The Right to Remain Silent

by Charles Brandt

  “Spare some change, man?” he asked in a hushed voice, flat and low. His eyes were watery blue. His pupils dilated and he smiled wickedly. “Just got out the joint, man. Off the motherfuckin’ Riker’s ferry. Need some money, man, to get started. You know what I mean?” He stuck his right hand into his pants pocket and moved it about menacingly. “That’s a nice ring the lady got.”

  “Are you begging for money or are you threatening for money?” I said and got in front of Honey.

  “Good question,” he said and flashed clenched teeth. He lifted his right hand, casually snapped out a black stiletto switchblade, and pointed it with his right arm at my heart. I saw the right arm as a gift, the way my little doctor from Taiwan had taught me. With my right foot I took a quick sinking step toward that gift. Lowering my weight into my right leg, I jutted my left foot forward, kicking his shin. My hands moved at his right arm as if I were clapping two cymbals, but about a foot off from making a direct crashing contact. I jammed the palm of my left hand into his right elbow joint and the palm of my right hand into his wrist, avoiding the knife. The movement of my hands working in opposite directions, combined with the sinking of my weight, snapped his elbow at the joint, making a loud crack in the otherwise noiseless corridor. He groaned sharply, dropping the knife, and his right arm hung lifelessly at his side. I had the knife the instant it smacked the cement and came up with it on a vertical line into the softness of his left underarm, cutting through the left shoulder joint ligaments and hitting bone. His left arm dangled like the right, and I pulled the knife out. He groaned as pain overcame narcotics. I held the dagger near his mouth and held him by his belt.

  “Open up,” I said, “say ‘ah.’ ”

  His eyelids closed. I put a foot on one of his, yanked his belt toward me, and threw him past me to the ground on his belly, his chin striking pavement. I frisked him and found nothing worth taking. He was still groaning, but he wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Let’s go,” I said, taking Honey’s arm. She hesitated and I pulled her out onto Fifth Avenue. We walked north toward the Plaza, with me holding her arm and moving at a good pace.

  “What happened?” she asked. “It happened so fast, Lou. What did you do?”

  “It’ll come back to you. We’ll talk about it later.”

  “We’ve got to report it.”

  “I will.”

  I dropped the knife through a sewer grate as we crossed over it.

  Before we got to the Plaza, I called the NYPD from a corner pay phone and gave them an anonymous tip that a robbery victim had stabbed his mugger and told them where to find him. Honey stayed by me until I finished.

  We walked into the hotel and rode in silence to our air-conditioned room. She double-locked the door.

  We talked as we undressed. “Lou, what are you doing? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not getting tied up in any more courts. Anyway, he’s had his punishment. He doesn’t need jail.”

  “What did you do to him?”

  “I broke his elbow, and I tried to cut the strings on his other arm with his knife. I think I got that arm too.”

  She sighed. “You’re right. It’s coming back to me. Why did you slam him down so hard after you had his knife?”

  “Don’t ever assume that the weapon he shows you is the only weapon he’s got. It could cost you your life. What’d they teach you?”

  “What’d they teach me?”

  After we undressed she got into one of the beds without looking at me. With cold water I washed the drops of blood off my shirt and pants. When I finished I asked, “Should I turn out the light?”

  “Yes,” she said and then shifted to the center of the bed, making it clear that I had no side in her bed. I turned off the lamp and plopped into the other one.

  Everything had now gone wrong. I felt like I was in an avalanche, going down with the rocks. Love and sex couldn’t stop the fall for long. It was something inside me, some turmoil that kept me from standing safely on the mountain, kept me from staying put. It was like a little worm inside a Mexican jumping bean. When Honey had kissed my stomach and I was convulsing, I really had seen Covaletzki’s face. With his lips pressed shut. Committing a continuing crime of silence against me. But I knew, as I lay in bed listening to Honey try to sleep, that Covaletzki wasn’t the worm. The worm was inside of him, too. It was the unanswered question of why they had framed me. I wanted that worm out of him so much I could cut it out of him. But there was nothing I knew to do about it.

