Deadly Assets

VII
[ONE]

The Roundhouse

Eighth and Race Streets, Philadelphia

Saturday, December 15, 3:45 P.M.

The enormous black thirty-six-year-old homicide detective standing at the two-way mirror of the Homicide Unit’s Interview Room II turned at the sound of the door opening.

Harold Kennedy nodded as Sergeant Matt Payne entered the small, dimly lit viewing room.

“Hey, Sarge,” he said.

“I miss anything, Hal?” Payne gestured toward the interview room on the other side of the two-way mirror. “How’s he doing in there?”

Payne saw that Detective Dick McCrory was in the slightly larger-ten by twelve feet-harshly lit room with a male teenager. McCrory stood leaning against the far wall, looking down at the teen, who was seated in one of two metal chairs, both of which were bolted to the floor on opposite sides of a bare metal table, also bolted to the floor. A manila folder was on the table, next to an open plastic bottle of water.

Payne studied the unkempt teenager, who was handcuffed to the chair, one cuff on his left hand and the other around a thick bar on the seatback. He had matted hair and filthy clothing-a black sweatshirt, ragged blue jeans, scuffed leather boots. The hood of his sweatshirt was down, exposing a hard face with hollow eyes behind thick black-framed eyeglasses and framed by a scraggly beard.

Kennedy’s massive shoulders shrugged as he raised his eyebrows, making a look of frustration.

“So far it’s looking like you wasted your time coming. All I can say for certain is the kid’s got a clear case of rectal cranial inversion.”

Payne grunted.

“Don’t they all have their head up their ass?” he said, then added, “So, this guy is supposed to be our big lead, but now my time’s wasted?”

Kennedy grimaced.

“Key word supposed. Say hello to eighteen-year-old Michael Hayward, aka Jamal. Turns out Antwan ‘Pookie’ Parker lied-”

Payne, making his eyes wide in mock horror, slapped his hand to his chest and said, “A CI lied? I’m shocked!”

“And-brace yourself-one of the things he lied about was this guy wanting to see the famous Wyatt Earp of the Main Line.”

Payne thought: I knew the bastard was blowing smoke.

He said: “Well, in addition to being shocked, now Jamal the Junkie has really hurt my feelings.”

Kennedy chuckled.

“What’s more,” Kennedy went on, “Jamal said he doesn’t have a clue who the famous Wyatt Earp of the Main Line is. In fact, with his high level of maybe an eighth-grade education-he got thrown out of Mansion barely into his first year-it wouldn’t surprise me if he ever heard of the actual Marshal Earp and/or the Main Line.”

“Mansion”-Strawberry Mansion High School, its student body of four hundred coming from deeply impoverished families-struggled to overcome a reputation as one of the most dangerous schools in the entire United States. The addition of metal detectors manned by armed school police officers, and the running of students through them throughout the day, had helped create a somewhat safer learning environment. But that hadn’t stopped the fights in the hallways and the cafeteria from breaking out daily.

“When we frisked him,” Kennedy went on, “he had that belly pocket full of packets of smack and pills. And in his waistband there was a.40 cal semiauto, a Smith amp; Wesson M-and-P with-get this-only one cartridge. The fifteen-round magazine was empty. When I asked him about it-while doing my little show you said to do-he told me that one bullet was all he had left.”

“Did Jamal get tested for gunshot residue?”

“Yeah, and there was none on him. And it’s not like he washed his hands and clothes of it. I mean, look at him. Washing would have actually cleaned some part of him. And I’m not going to ruin your day and describe what we saw passes for a toilet on his street.”

“The street probably is the toilet.”

Kennedy grunted.

“Right. Close enough. .”

“Well,” Payne said, pointedly getting back on topic, “if there was no GSR on him, then someone cleaned the gun.”

“Yeah, but only wiped down the exterior. When I glanced down the barrel, the bore was filthy. Someone ran a lot of rounds through it. Way more than just the one magazine.”

“He say where he got the gun?”

Kennedy shook his head.

“He hasn’t really said anything. But I’m betting it was from Pookie. He has a reputation for that. Where Pookie got it is another story. We do know that the street and sidewalk at the scene of Dante’s drive-by was riddled with.40 cal casings.”

“And nine-millimeter, right?”

“Right. And there was plenty of lead recovered, by the Crime Scene guys and a couple during Dante’s autopsy. That’ll keep ballistics busy looking for a match. Especially if they find any of the recovered.40 cal bullets are full metal jackets that had been scored.”

“Cut so they can flatten more like hollow points?”

Kennedy nodded. “Looks that way. That’s what the lone round in Jamal’s gun had. Obviously, a match won’t point to the shooter, but it would at least place the gun at the scene.”

“Sounds like it would be a helluva lot easier having a heart-to-heart chat with ol’ Antwan ‘Pookie’ Parker and getting him to confess,” Payne said, then glanced above the mirror.

Mounted on the wall at the top of the mirror’s window frame was a twenty-inch flat-panel monitor. There were six images, two rows of three, on it, the cameras of the interview room showing its entire interior from various angles. A line of text at the bottom of each image had a date and time stamp and showed the names of the officer conducting the interview and the person being interviewed. All of it was being digitally recorded.

