Snitch Jacket

by Christopher Goffard

  ‘You were fuckin’ Kevin Spacey in there, dude,’ Munoz said, sliding open the door. ‘Give the man an Oscar.’ With latex-gloved fingers he took the longneck from me and deposited it in a supersize Ziploc bag. ‘Now it’s our move. We’ll find you tomorrow.’

  I watched the piece of glass disappear in the van. Somewhere on it lay my best friend’s name.

  CHAPTER 19

  The prints proved coy on that particular point, however. They told a more complicated story, as I learned from Munoz Saturday afternoon. Run through the national law-enforcement print bank, they yielded four other names linked to Gus Miller. They described a 30-year span of shifting identities, incarceration, and wretched felonious bungling. Munoz read me the police reports and nearly choked laughing. His laughter was infectious. I laughed along. But I felt something else: sadness and pity and disbelief.

  January 1967: During the daring daylight burglary of a nursing home in Clearwater, Florida, flimsy plywood panels send an intruder plunging from a ceiling crawlspace into the cafeteria, where the lunchtime serving is under way. Showering down with him: all the watches, wallets, bracelets, and valuable family heirlooms he swept into his bag during a raid of the premises. As the police report phrases it, ‘The perpetrator sustained two fractured fibulas in the fall and was unable to defend himself against irate residents, who set upon him with canes and cutlery. Perpetrator suffered numerous lacerations to the scalp, abdominal area, and extremities.’ When he regains consciousness, he gives arresting officers the name Evel Sanders. His real name is determined to be Gerry Finkel.

  December 1976: A young waitress in Denver, Colorado returns home to find, sprawled on the floor of her rear pantry, the helplessly thrashing head and shoulders of a fat man in a skimask. The intruder’s midsection remains pinned in what the police report called ‘the canine ingress,’ through which he tried to gain illegal entry. The waitress beats the masked head with a tennis racket until police arrive. On the way to the hospital he gives the alias Quentin W. Cash.

  October 1984: An audacious car thief attempts to steal a sports car belonging to Rick Springfield while the rock star dines in a New Jersey restaurant. The intoxicated thief cannot operate the stick shift and is stopped by a mob of 20 or 30 teen and preteen girls. They haul the thief bodily from behind the wheel, tear his clothing to ribbons, and rake his skin with their nails. As he’s being sutured, police check his driver’s license, which is stolen, belonging to the man whose name he has been living under, Dale Delacroix.

  Evel Sanders, Quentin W. Cash, Dale Delacroix, Gus Miller . . . Gerry Finkel.

  ‘Can’t be the same guy,’ I said, surprised at the defensiveness in my voice. ‘I mean, it can’t be the one I know.’

  But it was, and to clinch the point, here were the mug shots that accompanied those arrests, which Munoz laid out side-by-side: the arc of my barmate’s bruised and bleeding life. The evolution of his face. Variations on a theme: studies in American Toughguy manqué.

  Photo one: a longhaired hippie in his mid-twenties who, despite the cuts and shiners from the recent nursing home pummeling, managed to convey an aura of toughguy arrogance and disdain – squint, sneer, uptilted chin and all – a pose clearly perfected by years of practice in the mirror, in anticipation of important Kodak moments like these.

  Photo two: thicker face, sideburns, ample but disheveled Seventies hair, and, even with one swollen-shut eye and a forehead crossed by racket marks, a face alight with defiant bluster and superiority. Already a veteran con’s practiced glare.

  Photo three: the glint of the gleefully insane. A fat-cheeked, brown-bearded, middle-aged crook with terrifying psychopathic eyes. Having survived the siege by all those vicious teenage claws, he seemed to have crossed some kind of psychological threshold, at one now with the malignant absurdity of the universe. Here he looked like the Gus Miller I knew: the expression was one he’d leveled at me over a hundred beers.

  ‘The cabron should’ve watched his weight, he might’ve been a master criminal,’ Munoz said. ‘My favorite part is box seven of the’67 arrest report, where they list his official occupation. “Assistant gym teacher, Clearwater Catholic School for Girls.” Of course, he was really in Southeast Asia . . .’

  ‘Maybe he got his dates mixed up,’ I said. ‘I mean, there’s still a chance he was there.’

