Long Way Down (The Lt. Hastings Mysteries)

by Collin Wilcox

  “So break it in, pig.”

  “No, we won’t break it in. But if we have to get a warrant, it’s your ass. You’ll go back to ‘Q.’ Automatically. Now, I’ve told you what I’m going to do. You’ve got ten seconds to decide. You can stay on the street, or you can go back inside—just for what you decide to do in the next ten seconds. Your choice.”

  “What’d you want to talk about?”

  “I’m starting to count.”

  Five seconds later, the lock clicked and the door opened.

  “Well?” He wore only white undershorts and a barbarian’s necklace: mismatched beads and curved animal teeth, all strung on a leather thong. He stood with legs spread wide, fists clenched on his hips. He was magnificently muscled, with thick arms, heavy shoulders and a hard, flat stomach. He wore a close-cropped beard, streaked with gray. His smooth-shaven skull glistened in the dim light of the hallway. A slim golden earring pierced the lobe of his left ear.

  “Inside, Clark.” I’d given up my grip on the gun butt. I stood with my arms loose at my sides, ready. I watched him smile, saw him step back a single slow, insolent pace.

  “We can talk here, man. We’re inside. That’s what you wanted.”

  “I don’t stand in hallways, Clark. Besides”—I looked him up and down—“besides, there’s a draft.”

  “Yeah. Well, a draft is all right with me, if it’s all right with you. And anyhow”—he moved his head back down the hallway—“anyhow, I’ve got a little—company.”

  “A woman?”

  He slowly nodded, covertly watching me. Illicit sexual relations constituted parole violation.

  “Inside, Clark.”

  He raised his stevedore’s shoulders, sighed, shook his head and finally turned, giving way. Behind me, Markham closed the door and locked it. As I followed Clark down the hallway, I heard Markham on the walkie-talkie. Culligan and Sigler would return to their car, where they’d watch the front entrance.

  Quickly surveying Clark’s living room, I decided that he must have spent thousands on the furnishings. The outsize couch was covered with zebra skins, the walls were hung with African trophies: shields, spears, tribal masks. In contrast, some of the furniture was modern: burnished chrome, combined with oil-rubbed hardwoods. Elaborate hi-fi components were fitted into an intricately carved Mexican chest.

  Clark moved to a black leather safari chair and seated himself with deliberate, graceful insolence. I watched the play of his muscles. It would take four good men to subdue Clark.

  The apartment was spacious: a living room, a kitchen and two bedrooms. The rooms were large, in good repair, newly painted. Behind a decaying ghetto façade, Clark was living in style.

  Leaving Markham with his eye on Clark, I checked the kitchen, the bath and the front bedroom. All of them were in fair order, all of them furnished with a flamboyant, far-out flair. In the back bedroom, tangled in the blankets of a king-sized bed, I found a blonde. She looked to be in her early twenties, and she lay with the bedclothing drawn up tightly beneath her chin. She was very pale. She looked at me with huge, frightened eyes.

  “Do you have any clothes on?” I asked.

  She mutely shook her head.

  “Well, put something on—anything. Then come into the living room.”

  “B—but”—she gulped—“but why? I mean, I d—didn’t d—do anything. I mean, I j—just—”

  “We have a couple of questions we want to ask your boyfriend. We want you where we can see you. And incidentally, the back is covered. So don’t get dressed and decide to leave. What’s your name?”

  “It—it’s Gretchen.”

  “All right, Gretchen. Get dressed. Underwear will do.”

  “B—but I—All I’ve got is panties. I mean, that’s all I ever wear. I—”

  “Just pick something you can’t hide a gun in,” I snapped, “and then get out of that bed. We came here to talk to Clark, not to you. Is that clear?”

  “Y—” She swallowed. “Yessir.”

  “All right, Gretchen. Move it.”

  I returned to the living room, and sat on the zebra-striped couch. I’d left the bedroom door ajar, and I could hear the squeak of bedsprings. Turning to Clark, I said coldly, “This is Thursday, Arnold. Thursday afternoon. Right?”

  His lips twitched in an insolent smile, but his con’s eyes revealed nothing. “If you say so, man.”

