Snitch Jacket

by Christopher Goffard

  CHAPTER 16

  Detective Munoz met me at our normal spot, in an alley behind the evangelical bookstore on Harbor Boulevard, and whisked me in his chocolate ’89 Porsche Carrera to the garage at John Wayne Airport. We sat behind the dark-tinted windows listening to the planes come and go.

  ‘Not the worst little measly tip you’ll ever get,’ I said. ‘A 187 is not too shabby, huh?’

  His jaw pumped silently and rhythmically. Since he quit smoking a couple of years ago he chewed three sticks of Big Red at a time. When he spoke I inhaled the sharp cinnamon of his breath and glimpsed the wolfish glint of his immaculate choppers. Again I was reminded of all the fucking I was missing; he was that kind of guy.

  ‘Who is this fat-ass cabron, Cowboy?’ Munoz said.

  His tone of voice suggested he was less excited about the story than I thought he might be. On a certain level this came as a relief to me, since I believed I may have loved Gus Miller. At the same time I didn’t want to disappoint my man Munoz, who was a busy guy with important and interesting crimes to solve, a guy with whom I had a friendship based on mutual respect.

  ‘ We’re dealing with an unpredictable and dangerous dude,’ I said, realizing as I gave the description that Gus Miller himself would proudly be tagged with it. ‘He’s supposed to be a war hero who slaughtered half of Vietnam. Also a prolific professional assassin, hand-to-hand combat expert, torture survivor, manic-depressive, suicidal, chemically dependent berserker Rambo. So he’s supposed to be alla that, but underneath he’s all squishy and pink. Sentimental. That’s our perp profile.’

  Munoz was not impressed by this, either. He’d been at cop-work too long to get excited easily. Still, he took it down dutifully in a small lined notebook that he flipped open over the steering wheel.

  Sighing, he said, ‘I know you dig the brothers-in-blue parlance, partner, but he ain’t a “perp” till he’s done something. We’re looking at a maybe/might-be/probably-not perpetrator. Hate to deflate your sails, but how do you know he ain’t just a lard-ass liar, like every asshole in every bar that ever was?’

  Considering this for a minute, I felt a little trickle of desperate sweat roll from my hairline into an eyebrow. ‘I guess I don’t know. But he’s got medals and everything. And scars and prison tats and stuff. And he’s flashing a big wad of money he says he got for this hit.’

  ‘You overheard this remark?’

  ‘Shit, man, he wants my help. He wants me to drum up a piece of ordnance for him and tag along.’

  ‘A hit-man without a gun. Does he kill with his wit?’

  ‘He’s got two strikes on his record already. Too risky to be packing with guys like you out there. He says it’s just another excuse for the man to burn him.’

  ‘And this hit? Details?’

  ‘He won’t say much about it, on account of it’s against assassin protocol to divulge more than is absolutely necessary. Need-to-know status and all that. I think he got that stuff from a book.’

  Munoz gave an amused and disdainful little snort, saying, ‘Cabron.’

  ‘He says every assassin worth his salt operates that way.’

  ‘He won’t tell you anything?’

  ‘Only that we’re going after some gecko guy.’

  ‘Gecko guy?’

  ‘ Yeah. He let it slip and he seemed angry at himself that he did.’

  ‘What’s Mr. Gecko’s first name?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s just some dude up in Northern California who did someone dirty.’

  He blinked at me, shaking his head. He wrote it down. ‘Anything else? Like who wants this guy taken out? Like who’s paying for it? Like why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s an unusual situation,’ Munoz said, nodding slowly and opening his teeth to accommodate the tip of his pen. ‘Why did shitbird approach you?’

  ‘He considers me a friend. We drink together.’

  ‘You still drinking at that shitty little dive with the sawdust on Harbor? The “Greasy Asshole” or “Greasy Forehead” – – ’

  ‘Greasy Tuesday. It’s a landmark.’

  ‘I never heard a stupider name for a bar. But go on.’

  ‘Well, he lives in the back room with this sorry old German shepherd and does chores here and there, when he’s sober, which isn’t a lot of the time. He gets drunk and tells these stories and nobody’s really sure whether he’s full of shit, but everybody’s afraid of him. Even Junior — he’s the proprietor — even he’s afraid to say, “Hit the bricks,” and I know he’d like to. Look, am I doing the right thing, coming to you?’

