No Lesser Plea (16 page)

Karp put a hand on Walker’s shoulder and eased him back into his chair. Karp believed Walker’s story, and thought him to be what he seemed—a patsy with his ass in a sling. He asked, “Mister Walker, do you have any idea who could have made that call?”

“Who! You know damn well who. It hadda be him, that Stack, him or his damn buddy, Willy Lee. Who the fuck else knew my damn plate numbers?”

“You did,” said Fred Slocum.

“What! You think I call the cops to turn my own self in?”

“Take it easy, Mister Walker,” said Karp, “nobody’s implying anything of the kind.” He gave Slocum another look.

“But here’s our problem, Mister Walker. You say there were two other men involved in the robbery, but all you’ve given us are two names, without any indication of where we could find these men. Somebody who knew your real plate numbers called the police. But if you were frightened about what you had done, and you wanted to paint yourself as a relatively innocent wheelman and not as the cold-blooded killer of two people, it is at least possible that you could have invented a couple of partners and made that call to make it seem like somebody else was involved in the crime.”

Walker looked at Karp as if he were speaking Ukrainian. He turned from one man to another and settled on Sonny Dunbar. Waving his hands, he cried, “I tol you! They don believe me. I bein’ set up for this. Damn, Sonny, you gotta tell them. How could I make up some story like that?”

“Donny, it’s OK, I believe you. But you gotta give us something. Are you sure neither of these guys ever mentioned where they lived or worked, nothing we could use to find them?”

“Shit, Sonny, I tol you that. I don know nothin’ about who he is, where he live. I jus call him at this number he give me an …”

“Number? You have a phone number?” shot back Karp.

“Shit, Donny,” said Dunbar, smacking the table, “why in the hell didn’t you tell me you had the dude’s number?”

Karp leaned closer to the bewildered Walker. “Look, this is very important. Can you remember the phone number?”

“Remember? Hell, I jus call it a coupla times. It was … eight, five, three or two, or eight one five, somepin like that.”

Dunbar rubbed his face and gritted his teeth. Slocum smiled an innocent smile. Karp tapped a pencil on the table. Walker looked like a man trying to remember something. “Shit, I can’ recall it. I was readin’ it offa this piece of paper he give me on the night …”

“What paper? What did you do with it?” snapped Karp.

“I din do nothin’ with it. Jus put it in my pocket.”

Karp said to Slocum, “Fred, was there a piece of paper with a phone number found on him when you arrested him?”

“Not that I recall. But it’s no big thing to check with prisoners’ property.”

“Could you?”

“No problem, but we’re getting our cranks yanked.” The red-haired detective got up and left.

Dunbar said, “Donny, if we have a number we can trace where the phone is installed. That means we have a chance to pick up the guy Stack, or the other guy. OK, let’s say we find out where he is. You know the guy. Is he gonna give us trouble?”

“Shit, trouble? That dude nothin’
but
trouble. Guy look like a fuckin’ schoolteacher, I know he kill somebody like you squash a fly. That other dude, that Willy Lee? A big, strong-lookin’ guy, look like he could bust Stack in two? He scared shit of him.”

How do you know?”

“I jus know. I done smell it, man. You go after Stack, you better take a fuckin’ tank.”

They waited in the little room, tense, for fifteen minutes. Karp sent Leonard out to get the confession typed for Walker’s signature. Slocum returned first, with a bemused expression arranged around his cigar.

“So? What did you find?” asked Dunbar.

“Sonuvabitch if it don’t check out. There
was
a phone number on a scrap of paper in his pants pocket. I ran it through the phone company. Its registered to a guy named M. Louis, Apartment Five-fifteen, Thirty-six-oh-two Amsterdam.”

Dunbar jumped up and headed for the door. “Let’s get him.”

“Sonny, calm down,” said his partner. “Let’s think this through.”

Dunbar looked narrowly at the other detective. “Don’t tell me. You still think it’s a scam. Shit, Freddy …”

“You’re wrong there, kiddo. I’m converted. But look here. One, this is a big collar. We don’t want to screw it up. Two, we got a mutt with a handgun and a shotgun, maybe two mutts, come to that, who killed two people in cold blood and then calmly pinned the rap on this kid here. I’m thinking, these guys are smart, not just some street jitterbugs, you know. I mean, let’s give it some thought before we go stepping on our jocks.”