  ‘You can’t be in Vietnam if you’re in lockup through the war. You ain’t picked up by now that he’s just blubber and blabber?’

  ‘He wouldn’t be the world’s first bullshit artist.’

  ‘He’s not your friend, Benny. He’s a conman, a crook trying to play you – a very shitty, ham-fisted crook, but still a crook. I’m your friend. Law enforcement is your friend. Remember that.’

  ‘Does that make the hit bullshit too? Does that mean I can go home and forget about this?’

  ‘I would have said yes to bullshit – until this morning. Just because everything a man says Monday through Saturday is a lie doesn’t mean he ain’t telling the truth, or at least part of the truth, on Sunday. Cop consensus now is, blubberguts actually means to whack someone.’

  ‘How’d you come to that?’

  ‘ We’re tenacious detectives. You’d expect us to do some digging, wouldn’t you? Last night we stealth-raided that junkheap Dodge of his and found something extremely pertinent.’

  With a flourish Munoz produced a piece of paper and slid it before me. It was a photocopied page from a Thomas Bros.’ road guide. The area of concentration was Santa Cruz. A section of a road called Peach Terrace was circled three times.

  ‘It was open to this page,’ Munoz said. ‘Naturally we replaced the map book exactly where we found it. We know exactly where he’s going now.’

  ‘There might be a hundred houses on that block,’ I said. ‘How do you know which one the target’s in?’

  Flashing a wolfish smile, as if he’d been waiting for that question, Munoz continued: ‘How many geckos live on that block, do you think? One! Professor Manfred A. Geikowitz, world-famous but controversial chairman of the English department at UC Santa Cruz. Funny name, but thank God for that. Imagine our headache if it’d been Smith. Your next question will be, “Does anyone actually want a tweed-sucking academic dead?” And I say to you, “Yes, yes, yes.”’

  ‘A professor? How are you sure about this?’

  ‘Instinct, Benny. Call it intuition, call it logic – call it Detective Al Munoz’s cop brains – but for all we don’t know at this point, we can say for a certainty that this professor’s the one with the bull’s-eye on his back.’

  ‘Why?’

  A strange story followed. As it turned out, they had teleconferenced with Professor Geikowitz just a couple of hours ago. To the detectives’ question, “ Who may want you dead?” there came a long silence from the academic’s end. Then they heard him weeping. ‘I knew it would come to this,’ croaked the professor, confessing that a lesser academic had for years leveled allegations of plagiarism against him.

  The work in question involved certain obscure ideas having to do in some way with Karl Marx and William Faulkner. Professor Geikowitz had vaulted to glory on the strength of an essay entitled ‘The Snopes Cow and the Dialectical Implications of Bovine Rape,’ which I’m not really qualified to talk about, but which sounded like hardcore, breakthrough shit. The thesis stemmed from a series of obscene fingernail doodlings discovered on the walls of Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi animal barn, scratched into the wood (it was assumed) during one of the Southern writer’s legendary drinking bouts. They were now considered the Rosetta Stone to Faulkner’s difficult fiction.

  The man who claimed to have made this breakthrough, it seemed, was a humble lecturer at tiny Huntington Beach Community College named Norby D. Valentine. This Valentine, a sometime newspaperman, was murderously bitter over what he claimed was Professor Geikowitz’s theft of his research. For more than a year he’d been sending Geikowitz anonymous but very threatening limericks. It was really only a matter of
time before Valentine worked up the courage to try to murder him. Now Professor Geikowitz was very scared. He insisted he had done nothing wrong. Perhaps (he allowed) he had borrowed certain amorphous notions from Valentine’s literary cowfucking scholarship, ‘But really, Detectives, this Valentine, who has actually worked as a journalist, lacked the theoretical chops to extend the proletarian bovine thesis to any kind of rigorous conclusion. Like so many of this world’s also-rans and mediocrities, the ex-journalist is full of envy toward its successes, and would like to see me in my grave.’

  (Geikowitz, it turned out, still bore a slight limp from a knife attack as a graduate student at Columbia University years earlier. The attack was prompted by his use of the word ‘niggardly’ at a Harlem bar, where he was trying to impress an undergrad with his vocabulary.)

  ‘Are you gonna arrest Valentine and Gus, or – or whatever his name is?’ I asked Munoz.

