Dead Man's Thoughts

by Carolyn Wheat

  It was honest as far as it went. I really did need to know. And maybe some sense of that got through to Button. He snapped his head up decisively and said, “Where can we talk?”

  It was a good question. A homicide detective and a Legal Aid lawyer having a tête-à-tête were bound to cause comment anywhere in the court vicinity. I motioned Button to follow me into the door marked No Admittance, Authorized Personnel Only. It led to a corridor off which were located the back entrances to the AR1 courtroom and the clerks’ office as well as the room I was heading for. The so-called judge’s robing room for the arraignment part. It’s a bare little room with castoff furniture—a desk and some old-fashioned benches—as well as the only regularly cleaned bathroom on the first floor. The public bathrooms they just hose out, like a horse’s stall.

  We each sat on a bench. I put my Channel Thirteen bag on the desk. Neither of us spoke. I was beginning to wonder if Button had changed his mind. I looked at him quizzically. He shook his head. Then I heard a flushing sound. The bathroom door opened, and Cornelia, the court reporter, stepped out. She scurried out when she saw us, but the look on her face told me she was sure she’d interrupted a tryst. Button threw his head back and roared. It was a big laugh, bigger than I’d expected from his small frame.

  When we both stopped laughing, he said seriously, “You know, Counselor, every instinct I have plus ten years’ experience tells me not to do this. Not to trust a lawyer. Try not to prove me wrong, okay?”

  “Oh, come on, Button. You’re not giving me anything the 18-b lawyer won’t get from the D.A. Besides, if you’ve really got this kid locked, what’s the difference?”

  “You know better than that, Miss Jameson. No case was ever so tight a good lawyer couldn’t twist things around to his client’s benefit.”

  “Why would I want to twist things around to help the kid who killed Nathan?” The words almost stuck in my throat. Because they admitted, tacitly at least, that maybe Button was right, maybe this kid was the killer. But I said them anyway.

  They turned out to be the magic words. “What do you want to know?” Button asked.

  “What have you got on this kid?” I countered.

  “We’ve got his name in the book at your friend’s apartment building,” Button began. “You know, the one people sign in when they’re visiting someone. He signed in at eight forty-five on Wednesday night. Time of death was estimated at between eight-thirty and nine thirty.”

  “Jesus.” A chill ran up my spine. This was serious.

  “Plus the kid admits being there—well, he could hardly deny it. He says he got up to your friend’s apartment, knocked on the door, got no answer, and left right away. But the guy at the desk that night says no, the kid signed in, went upstairs, and didn’t come down till after nine thirty. So the kid’s lying about the amount of time he spent up there.”

  I was silent for a moment, trying to turn off the personal feelings and think about it as I would any other case. “Two things,” I finally said. “One. If he went up there to kill Nathan, would he have signed his real name in the book?”

  “Remember, Miss Jameson, our theory here is crime of passion. When he signed into the book, he had no intention of killing your friend. That came later. After some sexual confrontation in the apartment. So his signing in is no guaranty of innocence.”

  “Okay. I’ll give you that. Two. Would the desk attendant really remember the time? He sees a lot of people. They don’t have to sign when they leave, just when they come in. What’s so special about this kid?”

  “It’s a fairly classy building, Counselor. High-rise. Young professionals. How many Puerto Rican hustlers in skintight pants, leather jackets, and boots do you suppose this guy sees in a night?”

  It sounded good. Too good. A jury would buy it in a minute.

  “This statement. Who’d he make it to and when?”

  “Warrant officer. Before the officer could even give him the Miranda warnings, the kid was blurting it out. It was like he was just waiting to get arrested, waiting to get it off his chest.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  The interview with the kid took a lot out of me. For one thing, it was a good twenty times longer than my usual first interview. That’s because I ordinarily cover the high points and leave the rest for later. My theory is that getting the guy out of jail is the number-one priority and the rest can wait. That way I haven’t wasted an interview if the guy pleads guilty, skips, or hires private counsel. Besides, the interview goes better the second time. The guy’s had a shower; he’s cooled down a little from the frantic, get-me-out-of-here arraignment mood; we can talk about what’s really important instead of what dirty names the cop called him. Because I save all the details for the second meeting, my first interview seldom goes over three minutes. They don’t call me the fastest mouth in Brooklyn for nothing.

