Terminal (13 page)

I
wasn’t surprised when he intuited that “there” was the night of the killing. He skipped back over thirty years, got right to it. No problem.

Maybe that’s when I first realized that Thornton was an easy guy to underestimate. On my side of the border, that made him dangerous. Some are good with knives, some with guns. You get good enough at anything, you get a name for it, but that’s not always a roadmap you can trust.

“A man’s name don’t always give away his game,” the Prof had schooled me on the yard. “See Ruppo over there,” he side-mouth whispered without turning his head, knowing I wouldn’t turn mine—I’d already learned that trick in the “training schools” where I’d served my apprenticeship. “People call him ‘Blade,’ but they never peep his shade.”

Ruppo’s shade was big enough to provide plenty of it. That was the first time I’d seen Gigi. He was big enough to block the sun, and the sun was about the only thing he’d ever let get behind him, anyway.

Thornton was the same cut, only from a different fabric. He had a weak chin, coward’s eyes, and a body that would probably reject steroids. His hard-guy talk was nice cover. He’d expect a man like me—a blooded-in Brand, vouched for by a former shot-caller—to see right through the pose, but be under orders not to slap him down.

What he wouldn’t expect was that I could see his slimy mind. Not just the part he’d kept from the psychiatrists—the part he’d kept from the Brotherhood, too.

I could see him for what he was, but he could only see me for what I was supposed to be…what he
needed
me to be.

I remembered my lesson: “You do it right, they should never see you coming.” Not the Prof’s words. Wesley’s.

“Where do you want me to start?” Thornton asked. “Claw already told you the story, so…?”

“You told the kids—the three boys—that you’d take care of everything?”

“For a price,” he reminded me. Making sure I wouldn’t forget he wasn’t some sucker who’d do favors for punks; he preyed on them, same as any real man would.

“Yeah. You went right out to this house where they’d left the body….”

“It’s called ‘window of opportunity,’” he said, back to the superior tone a fool uses when he thinks he’s teaching you something. “Late summer, it gets light early—there wasn’t a lot of time for me to get everything done.”

“Sure. The kids, they stayed in your place?”

“Fuck, no! I told them, move it! Get their punk asses back home, sneak back into their beds, make sure they were ready to alibi each other, if it ever came to that.”

“They left before you did?”

“By a minute or so.”

“What kind of car were you driving then?”

“A ’71 Plymouth. The GTX. That car had
everything.
”

“Including a big trunk.”

“You got it,” he said, risking a wink. “Never know when that’s going to come in handy.”

“The rug?”

“I told you—”

“Me?” I said, toning my voice just enough to let his mind put me back in the role he’d cast me for.

“Oh. I see what you’re saying. Truth is, I don’t know where the rug came from. That was the punks’ idea. I mean, they brought it with them when they snatched her. To roll her up in when they were done. It was still there. On the floor, I mean. Right next to her body.”

“Were you gloved?”

“Huh?!” He paused too long before covering up with, “I mean, of course, man. Fuck, you think I’d walk into a murder scene so I could leave prints?”

“What’d you do with everything later?”

He was back in control by then. He wasn’t being interrogated, he was a player, the one the boss had picked to brief a soldier for a mission. He visibly relaxed, knowing he was in about as much danger as a guy showing a map to the getaway driver…a map for a bank job he wasn’t going to be involved in.

“Everything I had on me went into the furnace,” he said. “I cleaned every inch of my car—I was always doing that anyway; I kept it
sharp.
But the trunk didn’t just get cleaned, it got
bleached.
If the cops ever asked, I spilled a bottle in there when I was taking a load to the Laundromat.”

“You didn’t have a washing machine in your place?”

“Sure,” he said, just the safe side of insulted. After all, he’d already told me that, besides being a master criminal back then, he’d been living semi-large, too. “But it was broke.” He grinned around the words. “The repairman who came out gave me a bill anyway. Fucking robber charged me fifty bucks for a ‘service call,’ when it was nothing but a loose wire.”

“Nice.”

He lapped that up.

“So, okay, you’ve got her in the trunk, wrapped in the rug, and you’re driving. By now it’s, what, four in the morning?”

“Maybe,” he said, rolling his eyes upward to show me he was trying to re-create as faithfully as he could. “Whatever, it was too damn close to daybreak for my taste. Which is why I took her to this place I know—”

“In the woods?”

“Not
deep
in the woods. Just enough for me to back the car in, so you couldn’t spot it from the road. If I had driven all the way over to the place I wanted, the car could have bottomed out. Been scratched all along the sides, for sure.”

“And made tracks.”

“Right. I just put her over my shoulder and walked.”

“Yeah?” I said, sounding just impressed enough to mute any trace of anxiety he might have left. “That must have been a bitch, carrying that much weight all that distance, especially in the dark.”

