come across as a naivete, but to Dart it felt more like a concentration of energy-as if she were a battery of sorts, and that battery partially discharged when he met eyes with it.

Autumn was not far off, and the first signs of it frosted the edges of some of the leaves with color, and the air smelled of it, and the sun’s rays felt different-things no longer shined, they glowed. He wondered why he had noticed none of this until now.

“It’s just north of Bellevue Square projects,” she cautioned. A bad neighborhood, he thought.

“This is not the best time of day for that area.”

The projects were safest from sunrise until eleven in the morning, because the gangs were late-night phenomena and the kids slept late-drugged, hung over, exhausted.

Abby responded, “Tell me about it. But she’s willing to talk, so I’m going.”

“One block north of Bellevue Square? A white woman? Alone? Are you kidding?”

“Is that a sexist, racist, comment, Detective?”

“I wouldn’t go in there alone,” he stated honestly.

“Well, then, I’ll keep you company,” she declared with a wry grin, leaning away from him and popping open the passenger door.

“No, no, no,” Dart protested, standing his ground.

“Get in,” she said, glancing beyond him at the gathering of patrolmen standing by the head-quarter’s front door, “or I’ll make a scene.”

They met eyes, and he sensed that she meant it.

He found himself walking in front of the car and climbing in alongside of her. “This is a bad idea,” he warned her.

“Live a little,” said Abby Lang.

Lang’s blond hair whipped in the wind of the open window. He caught the silhouette of her tiny nose in profile and the elegant, even graceful line to her chin. “Do you have kids?” Dart asked. Where had that come from? he wondered.

“Three.”

“How is it? The family life?”

She glanced over at him and glared. Her blouse ruffled and billowed. “It’s the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened to me. One part joy, one part chaos. Highly recommended.” He sensed little or no sarcasm in her.

“Married?”

“Once upon a time. Only it didn’t work out that way-like the fairy tales, I mean.”

The palms of his hands went damp; he felt nervous.

“Are you flirting with me, Dartelli?” She looked over and grinned.

“What?” he asked incredulously. “No,” he answered lamely.

She shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, well.”

They turned right and drove into the heart of the north end. They rolled up their windows and Abby turned on the air, and Dart checked to make sure all the doors were locked. White people rarely entered the north or south end-not without a blue uniform-and the residents of the projects rarely ventured into the downtown core. If the gangs crossed north to south, there was bloodshed. Three separate cities co-existed poorly, side by side. The police refereed.

“Do you like ice cream?” she asked him.

This question was so far from his thoughts, Dartelli took a moment to answer. “Who doesn’t like ice cream?”

“What flavor?” She added, “And don’t say vanilla.”

“Vanilla.”

“Damn it all.”

“I can be a major disappointment,” he apologized.

“Yeah? And you think you’re alone in that?”

“Meaning?”

She smiled that self-contented smile of hers and angled her head toward the air-conditioning vent, enjoying the cold breeze. She addressed the windshield. “Chocolate frozen yogurt with raspberry sauce.”

“Maybe I am flirting,” he announced honestly.

“We’re only talking about ice cream. Rest easy.” A few blocks later, she asked, “What was Ginny’s flavor?”

“Mint chip.”

“I hate mint chip,” she proclaimed.

“Yeah, me too,” he said, grinning.

“I kinda figured that,” she said. “Just by the way you said it.”

Passing the Bellevue Square projects it occurred to Dartelli that these kinds of living conditions did not belong in a city in central Connecticut, in the United States of America. It seemed unimaginable that this kind of barren wasteland of urban decay could be but a scant few minutes from the city’s revitalized downtown. Bellevue Square looked so much like a prison that it wasn’t too surprising that many of its teen residents ended up in one. Decrepit, shell-shocked buildings; storefronts boarded up with graffiti encrusted plywood; sidewalk curbs ankle deep in litter. And not an aluminum can in sight.

Blacks and Hispanics attempted to stay cool on front stoops, curbs, and perched in open windows. A wasteland, like something from a futuristic novel. Dart took this all personally. The system had failed miserably. To drive through the projects was to experience total despair. He felt it in the pit of his stomach.

“Park it where we can keep an eye on it,” Dart suggested as they neared the address.

“Point taken.”

If the car were identified as belonging to two white people, it had a life expectancy of about ten minutes. Only the stenciled announcement POLICE, which Abby placed on the dash, offered them any hope of returning to the vehicle and finding it driveable. And that was no guarantee.

