Known to Evil (20 page)

Utterances?

"But I represent his lawyer," I said.

"If you do not wish to continue we can stop the process here."

"No," I said. "You can knock yourselves out recording me. Just remember my left profile is my good side."

The brown woman--who had short, straightened hair--almost smiled.

"Have a seat, Mr. McGill," she said. "You'll be called in the order this application has been filed."

The morose Arab woman didn't seem to want to commiserate, so I sat five metal chairs away from her and her oppressed children--waiting my place in a line of two.

Seventeen minutes later a man's voice said, "McGill."

The woman had yet to be called.

I looked around and saw that a door-sized panel to my right had slid open. After a moment that might have seemed like hesitation I stood up and went through the makeshift doorway.

The hall was short, ending at a larger-than-normal metal door replete with a metal screen window.

A man stood on the other side of that door.

"I'm Agent Galsworthy. How can I help you?" a tall white man in a gray-green suit asked me. His eyes were the color of lemons and pecans, giving the impression of small, dusky oranges. He was slender and should have been tall except for the fact that he was a little stooped over, which was odd because he wasn't a day over forty.

"McGill for Sharkey," I said.

"How did you know he was here?" the official asked through the grating. He was my own personal antagonist-confessor.

"His lawyer."

"Who's that?"

"Breland Lewis."

"What's your relationship with the prisoner?"

"His lawyer--Breland Lewis."

It was then that I detected a strong smell of human sweat on the air.

"What is your connection to the prisoner?"

"Can I just say ditto, or is there some reason I got to say the same words over and over?" I asked.

Galsworthy was like the cop in front of Wanda Soa's building; he thought that an evil stare would break me down to jelly. But he was just another bean counter. The only difference was that he counted skulls instead of legumes.

I smiled politely.

"What do you do for Sharkey's lawyer?"

"PI."

I have learned over the years that you never give a lawman or a bureaucrat any more information than they ask for. If you do, they get confused, and then they get angry.

"You aren't on the visitors list," the pen-pusher told me.

"Lewis said that he called."

"The call has to be followed by a fax."

"You're telling me that he didn't send the fax?"

"We check the machine every three hours."

"And so I have to wait until that time is up and someone looks?"

"That will be after visiting hours are over."

"So what are you telling me?"

"Procedure," Galsworthy said, as if I were a dog trying to understand the true intentions of the man who called himself my master.

"Thomas," another voice said.

Through the haze of metal crosshatching came a broad man in a slate suit with the jacket open, his shirted belly hanging out. This man was in law enforcement. I could only hope that he had more power than the hunched-over inquisitor.

"Yes?" Galsworthy said to the new arrival.

"Let Mr. McGill in."

"We haven't received the fax yet."

The slightly disheveled man took a key from his pocket and approached the door that separated us.

"I have to finish the paperwork before you can allow him to enter," Galsworthy complained.

"You go do that, Tom. Mr. McGill and me will be in my office."

While speaking, the cop, whatever kind of cop he was, unlocked the door and swung it inward.

"Stop!" Galsworthy shouted.

Heads shot up at desks in the small office behind the two men. Two uniformed federal officers came in through a door with hands on their holstered pistols.

I stepped across the threshold as the pudgy cop held up his hands for the guards.

"No problem," he said to everybody but Thomas Galsworthy. "Just a question of jurisdiction."

The uniforms sighed and went back to their office. The heads went back down, and the cop offered me a welcoming hand.

"Jake Plumb," he said. "I'm in charge of the Sharkey case. Don't pay any attention to Tom here. It's his job to make sure that nobody ever gets in to visit their clients and loved ones. He's kept one poor woman and her kids outside for the past three weeks. Her husband isn't even here anymore, but the rules are we can't say that he's been shuttled down to the deportation detention center in Miami. Ain't that right, Tom?"

Agent Galsworthy sneered in silence.

"What do you do, Mr. McGill?" Plumb asked me.

Jake was three inches taller than I but his loose girth made him seem a bit shorter.

