“You sure this is the place?” Lauren looked up at the senior apartment complex on Elmwood Avenue, smack in the middle of the trendy Elmwood Village, with its boutique shops and martini bars. A U-shaped construction, it boasted a sad, narrow courtyard between the two main buildings. A fuzzy-haired octogenarian in a puffy coat slowly pushed a walker toward a wooden bench at the far end, plastic shopping bags filled with God-knows-what hanging from each hand grip. The lady gave them a suspicious look as Lauren and Charlie came up the sidewalk, then sat down and began fiddling with her goods.
“That’s what Morgan’s message said. Apartment 202.”
The weather had turned overnight, coating Lauren’s front lawn with frost. She had watched Reese scrape his windshield that morning, then head to work. She hadn’t said a thing about yesterday’s excursion with Charlie. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Reese; she just couldn’t be a hundred percent sure Ben Lema or Joy Walsh weren’t the leaks. If word hit the street that Rita Walton was trying to snitch on someone, that would be akin to signing her death warrant. The fact that the police couldn’t find Rita, and Charlie had to resort to using Mr. Morgan, meant she’d already been hiding from something or someone.
After all, it could be nothing.
The outer door to the south-facing building was open. Walking into the lobby, Lauren noticed a fat, twenty-something security guard eating nacho chips and playing on his phone. He didn’t look up as they crossed the filthy carpeted floor to the elevator. Benches were pushed up against the walls, filled with the residents who took no notice of them. They sat with coffee mugs or holding onto their walkers with one hand as they spoke in loud voices to be heard over the television set mounted above the security guard station, currently airing a daytime talk show.
One older gentleman looked up at them as they waited for the elevator car to come. “You got a smoke I could borrow?”
“Sorry, boss,” Charlie told him, “I quit when I was sixty.”
“Yeah?” He laughed, showing off a lifetime’s worth of tobacco-stained teeth. “So did I, but it didn’t stick.” He burst into a fit of hacking coughs, drawing dirty looks from the lady next to him.
“Have a good one,” Charlie said as he and Lauren got on the elevator. When the door shut, he turned to her. “Don’t you ever let me end up in a place like this.”
“What?” She stared up at the floor numbers. “This place is heaven compared to some of the nursing homes I’ve been in.”
Stepping off onto the second floor, the smells of greasy home cooking flooded Lauren’s nostrils. She’d been in these apartments a few times before and she knew they each had little kitchenettes. Just big enough to cook for one. An enormous orange cat sat on the window sill at the end of the hallway, watching them with yellow eyes as he soaked up the afternoon sun.
“201.” Charlie’s finger pointed to the brass number on the door to their left, then changed course, across the hall. “202,” he declared.
Positioning himself in front of the door, Charlie took his oversized thumb and put it over the peephole, an old street copper’s trick, before he knocked. Lauren stood off to the side, watching his huge fist pound three times on the door. From inside, they could hear the sound of a person shuffling around, some swearing, and a very loud television.
“Ellie, if that’s you, I ain’t got no money you can borrow—” The door swung inward to reveal a heavy-set black woman around Charlie’s age with her hair in pink plastic curlers. A pair of huge gold hoops hung from each lobe as she stood dumbstruck in the doorway, clutching her blue and white house dress together at the chest.
“Hey, Rita,” Charlie said. “Long time no see.”
“Am I dead? Am I seeing a ghost? Oh Lord, you come right in here!” She stepped back, waving her arm frantically for them to come inside. “Did anyone see you?”
Lauren followed Charlie into the tiny but neat apartment. A huge flat-screen TV was blaring from its place on the floor, the box it came in propped against the wall next to it. Charlie seemed to take up the entire space of the living room; Lauren would bet if he held out his arms he could touch each side wall. Poor Rita was throwing the deadbolt and fastening the chain behind them, mumbling to herself, “I knew it. I knew it. I knew I shoulda minded my own business.”
“You’re not in trouble, Rita,” Charlie told her when she was finished with the door.
She turned to face him, her meaty hands propped on each hip. “If Charlie Daley is at my door, I’m in trouble. And don’t call me Rita, unless you want me to get my ass kicked out of here.”