  This was different. I wouldn’t get a second interview.

  The first thing I did that was unusual was to go inside the pen. That used to be standard operating procedure, until they put in a fancy little booth that looks like a confessional. Private, but you can’t see your client’s face. This kid’s face I wanted to see.

  “You gonna be my lawyer?” he asked. I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to talk. Not yet. The kid was small, about my height. His voice was soft, with the merest hint of an accent. He stood, thumbs in his belt, leaning against the wall in a parody of his hustler image. I motioned him to sit, but he shook his head.

  “It’s okay. I rather stand. If it’s okay witch you.”

  “Sure. Whatever you want. Only thing is, we got a lot to talk about. I just want you to know that. So get comfortable.”

  He nodded, but made no move to sit on the adjoining stool. I didn’t like it. It distanced him from me, and I needed to bridge that distance.

  I looked at the court papers. The complaint had three a.k.a.’s. I looked up at the kid. “Which of these names is yours?”

  “Heriberto Diaz.”

  “What do they call you on the street?”

  The look he gave me was deliberately blank. As though he had never heard of anything as outré as a street name. Funny, when I was in law school a street name meant the false name a big company would use to trade anonymously on Wall Street. It took me three days in Brooklyn to find out about the other kind.

  I pushed him. “Suppose you’re playing stickball with your buddies. One of the guys yells, ‘Heriberto, here comes a grounder.’ Right?” He started to smile.

  “Or some dude comes up to you on the corner. Does he say, ‘Hey, man, hey, Heriberto, how they hangin’?’” Now the smile was a broad grin. It helped his face a lot. He looked like a real kid, the kind I’d grown up with in Ohio, only a little darker.

  “The guys call me Paco.”

  “Hi, Paco. I’m Cassandra Jameson.” I extended my hand in a deliberately formal gesture. He took it, we shook, and finally he sat down on the stool opposite me. “Whatcha want to know?”

  What did I want to know? Were you Nathan’s lover? Did you kill him? Why? For God’s sake and above all, why?

  I didn’t ask him those questions. I talked about the warrant.

  “Look, Paco, they called me over here on this warrant. But the warrant doesn’t mean shit now that they’ve got you tagged for Nathan’s murder. You know that’s what’s happened, don’t you?”

  He nodded. His eyes were cast down. Then he looked up at me with his puppy’s eyes. “They think I done it, killed him.” There was wonder in his voice. “Man, how they can be thinkin’ somethin’ so dumb. Of all the dumb shit. Me killin’ him. Jesus!”

  “Why is it so dumb, Paco?”

  “Hey, you know, like the dude was helpin’ me, you dig? He was tryin’ to keep me from goin’ to the Rock. Why’d I want to kill a guy like that?”

  Good question. Button thought he had the answer.

  “He was trying to get you into a program, right?”

  “Yeah. Like he had this dude to phone my mother and te
ll me to meet him at his apartment that night.”

  “What night? The murder? What dude? Go back a minute.” I was trying to write it down, but I’m no Archie Goodwin. I can be fast or legible, take your pick, but not both at once.

  “My mother told me a guy called from the program. He was supposed to meet me at Nathan’s apartment that night.”

  “Okay. You got the message from your mother. You never talked to the guy yourself?”

  “Right. Only my mother. Then—”

  “Stop. When did your mother get the message? That same day?”

  “Yeah, I think so. I came home around one o’clock. I been out all night with some dudes I know. She told me the guy called then.”

  “So it could have been that morning. Could it have been the night before?”