  ‘Why not?’

  I shrugged, thinking: Because Gus Miller’s my friend and, however this shakes out, he’s going to be in a world of trouble.

  Then: If I consider him such, why would I have called a cop in the first place?

  Answer: Because I’m trying to save the poor bastard from himself.

  And: We’re on different sides of the game, me and Gus. Simple as that. Really sorry, man.

  ‘Some genius,’ Munoz said with a warm smile, ‘picking you for this.’

  ‘He’s supposed to get five grand for it, and promises me a cut,’ I said. ‘He made me make out a budget for him.’ I handed Munoz a soiled cardboard Anheuser-Busch coaster scrawled diagonally with my handwriting:THE HIT

  Expenses:

  Gas $50

  Food & snacks $80

  Sundries $50

  Dog treats $15

  Ordnance $150

  Benny’s cut $1,000

  = $1,345

  A little bullet of Big Red hit the dashboard as Munoz pitched forward laughing. When he stopped, he retrieved the gum with a napkin, saying, ‘Oh shit, that is good . . .’

  ‘He’s not so confident in his math skills, so I, you know, helped him out.’

  ‘Exhibit number one, your honor! The official budget. Every hit-man worth his salt insists on one, right down to the — Dios mio – canine rations . . . “ordnance” . . .’

  ‘He wants to leave by this weekend, so he told me to have him a piece by today or tomorrow. “Doesn’t need to be high style,” he says. “Don’t worry about the bells and whistles. Something blue-collar and reliable,” he says.’

  ‘What’d you tell him?’ Munoz asked, mirth glinting in his eyes.

  ‘I told him I’d score one for him. I thought about just taking the money he gave me and disappearing, but then I thought, “Someone could get hurt. He could hurt someone.” I don’t want any blood on my hands.’

  ‘That’s very admirable, my man – the act of a responsible citizen.’

  I gave Munoz the make and model of Gus’s Dodge, along with the Arizona plate, all of which I’d committed to memory. I could tell this impressed him. He wrote it down, then put the notebook in his jacket pocket along with the beer coaster. He took a PowerBar from the glove box and chewed, all business now, thinking. After a few minutes he gunned the Porsche and we purred out of the garage to join the snarl of traffic leaving the airport.

  ‘Isn’t this where I get paid and slink back to my rat-hole?’ I said.

  ‘I hate to hear you put yourself down, Benny. Some advice? Chicks find that self-deprecating, Woody Allen bullshit a major turn-off, like bad breath. You need to work on your self-image.’

  ‘I don’t have a lot to work with.’

  ‘One of these days, you and me, we’ll hit the racks. Maybe cross-train. You run?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, we’ll hit the racks. Get you fighting trim and improve your confidence a little bit. You climb?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Some weekend, we’ll hit Joshua Tree. I’ll introduce you to some climbing buddies. I bet you’re a cowboy up there.’

  ‘Your buddies – like, a bunch of cops?’

  ‘Cops and ex-cops, sure — you’ll fit right in. In a way, you know, you’re one of us. We’re all on the same side here.’

  ‘I guess working out together would be kind of fun.’

/>   ‘I just hate to see a guy like you – a guy as good as you – put himself down all the time.’

  As we merged onto the 405 I asked where we were going.

  ‘The station,’ Munoz said, ‘to work out a game plan.’

  On the way there I thought more about being Detective Al Munoz’s workout partner than anything else. Pictures kept filling my head. Me spotting him on a bench-press, leaning over him with two fingers extended under a thick-stacked bar that he strains to work off his chest. Gym-suited Benny urging him on in that rough way rack-partners do. Munoz’s inverted face grimacing mightily below me and the veins bulging in his biceps. ‘Your turn, partner,’ he says. People thinking, ‘ They’re friends.’ Afterward: showering unselfconsciously, toweling off in the steam, going for a PowerBar. Buddies. And the desert rocks: sheer cliffs and clinking carabiners, my life in his hands and his in mine. All of this going through my head, as I said, on the way to the Costa Mesa Police Department.

  ‘How’s life on the mean streets?’ I said.

  ‘Truth? I’m looking at retirement next year. Fifteen years is plenty, and they’re making it impossible to do real police work. Goddamn lawyers telling you what you can and can’t do, driving out the real cops. If you’re any kind of hard-charger, they’ll sic the IA jackals all over your carcass.’

