The Renegades (26 page)

“The network didn’t air that show the night Terry Laws died. They aired it the night
before.
I think you changed the date and time, Londell. That’s what the TV station thinks, and that’s what I think.”

Londell leaned forward now, put his forehead on his cuffed hands. After a moment he sat back up.

Hood was surprised that Bentley and Orr were making up so many lies. They’d already told him that the motel employees ID’d Londell and Patrice with near certainty, and that the
Fresh Prince
episode had indeed been aired that night throughout Southern California. But Hood also knew that creative interrogations are one way that cops get confessions from the guilty—they simply give up. And the innocent? Well, some of them give up, too. Hood didn’t think Londell would. At least not now.

“What about the machine gun we found, Londell?”

Londell sat up again. He looked hard at Bentley, who was still looming over him from across the table. He looked at Orr, who was leaning against one wall, arms crossed. He looked at the big mirror that hid Hood.

“If you tell me you found a
machine gun
that belongs to me I’m gonna explode right up through this ceiling and fly all the way to the moon and live forever in total freedom away from lying-ass criminals like you.”

“Blast off,” said Bentley. “Be sure to send me a postcard.”

“I can’t talk to you. I want a lawyer. Actually, with the lies you telling, I need a hundred of them.”

“Londell, you say you didn’t kill Terry Laws? Well, if you’re telling the truth, the last thing you need is a lawyer. You know why? Because if you get a lawyer he’s gonna make a deal with us and that deal is going to send you to prison for a long, long time. He’ll think he’s doing you a favor. He’ll think he’s doing his job. You hide behind a lawyer now, and you’re meat, nothing but young black meat.”

“I had a twenty-five-caliber pistol I never shot. Bought it legal and you guys took it and I haven’t seen it since. I don’t even know how to
use
a machine gun. What do I want with a machine gun?”

“It was in your apartment.”

“I’ve been framed. You guys framed me. I want those hundred lawyers right now.”

“You sure about that? It’s your right, Londell. I’m just telling you, once you get the lawyers involved it’s a loser for you.”

Orr had left the interview room and now stood with Hood, looking through the one-way glass.

“You’re hitting him hard,” Hood said. “He’s not budging.”

“He’s a tough little shit.”

“He’s either innocent or the best liar I’ve ever seen.”

“I keep thinking about that machine gun in his bed frame,” said Orr. “But he puts up a good fight, doesn’t he? Looks to me like’s he’s more pissed because we’re lying than because he’s been caught. This ought to be good. Watch.”

As if on cue, Bentley sat across from Londell again. He stared at him for a long beat, a bug-eyed Sonny Liston kind of stare, half death and half abyss.

Londell stared back, tired but contemptuous of the liars he was dealing with.

Bentley opened the folder and spun an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch photograph across the table like a playing card.

“Tell us about this.”

Londell squared the picture before him with a finger, and looked down at it. “That’s a machine gun in a bed.”

“And guess where that bed is?”

“I don’t know but I can tell you where it isn’t. It isn’t my bed. That isn’t my apartment. And that isn’t my machine gun.”

“Guess again.”

Hood watched as Bentley set a series of three more photos in front of Londell. Even from outside the room Hood could see that they were establishing shots—a wide-angle shot of Dwayne’s bedroom, and the hallway leading to the living room, the living room with the door open to the flat Palmdale desert.

Londell lunged across the table at Bentley. But the ankle irons held and Bentley casually backed his head out of range like a superior boxer. Londell landed hard on the steel, cuffed wrists outstretched, one side of his face down, ankles still anchored to the floor rings. He was breathing hard. He looked up at Bentley with a wild eye, or it might have been at Hood.

“Why you treat a brutha like this? Why you hate me? You try to execute the
wrong man
. You just need a handy nigga to lynch and I’m it. Your soul is dead, man. Fuck you, Bentley.”

Londell retracted himself across the table and back into the chair.

Bentley watched him for a moment, then he rapped on the door and the guard let him out. He joined Orr and Hood and for a moment they all looked down at Londell Dwayne slumped in his chair. He looked up and flipped them off with both cuffed hands.

“All we really have is the SAW,” said Bentley. “And you as a witness, Charlie. And the transport deputies telling us how Londell mad-dogged Terry Laws for taking Delilah away from him.”

“I can’t make a positive ID,” Hood said. “I can’t ID anybody with a bandana over their head and sunglasses on, at night, in a hail of machine gun bullets.”