  He thought. “I don’t think so,” he answered slowly. “My mother went over to my Aunt Rita’s that night. Nobody was home to get the phone. But you better ax my mother.”

  “I will.” I took down her name and phone number.

  “What time were you supposed to be at the apartment?”

  “My mother say the dude say eight thirty.”

  “You were there? On time?”

  He nodded.

  “What happened?”

  He shrugged. “Wasn’t nobody home, so I booked.”

  “You don’t get off that easy. Back up again. You got to the building when?”

  “’Bout eight thirty. Like I said.”

  “You signed in the book in the lobby?”

  “Right.”

  “Your real name?”

  “Yeah, my real name,” he said indignantly. “Whatchou think I am?”

  “You went straight up to the apartment? You knew where it was?”

  “Yeah. So what? I been there before to talk about my case. About the program.”

  “I didn’t say you weren’t. Just asking. You got to the door. Then what?”

  “I rang the bell a couple of times. Wasn’t no answer.” He shrugged again. “I left. That’s all.”

  “How long were you there?”

  Another shrug. “Five minutes.”

  “That’s all? You didn’t wait any longer?”

  “No. I told you, wasn’t no point. Nobody home.”

  “Did you knock? Maybe the bell was broken. Did you call out any names?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t wait a few minutes to see if maybe he stepped out for a minute? Did you call him later to find out what happened?”

  “No. I just left.” He was sullen. I was shotgunning the questions at him, hoping to deny him time to think. He was lying, and with time to think the lie might get better. I wanted it to stay bad.

  “After you left, where did you go?”

  “Out.”

  “Out where?”

  “On the street. I walked around.”

  “Where?”

  “Where he lived?”

  “Why?”

  “No reason.” Another shrug.

  “What went through your mind when you couldn’t get in to the apartment?”

  “I didn’t think nothin’.”

  “Come on, Paco. You come to an appointment set up by your lawyer to get you into a program. You get there on time. And there’s nobody there. You’ve gotta think something. Maybe you thought Nathan ducked out on you. Maybe you thought you had the wrong time. Maybe the guy from the program never showed.”

  “But Nathan would have told me—” he began.

  “Exactly. Nathan would have been there even if the guy from the program wasn’t. But that’s not the point. The point is you did think about it. You wondered. Anybody would. And you stayed. You waited longer than five minutes. Anybody would. And you did. The desk guy says you were up there forty-five minutes.”

  The kid sat in sullen and oppressive silence. There was nothing more for me to say. Either he told the truth now or he didn’t. It was only after he spoke that I realized I’d been holding my breath.

  “Maybe he’s lyin’. Maybe he made a mistake.” But there was no hostility, not even conviction, in the kid’s tone. He was just trying it on for size.

  “No good, Paco. We both know you were there. He’s not lying or mistaken. Did you get into the apartment?”

  “No!” The kid looked ready to explode. “How many times I gotta tell you? There wasn’t no answer!” His voice was high, nearly hysterical.

  “Okay, I’ll buy that,” I said in a voice I hoped would soothe him. “You didn’t get in, but you did wait around. Where? For how long?”

  “You ain’t gonna believe me.”

  “Try me.”

  He took a deep breath. “When I got to the door, I seen a note. It said for me to wait down the hall on account of because there was another dude in there with him. So that’s what I done.”

  “What did the note look like?”

  “It was on that yellow paper you got,” he said, pointing at my legal pad. “It was tape to the door.”

  “How’d you know it was for you?”

  A scornful look. “It had my name on it.” He didn’t actually add “you fool,” but he might as well have.

  “Which name? Paco?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did it say? Try to remember exactly.”

  “It said like he had a client inside and I should go and wait in the laundry room for a half an hour. So I did.”

  “It said laundry room?” He nodded. “Where is the laundry room?”

  “On the same floor. Down the hall.”

  “Can you see the apartment from the laundry room?” I knew the answer, having been with Nathan once while he did laundry, but I wanted to know how much the kid knew.