  ‘Internal Affairs?’

  ‘Some scumbag dope-dealer complains you put his cuffs on a little tight, you get written up. I got more use-of-force complaints in my file than any cowboy out here, and you know what? Badge of honor. Because it means I’m not on my ass, avoiding trouble. But someone leaked my IA file to the Daily Pilot a while back, so they’ve held up my promotion, even though I scored first in the department on the captain’s test. So I figure, next year, I’m in Aruba. Let someone else save the city.’

  We were stopped at a red light. As it turned green, his Porsche stalled out. Cars were lining up behind us. Munoz worked the key, over and over, rage and humiliation contorting his forehead. The transmission wheezed. We weren’t going anywhere. ‘Hija de puta!’ he cried. ‘Hija de la chingada!’ Finally it started, just as the light was turning red again, and he gunned it angrily through the intersection.

  ‘Captain’s rank is a twenty-grand pay bump,’ he said. ‘And they won’t do it, even though I took a bullet.’

  We rode the rest of the way to the police station in silence.

  Soon I was sitting in a small interview room with pink pastel walls and Munoz was handing me vending-machine coffee in a plastic cup decorated with poker-card queens and jacks. It was hot and bitter. Munoz said, ‘Cool your heels,’ and disappeared, leaving me a copy of Ultimate Climber magazine. When I finished looking at the pictures (so frightening they instantly banished any rock-climbing fantasies I had) I found myself staring at the walls and wondering why they were Easter-egg pink, as in a nursery or a ward for crippled kids. I remembered reading somewhere that they didn’t paint prison walls bright red because that particular color acts on an inmate’s rage like kerosene. Not without a little twitch of pleasure at my perceptivity, I decided the pink walls were intended to swaddle the jittery nerves of whoever might be in this room, which nevertheless only ratcheted up my jitteriness because it reminded me that I had reason to be jittery if I was in this room. This is where they must bring rape victims and other people who’d been seriously fucked-up when they needed to talk to them. Psychology! On the wall in front of me was a framed oil painting of ducks flying against a pretty cloud-flecked sky. More psychology! Aren’t they soothing! They had the ducks in their corner too. The great minds of law enforcement had mobilized even the ducks and sent them into battle in the war against crime. Cops were smart that way; they had their angles and knew how to work them. The temperature in here, I noted, hovered around a friendly 70˚F. I decided that I appreciated the pink walls and the ducks and the pretty sky and the AC – I appreciated the consideration for my nerves they showed – but I was still twitchy as hell and getting more so by the minute.

  It might have been 40 or 50 minutes before the door opened. In came Munoz with Capt. Harvey Wein, Munoz’s supervisor in Crimes Against Persons, he of the prehistorically protuberant jaw and indented forehead. ‘I understand we have a potential situation,’ Wein said unsmilingly.

  ‘Benny’s gonna help us get to the bottom of it,’ said genial gum-chewing Munoz. ‘It could be pretty bitchin’.’

  ‘We’ve got some basics to clear up first, like who we’re dealing with,’ Wein said in a flat, commanding voice. He had buzz-cut gray hair and the stiff manner of an ex-Marine. ‘We ran the name through the state booking database. It’s a pretty common one. Look at these.’

  He set out 10 or 15 mug shots on the table in front of me. It looked like a random sampling of criminal faces – a bleary-eyed Mexican, an Irish guy with red eyebrows, a somber black dude, a pimpled, bewildered-looking white teenager – all caught in the unhappy flash of a squad-room camera somewhere. And under them, the names: Augustus Miller, Gus Miller Jr., Gus V. Miller, J. Gustafson Miller, and so on.

  ‘I don’t see him,’ I said. ‘Maybe he doesn’t have a California record.’

  ‘The Dodge tag linked up to a Phoenix address,’ Munoz said. ‘A few years ago it was registered to a Gustavo E. Miller at 139 East Fischbach Court. D.O.B. July first, 1946. Is this our man?’

  Now Munoz slid a piece of paper in front of me. It was a grainy, faxed photocopy of an Arizona driver’s license. It only took a glance to tell that Gus Miller of Fischbach Court (mid-fifties, hard-looking face, long jaw, hooded eyes, broken Roman nose, thick, luxuriant hair) was not the Gus Miller of the Greasy Tuesday.