"PI," I said, "here to see, as you already seem to know, Ron Sharkey."

"Come on down to my little office, Mr. PI. I'd like to talk to you before you get in to see the junkie."

Thomas Galsworthy stared at us with what he must have thought was an evil gaze. But he kept silent, I guessed, because of having been humiliated by the way Jake had usurped his power in the office. The fat federal cop was moving toward another caged door. He used his key on that and we moved into a darker, more sinister area of the detainment center. We passed through three more locked doors until we came to a long aisle of nine-by-nine-by-nine cages designed to hold men for days, weeks, months, and sometimes for years; these prisoners were black men and brown ones, some Asians, and a sprinkling of whites.

These prisoners were silent and for the most part motionless. They had been defeated by a system so vast and unresponsive, so utterly powerful, that only suicide could counter the weight of it. The hall smelled powerfully of stagnant manhood, the longtime suffering of the guilty, the innocent, and those who just did not belong.

I followed behind Jake Plumb, gazing into the metal crevices. Some men stared out at me with red-rimmed brown-veined eyes, not hopefully but just for a momentary diversion in a life of deadly dull monotony. Madness and cancer, bloodletting and revolution grew like fungus in rooms such as these. I could feel the ghost of my father urging those souls to prepare to tear down those cages, that building, the whole city if they had to.

I wondered if Jake Plumb felt any of what I sensed.

"Right through here, Mr. PI," he said.

We'd come to a solid steel door with a fingerprint-activated lock on the side. I couldn't help but imagine the men we'd just passed hacking off Plumb's hand and using it, the blood still warm, to pop that lock in their bid for freedom--or revenge.

HIS WINDOWLESS OFFICE WAS small, and much neater than I'd expected. Even though we were on the seventh floor it felt to me like an OCD bunker in a lull between bombings.

Plumb's face was flat and wide like a bulldog's but his eyes were Chihuahua-like in their relative size and brightness. His smile was almost a frown.

"So," he said.

We were seated across from each other in this sepulchral workspace.

I didn't reply to the ambiguous beginning of the informal interrogation.

"What do you want with Mr. Sharkey?" he asked.

"His lawyer believes in his innocence and does not think he should be here under federal jurisdiction. The car wasn't his, he didn't cross state lines, he didn't have the keys to the trunk on him, and there's no evidence of him ever having been involved in illegal gun sales."

Plumb's glittery little eyes flared for me.

"Terrorism," he said.

"Come on, Agent Plumb. You yourself called Ron a junkie."

" 'Ron'?"

"I like to get personal with the people I try to help. There's not the slightest bit of evidence that Ron had anything to do with terrorists or terrorism. You're more of a terrorist than he could ever be."

That last sentence came unbidden from me.

"What?" he said. It was definitely a threat.

"What you got out there, man?" I said. "Haitians and Dominicans, Moroccans, Syrians, and Palestinians? If they're lucky you'll send them home. If they're unlucky you'll send them home in five years. It doesn't matter what they did, but whatever it is, when they leave here they'll hate me because I'm a citizen of a country that treated them like nothing.

"All Ron Sharkey did was take a joyride. You, on the other hand, got your fist shoved up the ass of every man comes through here."

I couldn't believe what I was saying. These were certainly my father's words. I don't even know if I believed them.

Surprisingly, Jake Plumb smiled.

"Kinda sensitive for a PI, ain't you, Leonid?"

"Bad day," I said, manufacturing a wry grin.

"Your lawyer's client had six semiautomatic weapons that had been altered to fully automatic bundled in his trunk," the federal agent told me. "We think that he knows something about it. We're sure that he does. I don't care about him, or you for that matter. All I want is a name. Because with that I can get out of this shithole and have a job in a proper office doing work I can be proud of."

There was a whole chapter squashed down into those few sentences, things about Jake Plumb that I would never know. But that didn't matter. He was giving me an opportunity, and I was intent on taking it.

"I'm here to secure Ron's freedom," I said. "I will do my best to achieve that end. If that means getting a name for you, I will try my utmost."

