The Right to Remain Silent

by Charles Brandt

  “It’s not my fault,” said Covaletzki, now pointing at Dershon. “You’re the lawyer. You should know the law.”

  “DiGiacomo, Dixon, and Majeski — kindly leave this room and close the door tightly behind you,” said Dershon as he began to pace. “We’re in a need-to-know situation. Honey, Chief, Lou — please take a seat.” When the others left with see-no-evil expressions on their faces and we all sat down, he lit a cigarette and continued: “Chief, are you telling us that you did, or are you telling us that you did not, accept Mr. Razzi’s resignation last night at the hotel?”

  “A man on departmental charges cannot resign without the chief’s expressed consent, and I did not give him no expressed consent. You cannot have a man putting in for a pension any time he wants if he’s got pending charges on him that could cost him his pension. How could you ever take a guy’s pension that way?”

  “Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear. Let me try again. In your heart and mind, when Mr. Razzi handed the papers to me and I handed them to you, in your heart and mind you gave him permission to resign. Is that not so, Chief Covaletzki?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Yes, it is that simple. It is just as exquisitely simple as that. This is a political no-win case for me. Strike that. Let me put it another way. No one, repeat, no one, is ever going to accuse Morris Dershon of helping a major contributor to his party beat a felony rap, in fact an attempted murder rap. Let us not mention what he has done to the integrity of the entire criminal justice system in this state. Let us simply focus on the fact that we are dealing with a murderer. In case you haven’t forgotten, Chief Covaletzki, murderers are still considered dangerous to the community at large.”

  “Regardless of their party affiliation,” I pointed out.

  “It’s not that simple,” said Covaletzki in a low voice. “I sent this whacko Razzi a letter right after we got back from the hotel. I typed it myself and put it in the mail. That’s what I was doing in here while youse were downstairs.”

  “So?” asked Dershon, singing the syllable.

  “It’s postmarked. It’ll show that I turned down his resignation request.”

  “So? We shall get it in tomorrow’s mail, or I should say this morning’s mail, and we shall burn it, with Mr. Razzi’s permission, of course, which I don’t believe will be unreasonably withheld.”

  “I put carbon copies in the mail.”

  “So?”

  “To the city solicitor.”

  “So? We shall obtain the copies from the city mailroom after the morning’s delivery. Heaven help me.”

  “That’s a federal offense,” said Covaletzki.

  “And you will commit it because you wrote the insipid letter.”

  “I sent a copy to Tom Moygar at the News Journal.”

  “Holy shit!” screamed Dershon as he kicked the underside of Covaletzki’s upturned desk, splintering the thin bottom wood.

  “He’s the one been covering Razzi for the paper,” said Covaletzki.

  “And you wanted further public embarrassment for Mr. Razzi. No wonder he hates your guts.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Honey. “Let’s not panic. We have a chance to create some new law on this. Lou was operating under a good-faith assumption that he was no longer on the force and that he could investigate without the restraints of the exclusionary rule.”

  “Your point is made, Honey,” said Dershon. “But we are not writing a law-review article. These issues were difficult enough when we were laboring under the assumption that he was a cop who had resigned and was acting on his own authority. I shall figure something out, but it will not be to create new law. I just need a modicum of cooperation.”

  “Can’t Marian give us the right to search the house without a warrant?” I asked. “It’s her house, too.”

  “It is not her secret room and they are not her file cabinets,” said Dershon. “Besides, searching is not the answer anymore. Not since friend Covaletzki permanently stained your initial search and interrogation by putting you back on the department roster. We already have the rifle illegally, and now we cannot ever use it in court. We have an illegal confession that is unusable and a man in a closet who is right now, as we stand here, illegally our prisoner. It is much too risky to attempt to rehabilitate the Gandry arrest or any of the other vigilante activities. What we need is a new crime, a brand-new conspiracy. Razzi, you’ve got to go back. You’re the only man who could pull it off at this point, and I’m afraid Cruset is far more dangerous today than he was yesterday. What’s that they say about wounding your enemies?”