  “No, it’s around the corner, like.”

  “Right. How long were you there? What did you do there?”

  “I lit up a reefer. I sat on a bench like and looked at the machines. I was thinkin’.”

  “Did you see anybody else?”

  “Not in the room. Some people pass by in the hall, but I didn’t want them to see the smoke, so I stay quiet.”

  “So you don’t know if they saw you?”

  He shook his head.

  “You were there about half an hour?” He nodded. “How do you know?”

  “Maybe there was a clock in the room.” His voice was tentative, evasive.

  “What do you mean maybe? You were there, Paco. You tell me. Was there a clock or wasn’t there?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Then how do you know a half hour was up?”

  He looked at the floor. Plainly he didn’t like the question. I didn’t know why till he answered. Then I saw his point. I didn’t like it either.”

  “I had a watch. A friend gave it to me.”

  “What friend?”

  “Na—Mr. Wasserstein.” He heard my sigh of resignation and began to talk fast. “He gave it to me! Honest! I didn’t steal nothin’ from him, no matter what the cops think. I wouldn’t do nothin’ like that to him. Not to him!”

  So far I’d dealt in facts. What time was it? What did you do then? Now we were into the hard part. I had to decide how to go with it. Should I confront the kid, beat him over the head and watch his reaction? Or should I play sympathetic, like I was on his side all the way, but the cops had this crazy idea.… I had the uneasy feeling that Detective Button had been thinking along the same lines when he’d questioned me the day I found Nathan’s body.

  I went for confrontation. The words should have stuck in my throat, but oddly enough, they didn’t. I was doing my job, the one I could do in my sleep.

  “What’d he give it to you for, Paco?” I asked, my voice as hard as I could make it. “Or maybe I should ask what you did to earn it, huh?”

  His reaction was more than I’d bargained for. He gave a hoarse animal cry, lunged out of his seat, and swung wildly at my head. He missed me by inches as he shrieked, “You callin’ me a faggot, cunt, I kill you.”

  TWENTY-TWO

>   I just sat and watched, like a clinical observer at a psychiatric ward. Or like a zookeeper.

  Finally, he subsided into sullenness, muttering, “I ain’t no faggot. Motherfucking creep cops.”

  I hit him again. “I hate to bring this up, Paco,” I said, in a tone laden with sarcasm, “but you got a sheet here, man, and we both know what it’s for. You’ve been busted for hustling, kid, you’d better face it. The cops aren’t making this up.”

  “Fuck that shit!” He jumped up from the stool again. He smacked one fist into an open palm and spun around, as though his anger was too great to let him stand still. I waited.

  “Don’t you see?” he finally said in a plaintive, high voice, his back still to me. “That don’t mean shit. That’s just hustlin’, man. That’s just to get a little coin, you dig? I get paid. Paid good. Them dudes like young guys. I pretend to like all that shit, but I’m laughin’ at ’em all the time. Laughin’, you dig? And then I rip ’em off, take like a watch or a ring or somethin’. ’Cause even though they’re payin’ me, ain’t nobody can really pay you enough to do that faggot shit. I wouldn’t touch none of them dudes if I couldn’t get my bread out of it. I ain’t no faggot! No way!”

  “So there was nothing between you and Nathan?” I kept my voice flat and steady. If there had been anything, I thought, then Nathan had been degraded by a little hustler who hated his clientele. Laughed at them. No, that wasn’t Nathan. He would have seen through this cheap little hooker who used the vulnerability of middle-aged gays. Ripped them off both physically and emotionally.

  “Let’s get back to the watch,” I said in a purposely businesslike tone. “Was it vouchered? Did the cops take it and give you a paper?”

  He nodded and reached into the pocket of his tight-fitting denim jacket. I looked at the paper to see if anything else had been vouchered. Vouchering means the item is likely to be used as evidence. In this case the watch would be People’s Exhibit One.