Accused

by Michael Kerr

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CLAYTON didn’t know what to do. He drove back towards town in a state of near panic: had to stop after driving for a few minutes to get out of the car and pace up and down to find some composure, and hope that the now cold night air would give him some inspiration. It did. Taking off his shoulder rig, he walked through a stand of trees to be faced by a drainage canal that cut a straight path for as far as the eye could see in both directions. Perfect.

  Carefully wiping the 9-millimeter pistol and the holster to remove prints, Clayton tossed them out into the middle of the canal.

  What else? His hands and jacket would have gunshot residue on them. No problem. He drove back into town, stopped on the forecourt of a Shell station, went into the 7-Eleven and paid the one-armed guy behind the counter twenty bucks for gas and asked for the key to the restroom. The key was chained to a hubcap, to ensure that customers returned it.

  Scrubbing his hands under the hot water faucet, Clayton wondered what had happened to Dwayne. If he was still alive he wouldn’t talk, but he had contact numbers in his cell.

  Placing the hubcap back on the counter, Clayton purchased a Big Bite hotdog and a cup of coffee to go, then went out and pumped the gas as he ate the dog. Driving home, he stopped once more to empty the pockets of his jacket and stuff the garment under garbage in a dumpster at the rear of a restaurant.

  Back in Terrytown he had the card ready to slip into the slot of the reader to raise the barrier to the parking garage, but didn’t get the chance to use it.

  It was as if they had materialized from nowhere. The Buick was surrounded by uniformed figures wearing helmets and Balaclavas. They all seemed to be holding what appeared to be submachine guns, and were pointing them at Clayton.

  “Both hands on the wheel,” a calm and steady voice instructed, as one of the tactical team stepped forward and pointed his weapon at Clayton’s head. “Do it now.”

  Clayton complied. He had an alibi for when the diner had been hit, and had nothing incriminating for them to find. No worries.

  They used ratchet cuffs, not cable ties to pinion his wrists. He was given a thorough search and then relocated to the cage in the back of a Transit van. Two armed officers climbed in behind him.

  “Why did I just get taken down by a bunch of masked gorillas?” Clayton said.

  Neither of the officers answered.

  “You both deaf as well as dumb?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” the nearest one to him said.

  “You have no right to―”

  The short barrel of the SMG was rammed into his stomach and doubled him over.

  “You get to talk downtown, asshole. Another word and you’ll be going there via the nearest medical center to have treatment for serious injuries acquired as a result of resisting arrest.”

  The second officer said: “And as for rights, you don’t have any in the back of this vehicle. Understand?”

  Clayton groaned and sucked in three or four large gulps of air as he assimilated the flaring pain in his stomach. These guys played hardball. He straightened up slowly on the bench seat and nodded and smiled at both of them in turn. No point getting worked over for nothing. He had a high threshold to pain, but that didn’t make him a masochist. He was just a guy that could soak up a lot of discomfort if need be.

  The scar on his cheek itched, but being cuffed with his arms behind his back, he couldn’t scratch it. That brought back the fact that he had been way too self-assured on a December night two years ago:

  It should have been a straightforward job. A family guy, Hal Baker, who’d been laid off, was facing foreclosure by the Bank of America on his house. In desperation he’d done a deal with the boss to keep a roof above his head. He’d got other work, but found a loophole in the contract he’d signed for Mr. Cassidy, and said he wouldn’t pay another penny to him, and that the agreement they’d signed was worth less than a piece of used toilet paper.

  Clayton and Dwayne had waited in the lot at the rear of the Liberty Sports Bar, way back in deep shadow behind Baker’s old Taurus.

  Unbeknown to most people, including his wife and kids, Hal Baker was bisexual. He came out of the back door of the bar with the intention of fooling around in the car with a young, slim black guy by the name of Earl Foster, who had a pretty face and a big dick. He usually met up with Earl once a week for a couple of beers in the Liberty before getting it on.