“Ah, she didn’t weigh much. And the rug was one of those thin ones, like for decoration? No padding or anything like that. Made it easier, actually—like having a cushion for my shoulder. The walk was maybe a half mile; I couldn’t tell you exactly.”

“How long did it take you?”

“To get there? Or to—?”

“To get there.”

“Ten minutes…maybe a little more.”

“Okay.”

“I knew the exact spot I needed,” he said. “There wasn’t time to be digging a fucking grave. I thought about the river—before I decided on the way I went, I mean—but the drive was too far, and there could be campers, or fishermen setting up early, or…a whole bunch of things. I had to think fast. I had to move fast. And that’s what I did. When I got her to the spot, I just rolled her out of the rug onto a bed of dead pine needles, made like a mound on top of her with more of them, and then the log.”

“Good thing you didn’t have more time.”

“What are you talking about? If I’d had more time, they’d never have found the little cunt.”

“Exactly. Then it’d be a disappearance, not a homicide.
You’d
be the only one who knew where she was buried. You, not the three guys we have to touch. They could all pass polygraphs that they didn’t know where she was. They’ve got money. They’d talk to lawyers. The lawyers would talk to forensic guys. Probably tell them, in the ground all those years, all anyone could ever prove is that it
was
her, not how she died. And that’s if they had wanted to play soft.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“They’ve got
money,
” I reminded him. “There’s guys, you put enough green on the table, they’ll go dig up a body, take it somewhere else, and make it
really
gone. What kind of leverage would you have
then
? You’ll go to the cops? Go the fuck ahead. What DA wants to try a murder case against three straight, clean,
rich
men with no body, no evidence, nothing but the word of an ex-con…especially an ex-con who’d caught a fraud beef? The only one who gets arrested in that scenario is the guy who tried to extort money from those good citizens. See what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” he said, slowly. “Because they found her body so quick, they
know
she was murdered.”

“And raped, right?”

“Oh yeah. Fucked, stuck, and made to suck. For all I know, she could have choked to death on cum.”

“Body pretty marked up?”

“I didn’t look that close. And there was no light, anyway.”

“I thought maybe you had a flashlight. You know, to make sure the log had her covered.”

“Oh, that. Yeah. But I didn’t use it for—”

“I got you,” I told him, dialing down his rheostat with my voice as I listened to another voice in my head: Albert Collins, telling the truth on “Cold, Cold Feeling.”

People like to say “the blues are the truth.” Not where I come from. Down here, only behavior is.

I put Thornton back to sleep.

“C
law?” I said, a few hours later.

“It’s a long story.”

“I got time.”

“So did I,” he said. “Starting when I was a kid. Same as you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You know how they jump on you for anything in there? I don’t mean just the color thing, anything they can fuck you around with—like if you’re fat, or dumb. Well, the name I came in with was one I had on my school records: Claude. I took a lot behind that name. Where my parents came from, that was a man’s name. But where I ended up, it was one of those faggy names…for a white man, anyway. You know, like ‘Stanley’ or ‘Melvin.’ A hard guy, he turns that into ‘Stan’ or ‘Mel,’ see? But what can you do with fucking ‘Claude’?

“I was always a big guy, and good with my hands, too. But that name just…I don’t know, it made some motherfuckers braver than they should have been. One day, I’m out in the yard, I find this rusty old pair of pliers. Now, I know that’s a treasure, but I don’t know what to do with it. Then, like a bomb going off in my brain, I
see
it.

“I put a piece of stone inside the lips of the pliers, and I squeezed it with all my strength. I kept squeezing until my hand froze. The cramps in my arm were so bad I almost cried behind it. But I knew I’d found something that would change my whole life, if I had what it took to use it right.

“After that, I practiced all the time. Every chance I got. Sometimes for hours and hours at a time. One day, the stone
broke.
Right in my hand. After that, I found lots of other ways to work on my grip. I never stopped.

“I woke up one morning, and I knew it was here. My day. I couldn’t wait to get out on the yard. Walked up to this giant nigger who was always ragging on me. He was fucking Mighty Joe Young with a brain, that guy. He could kill you with his mind. I hated him, but I admired him, too. You ever know anyone like that?”

“Inside
and
out,” I said.

“Okay. So—I’m passing by and he says, ‘What’s up, Claude?’ The way he said it, his whole crew got shit-eating grins on their faces. I didn’t keep moving. I stopped, and stuck out my hand, like for him to shake. ‘I’m good,’ I tell him, ‘but you got my name wrong.’ You could see from his face he didn’t know
what
the hell was happening, but he grabs my hand. And that’s when I locked down and
squeezed.
I could feel him trying for power—the muscles in his arm were jumping like current was running through them. He kept right on grinning, like it was nothing, but, that day, I was the pliers, and he was the stone. ‘You said my name wrong,’ I say, real relaxed. ‘It’s not Claude, it’s Claw.’

