Thirteen Confessions

by David Corbett

  The judge signed off and Kolchek introduced me to a tech for the county attorney’s office named Pritchard, who’d go in and actually set things up.

  “I’ll go with,” I told Kolchek.

  “No, I will,” he said. “I’m a pretty good lock pick and we only need two men inside.”

  “What about the dog?”

  Kolchek cocked his head. “Dog?”

  “A white shepherd,” I said. “It’s in the surveillance reports.”

  “Right. I remember. What’s your point?”

  “I used to work canine. The white ones are unpredictable, you don’t want to go in there alone.” That was mostly crap, but there was no way I wasn’t going with them. I wanted a look inside that house.

  The next day, when Mike and Rhonda were at the restaurant, Kolchek walked up their front walk and took a Polaroid, then went to the hardware store, bought an identical door and set it up in his office, practicing till it took only forty-five seconds to pop both locks.

  Meanwhile, I scoped the neighborhood for the best spot to place the undercover van. Mike and Rhonda lived in a maze-like community of townhouses grouped in quads, and the geometry of the place was all wrong; there was no place within a hundred yards of their unit to park the van and not stand out.

  Then I saw there was a unit for rent one quad over. We could set up the wire room in there, as long as we kept a low profile.

  I hit up Tally’s office for the rent and two days later, when Mike and Rhonda and most of the neighbors were off to work, we moved our guys in. Me, Kolchek, and Pritchard headed over for our entry to plant the bugs, while a ram car took up position on the street in case Mike or Rhonda came back while we were still inside the house.

  When we got to the front porch, though, we found a brand new security gate with two additional locks, barring access to the door. Kolchek just stood there, staring, holding his lockpick tools. “This isn’t happening.” He glanced at his watch and swallowed hard. Inside, the dog was barking like the place was on fire.

  I started heading for the back of the house. “Bet you’re glad you brought me along now.”

  There was a privacy wall around the patio in back and I scaled it, dropping down onto the pavers. A sliding Arcadia door led inside, with an insert for a doggy door. I got down on the ground, reached through and flicked aside the dowel lodging the door in place. The dog realized what was happening then, and as I slipped inside he turned a corner and charged toward me, hackling up, fangs bared.

  I reached frantically in my pocket for the syringe of Isoforine I’d brought along to knock him out, only to sink my thumb into the needle. I played air banjo with my hand for a second, saying something original like, “Goddamnmotherfuck,” then glanced up and saw I wasn’t the only one to miscalculate.

  As his paws hit linoleum, the dog lost traction, sliding toward me helplessly. Stepping forward, I caught him under the jaw with a kick so fierce he cartwheeled backwards.

  “Get in the god damn bathroom!”

  The dog sulked off, mewling, as I checked my thumb, hoping adrenalin would ward off any grogginess. Suddenly, I remembered my dream from weeks before—the lonely house, the wounded dog.

  A chirp from my radio broke the spell.

  I clicked on. “Yeah?”

  “We heard that, detective.” It was one of my guys in the wire room. In the background, laughter. “Punt the pooch—that what they teach you in canine?”

  I switched off my radio and searched out the front door. When I got there I found out the security gate was locked from inside, requiring a key. “This nails it,” I told Kolchek through the grating. “Somebody’s tipping this guy off.”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Kolchek whispered, standing exposed with Pritchard on the porch. “Get us inside.”

  Kolchek lacked the physique to scale the privacy wall, so I found a window in a small utility room near the back for the two men to crawl through. Once everybody was inside, we headed to the living room to set up shop. Kolchek got busy taking pictures of the room on his phone so we could put it back the same way we found it.

  “Look at this,” I said, pointing to the couch. There were sheets, blankets, a pillow. “Christ, she’s kicked him out of bed. They’re in the middle of another fight.”

  “Get to work,” Kolchek said. He was testy and pouring sweat. It dawned on me then that, despite a first-rate mind, Kolchek lacked any serious operational experience. The glitch with the locks had rattled him.

