(1995) Chain of Evidence

by Ridley Pearson

  Dart just stared at the man. He was thinking that he’d gone too far, that it was time to close ranks.

  CHAPTER 13

  Not even the bathroom would work for his purposes. Dart needed someplace isolated, someplace there was no chance of being overheard, and preferably a location that wouldn’t raise eyebrows. He ruled out either of the interrogation rooms because they would attract far too much attention. He ruled out the crib—too easily interrupted. A vehicle would work, he realized, though getting the two of them into the same car would take some logistics and, at this point, some negotiating.

  And then he hit upon it: the elevator. Kowalski’s use of the elevator, in what was only a two-story building, was the subject of much teasing within CAPers.

  The opportunity arose a few minutes after the lunch hour, when both Dart and Kowalski were summoned to Teddy Bragg’s office. Dart found Kowalski playing computer solitaire on a PC that belonged to another detective. Kowalski offered no apologies for using his time this way. Instead he said, “Just a minute, okay, Dartelli? I almost got this thing.” Dart waited him out, his impatience mounting. Finally Kowalski lost the hand, closed the game off the screen, and spun around in his chair. “Piece of shit,” he said.

  “You played the jack of diamonds on the wrong pile,” Dart informed him, not fully understanding why he began with confrontation.

  “Bull-fucking-shit I did. I suppose you play the game more than me, huh? I don’t think so. Mind your own fucking business.”

  “Bragg wants us downstairs. He has the initial workup on Payne.”

  “Sure. Why not?” As Kowalski stood out of the chair, Dart was reminded how large and how solid the man was. Suddenly the idea of a one-on-one confrontation in an elevator didn’t seem like such a stroke of brilliance. But it was all he had, and he intended to follow through.

  As they entered the hallway, Kowalski asked, “You taking the stairs?” Making it sound like a chore.

  “No. Let’s ride,” he said, clearly surprising the man. He stabbed the CALL button, and a moment later they stepped into the empty elevator car. He felt his heart pounding, and the pulsing of a fatigue headache at his temples. This was a little bit like deciding to ride a wild bull, he realized. He pushed the button marked 1, and the elevator doors slid shut. He tried to settle his nerves, knowing full well that Kowalski’s reaction would be indignation. Dart counted to three and pulled the red STOP button. The car jerked to a halt.

  “Hey, what the fuck?”

  Dart faced the man. Kowalski had dark Mediterranean skin, haunting brown eyes and heavy, masculine features. If he had been fifteen years younger he would have been working Guess jeans ads. His center teeth were stained from smoking the non-filters, and his voice sounded like someone chipping ice.

  Dart explained. “Lewellan Page.”

  “Who?”

  “Lewellan Page—the girl who witnessed the Lawrence murder.”

  Kowalski made a move for the elevator control panel, but Dart blocked his effort. “Get this thing moving,” he complained.

  “I wanted to talk in private,” Dart explained. “The point is not to embarrass you, but to understand your thinking. Your reasoning.” An oxymoron if he ever heard one.

  “Lawrence?”

  Like talking to a bull elephant. “The suicide over on Battles,” Dart reminded.

  “The hanging?” the detective asked rhetorically, the case finally registering.

  Dart couldn’t tell if the man was acting or not; every detective had an actor inside.

  “Oh, her,” Kowalski said.

  “Yeah, her,” Dart agreed.

  “What’s to tell?”

  “You interviewed her. You wrote up that interview. And you kept it out of your report. Why?”

  Kowalski looked confused—a child trying to connect the dots. He had to be wondering just how Dart had gained such knowledge, what else the detective knew, and how it all impacted him. He stuttered, “She’s a kid, Ivy. What the fuck?” Attempting once again to reach past Dart, he said anxiously, “Get this thing moving—this is giving me the creeps in here.”

  It wasn’t the elevator but the topic making him nervous, Dart realized. “She’s a witness,” he said emphatically.

