The Witness

by Dorothy Uhnak

  “Is there something wrong, Mr. Reardon?”

  “You’re damn right there’s something wrong. There’s something very wrong.” He waved his hand quickly. “Not with your work, Christie. You’ve done a good job. Look, you knock off for tonight. Be here tomorrow at around eleven. I guess you know everyone’s on a twelve-hour day until further notice. I have a special assignment for you tomorrow evening, and in the meantime you can help Ginsburg and Treadwell.” He pulled his glasses off, tossed them over the report on the desk. “Hold it a minute, Christie. I got something for you.” He went to the clothing rack by the door, dug in his jacket pocket, then consulted a slip of paper. “You got a phone call this afternoon. From a Captain Gene O’Brien.” He sounded as though he was accusing her of something.

  “Gene called me here?” Immediately she thought of someone informing Reardon about a phone call intended for her, and impulsively she asked, “How do you know that?”

  Reardon crumpled the paper into a small pellet which he tossed at the wastebasket across the room. It bounced against the wall, then fell to the floor. “Gee, Detective Opara, you see, there was no one in the outer office and I just happened to be passing the desk and the phone rang. I thought it would be all right if I answered it. I mean, it was all right, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. I just—”

  Reardon’s voice was hard. “Yeah, I know what you just. Who’s Captain Gene O’Brien?”

  “A friend of mine.” She hesitated, but couldn’t resist adding, “Why?”

  “Personal friend, professional friend, family friend—what?”

  Reardon could see the deliberation; the sharpening process, the careful calculation. Without saying it, she was telling him to mind his own business.

  He broke the silence. “You see, when a member of my squad gets a call from any other member of the Police Department—particularly from a ranking officer who is not connected with this squad in any way—I have certain questions. Like what the hell is this all about?”

  “Captain O’Brien is a personal friend,” she said quietly. “He’s never called me before at the office. He probably tried to get me at home and couldn’t reach me.”

  “Yeah, he said something like that. Also that he’d call again tonight, at home. He works at the Communications Bureau?”

  Christie met his eyes steadily. Reardon had checked Gene out. Probably knew the color of his eyes and how tall he was and what marks he got in math in the seventh grade.

  “I’m sure you know, Mr. Reardon.”

  Reardon bit down hard on his back teeth and exhaled. He had known, of course, that this captain was a personal friend of Christie’s. Her confirmation came as no surprise. What surprised him, or irritated him, was his reaction to her response. What the hell did it matter to him that Christie was seeing some goddam captain? Not a damn. It had nothing to do with him. Nothing. He had no reason to be bothered by the concerned, articulate deep masculine voice asking if Christie was all right. He just didn’t like being a message taker, that’s all.

  “Go on home and get some sleep, Christie. Tomorrow is going to be another long day.”

  When she left, he snatched up the balled scrap of paper and flung it into the wastebasket and returned to his desk. He had enough problems without getting involved with Opara and her boyfriend.

  He held the papers before him and said softly, “Something’s wrong, all right.” A hell of a lot of money was coming into this hokey Church of the Kingdom Here and Now. Too goddam much money: big money. Reardon sat hunched over his pad, making notes, and what it added up to was a great deal of wrong. He took out a small leather-bound notebook and thumbed through the indexed pages. He would have to be very, very careful on this. Only people he was absolutely sure of; they would be stepping on toes and maybe opening up a huge can of worms. He dialed the phone number next to the name of a lieutenant in charge of a narcotics squad in lower Manhattan.

  A woman answered and asked him to wait for a moment; her husband was putting the children to bed. Then, after a series of household noises, a familiar voice said, “Hey, Casey, how’s things?”

  “Got something that might be very explosive. I’m going to need all the competent help I can get. Might involve a lot of people—Department people.”

  There was a momentary silence, then: “When shall we get together?”

  By 11:00 P.M. Reardon had completed five similar phone calls. He put the small leather book back in his desk drawer, locked the desk and rubbed his eyes. He felt sick, and before this damn thing was over a lot of other people were going to feel a lot sicker.

