“You only like Tory papers, then,” Bristow observed.
Williams was irritable. “What does that matter?” he demanded.
“Well, if this does turn out to be a racially motivated crime ...”
“It would be more likely to have been committed by someone who reads a Tory paper? Try that one in court. I can’t wait until the columnists—even the ones on the Guardian—get hold of that idea.”
They took a few minutes to thrash that one out, but it blew over. I went on with my story. I was on my way to see if the newsstand around the corner from Planet Hollywood was open (and I was, too; it was as good an excuse as any to go barreling into somebody, and I did want the paper—strictly true) when I collided with the man who was shot.
“Joseph Aliou.”
“Right. Joseph Aliou. I bumped into him quite hard. We both happened to have envelopes on us—”
Bristow’s face lit up as if he’d accomplished something.
“So now you admit you had the envelope with the five grand with you?”
I suppressed a grin. London cops were a lot like their New York brothers in a number of ways, but in this way, they were identical. To them, there is no such thing as an innocent fact. If you tell a cop the sky is blue, you have just “admitted” that, and will be held responsible for the knowledge. They never notice, it’s not even worth calling to their attention, just a reflection of the world in which they live. I wouldn’t have been surprised if DI Bristow went home and helped his daughter with her homework saying, “Now look, you already admit that six times four is twenty-four ...”
So I admitted that I admitted it.
“Sure,” I admitted. “I’ve never denied it. As you say, it has my fingerprints on it.”
“Perhaps you want to tell me why you had the five thousand pounds in post office money orders, payable to the bearer?”
“You can’t get any actual money bigger than a fifty-pound note,” I told him, strictly true. “It makes a terrible bulge in large quantities.” Also strictly true.
“Yes, but why were you carrying that much money in an envelope, in any form?”
“There is no law against it,” Williams said. “Is there, DI Bristow?”
Grudgingly, Bristow admitted there was not.
“Eccentricity,” I said, “sheer eccentricity.” This was also strictly true. It was merely Lady Arking’s eccentricity I was talking about.
Bristow was less than ecstatic with that explanation. He smelled a rat and jumped on it like a terrier and worried it for a few minutes, but eventually let it go.
I went on with my story; how I took a couple of steps by, then heard the shots, and chased the guy in the mixed sports regalia until I was collared by the long blue arm of PC Staines.
“That was a little foolhardy, wasn’t it?” Bristow demanded.
“What was? Oh, chasing an armed man? Well, yeah. But I wasn’t too worried, because before he actually started running he zipped up the pocket of his jacket. I figured even if he stopped and tried to get it out I’d have a chance to jump him.”
Bristow raised his eyebrows clear up to his bald pate. The corners of his mouth came down, and he nodded, mock-impressed. “Oh, you noticed that, did you?”
“Yeah,” I said, fighting a patience mutiny. “Someone had just been shot, and I was paying attention.”
“Mr. Cobb,” said Williams portentously, “has law enforcement experience.”
This time, Bristow’s surprise was real. “You do?”
“Yeah,” I said again. “Years ago. U.S. Army. Military Police. Bangkok. Drugs, rape, prostitution, fights, gambling. The kind of trouble soldiers get into.”
“I suppose your army records are available?” Bristow asked.
“I never heard of a bureaucracy ever throwing anything out.”
Williams cleared his throat. “Ah, Mr. Cobb is being modest. Several times, he has helped the New York Police Department in homicide investigations.”
“I suppose this is checkable as well?”
I sighed. Obviously, Rox had given Williams an earful. Still, the one person in the world a cop will trust is another cop, so let them check away. My credit balance with the NYPD and Detective Lieutenant Cornelius U. Martin Jr. was quite good.
“Very good,” Bristow said. His mask of good nature was slipping, too. “Evidently, Mr. Cobb, you are quite a remarkable character.”
“I’m just trying to get by,” I said.