  ‘Too soon,’ Munoz said. ‘We don’t got enough.’

  ‘You just said you’re sure about – – ’

  ‘We’re sure, but if we bring this case to the DA right now, he’s gonna light a cigarette, kick up his feet and say, “Get outta my office, it’s the weakest case I’ve ever seen.” We need our hit-man to set foot in Professor Geikowitz’s driveway with a gun. Or we need him to speak the professor’s full name, to make the plan to kill him explicit. That would be enough to nail him on attempted murder for hire.’

  ‘I couldn’t make him talk,’ I said. ‘I think maybe he doesn’t know all the details himself yet. Or he knew them, but lost them already.’

  ‘Maybe, but we figure he’ll have to know them by the time you guys leave to do this job.’

  ‘That’s supposed to be tomorrow morning.’

  ‘When he leaves, you leave with him.’

  ‘Huh?’

  Grinning as he talked, with his bright wad of Big Red pinned between his teeth, Munoz said, ‘Chill in that seat and listen. We got together a plan. It’s a bitch of a plan, and you’re maybe gonna be a little reluctant at first, but it’s as close to foolproof as they come. You can bounce a quarter off this plan, it’s so tight and so right. And I say this not without a touch of pride in authorship, my man. We’ve done all the hard work. All we need you to do is tag along with a wire.’

  Unease twitching through me, invading my bowels, I found myself suddenly sitting there, fighting to keep from shitting myself. Sick in the presentiment that I was being guided through a glossy, four-color brochure for a room at the leper ward. Jesus Christ, it looked like the Hilton in the picture.

  ‘We’ll be watching every step,’ said confident Munoz. ‘We’ll be following you with unmarked units, plus a helicopter and a fixed-wing. And we’ll have men planted all over Peach Terrace with Professor Geikowitz. Like I said – bulletproof.’

  ‘You forget that I’m supposed to get him a gun.’

  ‘Taken care of.’

  ‘What?’

  He withdrew a heavy object from his waistband and placed it in front of me. It was a black Smith & Wesson .38, old, battered. He pressed the handle into my hand.

  ‘It looks real.’

  ‘It is real. Only the firing pin’s been shaved down, and the rounds are blanks. This way no one gets hurt. Safe as a squirt gun.’

  ‘What if he wants to test it?’

  ‘Tell him it’s an old gun, you got it off the street, best you could do. You musta got ripped off. Be angry.’

  ‘What if something goes wrong?’

  ‘We won’t allow anything to go wrong.’

  ‘What if it does?’

  ‘ You didn’t become the best-respected CI in Orange County because you’re not willing to take a few little risks on behalf of what’s right.’ He took the gun back and put it in his belt. ‘You’ll get it just before you go.’

  I didn’t say anything for a minute or two. Munoz leaned back with his arms folded across his chest, frowning.

  Ape-jawed Wein walked in. He leaned forward with his elbows on the table and that vicious slash between his eyes trembling angrily about a foot from my face.

  ‘If you back me up against a wall, I can make your life uncomfortable in the worst way,’ Wein said. ‘I’m capable of fucking you up.’

  ‘I’m trying to take care of you here,’ Munoz told me. ‘You’re not allowing me to take care of you.’

  ‘What does he mean about fucking me up?’

  ‘In the last two years,’ Wein said, ‘you’ve been issued exactly one thousand, five hundred and sixty-five dollars and twenty-three cents’ worth of citations for unlawful operation of a bicycle on the sidewalks of local municipalities. Not to mention racking up a half-dozen Failure to Appear charges for the court dates you’ve missed. All of which we have generously been willing to ignore.’

  ‘He’s saying we might not be able to accommodate you any longer,’ Munoz said in a tone of regret.

  ‘You’re staring down the barrel of a prison sentence here, and that’s a place an individual like yourself doesn’t want to be,’ Wein said. ‘I’ve seen it happen, word gets out about the kind of work an individual like you does. And then there’s no way we can protect you.’

  Munoz reached out to put one of his fine-boned piano player’s hands on mine, to stop mine from shaking. ‘I’m taking Benny for a ride,’ he said. ‘He’s jumpy.’