  “What do you have in mind? Should I bring a bottle of Smirnoff s and some cleaning fluid with me? Should I tell Carlton to drop in on Gandry and finish him off with a dry cleaner cocktail straight up? That’s Cruset’s best hospital trick.”

  “Don’t tell him to do anything. That would be entrapment,” said Dershon. “Simply tell him you’ve changed your mind. You’ve decided not to turn him in. Tell him you want to join him. Ask him what his next move is. Be careful not to openly suggest a conspiracy to him. Hint, but get him to utter the actual words. Make it be his plan. Then stick to him like a dirty shirt until he commits an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy. Any act. Just getting in his car and starting it up is good enough. As long as the conspiracy is new.”

  “What conspiracy?” I asked.

  “Any new criminal conspiracy. Gandry’s good, or Target Nine, whatever it would normally be.”

  “I still wear blue,” I said. “In case you’ve forgotten, I still have a bell around my neck. I’m still a cop.”

  “I like that,” said Dershon. “Very nice image. The Blue Plague. It strikes only policemen. Well, we needn’t be overly concerned. This is an undercover operation, not a search and seizure. You can wear blue for this one.”

  “However,” said Honey, “what if Cruset doesn’t fall for it? You’ll still want Lou to pick up Carlton’s files. We’ve got to find out how he gets his inside information. I think that’s as important as anything. Lou shouldn’t leave without those files, and he shouldn’t touch those files if he’s got this Blue Plague we’re talking about.”

  “Are we on ‘Candid Camera’?” I asked. “I keep thinking Dorothy Collins is going to pop up with a microphone and tell me you people have been pulling my leg.”

  “Honey’s right,” said Dershon. “We need a fallback position. Chief, begin composing a typewritten acceptance of Razzi’s resignation, put the date prominently on it, and put in it that he is to get his pension and that your previous letter is to be disregarded in its entirety. Address it to him for hand-delivery right now. Make it clear in the letter that you have had a change of heart due to Mr. Razzi’s recent good-faith efforts to aid law enforcement and your sincere hope that he return to Brazil. Do you have that, Chief, recent good-faith efforts and your sincere hope?”

  “I got it.”

  “This is hairy,” said Honey. “It’s beginning to sound like dirty tricks and traps.”

  “Honey, leave the room,” said Dershon. “For your own protection.”

  “Not on your life,” said Honey.

  “I think maybe you’d better, Honey,” I said. “I don’t know that I’m going to do this, but I want to hear him out, and he won’t let it all hang out in front of you.”

  She said, “For you, I’ll leave the room,” and she did.

  “Very well,” said Dershon. “That leaves us, and us it will have to be. No one outside this room can ever know what we do here today. Do you have a Kel Kit, Chief?”

  “Sure.”

  “Get it.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Civilian Razzi, you will wear a Kel Kit transmitter in an elastic body bandage against your belly. It will transmit to a monitor hooked up to a reel-to-reel recorder in Chief Covaletzki’s vehicle.”


  “Don’t make me laugh,” I said. “The chief as my backup?”

  “We have no choice. And he’s not backup. You don’t need backup for Cruset. The chief will just be there to man the tape recorder. He will be less than five hundred feet from you, listening to your progress and recording it at the same time. If you obtain a new conspiracy, we shall have a permanent record of it and all will be above board, so to speak. However, if you fail to elicit a new conspiracy, then a new game plan will go into effect. Merely signal to Covaletzki by working the words Blue Plague into your conversation. The chief will then close down his operation, erase what he has on his tape, and go home. You will then begin the alternate plan, the civilian plan.”

  “Which is?” I asked.