  “Bullshit. She’s a bored nigger kid who sees whites as bad. The only whites she’s ever seen are cops. They come and take people away. They make trouble. Get a clue, Dartelli. She gets me by the cajones and tries to invent some story about a guy doing Lawrence. I mean, give me a fucking break, will you? How do you operate this thing?” He stepped forward.

  Dart maintained his position between Kowalski and the panel. “Not good enough,” Dart warned. “She witnessed a Caucasian male pulling a chair out from underneath Lawrence. She described the man’s flailing legs perfectly. I think she actually saw it. You’re saying she invented it?”

  “Probably saw it in a movie or something. How the fuck should I know? Did you bother with any of the rest of it? There was a note, I think. The place was locked up. No sign of a struggle. No evidence to suggest foul play. What’s the fucking big deal?”

  Dart felt confused. He believed Lewellan Page’s story. Kowalski had investigated David Stapleton while on Narco. Did Dart dare play that card as well?

  “Was Lawrence involved in trafficking?” Dart asked, hoping to see a reaction in Kowalski that might tell him something.

  “Drugs? How the hell would I know? Some pot found in the apartment, it seems to me. Nothing hard core that I heard about.” Kowalski’s expression revealed nothing—no surprise, no panic.

  Don’t trust it, Dart cautioned himself.

  “Let me tell you something, Dartelli. I don’t want no rogue cop prying into my cases, okay? You got problems with the way I’m doing things, you go through IA and we’ll see what they say.”

  “Your buddies at IA, you mean,” Dart said caustically.

  “Fuck off. Are you listening to me?” He stepped forward, an intimidating presence. “What I’m saying is I don’t appreciate your working my files without asking me, okay? Showing up at crime scenes uninvited. What is it with you? You go through channels from now on.”

  Here, Dart realized, was the ultimate in irony: a cop known for his misuse of the system telling Dart that he should play by the rules. The hypocrisy caused Dart to laugh and throw his head back. “You’re too much,” he said.

  Then, in a whisper, as if he believed he might be overheard even on a stopped elevator, Kowalski leaned in closely to Dart and said in his coarse voice, “Listen to me, Dartelli, okay? Let’s say that some white guy did do Lawrence that night—hypothetically speaking. A big white guy on the edge of Bellevue Square at night. Let’s think about this … Now how many candidates do we have for this person? Huh?” He held up his meaty hand and raised a single, chunky finger. “One: A junkie in need of a fix. That would mean Lawrence was a dealer, which we have no proof of. That would also probably mean a struggle of some kind. Okay? So where’s the evidence? Two: What other damn fool would be ballsy enough to visit the square after dark? Who but a junkie goes into that area at night? Not even the fucking cabs, for Chrissakes. There’s only one answer isn’t there, okay?” He glared at Dart; neither man was going to say the word that teased their tongues. “I’m not real upset about some pervert like Lawrence ending up hanging from a wire. And I sure as hell am not going to use some twelve-year-old abused and abandoned nigger girl to rip open an investigation that could lead where we both know it could lead. Okay? What’s the point? Let’s just drop it.”

  Dart shook his head. “We can’t drop it.”

  “Oh, for Chrissakes. Get off of your fucking white horse.”

  “We let it go because he’s a sex offender? Is that it?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Or because it might involve one of us.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Kowalski protested.

  “Sure you did.”

  The control panel buzzed as someone called the stopped elevator.

&nbs
p; Kowalski said, “You think justice is just left to us? That’s bullshit. We’re way the hell down on that food chain.”

  “Justice isn’t up to us—it’s up to the courts.”

  “Oh, come on!” Kowalski protested. “I mean us: human beings. There’s other kinds of justice, you know. There’s laws of the jungle. You stick your dick in a twelve-year-old and shit happens to you—car loses a wheel on the highway. Fucking radio falls into your bathtub. How the fuck do I know?”

  “A cop fakes your suicide,” Dart completed.

  “Maybe. Yeah, just maybe. And who the fuck cares, Dartelli? Are you honestly sorry that this maggot ate shit and died? You crying for this guy? Fuck him. Fuck anyone like him.”

