Done for a Dime

by David Corbett

  He ran down to dispatch. Gump, seeing him, seemed about to complain about being dragged in as a marital go-between, but Murchison cut him off.

  “I’ve got a voice mail message. It’s evidence. Log it in, Gumper, do it right.”

  • • •

  “No way we can authorize a warrant.” The chief sat at the conference table with Murchison, Peterson, and Chadwick. Gladden, the CDF man, was out in the field, as were the ATF agents and the other Rio Mirada detectives. “We need a reliable informant, with a proven track record of solid leads. This—I mean, good God—for all intents and purposes, this is an a anonymous tip.”

  They’d all just listened to the recording twice. The chief looked sick. He’d completed his press conference less than an hour before, going on record across the country as to who was responsible for the fires and why. Now this.

  “It’s bogus,” Peterson said. The press in his suit had begun to sag. His eyes hollowed out his face. “And no surprise, given how these people operate.”

  “Yeah. Kinda convenient.” It was Chadwick, looking not much better than his partner. “All he has to do is bare his sad little soul, from God knows where. Such a deal.”

  “And developers.” Peterson again. “Gee, who’d want to pin this on a bunch of developers?”

  “The eco-trash?”

  “You think?”

  “He’s reliable,” Murchison countered, “because his information tracks the fires down to the smallest details. Things not made public.” Like the incendiary ingredients used, he thought, the exact location of each placed bomb, the time progression of how they went off, entry and exit points, precise descriptions—of the truck, the tanker valve releases, the driver, the gas station owner, the guns used and the placement of wounds, down to which side of Manny Turpin’s face had been blown away. “And the court in Camarella—”

  Peterson cut him off. “Camarella granted a Leon exception on the basis of good faith reliance on a warrant that lacked probable cause. You can’t fudge up a warrant based on tips you know going in are loose on deck and expect a Leon ruling.”

  “Okay, then what about Gates? Gates gives us a totality of circumstances criteria with an anonymous tip, and this information tracks exactly with the facts surrounding the fire. That should give the court its comfort zone. And this isn’t an anonymous tip, the guy gave his name.”

  “A name,” Peterson corrected. “Not necessarily his name.”

  “Which reminds me.” Chadwick rose from the table and left the room. Murchison watched him go with a sense the whole thing was pointless.

  Peterson added, “And in Gates, what made the information credible was the tipster didn’t just provide facts about past acts. He predicted events that hadn’t yet occurred.”

  Murchison’s head pounded, his migraine was worse. Every few minutes it got hard to breathe.

  The chief went back at him. “Look, everybody agreed all along there could be a second guy involved. And yeah, that guy’s going to know everything about the fires. He should. He helped set them. But you want to drag in third parties who’ve got—I mean, Clint Bratcher, for fuck’s sake. Ralston Polhemus, Wally Glenn, Bob Craugh. Christ, we’re talking—I mean, why not the goddamn mayor?”

  “What if I said I had a corroborating witness?”

  “To Bratcher’s involvement?”

  “To how the thing at the gas station went down.”

  “Reliable?” Peterson was shaking his head. “That’s the whole issue here.”

  “He wants immunity.”

  “Well, knock me down.”

  “He’s an abscond. A parole beef. That’s all, but he—”

  “Wants it to go away. Shopping stories. Detective, really, tell me you’re not this stupid.”

  Murchison checked his anger. Slowly, he said, “I spoke with him earlier, before I got this recording. Understand? Before. He says it wasn’t a botched hijack. It was meant to go down that way. Baymont was the target all along.”

  “Not given everything else—”

  “I’ve got another witness, too. He’ll confirm Ralston Polhemus, the candidate this Ferry guy mentions on the tape, is already pushing eminent domain and negotiating lowball payouts to home owners on the hill, trying to pave way for redevelopment.”

  “None of that is going to justify a search warrant of Bratcher’s accounts.”