“That’s certainly what his defense would argue.”

“It would be the truth.”

“Yeah, Charlie, I can see the difficulty. They’re going to arraign him on the assault, gun and sex charges tomorrow. Judge won’t set a bail Londell can make. That keeps him nice and close while we make the case for killing Terry.”

They watched Londell for another moment. Then Bentley turned to Hood. “What’s your gut say, Charlie?”

“It wasn’t him.”

“Why?”

“You know the gut,” he said. “It feels what it feels but it doesn’t say much.”

Hood watched two big deputies come into the interrogation room, cuff Dwayne and unlock his ankle irons, then guide him out the door.

As Hood walked across the parking lot in the late morning sun he got a call from the spectrographic voice analyst. He said the 911 recording was made outside in a high wind, or maybe with the caller’s head sticking out an open window in a moving vehicle. He’d cleaned it as best he could but the recording was compromised. The anonymous call about a shooting and Eichrodt’s fleeing red truck could have come from either Terry Laws or Coleman Draper or hundreds of millions of other men.

31

I
order two good cognacs
and look down at Sunset Boulevard. It’s after midnight and the clubs are still an hour from letting out. The L.A. air is a soft mixture of restaurant and car exhaust and bottled scents with their hint of human rut, all rising up from the strip. I draw it into my lungs before lighting another cigar.

The boy takes his snifter and swirls the liquor and looks out over the city. I clearly remember when I was just a little younger than he is—not that long ago, really—and the terrible sense of liberation I experienced after the tragic death of my family. I was utterly alone, except for a few friends and my dogs. My world became a different place.

“I know where this story is going,” he says.

“You think you know.”

“Laws is doomed by his conscience.”

“But doomed to what? Things change. You will see. Within just a few weeks, I began to see a change in Terry.”

“He regrets his erratic behavior.”

“No. It’s better than that. He doesn’t even
see
it. Listen, a month later we’re making another run, and Terry asks me to stop off in Puerto Nuevo, the lobster village south of TJ.”

“I’ve taken Erin there.”

“Well, Terry says there’s something he wants to show me in Puerto Nuevo. He says he’s been driving past it his whole life but has never really seen it. But because of something that happened to him a few days ago, he says he sees it now.
Gets
it, is what he says.”

“You’re leaving something out.”

“Patience. I can’t reveal the future without a present to rest it on, right? Okay, so I’m driving Terry’s red pickup truck. We’ve just crossed the border into Tijuana. Now it’s time for Mexican Customs. A chipper bunch, I can tell you. We’ve got $385,000 and all the usual fishing stuff in the back, protected only by a camper shell and our badges and our weapons and ability to use them. And here’s Terry, sitting next to me, badgering me about Puerto Nuevo.

“I’ve got no interest in Puerto Nuevo. For me, the purpose of this trip is not tourism. All I want to see is El Dorado, get my cut and get home. The truth is that Terry has pissed me off—his drinking, his mood swings, his blather, his new babe, his so-called ideas. But we make it past Mexican Customs. I look at the rearview mirror and watch the Customs booth recede and the officials approach the next vehicle. When I look over at Laws, Terry is staring out the window with an odd smile on his face. He hasn’t had a drink since we left L.A. He hasn’t even joined Avalos for his usual prejourney shot of tequila. Terry was usually drunk by now, and starting in on his second flask. What was up?

“We park outside a very small church on a dirt road in Puerto Nuevo. It is chilly and foggy for June. I smell the ocean, which is just a few yards away, and I also smell the lobsters boiling in the dozens of Puerto Nuevo restaurants up and down the village streets. As a teenager I’d come down here scores of times with Israel and other friends, for drinking and eating the lobsters then sleeping it all off in TJ.

—This is it, said Laws.

—It’s a church.

—Come in. I haven’t been in here since I was a boy. I want to ask you something.

“So I follow him in. Churches have always disturbed me. They make me feel unimportant. I sense the atrocities committed in the name of God through the ages but even that can’t cheer me up that night with Terry. The church is tiny and simple, no vestibule, just a few rows of pews and a raised altar with a small stained-glass window behind it. The cross is smallish and smooth. There are candles and plastic flowers and paintings of saints on heavily lacquered boards hung along the walls. It’s cool and it smells to me like incense and mildew. Laws walks toward the altar, then stops and turns to me, smiling. His bigness is exaggerated by the smallness of the church. He looks almost gigantic in there.