  “David Stapleton, Harold Payne,” Dart said. And then he realized, by Kowalski’s expression, just how thick the man could be. By all appearances, Kowalski had not made the connection until that moment—one hell of a performance, if that’s what it was.

  “Fuck me,” Kowalski said.

  “They probably would have liked to,” Dart answered. But in his heart of hearts, he ached. If Kowalski’s surprise was legitimate, then Dart could remove him from suspicion, which left only one other. On some level he knew that the killer could be any one of hundreds—thousands—of people, but that did not register. One face, one name dominated his thoughts: Walter Zeller. He stepped out of the way of the panel.

  Kowalski got the elevator moving again. The floor bounced. Kowalski cautioned, “You bring that girl into it, and you’re in for some serious trouble. I’m telling ya.”

  Dart nodded. He saw Kowalski, and his possible involvement, in a different light, though he wasn’t sure whether to trust it or not. “Wherever this leads,” Dartelli cautioned, “then that’s the way it is.”

  “You want to play Boy Scout, go join a troop.” Being called a Boy Scout was among a handful of the most derogatory labels used among fellow officers. Kowalski added, “Lawrence got what he deserved.” The car stopped moving and the doors opened. Kowalski took one step toward freedom, reconsidered, and turned to face Dartelli. “No that’s not true. He got off light. If I’d done it,” he said convincingly, “I’d have cut off his cock, shoved it down his throat, and let him choke to death.”

  Dart didn’t move from the elevator car, thinking: If you had done it, we would have caught you.

  Whoever had staged these suicides had done so brilliantly, and again, Dart could think of only one.

  CHAPTER 14

  As difficult as it was for him to face it, Dart realized that he had to locate Walter Zeller and question him. Informally, he convinced himself—at least at first. He would make it appear that he was seeking Zeller’s advice, the protégé returning to the feet of the mentor. But he no longer had any doubt. It had to be done. At least three men were dead. Dart believed he knew why they had been selected. It was time to act before there were more.

  For the last few months, the word around the department had been that after a brief stint with a security firm in Hartford, Zeller had been offered a better job in Seattle. Dart had believed all along that, better job or not, it was important for Zeller to move on, preferably as far away from his wife’s murder as possible. Seattle certainly fit that bill.

  But try as he did, Dart failed to raise a Seattle phone number for the former sergeant, either through the personnel office, directory information, or through any of the many friends Zeller had left behind. He was able to obtain a Seattle address for Zeller—a box number on First Avenue—and to determine that Zeller’s pension checks were direct-deposited into a First Interstate Bank account, but beyond that, the trail ended: officials at the bank had the same box number, no residential address, no phone number.

  None of this came as any great surprise to Dart, or put him off his effort. Most police officers, retired or not, protect themselves from possible revenge attacks by maintaining unpublished phone numbers and using post office boxes for mailing addresses. Zeller, whose desire for privacy was legendary and who had put away dozens of killers, could be expected to take such precautions.

  While running an errand on a Tuesday in early November, Dart drove past Sam and Rob’s Smoke Shop on Asylum Street and pulled over a block later. In direct violation of federal import restrictions, Sam and Rob’s sold a variety of Cuban cigars out of their back room to preferred customers. During his twenty years of public service, Walter Zeller had been a regular customer and had developed a friendship with the owners.

  The shop smelled of fresh pipe tobacco.

  Rob, the older of the two proprietors, had died of lung cancer five years earlier. His brother Sam, in his late fifties, was bald with a brown mustache and red cheeks and high cheekbones. He wore a tattered green apron with the name of the shop embroidered in dull red thread. His shirt cuffs were threadbare, and a button had been replaced on one of them. He had a smoker’s voice and a gambler’s nervous eyes.

  He didn’t seem to recognize Dart until the detective mentioned Zeller’s name, at which point an association was made. For years, Dart had wandered the shelves of this outer room, while Zeller had negotiated for the Cubans in the back.

  After the introductions were made, Dart told him that he had a difficult investigation on his hands, and that he had lost track of Zeller. “I thought that he might have had you send him some cigars—that you might have an address or a phone number.”