  FIFTEEN:

  NO ONE IN HIS squad would have described Stoner Martin as a mean man. But then, no one in the squad had ever seen Stoner Martin exactly as he was being viewed by a massively fleshed individual known, appropriately, as Fat Man.

  In the considered estimation of Fat Man, Stoner Martin was a mean man. Not a loud, grab-your-throat and crack-your-skull mean man, but even worse: the kind of mean man who purposely spoke so quietly that you had to hold your breath so as not to miss a word he whispered at you, because if you missed one word, it might mean you blew what it was he wanted. There was something so held-in about Stoner Martin, you just knew that if he let go, you would be a dead man.

  Stoner Martin leaned both of his elbows on the polished bar and gazed into the drink he held between his palms. His eyes did not look at Fat Man, but his voice, soft and tight, was directed at him. Fat Man hunched his three-hundred-pound body as close to Stoner as he could get.

  “You locate this boy for me and you do it real quiet, because I don’t want anything to happen to him. Do it nice and easy with no alarms, Fat Man. You see, I got to get me this boy. You understand, of course, that if I don’t get me this boy, why, then, I’ll just have to get myself someone else. Maybe somebody big and fat, you know?” The detective sipped from his glass as he held it, rotating it slowly.

  “Why, Stoner, my man,” Fat Man began, then stopped and awkwardly removed his hand from the hard lean shoulder as the dark head turned slowly in his direction and regarded the fleshy touch with a withering look that traced its way up along the fat arm and clear into his eyes. This bastard could make your whole body shake just by blinking those mean black eyes once. “No offense, Detective Martin. Hell, man, I forgot you don’t like to be touched.” He settled uneasily on the stool. “Hell, let me tell you this. These, young kids, they don’t have nothing much to do with us older cats, like me. Why, man, they crazy little tiger cubs and they got a world of their own. Why, they crazy little cats, all the time howling how they going to take over everything and them learning how to chop people up with their hands and like that.”

  Stoner Martin held the cool glass against his chin, his mouth open slightly and his eyes smiling as if they could see right through Fat Man. Fat Man laughed but even he was aware that the laugh sounded scared. He would like to jam that glass right into the cop’s throat, but the cop just kept on with that real cool stare and the fat man couldn’t stop talking, like the cop was asking him questions, only the cop didn’t say another word.

  “You know how these young clowns are, Detective Martin. Hell, they don’t consider me nothing like them. Why, God, they consider me a white man, compared to them. Can you buy that?” He leaned back against the bar, and the rolls of damp flesh, hot against his heavy sports shirt, spilled over the bar, and his loud, unhappy laugh filled the room, which was not as cool as the blueness reflected by the tinted mirrors suggested. The bartender, a fleshless man who shone purple in the glow, glanced at Fat Man, then at Stoner Martin. He moved to another section of the bar and became very busy polishing some glasses.

  The detective spun about on his stool so that he didn’t have to move his eyes. They just naturally rested on the heavy face before him. He put his glass down and reached out with an index finger, which was as cold and hard as steel. The finger found some vulnerably painful spot right where a nerve was hidden be
neath the heavy flesh. “You don’t tell me any of your problems of alienation, man. You just find out where this boy Champion is. You dig?”

  It didn’t make any sense that the pain was so intense. Hell, he was just poking with one finger. Fat Man tried to lean back, to avoid the prodding. “It’s going to be tough. You know that, don’t you? Real tough.”

  “I got faith in you, baby.”

  Fat Man made a loud, gasping strangulating sound. “Why, you are just the end, Stoner. Having such faith in me. Why, God, I just old-time to these young ones, running around the streets and busting windows and beating up on cops and such. They don’t talk to the likes of me.”

  Stoner Martin narrowed his eyes and carefully considered the quavering mass of humanity beside him. Fat Man, whose given name was Tomlin Carver, was fifty-one years old. He had been arrested fourteen times; convicted of various misdemeanors seven times; convicted, sentenced and served time on felony raps three times. One more felony conviction and Tomlin Carver would automatically be sent to prison for the rest of his natural life as a habitual criminal.