  Earl had gone to take a piss on the way out, while Hal walked over to the car and fobbed it open. It was as he made to climb in that Clayton appeared from around the trunk and swung a baseball bat into his ribs with enough force to break a couple of them. That should have been enough. Dwayne just stood by and grinned as he watched Clayton prepare to give the guy another belt with the maple wood Louisville Slugger.

  That was when Earl ran across the lot shouting, “Leave him alone, you muthafucker.”

  Clayton had paused mid-swing and turned, but too late to avoid being slashed with a five dollar box cutter. He’d felt nothing more than he would have from a paper cut, but the blade had opened up his cheek to the bone. Without pause he redirected the arc of the still moving bat into an up and sideways direction and was rewarded by the thunk of wood against his attacker’s skull. Two more blows to the head finished Earl off.

  Turning back to Hal, who had witnessed the incident, Clayton had said, “Start the car, get the fuck away from here now, Baker. Say anything about what went down here tonight and your wife and kids get what this piece of shit just got. I’ll be in touch. Maybe we can come to an arrangement over what you owe that will satisfy both you and Mr. Cassidy.”

  The body of the young black guy wound up in the concrete foundations of a new apartment building, to no doubt be preserved for centuries, and the thought of that pleased Clayton, who would carry Earl’s mark on his face for the rest of his life.

  “Out,” Gil Walker – one of the SWAT team members – said to Clayton, which brought him back from reverie to focus on the here and now.

  It was a while before two detectives came into the interview room. Clayton’s wrists were still cuffed, but now through a steel hoop on the table in front of him, the legs of which were cemented into the floor.

  “I’m Detective Reynolds and this is Detective Pleshette,” Rod said as he took a seat opposite Clayton. “Tell us about what went down at the diner, Mr. LaSalle.”

  “What diner?” Clayton said with a slight smile. The severed nerves in his left cheek prevented him from anything broader.

  “Dicky’s. You and your buddy were there a few hours’ ago.”

  “Not me, cop. You’ve got fiction not facts.”

  “We have two witnesses that can identify you.”

  “What you have is at best mistaken identity. I spent the evening playing poker with a couple of pals over on Banks Street.”

  “So you’re telling me that you’ve got a spit image double in town that also has a knife scar on his face and drives a black Buick sedan?”

  “That must be it, because I wasn’t there.”

  “You haven’t asked me what went down,” Rod said.

  “That’s because I don’t give a shit.”

  “Okay, wise guy. Give me the name and address of your poker buds.”

  Clayton did. Benny was solid, because he knew that if he went off script he’d go down hard.

  “So take it easy while we check out your alibi,” Rod said as he got up to leave the room, accompanied by Lucy.

  “What about my phone call?” Clayton said as they went through the door.

  Lucy turned and said: “You’ve been watching too many movies, Mr. LaSalle. When we officially interrogate you and subsequently formally charge you with a crime, you’ll be entitled to legal counsel. Till then you’re on hold. This is our party, not yours.”

  “Do I get a cup of coffee while you check out what I told you?”

  “That’s the least we can do,” Lucy said.

  Twenty minutes later they were at Benny
Cooper’s door. They’d done a check and knew that he worked for K & L Meat Market on Jefferson, and that Dicky’s Diner was on his delivery schedule. That was a link that switched on a red light.

  Benny wouldn’t open up until Rod had held his badge up to the peephole and convinced him that he was a cop.

  Lucy could smell Marijuana, and thought that the guy looked more doped than sleepy. He was wearing piss-stained boxers, a creased ‘Stones’ T-shirt, and his hair was lank and dirty looking.

  “What’s the problem?” Benny said as they breezed past him into the apartment.

  “We don’t have one with you, yet,” Rod said. “Take a seat, Benny, and listen very carefully to what I’m about to say to you.”

  Benny sat in an old easy chair that had probably been fashionable and not so frayed and grubby back when it had been new in the seventies. He reached a hand out and shakily picked up a can of beer and swigged the last mouthful of it. Something bad had happened, and he knew that it would involve Clayton and the other guy that had called to see him several hours’ ago.