  “I won’t authorize it,” the chief said flatly. “I’ll put a call in to the presiding judge, every other judge and commissioner in the county while I’m at it. Probable cause, Detective. Good Lord.”

  Murchison turned to Peterson. “What about phone records? Find out who Bratcher’s been talking to and who’s been talking to him. You guys don’t need a warrant for that, not anymore. If you really think this is domestic terror, use the Patriot Act—”

  “Let’s slow down for a minute, shall we?” Peterson leaned forward, forcing a smile. “This tape. There’s no small problem, Detective, with the scenario this character lays out. I mean, just for argument. Let’s say this Ferry character planned to do the job with the Turpin kid the way it looks at first blush.”

  “The bank as target,” the chief said.

  “But the thing goes haywire. Truck driver has a gun.”

  “My witness saw the whole thing. It didn’t happen that way.”

  “Eyewitnesses get things wrong, you ever find that to be true? Especially ones trying to buy their way out of trouble. Look, just bear—”

  “It couldn’t have happened—”

  “Shut the fuck up, Detective, and listen to me.” It came out eerily quiet. Peterson wasn’t smiling now. “This Ferry character, he can’t drive the truck, he’s up there alone with Manny Turpin dead, and Manny was the one supposed to move the rig downhill.”

  “I said it before: they’d never have made it.”

  “Not the goddamn point, Detective. Once the Turpin kid dies, the plan is meaningless. Regardless how harebrained it was to begin with, it’s over now. This Ferry character, he’s going to run, no matter what. So the only question is: Why wouldn’t he just do that, disappear, instead of empty the tanker?”

  “Exactly.”

  Peterson leaned forward, as though tutoring a child. “Because we’re not talking about people who are idealistic. I don’t care what load of crap they use to defend what they do. They just … like … setting … fires.”

  Chadwick reentered the room. “Okay,” he said, sitting back down, “a little show-and-tell.” He had several pages of fax paper curling up in his hand. He spread them out on the tabletop, smoothing them flat with his palm. “Bratcher’s name has come up in a few investigations out of the Sacramento office. I called up there, asked if they had anything we might find interesting.”

  He turned the top page around so the others could see it. There was a photograph from an Illinois driver’s license, paired with one from a Chicago PD personnel file. The latter seemed more recent. The man had black hair and a drooping mustache, raw features, and an unpleasant intensity in his eyes, not so much menacing as cold, unavailing, empty. Stubble darkened his cheeks and neck and chin. He wore a black leather jacket over a crew neck sweater, his hair longish, brushing the tops of his ears.

  “You can see under ‘Suspect’s Name’ this guy is named William Malvasio. There’s a couple AKAs, none of them Richard Ferry, the one he used in the phone call, but that could be because it’s new.”

  “If it’s him,” Murchison said. He had to admit, this face, the voice, they went together. “How do we—”

  “It’s him. Stick with me here,” Chadwick said. “He worked undercover narcotics on Chicago’s South Side for several years, part of a tac squad that got brought down hard by IA. Nothing too original—jacking some dealers, running protection for others, that story. Malvasio here shot dead another cop he suspected of laying numbers on him and his pals.”

  “A cop killer,” the chief said, fingering the page for a better look.

  “Cop-killing cop.” Peterson
made a point to look straight at Murchison as he said it.

  Chadwick continued, “He’d worked with some Salvadoran police units in an exchange of sorts before disappearing from Chicago, but there’ve never been any solid leads down there. Either he’s hidden somewhere else or he’s got connected friends in country, watching his back.”

  “What’s his connection to Bratcher?” The chief was still reading.

  “Turns out Mr. Bratcher is a cooperating individual with the Sacramento office. He’s proved to be a reliable asset in several investigations concerning HUD fraud, abuse of the Officer Next Door Program.”

  Murchison couldn’t believe it. “He rats out cops?”

  “You’d rather he killed them?” Peterson’s impatience was mounting. “Would that make him more reliable in your book?”

