Peters wouldn’t let Kelson watch Toselli’s interview in person, but after Toselli pulled his signature move on a rookie outside the interview room and strutted out of the station with a service pistol shoved into the kid’s ribs, Peters let him see the video recording.
‘She was dying,’ Toselli said to the camera, ‘I mean, raking the skin off her face with her fingernails, she needed it so bad. Her husband had just OD’d. Good guy when he wasn’t high. Good father to Alejandro. Inez always counted on him to score for her. You know, I couldn’t watch her do that to herself. I said I’d take care of her. So I took care of her.’
Peters gave him a blank face and used a nonjudgmental tone, though Toselli knew the routine. ‘So you helped yourself to some crack – to help out your big sis?’
‘She was into skag by then. But yeah, that’s more or less it. Easy to rip off a little after a bust.’
‘But you didn’t stop at a little,’ Peters said.
Toselli had waved away the offer of a lawyer. He knew better than to talk without one, but he also knew better than to think one would do any good. So he acted as if he wanted to cooperate, as if he wanted to come clean.
‘My sister had friends,’ he said. ‘Their friends had friends. A little wouldn’t do.’
‘Junkies are a friendly group.’
‘They’ve got a shared interest,’ Toselli said.
‘Shared needles too?’
‘Inez already had Hep C when I started stealing for her. She was dying. I eased it for her.’
‘I suppose you’ve got to self-justify or you’d put a bullet in your head.’ Even in a seasoned cop like Peters, anger sometimes bled through a blank face.
‘Plenty of days when I wanted to do that,’ Toselli said.
‘So you became a big-time dealer. How about Alejandro?’
‘I swore to Inez I would take care of him. I didn’t want him in the game. But he was like her – he was already in it when he came to stay with me. He’d nicked from her stash since he was like eleven. Mostly he sold it to the older boys – at first for soda money, later for sneakers and phones – the shit kids like.’
‘Why’d you kick him out?’
‘I gave him a choice. Cut the dealing or leave. He left.’
‘But then you supplied him anyway.’
‘He wasn’t going to stop. He could get it from me, or he could get it from Chilito Nuñez, who would beat him to death if he came in late or short on cash and would cheat him anyway because Alejandro was just a boy. I told Inez I’d watch over him.’
‘Do the excuses help?’
‘Call it what you want, he was safer getting it from me.’
‘Until Sam Kelson shot him in the chest.’
‘Worst day of my life. Worse than when Inez died. When Kelson went into the alley with him, he wasn’t supposed to be armed. Department rules. Too much risk to Kelson. I set up the plan so there’d be no gun. Alejandro would rob the drug-buy money from him and escape out my end of the alley. No one would get hurt. I would fuck up the buy-and-bust op and laugh my ass off because I took department money. But Kelson brought a gun.’
‘So you decided to square things with him? Set him up. Wreck him. Kill him.’
‘I owed it to Inez. I owed it to Alejandro.’
‘And you forced Doreen Felbanks to do the dirty work for you?’
‘I had to stay out of sight. I figured I might as well put a pretty face on it.’
‘How about Dominick Stevens? Why gun for him?’
‘He betrayed my nephew with Francisca. Fucking her behind his back. Alejandro never even knew.’
‘Why’d you save Kelson in the alley when Alejandro shot him? You could’ve let him bleed to death.’
‘I ask myself that all the time. Alejandro was dead. I saw that. I mean, he had a hole where his heart was. And Kelson was dying. I could’ve let him go. No one would’ve known. It could’ve gone either way. Instinct kicked in. Principles. I saved him. I guess I’m a good cop.’
‘Tell yourself that as you sit in jail.’
‘I know who I am,’ Toselli said. ‘I don’t expect you to get it. But I’ll tell you this, by the time the ambulance pulled out of the alley with Kelson in it, I’d decided to kill him. I would make him hurt. I’d take away any sympathy people felt for him. I’d humiliate him. If I could, I’d drive him crazy. Then I’d shoot him. I’d put a hole where his heart was. You know why?’
‘Because you’ve got a sick mind?’
‘Because I defend the people in my life. My sister. My nephew. I defend them the way only a good man does.’
The rookie was supposed to handcuff Toselli before taking him from the interview room. Regulations required it. Common sense did. ‘But he’s a cop, for Christ’s sake,’ the rookie said later from his hospital bed. ‘You don’t cuff another cop, do you?’
As the rookie led him from the interview, Toselli grabbed the kid’s throat with one hand and pulled the pistol from his holster with the other. He held the gun to the rookie’s temple. Although he made the move silently in the middle of the busy Homicide Room, the whole room seemed to hush.
Then a detective emerged from the closest office with a gun drawn. He stepped close, held the gun about five inches from Toselli’s head, and said, ‘Nope.’
That made Toselli grin. In a single fluid move, he dropped the rookie’s pistol, slapped the detective’s gun hand, and, grabbing his wrist, wrenched the gun around so it pointed at the man’s belly. He kneed the detective, sending him down against a wall, and swept the rookie’s pistol off the floor. He stuck the detective’s gun in his belt and crammed the rookie’s pistol into the kid’s ribs. He announced to everyone in the room, ‘Next time, I shoot him and then shoot you.’
No one else drew a weapon.
‘Don’t come after me,’ Toselli added. ‘If I see any of you again, I’ll kill you. No hard feelings.’ Then he marched the rookie out of the back of the station, commandeered a cruiser, and made the kid drive him to the corner of Kimball Avenue and Irving Park Road on the Northwest Side. He used the rookie’s phone to tell someone to pick him up there. He scanned the car radio, had the rookie stop a block from the corner, and scanned it again, then ripped the cord from the handheld mic and smashed the radio unit with the pistol butt.
In a little parking lot at Kimball and Irving Park, a man with a medium build, gray-streaked hair, and a mean face stood by a white Plymouth. Toselli told the rookie to pull into the spot next to the car. He said, ‘No hard feelings’ again, and cracked the rookie’s head with the pistol butt.
‘And that’s that?’ Kelson asked when Peters finished telling him.
‘Afraid so.’
But Peters misjudged. An hour later, Toselli’s escape hit the news – an armed killer-cop taking a hostage and outmaneuvering a whole station of other cops. Now he was running free with a list of targets and a willingness to hurt anyone who got in his way. The TV got hold of a series of pictures – Toselli as a young cop in uniform, Toselli looking heroin chic as an undercover cop in narcotics, Toselli looking like the meanest bastard ever born in his raid gear. The mayor advised citizens to shelter in place and, if they encountered Toselli, under no circumstances to approach him.
Peters streamed the coverage on the computer in his office. He asked Kelson to stay and offer insights. Besides, he said, a lot of cops still pictured Kelson as responsible for Toselli’s string of killings. Peters wouldn’t want one of those cops to see Kelson and make a tragic mistake. But when a CBS commentator went down that path and speculated on the rumored friendship between him and Toselli, Kelson got up and said, ‘That’s so wrong.’
‘Easy now,’ Peters said.
The commentator said, ‘An anonymous source high in the departmental chain of command says all aspects of Toselli and Kelson’s relationship will be investigated. In the meantime, Kelson is in custody—’
Peters yelled at the screen, ‘Not custody – protective custody.’
‘Dammit,’ Kelson said, and he walked out of the office and then out through the front of the station.