“Yes. Well, you may rest assured—and you, too, Williams—that everything Mr. Cobb has said will be checked down to the ground. In the meantime, sir, perhaps you might like to offer an explanation as to why five witnesses identified you as the killer. Or were they all eccentrics?”
“Not eccentrics,” I said. “Just normal, scared witnesses. I collided with Aliou just before he was shot; that impressed me on a lot of minds. Then, after the black guy in the sports kit shot him, they saw me running. I’ll make you a bet,” I said.
“We do not gamble here,” Bristow said.
I waved it away. “Just an expression. I will state something I believe to be true: you don’t have a single reliable witness who can swear I had a gun in my hand. And no one who mentioned the slightest sign of recognition between Aliou and me, let alone hostility.”
“So?” Bristow was well on the road to surliness by now, and that told me I was right.
Calculated risk. Witnesses can say they’ve seen any damn thing they can imagine, and cops have been known to plant the odd idea in a person’s head, inadvertently or otherwise. I was glad that the Yard had held to such impeccable standards of questioning.
“So,” I said, “one would think that if I was mad enough at this guy to kill him in a crowd on a Sunday afternoon, that he would be afraid, or angry or something. Wouldn’t one?”
“Stop that,” Bristow said, getting to his feet. “You sound like the Queen. We’ll talk again in the morning.”
He made as if to walk out. Williams filed briefs, appeals, demurrers, and all sorts of legal stuff, and concluded by informing DI Bristow that his client was insisting on a paraffin test, which would prove I hadn’t fired a gun.
“Yeah,” I said. “Nobody saw or found any gloves, either, did they?”
Bristow scratched his head, and knocked the carefully glued-down hairs awry. He then magically restored them in place with a sweep of his hand. Must get a lot of practice, I thought.
“Oh my, yes,” he said. “I must be getting old. Clean slipped my mind, that did. Technician’s right in the building, too. I’ll go tell him to get ready, and somebody will be round to fetch you straightaway.”
After he left, Williams and I looked at each other.
“What the hell was that all about?” I asked.
“From the way you told your story, I thought you had all the answers.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Every word, strictly true, as promised, but you’ve come mighty close to the edge. When we come to the end of this, and the whole story comes out, Bristow is not going to be your friend.”
“That depends,” I said.
“On what?”
“On what else I’m able to tell him at the time.”
“Like what?”
“How do I know like what? Aliou was shot for a reason and not because the shooter didn’t like the color of his dashiki.”
“And you’re going to find out why?”
“Let’s just say I’m going to get Lady Arking tête-à-tête and take it from there.”
“Cobb, this isn’t New York, you know, where the cop is a second father to you. This is an away match, and the killer and who or whatever is behind him has a decided home-ground advantage.”
“I know that. Maybe he was testing us.”
“What?”
“Bristow. Maybe he refrained from mentioning the test to see if we’d ask for it. Obviously, if I were guilty, I’d try to avoid the thing like a stale crumpet. The longer we went without mentioning
it, the more convinced he got that I was blowing smoke at him.”
“Perhaps you’re right.” Williams bit his lip. “You’re sure this test is going to show what you want it to show?”
“Don’t you start on me now, Williams. Believe me, if I were going to kill somebody in this town, I’d do a lot better job of it than this.”
He shrugged. “I told you this was an away match.”
I didn’t have to say anything to that, because somebody came along and fetched us.
I shuffled along the corridor in laceless shoes, holding my pants up, as a young Asian PC led us to a room very like the one I’d spent the last hours in, only a little bigger, a lot cleaner, and much better lit.
There was a little guy in a tweed jacket and a bow tie. He could have walked out of a 1930s Agatha Christie mystery. He introduced himself as Mr. Braintree, and he was the technician.
I responded as though I gave a damn what his name was. The English are tigers for introducing themselves. By this point, I was hungry, exhausted, pissed off, and a bit scared. I wanted food and a shower, and I wanted to crawl into bed with Roxanne and her teddy bear and sleep for a week.