  Pritchard hooked up his transmitters to the phone lines. Even though the service had been cut off, the wires still held voltage. We set them up in the three different rooms as planned, and Pritchard asked me to contact the wire room to see if we were live. Only then did I realize I hadn’t switched my radio back on after that crack about my dropkicking the dog.

  When I flipped the button, a voice came through almost screaming. “Jesus, Boghossian, where’d you go? We’ve been trying to contact you for ten minutes. The wife’s on her way, just west of Pepperwood. You’re lucky she stopped for smokes. Move!”

  We rushed to test the transmitters through the wire room and got an all-clear. Kolchek’s hands shook so bad from nerves he couldn’t screw the plates back on the phone plugs, so I took the screwdriver from him, told him to pack up with Pritchard, I’d close up.

  They scrambled out the utility room window and I locked it behind them. Turning back to finish up, something caught my eye, something I’d overlooked before.

  On a shelf near the door, a small daypack rested among some other odds and ends.

  We had no warrant to search the house or its contents, but I took the daypack down regardless and opened it up: A ski mask. A pair of black garden gloves. A .38 snubnose and a dozen plastic cuffs.

  There was a desk in the room and I laid the contents out, took out my phone and snapped a picture. This was a trophy, not evidence—I wouldn’t even tell anybody about it, let alone show them the snapshot. The whole investigation might vanish down a hole if guys started jabbering.

  I packed everything up again and put the daypack back where I’d found it, but then my curiosity got the best of me and I searched the desk. In the bottommost drawer, I found a photograph—Mike with Cavanaugh, up in the mountains somewhere. They were hunting together, carrying shotguns, the best of friends from their smiles. Rhonda, I guess, had snapped the picture.

  I took out my phone again. This too, of course, wasn’t evidence, and I told myself it didn’t really prove anything. It was just a reminder—my reminder—of what I might be up against.

  I ran back to the dining room and was just about finished putting things back in place when the voice came through my radio again: “Boghossian, she’s at the corner.”

  I barked into the mouthpiece, “Ram her!”

  I was making one last check when I heard the collision outside. It was about fifty yards from the house, some undercover cop plowing into Rhonda’s back end at the stop sign.

  I opened the bathroom door and told the dog to stay, then headed toward the patio, fit the doggy door insert into place and reached through and slipped the dowel back onto the runner.

  Through the glass of the sliding door, I saw the large white dog slink into view. Our eyes met. He flinched a little, tail lodged between his legs. Ashamed, like everybody else.

  It was up to the boys in the wire room now. I checked in as often as I could, but the days went by, nothing. Mike knew we’d been in there—tipped off by Cavanaugh, I supposed, something I had to keep to myself.

  Besides which, just like I’d thought, Mike and Rhonda were in a tiff, the two of them seldom speaking.

  As time passed, though, I felt strangely encouraged. I knew the dynamics of the simmering fight. I heard the cues—the caustic one-liners, the icy silences. Somehow, some night, something would set them off. And the words would come boiling out, things they
’d regret forever.

  As it turned out, that night came right before Thanksgiving. And the somehow and something of it proved, to my way of thinking anyway, too apropos.

  The surveillance team trailed Mike to a porno arcade near the airport. We’d watched him visit smut shops and strip clubs all over the valley, not sure if he was casing the places or had just grown tired of not getting any at home. This time, though, according to the cop watching from the parking lot, Mike came out wobbly.

  “I may be wrong,” the radio voice reported, “but I think our boy just had himself a little love.”

  When Mike got home he wasn’t inside five minutes before he launched into Rhonda—a fight over nothing, but so blistering everybody in the wire room shuddered. When one of the cops reached out to turn off the recorder, though, honoring the minimization guidelines, I told him, “Wait.”

  We’d gotten our first lead in this case after a brawl between these two. I could justify listening on the grounds there was a reasonable expectation that, in their fury, one of them would say something useful. Accusing.

