Reversible Errors (56 page)

Like things just had to snap back to normal. Then it comes to you, that isn't gonna happen.

"After Erno shot Gus I bust out crying and my uncle, man, started in hollerin. 'Whose fault is this, anyway, Collins? Whose fault?' Right then, I figured I was next, and I even started lookin out the windows, tellin myself there were two shots now, somebody had to hear and call the police. But it was the Fourth of July, nobody's thinking nothin 'cept firecrackers.

"Then Erno saw the last one. Hiding. Poor dude, he was under a table. Erno pointed the gun and marched him clown to the freezer. Then I heard the shot. Didn't sound like the first two, for some reason. Something worse about it. For Erno, too. After he came up and looked at me, all that anger, that was done. He just sat there wasted and told me what to do. We were gonna make it look like a robbery. 'Get this.' 'Wipe that.' I did it all."

"Was he threatening you?" Muriel asked.

"He still had the gun, if that's what you mean. But from the look of him, I wasn't thinkin anymore he was intending to shoot me. Truth of it is that it probably didn't ever occur to him that I wasn't gonna do what he said, cause it didn't ever occur to me either. It was just family," said Collins. He stopped and took a heavy breath over that thought.

"And it was you who dragged the bodies downstairs?" Larry asked.

"Right. Cryin the whole time, too." Collins chucked his face in Larry's direction. "You thinkin about those footprints?"

"That I am." Forensics had matched Paul Judsons shoes with the footprints trailing through the bloody drag patterns left by the bodies.

"When I come up the last time, Erno saw that my slip-ons were soaked through with blood. He said, 'You can't go out on the street in those. Go downstairs and see which of them dead men got shoes that might fit you.' That was the first time it even came to me to say no to him. i ain putting my foot in no dead man's shoe.' Can you imagine? We actually carried on about that for a while. But I finally did like he said, same as the rest of it."

Collins pointed at Larry. "You go check those shoes that came off the third one, the businessman. Nice pearl-gray pump, I-talian. Fac- cione, the brand, I think. Too big for him, too. I couldn't ever believe nobody noticed those shoes. What businessman goes round in a pearl- gray pump?"

Muriel could see something moving behind Larry's hard expression: the shoes were clicking. It seemed to be hitting home with him that Collins was probably telling a large chunk of the truth. She hadn't had much doubt of that for some time now.

"We were ready to leave outta there, already at the front door, when Erno snaps his fingers. 'Hold this,' he says. He had everything, wallets and jewelry, bank deposit, the gun, all of it wrapped up in one of Gus's aprons. He sort of tiptoed down the stairs and when he comes back up, he's got a johnny in his hand."

"A condom, you mean?" Muriel asked.

"Exactly. Used, too. After everything else - " Collins just shook his head several times. "Anyway, Erno says, 'Stuffed those tickets up her behind. Couldn't have found them with a miner's light, if I hadn't seen the edge of this here.' She had maybe fifteen tickets rolled tight in that rubber."

Collins for the first time looked back to Anne-Marie. Behind him, his wife had sat with her mouth compressed against the heel of her palm, appearing, to Muriel's eye, as if she was doing her best not to react. But when Collins turned to her, she responded at once. She reached out and the two sat holding hands for a second.

"You okay?" Aires asked his client.

Collins wanted water. They took a break. Everyone needed a minute. Muriel searched out Larry's eye, but he looked funky and wrapped up in himself. Out in the hallway, waiting for the john, Muriel asked Tommy Molto what he thought. Molto picked with a fingernail at spots of tomato sauce on his shirt and tie, and said he didn't know what to think. Muriel wasn't sure either.

When they returned, Anne-Marie had slid her chair beside Collins's and was holding his free hand. The other was still gripping his Bible. After a minute or two of fiddling with the tape recorders to be sure they were running, Muriel gave the date and time, then asked Collins what happened when they left Paradise.

"I followed Erno back to his house, and sat with him in his car.