  “Do you remember what you were doing Tuesday?”

  “Tuesday?” He frowned elaborately. “Any special time, on Tuesday?”

  “Let’s start with noon. Where were you at noon Tuesday, Arnold?”

  “Well, ah—” Mockingly coy, he shifted his gaze toward the bedroom. “Well, Tuesday, about noon, I was right here. See, I’m taking a few days off from work to take care of this bad back I got, and I need a little, ah, help. So I—”

  “Gretchen was with you. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Oh, come on now, man. You ain’t really interested in Gretchen, are you? Or”—he leered—“or are you? Because if you are, maybe I could—”

  “Listen, Arnold—” I allowed a moment of menacing silence to pass. “The word I get is that you’re smart—con smart, street smart. So you know as well as I do that unless you and Gretchen can produce a marriage license, your parole is kaput. Finished. Right this second. If I want you back inside, all I have to do is make a call to your parole officer. That’s all—just one call.”

  He made no reply. But his entire body had become rigid. His powerful muscles were jungle-tense.

  “Have you got that, Arnold? Do you understand where we’re at, you and I?”

  His lips twisted behind the close-cropped beard. “Yeah, man. I know where we’re at. But then I knew that a long, long time ago.”

  “Okay, Arnold. Good. We’re making progress. Now—” The bedroom door was opening. Dressed in tight-fitting faded Levis and a ribbed red sweater, Gretchen stood in the doorway. Her body was breath-taking. She wasn’t concealing a thing.

  I pointed to a low, sprawling ottoman. “Sit there, Gretchen. Listen, but don’t talk—not unless you’re spoken to. Then answer. Have you got it?”

  Nodding, she moved obediently to the ottoman. She looked like a wistful, chastened child who’d been told to sit in the corner. Her amethyst eyes sulked; her mouth was pursed in a pout.

  I turned back to Clark. “As I was saying, Arnold, this situation is very, very simple, so far as you’re concerned. If you answer all my questions—every one—then I might consider not busting you for parole violation. Repeat, might. Have you got that?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I got that, all right.” The black eyes were obsidian-hard. The muscles were bunched at the torso, corded at the neck and across the upper chest.

  “All right, let’s go through Tuesday, Arnold. What time did—” I caught myself and gestured for Markham to take Gretchen from the room. As he gripped her arm, he brushed her breast with the back of his hand. She drew sharply away from him. I waited for the click of the door latch, then I turned once more to the suspect. “What time did Gretchen leave on Tuesday?”

  For a moment he didn’t answer. Then, speaking with slow, deadly deliberation, he said, “She left about seven o’clock.”

  “In the evening?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “She went home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “She lives with her folks.” He smiled mockingly. “They live in Pacific Heights, as a matter of fact. With all the other rich folks.”

  I nodded, matching his mocking smile. “You do all right for yourself, Arnold. Your old friend Lieutenant Friedman says you’re into the radical chic skam. It looks like you’re making a pretty good thing of it.”

  “Yeah. Well, you know how it is. I mean, you got to keep up with the times.”

  “Is that how you met Marjorie King? On the radical chic circuit?”

  Instantly, his expression changed. He was smiling now. His mus
cles were slackening. He was visibly relaxing—amused, apparently, at the mention of the woman’s name. If he was acting, it was a masterful performance. But cons are good actors.

  “So that’s what it’s all about,” he said softly. “Some junkie sticks a blade in Marge’s old man, and right away you figure it’s me. Naturally. I mean, that’d be the best move in the world for me to make—the way you figure, anyhow. Marge and I have this thing going. She buys me a few knickknacks—” His hand circled the room. “So, right away, I figure that the smartest thing I can do is kill old Tom. I mean, it figures. It’s the old doublethink shit. I mean, it’d be so stupid for me to kill him that no cop in his right mind would suspect me of killing him. So I kill him. Naturally. And Marge and I live happily ever after, down here in the quaint, picturesque Fillmore. We—”

  “King was killed with your knife, Arnold.”