Payne looked at Jamal through the two-way mirror. He knew that the thermostat for the interview room was generally set around sixty degrees. Yet the teenager had beads of sweat on his forehead and the armpits of his sweatshirt were darkened by more moisture.

“What’s Jamal the Junkie on?” Payne said.

“We thought smack. He’s pretty much got needle tracks on his needle tracks. But he said he smoked some wet. Whatever he took, we didn’t get much out of him on the drive over here. Dick wanted to see if he’d open up to him in here-and to you, but that was before we learned Jamal doesn’t know any Marshal Earp exists. Now we’re just about to hand him over to the Detention Unit-let him dry out downstairs and try again later.”

“Look at that body language,” Payne said. “He’s closed-off, defensive. Legs crossed, his free arm hugging his chest. And he’s clearly anxious-he’s about to chew off his lower lip.”

“Uh-huh. He’d probably really be a basket case if it wasn’t for the drugs making a zombie of him.”

Payne reached toward the control panel and turned up the volume to the interview room microphone. From the speaker in the ceiling came McCrory’s voice: “Okay. . remember me asking, back in the car, how familiar you are with McPherson Square, Jamal?”

“With what?”

McCrory pointed at a sheet that was a desktop computer-printed map, his fingertip touching a square that had been marked in yellow highlighter.

–

The park-off Kensington Avenue, at F and Indiana, just two blocks from an elementary school and another two from a magnet middle school-was well known as an open-air market for the dealing and consumption of drugs.

When police patrolled it, the junkies slipped away into the shadows, looking like so many cockroaches suddenly exposed to light, and leaving the park grounds littered with empty glassine packets and dirty syringes. When the patrols left the park, the waves of junkie zombies rolled back in for another high.

Not all fled. Some were so severely wasted-it was not uncommon for the heavily addicted ones to shoot up ten to twenty hits of heroin a day-that they could not move, and simply sat or lay on park benches in a drug-induced state that bordered on the comatose.

The police found the park environment, as hopeless as it seemed, was preferable to the days of widespread drug dens in abandoned row houses and factory buildings. There the addicts would shoot up crack cocaine and heroin out of sight-but would then frequently simply disappear, their bodies discovered days or months later, if ever.

In the open, however, the officers-as well as various teams of volunteers, often those who had sons and daughters lost to the drugs-could approach those in and near the park and try talking them into attending a substance abuse program-detoxifications with the synthetic opioids Suboxone and Methadone-like the one at the addiction hospital across from nearby Norris Square.

The odds were great that the addicted, absent professional help would-sooner or later but most likely sooner-join the hundreds who died each year in Philly either from an overdose of heroin or, indirectly, from the violence associated with it-being killed in a robbery, for example, or in the course of performing sexual acts, as they tried to raise cash for their next high.

–

“Uh-huh,” Jamal said, nodding. “That’s Needle Park.”

“So McPherson-what you call Needle Park-that’s Antwan’s turf, right?”

“Antwan?”

“Antwan-Pookie.”

Jamal nodded again.

“I’ve seen Pookie there, if that’s what you mean-”

“Then it’s his turf?”

Jamal shrugged. “But I see lots of folks there.”

“Pookie work for anyone?”

Jamal again shrugged, then tried looking McCrory in the eye but looked away and said, “Guess you’d have to ask him about that.”

McCrory shook his head.

“So,” he pursued, “you see Pookie there working the park. And then along comes Dante Holmes. Was he trying to move in, work it, too? And that got him capped?”

Jamal, nervously chewing on his lower lip, did not reply.

“Okay,” McCrory then said, opening the manila folder on the table and placing a series of photographs before Jamal. The top one showed the street view of a row house with police line yellow tape strung from the porch out to the street. Evidence markers, inverted yellow plastic Vs with black numerals, filled the marked-off area.

“This is where the drive-by shooting took place,” McCrory said. “On the front stoop. .”

Jamal’s eyes darted to the photograph, then looked away.

“. . of Dante’s grandmother’s house in Kensington, on Clementine at E Street. Five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. Yesterday. Grandma happens to look out her upstairs bedroom window when a Chevy Impala with tinted windows comes rolling up Clementine and stops shy of her house. It’s dark already, but she can just make out the car’s front passenger window opening, and she sees a guy waving Dante to come over. Dante, probably thinking he’s about to move some product, starts walking toward the Impala. Then the back passenger window goes down and a hand reaches out with a semiauto. The night lights up with muzzle flashes as both passengers start firing multiple shots, at least twenty-five, at Dante. Grandma says that it looks and sounds like really loud Chinese firecrackers going off. Then the car speeds off. And Dante’s down. Three rounds, two to the chest, one to his thigh. He never had a chance. And right in front of his grandma.”

McCrory paused to let that sink in, then went on: “That’s bad enough. But what’s worse: most of those bullets skipped past Dante, some going into a neighbor’s row house. You have any family, Jamal, any brothers or sisters?”

Jamal, stone-faced, did not respond.