Framed family photos took up almost every inch of space on the walls, some in color, some in black-and-white, interspersed with embroidered Bible quotes and colorful inspirational prints. It made the small room feel even more claustrophobic now that there were three of them inside.
“So who are you now?” he asked in amusement as she shuffled by him to her kitchenette to turn off the burner under a whistling tea kettle.
“Virginia Robinson, my older sister. She died in North Carolina six years ago when I was staying with her. I needed to come back home to be near my babies, but I got too much negativity because of my previous lifestyle. I’m clean and sober now, seven years, and I ain’t been in no trouble. You know that, Daley.” She held up the kettle and looked at Lauren. “You want some tea? It’s Earl Grey.”
Lauren shook her head. “No thanks.”
Rita squinted at her. “I ain’t got my glasses on, but you look familiar. Who are you?”
“My name’s Lauren Riley. I’m a cop who used to work with Charlie.”
Reaching over the stovetop, Rita extracted a chipped teacup from a shelf. “So now you bound to him for life? Because that’s what it feels like for me. Charlie’s like a bad penny, he always turns up.”
Charlie gave a little snort of laughter.
“Actually, Rita, he’s helping me, and I hope you can help me too.”
“I ain’t rude, I just know Charlie don’t drink no tea.” She poured herself a steaming cup, dipping the tea bag up and down in the hot water. Lauren watched as she poured sugar from a glass container, exactly like the ones they had in restaurants, into her teacup. She vaguely wondered if Rita had slipped it into her purse the same way her own grandmother used to do every time they ate out. Every Sunday night there’d be a new set of salt and pepper shakers at Grandma Healy’s.
“Rita.” Charlie’s voice was low, like he was in business mode now. “Did you make some phone calls to the old Snitch Board?”
“Ain’t this a bitch?” she asked, leaning back against her countertop, tea in hand. “I ain’t seen you in a million years. I’m living a law-abiding life and you still wondering if I’m in the mix?”
“Law-abiding except for the identity theft?”
“She’s dead. She don’t need it no more,” Rita protested, taking a long slurp from her cup.
“Rita—”
“Shhhh, shhhhh, shhhhh!” she snapped. “It’s Miss Robinson now.”
“Rita,” Charlie said, a little more sternly now. “Quit playing games. Did you call the Snitch Board or not?”
Rita crossed her arms over her ample chest, earrings swinging, a couple of tea drops flying out of her cup. “Not.”
Feeling around in her jacket pocket, Lauren produced the slim black digital voice recorder. Without a word she held it out and hit Play.
Rita’s lined face fell as her voice filled the small space. She put the teacup on the counter, shoulders slumping along with the sound of her own voice. Lauren let all three calls play through before she spoke again. “Did you call the Homicide office that day?”
“Damn you, Charlie Daley,” Rita said. “I’m almost seventy years old. I can’t be involved in this shit no more.” She seemed to sink in on herself, like a great burden had just been replaced where she’d managed to shake it off.
“I know you don’t want to.” Lauren took a step forward. “But something made you call. You said you saw a murder.”
“That was a long time ago.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “Years and years ago.”
Lauren caught Rita’s eyes with hers. “If you have information about a murder, it must be weighing on you after all this time to leave those messages. Something made you call.”
Rita wiped her nose with the back of her hand, taking a deep breath. She had her other hand on the counter behind her, almost holding her up. Rita’s eyes went to Charlie’s. “When you cut me loose, I was in a bad way. Worst I ever been. You wouldn’t return my calls. I got busted a few times. Then I picked a john’s wallet, and he punched me, so I pulled a knife on him. I got arrested for robbery third. Didn’t show up to court, because I knew I was gonna do time.” Her voice got stronger as she continued to stare at Charlie. “You remember how it was. What I was into.”
“You were out of control, Rita.” Charlie’s voice was gentler now. “I couldn’t have you stealing half the drugs you bought for me.”
Nodding to herself, one of the pink plastic curlers unfurled a little, sending it spiraling alongside her face. “I know. Crack was like a demon. I had to have it, had to have it all the time. You let me go in the fall of 1991; I remember that because I got the robbery charge around Halloween. I was trying to get enough money to get down to my sister’s in Raleigh. But I smoked up every twenty dollars I made.”
