Presumed innocent

Chapter 34

Like Santa Claus or the demons that come out in the woods, Lipranzer arrives at my home after midnight. He seems lively and unusually good-humored as Barbara greets him at the door in her nightclothes.

Awaiting Lip, I have felt not the slightest inclination to sleep. Instead, the events of the day have combined in such a fashion that for the first time in months I have a sensation which I recognize as something more than hope aborning. It is like the closed eyelids' trembling reception of new daylight. Somewhere inside, there is faith reignited that I am going to be free. In that mellow luminescence, I have passed the most pleasant time in weeks with my wife. Barbara and I have been drinking coffee together for hours, talking about the demise of Painless Kumagai and Nathaniel's scheduled return on Friday, the prospect of a renewed life a balm upon us.

"Downtown they're sayin some wild things," Lipranzer tells both of us.

"Right before I pulled out of the Hall, I talked to a guy who had just heard from Glendenning. They say Delay's talkin about dismissin the case and Tommy is kickin and screamin and tryin to think up a new thing. Could that be right?"

"It could be," I say. At the mention of Nico dismissing, Barbara has taken hold of my arm.

"What the hell happened in that courtroom today?" Lip asks.

I start to tell him the story of Kumagai's cross-examination, but he has already heard it.

"I know that," he says. "I mean, how is it possible? I told you that little jerk said the guy was shootin blanks. I don't care how many times he denied it. One thing, Ted Kumagai is history. There ain't a soul in the Hall not sayin he'll be suspended by next week."

As Kemp predicted. By now, I find my feelings of sympathy pinched.

Barbara sees us out the door. "Be careful," she says' Lipranzer and I sit a moment in the driveway in the unmarked Aries. I perked another pot of coffee-this one with caffeine-when Lip arrived, and Barbara has given him a second cup for the road. He is sipping on it as we sit there.

"So where are we going?" I ask.

"I want you to guess," he says. It is, of course, a little late to go visiting. But I learned this approach from the coppers a long time ago. If you've got to find someone, the best time to be looking is in the dead of the night, when almost everybody's at home. "Gimme your shot on Leon," Lip says. "You know, tell me about him."

"I have no idea. He's got some kind of job that he wants to keep. That was clear from the letter. So he has to make a good buck. But he lives on the edge. I don't know. Maybe he owns a restaurant or a bar, with some straight partners. He could be anything semi-respectable. He runs a theater company, how's that. Am I close?"

"You'd never get close. Is he white?"

"Probably. Pretty well off, whatever he is."

"Wrong," says Lipranzer.

"No shit?"

Lipranzer is laughing.

"All right," I say, "twenty questions is over. What's the scoop?"

"Feature this," says Lipranzer. "He's a Night Saint."

"Come on."

"Sheet as long as my arm. Gang crimes has got all kinds of intelligence on him. This guy's like a lieutenant now. Whatever they call them, a deacon. Runs things on two floors in the projects. He's been up there for years. Apparently, he figured that all his hard-ass pals wouldn't think much of him if they found out he's runnin out to the Public Forest to suck white boys' cocks. That's his thing. Majoleski's got a snitch, gay as a jaybird, teaches high school, who gave him all kinds of information on this jamoche. Seems like he and Leon went sneakin around together for years. This guys was Leon's teacher. Eddie somethin. Nine out of ten, that's the fella who's been writin letters."

"Son of a bitch. So where are we going? Grace Street?"

"Grace Street," says Lipranzer.

The words are still enough to settle a shiver near my heart and my spine. Lionel Kenneally and I spent a few evenings in there. Early mornings, actually. Three a.m., four. The safest time for a white man.

"I give him a call," says Lipranzer. "He's an affluent type. Got a phone and everything. In his own name, by the way. That P.I. Berman did a hell of a job. Anyway, I called about an hour ago. Said I was given away newspaper subscriptions. He wasn't interested, but he said yeah, when I asked if I was talkin to Leon Wells."

A Night Saint, I think as we drive toward the city. "A Night Saint," I murmur out loud.

