Ghettoside (29 page)

Devin was starting to fray.
“Tell me!”
he pleaded. “You say you’ll be up-front! Well then lemme know everything.”

“Absolutely!” Skaggs said. Bright and helpful.

Then he returned to his obfuscations. He made reference to Starks, saying Starks was “a bitch.” Devin thought Skaggs was referring to a woman; street slang could be confusing even to seasoned users. Skaggs corrected him. He’d meant that Starks had broken down easily. Devin chortled.

Skaggs said he had found Starks’s phone number on a slip of paper in Devin’s bedroom. Devin demanded to see it.

Skaggs obliged, producing a page of the murder book. “That way you know what’s happening,” he said. Devin looked, and switched gears instantly: “I know him,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you … I’m an honest person,” he said.

For several more minutes, Skaggs let Devin page selectively through the murder book on the pretext of demonstrating how up-front he was. He showed Devin a letter in which Devin declared he belonged to One Hundred and Thirteen Blocc Crips. “I got put off of there, though,” Devin objected. The gang had beaten him up and kicked him out, he said. “Hold on! Devin!” Skaggs said, interrupting him. “We’re talking! You don’t have to answer to nothing!”

“All right,” Devin said, suddenly sounding weary. “Then I go back to camp after this?”

“You are going back to camp when we’re done here,” Skaggs said.

“And that’s it,” Devin said.

“What do you mean, ‘that’s it’?”

“I won’t have to worry about hearing this never again,” Devin said.

“I don’t know. We ain’t done talking about this, are we?” Skaggs said.

Devin emitted a pained laugh. “I’m not trying to make you mad or nuthin’,” he said.

“You can’t make me mad,” Skaggs replied airily.

He began producing letters he alleged Devin had written and making reference to a fictitious handwriting analysis. The letters talked about killing “Snoovers,” the derogatory term for Hoovers. At the word “Snoovers,” Devin giggled.

Skaggs showed Devin a letter in which Devin referred to himself as Baby Man. “Oops!” Skaggs said sarcastically.

“I ain’t from that shit no mo’,” Devin whined. Skaggs grew sharp again: “Devin!”

“All right! They call me that. I guess.” It was the second time Skaggs had forced Devin to backtrack. Skaggs acted exasperated. Devin asked again if he was going back to camp. Skaggs told him to stop asking. Devin turned back to the murder book, manhandling it.

“Hold it! Easy, tiger!” Skaggs said, keeping his hands on it. He showed Devin more pages. A picture of the Suburban. A picture of Midkiff. “Who the fuck is this bitch?” Devin said. He called the interview “bullshit” and demanded that Skaggs get around to his questions.

Skaggs calmly bade him to wait, flipping pages of the book. Outside, on the streets of the Seventy-seventh Division, a siren wailed.

“We’re gonna do some talking,” Skaggs said. “We’ll get to the good talking in just a second.”

“Can I get lunch? Please? I’m hungry,” Devin said.

“We’ll do that in a minute,” Skaggs said.

“ ’Cause I’m ready, sir! I mean, I’m doing my time—”

This was danger. What Skaggs feared most was that Devin would abruptly back out and demand to be taken back to camp. He’d had interviews end that way before, with a suspect declaring: “I ain’t sayin’ shit! Fuck you!” Skaggs couldn’t risk that now.

He shifted his tone, growing serious. “So here’s, here’s where we’re
at. Devin. There’s some snitches from Bloccs, and there’s some snitches from the nine-oh’s.”

The word “snitches” caught Devin’s attention. Skaggs went back to talking about a killing, daylight, a video camera, witnesses.

“So I’m in big, big, trouble?” Devin interrupted.

Skaggs downplayed it: “Well, what I’m sayin’ is, I’ve got people saying you shot a boy …”

Twenty minutes had passed and this was the most direct Skaggs had been about his suspicions. He introduced the murder accusation casually.

Devin, who for most of those twenty minutes had been exhorting Skaggs to get to the point, now seemed suddenly eager to turn him back. He cut Skaggs off, voice urgent:

“So, I—I’m getting in trouble for it, right?”

“Hold on! Eeeeasy, tiger!” Skaggs downplayed it. The heavier the mood, the lighter his tone.

But Devin got worked up. “I wish you’d just tell me the truth, sir!”

“There ain’t no truth yet. We ain’t done talking! When we’re done talking, I’ll answer anything you want. Okay? You with me?” Skaggs’s voice held impatient humor, fatherly, reassuring, exasperated. It worked. “Yes, sir,” Devin said.

