Reversible Errors (48 page)

The Code said nobody ever talked about what went down at Ike's -the tales told or who you left with. And as a result, you learned stuff here they couldn't teach in the Academy. Guys lied a lot-they covered themselves with false glory. But there were plenty of boozy confessions, too: when you hadn't covered your partner, when you got so scared your body failed you. You could cry about fucking up, and laugh about the world of bean brains who were out there just waiting for the police to find them.

When Larry entered, several voices rang out. He shook hands, taking crap and giving it, and worked his way back to the bar, where Ike was drawing drafts. The two projection TVs in the barroom were showing reruns of Cops.

As several other men and women had clone already, Ike congratulated Larry on the outcome of the Gandolph case. This thing with Erno had bothered a lot of people -it always did when anybody who called himself part of the brotherhood went bad.

"Yeah," said Larry, "I didn't shed any tears when Erno took off on the highway for hell." The morning paper was on the bar next to him. Below the fold, there was a photo of Collins and the others rolling
Erno's casket into the hearse. It had taken all Larry's self-control not to go down to St. Mary's yesterday with a sign reading 'Good Riddance.'

"Son of a buck was not my cup of tea, either," Ike said. "Something about the way he missed the job. You know, like mom kept him home when the other boys went out to play. I thought he had the wrong idea about things. Easy to say now. But," said Ike with a smile, "Erno wasn't all bad. Bought a hell of a lot of beer in here."

Ike resembled an elderly beatnik. His hair was gone on the top, but the snowy sides overflowed his collar, and he wore a goatee. He had a long apron, which might not have been washed in a month, and the eye that he'd lost when he was shot was a pure milky white and moved now and then for reasons of its own.

"Were you around the night he plugged that guy?" Larry asked him.

"Around? Yeah. But I was doing the same as I'm doing now. I didn't see nothing until I smelled the gunpowder. Isn't that a pisser?" asked Ike. "That .38 probably shook plaster off the walls, but the first thing I remember is the smell." Ike looked into the barroom. "Gage over there was standing not three feet from the both of them. He seen it all."

Once he got a beer, Larry drifted over that way. Mike Gage worked Property Crimes in Area Six. His picture was in the dictionary next to the term 'good cop.' He was one of those blacks with a permanent part in his hair that looked like it had been applied with a chisel. He was a quiet type, church on Sunday, six kids. Larry had a theory that the quiet guys did the best on the job. Larry himself, especially when he was younger, was just too damned excitable. Mike was even. A lot of policemen tended to run bitter. In general, the job seldom turned out to be the adventure you hoped for. Even your kids got old enough to realize you weren't the legend you wanted to be in your own mind. It was paperwork and boredom, getting passed over in favor of the connected, and making far less money than half the creeps you snagged. And by the time you got hip, you had too little going to move on to anything else. But Mike was like Larry, excited to see the shield when he picked it up every morning. Gage still thought it was a great deal, helping people be good rather than bad.

Mike was with a bunch of other guys from Six, but made room on the bench beside him. One guy with Gage, Mai Rodrigues, extended his fist across the picnic table, and Larry gave it a knock, ballplayer style, celebrating last week's victory again. It was noisy in here -Creed was pounding out of the speakers-and in order to be heard Larry had to get close enough to Mike to cuddle. They talked about the case for a minute, what a strange guy Erno had proven to be.

"Ike says you were right there when Erno popped that character- Faro Cole?"

"Larry, I'm on the job long as you, and truth be told, that's as close as I've come to a bullet." Mike smiled at his beer. "The fool Erno shot-Faro? -he'd been wailing like some Iraqi woman, and Erno got the pistol out of his hand and pushed him outside, then all the sudden they were back in here and bang. Not three feet from me." Mike pointed toward the side door where he'd been sitting.

Larry asked one of the questions that had been bugging him for a while: Why was a complaint never lodged against Faro for threatening Erno?

"We all figured Faro for past tense. And Erno didn't want charges anyway. Once we took the gun, Erno started in bawling over the body."