  “With my knife?” The idea seemed to delight him. Lapsing into the broad, cackle-hooting, thigh-thumping patois of the ghetto, he crowed, “Why, man, you got to be jiving me. Why, shit, man, I ain’t used a blade for—lessee—ten years, give or take a year or two. I mean, you go ’round flashing them blades, the first thing you know there’s this other dude. And he got a blade, too. And the fustest thing you know, him and you is a-starting to—”

  “The knife has your prints on it, Arnold. Two nice, clear prints. And a man answering your description was seen leaving the scene of the crime. Now”—I raised two fingers—“now, that’s two strikes, Arnold. Two quick strikes. Let’s forget that you’re a parole violator. I don’t need that, to put you away. I’ve got enough, right now, to book you on suspicion of Murder One. So”—again I paused—“so if I were you, Arnold, I’d try to come up with a pretty good alibi for your whereabouts on Tuesday from, say, eight to midnight. Because if you can’t come up with something pretty good”—I spread my hands—“well, I’m afraid I’m just going to have to take you downtown, Arnold.”

  As I’d been speaking, I’d watched the muscles once more tighten beneath his satin-brown skin. Suddenly he was sweating. He’d come forward in the chair, tensed. His legs were braced beneath him, ready. His hands were tightly clenched. I shifted my body so as to bring my hand closer to my revolver. If he came for me, I’d throw myself backward on the couch, kick him in the gut with both feet, and draw my gun as I rolled off the couch and up to face him, crouched over my revolver.

  He spoke in a low, choked voice. “I been inside for nine years, man. Nine out of the last ten years. I went in when I was twenty-seven, and I’m thirty-six now. A few years, and I’ll be forty years old. And I’m telling you—warning you—that I’m never going back. I mean—” With enormous effort, he unclenched his right hand, raising a trembling forefinger to point at my torso, dead center. “I mean, I’m warning you,” he whispered. “I’m not going back. Every con who gets out of prison says he’ll never go back. And most of them do go back—quick. But I’m not just saying it. I’m telling you: I am never going back inside, no matter what. I don’t know who it’ll be—you, right now, or some other cop somewhere else. But somebody’ll have to kill me. I’ll push it until he does. I’ll push it all the way—all the way to hell. But”—he drew a long, chest-heaving breath—“but I’m not going back.”

  Looking into those black eyes, feeling the full force of his gut-gathered ferocity, I believed him. I’d heard the boast made countless times in the past: “You’ll never take me alive.” But the first sight of a gun—the first crack of a shot—could cancel countless streetcorner vows.

  Yet I believed Arnold Clark. Because at that moment, I knew that he was capable of hurling himself across the room at me, his fingers clawing for my throat. And I knew that only a bullet could stop him.

  But if I believed his threat, could I also believe that he’d killed Thomas King? He had a good thing going with Marjorie King. Would Clark have risked his freedom to get more? It didn’t seem like a smart move. And Clark was smart.

  “We’re up to seven P.M. Tuesday Arnold,” I said quietly. “What happened then?”

  He was making a visible effort to control himself. I could gauge the intensity of the struggle, watching his bared muscles. Finally: “Nothing happened then,” he said. “Not one goddamn thing. I stayed home. All night. I didn’t see nobody all night. Nobody at all.”

  “How about phone calls?”

  For the first time, he faltered. “I got one call. From—Marge.”

  “What time was that?”

  “About nine, I guess.”

  “Was she phoning from home?”

  “I guesso.” He frowned, then shrugged. “Yeah. Sure.”

  “What’d you talk about, Arnold?”

  “Well, hell. I mean, we just talked, you know?”

  “A little sweet talk. Is that it?”

  His lips twisted. “Yeah. Right. A little sweet talk. What’s the matter? Does that bug you?”

  “That you’re making it with white women, you mean? Is that the question?”

  “That’s the question, all right.”

  “Then the answer is no, Arnold. It doesn’t bug me at all. From what I saw of Marjorie King, I can’t say that I particularly like her. So I don’t really give a goddamn whether she gets herself screwed up with someone like you. Is that plain enough?”

  He didn’t answer. The black fire in his eyes still smoldered.

  “How long did you talk?”

  He shrugged. “A half-hour, maybe.”

  “So you’d finished talking about nine thirty.”

  “About that, yeah.”