He'd been through some changes that night. We both had. At Paradise, he'd been outta-his-mind angry, then all blown away and subdued. Now he was just flat-out scared, trying to think out every angle not to get caught. He had one lecture after another for me. Make sure and mention to some folks how him and me went out for a pop last night. Don't ever get myself inebriated and start braggin about all this to my homes or some lady I was after. The big thing on his mind, though, was how to get rid of that apron full of stuff in his trunk-the gun, the wallets, the jewelry, it was all in there. It was past three by now and both of us were just too messed up and worn out to deal. I didn't want to have no more to do with any of this. And Erno was flat paranoid. All he could see was how we were bound to get caught, if we went to toss the apron in the river, or built a big fire and burned it all, or buried it in the Public Forest. There'd be light by five. But there was a toolshed in his backyard with a dirt floor-if we dug there, no way anybody was gonna see us. And so we each shoveled till we were halfway to China and threw that apron in there. He said he was gonna come up with a better plan when he calmed down, but I knew the both of us would be happy never to look at any of that again. Then he walked me to my car and right there on the street reached up and hugged me. That hadn't happened since I was ten, and in the middle of all that craziness, maybe the craziest thing of all was how good that felt. Murdered three folks and hugged me. I drove off cryin like a child.

"After that night, there just wasn't a way for me to be right with myself. I was done bein Faro for a while, case the po-lice figured out anything 'bout the tickets. It wasn't a week, and I was back in to dopin. Erno tried hard to stop me, but with time to think, I wasn't havin any more of him. One day I'm at Lamplight and there's Gandolph. This has to be two months after all this mess. And with twenty dudes around, he reaches into his pocket, and wrapped in this ratty piece of tissue, there's Luisa's cameo. I knew it straight out. I'd seen it on her neck.

" 'Faro,' he says to me -that's all he knew to call me -'Faro, man what-all'm I gone do with this thing now? Ain worth nothin to nobody else.'

"I'm like, 'Word up, nigger, you gone put yourself under. You best get rid of that. Po-lice be sayin you the one who busted a cap in her/ "He's like, 'How they do that, when I ain done nothin? I'm in mind to find her kin. They pay good for this here, now that she dead. They owe me, cause of how she held out on me/

'Tm like, 'Do what you have to, brother, but maybe you oughta hold up with that till somebody else is under the weight for dropping her down six. And I don't want to never hear nothin over them tickets/ "He says, 'Ain no chance of that.'

"Uncle Erno, man, he just was trippin when I told him. He was lookin around for Gandolph after that, gonna roust him and get that piece off him before he made trouble for himself and the both of us, but Erno didn't ever find him, I guess. Wasn't quite winter yet, so Gandolph wasn't hangin at the airport."

Muriel made a sound. Winter. As carefully as Erdai had papered over Collins's role, he'd missed that detail when he'd invented his own encounter with Gandolph and the cameo, and she'd nailed him on the witness stand. It was the first instant she was certain he was lying.

"Pretty soon, I had trouble enough on my own," Collins said. "Second of October I got set up on a big buy-bust. Videotape and everything. Cops knew they had me bad, even when they were shovin me in the cruiser. 'Third time for you, boy. Take a good look out the window, cause you ain never gonna see the street again for the rest of your life.' They were cold. But I had to give them something. I would have started in talking on the way to the station, if I didn't figure those Gangster Outlaws I was kickin down to would kill me first night in the jail.

"Anyway, couple hours back inside, and I'd gotten it in my head that this was all Uncle Erno's fault. If he didn't go and shoot those people, I wouldn't be jammed up like this. And if I stooled on my uncle, wouldn't be any gangbangers to kill me for doing that. Erno though, he was a smart one. Knew damn well what I was fixin to do. He was the first visit I got.

"He's like, 'You told them anything?' I was pretending I didn't understand, but he wouldn't let me get away with that. 'Oh, don't bullshit a bullshitter. I know what you're thinking. And I'm not gonna tel
l y
ou not to do it for my sake. But I will say that for yours. You tell them the truth, they'll put you right in the middle of it. Whose shoes are on that dead man? Who was stealing tickets with that girl? You're facing life for the dope. They offer fifty, sixty years for murder, you gotta take it. That's not what you want, is it?' Course not. And I'd rather not blame my uncle, specially when I was lookin at him. And he was right anyhow. Erno knew how the cops worked.