  40

  The Tall Ships moved slowly under sail in the dark-green water of New York Harbor as they entered the Hudson River.

  We had arrived at Battery Park before the huge throng came, early enough to get a spot on the black iron railing, but by 9:00 A.M. we were part of one of the biggest crowds ever to stand and face a body of water.

  We had to speak loudly to hear each other above the noise of the crowd — the rock music from big-box portable radios tuned to competing stations, the children crying and being scolded, the congas and bongos, and the inevitable firecrackers.

  There had been a cold war between us all morning. I thought I ought to explain the nightstick justice of last night, to at least talk about it, but during breakfast at the hotel Honey was hard to talk to. She said she had ambivalent feelings that she had to work through herself. All she would say was that she experienced it on different levels — fear of his knife and relief at his downfall, the sheer excitement of it, the speed of it — and she could understand why I would want to leave him, yet something wasn’t right about it. I offered that it was like seeing cattle slaughtered. You know it goes on, otherwise you wouldn’t have meat, but you don’t like to see it. She said that wasn’t it entirely, although it undoubtedly had something to do with it, and repeated that she had to work it through herself.

  Sailors on the Italian ship stood in the rigging and waved. A huge roar came up from those of us on shore and we all waved back. I marveled at the Verrazano Bridge, but to Honey it was no big deal. Neither was the smell of joints, nor the grafitti painted on the trees.

  We left the park and spent the rest of the day in downtown Manhattan at the Little Festivals of Celebration, small units of people dressed in foreign peasant costumes performing dances of their own lands and selling their own national foods. We ate snacks from Greece, Pakistan, Italy, Mexico, and India, all served with Coca-Cola. Just like in the old country.

  Honey and I held hands without feeling, dodged episodes of rain, and finally decided to go home to Wilmington.

  On the drive home on the turnpike, after about an hour of silence, Honey said to me: “I think I’ll call Dershon back and cancel my vacation days. I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be taking any time off next week.”

  “That’s disappointing. I guess you’ve worked through your ambivalent feelings.”

  “You put me in a hell of a spot last night. A deputy attorney general running from the scene. Actually covering it up, when you think about it. I could be disbarred.”

  She looked over at me, but I didn’t say anything.

  “You were brutal last night and I think you overdid it. You could have killed him.”

  “He deserved death. Kill anybody who pulls a knife on you, Honey. Pass it on.”

  All of a sudden I didn’t feel like having to explain that I wasn’t a sadist, that I never went out looking to hurt anybody, that I was going back to Brazil for chrissake, and that I couldn’t be bothered arresting him and getting involved in New York City justice. The man drew a knife on me. He made the rules of the game deadly, not me.

  After a while she wanted to know if I was angry about John Gandry, and did I think that since the law wasn’t working for me I had to take it into my own hands. It appeared that she wanted me to have some psychological excuse about the way I’d handled the robber. Like I was taking my hatred of John Gandr
y out on him.

  I said, “I just wanted to force the man into a safer line of work. You could say he had an on-the-job accident. God help you people when all the old cops retire.”

  “If there are any left that have your police-state mentality, the sooner they retire, the better,” she said. “I’ll bet you fit in just peachy in Brazil.”

  “We didn’t live in a police state in my heyday,” I said, “but let me tell you what these new rules of yours are leading to, all this unfair fairness.” I told her how Carlton had recruited me to work on the Gandry case now that I was suspended and not subject to the new rules.

  “A suspended cop is still a cop,” she said indignantly. “Your friend the vigilante professor is dead wrong on the law. Until fired or retired you are a cop, and any evidence you might manage to get on Gandry by playing by your own rules would be absolutely useless at trial.” When she told me that tidbit she had the superior look I’d seen when I brought her the first Gandry case.