"I thought Erno was saying self-defense."

"He was. But he kept telling us leave the guy alone."

"Not too logical."

"You're Homicide, you tell me, but I didn't think shooters were where you went for logic."

Larry took a second. Better sense told him to stop now, but at the age of fifty-four he still hadn't figured out how to heed the voice of caution.

"Here's the thing, Mike. Today, I'm starting to have bad dreams. I need comfort on one thing. You think you could make this guy? Faro?"

"Four years, Larry. Maybe Mai could. He had Faro's head in his lap for fifteen minutes while we were waiting for the mercy wagon."

"Lemme buy both of you a beer at the bar."

Ike had put today's Trib away and it took him a second to find it.

"This bird," said Larry, displaying the front page to Gage and Ro- drigues, "this one. Just check me out that he doesn't look like the guy Erno shot."

Rodrigues peered up before Mike Gage but there was the same thing in both faces. Larry had been pointing to Collins in the photograph of Ernos funeral.

"Christ," Larry said. But the columns kept adding up, just as they had all day. Faro was a travel agent and so was Collins. Size, age, race all matched. Like Collins, Faro had been represented by Jackson Aires. 'Faro Cole' sort of looked like 'Collins Farwell,' turned inside out, s
. O. P
. with aliases, so the doofus using it would have a clue, when he was on the spot, about what he had been calling himself. And it wouldn't be unusual for a bad boy just out of the joint, as Collins was in 1997, to be toting phony i
. D
., to make sure he didn't give the coppers-and his parole officers-a head start if he got jammed up on something. But what bothered Larry the most was what had struck him while he was sanding: Collins's story about how Jesus had entered his life with a bullet through the back.

Rodrigues tried to console him. "You don't need to trust a four- year-old eyeball, even if it's cops."

Larry went outside to use his cell phone. The high clouds were darkening and resembled an angry stallion rearing up. Storm tonight, probably. Then he rejoined the present and fell under its weight.

This fucking case.

Chapter
33

august 8, 2001

At Sea

"you got time to leave the office?"

Muriel had grabbed her own phone after-hours. Not even bothering with a name or hello, Larry sounded cozy and familiar. She'd been waiting days for his call, and she was immediately dashed when he added, "Some guys down here you ought to talk to." She could not quite dampen a faint echo of embarrassment in her voice when she finally asked where the hell he was. It sounded like a tavern.

"Do we have a problem?" she said.

"Can of worms. No," said Larry. "Snakes. Rattlesnakes. Cotton- mouth."

They had a problem.

"And, if you don't mind," Larry added, "bring the old file on Collins we put together when we went to see him in the jail." He told her where it was in the current materials stored in her office.

Pushing through the old oak door at Ike's a half hour later, Muriel could detcct a current in the room. Generally speaking, there were two schools of thought about her in the Kindle County Unified Police Force: some liked her, some hated her guts. The ones in the second camp kept it to themselves when they were 011 the job, but off duty they owed her no such courtesy. They remembered the cases she'd nixed, the hard lines she'd drawn and sometimes enforced on police practices. Their world was far too macho to comfortably endure discipline-or ambition -from a woman. She could grant them that she was often hardheaded, even abrasive, but in her heart of hearts, she knew that the main issue for the guys staring at her came down to plumbing.

Larry was back at the bar. He was in overalls and looked like he'd been rolled in flour. His clothing and hair were pale with dust.

"Let me guess. You're going to be a sugar doughnut for Halloween."

He didn't seem to get the joke until he glanced at the beveled mirror over the bar and even then wasn't very amused. He explained that he'd been sanding all day, but he clearly had other things on his mind besides his appearance.

"Wassup?" she asked.

He told her, slowly, piece by piece. She got right next to him when he'd finished, so she didn't shout.

"You're telling me Erno Erdai shot his own nephew?"

"I'm saying it's possible. Did you bring that file?"

