Now They Call Me Gunner

by Thom Whalen

  * * *

  Tuesday afternoon, I visited Randal in jail.

  Officer Monsour was on the desk again and, again, he gave me a hard time about visiting. This time, though, his heart wasn’t in it. It was just a ritual. We both knew that he was going to let me go back to talk to Randal once the formalities were over.

  Once again, he cautioned me to stay back from the bars.

  Once again, I ignored his admonitions. As soon as he shut the door, Randal asked, “Did you bring a blank check?”

  No Hello or How are you? Just cut right to the bottom line. He was right. We had to get business settled right away in case Monsour came back and kicked me out.

  He wrote out a check for three thousand dollars, payable to me.

  No one had ever trusted me with so much before. I felt like the weight on my shoulders had just increased by another ton.

  I had to prove his innocence.

  “I’ll prove that you’re innocent,” I said. “I don’t know how, but I’ll do it.”

  “That would be good,” he said. “If you can. But I was talking to a lawyer for a few minutes yesterday, getting the lay of the land. He says that the most important thing is to show that somebody else had a reason to do it and that they had an opportunity. That’s enough for reasonable doubt. If the reasonable doubt is strong enough, then they won’t even take me to trial. The prosecutor will let me go. So that’s what I need. Reasonable doubt.” As he spoke, his eyes shone with a light as though the words were his salvation. “Reasonable doubt.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. I got it. Reasonable doubt.”

  “Yeah.”

  But it bothered me that he wasn’t saying that he was innocent. Only that there might be a way for him to get off. Again, I had to ask myself why I thought that he didn’t murder Billy. It was a logical question. According to Gwen, he had plenty of motive. He had the skills. He had seen Billy just before he was murdered and he had Billy’s motorcycle. He could lie like a pro and, by his own admission, he had stabbed men to death in ‘Nam. Right now, I could make the case for the prosecution easier than the case for the defense. And that was after Randal and I had been investigating Billy for more than a month.

  I believed that Randal didn’t murder Billy because he was my friend. That was the whole thing. I liked him so he couldn’t be a murderer. That logic wouldn’t carry a whit of weight in court.

  Before today, I had another argument. I could have described how hard he had been looking for the real murderer. I would have concluded that only an innocent man could be so certain that someone else must have done it.

  But that argument was demolished by the words, reasonable doubt. Had Randal really been trying to find Billy’s murderer? Or had he been trying to find other people who had the motive and opportunity to kill Billy so that he could give a jury a full measure of reasonable doubt?

  That’s what a guilty man would do if he were smart. And Randal was smart. Maybe not educated in a formal institution, but smarter in the ways of the world than anyone I had ever met.

  And he had been jailed for aggravated assault in Buffalo a couple years ago. This was not the first time that he had spoken to a criminal lawyer. He must have known about the principle of reasonable doubt back when we first started our investigation.

  His innocence could well have been a cover story created for my benefit. Randal was good at making up cover stories. I had seen him put that skill to use more than once in the past few weeks.

  “So we good?” Randal asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Good to go.”

  “There you are.” He frowned at me. “Go see Johnny Paul again. Find out as much as you can before he hears that I’ve been arrested for Billy’s murder. He won’t be so cooperative when he learns that the cops think that I killed his brother. And don’t forget to visit Gus. He owes us five-fifty. You got to collect that so you can make another buy from Wanda the Warted One without dipping any deeper into our reserves than necessary. You gotta build trust with these guys or they’ll never tell you what you need to know.”

  God, I hated becoming a drug dealer.

  It showed on my face. “Don’t worry,” Randal said. “It’s going to be all right. You’re just dealing a little grass. That’s hardly a crime these days.”

  Hardly a crime? President Nixon had declared a war on drugs. A war. According to the newspapers, guys caught with a kilo of marijuana were getting prison sentences with no parole until they served twenty-years. Prisoners of the War on Drugs.

  I didn’t relish the thought of earning my college degree from behind bars. I doubted that Columbia had a prison outreach program.

  “You might have to go to Canton to see me next time. The lawyer says that I’ll be arraigned in the county court there in the next few days and I’ll have to stay in the jail there until my trial. It won’t be so easy to visit me. They got more rules about visitors up there.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I would have been transported and arraigned already but Albertson’s waiting for my shiner to fade a little. I don’t mind. I’m in no hurry to get moved to a bigger jail. I told my lawyer that but he said that I shouldn’t tell the cops. He talked to the prosecutor and got a deal. When I let them delay my arraignment, they agreed to give my lawyer an early look at the evidence that they have against me. They have to do that sooner or later, but usually they hold off for as long as they can. I told him to tell you everything that they tell him. You can go over and talk to him. His name’s Wade Adaire. He’s got an office just down the street.”

  “It can’t hurt for me to know what the cops know,” I said.

  “Right. My logic exactly. I’m happy to stay here in Wemsley for as long as I can because it’s easier to keep in touch with you this way.”

  Easier for him to send me out to deal drugs. I wasn’t sure if that was such a good thing for me.

  But I had to do whatever it took to save Gwen’s knight in shining armor from the electric chair.

  Even deal drugs.