  The voices kept rising, more and more shrill and cruel. And sexual. One Mormon on the wire crew blushed, but everybody kept listening, each of us wondering what we should do if, at some point, one of them tried to kill the other.

  And yes, finally, we heard scuffling.

  I reached for the phone to dial dispatch as I heard Rhonda stammer oddly, “M-Mike, n-no. No!” The yelling turned to muffled cries, then rhythmic, whimpering moans. Gradually it dawned on us that Mike had decided on a little show’n’tell, to demonstrate for Rhonda what had happened earlier that night, during his encounter at the porn hole.

  “One good pipe cleaning deserves another,” somebody cracked.

  “Turn off the machine,” I said, knowing we’d get nothing of any use now. Adding insult to injury, Mike moved back into the bedroom that night. So that’s how you make your marriage work, I thought, hating him even more.

  The first thirty days played out, no results. We got an extension but none of the departments would pony up the manpower like before. They put rookies on the line-of-sight details. Once, after letting one tail car pass him, Mike chased the cop all the way down Central Avenue, flashing his brights, just to embarrass the kid.

  Meanwhile the wire crew was going batty listening to nothing and more of nothing. We were back where we’d started—we’d never catch Mike Gallardi except red-handed, coming out the back of a restaurant. And everything we knew about him said, if that happened, he’d make us kill him.

  “The man’s gonna be dead by Christmas,” someone quipped, and it became the unofficial slogan of the whole operation, until I told everybody to knock it off.

  “If you’re right, and we take him out, you don’t want to have to explain that little mantra to Internal Affairs.”

  Given where we stood, though, I decided it was time to tickle the wire. I went to Tally again, told him we needed to put some pressure on the couple, inflict a little fear.

  I showed up at Rhonda’s front door when surveillance confirmed Mike was at the restaurant alone. I came in a marked unit, the strobe spinning out at the curb, and the uniform who’d driven stood with me on the porch. No more avoiding the neighbors—we wanted their attention now.

  Inside, the dog went off when the doorbell rang, then went still, dropping his tail, when he saw me beyond the grating.

  Rhonda deadpanned, “Gee, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you and the dog knew each other.”

  I pulled the subpoena from my jacket pocket and gestured for her to open the security gate. “Rhonda Gallardi, you’re to appear before the grand jury on December 5th. You’re not to discuss your scheduled appearance or the subject matter of your testimony with anyone except your lawyer—not even your husband. Understood?”

  She looked taken aback but hardly stunned—some fright in her eyes, but a baiting grin too. I wondered if that was how she looked right before Mike hit her.

  “What if I don’t open the door?”

  “I’ll just set it down on the porch here. Either way, you’re served.”

  The grin faded a bit, her fear quickening into anger as her eyes checked the cop behind me, then slid back. “This is harassment.”

  “Guess how many times a day I hear that.”

  “Because you’re a prick?”

  I nodded for the cop to head back to the car. Once he was out of earshot, I said, “Know what I think? You’ve been trying hard for a long time to make things work—your restaurant, your marriage. I admire that. But the point where things were gonna change is gone for good.” I stuck my hands in my pockets, to look harmless. “You want to turn that around, now’s the time.”

  Women who’ve been hit more than once have a look—sad and yet defiant, almost mocking, but defeated all the same. Come on, I thought, invite me in, talk to me. I knew, given the chance, I could open her up, end this thing. But her eyes turned hard and faraway again. “Leave your papers on the porch,” she said, then shut the door.

  In the wire room, we listened when Mike came home that night. Apparently, what I’d said registered, at least a little, because the good wife unloaded.

  “No more! I’m done.”

  “Shut up, Rhonda.”

  “I’m not gonna lie under oath for you! I never wanted—”

  “I said shut the fuck up, Rhonda!”

  The sound of scuffling came again. I grabbed the phone to dial dispatch. But a minute later, they were outside the house, walking the dog. The perfect couple—Mike with his arm around Rhonda’s shoulder, holding her close, loving, protective, whispering into her hair.