  “He went to Seattle,” Sam informed him needlessly. “Vancouver gets all the Cuban brands—Canada, you know; no restrictions.”

  “So you haven’t heard from him?”

  “Heard from him?” Sam repeated. “He was in here not three weeks ago. Bought several boxes of—”

  “Here? In the store?”

  “I hadn’t seen him in a couple years. Still too thin. He was complaining about a Dominican he’d been smoking and how they don’t measure up. No question. His cigar has a hint of cocoa in the wrap. You can’t find that in any of the Dominicans. There’s only one cigar for each of us,” he said, like a salesman. “Do you smoke a cigar?”

  “No.”

  “Have you tried it?”

  “No, thanks. Three weeks ago?”

  “Three or four. Yes.”

  “And before that?”

  Sam considered this a moment. “Hadn’t seen him in years.”

  “When he came in here three weeks ago, how much did he buy?” Dart asked.

  “Three or four boxes, I think it was.”

  “And how long will that last him?”

  “The sergeant? A while, anyway.” He thought a moment and said, “A month or more.”

  “And it’s been about a month,” Dart said.

  “Yeah, that’s right, isn’t it? Sure, I see what you’re saying. Maybe I can put him in touch with you.”

  Dart thought fast and spoke his mind. “Or better yet,” he said, “I could leave you my number, and if he came in, maybe you could stall him long enough for me to get over here and surprise him.”

  “Call you, ya mean.”

  “Right.”

  “I like that. Sure. I like putting people together. That’s one thing about cigars,” he advised. “They bring people together. After a good meal. A poker game. After a round of golf—it’s a social activity, smoking is.”

  “Staying here, or visiting?” Dart inquired. “Did you get a feel for that?”

  “Visiting, I think. He wasn’t very talkative. Not the same man by any means. But who can blame him? I don’t think any man could recover from losing his wife that way.” Sam’s face tightened, and Dart had the feeling that the loss of his own brother hung over him as well. “It’s not easy,” the man whispered, confirming Dart’s suspicions.

  A feeling of dread swarmed through Dart, like the first hint of the flu. It seemed implausible that Zeller would have visited the city and not looked up a single friend—Dart had touched base with everyone he could think of.

  Dart handed the shopkeeper his business card. “Call me right away, would you please?�
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  “I love a good surprise,” the man said.

  “Yeah,” Dart answered. “This will be a hell of a surprise.”

  Walter Zeller was not a rich man, having earned a policeman’s salary for twenty-two years, and so it had confused even his closest friends when he left the city and refused to sell his house—the house where his wife had been raped and murdered. He owned the house free and clear, and it represented his single biggest asset, and yet he had refused to sell, giving no explanation. For Dartelli, no explanation was needed. Perhaps he was the only one of Zeller’s friends to understand that part of the man, that specific quality, that would have made selling the house a further violation of his wife. Lucky Zeller had treasured the house—a rather common tract home in Vernon. The house was a brown ranch at the end of a cul-de-sac in a subdivision that hosted RVs, powerboats, and camper tops for pickup trucks. Dogwood Lane was oil stained from parked cars, its concrete gutters looking like chipped teeth. The limbs of the few mature trees, bare with winter’s approach, reached for a sky of gray cloud and cold wind.

  Dart parked in Zeller’s driveway, wondering if he had quietly moved back from Seattle without telling anyone.

  The building’s brown siding was stained gray where water from lawn sprinklers had soaked it. Dart felt a pang of nostalgia, troubled by the sight of the unattended gardens, and he knew in that instant that Zeller was not living here. The sergeant, renowned for his green thumb, for the endless hours he lavished on his plants and gardens, would never have allowed his beds to go unattended. A four-foot apron of bare earth, choked by clumps of dead weeds, surrounded the house. A few of the flower islands that had been cut into the small lawn by Zeller’s own hands had been covered over with gray gravel. Buried, as Lucky had been, Dart thought, knocking sharply on the front door. There was no answer, no sound of anyone inside. No surprise, he thought as he walked around the house and into the backyard, which flooded him with memories of barbecues, beer, and long discussions of the cases they had worked together.