“Christ, that was one
tough
nigger. I could feel the bones in his hand starting to go before he finally said, ‘Thanks for putting me straight, man. Claw it is.’

“So I won that pot, but I knew I couldn’t just take the money and walk away. I knew I had to
keep
what I won. And I did. Every day of my life since then, I worked this hand,” he said, holding his right out for me to inspect. It was half again the size of his left. “By the time that wormy little fuck you just talked to met me, I could crush steel. And ‘Claw’? That was my name. I earned it.”

“Ever turn it into money?” I asked, frankly curious.

“One time, I went up against the arm-wrestling champ of a joint I was in. Guy had arms that made the iron-freaks look like toothpicks. Never lost a match. The odds were just insane. We’re out on the yard, at the table, cons so thick around us it was like being inside the fucking Colosseum. We chalk up, lock hands, I clamp down, and he’s paralyzed. His hand’s broken, whole arm is dead. We had to rent space in a few dozen cells just to store all the smokes we won that day.”

“That was beautiful,” I congratulated him. “But no way the arm wrestler let it go, right?”

“No,” he said, sadly. “He didn’t.”

“W
e need things we don’t have yet,” I said to Claw as he stubbed out his cigarette.

“Like what?”

“The girl was murdered. The dates are right. I got enough out of the punk to believe he could prove he was the one who dumped the body, but that doesn’t get us where we need to be.”

This time he didn’t even waste the single syllable it would take to agree with me: a man driving on fumes doesn’t floor the gas pedal.

“He came up with enough details that never made the papers so that only someone who actually had their hands in it would know. What I can’t tell is if the cops finally put this in the deepfreeze. A few years ago, that would have been a sure bet. But as soon as something becomes fashionable, police procedure changes. Working cold cases, that’s a hot ticket now. See what I’m saying? Instead of buried in some basement, rotting inside an evidence box, the file could be on some detective’s desk right this minute.”

“So?”

“So we’re holding an ace—that your guy can prove he was involved—but it’s not close to the full house we need to play this round.”

“Why not?” Claw said. “All he has to do is—”

“What? Threaten to go to the Law, right?”

He nodded.

“What’s he go there
with
? A confession? That might put
him
down for life—”

I caught Claw’s expression, said, “This is New York, not California. One, we’ve got the death penalty here, too; but it hasn’t been used since I was a kid. And, two, there was a time when the Supreme Court threw out
all
death-penalty convictions. By the time some of the states were able to come up with new laws that would stand up, it was years later. A grace period, like. Nobody’s looking at the needle for this one.”

“Grace period,” Claw half-whispered, a tiny dot of rage buried in the iron of his voice.

“Yeah,” I told him. “How come you think the Manson Family keeps going to those parole hearings?”

He shook it off—a fighter telling you if
that
was your best you’re not going to be around at the end.

“You’re right,” I agreed. “Like we said, it wouldn’t matter if those three guys were looking at six months in the County or a thousand years. It would still be worth the same to them to make it go away.”

“What’s missing then?”

“The
connection.
I spent hours with your guy. And here’s the truth: He hasn’t got one tiny piece of proof that points to
those
three as the ones he buried the body for. Nothing.”

“But he tapped them for cash—”

“He
says.
”

“The bat they used.”

“They’ll say
he
was the one who used it. After he borrowed it from them, a few days before. Probably as imaginary as those Polaroids.”

“That journal they kept. That should—”

“Prove they were obsessed with the girl? Maybe.
They’ll
say they were writing a book, collaborating on a project, thinking they were creative geniuses. Free speech. I guarantee you, there’s uglier stuff on the Internet every day. Kids write school essays about torturing a classmate to death, and if they so much as get an F on the paper, the ACLU’s right on the job.

“And that’s
if
it ever got into evidence. You don’t exactly have a clean chain-of-custody going here—that journal’s been in
your
guy’s hands for thirty-some years. Maybe…
maybe
the lab guys could prove the approximate age of the thing, depending on the paper and ink they used. But it’s too weak to stand up, never mind walk.

“And it gets even worse,” I continued. “Even if you could dig up some old school papers they wrote, by that time, rich kids like those, they probably typed everything. Or paid someone else to do it. This whole ‘handwriting analysis’ thing is a whore’s game: You bring your expert; I’ll bring mine. Who’s going to bring the best one? You think some little town is going to spend the year’s law-enforcement budget trying to convict three of its most illustrious graduates, from three of its best families?”

“You said we needed a full house to play…and now we don’t even have the ace we thought we had?”

“Yeah.”

“So we’re done?” Claw said. Like he must have said to the oncologist who gave him the news.

“No. We’re down, not done.”

“Down to what?”

“The tape. The one your guy made of them asking him to go bury the body.”

“There is no tape. We already know—”

“That we’re holding garbage? Sure. But they don’t. Like a bluff in stud poker: we’ll show them we’ve got
something…
but we have to make sure that’s enough to scare them out of calling our hand.”