Braintree spoke with a slight Scots burr, and he went about his business, setting out a bottle, some wooden swabs, and several plastic bags.
As he snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, he said, “We should have done this earlier. The sooner the better, or you can lose your opportunity.”
“It wasn’t my idea to delay it,” I said.
“Well, you can’t fight budget cuts, I suppose. Have you been to the toilet since the alleged shots were fired?”
I appreciated the word. There was nothing alleged about the shots; they happened all right. But I appreciated somebody trying to introduce some doubt into these proceedings.
“No,” I said, “I haven’t, and now that you mention it ...”
“Please wait just a little longer, Mr. Cobb, if you will. Haven’t washed your hands for any reason?”
“Nope,” I said. “Haven’t had the chance.”
“Or wet your hands in any way?”
“No?”
“Then things should be fine, then.” He smiled. “Left hand, please.”
I gave it to him. He took it by the wrist, then opened the brown bottle.
“This,” he said, “is a mild solution of nitric acid. If there are gunpowder residues on you hands, this will dissolve them, and they will be picked up on the swab.”
He rubbed the swab all over my hand, but he concentrated on the area around my first two fingers and thumb, and the webbing in between.
“I understand you asked for a ‘paraffin’ test. If you’d been dealing with someone much younger than DI Bristow, you might have caused a bit of confusion. What you Americans call paraffin hasn’t been used for this sort of test for many years, and here in Britain, paraffin is what you call kerosene. Other hand please.”
He’d put the swab in a Ziploc bag and labeled it with my name, the date, and “lh-fngrs.” Now he did the same to the other hand, and put that swab into a bag of its own. After that, he did the same thing to both palms and bagged and labeled those.
He spoke to the PC who’d been guarding me.
“I’ll have the results first thing in the morning,” he said. “Tell Mr. Bristow I’ll ring him.” With that, he bid us good evening and left.
And it soon became apparent I was going to spend the night in the cell, a first for me. I was not pleased.
Williams fought like mad, but there were no judges to appeal to, no one to set bail. No clear evidence of my innocence until the paraff—excuse me, nitric-acid test came through.
I asked, and was given, permission to use a toilet for humans before I got locked up. I gave my hands and face a good washing, too.
Williams said he’d see me in the morning.
I said, “Sure,” and resigned myself to my fate. I wished I had a harmonica. Or a cake with a file in it. I wanted to see Roxanne one more time.
I had worked myself up to quite a pitch of self-pity; after that, the cell itself was an enormous letdown.
It had a door with a grillwork window, and there were walls between me and the other prisoners, mostly drunks and pickpockets. The place was meant for two, but I had no cellmate. The bunk was clean.
I could survive here through the night, if it was just one night.
Of course, it shouldn’t have been any nights, and I got madder and madder thinking about it, especially when I heard my fellow inmates making foggy-brained speculation about what a high-priced American hit man like me was doing in the smoke shooting down coons from Africa in the first place.
Then I got it, and I started to laugh. I went to the grille in the door and shouted for the guard.
“Quiet now,” he said. “It’s late.”
“Bristow,” I said. “Is he still around? I want to see Bristow.”
“What for?” The guard was suspicious. I wasn’t surprised. I don’t think that was the kind of job that inspired a lot of trust. Could make you cynical. Might make you want to take off to a foreign country with your girlfriend.
I was still laughing at that when Bristow showed up. He overruled the guard’s suspicions, had himself let in, and sat on the other bunk.
“I’m on my way home,” he told me. “Do you want to confess or something?”
“You know I don’t,” I said.
“I do, do I?”
“Yes,” I said. “You do. You know it better than you know your own father’s name. If you do know your own father’s name.”
“Watch it, Cobb,” he said.
“Oh, get stuffed. I’m sick of you. I finally figured out why I’m in here.”