The bulldog snarled a smile that made me doubt he had ever been happy a day in his life.

36

T
he small visitors' room was illuminated by six one-hundred-watt bare bulbs, and still darkness clung to the corners. The furnishings consisted of a short wood table hemmed in by two metal chairs, one on either side. I had been occupying one of the seats for eight and a half minutes when two federal marshals escorted a jittery Ron Sharkey into the room.

Dressed in the same clothes as when I'd seen him last, Sharkey was manacled, hand and foot, with a metal band around his lower abdomen. His hand- and ankle-cuffs were attached by thick leather belts to this band.

"Unchain him," I said to the dark-skinned, probably Hispanic, marshal.

He looked at his white partner, received a nod, and then began to undo the four locks that restrained the wan prisoner.

"Twenty minutes," the white officer said.

The marshals then left us.

"Mr.--" Ron began to say, but I pressed a finger to my lips, silencing him.

I stood up, moved the table against a wall, then brought the chairs together so that, seated, we would be side by side but facing opposite walls.

I sat down and gestured for him to join me. Then I leaned over and whispered, "The room is definitely bugged, so we are going to have to whisper."

His BO didn't bother me so much--mostly because his breath smelled like a line of garbage cans behind the greasiest diner on the block.

"I don't understand, Mr. Tunes. They told me that a guy named Macklil was comin' to see me."

"That's just a name I use to keep 'em guessin'," I said.

"Oh. Oh, yeah."

"You're in trouble, Ron. They're gonna keep you in here till your teeth fall out if they don't get an answer."

"They'd kill me if I talked."

"You don't think they will anyway? They know you've been busted. They know you're a user. There's no way they're gonna trust you to stay quiet."

"But they have to believe me," Ron complained. "I haven't said nuthin' to nobody."

One outstanding characteristic of most career criminals is their innate innocence. Their worldview is often simple, founded upon a basic equation of honesty and betrayal. Ron had been faithful to the big dog and expected the same treatment back. The only way to break that logic was to add a new variable.

"I found Irma," I lied in his ear.

He stood straight up and said, "Where is she?"

"Be quiet," I commanded, pulling him by the shirt back into the huddle.

"Where is she?" he whispered.

"I will take you to her, but first you got to get out of here."

"Bring her here to me."

"I don't work for you, Ron. I work for Lewis, and he, for whatever reason, wants you out of here. The only way I can do that is to provide a patsy for the weapons they found in the car you were driving."

"I can't," he whined.

It was my turn to stand up.

It wasn't an empty gesture. I was sick of Ron and his recidivism. I had a job to do, but if the client wasn't willing, then I had to cut my losses. I'd tried to save my victim, but sometimes trying is the best you can do.

Ron grabbed my hand.

"No," he whined.

"I need a name," I said, sitting once more.

"I don't know who the car belonged to," he said. "I got this, this letter."

"In the mail?"

"No. Under the door at Wilma's. Somebody left me an envelope with three hundred dollars and two keys--one for the car door and the other for the ignition. There was a note saying for me to pick up a yellow Chevy that would be parked across the street. I was supposed to drive it to a parking garage in Queens and leave it there."

"Where?"

"I forget where exactly. It was in Astoria . . . Pixie Parking. Yeah, yeah . . . Pixie Parking."

"What else did the note say?"

"That there'd be another letter with another three hundred if I did what they said. I needed to make the delivery because I already owed out the money they gave me. You see?" he said. "I really don't know nuthin'."

"If you don't know anything then what are you afraid to tell the feds?"

Sharkey swayed away from me for a moment there. I reached over and pulled him back.

"I asked Wilma if she saw who put the letter there and she looked worried," he said. "I know when she gets that look, so I pressed her. She said that she saw Joe Fleming out on the street walking away right after she found the letter."

"Who's Joe Fleming?"

"He's like a private bank in the neighborhood."

"Does he deal in guns?"

"I never heard about it."

"Does he know that you owed three hundred?"