McCrory flipped to the next photograph. It showed three evidence markers-one by a large dark stain on a threadbare couch-in the living room of a home.

“Okay,” he said. “Well, this is where a ten-year-old girl was watching TV after school with her little brother. She takes one of those bullets to the head. Now she’s still in intensive care, and not looking like she’s going to make it. And Dante, he’s dead.”

McCrory stopped and cocked his head.

“Look at me, Jamal. You following all this?”

Jamal glanced at him, then looked back at his feet.

McCrory went on: “It’s important that you do. Because it’s my job to find out who’s responsible, and I’m telling you now that I don’t give up. Nobody deserves to die that way. Especially an innocent little girl.”

He paused to let that sink in, then pointed at the evidence markers in the photo of the street scene.

“See these? They’re.40 cal casings. These and the bullets that were collected at the drive-by can be matched to the gun that fired them. And if even one was fired by the gun you had on you. . then you need to start talking, Jamal.”

Jamal glanced at the photograph, then stared at his feet a long moment, anxiously crossed his legs the opposite way, then back again. He met McCrory’s eyes, and sighed.

“Told you I don’t know no Dante,” he finally said.

“So you keep saying,” McCrory said, his tone disgusted. “Not knowing him and shooting him are two different things. I can imagine that you don’t know the little girl, either. But that doesn’t change the fact that she may die.”

“I didn’t shoot nobody. That gun I got so I can defend myself. There’re crazy folks out there, shooting you for no reason. But that ain’t me.”

McCrory picked up the stack of photographs and began laying them out on the table so that they were all visible at once.

In the viewing room, Payne grunted, then glanced at Kennedy.

“Don’t know about you, Hal, but I say he’s lying.”

“How can you tell?” Kennedy said. “Because his lips are moving?”

“He may not have pulled the trigger, but he knows who Dante is and/or knows who did it. And you nailed it-we’re wasting our time with him right now.”

Payne then reached into his suit coat pocket and produced a folded sheet of paper.

“Show this to Jamal the Junkie,” Payne said, handing the sheet to Kennedy. “Just to throw him off. Maybe it’ll jar loose that rectal cranial inversion.”

Kennedy unfolded the sheet and saw that it was the Wanted flyer of the heavyset male suspect in the LOVE and Franklin parks murders. He shook his head as he looked at the cold, empty eyes and the spread of tattoos-the inverted heart under the left eye, the inverted peace symbol under the right one, “Family” inked in tall, dark lettering across his throat.

“What’ve we got to lose?” Payne said. “I just want to watch his reaction-if any-to seeing the doer.”

Kennedy left the viewing room and, a moment later, Payne heard him over the speaker knocking twice on the interview room door. McCrory cracked open the door, leaned toward it to listen as the Wanted flyer was passed inside, then nodded and closed the door.

Payne watched McCrory glance over the flyer, then extend it toward Jamal.

“What about this guy, Jamal?” McCrory said, his tone sarcastic. “Don’t know him, either?”

Jamal didn’t move to take the sheet, and McCrory put it on the table on top of the other papers before him.

As Jamal focused on it, his eyes grew wide and he wrinkled his forehead. He quickly tried to mask his reaction by taking off his glasses, then running his hand over his face and rubbing his eyes.

“So you do know him?” McCrory asked, making it more a statement.

Jamal’s body slumped as he shook his head.

“What?” McCrory said.

Jamal shook his head again, and, apparently thinking he was being clever, looked at McCrory and said, “Who is he? What’d he do?”

Payne grunted.

“At least he’s consistent with his lying,” he said.

McCrory had come to the same conclusion.

“You’re lying, Jamal. Who is this guy? How do you know him?”

Jamal looked at his shoes for a long moment.

“C’mon, Jamal. Talk to me. You’re looking at some serious time already with a gun charge on top of possession with intent to distribute. . or worse.”

After a moment, Jamal sighed.

“He’s one I’ve seen at Needle Park, too,” Jamal said. “I don’t know him. But a guy I did know there said stay away from him. Said he’s a really bad dude. Angry at everything, you know?”

Jamal’s tired voice trailed off, and he began to rub his face again.

“What’s the guy’s name who told you that?”

Jamal shrugged.

“Harvey? Javier, maybe? Heard he OD’d. He didn’t say this guy’s name, just called him la gente loca. .”

“‘Crazy people’?” Payne said, making the translation from Spanish. “I’ll be damned!”

He reached to pull out his cellular telephone, then felt it vibrate. When he checked its screen, there was a text from Kerry Rapier: “The mystery of Where’s Waldo solved! At least the where part. .”

“Jesus!” Payne blurted, then looked at Kennedy and said, “If you’ll excuse me. I should be right back but might not. Nasuti and Lucke own the LOVE and Franklin parks murders. Let them and me know what else that bastard says about that doer, and also when you’ve got Pookie coming in for that heart-to-heart talk.”

“Will do, Sarge,” Kennedy said, crossing his arms over his massive chest. “We’ve already texted Pookie. Just waiting to hear back.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Oh, you can count on it that he’ll be in touch. The bastard thinks he’s due a payday for ratting out this knucklehead to us.”