  All we said the rest of the way down the turnpike were things like “How’s the gas?” and “Do you mind if I turn up the radio?” Mostly we listened to news of the Israeli raid at Entebbe. We pulled into the Howard Johnson’s, she took her overnight bag and her New York Times, and we said good-bye and politely kissed on the cheek.

  41

  The two young girls in pink sweaters standing at attention behind the mahogany reception desk in the lobby had nervous smiles. I checked with them to see if there were any messages, and I got a feeling similar to the one I’d had about the surprise party. Something was up. The girls tried to look as if they weren’t even with each other behind the desk, much less know whatever it was they knew.

  I did have messages. They were on slips of pink paper. Three of them. The messages said: “Call Marian.” I crumpled and stuffed them in the refuse hole in the aluminum ashtray near the elevator door.

  When I got to my room it was 10:05 P.M., and even though I had already decided not to, I dialed Marian’s number from memory. Her phone rang and rang with no answer. With each ring I felt my heart get stronger from the blood pumping through it, the way flowing water generates power at a hydroelectric plant. I hung up, pleased that no one had answered. I undressed and went to bed and slept quickly and deeply. At 11:06 there was a hard knock on my door. I pictured Marian. I considered ignoring the knock.

  “Can we come in, Lou?” It was DiGiacomo.

  I got up and opened the door to see DiGiacomo standing next to Chief Deputy Attorney General Morris Dershon, a wiry little man in his early thirties with an effeminate voice, smooth, nearly hairless pink skin, a narrow pointy nose and tapered chin, large round blue eyes, and naturally curly brown hair parted in the middle. His long, thin manicured fingers fiddled with a large red bow tie. There were two big-lug weightlifter-type plainclothes cops I didn’t recognize and Covaletzki standing behind them. The delegation looked very official.

  “Speak up,” I said, “out with it.”

  “Lou,” said DiGiacomo, “you know why we’re here. They want to come in.”

  “That’s an order,” said Covaletzki. “You’re still under my command.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Dershon. “Let’s not create legal issues here. Mr. Razzi, do we have your expressed consent to come in?”

  I stood in my undershorts and looked at this quintet of fools in the hallway, and my curiosity got the best of me. I let them in. I gave my “expressed” consent.

  I sat down on the bed, with my back leaning against the headboard and my legs crossed comfortably on the bed. Covaletzki had shut the door behind him. DiGiacomo was the only one to sit down. The rest stood around.

  The slightly larger of the two plainclothesmen — and it took a sharp eye to see the difference — took out his identification and showed it to me. He was a real Wilmington cop, another to come on since my frame. Maybe he’d been hired to fill my vacancy. He took out a little business-type card, held it in front of him, and read me the spiritual tenets concerning my divine right to remain silent in the face of reasonable questions and to have a free government lawyer.

  “Who pays for these free lawyers?” I asked. “I mean who sees to it that their secretaries are on Blue Cross?”

  “Luig,” said Rock from his chair in the corner, “any kind of reaction you have now could be used against you.” He seemed to want to say more. He glanced up at Dershon and Covaletzki, who both continued to stand, and then he chose to remain silent himself.

  “Rocco, I appreciate the subtle warning. Out with it, boys. I’ve had a busy weekend. I’ve been framed before, arrested before, recently suspended, and there is nothing I resent more right now than having my precious time on earth wasted in Delaware. I am a man with a mission.”

  “Understanding your rights, will you answer our questions?” asked Morris Dershon through the thin hole in his face.

  “Out with it,” I said. “Spit it out. Identify the subject matter. What are you people here for?”

  “We think you know something about the shooting of John Gandry, and we’d like your cooperation,” said Morris Dershon.

  “Outstanding. Is he dead?”

  “He’s in a coma,” said DiGiacomo.

  “Now see that,” I said. “All this while you’ve been standing around acting stupid, and you really have a legitimate reason to be here. Is this the way you work a case, or were you extending me professional courtesy?”

  “Lou,” said DiGiacomo, “this is real serious.”

