The Innocents

by David Putnam

  Kohl released my arm as I jerked it away.

  I walked over to the car. Dad sat back from the window with tears of frustration wetting his face. I don’t ever remember seeing him cry. He turned his face away, ashamed. It ripped my heart out, and I wanted someplace to vent my anger. If Good had still stood close enough to me, I’d have ripped his head right off his shoulders and kicked it down the street.

  I opened the car door. Dad turned his head even more and wouldn’t look at me.

  “It’s okay, Dad. I’m here now. Everything’s going to be okay. Just tell me what happened.”

  He started to sputter. All his words cluttered together, caught in his throat, and came out in a jumbled rush.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  “DAD, IT’S OKAY, I know you didn’t do it. Tell me what happened. What did they say you did?”

  He composed himself and turned to look me in the eye. Some of his pride returned and he grew stronger by the second. “It’s that nice Mrs. Whitaker, over in East Compton. She lives in that old estate off of Atlantic Drive, the one with the big long lot in the front and the long tree-lined driveway. Lots of pink crepe myrtles, absolutely beautiful when they bloom. I deliver mail to her every day. She’s on my route.”

  With all the stress, he threw in a lot of extraneous information. I didn’t stop him. I let him tell it in his own way.

  He said, “We talk now and again. She invites me in on hot days for iced tea.” He shook his head. “She called the sheriffs on me, Son. She told ’em I tried to rape her. You know better than that, Bruno. I don’t know what got into that woman. I never so much as touched her. I thought we really got along just fine.”

  The image of the midnight-blue Eldorado lady horned into my thoughts. I wanted to ask him about her. Was she the nice Mrs. Whitaker? Had to be. Right then wasn’t the time. But he’d just said he’d never touched her when I’d seen him hugging and kissing her on our front stoop.

  I patted his shoulder. “I know. It’s all right. I’ll take care of everything. You just sit tight, okay?” I’d calmed down a little listening to him talk and couldn’t help but sense the fear that had edged into his voice. It made a lump rise in my throat. No way would he go to jail. Not if I could help it.

  I eased the door closed and turned to Kohl, who waited close by—close enough to stop me if I tried to let Dad out of the car.

  “You have to believe me,” I said to Kohl. “He’d never do anything like this. I don’t understand why—”

  Wicks’ words echoed in the back in my brain. “Blue and Thibodeaux are going to try and dirty you up. They need to more than ever now.”

  What if they thought I couldn’t be dirtied? Not in the more obvious ways, like accepting the skim? Would they be low enough to set a frame on my father in order to put me in a box?

  What a dumbass question; of course they would. They were contract killers without a conscience, without moral compasses. Rogue cops who killed people for profit.

  Kohl read my expression. “What, Bruno? What did you just think of?”

  “What? Oh, nothing.” As quick as the thought came, so did the admonishment that I could tell no one of my undercover status. I understood the reason why now. We’d need the wiretap to help Dad. But if it ever came down to the job or keeping my dad out of prison, I’d shout it to the world. I said, “What do you have? What kind of case?”

  “You know that would be improper for me to tell you.”

  “It’s me, Sarge. This is me, Bruno Johnson. You know me. I won’t hang you out. You have my word.”

  He hesitated and reached into his suit coat.

  I sucked in a breath. He actually had physical evidence? Of course they would. No way would Kohl arrest Dad without it.

  He pulled out some Polaroid photos and again hesitated. I held my hand out and didn’t try to take them until he made up his mind.

  He handed them over.

  The photos stunned me. They depicted a close-up of an older woman’s naked breast, the whole breast, white skin with freckles, along with a few age marks. Ugly purple bruises in the form of fingers from a large hand outlined the breast. Someone had viciously grabbed her and squeezed, squeezed hard enough to leave bruising. How that must’ve hurt. How the threat of more must’ve menaced and intimidated. No woman should ever have to go through something like that for any reason.

