Judging Time

22

At 8 A.M. Friday, Lieutenant Iriarte slammed his fist on the pile of newspapers he'd neatly arranged on his desk. He'd stacked them up like pancakes and looked as if consuming them had been a long and bitter breakfast. He scowled in turn at the five detectives in his office as if each one had personally failed him, the department, indeed, the entire Criminal Justice System.

"What the hell is happening here?" The squad commander was having a cow, and the effort of controlling his temper and losing it at the same time caused a vein to pulse dangerously in his forehead. His cheeks flushed purple.

April had seen that particular facial hue for the first time on a tourist from Des Moines having a heart attack in a Chinatown subway station. It had been only by the sheerest chance that they'd gotten him to the hospital alive. She had a familiar impulse to tum to Mike, find out what he was thinking, but after what happened yesterday, she knew all possibility of closeness between them was over. His behavior proved she'd always been right about one thing. Men and women could work together, but they could not be friends or lovers. To this view she didn't think her own interest in Dean Kiang presented a contradiction. Falling for the right man was business everywhere, even in America. She returned her attention to Iriarte as he raised his voice.

"What do you people think you're doing?" Iriarte had wanted the case tied up by today. The commander of the precinct had wanted the case tied up by today. The police commissioner and the mayor had wanted the case tied up by today. That was a lot of people wanting something that hadn't happened. And who was taking the heat? his voice insisted. He was. "What are you, stupid?" he demanded.

April could feel Mike's eyes on her. Was he stupid? Iriarte slammed his fist on the newspapers again.

"You two talked to him all day. You were supposed to make nice and clear this thing up, Sanchez. I thought you assholes had this under control."

Mike's mustache began to quiver. He was not having a good week. He didn't like being called an asshole. "Are you finished, Lieutenant?" he asked softly.

No, the lieutenant wasn't finished.

"You told me you had this under control. You told me we had plenty of time, I'm reading here in the newspapers this guy has a history beating women, and now I find out he took off. Where was surveillance? Getting a sandwich. Do we know where the suspect went? No, we don't. So you shits don't have anything under control." Iriarte's fist came down on a copy of the Star.

The headline read NOT THE FIRST TIME, over an article about Liberty's brutal attack of a white coed in Princeton nearly twenty years ago when he was in college there.

"With all due respect, sir, since when do you read the Star?" Hagedorn's face was as pale as his boss's face was red.

"I don't fucking read the Star!" Iriarte blasted the tiny room.

"Then how come you got it there?" Hagedorn muttered.

"My wife reads it. It was on the kitchen table last night when I got home. You know they buried that poor woman yesterday, You want to know who was at her funeral? Half of fucking Hollywood was there. Every star you can name. Half the black community—

Was her husband there? No, he was not there. You know what they're saying?"

"Who?" Mike said solemnly.

"Huh?" Iriarte lost his train of thought.

"What who's saying," Mike persisted.

Iriarte scowled at him. "The whole world. The whole world is saying California may not be able to convict, but New York can't even find its killers."

"Since when do you care what's on TV, sir?" Hagedorn said.

"I don't have time to watch TV. 1 get home last night. My wife is crying."

April knew where Mike was going with this. She didn't dare look at him. She tried to focus on the issue and brush the ghost of her feelings for him away. Iriarte's wife was crying last night. Again.

"You know why she was crying?"

"No, sir, why was she crying?" April spoke with a straight face.

"She was crying because she didn't see anything on the news last night about our arrest. You understand? Even my wife is asking why we haven't arrested the bastard yet." The venom spurted over to April. "Woo, you tell me why you didn't arrest the bastard yesterday when you had a chance."

"We didn't have enough yesterday, sir," April said softly.

"What do you mean you didn't have enough?"

Mike straightened his shoulder against the wall where he was leaning against Iriarte's blackboard. His expression said he didn't like the way Iriarte was handling this. Maybe Iriarte was the stupid one.

"We don't have the tox reports on Petersen yet. The COD may have been a heart attack, but we're not convinced yet that there weren't contributing factors. We're not convinced yet that Petersen's widow didn't have something to do with his death."