“You’re assisting in our enquiries.”
“You’re throwing the foreigner to the wolves.”
“What wolves?”
“The press. Especially the tabloid press. The Sun. The Star. The Mirror. The Orbit.” It wouldn’t have done to leave that one out. “You’re writing their headlines for them.”
Bristow did the hair trick again.
“I’m a cop, not a journalist.”
“You’re something,” I conceded. “I couldn’t understand why the famous Scotland Yard was being so weird. A sensational murder with a racial angle, and all of a sudden you’ve got all the time in the world. I had to beg for the test that would clear me. I had to sit on my ass for three hours before anybody even bothered to talk to me. It wasn’t incompetence, it was deliberate.”
“Now, why would I do a thing like that?”
“Like I said, you’re writing headlines. If you’d brought me in and run the test right away, the results would be in now, and I’d be sleeping in my own bed.
“The only trouble with that was if you did it that way, the papers tomorrow would read POLICE BAFFLED BY PLANET HOLLYWOOD RACE MURDER SHOCK HORROR. Now, because of careful planning on your part, it’ll be YANK YUPPIE HELD IN RACE MURDER. How nice for you. Even when you let me go—as you inevitably will have to, you’ll do it in such a way as to intimate you’ll nail me when you get enough evidence, the lack of which is only temporary. Meanwhile, I’ll have to prove I’m not a murderer.”
“You could always,” he said, “leave the country. There’d be nothing to stop you. That is, in the, um, unlikely event we had to let you go.”
“No, thanks. I’ve got an extended visa, and I like it here.” I looked at him. I’d never seen such a deadpan. “But forget about me for a minute. Don’t you even give a shit about catching the real murderer? Who I almost caught for you, until PC Staines showed his rugger skills? If manipulating the press is all you care about, get out of police work and into PR.”
And at last I got a reaction from him. His face came to life so quickly and so intensely that I jumped.
“Now you listen to me, you smug bastard,” he said in a harsh whisper. “This city is a powder keg, like Los Angeles a few years ago, or a Detroit or Newark in the sixties. We’ve got militants, and we’ve even g
ot a bloody Nazi holding public office. We’ve got teenagers who kill black boys for dating white girls.
“Now, I was born in London, and I live here, and I love it, and I would prefer not to see large portions of it go up in flames, while slaughter rages in the streets. I admit nothing, but I tell you that any racial incident, even something a lot less final than a murder, could set it off.
“Again, I admit nothing. But if it takes inconveniencing one rich American boy to keep that from happening, I might just be willing to do that, wouldn’t I? I might even,” he added, “do a lot worse.”
I looked at him for a long moment, then clapped my hands, slowly. “That was truly beautiful, Bristow. Honestly, I’m touched. A man among men, that’s what you are.”
“You can save the sarcasm, Cobb. It doesn’t make me laugh, and it doesn’t do you any good.”
“My heart bleeds. Listen, if you’d thought like a cop instead of a goddamn politician, you would already have checked me out with the NYPD and—”
“What makes you think I didn’t?”
“You didn’t. You avoided anything that would clear me before the papers went to bed. I hope to hell you’re at least looking for the real killer.”
“We’ve been looking for the man you chased,” he said, as thought the admission caused him physical pain. “We got good descriptions from witnesses.”
“Well, thank Christ for that. You’re not a total loss. But look, if you’d called New York, you would have eventually gotten hooked up to Lieutenant Martin.”
“And?”
“And he would have told you that you could still run your scam. I’d have played along with it. I don’t especially care for riots myself, okay? And you could have been using your brain to smoke out the real killer.”
Bristow scratched his jaw. His tongue worked in his mouth. He wasn’t buying much of this, if any, but at least I’d created a seed of doubt in his mind.
Finally, he said, “You might as well get some sleep, Cobb. I’ve got some phone calls to make. I’ll call you in the morning.”
Killed in the Fog Page 6