  Rhonda got coached well for her grand jury appearance. All her answers reduced to: I don’t remember. I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I don’t know.

  “He beat us,” I told my guys afterward, like I was confessing to some crime of my own.

  A week later we went in to pull the wires, and I was hardly shocked to see they’d put a three-piece console in front of the wall socket where we’d planted the living room transmitter. They’d been a step ahead of us the whole time. Took us an hour, though, to take the knickknacks down, drag the big thing away, claim our bug then push the monster back and make sure all the junk was in the right place again, even smoothing the carpet so you couldn’t tell anything had moved.

  The operation got bagged, departments couldn’t justify the manpower any more. We went around to restaurants, schooling them on smarter ways to close up at night—it was all we could do at that point. Maybe Mike would decide his luck had played out. Or maybe he’d get reckless, hurt somebody, and the whole thing would heat up all over again.

  On Christmas Eve, I visited Barb and our daughter for the annual holiday torture—unwanted presents, forced smiles. And no talk of Donny, as though the only thing that could keep the pain at bay was a punishing silence.

  Walking to my car, though, I heard the front door click open behind me. Turning, I saw my daughter—she was five then—running toward me in her red velvet dress and green tights. Behind her, Barb waited in the doorway, a silhouette.

  Melodie scooted up, gripped my hand and pulled so I’d bend down. In a solemn whisper, she said, “Don’t be sad, okay? It’s Christmas.”

  “I’m not sad,” I lied, but she’d already dropped my hand, spun around and fled back toward her mother who let her back in, then closed the door.

  Later at my own place, drinking scotch as I flipped through the channels, I got the call from dispatch. A steak house up in Paradise Valley got hit right at closing. I was on my way to the scene when the second call came in. Shots fired. The address made my stomach drop.

  By the time I got to the condo the place was alive with cops, strobes spinning around the complex, mingling eerily with the Christmas lights. I got out of my car and pushed through the crowd of neighbors outside. The cop with the ent
ry/exit log took my name and badge number, then waved me in.

  Techs and detectives ambled about. A spindly tree stood in the living room, sagging with ornaments and tinsel. One of the guys from homicide pointed me back to the kitchen.

  In the breakfast nook, I found a uniformed cop standing guard over Cavanaugh, who sat gripping his head. He glanced up just long enough to catch my eye, his gaze frantic with calculation.

  To the uniform, I said, “Do everybody a favor and stand back a little. He makes a grab for your gun, you may both wind up dead.”

  From the kitchen I made way toward the utility room. A body sheet covered a sprawling form on the floor, a pool of drying blood trailing out from underneath. Spray patterns hazed the walls. An eerie handprint smeared the doorframe.

  In the bedroom, wearing an undershirt and cargo shorts, Rhonda sat with hollow eyes, stroking the shepherd, who lay at her feet whimpering. A female officer stood guard, one hand on her sidearm, as though she intended to shoot the dog if it so much as moved.

  It took a second for Rhonda to sense I was there in the doorway. Glancing up, she blinked, took me in. Her hair was a mess. She looked ashen and lost.

  Cavanaugh would take the fall, pleading out to manslaughter. His story—I can’t say whether it’s true or not, though I tend to believe more than I doubt—was that he and Rhonda, his cop-crazy buddy’s wife, were lovers. The night Mike found out, he knocked Rhonda around a while, then went out, got coked up and took down his first restaurant. He’d been pumping Cavanaugh for information on robberies for ages, claiming he just wanted to know how to protect his own place.

  Mike came back from that first job in an odd heat, feeling invincible—the man he was meant to be—and told Rhonda that, if he ever went down, he’d hand up her lover as the man who’d taught him everything. Cavanaugh had to protect him then, to protect himself, protect Rhonda. He began tipping Mike off on the robbery investigations, staying away from Rhonda once the surveillance began but getting messages through by using the guy who washed dishes at their restaurant as a go-between.