Abigail Lang and Joe Dart climbed a cement staircase under the glare of a bare sixty-watt bulb, along a plaster wall scarred from an endless stream of furniture being moved up and down these flights.

Entering the apartment, Dartelli pulled off his jacket and unfastened his collar button and reached for his handkerchief to mop his forehead.

Lewellan Page was a twelve-year-old black girl, wiry thin and bug-eyed, with small budding breasts stabbing at her tight T-shirt. Dart met eyes with her, smiled at her, but faced with a cold, expressionless stare, immediately saw her not as a child but as a victim. Abby clearly saw this too.

On the drive over, having never met her, never seen her in person, a very savvy Abigail Lang had described Lewellan Page down to her long, sinewy legs and high cheekbones-this because she fit so perfectly the description of Gerry Law’s former victims. Realizing that there were at least another dozen Lewellan Pages in and around this same neighborhood filled Dart with a sadness that manifested itself inside of him as a painful silence. No longer a child. Not yet a woman. Lewellan Page blinked up at him with something like terror in her eyes: Perhaps to her all men were Gerald Lawrence.

The girl took a chair at a black enamel kitchen table. Her mother was still at work, which was awkward for Dart, because they couldn’t use anything the girl said without her mother’s advance permission to interview her. She said she did not have a father, which hurt Dart: She did not know the difference between having and knowing. Her brother was out on the streets somewhere. The one-bedroom apartment was immaculately clean, though spare of furnishings. The small green couch and gray overstuffed chair in the claustrophobic sitting room were trained on a television. The pillow and folded blanket indicated that someone slept on the couch-probably the brother, who no doubt came and went. The apartment door had four heavy-duty locks on it and a police bar. The kitchen window near the fire escape had been boarded up and three pieces of wide metal strapping bolted to the inside.

One look at her living conditions, this young girl home alone, and it was not difficult to imagine the befriending tactics of a Gerald Lawrence. As the three of them began to skirt the inquiry, Lang expertly creating a rapport with the girl, Dart was struck by the girl’s maturity, and it occurred to him that Kowalski was wrong to distrust her statement because of age.

Prompted for what she had seen, Lewellan was forthright, showing Abby and Dart how, from her kitchen window, a person could see down into both the dirt parking area behind Lawrence’s Battles Street tenement, and a pair of windows that she claimed belonged to the dead man’s apartment.

“Did you know Gerry Law, Lewellan?” Abby asked.

The girl looked down at the chipped linoleum floor and nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, “I did.”

“And did you like him?”

The girl shrugged, but she was clearly uncomfortable, even frightened.

“Did he like you?” Abby asked, accustomed to such questioning, though Dart felt squeamish.

“Sort of,” the girl answered.

Dart did not want to be here for this. He wondered why he had bothered to come here at all, why Abby had dragged him into this, and he thought that maybe it was emotional punishment, a way to insure that he would not take a way out, not drop the suicides the way he felt tempted to. A few weeks and both David Stapleton and Gerald Lawrence would be little more than a pair of files collecting dust in the records room.

Abby’s eyes flashed darkly at Dart. She seemed to read his thoughts, and she did not approve. You’re not going anywhere, they said. Help me out here!

“Tell us what you saw,” Dart requested gently. He did not want any more of her case history. He did not want confirmation that this small girl had been locked up with Gerald Lawrence for even an afternoon. Dart reached for his collar and realized he had already unbuttoned it; he sucked for air, suddenly claustrophobic.

The girl’s large brown eyes begged at Dart, and yet she was scared of him. “It was some old car. Blue, maybe. Gray.” She shrugged. She was bone thin. Much too pretty. Too real for Joe Dart at the moment. He wanted out of there. “Old, you know. Come around back here and park. Big man get out. White man, you know. He go up the back stairs there,” she said, pointing in the direction of the outside.

Dart moved to the window. He didn’t want to hear this. He said, “It was late. It would have been dark.”

“No, not dark. The light come out of them windows down there. It’s plenty bright enough.” She studied Dart. “You think I be lying, same as that other man,” she said, referring to Kowalski.

Abby glanced up at Dart condescendingly and then said to the girl, “You saw a white man get out of his car-a blue car-and climb those back stairs?”

“Big man. Yes, ma’am. Gray maybe-the car.”

