by Thom Whalen
* * *
Immediately after closing at ten that night, I went straight to the police station.
The officer at the front desk was the youngest of the men who had helped arrest Randal that afternoon. His badge said that he was Officer Mansour. The name sounded foreign to me but he didn’t look any different from any other thirty-year-old man in town. He put down the novel that he was reading, a bestseller called The New Centurions by Wambaugh, looked at me, and said, “We’re closed.”
“I never heard of a police station being closed,” I said.
“We close at nine. Always have. Always will.”
“The door wasn’t locked.”
“Nobody’s dumb enough to try to rob a police station.”
Considering some of the jokers that I’d met in the last few weeks, I wasn’t sure about that. “You’re still here,” I said.
“We got a prisoner. Whenever we got someone in lockup, the station has to be manned.
“I want to talk to Randal.”
“You can’t. The station’s closed. Come back tomorrow during working hours.”
“I work during working hours.”
He raised an eyebrow at me and didn’t deign to reply.
“Come on,” I said. “I’m here now. He’s in there. I just want to talk to him. I’m not going to bust him out or anything like that.” I didn’t bother to tell Officer Mansour that Randal was capable of escaping all on his own if he chose.
“He’s asleep,” Mansour said.
“He’ll want to wake up for me.”
Mansour sighed loudly and said, “Wait right there.” He opened a door behind him and looked through it. “You up for company?” he called out.
I heard Randal’s voice reply, “Who?”
Mansour looked back at me, “Who are you?”
“Gunner. Phil.”
“It’s some kid named Phil Gunner.”
“Yeah,” Randal said.
“Back there.” Mansour gestured through the door. “Stand back from the bars and don’t give him anything. You do, and he won’t get another visitor ever again.”
“I won’t.”
“I’ll be watching.” Mansour gestured to a window in the door.
There were two cells. They looked just like you see on television. Concrete block walls and black iron bars across the front. There was a single cot and a stainless steel toilet in the corner.
One cell was empty. Randal was standing behind the bars in the other one. He had a wicked black eye. I wondered where that had come from. I’d seen him get arrested and he hadn’t resisted at all.
“You going to keep looking for who killed Billy?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“The brother knows more than he’s saying. He’s been lying to us from day one. He knows way more about Billy’s business than he claims.”
“I figure that you’re right.”
“Keep in touch with him and see if you can get him talk.”
“Okay.”
“You know where I live?”
“No.”
“You got a pen and paper?”
I glanced at the window in the door. No sign of Mansour, so I passed a pen and an old receipt through the bars.
He wrote an address on the front, then he wrote a short note on the back.
“Show that to the super. He lives in Apartment One. He’ll let you into my place. There’s a checkbook in the desk by the window. Next time you come, bring a check and a pen. I’ll write you a check for a couple thousand so that you can keep things going with Wanda for a while.”
Two thousand dollars was a lot of money. But maybe not when I was supposed to use it to capitalize a drug business that could get me thrown in prison for twenty to life.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’re going to need that money for a lawyer.”
“I don’t have enough to pay a real lawyer and a public defender’s just going to tell me to plead guilty to something that I didn’t do in exchange for a reduced sentence. My money is better spent investigating who really killed Billy.”
“Maybe you should hire a real detective, then.”
“He wouldn’t find out any more than you can,” Randal said. “Less. Licensed detectives are mostly ex-cops and the people who know what Billy was up to aren’t the sort to confide in cops, ex or not.”
I didn’t want the responsibility but I had to accept Randal’s decision. It was his life at stake. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do my best but I can’t guarantee anything. You know that I’m only eighteen.”
“You’ll do fine. I seen plenty of eighteen-year-olds in firefights in ‘Nam. You just keep doing your best and I’ll be out of here in no time.”
There was a pause. “What happened to your eye?” I asked.
“Intense interrogation. Small town cops try to play the big shots but they don’t know what they’re doing. They spin out of control when the stakes get any bigger than lost puppies and Halloween pranks.” He gestured to his eye. “This kind of thing right before I go to court is going to cause Albertson more trouble than he realizes.”
I hoped he was right.
“Oh,” he said, “and you’ll find a spare key to my truck in the drawer with the checkbook. You’ll need it if the weather gets too bad to ride a bike.”
He was right. I didn’t have any rain gear for riding a motorcycle in bad weather.
Mansour opened the door when I knocked on it.
“Okay, kid. You had your visit. Now get out.”
I got out.
I was Randal’s only hope, now. If I failed, Randal would spend the rest of his life behind bars.
I was terrified.