  “As every cop knows, there is a clock in the city clerk’s office that stamps the date and time on any piece of paper placed under it. It will occur to you after you leave here that the chief’s letter ought to be stamped so that all the world will know that from that precise moment on you are a private citizen. Naturally, whatever you do you are doing on your own and for your own reasons, and there cannot be even the slightest hint that you acted as our agent, that you wore a department Kel Kit, or that Chief Covaletzki followed you, or that we had this entire conversation. We shall say that we told you your initial search and confession were illegal. To show our good faith and appreciation, we let you resign with a pension, hoping you would immediately go back to Brazil. We decided not to do anything further with your information until we could test-fire the rifle you brought us and find out if the FBI had a sufficient bullet fragment for comparison purposes, and even then we knew we couldn’t use the rifle as evidence. We didn’t know what to think, and we hadn’t totally excluded you as a suspect. For all we knew, it was your rifle. We then called Marian Cruset in, advising her to free Professor Cruset — I’m saying that’s what we will do, and we’ll keep her here for two hours while I debrief her. That, Civilian Razzi, will be the extent of our knowledge. Apparently you, on your own, when you left us, decided to clock in Covaletzki’s little letter and go back into the house to handle this matter, the same way you handled that whole thing with Gandry and Mrs. Smotz. You did leave the door unlocked, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “If we are pressed, we shall freely admit that we wondered what sort of old-flame connection you had with Mrs. Cruset and whether your zealousness in pursuit of Cruset was in fact motivated by that connection. Whatever your motivation, we shall reluctantly applaud you when you return with the goods on Cruset for shooting Gandry, the Target files, and another confession.

  “This civilian plan is risky. It may never result in the obtaining of admissible evidence, but it is decidedly better than your returning empty-handed. We shall never be able to use the rifle or the original confession, but the fact that you are now a civilian may cure you of the Blue Plague, such that whatever you get on this trip may be usable, and may not be ‘fruit of the poisonous tree.’ But who can say? It’s a chance we’ll have to take, if it comes to that. I implore you, however, to do your best to obtain a new conspiracy to kill Gandry. It is so much safer for us all. You cannot imagine.”

  “The cure for this plague,” I said, “sounds worse than the disease. It would probably be unfair to blame your law school, so I’ll just blame your parents. You weren’t brought up right. You’re the one sending me back out there, as your agent, whether I’m a cop or not. I’ll never say I thought any of this up when I didn’t. I won’t tell stupid lies for you.”

  “You won’t have to. We’ll plea-bargain the case before it reaches a suppression hearing, but if we can’t, you still won’t need to testify. You can be temporarily in Brazil, even if only for a swim at Ipanema that lasts long enough to miss the suppression hearing. Covaletzki and I will do the testifying in accordance with the official version, and no matter what you think of me I shall feel no more guilt than a waiter who doesn’t report all of his tips. You see, Civilian Razzi, these days there are so many rules that we are all guilty of something all of the time. We live in governmental original sin.”

  “Do you go along with this, Covaletzki?” I asked.

  “Sure. It’s a good idea. We gotta do the right thing here. So we bend the rules just a little bit. There’s no harm done. We’re only trying to get the truth out in the open. He might’ve framed some innocent people with his bullshit, just like what was done to you. You and me ought to be able to bury the hatchet long enough to get this job done, and he’s right, you’re the only one could do it now. Here’s the wire transmitter. Help me put the reel-to-reel on the passenger seat. I’ll give you a head start, and then I’ll follow you.”

  “First give him the letter,” said Dershon, “and while he’s downstairs at the city clerk’s, you and I shall run a test on the transmitter and check the batteries on the reel-to-reel, and then we shall set it up. Do this for us, Lou. Think of your daughter living with that man.”

  “You’ve got yourself a deal,” I said. “On the way to the clerk’s I’ll say good night to Honey. She’s probably pissed we kicked her out. You gentlemen are responsible for a lot of problems between us.”

  45

  “You were very cruel to me,” said Carlton as he sat on the edge of his bed, clutching his robe tight around him. “I thought I’d lose my mind in my secret room.”

  “Then you know how I felt in jail for two years,” I said. “But you’re free now. Doesn’t it feel good?”