“And what did you do then, Lewellan?” Dart asked, hoping to discover some inconsistency that might invalidate her as a witness and at the same time explain why Kowalski had left out her statement. Hope built inside him that Abby’s instincts were right: perhaps the connection was Kowalski, not Zeller. What a pleasure it would be to bring down Roman Kowalski.

“I watched,” the girl answered. “The Man come sneaking around our alley late at night, and I figure somebody gonna get arrested, maybe kilt.” She nodded at Dart, and he felt a chill down to his feet. Bellevue Square entertainment-arrests and shootings. Said with excitement, as if this window were just another television screen.

Dart considered the possibilities. Gerald Lawrence could have been a dealer, his white visitor a customer. Kowalski could know something about that, having been Narco once. The buyer could have been a cop, Dart realized, looking for Kowalski’s motivation. A cop buying drugs near Bellevue Square, or performing a shakedown was just the kind of information that Kowalski would attempt to keep quiet. If he handled it on his own, if he hushed it up, he could protect a fellow officer and pick up some chits to barter later in his career.

“The white man was upstairs about five minutes,” Abby repeated.

“Yeah, and no shooting.” She told Dart, “My mama tell me when there a shooting to get under a table. Head down and under a table.”

Five minutes was enough time to make a buy and get back down to the car, Dart thought. It didn’t seem to him near enough time to fake a suicide. He experienced another wave of relief-he had jumped to conclusions by considering Zeller. Guilt, he thought, is a form of illness.

He looked at Abby and saw sadness. Someone so young, her eyes said to him. Someone innocent. And innocence, he thought, is like a balloon-once punctured, it’s gone. There is no making it whole again. No making it well. His mother had stolen a different innocence from him; he felt empathy for this young girl.

“What time of night was this, Lewellan?” Abby asked.

“Between eleven and eleven-thirty.”

“You were up that late?” Dart asked. He wondered if this was a possible crack in her story.

“I don’t sleep so good. My mama reads to me after the news is over, then maybe I sleep for a little while.”

“Why don’t you sleep well?” Abby asked.

“Bad dreams.”

By the name of Gerald Lawrence, Dart thought.

He glanced at Abby. How could a person volunteer to work Sex Crimes? How could she live with this day after day?

Abby asked the inevitable question, and as it registered, Dart looked away. “Did Gerry Law ever ask you over to his place?”

“I don’t know.”

“We won’t tell your mother,” Abby promised.

She knows exactly what to say, Dart thought.

He looked back as Lewellan Page shrugged and focused her attention on the cracked linoleum again. She nodded sheepishly. “He had bunnies,” she said. “White bunnies.”

Dart felt a stinging in his eyes, and caught himself with fists clenched. Why bother asking this? he wondered. He didn’t want to hear any of this. But then he realized how important a question it was-perhaps enough animosity and hatred toward Lawrence had built so that a neighbor had killed the man and made it look like a hanging. Maybe there was no white man involved at all. Maybe Kowalski had discovered the hint of a murder and decided a scum like Lawrence wasn’t worth the taxpayer’s money.

Abby’s face held an expression of infinite patience and compassion. Dart admired her; his own face probably held a look of horror. He could see in the young girl’s fear and hesitation that she had indeed been in Lawrence’s lair, had petted those bunnies. A victim.

Attempting to fend off her confirmation-not wanting to hear it-he said impatiently, “Well, you’ve certainly been a big help.” God help him, he would not bring this girl downtown. He no longer cared about Kowalski’s missing pages. Let it go.

But for Abby this was simply another investigation, another case; she had seen dozens of girls like Lewellan Page. She would not allow Dart to close the questioning. “Are they nice bunnies? Cute bunnies?” she asked.

The girl nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Lewellan, did you visit Gerry Law that night?”

“At night? No way. Only when Mama’s at work. Mama don’t like Gerry none. Mama don’t want me seeing the bunnies.” She asked Dart, “You know what happened to them bunnies now that Gerry is dead?”

Dart spun around and left the room, his throat constricted, his vision blurred.

Kill all the Gerry Laws you can find, and there would still be more, he thought. He wanted to change this girl’s life, to turn back the clock.

“Abby,” he called out, hoping to end this.

But he heard her voice from the other room as she asked softly, “Do you think you might recognize this white man if you saw him again?”

