He shoved me in the direction of a metal chair, and as I stumbled toward it, Ziegler stuck out his foot and I went down, chin first, on the linoleum floor.
Tandy helped me to my feet, saying, “I’m sorry, Jack. Len didn’t mean to do that. It was an accident.”
Even cuffed, I could have gotten in a groin kick Ziegler would have remembered for a couple of months, but I knew what would happen to me after that.
“Sure, what else could it have been?”
Tandy said, “You’re not getting mouthy with us, are you, Jack? That wouldn’t be smart.”
Ziegler and Tandy hoisted me to my feet and angled me into the chair. I wondered who was behind the one-way glass and if Fescoe knew I was about to be worked over.
“I’ve got to admit it,” Tandy said. “We sent your lawyer on a little detour, kind of a runaround. It’ll take him a while to find you, but we did it for your benefit. We’ve got information you’re going to appreciate.”
“Ah. I get it, Mitch. You’re going to help me.”
Tandy walked behind me to a spot where I couldn’t see him. Ziegler sat two feet away from me. He cleaned his nails with his pearl-handled pocket knife. Len Ziegler was a vain man. He worked out. He dressed well. But there wasn’t much he could do about his weak chin and his little pig eyes.
“Listen, Jack,” Ziegler said. “This is as close to a slam dunk as the LAPD has ever seen.”
He listed the physical evidence they had against me, then said, “You made a phone call to your brother at around the time the victim bought it. We talked to Tommy. We leaned on him. Hard. He says all he got was a hang-up call. But here’s the thing, Jack. You established your presence at the scene.”
“Why’d you make that phone call?” Tandy asked. “That’s a mystery to me. Did you dial by mistake? Do you have a guilty subconscious?”
“I don’t understand that phone call either,” I said. “I didn’t call Tommy. As soon as I saw what happened, I called 911. Mitch, given your theory of the crime, why on earth would I have called Tommy?”
Tandy said, “Well, I asked Tommy about that. I spent a couple of hours with him. He has a good alibi and nothing good to say about you. Frankly, and I tell you this as a guy who’s been a cop for twenty years, you are so cooked, I don’t know when I’ve been happier. Len, have you ever seen me this happy?”
“I think when you hit the trifecta at Santa Anita you were over the moon, but it’s a close call.”
“One Fine Day. That was that filly’s name.” Tandy laughed at the memory, then said, “I’m just an intermediary at this point; you know that. It’s the chief who asked me to help you out.”
Ziegler folded his knife and put it in his back pocket. “Fescoe said to tell you, if you save the city the cost and trouble of a trial, if you make a statement detailing what you did, Mickey will take care of you. He said he would do that. And to remind you that he and the DA are the best of friends.”
“I didn’t kill Colleen.”
Tandy put his hands on my shoulders and tipped my chair over backward. I went down, and when my head was on the floor, Ziegler tapped it with the toe of his shoe. It was just a tap-tap-tap, but I felt cold all over. I thought how a kick at my head could sever my spine, what’s called an “internal decapitation.”
I wouldn’t come back from that.
Tandy was speaking to me, apologizing about the chair falling over.
“Let’s cut the bull,” I said from where I lay on the floor. “I’m not making a statement. There’s a set bail for murder on the felony bail schedule. When Caine gets here, we’re going to pay the million bucks, and then I’m leaving.”
Tandy stooped so he could look me in the eyes.
“There’s no set bail for murder with special circumstances,” he said.
“What are you talking about? What special circumstances?”
“Colleen was pregnant when you killed her, Jack. That’s special circumstances. Murder times two.”
CHAPTER 56
I could barely absorb what Tandy had told me.
Colleen couldn’t have been pregnant. She wasn’t showing. Besides, she would have told me. Right?
Ziegler picked up the chair. Then he and Tandy hauled me back into it.
“You’re lying, ” I said. “Colleen wasn’t pregnant.”
“How do you know that?” said Ziegler. “You get the autopsy report? We did. It’ll be a while before we get the DNA, but it doesn’t matter who the daddy is. She could have been pregnant by anyone. It’s still murder of her kid.”
Tandy patted my shoulder.
I turned my head to look at him.
“Jack, are you with us? I haven’t been running the video recorder, but I’m going to turn it on now. You should tell us the truth while there’s still time.”
Tandy ducked out and sure enough, the video camera in the corner of the ceiling focused with a whirr. A little red light blinked.
Tandy came back into the room with a yellow pad and a Bic.
“Ready, Jack? Because this is it. Once we say bye-bye, no one can help you. Not even Fescoe.”
He had just slapped the pad and pen down on the table when Eric Caine, my friend, a Harvard Law grad, and the head of Private’s legal department, stormed into the interrogation room.
Caine was a big man, prematurely gray, and like me, he played college football. Normally, Caine was a man of measured responses, dry humor, and self-control.
But now he was raging. And that made me feel good.
He shouted at me, “Did you say anything, Jack?”
“Nope. The detectives have done all the talking.”
Caine walked over to me, turned my head from side to side. “You’re bleeding.”
He said to Tandy and Ziegler, “Beating a prisoner is illegal. Not only is a lawsuit coming straight at you, but that beating automatically throws out anything he said.”
“He said he’s innocent,” Ziegler scoffed.
“Big barking dog,” Tandy said to Ziegler, eyeing Caine. “Woof woof.”
“I want my client checked out by a doctor, ” Caine said. “I mean now.”
CHAPTER 57
I was shuffled between cops to the Twin Towers infirmary, where a nurse swabbed my cuts and scrapes with alcohol. She put a bandage on my chin.
I was thinking about Colleen, that if she had been pregnant, it was impossible for the baby to have been mine.
Except for our good-bye tryst a week ago, I hadn’t seen Colleen in more than six months. I mean, I would have been able to tell if she’d been six months along, right?
Still, as Tandy said, the murder of a fetus was a special circumstance when tacked on to murder. Yes, I would be denied bail. In fact, I could spend the next year in this sewer before I went to trial.
I refocused my eyes as a few feet away Tandy explained to the doctor that I had tripped and, since I was cuffed, hadn’t been able to break my fall.
“And what about the bruise on the back of his head?” the doctor asked. The doctor was a late-middle-aged white man. If he’d graduated anywhere in the top 99.9 percent of his class, he wouldn’t have been here.
“Jack is one of those masters-of-the-universe types,” Tandy joked. “Doesn’t like being detained. When I was putting him into the back of our car,” Tandy twisted his body to show exactly how I had rammed my head into the doorframe, “he bumped his head.”
The doctor asked me, “Is that how it happened?”
