The Renegades

30

In the morning Hood stood outside the interview room and watched through a one-way window as Bentley and Orr questioned Londell Dwayne.

Dwayne sat cuffed at a steel table, ankle irons secured to rings in the floor, dressed in the yellow jumpsuit issued to accused violent felons. He was dull-eyed and tired.

Bentley sat across from him in a crisply laundered white dress shirt, no tie. He wore a silver cross on a chain around his thick black neck. There was a folder on the table in front of him, and a digital recorder next to that.

In one corner of the room stood a tripod with a video camera that could be turned off by an interviewer for “off the record” statements. Hood knew that these statements would be videotaped by the two hidden cameras, one positioned in another corner and the other hidden behind a false heat vent behind Dwayne.

Orr paced.

Dwayne sat back and dropped his cuffed hands to his lap.

“I’m not going to record now,” said Bentley. “I’m hoping we can have an honest talk here. Just man-to-man, you and me, nice and easy.”

“Talk away,” said Londell.

“You are in a whole bunch of trouble,” said Bentley.

“I got the alibi.”

“You think you do. Londell, you are under arrest on suspicion of assaulting two peace officers. That would be the Mace. Figure one year in jail. You are under arrest on suspicion of possessing a machine gun. That would be the M249 SAW that I personally saw hidden under your mattress in your apartment. Another year in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. You are under investigation for the statutory rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. One more year in prison. And guess what?”

Dwayne glared at him. “What?”

“That’s the good news.”

“That’s mostly all bullshit. I peppered the cops because I was being wrongly pursued. I never even seen a real machine gun in my life. I have never touched a real machine gun. And I definitely never raped Patrice. I made love to her. You know the difference between rape and making love, don’t you?”

“That’s also called illegal intercourse. She has to be eighteen, Londell. Everybody knows that. Tell me you didn’t know that.”

Dwayne shook his head tiredly, but said nothing.

“And that is the least of your problems, because what I want to talk to you about is the murder of Deputy Terry Laws.”

“Talk all you want. I wasn’t there.”

“That’s not what his partner says. He was right there, sitting next to Laws in the squad car. He says you were the shooter.”

“I can’t help what his partner says.”

“But he knows you, Londell-it was your buddy, Hood.”

Londell’s glassy stare followed Orr as he paced. “Hood? If it was Hood, then he knows it wasn’t me.”

“You’re the one who’s blind, Londell. You can’t even see the depth of the shit you’re in.”

“ Hood said it was me?”

Hood saw the disbelief on Londell’s face. Dwayne shook his head and made a face like he’d just swallowed something nauseating.

Bentley sat back and crossed his big arms. “Londell, there are two ways for you to play this. One is you keep lying and covering up and we bury you with the eyewitness, and with additional evidence. We’ll get to that evidence in a minute. The other is you help us and we help you. You tell me what happened, the straight truth of it, and I help you get a fair trial-or maybe no trial at all. I’m sure you had your reasons. They’re probably reasons I can understand. Maybe it came down to your dog-Delilah. I know all about what happened to Delilah. Laws took her and lost her, or sold her, or worse. I got a dog too, man, and I’d kick the ass of any man that would hurt that animal. But Londell, you are looking at the death penalty here. You gunned down a cop right in front of another cop. California Penal Code One-Ninety was written for guys like you.”

Londell slumped down in the steel chair. “Why Hood want to mess me up?” he asked quietly. He shook his head, looking in my direction. “I didn’t kill that cop and I ain’t going to no lethal injection. That’s my final answer.”

“That’s exactly where you’ll go if you don’t come clean and tell us what happened.”

Londell sat up straight and leaned toward Bentley. He seemed suddenly light and energized. “I know more than you do. You’re the fool here, not me.”

“Tell me what you know.”

“Here it is: I was with Patrice when the deputy got shot up. We have two motel people can tell you that. We got pictures we took with the date right on them. That’s proof for any jury in the world. You can take me to the court but I’ll win. I’ll win because I can prove I wasn’t even there. It’s so simple even you can understand it, Bentley.”

Bentley stood and sighed. Orr stopped his pacing in front of Londell and looked down at him.

“The motel people aren’t sure,” said Bentley quietly. “I showed them your mugs and they weren’t sure. Witnesses who aren’t sure don’t get far in court.”

“That’s a lie. How can they not be sure?”

“Why would they lie?”

Londell sat back again, hard, and the dull patina returned to his eyes. “We got the pictures we took.”

“Anybody can change a time and date stamp, Londell. You know that.”

“This is ceasing to be funny. We got Will Smith on the TV, right in the background. We were trying to make faces like him. That proves what night it was when the pictures were taken, proves we were there, proves I didn’t mess with the time and date.”

Bentley put both hands on the table and leaned over toward Londell. “I took the camera to the affiliate that shows Fresh Prince. The episode on your camera isn’t the episode they aired that night.”

“Bullshit, man! It’s the one where the girl’s father parachutes out of the airplane and leaves Will Smith but Will Smith can’t fly. Then Will Smith finds the other chute and jumps and they land in the same tree!”

“The network didn’t air that show the night Terry Laws died. They aired it the night before. I think you changed the date and time, Londell. That’s what the TV station thinks, and that’s what I think.”