  He sighed. “So now you want to help our cause. I just don’t know if I’ve got any fight left.” He closed his eyes wearily, hung his head, and sighed again as a horn beeped once in the distance. “Gandry was intended as practice, a learning experience to prepare me for the ultimate, Target Nine, but instead it wore me out.”

  “What are you saying? Wore you out? You have fight left. Take a deep breath. This is no time to let me down. I finally realize that you did Gandry, in part, for me. You knew how responsible I felt for little Johnny Mastropolito’s death, and God bless your heart, Professor, you tried to do the right thing by me. I feel like an ingrate. I was selfish. The only thing I cared about was my personal safety, the fear of going to jail. Professor, it’s a terrible fear, but I’ve recovered and so will you. We’ll do Target Nine together. Like John Brown at Harpers Ferry.”

  “We got a problem, Professor,” said Covaletzki as he stepped into the room pointing his .357 at me. “Move an inch from that chair, Razzi, and you’re history. I know what you done to that trooper and to that guy up in New York. You ain’t gettin’ ten feet near me.”

  “That soft soap about Cruset framing innocent people came out of your mouth like rotten pork,” I said. “It didn’t fool me, but now I get the whole picture. You’re Cruset’s inside man. You’ve been feeding him information, haven’t you?”

  “You guessed it, shit-for-brains.”

  “I’m sure he pays well.”

  “I don’t do it just for the money, but you wouldn’t understand that.”

  I laughed. “You’ve had your hand out for money all your life. It’s a habit with you. Like some people gamble, you skim.”

  “He’s wearing a wire, Professor,” he said. “He met with Dershon and them, and he came out here to get more on you. I volunteered to be his backup so’s I could get you out of this thing. We gotta do something with him.”

  Professor Cruset sat in a daze like a prisoner of war.

  “He’s not telling you the whole truth,” I said. “Before this is over he’ll have to kill you, too. If he thought he could trust you to keep his name out of this, he wouldn’t be in this room in the first place. He can’t let you get arrested, get a lawyer, and look to make deals to save yourself. He’ll kill me all right, but he’ll make it look like you did it. Watch him ask if you’ve got any guns left lying around. Once he does me, he’ll get you out for a ride, maybe to search for a place to bury me, then he’ll kill you and bu
ry us both. If you’re lucky he’ll kill you before you start digging the grave. He’ll even pack a bag for you to make it look like you ran away after you killed me. By the time they find your body, if they ever do, no one will care how you bought it. And your Target files, what do you know, they’ll disappear with you. Professor, he no more believes he needs your help in killing me than I do, but if you did help him kill me, he still could never trust you. You’re too screwy.”

  Covaletzki’s gun moved a half inch in the direction of Carlton.

  “See, Professor,” I said, “look how his gun moved ever so slightly. He can’t trust you. He’s going to do us both, only this time he’s going to frame you instead of me. He’s good at framing people, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I’m good at it. Look at you, dummy. I’m sorry, Professor, but he’s got a point. I could never trust you. I got no choice. Believe me, this ain’t somethin’ I wanna do. Not to you anyway.”

  Professor Cruset looked old, very old and very pathetic. His mouth twitched, closing and opening as if he were nursing on his mother.

  “That’s enough, Covaletzki,” I said, “don’t torture him, and don’t forget my wire.” I lifted my shirt and showed him.

  “Don’t make me laugh.” He waved the gun back at me. “It only transmits to the monitor in my car, and I turned the thing off before I got out. You must think I’m as dumb as you. You can’t be serious with that shit.”

  “I’m as serious as a heart attack. I’ve been under the impression that everything we’ve been saying was being heard and recorded, that somebody even switched on your police radio and broadcast this conversation to cops all over the county. I can almost see their faces now.”

  “Your mind’s gone, motherfucker, and you’re goin’ with it.” He pulled a beat-up .25 automatic out of his pants pocket and smiled that pinch-lipped smile of his.

  “The murder weapon,” I said. “Beep the horn again, Honey. This is getting serious.”

  Covaletzki’s car horn honked outside, and the color drained from his face as he realized just how serious it was.