—Laurel and I are going to be married the last Saturday in August.

—Of this year?

—Yes, Coleman. Nine weeks from now. And I want you to be my best man.

—Well, okay. That’s great, Terry. I’m sure she’s a fantastic woman and you deserve her.

—I remember this place from when I was a boy. Dad brought us down here a couple of times to see the blowhole and eat lobster and buy tourist stuff. And I remember standing in this little church. Right here, where we are now. And I remember feeling something here. It was something that moved in my heart, like a tickle, like speeding along a rolling highway when you’re a kid and your dad or mom is driving—you know that tickle in your guts?

—To me it was sexual.

—Well…anyway, I never had that feeling again for about thirty years. Until last Sunday when I took Laurel to church.

“And, of course, I understand: Terry’s beatific stare, his booze-free smuggling, his impending marriage, his renewed interest in this church. I felt like I was standing at the base of a mountain that was about to collapse. Dread? Terror? I’m not sure there’s a word to describe a catastrophe that hasn’t happened yet but assuredly will.

—You found Jesus.

—He found me. Coleman, I never knew how bad I needed to be found. It’s like the feeling I had in this church thirty years ago, but ten times as strong. Fifty times.

—I’m very happy for you and Laurel, Terry. And for you and Jesus. But we should get back to the truck. Mexico is not a place to leave our kind of luggage unattended.

—I’m glad you’ll be there with me, man. Laurel is going to be stoked, too.

“I clap Laws on the shoulder and force a smile. I look into his joyful eyes. But I’m doing a lousy job of hiding my worry. I’m happy that Laws has found a fortune, and a woman with unbelievable legs who wants to marry him, and found Jesus, too. But I can’t avoid this weighted black thought that Terry is becoming a dangerous partner. I feel this heavy blackness in the same place that Terry feels the tickle of God.

“That night at Herredia’s, just after dinner is served, Terry asks Herredia, old Felipe and me to bow our heads in prayer. Terry thanks the Lord for this great bounty and for the great friendships that have sprung up between us. He asks that the food be blessed for His service, and he concludes grace in the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior, amen. Then, all through the meal he talks about his personal relationship with Jesus and he inquires directly into the health of each man’s soul. He says he will gladly witness to the Lord for us when we are ready. He refers to Laurel several times as the woman who has saved him through Christ. When dinner is over I look at Herredia. El Tigre has the same dark glower that he had the very first night we met him, you know, where he’s deciding not whether to kill someone, but how.”

“You guys are in trouble.”

“But listen. The next day we take Herredia’s fishing boat out of Ensenada and speed southwest. It’s a twin-engine Bertram fifty-eight-footer with outriggers and bait tanks—tournament rigged and ready. The engines have just a few dozen hours, Herredia tells us, but that was about all he said. He’s angry and it shows.

“And my other problem is I don’t fish. Never did it as a boy, never did it as a man. I don’t care about fish unless it’s on a menu. But, as you remember, I’d sold Terry and myself to El Tigre with gifts of fishing gear, some of which I’d personally endorsed. You know, the international brotherhood of anglers. So, when I begin to see that Herredia will want to take us fishing someday, I go out a couple of times on a half-day boat out of Long Beach, try to learn something about it.

“Now I have to call upon all of my acting skills to play the part of a seasoned saltwater angler. The postures and language of the sport come easily to me, but it takes more than ’tude and lingo to select, tie on and work a lure well enough to fool a wild animal. I concentrate on the fishing like I’ve never concentrated on anything in my life, except maybe seducing women, and I stay within my capabilities and I start catching some smaller fish. I can’t believe it! Herredia, of course, he sees that I’m not really very good but that’s perfect for him—he ridicules me and puts me in my place, does the whole macho trip you’d expect from a guy like that. But the fish quit biting my lures, and I start to feel the first shivers of panic at being unmasked. What if Herredia sees how deeply I’d been lying when I gave him all the fishing tackle? My guts start to ache. I start messing up my casts, getting tangles and knots. My confidence vanishes. I dig a hook into my damned thumb and pry it out and try to fish through the pain, but I still can’t get so much as a sardine to bite. Even way down in the water, the fish sense my incompetence. I catch Herredia staring at my middle section and I wonder if he’s thinking shotgun or the fillet knife I saw Felipe sharpening early that morning. I’m fucked.