  But Tomlin Carver was a man of varied and interesting accomplishments and value. He was not only a professional stool pigeon; he also supplied information to various members of his particular community relative to impending “showcase” cleanups on narcotics, prostitution, gambling and all other illegal operations well in advance of such actions. Those who were taken in such drives were those few remaining independents who were not incorporated into the unofficial tangle of threads that related certain elements of law enforcement to certain elements of the criminal community. Detective Martin was not certain—not really certain—of how deeply Carver was involved, but he was a good prospect for his purposes.

  “Fat Man,” the detective said quietly, “I’m going to lay it right on you. Going to tell it to you like it is, just once, so listen real good.”

  Fat Man held himself so still, he could hear his own swallowing sounds.

  “Now, you’re going to tell me, by noon tomorrow, not a minute later, exactly where this Champion is. That is a fact. Now, here’s another fact. I got me a little plastic bag, oh, about yea big.” Stoner Martin separated his thumb and index finger, holding them about two inches apart, and Fat Man’s eyes were fascinated by them. “Weighs maybe half a pound, ounce more, ounce less. Pure, untouched, uncut heroin. Collected, a speck at a time, over my sixteen years in the Police Department.” The fingers closed inside a solid fist and the voice was still smooth and velvety, but his eyes were shining with a hard glow. “That would about do it for you, right?”

  Fat Man felt a twitch alongside his left eye. He could feel the jerking but he had no control over it. “What? What’s that got to do with me? Hell, I don’t handle no junk. Never. Not stuff. Not this fat boy, indeed not.” Stoner Martin just kept staring at him, and a flood of words began to gush from Fat Man’s heavy lips. “Not since—oh, you know. Okay, so I handled stuff once, but that was long, long ago. Many long years past, when I was just a dumb punk in Chi. You know about that, huh? Sure, you know all about everything, I guess. But junk—now? Not me. Not once in all these many years. I’m not too bright, but I learned, yessir, learned the hard way.” He wiped his forehead and his voice was low. “How’s that little bag of stuff connect up with me, anyhow?”

  “Where’d I get my little bag of stuff?” Stoner asked quietly. The effect of his words was incredible. The body before him oozed large beads of sweat; the material of the sports shirt was soaked through and the fat hands trembled as they smeared the moisture across his broad cheeks.

  The laugh was nervous. “Oh, hell, Detective Martin, you’d never do that. I known you many years. I’d lay my life on one fact. You not the kind of cop plants something on somebody. No, sir, not you. Why, you the one and only hundred-percent cop ever been around here. Everybody knows that.”

  Stoner’s voice was as fine and deadly as a honed razor. “That’s exactly why I could get away with it, Fat Man. Because of my reputation. No one would doubt I took it off you. Then it would be goodbye Fat Man. Life on a fourth felony.”

  Tomlin Carver no longer smiled or attempted to smile. There was an unaccustomed hardness in his voice. “All right, all right. I’ll call you tomorrow. By noon. See what I can do.”

  He watched the tall lean figure move through the darkened bar and wished Stoner Martin had raised his arm over his eyes to protect himself from a rain of deadly bullets instead of from the sharp biting late afternoon sun that hit him as he reached the street. He finished his own drink, then picked up the remainder of the detective’s drink and swallowed. He’d like to bury them all: Stoner Martin and all cops everywhere. And yes, those friggin’ little dumb black boys with their secret army of choppers who really thought they were going to set up that Secret Nation.

  And he’d like to bury Darrell Maxwell Littlejohn, too, for making it all so complicated. But now he’d have to go and see him.

  SIXTEEN:

  DETECTIVE SAM FARRELL SIPPED the homemade wine and nodded his approval. The old woman noticed the red spot that was rapidly spreading into the grey gabardine fabric of his trousers, and despite his protests she dashed from the room, returned with a clean washcloth and dabbed at his trouser leg.

  “No, no problem, Mrs. D’Angelo. It’ll come out in the cleaners. Fine wine, real good.”

  Patrolman Nicholas Linelli waited until his mother-in-law left the room. He was a pale man with a worried expression. “Detective Farrell, no kidding, how do things look? I mean, you know, you guys are working on it.”

