The Right to Remain Silent

by Charles Brandt

  When I didn’t say anything, he lit up a Chesterfield.

  I had trouble looking at Rock, and so I looked out the window. The way I remembered old-time detectives, they got more self-confident as they got older. They aged like hickory wood. Maybe old-time detectives were now supposed to age like wood-grain plastic.

  By the time we reached the hotel I was looking forward to bed. After parking next to a hydrant, Rocco told me he was going to see me to my room, which he then began to do without asking my permission.

  The hotel lobby was as elegant as I remembered. Shiny beige marble floors and walls. Carved mahogany paneling high up framing a ceiling of gold-, red-, and green-painted ornamental plaster.

  “It’s funny,” said Rock as he reached the desk clerk. “What annoys me about this place is the men’s room. You can’t flush the urinal.”

  “I never used it.”

  “Try it sometime. There’s no flusher. The thing flushes by itself. The first time I used it I looked all over the place for the flusher, but there is none, and by the time I’m drying my hands on a paper towel, the damn flusher goes off and scares the piss out of me.”

  “The piss out of you?” I said. “You go again. It flushes again. It sounds like a vicious cycle, Rock.”

  The desk clerk told me my room was unavailable. The guest in it had decided to hold over. After a pause and after getting no comment from me, she told me that at no extra charge they’d put me in the presidential suite. She wasn’t very good. Neither was Rocco. If they’d really had no room for me, Rocco would have jumped right in during the pause and offered to put me up at his place.

  We got in the elevator. The presidential suite was on the eleventh floor. I held the key. We rode up in silence. My nostrils widened a little bit and my heart got just a touch racier. Rocco moved too casually, too nonchalantly. You got to know a partner when you rode with him even for a little while, and nothing could make you forget him. In the eleventh floor hallway he began to cough loudly.

  “Sounds like you’re getting a cold. Maybe you could use a rock and rye,” I said and stopped. “Let’s go down to the Brandywine Room and have a drink. There’s no point in your seeing me to my room.”

  “Get settled first, then we’ll go down,” he answered, looking directly into my eyes without blinking. The first sign of deception by a cop. He controlled his eyelids to prevent the subtle but rapid flutter of your garden-variety civilian liar.

  I put the key in the door, pushed it open, and the lights went on. I turned to Rock with a look of mock anger and he gave me a sheepish look. Shy Whitney was the first one to me. I grabbed his hand and shook it and then shook hands with Tony Landis, John Judson, and Clem Augrine. These five men, and these men alone, stopped by the trial at various times to wish me luck. “Is this my welcome-home party or my retirement party?” I asked as they gathered around me, shaking their heads and smiling.

  “This is welcome home,” laughed Judson. “You don’t retire ’til tomorrow night. Then we’ll throw you another party.”

  “Any you other guys retired?” I asked.

  “Only Judson, only White Trash,” said Tony Landis. “He’s right here in hotel security. That’s how we got this great big room. Nobody’s hiring retired cops anymore. Judson got out just in time. The rest of us stayed on past twenty. It pisses off the young guys. They want us to put in our papers so they can get our rank, but they can fight over my rank during my autopsy. How ’bout it, Lou, you hiring broken-down cops down there in Brah-seal? Damn, you look good. What they got down there, the fountain of youth?”

  “You make ’ese boys look old,” said Shy Whitney.

  “What do you mean ‘these boys’?” asked Clem Augrine. “What’s he mean? About twenty years ago they stopped making rocks as old as Whitney.”

  “Speaking of rocks.” I went over to the bar they’d set up, poured a Rolling Rock beer into a water glass, raised the glass in toast, and drank. Its cold flavor was like a splash. It was the first sensation that felt familiar about being back. Here I was the Japanese soldier, adjusting slowly. Doesn’t anyone know there’s a war going on?

