The Silent Hour

Had him.”

“How so?” Ken said.

Another drink of Scotch, little more than a sip. He hadn’t offered us any, which wasn’t a problem but confirmed that he wasn’t much of a drinker. This glass was for him while he told his story, and it didn’t even cross his mind that anybody else would want a drink in the middle of the day.

“There was a motel out on the east side—a big old place with lots of separate units—that Dominic and his team were using. The owner of the place was a sleaze, and he knew they were dirty, but they paid well and tipped better, and so he kept his eyes wide shut to everything they did. Well, I put some energy into turning him, put some pressure on, and he agreed to cooperate with us. The idea was that he’d be a pretty general snitch. I wasn’t asking him to do anything out of line, just tip us to comings and goings. I wanted to do some wiretaps out there—the whole reason they were using the place for meetings was to avoid wiretaps—but they were smart enough to get different units every time, and the judge wouldn’t sign off on a warrant for the whole damn place. Even if he had, we couldn’t have gotten that much equipment. It just wasn’t practical.

“So instead I’m using the guy as a source of information on movement, nothing more. About a month after I turned him, I get a call from him. A page, actually—back then we were still using pagers. I call him back, and the guy’s frantic. Says Sanabria and another guy had just checked into the motel, and that there were blood splatters on Sanabria’s shirt and that he looked all disheveled and out of breath, like he’d just come out of a fight or something. They asked for a unit all the way in the back of the place and then pulled the car up right outside the door, and when they go in Sanabria carries a handgun in with him. This is good news, because he’s a convicted felon and not allowed to have a handgun.”

This time, Dunbar took more than a sip of the Scotch.

“I haul ass out to the motel. When I get there, the owner tells me somebody else showed up at the room and then drove away, but the car Sanabria and the other guy came in originally is still parked out front. So I go down there, with the owner, and bang on the door, and this guy named Johnny DiPietro answers. Remember that name. He’s the guy that checked into the motel with Sanabria. I badge him and tell him I’ve got the owner there. I stand there in the door, and I say to the owner—this is your property, and I have consent to search. Right? He says yes. All this, DiPietro hears. So then I turn back to him, and I say, okay, you heard that, now are you going to make trouble? He shakes his head and steps aside, and then I say to him, I repeat it carefully, I say—do I have your permission to search the room, then? He tells me that I do, he tells me this in front of the hotel owner, who has also given consent, and, you know, it’s his property anyhow.”

Dunbar paused again. There was a flush building in his face.

“I search the room and find a gun and a shirt that’s soaking in the shower, has blood on it. DiPietro is panicking now, but Sanabria is gone. He left with the other guy. We arrested him eventually, first for the handgun charge, and then later we got his fingerprints off the gun and a ballistic match to the homicide of a kid named Lamarca, who had just been shot that day. After that, we even got a blood match—Lamarca’s blood was on Sanabria’s shirt. We had that confirmed by the lab. Ballistic and blood evidence tying Sanabria to a homicide, and if nothing else we’ve got him on the gun charge.”

He paused then, and it was quiet for a moment before Ken said, “So how the hell did he walk?”

I answered for Dunbar.

“DiPietro didn’t rent the motel room.”

Dunbar raised his eyebrows, then gave a short nod and lifted his glass to me. “Well done, Detective.”

“You had ballistic and blood matches that you got through a good-faith search, though,” Ken said, incredulous.

“He wasn’t a cop,” I told Dunbar. “Doesn’t know the lovely law of the exclusionary rule.”

“Fruit of the poisonous tree,” Dunbar said, nodding. “Sanabria, piece of shit that he is, is legally entitled to privacy in a motel room that he rented. If he wants to leave a homicide weapon and a bloody shirt in that room, he’s allowed to do that in private. It’s his reasonable expectation. Fourth Amendment right.”

Ken looked shocked. “You had consent from an occupant and the property owner.”

“I know,” Dunbar said. “I thought that would be enough. I really did. I knew there was a chance the owner might not be able to grant consent to a rented room without a warrant—honestly, I wasn’t sure about that, which I probably shouldn’t admit, but then I’m not a lawyer. That’s why I used him to bait DiPietro into opening up, though, because I figured DiPietro had to believe it was the owner’s right. What I didn’t count on was DiPietro being a visitor and not the registered guest. It was Sanabria’s room, legally. That means nobody else could give consent.”

“So he walked?”

“Yes.”

Dunbar put the glass down on the coffee table. “Well, I suppose you don’t care about that. I suppose that’s not relevant. What you’re interested in, I imagine, is how I happened to get Joshua Cantrell killed.”

He said this through his teeth, eyes still on the glass. Ken and I were silent.

“So I had Sanabria once and couldn’t deliver,” Dunbar said. “There’s your background. That’s all that really need be said. The details, well, the details are mine to worry about, not yours. The point is, we went back after him again. I went back after him. I also went to Joshua Cantrell.”

“As an informant?” I said.

“That was the original idea. It didn’t go well. Not only did he refuse to talk with us about Sanabria, he insisted he didn’t know anything about the man. Said he only knew what his wife told him, and that was old news. His impression was that we knew more of the family he’d married into than he did.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Actually, I did. In any event, it was clear he wasn’t going to cooperate, so we didn’t waste any time on him. I kept tabs on him, though. Made the occasional call. We did that sort of thing with the idea of keeping the pressure up, both on Cantrell and Sanabria. We wanted Sanabria to know that we were always around, always talking to the people who surrounded him, looking for a chink in the armor.”

“Was Alexandra a part of this?” Ken asked.

He shook his head. “She wouldn’t have anything to do with us. Joshua, though, was almost as scared of us as he was of Sanabria. So while he didn’t help, he also didn’t refuse to communicate. He was afraid to do that. Now, as I said, we’d check in with him every so often. I caught him alone one day when I came out to their house to show him some photographs. No reason at all that he or Alexandra would be able to ID anyone in the photos, but we wanted to rattle Sanabria’s cage a little. He hated it when we talked to his family, but we could pretend it was necessary investigation, not harassment. Truth was, we just wanted him sweating.

“So this time, Joshua seemed a little different. He looked at the photographs, told me he didn’t recognize any of the people in them, which was of course true, but he was cooperative, too, and as I was leaving he made a remark about wishing he could help, and it sounded genuine, and almost angry. We talked for a while, and he told me about the new houseguest they had, a guy who’d done a long stretch for murder. Mark Ruzity.”

“Are you saying he wasn’t in favor of the hands-on approach his wife brought to the mission?” I said.

“I’m saying he was absolutely opposed to it. The phrase he used was ‘she’s bringing them into our home.’ Apparently against his strongest objections.”

“So you made a suggestion,” I said. “A pitch. If he was willing to help with Sanabria, why not take advantage of the situation.”

His nod seemed embarrassed. “It was almost a joke. On that day, in that conversation, it really was almost a joke. I mean, it was that ludicrous—place an informant in Sanabria’s sister’s home and use her husband to work him? Crazy, right?”

“But he agreed,” Ken said.

“No. He rejected the idea, emphatically, and as time passed, I stopped dropping in on them, refocused in other areas. Then he came back to me. Contacted me by phone and asked if we could meet in person. He seemed very nervous, very agitated. So I drove out to a restaurant in Shaker Heights and met him, and he told me that he’d reconsidered.”

“Why the change of heart?” Ken asked.

Dunbar frowned. “The motivation, I’m afraid, was anything but noble. What led him to pick up the phone and