I became familiar with Grace Street projects during my fourth year as a deputy P.A. By then, I had joined Raymond Horgan's fair-haired coterie, and he selected me to lead a large-scale police/grand-jury investigation of the Night Saints. This assault on the city's largest street gang was announced by Raymond just in time to become the centerpiece of his first re-election campaign. For Raymond, it was an ideal issue. Negro gangsters were not popular with anybody in Kindle County, and success would permanently dispel his bleeding-heart image. The Saints investigation was my initial trip to the spotlight, the first time I worked with reporters at my side. It took almost four years of my life. By the time Raymond ran for re-election again, we had convicted 147 identified gang members. The press heralded Raymond Horgan's unprecedented triumph, and never mentioned that more than 700 Saints remained on the street, doing all the old things.

The Saints' genesis would make some sociologist a reasonably good dissertation. Originally they were the Outlaws of the Night, a small, not particularly well disciplined street gang in the North End. Their leader was Melvin White. Melvin was a fine-looking American, with one sightless eye, milky and wandering, and, for balance perhaps, a dangling turquoise earring, three inches long, in the opposite ear. His hair tended toward the straight and was worn in Gorgon fashion, resembling, if anything, an unkempt Rastafarian tangle. Melvin was a thief. He stole hubcaps, guns, mail, the change from vending machines, and all manner of motorized vehicles. One night Melvin and three of his pals killed an Arab gas-station owner who drew on them while they were emptying his register. They pled to involuntary manslaughter, and Melvin, who up until then had only visited state youth camp, went to Rudyard, where he and his three buddies got to meet men to admire. Melvin emerged four years later in a caftan and phylacteries and announced that he was now Chief Harukari, leader of the Order of Nighttime Saints and Demons. Twenty other bloods dressed just like him settled in the same part of town, and within the next twelve months they all began, as they put it, involving themselves in the community. Melvin gathered his followers to him in a deserted apartment building he called his ashram. He preached from a loudspeaker on weekends and evenings. And during the day he taught those inclined how to steal. Initially, it was mail. The Saints had people in the post office. Many, in fact. They stole not only checks and the tickets to events but account information, so that they could pass forgeries at any bank. Harukari had what for lack of anything else has to be called the vision to recognize the principles of capitalist enterprise, and his profits were reinvested, usually in decimated real estate in the North End purchased at county scavenger sales. Eventually entire blocks were Saint-owned. The Saints drove up and down in their big cars. They blasted their horns and played their radios. They hustled the daughters of the neighborhood and made hoodlums, willingly or not, of the sons. Harukari, in the meantime, emerged as a political figure. The Saints gave away food on the weekends.

As they became better established, Melvin led the Saints into smack. Entire buildings became processing centers. Guys with chemistry degrees would cut the heroin with quinine and lactose while two dudes with M-16's watched them. In a second area six women, each one stark naked to prevent any body-cavity smuggling, made up dime bags, closing them off with seal-a-meals. Out on the streets in Saintland, high-grade heroin was sold from stands. There were drive-up windows in garages to which white kids from the suburbs could come down to score, and on weekends the traffic was so bad that some mogul in caftan and shades would be down there with a whistle telling people where to go. Once or twice the newspapers tried to write about what was going on, but the coppers didn't like it. There were policemen on the take, something the department has traditionally preferred to ignore, and the cops who weren't taking were just scared. The Saints killed. They shot, they garroted, they stabbed. They murdered, of course, in dope squabbles; but they also killed because of minor differences of opinion, because someone insulted the upholstery in somebody's mobile, or because of an innocent brushing of shoulders on the street. They ran six square blocks of this city, their own little Hey Dude fascist arena, a quarter of their terrain occupied by the Grace Street projects.

