The Big Exit

by David Carnoy

  The station is nicer than he remembers from his one other visit years ago. He realizes why: it’s new. During his trial, he’d heard people talking about redoing the station and the civic center, and now the project is completed.

  “If you need to go to the bathroom, knock on the door,” Madden says.

  Back at the View, before they’d arrested him, he’d downed another whisky—a double—and made his last substantive comments before he stopped talking. “Someone was putting the heat on Mark,” he said. “They wanted some dough. I think he thought it was me. He sent over some muscle to send a message. I reported it to the SFPD. That’s all I gotta say. This nonsense, I got nothin’ to do with. I didn’t kill nobody.”

  Not long after that Madden took a call and stepped away from the table. He was gone awhile. A good ten minutes. When he came back, the place was getting ready to close. He said:

  “Good news, Richie. The judge just issued a warrant to search your apartment. You want to come along?”

  He rode back with them to his apartment and waited outside while they snapped some pictures and searched it. About forty-five minutes later, Madden and Billings came out with some of his belongings sealed in plain paper evidence bags, which got his heart racing more than it already had been.

  What the hell did they take? The diving knives? My laptop?

  “What you got there?” he asked Billings, who was in the process of lifting the hatch to the trunk of Madden’s SUV.

  “You’ll know soon enough. You got a lawyer?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “You want us to get you a lawyer? You need some numbers?”

  He shook his head, the gravity of what was happening finally sinking in. He’d already texted Ashley three times, asking her for help. “They got a warrant,” he wrote. “Searching apartment now.”

  “Don’t say anything,” she wrote back. “Keep your mouth shut, whatever you do.”

  Too late. Now he was fucked. They were going to arrest him. And to make matters worse, they were getting cocky about it. Which could mean one of two things. They either thought they had him nailed or they thought they almost had him nailed but were missing the hammer and were hoping he’d give it to them.

  His original lawyer, Max Fischer, actually had died, but he could have called the attorney from the firm, a woman named Gail Stevens who’d represented him at his parole-board hearing. The only problem was he couldn’t afford her. And more than getting charged, the thought of how he was going to pay for decent representation was what was really weighing on him. He might as well have been walking gravely injured into an emergency room without insurance. He’d be in debt for years. If his father were alive, he would have called him, because his father wouldn’t forgive him if he didn’t. But he’d already cost his family so much the first go-around, he couldn’t bear the thought of making the call to his mother. She’d be devastated. He just couldn’t. He asked Ashley to speak to Lourdes. He’d seen that guy Krisberg in the office. Maybe he’d cut him a deal.

  “When do I get a call?” he asked.

  “Face the vehicle,” Billings said, taking him by the arm and gently turning him. “You’ll get your call when you get to the station house. But looks like you’ve been texting your head off. Who you talking to?”

  Richie was sober enough to know that in some ways they actually didn’t mind him texting. It would later give them a record of whom he’d contacted and what he’d said. And all too often people made incriminating statements in texts.

  “A friend,” he murmured as Billings cuffed him.

  That was how it went down. In the car ride down, he kept hoping he’d drunk enough to keep them from questioning him right away. Sure enough, when they got to the station house, they allowed him to go to the bathroom and make a call (he spoke to Ashley), then left him in the holding cell.

  Richie sat on the bench for a few minutes, waiting for someone to return, but no one did. Madden hadn’t said anything but Richie knew they needed him completely sober. Taint the beginning, you taint the end, he thinks now, lying down on the bench, reminded of something a lawyer had once told him. He likes the sound of that. Tainted beginnings, tainted ends. And then for some reason he remembers a book he’d read in his high-school advanced-placement English class. The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski. A goddamn holocaust novel. Perfect.

  Tainted beginnings, tainted ends, he repeats to himself over and over, finally falling asleep.

  They wake him at seven thirty. A younger, clean-cut cop with short blond hair who looks like he lifeguards on the weekends gives him a towel and a cheap travel toiletry kit that reminds him of something you’d get on an airplane when you fly overseas coach class. He tells Richie to get his shoes on. He can brush his teeth and wash his face if he wants.

  After he’s through in the bathroom, two more uniformed cops lead him into an interrogation room. It looks very similar to the “cell” he’d slept in but is about twice as large and has a rectangular gray institutional-looking table in the middle of it with a single chair on one side of the table and two chairs on the other. There’s a window on the wall across from the single chair. He can’t see out the window but assumes whoever is on the other side can see into the room.

  They make him wait in the room by himself for almost ten minutes. Then Madden enters, trailed by a tall, thin black guy Richie vaguely remembers. Short-cropped afro, pleasant eyes and a strong, angular jaw. Would be better-looking except his face has pockmarks on his cheeks and neck from cystic acne.

  “Good morning, Mr. Forman,” Madden says. “This is Detective Burns. I believe you’ve met before.”

  “Déjà vu,” Richie says.

  They’d brought breakfast. Madden puts a cup of coffee down in front of him along with a bag that he says contains a bagel and cream cheese, a banana, and a bottle of water.