  It turned out that Judson had retired as a lieutenant. All the rest were sergeants and still pretty much worked together in dicks. Shy Whitney still smoked cigar after cigar and still sang “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms” at every cop’s wedding. He was a limited edition of one, an irreplaceable, with snow-white hair and a ruddy face, and he was the strongest man I ever saw. One time he punched a car thief through a closed and moving Mercury window and broke the guy’s jaw. I was there. Clem Augrine, a short, pudgy “dude” with glasses and brown mustache, still repeated himself when he talked and still wore three-piece suits. Shy, the oldest, and Clem, the youngest, had been partners when I left, and Shy had broken him in just the way he broke me in. Tony Landis was no longer Negro. He was now a black man, and he missed his old partner, Judson, and seemed to resent the DuPont Company for hiring him away.

  The more we talked, the more I sensed that something was missing with all of them, not just Rocco. There was no aging hickory wood in this pile either. Shy had gotten more round-shouldered. Augrine was balding like Rocco, and Tony Landis and Judson were gray, but that wasn’t it. There wasn’t any energy to their voices when we talked about the job, except a trace when we talked about things we’d done together back in detectives, cases we’d worked in the late fifties, that sort of thing.

  They were like a baseball team that was sitting on a lead in the seventh game of the World Series and watching it dwindle inning by inning as the opposition got stronger. It was as if they were concentrating on not making errors in life.

  “You wouldn’t believe all the new rules and procedures we got now for working cases,” said Tony Landis.

  “Rules? Fools. You would not believe the young fools we got now,” said Clem Augrine. “We got fools now that could not find their ass with both hands.”

  “The young guys ain’t so bad, Clem,” said Rocco. It’s the rules. You seen that cartoon in the F.O.P. magazine? The cop’s got a blindfold over his eyes, a piece of tape across his mouth, big puffs of cotton in his ears. His gun is chained to his holster, and his hands and feet are tied together. On the bottom it says, ‘Now do your job.’ Hah? What are these young guys supposed to do? What do you think, Lou? You was never big on rules.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, “but I learned how to follow rules in the workhouse, and on probation.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good point,” said Rocco. “What hurt Lou was that probation over his head. Nowadays we all got like a probation over our heads slowin’ us down. He couldn’t even work his own fuckin’ case when he got out, and now it’s too fuckin’ late. It’s harder on the young cops.”

  “Old cops, young cops,” said John Judson. “When we were young the old cops said we’d never be any good.”

  “Yep,” said Shy Whitney as the attention focused on him the way it usually did when he had something to say, “but those old cops were jealous of us. We had it down good back then.” He looked at me and put his cigar back in his mouth. “Nothin’s too fuckin’ late.”

  “I hope,” I said.

  “Yeah, well,” said Rocco, “that’s a horse of a different color. Some of the old cops were jealous of us, sure. They were jealous of Lou mostly. But that’s history, right? Water on the dam, hah? What?”

  “That’s right,” said Clem Augrine. “No sense in stirring up a lot of old memories. Old memories, who needs them, right Lou?”

  “And ye shall know the truth, Clem,” I said, “and the truth shall make you free.”

  “He’s chief now,” said Tony Landis, staring in my eyes, getting to it.

  “He knows,” said Rocco.

  “He’s a good chief,” said Tony. “He’s fair and he leaves us be. He’s not trying to force anybody to retire who don’t want to. He locked you up, but do
n’t forget he was on orders from Hanrahan. The real devil was Hanrahan. We all knew he was no fuckin’ good.”

  “That’s right,” said Augrine. “Friar Drunk. But there’s nothing on Covaletzki. Nobody said nothing about him.”

  “I appreciate your thoughts,” I said.

  “Hey, this is a party,” said Rocco. “Let’s keep it light. Any you guys seen that rookie pitchin’ for Detroit, Mark ‘The Bird.’ He puts me in mind of my youngest boy. What a nut.”

  There was silence and then Landis said, “I heard about him, but I’ve not seen him.”