  “How’d it happen?” I asked.

  “You tell us,” growled the detective who had told me about my rights.

  “What technique,” I said. “Learn that from your chief?”

  “Look here,” said Morris Dershon with surprising firmness considering his lilting voice, “you were seen in Gandry’s neighborhood Friday afternoon by a surveillance officer. You were observed walking right up to the front door and breaking his window with a brick. In fact, he was in the house when you went to his front door, and after you left he called the radio room to find out what you were doing there and whether you had a warrant. We have Gandry’s call to the radio room on tape like any other call to the radio room, and that tape is evidence. I might point out that you had a motive to kill him because he made you out a fool in the way you bungled the Morris case and forced me to release Gandry, making the whole system look like shit. You are an extremely revenge-oriented person. Everyone knows why you really came back to the States. Furthermore, you knew about the attack on the Mastropolito boy, didn’t you?”

  “Well done, Bulldog. You got me. Yes I did. I knew all about the Mastropolito boy. Deputy Attorney General Honey Gold showed me the witness’s statement. You can ask her. You can also ask her where I’ve been all weekend. You see, gentlemen, I’ve got what you could call an airtight alibi. You’ll never take me alive.”

  “We just left her,” said the nameless Detective Hulk. “What time did you leave her apartment on Saturday morning, July third, 1976, and what time did you meet her at the Howard Johnson?”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Don’t tell me. Gandry was shot sometime on the morning of the third after I left Honey’s apartment and before I met her near the bridge. There goes my airtight alibi. Take me away. Can I plead lunacy?”

  “Lou, they’re serious,” said Rocco.

  “DiGiacomo, let Captain Dixon handle this,” said Dershon sharply.

  Captain Dixon looked pleased. He now had a name and a rank and he could handle it. “What time on Friday?” he repeated.

  “We met at the Howard Johnson’s at 11:10 A.M., as you well know, and I left Honey Gold’s apartment around six-forty A.M., but I don’t like you, Dixon. I’ll bet you made Shy Whitney’s skin crawl every time you walked into the Detective Division.”

  “He’s sick,” said Covaletzki.

  Morris Dershon began talking to me in a soothing voice: �
�You know, Lou, we knew you were in New York with Honey. She phoned me for permission to take Monday and Tuesday off, and she told me you were going with her, but we didn’t know where you were staying. Look, we don’t like this any more than you do, but we’ve got certain information that has to be checked out. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Yea-yah,” I said.

  “Look here, we know about your emotional reaction to hearing the Supreme Court’s death penalty decision,” said Dershon. “You didn’t even finish your eggs, and right after that on your way home from Honey’s you heard on the radio that Johnny Mastropolito’s body had been found in a shallow grave in the woods.”

  “Peppers and eggs,” I said.

  “That’s right,” said Dershon, getting palsy-walsy. “Peppers and eggs. Lou, you’ve been under a lot of emotional strain. We can appreciate the pressure you’ve been under. You had a very emotionally exhausting day on Friday — that was the day you read the Mastropolito witness interview, the same day your mentor, Shy Whitney, was buried, the same day you threw a symbolic brick at Gandry’s window.”

  “The brick wasn’t symbolic. It was a purpose pitch.”

  “Look at the difficult time you gave that Delaware state trooper,” Dershon said. “We know you have got plenty of pent-up rage inside of you. We can feel it in you and we can relate to it. We don’t blame you. We understand you. We can help you. You may not trust us, but I repeat, we can help you. Have you ever heard of extreme emotional distress or irresistible impulse? With a plea to either, you could be back in Brazil in short order.”

  “Copacabana, here I come,” I said. “See the cop from Ipanema. How’d you like an irresistible impulse, Bulldog?”

  “He’s playing with you,” said Covaletzki, but not in that slow, deliberate monotone of his. There was a hint of hysteria in his voice. “Let’s stop wastin’ time. We know about the panhandler you cut in New York. You fuckin’ psycho. You half-killed the guy.”