  “What do you know about the shootings at Dicky’s Diner?” Rod said. “And be aware that if you lie to me you’ll be in shit so deep you’ll suffocate in it.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about any shootin’,” Benny said.

  “A bunch of people got shot dead,” Rod said. “We have witnesses that can finger the shooters, and we have one of the killers in custody.”

  “What the fuck has any of that got to do with me?”

  “A lot. The guy we have chained to a desk says that he was here with you when it went down. We know that he wasn’t.”

  “What guy?”

  “Clayton LaSalle.”

  Aw, shit, Benny thought. I’m in a fuckin’ bind. What do I do? If I tell them the truth I’ll get a visit by someone like the asshole that hit me, and I’ll probably be whacked.

  “I was playin’ poker with him and a guy by the name of Dwayne last night,” Benny said as self-preservation kicked in.

  “From when until when?”

  “They came around about seven-thirty and left at eleven or so.”

  “You’re lying, Benny,” Lucy said. “You’ll end up doing a lot of time as an accessory to murder if you don’t come clean.”

  Benny got up and walked over to the wood TV stand and opened a small door and took some bills from off the top of a row of DVD’s: “I had a good night” he said. “I took five hundred bucks off Clayton. Maybe your forensic guys can find his prints on them.”

  “You’re a dummy, Benny,” Rod said. “We know as a fact that LaSalle and his partner were at Dicky’s a little after eight p.m. All you’re going to get out of this is hard time in Louisiana State pen for the rest of your natural. Is that what you want?”

  “I haven’t been out or done anythin’ illegal,” Benny said.

  “You don’t have to have been with them,” Lucy said. “Giving them a false alibi makes you equally guilty. You are assisting them in the crime because you have knowledge that they have committed it. You are knowingly attempting to help them avoid arrest or punishment. That makes you an accomplice after the fact.”

  “I’m tellin’ you the truth, they were here.”

  “Maybe they were,” Rod said. “And maybe you were a little stoned on weed and got the times wrong. Think about it real hard. Could it have been later when they showed up here?”

  “I…I got nothin’ more to say to you. I mind my own business.”

  “I got reminded by someone this evening that I don’t believe in coincidences,” Lucy said. “You admit that you know LaSalle, and you also deliver meat to Dicky’s. That’s a connection that raises a bunch of questions.”

  “I used to deliver to Harlan Koppel’s bar and grill on Lakeshore Drive, and knew the guy, but that didn’t mean I had anythin’ to do with what he did.”

  Lucy had attended the murder scene at Harlan Koppel’s house. It transpired that Koppel had overreacted when he found out his wife had been having an affair with a tennis coach at the country club that they were members of. It was Koppel that called it in. He told the 911 dispatcher his name and address in a calm, strong voice, and informed her that there had been multiple murders at his home.

  When the first unit arrived, Harlan had been standing on the platform at the top of the stoop. He was holding a gun with the barrel pressed to his right temple, and said, “You took your time to get here,” before blowing his brains out.

  Inside the house they discovered the bodies of his wife, nine-year old daughter, seven-year old son, and the live-in maid. They had all been shot to death.

  “Point taken,” Lucy said to Benny. “But we know that you’re lying about the times, so you’ll be accompanying us downtown to provide a full, official statement.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  LOGAN told Ellie Mae to get out of the bath. She did.

  “Do you know how to use one of these?” Logan said as he held out the Glock pistol for her to take.

  “Point at what you want to hit and pull the trigger,” she said as she took the weapon from him.

  “Keep at least eight feet away from him. If he comes round and makes a move on you, shoot him as many times as you think you need to.”

  Logan left her holding the silenced semiautomatic two-handed. She was looking as nervous as a virgin bride on her wedding night, and chewing at the inside of her cheek, but her hands were rock steady. She had enough mettle to do what she needed to. He was positive that she wouldn’t freeze up if the injured man came round and went for broke.

  The Tahoe’s engine was still turning over, but Logan couldn’t see the trooper inside it. He approached it warily and looked in through the open window.