  Munoz drove me to a hill overlooking the Costa Mesa municipal dump, a place he frequently came, he said, to clear his head, to meditate on life and nature and the state of man. ‘I won’t let him fuck with you,’ he reassured me. ‘But we need you to play ball.’ He put his arm around me and nodded toward the mountains of refuse stretching before us under a hundred little storms of birds.

  ‘What do you see down there?’

  ‘The world’s shit.’

  ‘I see something beautiful,’ Munoz said. ‘I see the life cycle. All the little creatures that nobody ordinarily pays attention to – the maggots and the fungi and the other decomposers – are busy breaking all that shit down out there, putting nutrients back into the ground so the great cycle of life can continue. Because without them – I saw it on the Nature channel – the world would choke on shit and pile high with carcasses.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The real heroes of the criminal justice system aren’t guys like me, all flash and profile. Who are the heroes? It’s the invisible ones, the unsung, brave little creatures who soldier away in anonymity — the Benjamin Bunts of the world.’

  ‘I feel like I’m being lubed up for an ass-fucking, man.’

  ‘Listen, Benny – I admire the hell out of you, okay? You may not think much of yourself, but I think a lot of you. And I’m trying to help you out of a pinch, here.’

  I remembered I had leverage. I had a card to play. I blurted, ‘Was it Wein who shot you that time behind the Dress for Less? I mean, so you could get that Glock guy?’

  The question made him blink; a tremor of uncertainty flashed across his face. The next instant he was all smiles, all brotherliness. ‘Why would a cop shoot another cop, compadre? What kind of pendejo question is that? Let’s get back to the station.’

  What did I expect to gain, with the remark? Before now I had never conceived of mentioning it, because to do so would tell Munoz I distrusted him, would put him on notice that I constituted a threat. I feared his reaction, the sudden obliteration of our friendship, his fearsome transformation into an enemy. What’s more, I didn’t want to distrust him.

  His breezy response left me even more off-balance, more uncertain. As we pulled away from the dump in his dark-windowed Porsche, he told me paternally that for a long time he’d been worried for me, considering the crowd I ran with. I might forget I was on the side of the good guys. ‘It’s dangerous for your soul. All kinds of temptations to do bad,’ he said. ‘Bad’s a habit, Benny, like booze or coke or anything else. It gets easier and easier.’

  He promised that when this was all over he would swing me a guest pass at the cop gym and
put me on a six-month workout program. He would be my physical-fitness mentor. He was already working on the details of my high-protein diet. When he finished with me, I wouldn’t be a mole man anymore.

  ‘What you need is some ab work, some bench time, bicepcurls, upright rows,’ Munoz said. ‘We’ll build you a nice striation foundation. On alternate days: some military presses, quads, lats, and glutes. I’ve got an extra juicer and a Foreman’s Grill I’ll give you. Maybe throw together some pimp-ass threads for you. You’re gonna have a whole new glow. You’ll be knee-deep in bitches: a whole new man.’

  ‘I’ll still just be a snitch.’

  Munoz frowned. He removed a piece of paper pinned under the sun-visor and passed it to me. It was a brochure for the Costa Mesa Police Academy. Shiny young-faced recruits – a Mexican chick, an Asian chick, a black guy, a white guy – stood shoulder-to-shoulder in uniform, smiling proudly. ‘JOIN OUR FAMILY,’ it said.

  ‘ We’ve got twelve openings and a shortage of talent,’ Munoz said. ‘Lots of guys taking early retirement, so we’re thin. And we’re aggressively recruiting minority candidates. You’ve got some American Indian blood, don’t you?’

  ‘Not that I know about.’

  ‘I hear that you do. And I’m gonna say so to our recruiter, Captain Hines. Good friend of mine, Dick Hines. That application of yours that’s been sitting on his desk for God knows how long shoots to the top of the stack.’

  ‘You mean I could get on that way?’

  ‘I could swing it for you, bro. All you need’s a piece of paper shows you got somebody in your line with a few drops of Comanche or Choctaw or whatever. Not hard to get. I could hook you up.’

  ‘But I wouldn’t, you know, what about getting in on my own merit?’

  ‘ You think the mayor’s nephew, who wrapped his cruiser around a tree last week, you think he got in on his merit? Or half these other jokers? The Indian blood gets you in the door. Hines makes his minority quota, he’s a happy Hines. He’s not gonna fuck that up by asking a lot of questions.’