  Chadwick gestured for everybody to calm down. “Agent handling this guy Bratcher assured me he’s a tough nut, but he’d never have anything to do with a job like this guy Malvasio, or Ferry, or whatever the hell he calls himself—”

  “But the connection,” Murchison said, knowing it would mean little. Bratcher had juice. You’d have to have hard evidence, not just probable cause, to get anyone to move on him now. “What’s Bratcher’s connection to this Ferry guy, Malvasio?”

  “He advertises himself as a security consultant. Had a Web site—Bureau tried to sting him twice with that, set up phony clients, but he’s been too smart to fall for it. Web site’s closed down now.”

  “But Bratcher fell for it,” the chief guessed.

  “Once. Yeah. Bratcher owns property in Sacramento. He had a drug problem with tenants, a bad one. He’d tried everything else, figured he’d give this solo hotshot a chance. Malvasio ended up killing two kids, gangbangers living in one of Bratcher’s buildings, then tried to extort Bratcher, claiming he ordered the hits.”

  “He didn’t?” Murchison glanced around the table, wondering if anyone else had doubts. “Order the hits, I mean.”

  “He says no. And like I said—”

  “He’s a valuable asset.” Peterson again, tag-teaming.

  “He’s provided critical information in several successful investigations, one of which is ongoing.”

  “Which means you risk being in contempt of the grand jury you try to push this joke of a confession too far.”

  Chadwick shuffled his fax pages together. “Yeah. I’d have to weigh in here and say we need a lot more than the word of this sociopath before we moved on a guy who’s proved to be reliable and has cooperated with us. Arrests and convictions, all good.” His glance circled the table. “Anybody else?”

  “He didn’t even level with us about who he is.” The chief’s voice was stronger now. He’d made up his mind. “His being a bent cop, the IA business, the killing, nothing.”

  Murchison wasn’t letting go. “How did a guy like this end up with a bottom-feeder like Manny Turpin? This Ferry guy, Malvasio, whatever, he does what he does for money. You telling me he’d work for a high five and ‘attaboy’ from a bunch of green freaks?”

  “There are people connected with the movement,” Peterson said, again like he was schooling an idiot, “who are supportive of the more extremist elements but who prefer to retain an image of moderation. They channel money—”

  Murchison was stunned. Talk about hypotheticals. “You saying the Sierra Club hired this guy?”

  Chadwick said, “There are a lot of weasels in Hollywood, actually—”

  Murchison howled, “Oh, come on. What, Susan Sarandon was behind this?”

  Peterson, leaning forward again, responded, “You’re not privy to the kinds of intelligence we are, Detective. It stops being funny real quick.”

  Chadwick chased him down in the hallway this time, like Holmes had before. “Look,” he said, stepping in front. “Sorry if that got rougher than it should have. We’re all on the same side in this.”

  “Oh yeah.” Murchison tried to pull away, but Chadwick stopped him.

  “Try to see it from our perspective, okay? You track this stuff as long as we have, I mean, it’s like trying to bottle up smoke. You can’t infiltrate these people. Even if everything falls out right, you nail some dweeb, turns out he knows nothing or just clams up. Meanwhile, the shit just keeps mounting. Seven years now, it’s just gotten worse. We’ve solved damn few of these things and it gets to you.”

  “So blame them for a fire they didn’t set.”

  “You know for a fact they didn’t set it? You’ve got a tape recording from a killer on the run, trying to blame somebody else for what he did. You can hardly blame us for not taking it as God’s truth, okay? Now listen to me—we’re not wedded to this Bratcher guy, understand? He’s not our snitch. We could give a rat’s ass about him. And yeah, we’ll see whether this story that he’s involved has merit. We’ll work it, I promise you that. But we’re not going to just ignore everything we know, everything we’ve learned over years of tracking this kind of deal, everything we see here, on the basis of what you’ve got so far. Especially when this kind of disavowal is almost predictable given how bad this thing turned out. That’d be nuts, and you can call us a lot of things—”

  “I’m not going down with you like those guys in Oakland, okay?” Murchison glanced up and down the hallway. There were men coming and going, so he kept his voice low. “They fell for your line and jumped on those two Earth Firsters just like you told them to. Look what happened. If I’m gonna get a multimillion-dollar judgment against me, I want it to be because I followed my own instincts, not yours.”