I have heard it said on many occasions that these projects were drawn from the same architectural plans as the student dormitories at Stanford. Suffice it to say, there is no resemblance now. The small balconies at the rear of each apartment have been curtained off with chicken wire to end the rain of suicides, infants, drunks, and persons pushed, who, over the first five years, became a sauce upon the pavement below. Most of the sliding glass doors to the balconies have been replaced with plywood sheets; and from the balconies themselves a wide variety of objects hang, including laundry, garbage cans, gang banners, old tires, car parts, or, in winter, anything that profits by being kept out of the heat. No sociologist can portray how far the life in these three concrete towers is from the existence most of us know. It is not Sunday school, was Lionel Kenneally's favorite phrase. And he was right; it was not. But it was more than cheap irony or even rabid racism could comprehend. This was a war zone, akin to what was described by the guys I knew who came back from Nam. It was a land where there was no future-a place where there was little real sense of cause and effect. Blood and fury. Hot and cold. Those were terms that had some meaning. But you could not ask anybody to do anything that involved some purchase on what might happen next year, even next week. At times when I listened to my witnesses describe the daily events of project life, in the disconnected way most of them had of doing that, I would wonder if they were hallucinating. Morgan Hobberly, my star, a reformed Saint who, truly, got religion, told me that one morning he rolled out of bed to the sound of gunfire outside his door. When he investigated, he found himself caught between two bloods trying to zap each other with carbines. I asked Morgan what he did. 'Back to steep, babe. Not my thing. Pulled my pill over my head.'

In truth, my four years of investigation succeeded only because of Morgan Hobberly. The whole incursion into gang life, which Stern has trumpeted before my jury on a dozen occasions, came down to one piece of luck: finding Morgan. An organization like Harukari's did not have the kind of membership who could not be bought. Dozens of them were informants for the police or the federal agencies. But Melvin was smart enough to have a few of them out there doing counter-intelligence work. We were never sure what was right, since we got, through our sources, two or three different stories at any one time.

But Morgan Hobberly was the real thing. He was on the inside. Not particularly because he wanted to be, but because the Saints enjoyed having him around. Everybody knows a Morgan Hobberly. He was born cool, given a grace the way some people are born to music, or horses, or high jumping. His clothes just hung on him right. His movements were lithe. He was not so much beautiful as composed, not so much handsome as present. Aloof was not the right word as much as magical. There was a vibration he stirred in me that somehow reminded me of my feelings for Nat. And because some moral voice that Morgan took for divine told him one morning that Harukari's ways were evil, Morgan secretly went to work for the state. We put a body recorder on him and he sat in the meetings of chieftains. He gave us the numbers of phones that we connected to pen registers and, eventually, tapped. In the seventy days that Morgan Hobberly helped us, we gathered virtually all the evidence for trials that lasted another two years. He did not make it, of course. The good, they say, never do. It was Kenneally who told me they'd found Morgan. They had a call from the Public Forest district command, he said, and it didn't sound encouraging. When I arrived, there was already that funny scatter of cops and paramedics and reporters familiar to a murder scene. Nobody wants to talk to anybody else; nobody wants to be near the body. People were all over, shot out in different places like spores. I couldn't figure where he was. Lionel was there already, with his hands dug deep into his windbreaker. He gave me that low look of his, the varlet's eyes. We fucked up bad, he was saying; and then his eyes drifted back enough for me to guess the general direction. He had died of drowning. So Coroner Russell Latei determined-I would not let Kumagai near the body. He had died of drowning, the coroner found, in the waste pool of a public outhouse. That was where he was. Upside down, with his head, and his two broken shoulders, pushed through the wooden seat. Rigor mortis had set in, so that his legs were spread at a kind of scarecrow angle, and his plain twill work pants and raveled nylon socks and worn oxfords created an atmosphere of unbearably humble address. His skin-the band of flesh visible where the pants and socks didn't meet-was purple, a royal shade. I stood in that tiny wooden shack, where a fly or two still buzzed even though it was now November, where the air was rank even without the summer heat, and contemplated Morgan Hobberly's strange humor and the ether on which I always thought that he could float. I believed less then in angels and ghosts, because I had thought surely that this was one man who, as he made his way through the world, could not be touched.

Lipranzer is looking cold-not unemotional or distant, but actually cold, although the nighttime temperature in August is still verging on the seventies. His shoulders are hunched close and his windbreakers is zipped tight. I know him well enough to recognize this is a sign of discomfort, if not fright. On this turf, I am probably more experienced.

"How you doin, Charlie Chan?" I ask him as we head up the concrete staircase.

"Me no likee this one, boss," he says. "Uh-uh. No fuckee way."