Larry waved Mike Gage over first to look at Collins's mug shot from 1991. Mike just gave him a look. Rodrigues said, "I take it 'Definitely' is not the answer you're looking for."

"Tell it like it is."

"The eyes, man." Rodrigues tapped the color photograph. "Almost orange. Village of the Damned or something."

"Right," Larry said.

"Let's get out of here," Muriel told him. This wasn't the place for a discussion. Even the cops who liked her were uncertain allies, many of them more loyal to the reporters who kept them on their call list than they'd be to her. Outside, she offered Larry a ride up the hill. He hesitated at the door, reluctant to bring his dust into her sedan. She'
d o
wned the Civic since 1990, and it hadn't been tidy even when it was new.

"Larry," she said, "there is nothing this upholstery hasn't seen," and barely caught herself from laughing when she lit 011 a distant memory. He gave her directions as they drove.

"So, okay," she said. "Explain."

"I don't think it makes any difference."

"That's step two," said Muriel. "We have to know what the hell was happening first. Am I reading this right? If my mother wants to reconcile with her sister, she ought to trying shooting her in the back?"

Larry laughed for the first time tonight. "Three thousand comedians unemployed, and you're making jokes."

"Seriously," she said. "Isn't that the sequence? Erno and Collins got all lovey-dovey after that."

"Fuck," said Larry, "I don't have a clue. And I don't care. Erno's family is as messed up as the next guy's. So what? It's TMI, as far as I'm concerned." Too much information. An acronym for the times, if ever there was one.

Larry was pointing up a long driveway. The house was a Victorian, which he had once described as his specialty. San Francisco colors had been applied on all the trim, bright contrasting shades to bring out the feathering and diamonds scored on the presswood exterior. Muriel leaned over the wheel to see it all through the windshield.

"Jeez Louise, Larry. What a beauty."

"Isn't it? This one especially, sometimes I'm walking around inside and it bothers me that I couldn't afford anything like it for myself when the boys were young. But that's the story, right? You never get what you want when you need it." He seemed to hear himself only after he'd spoken. She could see him tense up and avoid looking her way. To save him, she asked for a quick tour.

He started with the garden. The light was weakening and the bugs were on the attack, but Larry was undeterred, stepping carefully between the recently bedded plants. The legacy of color and glory he was leaving behind for whoever would buy the house was full-grown in his head and he took quite some time explaining how the various perennials -everything from crocuses to peonies to hydrangeas--

would rise up and expand year by year. It was nearly dark when he quit, and that was only because she finally mentioned getting eaten alive.

Inside, he was more cursory. In order to contain the plague of dust, sheets of plastic hung over the doorways to the rooms being sanded. The challenge of a place like this, Larry said, was knowing which details to preserve in the name of character and which had to be sacrificed for the sake of the marketplace. Lighting was an example. When they were built, these rooms were dim as an outhouse, illuminated at night by gas sconces. Todays homeowners were innate energy hogs. Over time, Larry said, he had learned strong overhead light and lots of switches were prized by buyers.

It was neat to see Larry in his other life. He amused her as he always did, but she'd had no trouble imagining Larry as an entrepreneur. Even his tenderness in the garden was something she'd gradually taken account of. The guy she knew in law school liked to pretend that the only use for the word 'sensitive' was on a condom wrapper. But there was somebody else there-she'd always known that-and she admired Larry for letting him out.

"Does the plumbing work yet?" she asked. Larry showed her where she was going. There was a little quarter-window across from the sink, and amid the lights below, Muriel could more or less pick out the neighborhood where she'd grown up a fourth of a mile from Fort Hill, a bungalow belt set amid rail yards and truck depots. Even today, it remained a land of endless parking lots, harshly illuminated to prevent theft, half-mile stretches where truck trailers or new Fords or rail containers waited beside the right-of-way to be loaded on trains. It was a good place. People worked hard, were kind and decent, and wanted better for their kids. But as was always the case with working people, they also felt the harshness of raw happenstance that kept them from counting as much as the folks who bossed them around. Not her, she'd vowed. Not her.