Skaggs took a breath and then repeated his infuriating mantra: “Listen to me. We are gonna do some talkin’.”

Rick Gordon had elicited evidence this way, too: breaking suspects down through a simple tactic he called Boring Them to Death. Skaggs returned to his meanderings, saying that snitches had said Devin had been put up to the crime by Starks, but then burying the allegation in lesser ones, saying Devin had done this and that. Devin was reduced to denying small allegations in pieces: “That’s on my mom!” he exclaimed at one point, swearing on some denial. Skaggs used the occasion to open a discussion about Devin’s mother for no reason. Devin took the bait. They digressed.

Then Skaggs mentioned Midkiff again. “She is not going to take a hit for you,” he said.

“I’m not gonna take a hit for her!” Devin retorted hotly.

Skaggs pounced. “What she do?” he said swiftly.

But Devin saw it, and pedaled back. “Shi’, I dunno … I’m not takin’ a hit for nobody,” he muttered.

Skaggs resumed as if nothing had happened. Devin protested. “It’s just—you said you had more to tell me,” he said. Skaggs assured Devin that he did. Devin needed only to listen.

“But I mean all the other stuff you’re sayin’, reee-ally makin’ my blood pressure go up,” Devin said.

“I bet it does,” Skaggs said. “It’d make me fuckin’ freak out.”

Devin agreed. It certainly was making him freak out. “It should,” Skaggs told Devin, suddenly quiet. “Someone just told you you’ve been fingered on a killing.”

Devin mumbled something. Skaggs zeroed in. “Hmm?”

“Nothin’,” Devin said. “I’m sayin’ it to myself, just thinkin’ out loud.”

“That’s cool!” Skaggs was light again, and he went on as if Devin’s internal dialogue held no interest for him. He droned on about the evidence, this time inserting the phrase “killin’ a cop’s kid.”

“Killin’ a cop’s kid!” Devin sounded shocked.

“Yeah,” Skaggs said, suddenly sounding annoyed. “I don’t expect you to admit to anything, Devin.”

“I ain’t lyin’ to you, sir! I been honest with you the whole time!” Devin cried. Skaggs disagreed. An argument ensued. “You didn’t even admit your name was frickin’ Baby Man!” Skaggs said.

Devin’s voice was tight. He retreated, pleading: “Can we just keep it low-low? Like, ’cause it’s, like, I feel like you gettin’ mad and stuff.”

“Why would I get mad?” Skaggs’s easy tone was back. Devin again asked him to move his legs. Skaggs acted surprised. He asked if Devin was “claustrophobic or something.” Devin said he was. “Okay!” Skaggs said amiably. “I’ll stay back.”

He launched into his meandering talk again, getting nowhere. This time he assured Devin that “we are gonna get to some questions, but first I wanted to lay it all out for you.” At one point, he stalled with the phrase, “As you know, we know our business—”

“I know! I’d put you up for a job! Truthfully!” Devin interrupted.

Skaggs ignored this endorsement and went on. Devin again cut him off. “Okay, but are you gonna tell me who is snitchin’ on me?” he demanded.

“If this was to go to court, absolutely you are going to find out. But I ain’t going to tell you today,” Skaggs said.

Devin started. Going to court? He wasn’t going to court, was he? People didn’t usually go to court on something like this—did they? Skaggs told him that it was up to the DA. Only when they finished talking would they be “locked in,” he said.

Devin got quiet. “What you mean by locked in?” he said.

Skaggs spoke very slowly. He would prepare his findings. The DA would decide what to do, he said. Then, “What do you think the DA’s gonna do to the person that’s in the video bustin’ on some kid?”

Devin let out a sharp burst of air. “I’ll be there for the rest of my life,” he breathed, as if speaking to himself. He sounded resigned. Then he rebelled: “I got a baby on the way, though!”

They had been in the room for twenty-eight minutes. Devin began to cry. “You and I need to have a heart-to-heart talk,” Skaggs said.

But Devin was working up to sobs. “I’m about to have a son. I won’t see my own baby be born!”

Skaggs tried for calm. This was dicey. Devin seemed to be cracking. But he had not yet been Miranda-ized. “You and I are gonna have a real-deal talk here,” Skaggs said, scrambling.

“It don’t matter! I’m gonna go to jail anyway. I’m gonna sit in there for the rest of my life anyways. I ain’t gonna never go home!” Devin wailed. “Fuckin’ sucks!” Then the inevitable addendum: “ ’Scuse my language.”

This was like the overuse of “sir.” For some reason, swearing, then apologizing for it, was a common gang tic.

Skaggs downplayed Devin’s tears and resumed talking about the case. Devin interrupted him.