In the projects, a staircase is a building's main thorough-fare. The elevators are seldom operable, and when they are, nobody will get on them anyhow, since there is no mercy for him who finds himself between floors with a carload of Saints. Instead, all commerce is transacted in this stairwell. Dope is sold here; wine is drunk here; love is made. It is near 3 a.m. and still this vertical Ganges is not completely deserted. Near floor 4 two young men are drinking something in a bag and trying to romance a young woman whose head is lolled back against the cinder blocks. "How you doin, brother?" they say to a black man who happens to be climbing up ahead of us. To Lip and me, they say nothing, but their looks are insolent and cold, and Lip, without missing a step, flips out his tin as we are going past. He does not want to be mistaken for an ordinary white man.

At the top of the stairway, the eighth floor, Lip holds a finger to his lips and quietly pulls the steel fire door back. I follow him into the corridor, a typical project hallway; brightly lit to discourage intruders, trash along the sides in isolated pieces, an uncut smell of human use. About halfway down the wall, the sheet rock has been smashed out in a shape which for all the world resembles someone's head. In a hallway like this, one of Lionel Kenneally's guys shot Melvin White, the night after we returned the first round of indictments. I was outside to supervise the arrests, but it was about twenty minutes after we all heard the gunfire before the coppers would let me go in. By then the ambulance had arrived, and I went up with the paramedics. Along with the surgeons, they eventually saved Melvin's life, making way for his return to Rudyard. When I saw him, however, Harukan's chances did not seem good. They had laid him out in the middle of the hallway next to his automatic rifle. He was making a sound too labored, too desperate to be called groaning, and his stomach and his arms, which lay upon it, were painted with blood. Between his hands, a little twisted purple piece of tissue protruded. And above him stood Stapleton Hobberly, Morgan's brother, who had begun snitching for us after Morgan was killed. Stapleton had his penis in his hands. He was urinating in Melvin White's face while a number of coppers lounged against the walls and watched.

And what the fuck am I supposed to say if this guy dies of drowning? one of the paramedics asked me.

Now Lip is rapping on the door.

"Open up, Leon! Wake up! It's the police. Come on, man. We just wanna talk."

We wait. The building, in a way that is almost beyond the threshold of detection, seems more silent now. Lip raps again with the flat of his palm. There is no kicking this door in. They are all reinforced steel.

Lipranzer shakes his head. And at that moment the door suddenly, silently, swings open. It is very slow. Inside, the room is totally black, no sign of light. Somehow an extraordinary adrenal rush has begun. If I were to pick out the details that key this response, I could only identify the little metal click, but even before that there is an instantaneous perception of alarm. Danger is palpable in the air, as if the threat of harm were an odor, a stirring like wind. When I hear the sound of the gun being readied, I realize that we are perfect targets, standing backlit in the bright hallway. Yet clear as the thought is, I have no impulse to move. Lipranzer, though, is going. Somewhere along he has said, "Motherfucker," and as he is on the way down, he slides in my direction and cuts my leg out from under me. I land, painfully, on an elbow and roll away. We both end up lying on our bellies on the floor, staring at one another from either side of the door. Lipranzer has his pistol gripped with both hands.

Lip closes his eyes and yells at top volume.

"Leon, I am the police! This man is the police! And if your piece is not out here in ten seconds, I am callin this in, they are blasting your ass away before you can say shit. Now I'm gonna start countin!" Lip gets to his knees and presses his back to the wall. He motions with his chin for me to do the same thing. "One!" he yells.

"Man," we hear, "if you are the police, how am I gone know it. Huh? How am I gone know it?"

Out of his windbreaker, Lip draws his creds-the star and his picture I.D.

He inches toward the doorway, then allows only his hand to cross its plane as he pitches them in.

"Two!" Lip yells. He is backing away. He points up at the lit exit sign. We are going to run for it soon. "Three!"

"Man, I'm puttin on the lights now. Okay? Okay? But I'm keepin my piece."

"Four!"

"Okay, okay, okay." The gun scutters, over the tiles and lands against the molding of the hallway with a thump. A heavy black item. Until it stopped, I thought it was a rat. Light from the apartment angles out of the threshold.

"Out here, Leon," Lip yells. "Down on your knees."

"Oh, man."

"Down!"