"What the fuck does that have to do with nailing the bastard for killing his wife?"

April raised her own shoulder in a half shrug. This hysteria wasn't like the commander at all. He liked women to be women and men to be gentlemen. He wasn't one of those commanders who had a girlfriend in the office on the side and thought the rules of the department and the law were different for him. As far as she knew, Iriarte had never spoken like this to her or anyone else. Who was he scared of, the commissioner or his own wife?

"We don't have a clear picture yet of what happened that night, sir," she replied.

"What? What?" The commander grabbed the purple handkerchief decoratively arranged in his suit breast pocket and mopped the shine from his forehead.

"There are some things that aren't clear. There's a lot of lab work to do. A lot of background work."

"I did the damn background work." Hagedorn waved his own sheaf of papers, finally ready to jump in with his two cents. "I have it. I got three incidents that form a pattern going back to the bastard's schooldays. We can nail him."

"I've had it. I'm getting out of here," Mike muttered.

"No, you're not getting out of here until I know what the hell went down yesterday when you went over to the bastard's place."

"Fine," April said.

"Don't you want the background?" Hagedorn whined.

Iriarte threw up his hands in frustration. "Al right, let's have it."

Hagedorn was seated in the front row with his harvest of dirt from Liberty's life. From the thinness of the manilla file, it didn't look like all that much. Creaker with the scary-looking scars on his head sat blank-faced and empty-handed next to him. He and Skye, leading garbage-and-questioning-of-neighbors detail, had come up with zip from the streets in the crime scene area. Zip. Nada. Nothing at all. When it got that cold, the street people made fires in metal drums in several of the small parks along Ninth Avenue. No one hung out on the side streets. Creaker and Skye had nothing to say about what went down on the street that night. When an arrest was finally made, people would come forward claiming to have seen everything, then they'd have something to do, check it all out. It happened all the time. After the fact, an army of witnesses would appear. They'd want to tell their stories about what they'd seen and what they'd known all along, and just happened to neglect to pass along in a timely manner. Somebody would have to sift through these stories for a possible real story they could use.

It was a different story about what went on inside the building where the couple lived. The Libertys were not the quiet and loving couple Liberty claimed. Hagedorn opened the file and plunged into the spotlight.

"First incident with white people occurred when Liberty was only fourteen." Hagedorn looked up. "We don't have anything before that yet," he said. "But you know niggers. They wouldn't call the police on him if he killed his own mother."

Somebody farted.

April put her scarf to her nose. The living sometimes smelled worse than the dead.

"Get on with it," Iriarte said impatiently. "What'd the man do?"

"He beat up some kids in his boarding school. Broke one kid's nose, another's arm. The parents tried to get him thrown out, but the school hushed it up."

"Did the police come? Was he arrested?" Iriarte asked.

"No," Hagedorn admitted.

"Anything else?" Mike said, disgusted.

"Yeah, there's something else. He went to Princeton. He beat up a white girl and her date on the street. When the police came, he convinced them he was walking by and saw the guy beating the girl and restrained him. This nigger was such a smooth talker he got the police to arrest the other guy. Princeton football captain. What could they do? They believed him. The next day the girl said it was all a lie. It was the black man who punched her teeth out."

"Was he arrested then?" Iriarte asked hopefully.

Hagedorn shook his head. "I told you this guy is smooth. Some kind of sociopath. He talked his way out of it. Next thing we know he's transferred to Stanford. They got rid of him, see. A pattern emerges, huh?"

"Yes, no, maybe so, Hagedorn. Anything else?"

"Yeah, there's more. There was a Super Bowl incident."

Iriarte flipped through the newspapers. "Yeah, the Enquirer picked up that one."

"The Giants were thirty-two points down at half-time. Liberty was pissed because no one was doing the assignments he gave them. He thought the team was fucking up, so he tore the locker room up during halftime and they had to take him away in an ambulance. "

"I never heard that," Mike murmured.

"Yeah, well, it was hushed up. Everything with him is hushed up, know what I mean?"

