Delilah slept. With the floor as my office, black coffee for fuel, I undid the elastic on the accordion folder from Bill. Each pocket was crammed with notes, as unorganized as the deck crew on the Titanic. Bill on Search and Rescue grabbed whatever he could find in the Evidence Room and elsewhere.
There were the expected duplicate photographs. Pictures of the murder weapon, mug shots of the defendants. Bill had secured those and more. He’d provided me with all the postmortem information on Desiree Fox. I set aside her paperwork.
I surveyed the perps as they’d appeared on the night they’d been arrested. Kane could pass as the twin of Huggy Bear from the television show Starsky & Hutch. Like the actor Antonio Fargas, he was thin as a drainpipe. A thin caterpillar he called a moustache crawled above his upper lip, and his choice of threads was loud and proud and visible to an oil tanker in the mid-Atlantic. Kane’s rap sheet flipped my expectation because I’d had Robichaud pegged as the pimp, on account of what Dick and Desiree had said about the man. The French last name was as sophisticated as a Colt 45 Malt Liquor commercial and fit the vocation. Dick the writer had it ass backwards. Desiree had lied to me because she said Henri was her daddy. Nope. Kane pimped and Robichaud muscled. I suspected Andre treated her like Norman Mailer wrote about women: rough and with contempt. She was afraid of him and protected him until the end, possibly out of fear of what he’d do to her.
Henri Robichaud’s jacket detailed an extensive career in R & B, as in robbery and battery. He exceeded expectations. Page after page, I flipped through his misdeeds, and one thing was consistent. The man never turned violent despite being caught interruptus, which was often the case because he worked alone and demonstrated all the hallmark signs of a poor aptitude at planning. If he were white, Henri Robichaud would be management material at IBM.
I shuffled between the mugshots and the morgue photos. I took another look at Dawson. The football player exhibited no defensive wounds. Here was a man who’d played on defense and should’ve known how to use his hands when he was attacked from the front. He played cornerback, a position that covered receivers, and as such received the cattle train of a tight end and halfbacks when the offense ran a power sweep to his side of the field.
Cornerbacks were noted for speed and for their ability to read and react to the offense. They responded and shut the play in motion down. Within five yards of the line of scrimmage, cornerbacks such as Mel Blount for the Steelers and the terrible triplet of Willie Brown, Mike Haynes, and Lester Hayes for the Raiders smacked and whacked, bumped and thumped their opponents, and Dawson belonged to that brotherhood of the pigskin.
No defensive wounds. Not one.
Mugshots. Kane and Robichaud faced the camera in bloodstained clothes, but that’s consistent with carrying a wounded man to the hospital. I would’ve been interested in seeing photos of the heroic officer who’d carried Dawson to the ER. I didn’t, though I read his career jacket. Average for height and weight, a salt-of-the-earth guy, and he was a third-generation cop from Somerville. All that was missing was the last name Sullivan, and I could call him Sully from Slummerville.
There was nothing in his past performance reports that said he woke up every morning and ate spinach like Popeye. If there was a photo of him from that evening, he’d be wet, head to toe, in sweat and blood. I’ll never know, and neither did the jury, which brought me around to Desiree Fox.
I wanted to see what Bill might have found in his paper expedition that could explain why she appeared before a grand jury but not at the main trial. I heard her side, but I wanted corroboration. I doubted that I’d find it.
Days ago, Bonnie had explained the distinction between a grand and trial juries in the same amount of time it took me to finish my first cup of coffee. The ground rules for a grand jury were far more flexible than for the twelve jurors we see in movies. First, twenty-three people sit on a grand jury and they work closely with the prosecutor to establish cause for an indictment. They could ask witnesses questions, view evidence, and they can request for clarifications on matters of law. Bonnie emphasized a grand jury did not have to be unanimous to issue an indictment.
“If it sounds fair and democratic, it’s not,” she said and explained why. There was no judge present, and no opposing counsel. “The rules of evidence that apply in a trial jury don’t exist for a grand jury,” she told me. “A prosecutor is like a movie director and producer, in that he owns the stage and screen, including the actors and the script the grand jury sees and hears.”
The idea behind the grand jury is that witnesses could speak freely, and if nothing came of it and there was no indictment, the defendant’s reputation was left intact, but we know that’s not what happened.
I read through Desiree’s sheets. Drugs. Prostitution. She was consistent as a parking ticket on a busy street. Desiree Fox, a black woman, had faced a white lawyer and white faces. The legal system was white and acted white. She was black and placed on the defensive. Fast forward to Dawson, she’d come into the courtroom as a prostitute, a woman with a drug problem. Her credibility had been executed before she’d said a word. That alone may have been why she never showed up as a witness at the trial. It’s plausible, but why the apartment in Chinatown? McCormack have a soft spot for her? She lived there, like someone’s mistress. I’d thought of McCormack again, but I don’t think the Public Defender was that kind of guy. He was a working-class stiff who managed to get into law school, and he lived in Chinatown to keep his overhead low. He made a deal and kept his word. He did pro bono work for Mr. W while he made the legal profession’s idea of minimum wage.
Before I found out that McCormack had Desiree holed up in his former apartment, before I learned about his flight to a tony office at a prestigious and lucrative law firm, I had asked Bonnie about his rep as a Public Defender. Reputation was everything, after the law degree and family name established pedigree and standing.