"Shee-it." He comes knee-walking right out the doorway, his arms extended before him. He is quick and comical now. The cops, man. Always so serious. Lip pats him down. Then he nods. And the three of us get to our feet. Lip snatches his creds back. Leon has a black sleeveless T-shirt and a red headband. On the bottom, he is wearing only his Jockey shorts. Apparently we roused him. A smooth-skinned, powerfully built man.

"I'm Detective Lipranzer. Special Command. I'd like to come in and talk.

"And who's he, man?"

"He's my goddamned friend." Lip, who still has his gun in his hand, pushes Leon. "Now get back inside." Leon goes first. Lip covers the doorway; with his gun held by his face, he flashes from post to post, staring inside. Then he goes in to search. After a moment he emerges and motions me in. He holsters his pistol again, at his back, under the coat.

"Man, would we have been a headline," I say to him, my first words since this started. "If he was shooting, you might have saved my life."

Lip makes a face, meant to disparage me. "If he was shooting, you were dead by the time I knocked you down."

Inside, Leon is waiting for us. His apartment is a galley kitchen and a couple of rooms. There is no sound of anyone else, but he is seated on a mattress on the floor of the living room. He has put on his pants. A plastic alarm clock and an ashtray are by the bed at his feet.

"We want to ask you a couple of questions," Lip says. "if you're straight, we're out of your face in five minutes."

"Hey, man. You come in here three clock in the mornin. Come on, man. Gimme a break. Call Charley David, man, he's my 'torney, man. Talk to him, Jack, cause I'm tired and I'm goin to sleep." He leans back against the wall and closes his eyes.

"You don't need an attorney, Leon."

Leon, still with his eyes closed, laughs. He has heard that one before.

"You got immunity," Lipranzer tells him. "This guy's a P.A. Aren't you?" Leon opens his eyes in time to see me nod.

"See, now you have immunity."

"7-7-2," says Leon, -5-8-6-8. That's his number, man. Charley Davis."

"Leon," says Lip, "about eight, nine years ago you dropped fifteen hundred bucks on a deputy P.A. to make some problems you had go away. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"No chance, man. Okay? I mean, you come bustin into my home, three clock in the mornin, man, askin me shit like that. Am I a fool, man? Huh? Am I a frickin fool? I'm gone be talkin to some fuckin white-ass policeman about shit like that? Come on, man. Go home. Let me sleep." He closes his eyes again.

Lip makes a sound. For some reason I get the idea that he is going back to his gun, and I have an impulse to stop him, but instead he walks slowly over to Leon. He crouches, right at the head of his bed. Leon has watched him approach, but he closes his eyes once Lipranzer has reached his level. Lip takes his index finger and jabs Leon a couple of times in the forearm. Then Lip points at me.

"See that guy? That's guy's Rusty Sabich."

Leon opens his eyes. Captain Saint Killer. Right in his living room.

"Bullshit," says Leon.

"Show him your card," says Lipranzer.

I am hardly prepared for this, and I have to empty the pockets of my sportcoat. In the process I discover that my coat is gray across its entire front with the hallway's soil. I have brought along the documents Lip obtained months ago from Leon's court file, my appointment diary, my wallet. In there I find one dog-eared card. I give it to Lipranzer, who hands it to Leon.

"Rusty Sabich," says Lipranzer again.

"So?" asks Leon.

"Leon," says Lip, "how many of your blood brothers do you think have been on his pad, huh? Twenty-five? Thirty-five? How many Saints do you think he's paid to snitch? You go back to sleep, Leon, and Rusty Sabich is gonna get on the phone tomorrow morning. He's gonna tell every one of them how you go out to the Forest to suck off white boys. He's gonna give them who and when and where. He's gonna tell them how they can find out all about this stone faggot deacon they got, name of Leon Wells. Okay? You think this is bullshit? This is not bullshit, my man. This is the guy who let Stapleton Hobberly take a piss in Harukan's face. Have you heard that story, huh? Now, all we want is five minutes of your time. You tell us the absolute truth and we're gonna leave you alone. We gotta know a couple of things. That's all."

Leon has not moved much, but his eyes are wide open as he listens to Lipranzer. There is no more play in his expression.

"Yeah, man, and next week, you need somethin else and you be bustin in the door at three clock in the mornin pullin this shit again."