  But there was a worse part. Worse for Dad, anyway.

  The woman was white.

  The Stops hot-link sandwich and chili fries turned in my stomach. I swallowed hard to keep them down.

  Kohl lowered his voice. “We have an independent witness that saw your dad at the victim’s house today. The wit puts him on the scene at the time of the incident.”

  “He was delivering the mail. So, of course, he’s going to be there.”

  “Bruno, the wit says he went into the house. Was in there for a few minutes, maybe as long as twenty.”

  I handed him back the photos. “He didn’t do this.”

  “I know he’s your dad and all—”

  “Trust me when I say he didn’t do this. I can’t tell you right now how I know, but I promise you, I’ll get it all straightened out. Can I talk to him one more time, please?”

  “If you know something about this mess, you better tell me.”

  “I can’t, not right now.”

  “You can’t get anywhere near this thing, Bruno. I mean it. Let me investigate it. I’ll get to the bottom of it, I promise you. But if you stick your nose in it, and I find out, I’ll arrest you for obstruction. You understand?”

  I nodded. “Now, can I talk to him, please?”

  “Okay, make it quick.”

  “Thanks. I owe you.”

  I went back to the car and opened the door. Dad looked up with eager eyes, his expectations far too high. And it hurt to have to disappoint him.

  “Listen,” I said, “they’re going to take you to the station and book you in.”

  “Really, Son? You can’t do something? Can’t you please do something? I didn’t do this.”

  An hour ago, he’d have been too proud to beg me like that, but handcuffed, sitting in the back of a cop car, looking at an ugly crime like attempted rape would scare the strongest of men. And Dad was the strongest man I knew.

  He’d only ever been to jail once, when Mom died, and he’d told me long ago, in a moment of weakness, that he’d never go back. Never.

  “I know you didn’t. I know who did and I promise you, I will get this all straightened out.”

  “You know who did this? How do you know? Wait, wait, Bruno.”

  He rarely called me by my name. He always called me son.

  “Don’t you go after whoever did this. You hear me? Please, let the law handle it.”

  He saw the rage building inside me. He saw the consequences it would bring, the danger in it.

  “I am the law, Dad.”

  “Bruno, you listen to me. Bruno, promise me that you—”

  “Don’t say a word to anyone. You understand?”

  “Bruno—”

  “Do not give any kind of statement. I’ll follow you in to bail you out. You won’t be in there long.”

  “What? Wait. I have to bail out? How much?”

  “I don’t know, maybe twelve or fifteen.”

  “Fifteen hundred? Oh, we can scrape that much together. I got that much in my savings. Bruno, I don’t want you—”

  “You sit tight. You won’t be in there long, I promise.” I didn’t want to correct him, tell him not hundreds in bail, but thousands. It’d only serve to scare him more. I reached in and squeezed his shoulder. “You hang in there, Dad.”

  “Bruno?”

  I closed the door.

  I tried to control my rage at Thibodeaux and Blue. They’d made it personal and gone after my family. If I wanted to get them, I needed to be smart like they were and not fly off the handle. To meet them head to head with gun or knuckles would get me nowhere. I turned back to Kohl. “What’s t
he bail?”

  He shrugged. “Not good.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Bruno, I can’t treat him any different than anyone else. You know that. This has to go down by the book.”

  “What’s the bail, damn you?”

  “Fifty K.”

  “Fifty thousand? No way. Why? That’s not fair.”

  “The attempted rape, the sexual battery, and the burglary.”

  “Burglary?” I said the word, but he didn’t have to explain. The elements of burglary are: the unlawful entry with the intent to commit petty theft, grand theft, or any other felony. Attempted rape accounts for the any other felony part and fulfilled the last element in burglary. Though the entry with the intent might be a hard pull.

  “Yeah, like I said, I can’t show any favoritism. As it is, the press is going to eat this up with a spoon.”