  Sam swallowed the rest of the wine and felt the warmth creep down into his chest. “Wow, that stuff’s got strength. Well, look, Nick, we’re working on various aspects of the case, you know? I know my part, another guy knows his part. I can’t tell you too much, except that all our work is in your best interests. See, what I want to point out is that anything I find out, well other people can find out too, you know?”

  Linelli wiped his hand across his dry mouth. The large man sprawled on the couch regarded him with large, round candid blue eyes. “Like what?” he asked nervously.

  Detective Farrell shrugged. “Well, like I wouldn’t expect you to volunteer any detrimental information about yourself, like to the newspapers or anything. But on the other hand, you got to come clean with us, you know?”

  Linelli glanced toward the kitchen. “Let’s keep it low, okay? My wife and her mother been crying for two days now, since it happened.” He sat beside Farrell and lit a cigarette. “What do you want to know, Detective Farrell?”

  “Well, when I interviewed you right after the kid took one in the head—I mean, I know a lot of people were all talking at once and all, but remember, I asked you a couple of questions. Wait a minute.” Farrell dug in his jacket pocket and there was a sudden flurry of small papers in the air. He leaned forward, collected them, sorted them out, then jammed them back into his pocket. “Now, see, you told me you didn’t belong to no organizations but the VFW and the church and like that. But, see, Nick, you belong to a couple of organizations and signed a couple a petitions you never mentioned, you know?”

  Linelli’s face was bloodless. “Well, you know. Hell, they were busing those colored kids in, okay. I didn’t say nothing. Then they were going to start busing our kids out. I mean, how the hell would you like it? The school two blocks away and they’re planning to send my three little girls into the colored school twelve blocks from the house to even things up. Sure, I signed a protest thing against it. Sure, I belong to a property-owners association formed to fight it. It’s legal isn’t it?”

  “Sure, kid, sure it’s legal. I’m not questioning that. Just, see, you should have told me. Would have saved me some legwork, you know. Look, the reason I’m here is just that: to save me some additional work. Wait a minute.” He dug into his shirt pocket, glanced at a scrap of paper. “The sergeant you worked with that day—Sergeant Frankel TPF guy—said you made some wisecracks in the van, when he was briefing the
men. Like you thought those demonstrators were going overboard or something?”

  Linelli’s face was blank. “Remarks? I don’t know. We all—everybody was cracking wise. You know how guys do. My God, is that sergeant trying to crucify me too?”

  Sam patted his arm. “Naw, nothing like it. He just told me that he didn’t know you, but that you and most of the other guys seemed unhappy about the assignment. Nothing to worry about—he had no official statement to make, this was just over a cup of java. Now, look, reason I’m here, as I said—anything else, anything at all, I should know. Because if there is, I’ll find out, so save me the trouble.”

  Slowly and definitely, Linelli shook his head. Without realizing it, he raised his right hand. “I swear to God, on my mother’s grave, on my children’s lives: nothing. Just those protest things about them busing my kids out. And not even against the colored kids coming in. That was okay by me—hell, kids are kids. I just didn’t want my kids going out.” His voice broke and he covered his eyes. “What’s all that got to do with it anyway? I didn’t shoot that Everett kid. They know I didn’t. The lab men know I didn’t fire any weapon. And I’m left-handed. All my life I been left-handed, so what was the gun doing in my right hand? For God’s sake, can’t you people get this out into the open? This is killing me and my family. My kids are upstate at my sister’s. They know something’s wrong, but they don’t know what. When will it get cleared up?”

  Farrell felt clumsy and uneasy. He pounded the cop’s shoulder and tried to sound reassuring. “It’s a little more involved, Nick. See, we want to do a nice, round, complete job. It’ll come out better for you in the long run. You’ll see, kid, it’ll all come out better.”

  The patrolman nodded but he did not feel reassured.

  SEVENTEEN:

  THE MAYOR HAD A handsome, boyish face suddenly gone old. The smile lines around his eyes were crumply as tissue paper and there were deep hollows in his cheeks. He didn’t remember when he had slept last. He remembered a succession of hot and cold showers, meals taken standing up in corridors or behind his desk between meetings. The meetings all ran together in his mind: angry, frightened, concerned, indignant, righteous, saddened faces confronting him, all asking him “What’s being done?”