  No surprise. The trooper was slumped sideways across the passenger seat, and just a glance at the ruined head and the amount of blood was enough to know beyond any doubt that if men had souls, then Ralph Meakin’s had departed his body and was as free as a bird on a flight to who knows where. Logan opened the door and checked for a pulse anyway, even though he knew he wouldn’t find one.

  The night manager or owner of the motel was as dead as Ralph. He was lying in a pool of blood in the office. His eyes were open, rolled back to show the whites, and there was a dime-sized hole just above the bridge of his nose.

  Back in the room, Logan could see Ellie Mae standing exactly as he had left her, arms straight out with the handgun angled down and pointing at the guy on the bathroom floor.

  “Keep the gun and go make some coffee,” Logan said. “I’ll have a word with this creep. Close the door behind you.”

  Dwayne didn’t know it, but he was moaning aloud as he regained consciousness and the pain in his wrist and head vied for attention. It took a few seconds for the memory of what had happened to him to come back. He had been climbing in through the small window at the rear of the motel room, and then it had felt as if someone had chopped his hand off with an ax, and then nothing.

  Logan bent his knees, grasped the collar of the guy’s jacket with his left hand and lifted him up off the floor, to turn and dump him in the bath, still face down.

  Dwayne yelped like a kicked dog and attempted to turn over, but pressure on his back, which was applied by Logan’s booted right foot, pinned him down and prevented him from moving.

  “Move and I’ll shoot you in the head,” Logan said. “Just stay as still as dirt.”

  Logan frisked the man that had come to kill them. Twisted him back and forth and took a wallet from a hip pocket and a cell phone from an inside jacket pocket. Opened the wallet and found a wedge of money, a half dozen credit cards and a driver’s license. The name on the license – that had been issued in Baton Rouge – was Dwayne Nash, and the photo was of the man with close-set eyes that had been with Scarface at the diner. His DOB made him twenty-nine years old.

  Logan removed the bills, tossed the wallet on the floor, pocketed the money and cell, and then took a thin, worn towel from a shelf and twisted it lengthwise to fo
rm a make-do rope to secure Nash’s wrists behind his back.

  Dwayne cried out as the tightly wound towel bit into his broken wrist.

  “Here’s the deal, Dwayne,” Logan said as he placed the tub stopper in the drain and turned both faucets on. “If you tell me the name of your scar-faced friend, and who you both work for, then I turn the water off and we talk. If you want to drown, then say nothing. Think of this as a novel form of waterboarding, without the benefit of getting to come up for air.”

  Dwayne twisted his face to the side and attempted to raise his head up off the bottom of the bathtub, but a large hand appeared and pressed his head back down. It didn’t take long for the level of the water to reach the corner of his mouth.

  “Maybe you’re thinking that I’m bluffing,” Logan said. “If you knew me, you’d know that I don’t make idle threats.”

  Dwayne closed his mouth and breathed through his nose, and soon after began to hold his breath, and then panicked and began to cough and choke as the water entered his nostrils: “I’ll talk,” he shouted into the water.

  Logan couldn’t make out the words, but guessed that Dwayne was ready to answer questions, so grasped him by the shoulder and flipped him over on to his back and reached over him to turn off the faucets.

  Lowering the lid of the toilet at the side of the bath, Logan sat on it and waited while Dwayne finished coughing and then said: “So talk, son, or the water goes on again, and stays on.”

  “The guy who was with me is called Clayton LaSalle,” Dwayne spluttered. “All we wanted to do was warn you and the waitress to keep your mouths shut.”

  Logan’s arm snaked out and down with the speed and accuracy of a chameleon’s tongue, for his clenched fist to break Dwayne’s nose like a dry twig.

  “Fuck,” Dwayne shouted as blood sprayed from his nostrils and ran down his face to drip from his chin.

  “You retards murdered a young cop and the guy in the office,” Logan said with quiet menace in his voice. “So don’t shoot shit. Who do you work for?”