  “What time did you go to bed?”

  “About ten thirty.”

  “How often do you talk to Mrs. King? Once a day?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you talked to her today?”

  “No, man, not today. I mean”—his eyes slid toward the back bedroom—“I mean, it’s still early. You know? Don’t push me.”

  “Did you talk to Mrs. King yesterday?”

  He frowned, then said carefully, “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did.”

  “What time?”

  “Oh”—he shrugged—“sometime in the afternoon, I guess.” He was idly fingering his pagan necklace.

  “Did she mention that her husband was missing?”

  “No.”

  “What was the conversation about?”

  Again he shrugged, but now his lips parted in a sly, knowing smile. “It was the usual. She likes me to tell her how it was going to be next time we get together. She likes to hear what I’ve got planned. You know—a little advance publicity, you might say.” He was caressing the largest tooth strung on the necklaces: a small curved tusk, ivory-white.

  “What kind of things did you plan, Arnold?”

  “Oh, come on, now. I mean, you’re already giving me all that jive about how I’m a big-ass lawbreaker, and everything. You can’t expect me to—”

  “Answer the question, Arnold. I’ve already got all I need if I want to put you back inside. The rest is just trimming, and you know it. On the other hand, if you help me, you help yourself.”

  “Yeah. Well”—he lazily shrugged—“well, I guess you’d say Marge is a little kinky. Like, she goes for the rough stuff, you know? That’s what most white chicks want. They want to be cuffed around a little, you know?”

  “Does Marge like whips?”

  “No, man. She’s not on that trip. And if she was, I wouldn’t go along. I mean, a little rough stuff, that’s cool. If it turns on the white chicks to get cuffed a little, it makes a lot of black guys feel good to oblige. It’s called relieving aggressions, you know?”

  “That’s how you fell for rape, eh? Relieving your aggressions on white women.”

  The obsidian eyes were expressionless. He still fingered the single small ivory tusk.

  “How about the husband, Arnold? Mr. King? Was he kinky, too?”

  “Well, I never met the dude. But according to Marge, he was a real swinger. I remember her telling me, one
time, how they got into the swapping scene. According to her, it was all his idea.”

  “According to her.”

  He shrugged.

  “How often do you see Mrs. King?”

  “Oh—” He shifted in the chair, elaborately relaxing—preening, rippling his bulging stud’s muscles. “Oh, once a week, I guess. Sometimes twice a week. It depends.”

  I looked around the apartment. “Did Mrs. King give you the money for this?”

  The response came ghetto-quick: “Did she say she did?”

  “I’m asking you, Arnold.”

  “Then the answer is no. Not for everything, anyhow.”

  “Where d’you work? When your back isn’t bothering you.”

  “I work at Gamble’s tire-recapping plant.”

  “How much do you make a week?”

  “Wal, now—” He lapsed into his broad, black man’s drawl. “Wal, I make about eight-five dollars a week. ’Course if I wasn’t a cullud man, and wasn’t on parole, now, I ’spect I’d make considerably more. Like, twice as much, considering that I just about kill myself, recapping those mother-loving little ole tires. But”—he spread his huge hands—“but that’s how it is. You don’t hear me complaining. No siree. Not me. I jus’ takes what they give me, and smile when the boss-man pockets the difference. Because I—”

  “How do you account for the fact that your knife was used to murder Thomas King?”

  “I don’t account for it,” he answered. “Because I don’t believe it. And the reason I don’t believe it is because it’s not true.”

  “Your prints were on the knife, Arnold.”

  “Yeah, well, you tell me that. And, naturally, I’m not calling you a liar. I mean, you’re a cop, and all—a po-liceman. But you know as well as I do, Lieutenant, boss, that unless there’s a full set of prints on that knife, then all you got is a little ole hunch. I mean, unless you got a full set, you don’t have any evidence. Right?”

  I allowed a moment of silence to pass as I stared directly into his eyes. “Let’s put it this way, Arnold,” I said softly. “Let’s just say that I’ve got a problem that you can help me with. The knife. And then let’s say that you’ve got a problem that I can help you with. Your freedom. Now”—I looked at him with bogus solicitude—“now does that help clarify things for you?”