"We'll tell you right now if we're ever gonna need anythin else. Just as soon as you answer our questions." What we'll need is for Leon to come down to court to testify, if he nails Molto. But Lip knows the ropes; you don't tell them that for a while. "Now don't bullshit me, Leon. Here's my first question: Did you or did you not pay fifteen hundred to make that case go away?"

Leon makes a sound. He sits up straight.

"That fuckin Eddie," he says. "You already know, man. Right? So why you be botherin me?"

"Leon," says Lip quietly. "You heard my question."

"Yeah, man. I paid fifteen hundred."

My heartbeat has become very solid now. Thump thump. expect to see my pocket jumping when I look down at my shirt. I speak for the first time.

"Did-the woman have anything to do with it? Carolyn? The probation officer?"

Leon laughs. "Yeah, man. You might say that."

"What?"

"Come on, man," he says. "Don't shit me. That bitch set the whole thing up, man. You know that. She tell me I don't have to be mopin round, she know how to take care of everythin. Real smooth. Real smooth. Man, I bet she did it a hundred times. Tell me where to go. How to bring the bread, man. Very cold lady. You hear me?"

"I do." I crouch down now like Lipranzer. "And was she there when you made the drop?"

"Right there. Sittin right there. Very cool. You know, man; 'How you do. Sit right there.' Then the dude start talkin."

"He was behind you?"

"You got it. She be tellin me when I come in. Don't turn round, just do what the man say."

"And he told you to put it in his desk?"

"No, man. The desk where I was. He say just leave it in the top drawer."

"That's what I mean. It was the P.A.'s desk, right?"

"Yeah. That desk."

"And you paid him, right?" asks Lipranzer. "The P.A.?"

Leon looks at him with irritation.

"No, man, I ain't gone be payin no little toad P.A. Am I a fool? He gone take my bread, man, and be sayin, Oh no, can't do it, just got the word from downtown. I heard enough of that shit."

Lipranzer looks over at me. He has not gotten it yet. But I have. Just now. Finally. God, am I dense. Dense.

"So who was it?" asks Lip.

Leon mugs. He does not like to tell a policeman anything he does not already know. I say it for him.

"The Judge, Lip. Leon paid the judge. Right?"

Leon nods. "Black dude. Was him, too, man. Behind me? I could tell the voice when I heard him in court." Leon snaps his fingers, trying to get the name. But there is not any need for him to bother. It's right on the order of dismissal. I take it out of my pocket to check. There's no missing that signature. I've seen it dozens of times in the last two months. It's as distinctive as everything else Larren does.

"So what is it?" Lip asks. It is nearly five now and we are sitting in Wally's, an all-night joint by the river. They used to be famous for doughnut holes, before the national chains got hold of that idea, too.

"Larren's porkin her and takin the money to keep her in style?"

Lip is still wired. On the way here, he stopped at some hole in the wall, a blind pig he knew about, and came out with a half pint of peach brandy, of all things. He drank it down like a Coke. He still had not shaken off our initial encounter at the doorway.

God, he said to me. Sometimes I hate bein a cop.

Now I shake my head at his questions. I don't know. The only thing I have figured out for certain in the last hour is that this is what Kenneally didn't want to tell me when I saw him last week. That Larren was taking. That's what pissed off the coppers back then. The judge was doing it, too.

"What about Molto?" asks Lip. "You figure he was in?"

"I figure he was out. I don't see Larren Lyttle in any triangles. Nico said Molto always looked up to Carolyn. She probably asked him to dismiss cases and he just obliged. I'm sure he had the hots for her like everyone else."

All very Catholic and suppressed, of course. That would make sense, too. That's the fuel that's kept Molto's engine running at high speed. Unresolved passion.

We talk it over like this for most of an hour. Eventually it gets late enough to have breakfast and we both order eggs. The sun is coming up now, over the river, that spectacular profusion of rose-colored light.

I suddenly think of something and laugh. I laugh too hard, with an embarrassing lack of control. A bout of juvenile hilarity. My thought is ridiculous, not really funny at all. But it has been a long and very odd day.

"What?" Lib asks.

"All these years I've known you, and it never really dawned on me."

"What's that?"

I start laughing again. It's a moment before I can speak.

"I never realized you carry a gun."