  “If you’ve got any special requests, we’ll see what we can do,” Madden says accommodatingly.

  Richie rubs his eyes. His contacts are bothering him a little.

  “How ’bout some contact-lens solution?” he asks. “My peepers are starting to bark like hell.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “And a newspaper wouldn’t be bad. I like to read the sports section in the morning, you know.”

  “We switched to iPads,” Madden says without missing a beat. “Since we got the new digs, there’s been a push to go green. We’re running a little experiment. Going as paperless as possible.”

  “For real? All you guys got iPads?”

  “Not everybody. We got ten. Corporate donation.”

  “Nice. And I heard Facebook has taken over the old Sun campus over by the 101. That’s gotta feel pretty good. Little civic pride.”

  Madden shrugs. He’s hard to read. “City’s happy,” he says. “Free publicity. And they’ll probably get some concessions down the road. Who knows, maybe Belle Haven gets a new community center. But I’m not sure what it really does except make it more expensive to buy a home here after they go public. They’re on the other side of 101, basically off on their own. They’re building it out. Meals in-house, all that fun stuff.”

  “Kind of a self-contained little utopia,” Burns comments. “I wouldn’t leave. Ever. They should have a free senior center and crematorium on campus.”

  Richie takes the bagel out of the bag and inspects it. It’s plain and passably soft. He then pulls the top off the coffee and takes a look.

  “Milk and one sugar,” Madden says.

  “You remembered.”

  “I’ve got a good memory.”

  They let him eat for a bit before they finally get down to business.

  “You understand the seriousness of the situation you’re in, don’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “We just want to make that clear, Mr. Forman,” Burns adds. “And we’re going Mirandize you now. I’m going to read you your rights and then have you sign a Miranda waiver. You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to answer any
questions without a lawyer present. Do you want to make another call?”

  Richie takes a sip of the coffee, doing his best to appear nonplussed.

  “I’m good for now. Go ahead. I’ll be grading on elocution. No pressure.”

  Burns, who’s got more of a sense of humor than Richie first thought, cracks a smile. He then reads him his rights slowly and deliberately, enunciating each word. “How was that?” he asks when he’s through.

  “A for effort,” Richie says.

  If Madden’s getting impatient with his shenanigans, he doesn’t show it. He lets him have another bite of his bagel, then makes him read the top of the form aloud and sign it at the bottom. After he signs, Madden says, “We’re going to ask you some questions now.”

  “Shouldn’t we do a sound check first?”

  Madden looks at Burns, then back at Richie. Before either of them can respond, Richie says:

  “Those pictures of the Tongans, the ones in my laptop case, you find ’em?”

  Madden nods. “We did.”

  “You seen either of those mugs before?”

  “We’ve got them up on the wire,” Burns says. “The SFPD said they didn’t turn up anything.”

  Madden: “So, you really think someone was trying to blackmail Mr. McGregor?”

  “Looked that way.”

  “And you had no part in that? You didn’t say to one of your old buddies from prison, hey, I’ve got an easy mark, you just have to put the screws in a little and we can pick up some fast cash.”

  He laughs. Not a defiant snort, a real chuckle.

  “What’s so funny?” Madden asks.

  “Just the way you said it, like they were guys I’d gone to school with or something. You know, college buds you meet up with at a reunion and knock back a couple of cold ones, talk about the good ol’ days raping and ripping people off.”

  “You were in there awhile,” Burns says. “You had friends. Anybody you close to out now? You talk to anyone?”

  He shakes his head, a touch of sadness coming into his eyes.

  “You sure about that?” Burns says a little more aggressively. “I noticed a little tentativeness there.”

  “No,” he says firmly.

  Madden: “You wanna give us some names, so we can check on their status?”

  “You remember this guy Dr. Jaron? Dr. Ben Jaron?”

  “The anesthesiologist?” Madden says.

  “Yeah, him.”

  “Man, I haven’t heard that name in a while. You remember him, Burns?”

  Burns remembers.

  “Well, he’s still locked up,” Richie says. “Go talk to him.”

  Madden: “You guys were tight?”

  “Whatever you want to call it. We played board games, philosophized about the state of the world, traded dating stories. His batting average was a lot better than mine. I tried to sleep with broads while they were awake, which can be challenging.”

  His closest friend in the pen was a rapist, an anesthesiologist who brought women back to his home, knocked them out, took pictures of them naked and had sex with them while they lay there unconscious. It only took about two years and ten victims before he got caught.

  “Who else?” Burns asks.

  He tells them he had another pal, Alain Dessain, who liked to rent apartments for the week then sublet the same apartment to fifty other people for the year, walking away with their deposits. He was popped doing it in San Francisco, got off with probation, then moved to New York, pulled the same stunt there, went to jail, came back to San Francisco and picked up a five-to-seven bid for defrauding charities and violating his parole. The guy was a three-time loser but he was smart. His biggest flaw was his limited repertoire; he kept committing the same crimes over and over. A light-skinned black guy who moved well among the various prison factions, he talked a good game. Richie thought he’d have made a great political fund-raiser and organizer. Dessain agreed. But now it was too late for that.