  “Where am I going to get fifty thousand dollars?” That’s fifty thousand in collateral. Ten percent of that goes to the bondsman, gone forever. Five thousand of that fifty is going to be a total loss.

  Wicks said that Blue and Thibodeaux would try and offer me some of the skim. Wicks didn’t say they would give me a desperate reason to accept it. The carrot and the stick. Those assholes.

  “I’m sorry, Bruno. I gotta go and get him into the station. The clock’s ticking on the arrest.” He stuck his hand out to shake. For the briefest of moments, my anger at the system, the one that was now trying to eat my father alive, transferred to Kohl, who was only trying to do his job. I gritted my teeth and shook his hand. “Thank you. I’m sorry for being such an ass.”

  “I understand. I’m sorry for having to be the one to do this.”

  “I know you are.”

  He went around, got in the black-and-white, and drove off down the street with my father handcuffed, his face in the back window watching me.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  I WENT INTO the house and phoned Robby Wicks. Barbara answered, said she hadn’t seen her husband since the day before.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”

  I didn’t know how much she knew, and didn’t need the added problem of telling her something she wasn’t supposed to know.

  She didn’t seem concerned that her husband hadn’t come home overnight. If you hunted men, I guess it sometimes went that way. I hung up and tried to put aside the emotion of the situation and think clearly. The adrenaline bled off and my hands shook. I paged Wicks.

  After running through every option and coming up blank, I didn’t have any choice. I’d have to track down The Bing and make peace with him, do whatever it took, up to and including getting down on my knees and groveling.

  I checked the phone book and found him in the yellow pages. I really should’ve remembered the number. The Bing’s ugly face smiled at me from every bus bench in the ghetto and even a few of the billboards as well. Not many crooks could forget his stupid slogan: Bing’s Bail Bonds, We’ll get you out if it takes twenty years. He’d stolen the slogan from another bondsman he’d run out of the business with his cutthroat tactics.

  I dialed and got his answering service. I left a message that I wanted to see him right away and said my name again at the end just in case he missed it. I didn’t let on as to why.

  Then I paged Wicks again and waited.

  And waited.

  How come he didn’t call right back? I’d only left him in the parking lot of Stops thirty minutes from the time I paged him the first time.

  I paged him again. Waited.

  And again.

  He said to call him if I needed anything. Well, I needed something right damn now. He’d been the cause of all of this mess and he was going to help me get my dad out of jail or we were going to have a big problem. I paced the living room like an animal in a cage, wringing my hands.

  Mrs. Espinoza sat in the rocker, rocking Olivia. She watched my movements going back and forth across the living room floor, the same as if she were watching a tennis match.

  I tried to force out the image of Dad sitting in that booking cage with other criminals, real criminals who might have a grudge against me for past arrests, for the nightstick curbside justice I had occasionally meted out. I forgot to tell Dad to keep quiet about his name and that he had a deputy for a son. Dad possessed street smarts like no one else I knew. He wouldn’t do a stupid thing like that, right?

  The phone rang. I grabbed it up and said, “It’s about time you called me back.”

  The caller said nothing.

  “Hello?”

  “Take it easy, big man. I only just got the message a few minutes ago.”

  The Bing.

  J. D. Bingham. We called him The Ham in elementary school. He’d never shed his chubby baby fat and carried it over into adulthood. Nowadays he used his surety bond company to let out every criminal I threw in jail. He worked as the hinge on the forever-revolving door of the justice system. He represented the legal side of the bad and didn’t mind walking that razor edge, half in the real world, half in the underworld. He made money, lots of money, off the backs of the victims who lived in fear once he wrote the bond to let the violent offenders back out.

  “I need a meet.”