  ‘That’s not him either,’ I said.

  Munoz and Wein looked at each other.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ Munoz said, ‘for the last two months this particular Gus Miller has been receiving VA disability checks at 11,520½ Harbor Boulevard, which he lists as his primary residence.’

  ‘That’s the bar,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Wein agreed. ‘Which raises some interesting questions. Like, “ What happened to the real Gus Miller, if your guy is driving his motor vehicle and cashing his checks?”’

  ‘You think he whacked him?’ I asked.

  ‘Could be,’ Munoz said.

  ‘Well, whoever this individual is, we’re not ready to bring him in just yet,’ Wein said. ‘It would be a tactical mistake at this stage of the operation. We need to know whether he seriously means to hurt someone, we need to know who and why, and if we haul him in now, the whole thing is as good as shot.’

  ‘We’re short on leverage,’ Munoz said.

  ‘ Yes,’ Wein agreed, thoughtfully stroking that monster mandible. ‘If this really is a righteous contract hit – and it does happen – we’ve got nothing so far to compel him to divulge the identity of the person, or persons, putting him up to it. Which means, even if we bring him in, the intended target is still waiting out there with a bull’s-eye on him, whoever he is – this Mr. Gecko. Whoever wants this person dead will simply turn to someone else.’

  ‘So what’s the strategy?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re the strategy, Cowboy,’ Munoz said.

  ‘Excuse me? Beg pardon? Come again?’

  My forehead was suddenly moist, despite the companionable 70˚F of the thermometer.

  ‘We’re gonna have to wire you up,’ Munoz said.

  ‘I have to say my comfort level with that is not real high.’

  ‘I’ve been telling Captain Wein here, “Benny’s a friend of mine, not like these other low-lifes we have to deal with. He knows right from wrong – – ”’

  ‘I’m just your eyes and ears out there,’ I said. ‘I’m good for a phone call. I make it, I get paid, I’m in, I’m out, I don’t linger, I don’t walk around with electronic bugs in my asshole. I never wore one of those things.’

  ‘Don’t make a fool of me in front of my boss,’ Munoz said. ‘I told him, “Benny here will play ball. Benny’s
a cowboy. We have an understanding. You watch.”’

  ‘Maybe you dudes remember Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, with John Travolta?’ I said. ‘Or maybe Big Pussy from The Sopranos. I seem to remember fatal things happening to people who wear wires.’

  ‘ Well, of course those Hollywood hacks gotta dramatize it,’ Munoz said, as if explaining to a child that the pretty square pegs go in the pretty square slots. ‘In my fifteen years on the force I’ve never seen it happen, and Captain Wein’s got nineteen – – ’

  ‘It never happens,’ Wein said.

  ‘That’s thirty-four years in law enforcement between us, and it hasn’t happened,’ Munoz said. ‘And that’s the voice of experience. We use wires all the time.’

  ‘If he finds out I’m snitching – – ’

  ‘No!’ Munoz cried, slapping his palm on the table. ‘Don’t ever use the s-word in my presence again. You understand? You’re not an s-dash-dash-dash-dash-dash, okay? That’s their word. A despicable word. The same way they try to hurt us by calling us pigs. They’re worthless human germs and need to demean their betters. But we don’t internalize their hatred. We don’t let them define for us who we are. We’re not pigs, we’re law-enforcement officers. And you are a confidential police informant. We’re equal partners here. Alright?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Now look,’ Munoz said. ‘We’re gonna PowerPoint you on what we need.’

  ‘Point One,’ Wein said, seemingly impatient with anything but business, stabbing a long index finger into his opposite palm, ‘we need his prints, and we need them in such a way that it doesn’t alert him to our interest in him. We’ll run them through AFIS – that’s a national database – and look for hits. Get a sense of whether this is a bona fide killer or just another schmuck running his jaws . . .’

  Wein’s mouth continued to move, but suddenly his words were coming from a long way away; on the pink wall behind the cops, directly between their forward-thrust heads, I saw the carefree ducks, the police ducks, angling as a family into their serene, cloud-flecked sky.

  ‘. . . anything he lays mitts on . . . keys, wallet, glass of beer . . .’