"Said he had a better idea. Put all of the blame on that poor lame Gandolph. He'd been runnin his mouth 'forehand how he was gonna kill Luisa anyway. Sort of made himself suspect number one. Just had to lead the po-lice the right way. I wasn't sure Squirrel'd be silly enough to keep that cameo around after I warned him, but Erno said not to worry, he had all that stuff still buried under his toolshed at home, worse came to worst, he'd figure some way to put a piece of that in Gandolph's hand, say they discovered some stash of his at the airport. Never had to, of course, because that poor hook was still holdin on to the cameo when you-all found him. Still gonna get himself the money he was owed. Dude that soft, once an idea gets into his head, you can't get it out." Collins shook his face in grim wonder.

"Only thing is, I couldn't ever believe anybody would look at that skinny little Squirrel and figure him for a killer. 'Dog'll do it to any bitch he finds,' Erno told me, 'once he smells heat.' My uncle knew the po-lice."

Muriel glanced over to see how Larry had taken that observation, but he was zoned again, staring through the blinds at the parking lot. The truth, as far as Muriel could see, was that Erno had figured things pretty well. His biggest risk was that when Squirrel was arrested, he would start talking about the tickets in order to explain the cameo. But apparently even Gandolph realized that story put him in too deep. Threatening Luisa was way too close to killing her. And even if Squirrel had coughed all of that up, Erno and Collins both knew the police would have a hard time finding Faro.

"That's why you said at the jail in '91 that you'd never testify, right?" she asked Collins. "When you told us about the cameo?"

"Right," said Collins. "Couldn't do that. Rommy would have recognized me as Faro straightaway. No way to keep the whole tale fro
m c
omin out then. But it worked. I got my ten, and Uncle Erno, he just drove on by like it was an accident on the highway.

"My uncle was good to me all the time I was inside, come visit, packages, whatnot, lecturing me to make the most of this chance when I got out. That came late '96. Old Faro, nobody had tumbled to that, so 1 was Faro again, ready to go back into travel agenting, but the truth is I wasn't on the street forty-eight hours 'fore I had a pipe in my hand. Everything the same. I was strung out, Erno wouldn't even speak my name. Only thing, I was afraid to start in slanging again. I knew it was life for sure if I got busted with quantity. Couldn't give up my uncle on the murders this time, cause I'd put Gandolph inside already and there'd be nobody to believe a different tale.

"One night I was hurtin bad. Needed to cop and didn't even have those moths in my pocket they show in cartoons. And it come to me that Erno had said all that stuff that we took out of Paradise that night was still under his toolshed. I went over there with a shovel and started in diggin till I found that apron. Cloth was full of holes, but everything was inside. All I had in mind to do was sell some of it-the watches and rings-so I could buy a couple bottles, but I saw that gun in there and it come in my head that if I had that, I could shake big money out of my uncle. Might be that his fingerprints were still on the gun, so he'd have no choice, gonna have to give what he owed me. I was back to that. How he owed me. Owed me and owed me.

"My aunt came home and said he was down at Ike's. I run in there holdin that gun by the barrel, so I didn't wipe off any prints Erno'd left on the handle. I was screamin about how he messed me up and owed me. I wasn't thinkin too good, naturally enough. Half the folks in that place were po-lice and armed, and they all had their gats out and pointed straight at me ten seconds after I said my first word.

" 'Gimme that thing,' Erno says and takes the pistol straight out of my hand, pushed me outside, trying to talk sense, how I was gonna get killed carryin on like this, and couldn't put those killings on him now that I put them on Gandolph. I said, 'Hell, that gun probably got your fingerprints all over it.' 'What of it?' he says. 'Twenty cops just saw me take it out of your hand.' He was right, too, probably, but it was the same old doo-doo so far as I was concerned, him right and white, an
d m
e black and back. Yeah,' I say, 'I got the rest of where that come from back at your house and a hole under your shed where it been, and you ain walkin from what you clone this time, I'm goin back in there, tell everybody you know what a murderin coward you been.'