  He gave a raspy cackle. “That right? What happened to the last time when you called me, ah . . . what was it? A slimeball. A piece of lowlife gutter trash. A—”

  I cut him off. “Nothing’s changed. That last time when I called you those things, you’d just written a bond on Maurice Tubbs. You knew all about Maurice, how violent he was, how he preyed on people. You got him out before I’d even turned in my paperwork. Tubbs assaulted his dad and threatened to kill him. And you let him out, remember? As soon as he got out, he went right back to his parents’ house. He took a piece of garden hose with a steel pressure nozzle on the end and beat his eighty-year-old parents near to death. All so you could make that ten percent on the bail. Like I said, nothing’s changed.”

  He stopped laughing. “Bruno, business is business. I told you that, but you just don’t seem to get it. If I didn’t go the bail, someone else would’ve. You do what you do, and I do what I do. That’s just the name of this dance we do. That’s life in the ghetto.”

  “You can’t see the difference? You’re a mercenary that preys off—”

  “And you’re any better than me? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes, I’d like to think so.”

  The phone beeped to let me know of a call waiting.

  “You’re no different than me, big man. You clubbed your brother Noble over the head with your gun and arrested him for murder. Now he’s sittin’ in the can waiting trial and you’re the star witness. So don’t talk your shit to me. I’ll write your bond for your dad and I won’t charge you a dime for it. Your dad was always good to me when we were kids. He always fed all of us kids no matter the time of day. He always had a hot meal for us who didn’t have it at home.”

  I couldn’t talk, couldn’t reply. I’d berated this man and thought ill of him. What was the matter with me?

  “That it?” The Bing asked. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  I forced the words out. “You know about my dad getting arrested?”

  “That’s right, I know everything that happens in this hood. Everything.”

  “Why are you doing this? Why are you going his bail?”

  “I told you.”

  I said nothing.

  He paused, took a breath. “Okay, okay, listen. You’re going to find out anyway, and Lord knows I don’t wanna be on your bad side. I don’t want you to club me over the head and drag me off to the can. A guy named Wicks called. He said he’d personally go the bond. He’s putting up his house. He’s on his way here now with the five K in cash. I don’t know how you have a friend like that. I hope you don’t talk to him like you talk to me. Good-bye, Bruno, The ‘Bad Boy’ Johnson. Don’t call me again.”

  I hung up the phone, stunned.

  Wicks did that?

/>   CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  I WALKED TO the door, needing something, anything, to do and looked out the side window to the empty curb, wishing Dad still sat out there in the cop car and at the same time hoping that an obvious solution to the problem would just pop in my head.

  The pager went off. I checked the readout. Wicks.

  I went to the phone to call, ready to lavish him with many thanks, a little ashamed that I’d ever doubted him. Before I could dial, the phone rang. I picked it up and said, “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’ve done and—”

  “Hold on there, cowboy. Don’t know who you think this is, but I know you’re not gonna be happy about this. I’m calling you back in.”

  “What? Who is this?”

  The strong and confident voice locked in. Blue.

  “We’ve got a job going down. I need all hands on deck.”

  I immediately shifted from grateful acknowledgment toward Wicks to pure hate for Blue. I really had to fight to keep that hate from permeating my tone. If I didn’t play the game and play it well against these people, I’d lose. And they’d already doubled down on the stakes, pulling in Dad and now Olivia by default.

  No way did I want to go in and face Blue and Thibodeaux. I didn’t think I could keep from ripping their heads off.

  And more important, I needed to get Dad out of jail, pick him up at the station, and drive him home. I needed to reassure him that I had everything under control.

  When I really didn’t.

  Right now, Blue controlled everything. I needed to change that balance, and fast. “You sure you need me?”

  “Is your daughter still giving you a problem?”

  I gritted my teeth, closed my eyes, and put my head against the wall. He knew exactly what kind of problem I had and now he wanted to play word games. “No, I got that all straightened out, thanks.”

  “Good. See you in twenty.”

  He didn’t wait for an acknowledgment and hung up.

  The phone rang, my hand still on it.

  I turned around and looked at Mrs. Espinoza sitting in the rocker, rocking Olivia. She smiled, but not the huge one she usually gave me, one more like wilted lettuce.