  There was more silence and then Augrine asked, “Anybody want to play liar’s poker?”

  Nobody did. We drank some more cold Rolling Rock and in a little while they left, but they weren’t any livelier.

  6

  I groped for the receiver to nail the 6:30 A.M. wake-up call. I didn t want to be late for my day on the job, even though my body wanted more horizontal time.

  I walked over to my Hotel DuPont room window. I was a tourist surveying the city. A new city in many ways. There were a couple more fifteen- to twenty-story office buildings on Market Street, and still more new buildings east of Market on King. New office construction was under way another block east on French. The next north–south block was Walnut, the black-populated border street of the all-black neighborhood of the East Side, a neighborhood with its nose up against the glass of the business district. Although the favellas of Brazil are worse slums, to be sure, there’s no such thing in Brazil as a neighborhood with darker-skinned Brazilians than the next neighborhood. It seemed curious to me as I stood in the window, but when I grew up I never gave it a thought.

  It was light outside. A young cop on a brown horse scratched his horse’s neck and yawned in the grayness of a Wilmington morning. We’d had no horses, but then we didn’t have a pedestrian mall running south clear down the heart of Market Street from Tenth to Fourth. When you have pedestrians you really need horses. You sit up high above the lunch-hour crowd and get a better view of purse snatchers.

  Beyond the slums of the East Side and partially hidden by fog, the Delaware River slipped its way north past the oil refineries and chemical plants of Claymont, Delaware, and Chester, Pennsylvania, all the way to the ports of Philadelphia and Trenton, then farther north to the green of upstate New York. A rainspout compared to the Amazon, I thought.

  After showering and shaving, I put on a starched-white cotton shirt, a white linen suit, and a red silk tie with gray cherries printed on it. The rest of my uniform consisted of a burgundy belt, burgundy Italian loafers, and burgundy socks. I topped it with a yellow narrow-brimmed Panama hat with a navy blue band. Very un-Wilmington. Dressed to kill, if the need or occasion arose. Come on back, red-haired prosecutor. Give me another chance. In the lobby I rented a silver Ford Granada with red interior, just for the day, a Ford in honor of our first appointed president. I parked it across from the hotel entrance in the Eleventh Street outdoor lot and walked the one block across the grass of Rodney Square Park to the Public Building. The all-purpose gray granite building with large pillars in front and what the bureaucrats would call wasted space inside had been my place of business from 1954 to 1961. I’d spent a lot of time in the city-side police station and a lot of time in the county-side courtrooms, including my own trial. The majestic turn-of-the-century Public Building, three stories high, faced and looked out over the grass and park benches of Rodney Square. It was impressive, especially in the summer. All that green of the square right smack up against all that gray of the building, with the thin black line of King Street separating them. As instructed, I reported to something called Youth Diversion, not to be confused with Youth Division, in the basement of the city side of the Public Building.

  “Hello, I’m Lou Razzi,” I said to the small, thin, toothy, blond-haired young man with a tan shoulder holster and a blue four-inch Colt .38 dangling upside down in it under his armpit. He was the only person in the youth diversion room. He was leering, not something you see much of in modern times, what with laws against inbreeding. One look at him and the Youth Diversion room, and any chance at nostalgia was squashed like a bug.

  “I’m Tim Gronk,” he said but didn’t hold out his hand for a shake. “This is your desk. This is your weapon, your shield, and your ID.” He opened a drawer and showed me. “Sign here.”

  I picked up the items and stuffed them all in my right-side suit pocket. I signed the receipt.

  “Is it loaded?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it’s loaded,” he said as he stared at the clumsy bulge. “You want a clip-on holster?”

  “That would be nice.”

  He left, and I looked around the room, which didn’t take much doing. It was no more than ten-by-twelve, with two small gray desks, each with a telephone and a beat-up manual typewriter. The walls were cream-painted cinderblock and were crowded with posters about an Officer Friendly and how much help he could be in life to little boys and girls. There were boxes of multicolored Officer Friendly pencils and rulers stacked all around the room.