Dart didn’t hear an answer. He could picture those thin shoulders lifting into that shrug, the eyes expressive with fear. There was a picture of Jesus Christ on the wall and another of the pope by the door to the bathroom. There was a picture in Dart’s head of Gerald Lawrence hanging at the end of a lamp cord. Cut him down with a pair of wire cutters. Zip him up inside the ME’s black plastic body bag and forget about it. Who cares about him? Why bother to investigate? Kowalski was right: good riddance.

“Abby,” he called again.

“Come in here a minute,” she answered.

Reluctantly, Dart reentered the kitchen.

“Tell him what you just told me,” Abby said, glancing at Dart, and punishing him for his desertion.

“I saw the white man pull the chair out from under him.”

Dart stood there, slack-jawed. For a moment it felt as if his heart had stopped. The rationale that he had formulated in his head-the drug deal, Kowalski chalking up a favor-evaporated.

Several thoughts coursed through him, from how lousy a witness she was: a twelve-year-old victim of sexual abuse; to Kowalski’s missing pages.

The chair. He recalled the photograph: the chair lying on its side, spilled over as if kicked away.

Standing up and glancing out the kitchen window, Abby asked, “Were the shades up or down?”

Dart recognized that tone of voice: Abby didn’t believe the girl. Thank God! he thought.

“The shade was down. Gerry always had the shades down. Said the bunnies didn’t like the sun.” She turned to face Dart and explained, “But it was hot that night, and there was a wind, you know, and the shade blowing back and forth, and it moved once, and I saw that white man pull the chair, and I saw Gerry’s feet … you know?” She glanced over at Abby, and paddled her hands out in front of herself. “Like he was running, you know? Running real fast.”

Dart felt paralyzed. Lewellan Page had witnessed a murder.

To Abby the girl said, “Fritz ran away. That’s my dog. Mama’ll let me have bunnies now that Fritz is gone. Said no bunnies as long as we have Fritz, but Fritz is gone now, gone for good.” She nodded enthusiastically.

Fifteen minutes later Dart and Abby Lang were back in the department-issue Taurus soaking in the air-conditioning. Abby stated strongly, “She killed the dog, or let him go, or gave him away.”

“You think?”

“She wants those rabbits.”

He had a witness now that in many ways he did not want, and yet felt grateful to have. Someone had murdered Lawrence-the same person who killed the Ice Man? he wondered-and no matter who this person turned out to be-even if Walter Zeller-he had to be stopped, and right away. He couldn’t help but think that he might have stopped this killing if back then had he spoken up. He felt cold all of a sudden.

“Why would Kowalski leave her out of his report?” she fired at him.

Kowalski was a big white man; Dart understood what Abby was saying. He objected, “She could be lying about the guy’s color. About any of it.”

Abby kept her attention on the road and slowed for a red light. “I don’t think she’s lying,” she said.

“No,” he said, though he wanted to bury the whole thing. He thought he understood Kowalski now more than ever.

Mistakes compound other mistakes, Dart reminded himself. You overlook something three years ago, and it comes back to haunt you. I did my job, he reminded himself, wondering if a board of inquiry would see it that way, wondering if his career was on the line. He felt like a fuck-up. A fool. He considered a transfer-someplace in the South, away from the winters. People might attribute it to his breakup with Ginny. It was a good time to try.

But the better part of him knew that he could not outrun the truth. Better to stay and fight.

Abby asked, “What exactly is going on with us, Joe?”

Dart felt his face and spine go hot. How could she disconnect from Lewellan Page so quickly? Was that what Sex Crimes did to you, numb you, the way Homicide turned you into a comedian?

She wanted an answer; she didn’t want to repeat herself.

“Let’s forget the ice cream,” he said.

“I’m not talking about ice cream.” Abby found a stray button on her blouse and closed it. She steered clear of a slow-moving truck, turned at the jai alai fronton and crossed over the tracks. She parked in the back of the Jennings Road building, and just before they climbed out of the car, announced, “I know what I know. I know what I’m feeling from you. For you. It’s scaring me a little.”

“You’re good company, Abby.”

“Okay,” she said, accepting this.

But Dart didn’t accept his own explanation. He wanted to say something. She was more than good company; he was interested-the couple of years that separated them didn’t bother him a bit. She was a fighter; a comer. She spoke her mind, and when she met eyes with him he felt it inside.

Whereas she seemed to have faced all of this, to have reconciled herself to the obvious, he could not. Not verbally. And so he said nothing: Another deliberate omission on his part. Would he pay for this one as well?