Dunbar let out his breath in a rush and relaxed against the table. “OK, Freddy, I’m listening. You got a plan?”

When Slocum didn’t say anything Karp spoke up. “I do.”

The two cops looked at him, surprise showing on both their faces. Karp was surprised himself.

The object of their discussion was at that moment reclining on his couch, dressed in a bathrobe of blue silk with Chinese figures, reading
Forbes.
He liked to read about big deals and the kind of people that the business press in the sixties called “corporate gunslingers.” He considered these people kindred spirits. Louis was a calculator rather than a fantasist, but occasionally he let himself imagine what it would be like to move through the Lear-jet world of high finance. He felt ready for a change; he was almost forty, and he did not look forward to cleaning out tills and knocking off payrolls at fifty.

In fact, Louis was quite well-off at this point. For nearly a decade he had been taking in thirty to fifty thousand dollars a year, tax-free, naturally, and without thinking about it very much had stashed it in gold collectors’ coins. A quantity of these now sat in the safe deposit vault of a downtown bank. He would have liked to play the go-go market along with everybody else, but wisely decided that his source of income could not bear the scrutiny that a complicated tax return would entail.

But like most men of action, Louis was short on self-knowledge. He increasingly saw himself as an executive, although he utterly lacked the premiere quality of a good executive, which is the ability to choose and inspire good subordinates. Nobody really existed for Mandeville Louis except Mandeville Louis. The rest of humanity was a sort of animated Kleenex, to be used when needed and then thrown away. This was no problem as long as he remained a lone-wolf robber, but it was inevitable that, when he decided to obtain a true accomplice, his choice would fall on someone like Preston Elvis, who was a jackass.

Louis put down his magazine, yawned, arose, stretched, and consulted his gold Rolex, the kind all the corporate gunslingers wore. It was 2:30. DeVonne was due back from the beauty parlor at 4:00. He had time for some work. Louis had a legitimate job, which he felt he needed as a cover for the straight aspects of his life—his car, his apartment, and so on. He worked as a freelance proofreader for the Claremont Press, a Harlem weekly newspaper and book publisher in the black liberationist vanguard. Louis rather enjoyed mingling with the sincere young people on the paper, although he was, of course, quite indifferent to black political aspirations, radical or otherwise. He enjoyed it because he liked pulling the wool over peoples’ eyes; it was another version of pissing on the altar. When the talk ran to revolutionary action and trashing the system, Louis always cautioned against violence, for which reason he was considered something of a Tom.

In his real career, Louis was perfectly oblivious to racial issues. Most of the people he had robbed and killed were white, while all of the people he had killed to cover his tracks were—naturally—black and as close to Louis himself in physical appearance as possible, since there was always the chance of an unexpected witness. He was an equal opportunity murderer.

As Louis sat down at his desk to check galley proofs, this career, and the whole elaborate structure of deception that supported it, came to an abrupt end. The phone rang. Louis picked it up and when he heard and recognized the voice on the line a jolt of pure terror ran through his body. His brow broke out in sweat and his mouth dried up so that he could barely speak.

“Stack? Hey, Stack, you still there?”

“Ahhh … ckk … S … Snowball? Snowball, what you doin’?”

“What I’m doin’ is I’m in deep shit. Nobody show at that goddam hotel so I come home. Now there’s cops swarmin’ all around the front yard. What I spose to tell ’em?”

“Be cool, Donald. You don’t tell em nothin’, hear? I take care of you.”

“But Stack …”

“Just keep yo lip buttoned, everything gonna be all right.”

Louis heard a pounding noise in the background over the phone.

“Stack, they’s beatin’ on the door. I gotta go open up or they gonna bust it down.”

“Donald? Goddamn, Donald, hear me now! I’m talkin’ bout yo family now, you hear!”

Louis shouted this into the mouthpiece, but his ear told him that the line had gone dead. He drew a deep breath and struggled for control. He cursed himself for his mistakes. Elvis had screwed up, that was obvious; and Walker had possessed a home to go to, which had broken the pattern of perfect junkie dependence that was at the heart of Louis’s strategy.