She itched around the cheap lace of her housecoat collar and Lauren saw a puckered, jagged scar that ran down the side of her neck. Unconsciously, Lauren’s hand snaked to her side. Rita noticed her noticing. “Some bitch with a razor blade cut me. Twenty-seven stitches I got that time.”
“I didn’t mean to stare.”
Snapping her fingers, she pointed at Lauren’s face. “That’s where I know you. You the lady detective that’s been all over the news. You got stabbed in the back or something.”
“That’s why I need your help. You called the district attorney’s office the afternoon I got attacked. I need to know if you called the Homicide office and who you talked to.”
“Aw, shit. This is worse than I thought.” Her round brown eyes turned back to Charlie’s face. “You ain’t a cop no more. You can’t protect me. These guys will kill me.”
“I never let anybody hurt you when we worked together, and no one’s going to hurt you now.”
Waving him off, she walked over to her sad, tired-looking blue sofa and sat down. “That’s just words, Daley. This is for real. They stabbed her”—she pointed at Lauren—“and she’s a cop! What do you think they’d do to an old junkie hooker like me?”
“You keep saying ‘they’,” Lauren interrupted. “Who do you mean by ‘they’?”
“I never took care of that robbery warrant,” Rita said. “I can’t go to jail for no felony now, not at my age. That’s why I left this town in the first place.”
“The statute of limitations is long over for a robbery third,” Charlie pointed out. “They probably pulled that warrant years ago and you’ve been living like a spy all this time for no reason.”
“Do I look like a lawyer to you?” she demanded, the pink curler flopping around. “How would I know that shit?”
“You know it now.” Lauren tried the gentle voice again. “Tell us what happened.”
Rita sat, looking back and forth between Riley and Charlie, as if that would make them leave, her mouth working from side to side like she was practicing what she was going to say. The noise of the TV seemed deafening to Lauren as she waited for Rita.
“Listen to me now.” Rita put a hand over her heart like she was about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. “Because I’m only going to tell this once and only to you two right now, right here. I was trying to save money to get to my sister’s, so I was working a lot. East Side, West Side, wherever I was, I’d find me a corner to stand on. There’s always a guy to pull over. It was in late January and it was cold as hell out. I remember standing in front of the liquor store at … let me think. Allen and Wadsworth? You know the one?”
Charlie nodded. “I know it.”
“I was smoking my last cigarette, hoping some drunk would stumble out of one of the bars so I could lift his wallet.”
Lauren watched as her face hardened, the lines etched around her mouth becoming more prominent, as she steeled herself to tell her secret. “I was watching Culligan’s Bar, but it was dead that night. Had to be around midnight and nothing was going on. If I had somewhere to go, I would have called it a night,” she sighed at her own memory, “but I had gotten thrown out of my grandmother’s earlier because she caught me stealing from her purse. Anyway, I see Spider creeping around. He was a neighborhood kid, Somalian. His mama spoke almost no English and he was a pistol, always boosting anything that wasn’t nailed down. But he wasn’t a good thief because he was always getting himself caught. If something turned up missing in Allentown, the coppers would go knocking on his mama’s door and she’d hand over the stuff. They couldn’t charge him because he always ran and they never caught him dirty.”
“I remember this,” Charlie said.
“I’m sure you do,” she shot back at him. “You was there that night, but later, after it all went down. When every cop in the city showed up. Anyway, I see Spider—never knew his real name—and he’s poking around, looking into car windows, trying door handles. I tell him to go home to his mama, but he just says she knows he’s out. He had a very thick accent. A real skinny kid, all arms and legs. He was never nasty, just couldn’t stay out of trouble. And he was a runner. That child could run so fast and hop a fence so quick, you’d think it was just a blur.