  “You can’t compare this to the Oakland deal.”

  “Sure I can.”

  “And neither Peterson nor I worked that case.”

  “Lucky for you.”

  “Look, I said it before. These aren’t idealists. They’re criminals. I’m not making that up, Detective.” He took a second to collect himself, playing something in his head as he looked past Murchison down the hall. “Can I run a hypothetical by you?”

  Murchison laughed. “If you guys are so convinced you’ve got this figured out, what’s with all the hypothetical?”

  Chadwick ignored that. “There’s a similarity between these radical groups here and what we see abroad. Just a total hatred of the West and what it stands for. There’s another element to that, actually, that I’d like to run by you.”

  It came out surprisingly guileless. Murchison shrugged, thinking, Truthfully, what else is there to do? “Sure. Shoot.”

  “It’s the drug angle. This kid Turpin, he was hanging not just with rads but a pretty heavy drug crowd, too. Especially here in town, that right?”

  Murchison wondered who’d briefed him on that. Not like the mutt hunt of yesterday morning was any great secret, he realized, the whole Sunday squad had been on it. “Yeah. From what we know.”

  “You raised a good point in there. If this Malvasio guy, Ferry, if he was in this, and his information’s too specific not to think he was, then somebody was bankrolling him, because he’s not the kind to be in it otherwise.”

  “You’re thinking—”

  “We understand there’s a guy named James Mooney, goes by the name Long Tall—”

  “Long Walk.”

  “Him. He’s a major player in the local drug scene, right? He’s also got his hand in a lot of property on that hill.”

  “Where did you hear—”

  “Your partner talked about it yesterday, with some of the other detectives. It’s true, then.”

  “Yeah, what I can tell. We haven’t followed up, there hasn’t been—”

  “I think that might prove a viable area, Detective. There may be a motive for setting those fires we don’t see yet. Insurance fraud, maybe, on Mooney’s part. Building inspectors were beginning to find out he’d financed renovations that didn’t meet code. Pretty soon the home owners were gonna get grilled about where the money came from. This Mooney character, he was going to be exposed. He may have thought a bunch of fires would solve his problems.
Wouldn’t be the first guy to think like that.”

  Murchison thought it through. Chadwick could be right, he realized. Regardless, it only made sense to take a look. “We should bring Holmes in on this. He has a source inside Mooney’s crew.”

  “We don’t think it would be wise to bring Sergeant Holmes in just yet.” Chadwick hunted Murchison’s face, looking for a flinch, a tic, a giveaway.

  “Explain that,” Murchison said.

  “He has a source. Exactly, you said it. We want to make sure the information flow doesn’t become two-way.”

  “You think Holmes would—”

  “This early, we don’t want to risk anything we don’t have to.”

  “You can’t keep him out of the loop.”

  “We think we can. And we’ll need your help.”

  Murchison saw it then. The voice didn’t match the eyes.

  “I think you need to find somebody else.”

  “He trusts you.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Besides, if it were true, why would I want to betray that trust?”

  “For the greater good.”

  Murchison gave in to his disgust and pulled away. “You gotta try harder than that.”

  “This is an extremely touchy deal, Detective. I’m asking.”

  “And I answered. No.”

  “You don’t know how dangerous these people are. We do. Mix that with drug money—”

  Murchison stopped. “I just saw an entire hillside in my hometown burned down, seen my partner killed and a family burned to death in a bathtub while they clawed each other to pieces. I don’t understand that the people responsible are dangerous?”