"Anything else?" Iriarte asked wearily.

"Now the good part. Present time, the guy had screaming fights with his wife on a regular basis. Everyone in the building knew about it. The painter had to come up and replaster walls in the apartment three times this year alone. Sometimes neighbors called them directly and the noise stopped. Once the police had to be called in."

"Anything else?"

"Yeah, there's more." Hagedorn consulted his notes. "Uh, I talked to some of the secretaries at this place he works. They all said he gets these headaches sometimes and goes kinda crazy."

"Kinda crazy. That's kinda ambiguous. Can you be more specific?"

"Kinda crazy. That's what I have. 'He gets scary.' " Satisfied with his work, Hagedorn shut the file.

"He's black. He weighs two hundred pounds. For a lot of people that's scary enough," April said. She didn't like the foul odor in the room. "You're right, maybe we should have lynched him when we had hlID. "

"You were there all afternoon. You had every opportunity to get him. And what did you do? You didn't bring him in. You scared him off. I'd call that a cock-up. I'd call that a fucking disaster, Woo. I thought you were good. I had big hopes for you, and what do you do? You and your boyfriend mess up on the big one."

April slung her bag over her shoulder and steadied herself. A couple of 'Years ago before she was transferred to the Two-O and met Mike, she used to lower her eyes in situations like this, put her head down and practically knock it on the floor as Chinese peasants used to do to show their humility to their lords in old China. She used to think the impulse to bow to her superiors in the face of humiliation was a genetic thing that she could not overcome. But Mike had taught her to stand up and fight back when she had to. Now even js her face burned with the shame of public humiliation, she kept her head up and replied in even tones.

"Sir, let's get to the bottom line here. As far as we know, there are only two crimes this guy Liberty is guilty of for sure and certain, and we can't arrest him for either one."

"And what might those be?"

April ticked them off. "For one, he didn't attend his wife's funeral. He was in his apartment most of yesterday when we searched the place and checked the route to see if he could have killed her."

"And you've no doubt he could have."

"Oh, yes, he could have gotten out and in and he could have jogged down to Forty-fifth Street and back within the time frame. No doubt about it. The building complex he lives in is like a sieve. There are two elevators in each building and between the buildings is a courtyard that's locked to outsiders but available to tenants twenty-four hours a day. A basement runs under the courtyard between the two buildings. There's also a garage. Liberty could have gotten out at least four ways." April spoke matter-of-factly.

"So he's our man."

"He could be our man," Mike interrupted.

"But you let him get away."

Mike kept his voice cool. ' I said he could be. Then again he might not be. We have a little problem here. A little question of evidence. As of yesterday no one saw him leave his building on the night of the murder, or return for that matter. We've checked out the garbage in his building for a murder weapon and bloody clothes. Everything in that building is tossed down chutes located by the service area on every floor. Yesterday we tested for prints on the chute handle on his floor. Someone had wiped it clean. We don't know if he tossed bloody clothes or a weapon down there. Nothing's been found. In addition, we have nothing attributable to him on the scene itself. No murder weapon, no witnesses."

"Well, how did he handle himself in the interview?" Iriarte asked. "What did you think?"

Mike did not look at April. She did not look at him.

"He smooth-talked you, too," Hagedorn sneered.

"Nothing clear emerged," April said pretty smoothly herself. "And just because he wasn't at home this morning doesn't mean he's run away."

"Well, I hope you're right, Woo, because I'll hold it against you if we read in tomorrow's paper he's in Mexico."

Finally, just like old times, Mike jerked his head at April. They'd played nice long enough. "Let's go."

"Just a minute. What's the second thing you're sure Liberty's guilty of?" Iriarte demanded.

April pushed the foul air out of her nose. "He's black," she said.

Iriarte pointed a finger at her. "Is that a problem for you, Woo?"

April shook her head. It was a problem for other people though.

"Then get him."

"We'll find him." Mike turned and glanced at Iri-arte's blackboard with the assignments on it. The blackboard was crooked now. He straightened it as he left.