“So I’m watching him case the cars and he finds one unlocked. He opens the passenger door and crawls his skinny ass halfway in, trying to scoop all the change out of the center console. Next thing I know, there’s this young cop I ain’t never seen before, holding a nightstick in one hand, trying to grab Spider out of the car with the other. Spider got startled, you see; he wasn’t expecting no cop to walk up on him. They always came in cars and by twos. He starts trying to squirm his way out of the copper’s hands, but the cop’s not letting him go. Then Spider hits the cop—accidently or on purpose, I don’t know—and now there’s a real struggle. The cop drops his nightstick. They’re rolling around on the sidewalk. I see the cop’s radio mic has come off his shoulder and is flying around. He can’t call for no backup. Then Spider breaks free and he starts running down Allen Street toward me. That cop pulls his gun and right there in front of me he shoots Spider in the back.” She paused to let the words sink in. Rita’s eyes welled with tears.
“I was so scared, I pressed myself into the alley, so the cop couldn’t see me. I was trapped. That young cop, he freaked out. He swore and stamped up to Spider and looked over that boy’s body. Then he looked up and down the street, threw his gun under the car next to Spider, and ran around the corner, down South Elmwood.” She paused, closed her eyes for a second, then took a deep breath.
“The people in the bars must have heard the gunshot because two guys trickled out and looked around. They saw Spider on the ground and ran back in to call the police. I was still trapped in the brick alley, freezing my ass off, scared to death. Then the police cars started showing up. First one, then two, then it seemed like every copper in the city was there. I saw you Narco guys pull up. I couldn’t let you see me, Daley. I still had that robbery warrant on me. I needed to get out of there. I pushed a metal garbage can to the back wall of the alley and threw myself over onto the next street. Then I ran like hell.”
“I remember that night,” Charlie pinched his nose between his fingers. “It was cold, like you said, and we were surveilling a house a couple blocks over when the shots-fired call came out. Everybody knew Spider. The thought was that someone tried to stop him from breaking into cars and shot him, but not a cop. No one ever suspected a cop.”
“So it’s a cold case?” Lauren asked.
With a grim look on his face, Charlie nodded. “Never solved. The Homicide squad put a lot of work into it, because the victim was just a kid. Spider had just turned eighteen but was still in the tenth grade because of the language barrier, if I’m remembering it right. It was Ricky Schultz’s case. He worked it hard.”
Lauren knew that name. “Ricky retired five years ago. His other brother, Vince, is still on the job, on patrol. He must have at least thirty years on.”
“Ricky was a hell of a detective,” Charlie said.
“I bet he was.” Rita pulled open a drawer in the small table next to her couch. She ruffled through some papers, then withdrew a shiny campaign mailing. She threw it down on her scratched glass coffee table. “The young cop I saw shoot Spider was this guy in the middle.” She tapped the photo. “And it says that the guy standing next to him is his brother, Richard.”
The picture on the front of the glossy flyer showed three men who all resembled each other, standing in front of the County Court building. A man in his late fifties on the left side was wearing a police uniform, the younger man in the middle had on a three-piece suit and was smiling confidently into the camera, while the third man sported a solid blue golf shirt. The tagline above the photo read in bold black letters: HE USED TO PUT CRIMINALS AWAY WITH HIS BROTHERS BEFORE HE BECAME A LAWYER. NOW HE’LL PROSECUTE THEM. ELECT SAM SCHULTZ FOR ERIE COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY THIS NOVEMBER!!!
“This here is why I called the Snitch Board. I ain’t done a lot of things right in my life, but I never hurt no one that didn’t hurt me first. I didn’t know who that cop was. I ran because I was scared. I’m still scared. I thought I’d just make a phone call, tell someone what I knew and that’d be the end of it. The police would do their job, leave me out. Anonymous, ain’t that what it’s supposed to be?”
Lauren’s throat closed up so tight, she thought she’d suffocate. The Schultzes were a prominent police family. Their father had been police commissioner in the late 1960s. The brothers had juice, as cops would say, connections that went all the way to City Hall and beyond. Lauren knew what kind of favors it took back in the day to get appointed police commissioner, and patronage was often handed out like candy before entrance and promotional exams were given.
She quickly picked her brain for what she knew about the brothers. Sam Schultz had been on the job for less than a year when he left to go to law school in the early 1990s. She’d worked briefly as a detective with Ricky right before he retired a few years ago, but she’d been in Sex Offenses. The middle brother, Vince, was one of those old-timers everyone was convinced would die on the job, still in patrol humping calls.