Londell leaned forward now, put his forehead on his cuffed hands. After a moment he sat back up.

Hood was surprised that Bentley and Orr were making up so many lies. They’d already told him that the motel employees ID’d Londell and Patrice with near certainty, and that the Fresh Prince episode had indeed been aired that night throughout Southern California. But Hood also knew that creative interrogations are one way that cops get confessions from the guilty-they simply give up. And the innocent? Well, some of them give up, too. Hood didn’t think Londell would. At least not now.

“What about the machine gun we found, Londell?”

Londell sat up again. He looked hard at Bentley, who was still looming over him from across the table. He looked at Orr, who was leaning against one wall, arms crossed. He looked at the big mirror that hid Hood.

“If you tell me you found a machine gun that belongs to me I’m gonna explode right up through this ceiling and fly all the way to the moon and live forever in total freedom away from lying-ass criminals like you.”

“Blast off,” said Bentley. “Be sure to send me a postcard.”

“I can’t talk to you. I want a lawyer. Actually, with the lies you telling, I need a hundred of them.”

“Londell, you say you didn’t kill Terry Laws? Well, if you’re telling the truth, the last thing you need is a lawyer. You know why? Because if you get a lawyer he’s gonna make a deal with us and that deal is going to send you to prison for a long, long time. He’ll think he’s doing you a favor. He’ll think he’s doing his job. You hide behind a lawyer now, and you’re meat, nothing but young black meat.”

“I had a twenty-five-caliber pistol I never shot. Bought it legal and you guys took it and I haven’t seen it since. I don’t even know how to use a machine gun. What do I want with a machine gun?”

“It was in your apartment.”

“I’ve been framed. You guys framed me. I want those hundred lawyers right now.”

“You sure about that? It’s your right, Londell. I’m just telling you, once you get the lawyers involved it’s a loser for you.”

Orr had left the interview room and now stood with Hood, looking through the one-way glass.

“You’re hitting him hard,” Hood said. “He’s not budging.”

“He’s a tough little shit.”

“He’s either innocent or the best liar I’ve ever seen.”

“I keep thinking about that machine gun in his bed frame,” said Orr. “But he puts up a good fight, doesn’t he? Looks to me like’s he’s more pissed because we’re lying than because he’s been caught. This ought to be good. Watch.”

As if on cue, Bentley sat across from Londell again. He stared at him for a long beat, a bug-eyed Sonny Liston kind of stare, half death and half abyss.

Londell stared back, tired but contemptuous of the liars he was dealing with.

Bentley opened the folder and spun an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch photograph across the table like a playing card.

“Tell us about this.”

Londell squared the picture before him with a finger, and looked down at it. “That’s a machine gun in a bed.”

“And guess where that bed is?”

“I don’t know but I can tell you where it isn’t. It isn’t my bed. That isn’t my apartment. And that isn’t my machine gun.”

“Guess again.”

Hood watched as Bentley set a series of three more photos in front of Londell. Even from outside the room Hood could see that they were establishing shots-a wide-angle shot of Dwayne’s bedroom, and the hallway leading to the living room, the living room with the door open to the flat Palmdale desert.

Londell lunged across the table at Bentley. But the ankle irons held and Bentley casually backed his head out of range like a superior boxer. Londell landed hard on the steel, cuffed wrists outstretched, one side of his face down, ankles still anchored to the floor rings. He was breathing hard. He looked up at Bentley with a wild eye, or it might have been at Hood.

“Why you treat a brutha like this? Why you hate me? You try to execute the wrong man. You just need a handy nigga to lynch and I’m it. Your soul is dead, man. Fuck you, Bentley.”

Londell retracted himself across the table and back into the chair.

Bentley watched him for a moment, then he rapped on the door and the guard let him out. He joined Orr and Hood and for a moment they all looked down at Londell Dwayne slumped in his chair. He looked up and flipped them off with both cuffed hands.

“All we really have is the SAW,” said Bentley. “And you as a witness, Charlie. And the transport deputies telling us how Londell mad-dogged Terry Laws for taking Delilah away from him.”

“I can’t make a positive ID,” Hood said. “I can’t ID anybody with a bandana over their head and sunglasses on, at night, in a hail of machine gun bullets.”

“That’s certainly what his defense would argue.”

“It would be the truth.”

“Yeah, Charlie, I can see the difficulty. They’re going to arraign him on the assault, gun and sex charges tomorrow. Judge won’t set a bail Londell can make. That keeps him nice and close while we make the case for killing Terry.”

They watched Londell for another moment. Then Bentley turned to Hood. “What’s your gut say, Charlie?”

“It wasn’t him.”

“Why?”

“You know the gut,” he said. “It feels what it feels but it doesn’t say much.”

Hood watched two big deputies come into the interrogation room, cuff Dwayne and unlock his ankle irons, then guide him out the door.

As Hood walked across the parking lot in the late morning sun he got a call from the spectrographic voice analyst. He said the 911 recording was made outside in a high wind, or maybe with the caller’s head sticking out an open window in a moving vehicle. He’d cleaned it as best he could but the recording was compromised. The anonymous call about a shooting and Eichrodt’s fleeing red truck could have come from either Terry Laws or Coleman Draper or hundreds of millions of other men.