  Way too fucking late.

  The big problem, Dessian liked to point out, was that once you got a record you ended up behind the eight ball. It was hard to get hired, even for crappy jobs, especially when the economy was bad and especially when you were black and had no college diploma. He didn’t want to drive a bus. Menial labor wasn’t part of his DNA. What was he supposed to do? He liked hanging out with successful people. He felt that’s where he belonged, he just didn’t want to do what it took to really get there. He knew he was being stupid but people were stupid. They were consumed with their own political correctness and they kept giving him their money because they didn’t want to appear racist for not trusting him. Was that such a crime, showing “wine-sniffing Marina bitches” how stupid they were?

  Richie smiles at Madden but he’s really smiling at the memory of Dessain’s perverse logic. There was a lot of that in prison. A lot of perverse logic.

  “Mark offered me some money when I got out of prison,” he says. “I didn’t take it. Why would I then go out of my way to try and squeeze it out of him now?”

  Burns: “Circumstances change. Maybe someone was trying to squeeze you. Maybe you owed someone.”

  “Look, I reported the incident to the police. Yeah, it was a few days later, but I reported it.”

  “Why’d you wait?” Madden asks.

  “I hate to break it to you, but based on previous experience, I don’t have much fondness for cops. But a couple of friends convinced me that it was in my best interest to put something on the record.”

  “In case you got caught?” Burns jumps in.

  Richie sighs. “Come on. If I were blackmailing him, why would I report it?”

  Madden: “To cover it up.”

  “That’s rich,” he says, kicking the Jersey accent up a notch. “You fellas got a fertile imagination. You do an internship at Disney Imagineering? You’d be good. I’d give you the gig.”

  Madden smiles. “You’d be surprised by the crazy, stupid stuff people do. Even here in Mayberry.”

  “Yeah, you’d be surprised,” Burns agrees. “What about that guy a few months back, the one who got stabbed by his wife?”

  “Yeah, that’s a good one,” Madden says. “Tell him about that.”

  “Okay, get this. A couple months back a guy calls 911. Says his wife stabbed him. So we go over there and the paramedics are there and there’s actually a decent amount of blood. And the guy has a wound on his side. It’s not insignificant but it’s right above his belt, you know, right where his tire roll is. He’d gotten stabbed in the fatty part. It looked like he needed stitches. And the guy’s yelling about how his wife tried to kill him. Well, she tells a different a story. She says she never went near him.”

  “We brought them in separately,” Madden says.

  “And we go back and forth,” Burns goes on. “And I think to myself, the wife actually sounds pretty convincing. A little hysterical at times but she sticks to her story and never deviates from it. Very consistent.”

  “The guy, however, starts to introduce some small discrepancies. How she approached him. From what side. You know, little stuff like that. We brought him back a second time and finally after about an hour of questioning he admits that he stabbed himself. You know why? Because he knows he and his wife are going to get divorced and he doesn’t want her taking the kids. So, he thinks, hey, I’ll hit her up with something that’ll stick her with a police report. And maybe it doesn’t mean I’ll get custody, but I’ll use it as leverage so I don’t get screwed. That’s how he’s thinking. Intelligent guy. A VP at some tech firm.”

  “Marketing guy,” Madden says

  “Oh, those marketing guys,” Richie says. “They’re not so bright.”

  “Well, you get the idea,” Madden says. “You wouldn’t believe the twisted crap people do, Mr. Forman. So yes, we have fertile imaginations.”

  “Well, I’m telling you someone was trying to blackmail the guy.”

  “We know someone was trying to blackmail him.”
/>   “You do?”

  “He reported it himself ten days ago to the Sunnyvale police.”

  “He filed a report?”

  “Yeah, someone had sent him a letter saying they wanted two hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

  “And what was the threat?”

  “He got a note. It said, ‘I know you were driving that car that night.’”

  “Yeah. And?”

  “Apparently, whoever sent the note threatened to provide evidence to the authorities that he’d been driving the car.”

  “I’d like to see that evidence.”

  “I’m sure you would.”

  “And how was the exchange supposed to take place?”

  “It never got that far.”

  “Well, did you analyze the note? Send it to the FBI?”

  “We just heard about it late last night.”

  “Why Sunnyvale?” Richie asks.

  “That’s where his office is. That’s where the note was delivered.”

  “By snail mail?”

  “We’re not at liberty to discuss that,” Burns says.

  “Well, what were the next steps?”

  Madden: “Next steps?”

  “I don’t know what you guys call it. What was the action plan? You guys have action plans, don’t you?”

  “Look, let’s talk about your trip down here yesterday,” Madden says, realizing his suspect is controlling the conversation too much.

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss that without my lawyer present. I’ve told you I was on the six forty-five train. I came in at around noon. I forget the exact time. I brought my bike ’cause I don’t got no license. You can confirm that.”

  “Where’s your lawyer?” Madden asks.

  “I don’t know. Someone’s working on it for me. What I’m willing to discuss right now is what I discussed already with the SFPD. When do I get my hat and ring back?”