  I sat down, dialed Information, got the number, and called Marian.

  “Cruset residence,” an elderly black female voice answered. She sounded fat and formal.

  “Marian Cruset, please.”

  “Who’s calling, sir?”

  “Detective Sergeant Louis John Razzi, Junior.”

  “Please hold the wire.” Her voice stiffened.

  I grinned, reached down, and grabbed hold of the wire. My little mind again. Marian had come a long way for a townie.

  “Lou, is that you?” asked Marian.

  “Nobody else would claim to be.”

  “It’s so dear of you to call. I read in the newspaper that you were returning. Isn’t that something about Deputy Chief Hanrahan? You were always suspicious of him. I remember how you used to talk about him. Tell me, Lou, how are things with you?”

  “I work hard. I make money and I’m used to the life.”

  “Oh that’s super. That is super.”

  “And how’ve you been?”

  “Just fine. Perfectly fine. Aged a tad, but I keep my spirit young with my five o’clock ’tini.” She laughed.

  “And Sally, how is she?”

  “Yes, of course. We don’t call her Sally anymore. I’m sure you remember her given name is Sarah. We’ve sort of agreed on Sarah, Carlton and I. As I indicated to you he would, Carlton has adopted her.”

  I sidestepped the “indicated” very nicely. “Well?” I asked.

  “Well what?”

  “Well, how is she?”

  “She’s just perfectly fine. And you know, I think with all this publicity she’d love to meet you, to get to know you before you go back.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think it might be a good idea,” she said. “Her therapist feels it might be important for her.”

  “Therapist? Is she all right?”

  “Yes, certainly. Her therapist.” She sounded offended. “Sarah has no overt problems as such if that’s what you’re thinking, but in this troubled day and age Carlton and I feel strongly that a young girl — after all, she’s almost fifteen — needs a little push to pull through and compete successfully. She’s in a very competitive school and her therapist is affiliated with the school. She’s a success, really, academically. It’s true she doesn’t make friends easily, but I think that’s good. She’s a selective child, very serious about life. Perhaps too intense. Well, you’ll see for yourself, won’t you? She’s a lot like you. She loves old movies on the late show just like you.”

  Tim Gronk walked back in with the promised clip-on holster and put it on my desk in front of me.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll see her. I want to. You’re making it easy. I had you figured wrong. I’ll call you tonight.”

  “Don’t call me at night,” she said
quickly. “We have a family rule about personal calls in the evening. I’ll call you first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Do you know where I’ll be?”

  “At the police station?”

  “Not necessarily. Today’s my last day. I’m staying at the hotel.”

  “I’ll find you,” she said. “My God, Lou, I really need to talk to you. It’s strange after all these years, but I feel as if you’re the one person in the world I can talk to.”

  She hung up quickly. Her last words sounded like the Marian I knew. She must have paid an imposter to do her talking for her until those last words, when it counted. From the time my mother died of cancer in a Philadelphia hospital, when Marian and I were seniors at Wilmington High, I never once needed anything from her until prison. She needed me constantly to help her “pull through.”

  “Sarah,” I said aloud with contempt.

  “Excuse me,” said Tim Gronk.

  “Nothing,” I said. “What the hell is Youth Diversion?” “It’s a federal grant. Don’t you know what it is?”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Then what the hell is it? What do you do for a living?”

  “What do I do for a living?”

  “Sonny, if I kissed my wife and kids good-bye every morning, strapped a badass .38 under my arm, and showed up at a concrete room like this with a sign on the door that said YOUTH DIVERSION, I would spend every waking second planning my escape. What do you do besides keep an eye on me? Count Officer Friendly rulers? Come on, tell me the truth. You’re a civilian volunteer. Nobody pays you a cop’s salary to divert youth.”