“A real knob,” she called him, and she didn’t spare the DA, either. “He’s another prick on his way to becoming a bigger prick. He has the disease they call political ambition. He wants to be the AG.”
Bonnie explained what I’d already understood about prosecutors. A DA’s career lives and dies with his conviction rate, not unlike a baseball player and his batting average. When I pointed out there have been plenty of Hall of Famers who’d batted under three hundred, she countered a conviction rate was the right combination of pitcher and ump. Case and judge.
“It’s all about appearances at the plate,” she said. “That and runs batted in.”
Made sense to me. Defense lawyers take the case they think they can win, whereas prosecutors work with what they’re handed, which is why they made deals. Bonnie stated what every black person understood about plea deals and the criminal justice system, “They say it saves money and time and it does. The defendant often does more time.’
I could see why the prosecutor wouldn’t call Desiree. She’d been honest with me. To the DA, she was a whore and a junkie, and to counsel across the aisle, she was another black face, and she could hurt his clients on the docket. I’ve read the pleas deals. Bonnie said they were pro forma. Meechum, Junior may have sunk his own ship refusing a better lawyer from dad. The end result was College Boy was handed the whole ticket, twenty years, while Kane and Robichaud by comparison walked.
I thumbed through the images of Desiree. The first few photographs were not new. The two dicks who’d questioned me at the barn, in front of Bonnie, had shown them to me. I had pointed out details to them, such as Desiree changing clothes and that her Afro pick was missing. Details mattered during that interview, especially when the accused held more cards than the cops dealt from the bottom of the deck. They’d lost their lever in the game of intimidation with me because my observations sent them back to the blackboard.
Before me now were pictures I had not seen inside the box during the interview. The lighting had not changed. Her lips were parted, her eyes bloodshot and aimless, as if she were looking into the air for the word to fit the clue in the crossword puzzle. Those eyes were consistent with strangulation. Her throat was purple as the stamp on the plastic that covered a steak at the supermarket. The ME Report confirmed the fracture seen in those choked to death: her hyoid had been crushed. She’d been strangled from the front. I flicked one glossy after another, as if they played like a movie, and I noticed something.
Near her body was something shiny and crumbled, and next to that was a wrapper. It was red, as in the brand of chewing gum Big Red. People who try to quit smoking often resort to chewing gum; they’ll substitute one oral fetish for another one, and the smart ones will either pick a flavor of gum they love, or one that’ll taste horrible if they indulged their habit.
Big Red was a recent creation from Wrigley’s, and it was marketed to compete against Dentyne, a brand of chewing game that dated to the late nineteenth century. Big Red’s slogan was “Long-lasting fresh breath” and it was The Six Million Dollar Man of chewing gum. It was better, stronger, and faster than its rival Dentyne. Big Red burned the tongue and heated the mouth because it packed the sting of cinnamon.
I consulted the ME Report. She had not eaten or drunk anything prior to her death. Desiree was far from quitting anything, especially cigarettes.
Big Red belonged to her killer.
I was in the kitchen, coffee pot in hand for another tank of leaded gasoline, when the phone rang. There’s a lot to be said about what to expect behind the ring. There’s the bill collector, who makes you feel as if you left home with dirty underwear, the salesman who wants to meet quota or sounds as if he’ll use the razor blade if you’re not buying, the friend or relative who never calls unless they need something and you’re Radar from M*A*S*H, the guy who can fix anything. Then there was the other sound. The modern telephone was what Western Union was to the military, all the bad news all the time. I picked up.
“It’s Bill.”
“Oh, thank goodness, it’s you. I was afraid it was bad news.”
“I don’t aim to disappoint then.”
“Bad news?” I said. Delilah’s ears twitched.
“In duplicate.”
“The lesser of two evils first then?”
“The joe you handed me this morning.”
“I remember Peter Pan. What about him?”
“Kicked loose, and it has all the earmarks of a VIP.”
“That very important person tried to strangle Delilah.”
“He got a pass.” Bill’s voice dipped, as if he were talking into his armpit. “All I’m saying is he is some shade of blue, and not from our garden patch.”
“Federal.”
“Ding-ding. We have a winner.”
“And the bad news?”
“That also comes in two parts,” Bill said.
“Fine, I’ll play. Give me the ugliest of the two first.”
“Bonnie’s been attacked, at her place, and that’s the half of it.”
“There’s more?” I used my fingers to stretch my collar. I was more than hot and bothered. I didn’t need One-Hour Martinizing. My anger could dry clean the shirt I was wearing. “What else?” I asked.
“They hurt her bad, Shane, and whatever she had for paperwork is ashes.”
“Burned in the fireplace?”
“Looks like it, and one more thing?”
“You’re killing me here. What is it?”
“They burned the bottoms of her feet, and she’s at The General.”
I’d heard what Bill said but I couldn’t feel anything yet. I was numb. ‘They’ could’ve been singular or plural. It didn’t matter to me the number because I wanted to kill them. No slap the handcuffs and feed the bastards to the system. I mean, kill them and make sure ‘they’ were never found.
“You there?” Bill asked and reeled me back from my fantasy of revenge.
“Yeah, I’m here. Sorry.”
“Sorry? Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to her.”
“Anything else?”
“You have two days with the case file, three tops. The BPD ain’t no lending library.”
“Roger that,” I said. “Neither one of us wants to pay the late fee. Thanks.”
I hung up, certain that whatever was left of my relationship with Bonnie was incinerated.