“You already said—that
he put me up to it
,” Devin said, then dissolved into a cascade of snuffles.

The statement was thunderous. But still not quite a confession. “Wait!” Skaggs sought to wind the conversation back. But Devin sharpened up again, pausing mid–whimper. “I’m not admittin’ to it,” he said.

Devin said he hoped the cops would help him. “I’m not here to hurt or help,” Skaggs said. “I’m here to find the truth. That’s why we need to get to the point.”

The phrase seemed to send Devin around the bend. “That’s what I’m askin’! Just
get to the point
!” He sounded desperate.

Skaggs was sympathetic and promised to get to his questions very soon. He made a seamless transition: “For me to ask you questions—well, you’ve had your rights read to you before, right?”

Devin had. This could be a scary moment for detectives. The reading of rights broke the mood. Skaggs spoke easily. He even made a game of it, asking Devin if he knew his rights well enough to recite them. Devin tried, then trailed off. He was in his own world, tears flowing, head bowed. “I’m never gonna go home,” he wept.

Skaggs offered to read the rights for him, magnanimous, as if doing Devin a favor. Devin listened at first, sniffing, then interrupted: “I don’t even want to hear it, sir. It’s just gonna hurt me more,” he said.

“Well,” Skaggs said mildly, as if dispensing with unpleasant business, “I have to. So let me just go over them … And then we’ll talk.” He read the Miranda rights, slowly and clearly, stopping for Devin’s “Yes, sir” after each line.

A pause. Devin still wept. “I feel for you, for the predicament you’re in,” Skaggs said softly.

He suggested they take a break. He offered Devin a tissue. He said he would steer the conversation away, give Devin a chance to relax. He brought up Devin’s mother again. “Your mom is a very nice lady,” Skaggs said. “I feel for your mom.” This was true: Skaggs did think Sandra James was a nice lady.

Skaggs had separated the cuffs so Devin’s hands were free, though he still wore the metal shackles and one was hurting his injured wrist. Skaggs helped him shift the cuffs to fit more comfortably. Then he circled back to the murder, talking about Devin in the third person. People were asking
why Devin had done it, he said musingly. “He doesn’t seem like that bad of a guy,” Skaggs rambled. “What the hell happened?” Skaggs turned over more pages in the murder book, referring again to the case as being “the real deal.” But his efforts to elicit a response from Devin failed. To everything, Devin replied, “It doesn’t matter, sir, I’m already gonna go to jail.” The teenager was talking to himself, lamenting that his friends had snitched.

He sat crumpled over the table, a desperate, ailing, injured seventeen-year-old boy—seemingly in real pain, weeping pitiably, crying that he wanted to go home. Faced with Devin’s searing agony, Skaggs didn’t flinch. His calm never wavered, but his tactics were without mercy. He came at Devin again and again. “I want to know why,” Skaggs said.

Devin’s head dropped.

Skaggs’s eye caught the gesture. He froze, and time stood still.
Now
, he thought.

“He put me up to it,” Devin said, his voice suddenly clear. Then something about how he had closed his eyes.

“Okay,” said Skaggs, very quietly. “That’s what we are gonna talk about. Go ahead and clean yourself up.”

But Devin caught himself a second time. Again he backtracked. “I didn’t do it,” he said. He was taking back the confession he had just made. “I was thinking about something else,” he said.

They had been in the room nearly forty-five minutes. A confession seemed close, yet remained out of reach. Corey Farell had barely moved. His notepad was before him but he had jotted only sparingly—afraid of doing anything that would break the flow. If Skaggs felt anxiety he didn’t show it. In fact, he seemed calmer by the minute.

Watching from his corner, Farell felt the weight of the whole case beginning to fall into place, its separate pieces converging with the escalating tension in the room, rushing like streams to a river. But each time Devin backed off, the currents slackened.

“Okay!” Skaggs said easily when Devin took back his confession. “Ain’t nobody mad!”

He gave the weeping teenager more tissues and coached him on how to use them, as if talking to a child.

Devin was getting hysterical again. He returned to sobbing—“I’m going to jail for life. I’m seventeen, and I’m goin’ to the pen!” he said. “They gon’ punch on me. I got one hand. I can’t do nothin’!”

“Devin! Devin!” Skaggs was talking over him again, trying to bring him back. When Devin paused for air, Skaggs began talking nonsensically, buying time.

“Devin, you’re seventeen. I’m—how old do I look?”

“Forty-seven,” said Devin through sniffles, coming close.

Skaggs acted sheepish, laughing. “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t like to admit it, but …”