She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the mailer. Pain seeped up from her chest as her heart began to race. That pockmarked face, that barrel-shaped chest. There was no mistaking him: Vince Schultz had been in the Homicide office the afternoon she was stabbed.
“You’re sure, Rita? This is the guy who shot Spider in the back?” Charlie picked up the picture, snapping Lauren’s attention back to the reluctant informant, who was now nervously pulling at the foam seeping from a rip in her couch cushion.
Dropping little tallow bits by her pink house shoes, Rita nodded. “I know that was a bad time for me, but I ain’t never forgot that man’s face. I thought I knew everyone in old Precinct Three, but I never saw him before, or since, until now.”
“He left the job for law school, wasn’t on but a couple months,” Charlie told her. “Probably because of this.”
“I have to get to the file room.” Lauren’s voice was tinged in panic. “If Vince manages to get back in the Homicide office and gets his hand on the original file, whatever Rita saw won’t matter.”
Starting to charge toward the door, Charlie swept her up in one of his huge arms. “Easy, Lauren. You’re going to end up in the hospital. Your face is as red as a baboon’s ass. We’ll call that partner of yours—”
“No. I have to get that file. Get it out of there. Make copies of it, right now.” She was breathing so hard, she was panting. Charlie eased her down onto the couch next to Rita. He knew how to use his size, and Lauren was no match for him in the state she was in.
“You’re going to sit, and I’m going to call Reese, and we’re going to figure this out.”
“No more cops,” Rita wailed. “They’ll kill me for sure. Look what they done to her. And she is a cop. You can’t do this to me, Daley.”
Charlie turned to Lauren. “We gotta get that file, and you gotta start working the case, however you do these cold cases now, without anyone knowing about Rita. At least until you’ve enough to make an arrest.”
Practicing the breathing techniques her physical therapist had taught her, Lauren managed to get herself under control. Her stitches throbbed under her shirt. She pressed her hand against them, doubling over a little. “No one in Homicide will know. Not even Joy Walsh, who’s been working with Reese since I’ve been laid up. There’s a leak in our office.”
Rita threw her arms up, sending the hanging pink curler across the room. “A leak, she says! No way am I saying nothing to nobody. I never seen either of you before. My name’s Virginia Robinson and I’ve lived here in this apartment for six years without any trouble. Now you two get the fuck out.”
“You listen to me, Rita.” Charlie leaned down, hands on his knees, causing Rita to lean back into the cushions away from his face. His nose was almost touching hers. “If I found you, don’t you think they can too? What did you say when you called the office, anyway?”
She swallowed hard, and Charlie backed off an inch or two. “The man said, ‘Homicide.’ And I said I needed to speak to a detective. He asked what for, and I said I knew about a murder of a young man people called Spider. I said I seen it happen back in ’92 on Allen Street. Then he got quiet and I thought he hung up on me. I asked, was he still there? And he asked me, real serious, real quiet like, where was I now? He could come and pick me up right then. I got scared. Something wasn’t right, you know? I hung up and threw my phone in the nearest garbage tote. Then I went on with my life, until you two showed up.”
Charlie gave Rita a pat on the shoulder as he straightened up. “You did good, Rita. And I ain’t letting no one hurt you. You just need to lay low, stay here and don’t open the door for no one that ain’t me or her.” He jerked a thumb at Lauren.
Pulling herself to her feet, Lauren held onto her side as she stood next to Charlie. “I’m good. Ready to go,” she assured Dailey. She turned toward Rita, who was wringing her wrinkled hands in front of her. “Thank you. I want you to call me if anything seems suspicious. And I mean anything.” Lauren extracted her business card from the back pocket of her jeans, putting it on the coffee table. “Day or night.”
Charlie flipped a bunch of twenty-dollar bills down on top of Lauren’s card. “Don’t leave town.”
Snatching up the money and the card, Rita quickly tucked it all down the front of her housedress. “I can’t believe we back in business, Daley.”
Looking over his shoulder at Rita as he turned the doorknob to leave, Lauren heard the catch in his voice as he agreed. “Neither can I, Rita. Neither can I.”