He got up and went to his closet. No point in sticking around here. The cops would crack Donald Walker in about four minutes flat. Donald still had his phone number, which meant they could trace it to his Amsterdam Avenue apartment. As he dressed, he was already planning his next setup. First of all, Elvis would have to go. That whole move was a mistake. Then, no more phone numbers. He’d have to work out some other system of keeping junkies on ice until he was ready to zap them. In any case, he had plenty of resources. It was time to get out of town for a while; he could get in touch with DeVonne, leave her to watch the place. The cops would soon give up looking for someone who wasn’t there. They had plenty else to do.

By the time he was dressed in slacks, a light sweater, and a raincoat he felt calm again. He pulled his attaché case from under the bed and flipped it open. He took out all the cash and stuffed it in his wallet, then threw a change of clothes on top of the shotgun and the pistol. The pistol! HOLY SHIT! Louis ground his teeth and trembled in a paroxysm of self-contempt. He’d forgotten to ditch the pistol that tied him to the liquor store killings. Damn! He should have given it to Elvis and then wasted the asshole. But who could have figured that Elvis would fuck it all up like this? Weirdly, one of his mother’s sayings passed through his mind: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”

He shook his head. I’m going batshit, he thought. He closed the attaché case and made for the front door. He decided to go down the fire stairs and ditch the gun in the trash can out back. He went out the door and slammed it behind him.

He turned right toward the fire stairs. A white man in a plaid jacket was leaning against the fire door. Before Louis could register what this meant, a voice behind him said, “Don’t move.” He snapped his head around and looked into the barrel of Sonny Dunbar’s revolver, pointed at his head, three feet away. Then, as he stood frozen, the white man was by his side, he was pushed against the wall, his attaché case was taken, and he was thoroughly frisked. His hands were cuffed behind his back. Dunbar told him he had a warrant for his arrest for murder and read him his rights. He took his right to remain silent seriously. The two detectives got not a single word out of him during the long ride downtown.

Nor did Karp do any better. He was still jazzed up from the excitement of the last hour: the ride to the precinct and the operation of his plan to catch Louis without violence, the positioning of the two detectives by radio, Walker’s phone call, and the successful capture of the desperado. His first sight of Mandeville Louis had been a letdown. It was difficult to believe that this calm, slight, almost scholarly looking man could be a cold-blooded murderer. The thought flashed through Karp’s mind that a mistake was being made—but then he recalled the guns in the attaché case. The pistol was already on its way to police ballistics to be test-fired.

After Louis had been booked and fingerprinted at Midtown South, and after Walker had identified him as Stack, Karp had him brought to an interrogation room. Karp found the man disturbing, his preternatural calm, something almost reptilian about the way he sat erect in his chair, hands folded on the table, as if waiting for a rabbit to emerge from a hole.

Karp introduced himself, Dunbar, and the stenographer for the record and said, “Mister Louis, I want to ask you some questions concerning the shooting deaths of Angelo Marchione and Randolph Marchione at A&A Liquors, located at Madison Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, which took place on the night of March Twenty-sixth, Nineteen-seventy, between 10:30 and 11:00 P.M. Before I ask you any questions, I want to advise you of your rights. You have the right to remain silent and to refuse to answer any of my questions. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“And anything you do or say can and will be used against you in court. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“And you have a right to consult a lawyer now, before any questioning, and to have a lawyer present during any subsequent questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided free of charge. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. Now, do you wish to make a voluntary statement concerning the shooting deaths I have described?”

“No, I do not. I wish to remain silent and I wish to consult a lawyer at this time.”

And that was that. Any information obtained through questioning after such a statement would be tainted. Karp knew it, and obviously Louis knew that Karp knew it. He gave Karp a little smile. Karp tightened his jaw and called the prisoner duty officer to take Louis back to one of the precinct cells.

But after some reflection, Karp felt he had done pretty well. With Walker as a prosecution witness, and if the gun checked out, he felt he had a tight enough case. There was also the chance that Mrs. Kolka had gotten a good enough look at Louis to pick him out of a lineup. As Karp gathered his papers and prepared to return to Centre Street to write up the case, he began to feel happy—champagne-silly happy. He thought, I caught a killer!