Chain of Evidence

Entering the apartment, Dartelli pulled off his jacket and unfastened his collar button and reached for his handkerchief to mop his forehead.

Lewellan Page was a twelve-year-old black girl, wiry thin and bug-eyed, with small budding breasts stabbing at her tight T-shirt. Dart met eyes with her, smiled at her, but faced with a cold, expressionless stare, immediately saw her not as a child but as a victim. Abby clearly saw this too.

On the drive over, having never met her, never seen her in person, a very savvy Abigail Lang had described Lewellan Page down to her long, sinewy legs and high cheekbones-this because she fit so perfectly the description of Gerry Law’s former victims. Realizing that there were at least another dozen Lewellan Pages in and around this same neighborhood filled Dart with a sadness that manifested itself inside of him as a painful silence. No longer a child. Not yet a woman. Lewellan Page blinked up at him with something like terror in her eyes: Perhaps to her all men were Gerald Lawrence.

The girl took a chair at a black enamel kitchen table. Her mother was still at work, which was awkward for Dart, because they couldn’t use anything the girl said without her mother’s advance permission to interview her. She said she did not have a father, which hurt Dart: She did not know the difference between having and knowing. Her brother was out on the streets somewhere. The one-bedroom apartment was immaculately clean, though spare of furnishings. The small green couch and gray overstuffed chair in the claustrophobic sitting room were trained on a television. The pillow and folded blanket indicated that someone slept on the couch-probably the brother, who no doubt came and went. The apartment door had four heavy-duty locks on it and a police bar. The kitchen window near the fire escape had been boarded up and three pieces of wide metal strapping bolted to the inside.

One look at her living conditions, this young girl home alone, and it was not difficult to imagine the befriending tactics of a Gerald Lawrence. As the three of them began to skirt the inquiry, Lang expertly creating a rapport with the girl, Dart was struck by the girl’s maturity, and it occurred to him that Kowalski was wrong to distrust her statement because of age.

Prompted for what she had seen, Lewellan was forthright, showing Abby and Dart how, from her kitchen window, a person could see down into both the dirt parking area behind Lawrence’s Battles Street tenement, and a pair of windows that she claimed belonged to the dead man’s apartment.

“Did you know Gerry Law, Lewellan?” Abby asked.

The girl looked down at the chipped linoleum floor and nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, “I did.”

“And did you like him?”

The girl shrugged, but she was clearly uncomfortable, even frightened.

“Did he like you?” Abby asked, accustomed to such questioning, though Dart felt squeamish.

“Sort of,” the girl answered.

Dart did not want to be here for this. He wondered why he had bothered to come here at all, why Abby had dragged him into this, and he thought that maybe it was emotional punishment, a way to insure that he would not take a way out, not drop the suicides the way he felt tempted to. A few weeks and both David Stapleton and Gerald Lawrence would be little more than a pair of files collecting dust in the records room.

Abby’s eyes flashed darkly at Dart. She seemed to read his thoughts, and she did not approve. You’re not going anywhere, they said. Help me out here!

“Tell us what you saw,” Dart requested gently. He did not want any more of her case history. He did not want confirmation that this small girl had been locked up with Gerald Lawrence for even an afternoon. Dart reached for his collar and realized he had already unbuttoned it; he sucked for air, suddenly claustrophobic.

The girl’s large brown eyes begged at Dart, and yet she was scared of him. “It was some old car. Blue, maybe. Gray.” She shrugged. She was bone thin. Much too pretty. Too real for Joe Dart at the moment. He wanted out of there. “Old, you know. Come around back here and park. Big man get out. White man, you know. He go up the back stairs there,” she said, pointing in the direction of the outside.

Dart moved to the window. He didn’t want to hear this. He said, “It was late. It would have been dark.”

“No, not dark. The light come out of them windows down there. It’s plenty bright enough.” She studied Dart. “You think I be lying, same as that other man,” she said, referring to Kowalski.

Abby glanced up at Dart condescendingly and then said to the girl, “You saw a white man get out of his car-a blue car-and climb those back stairs?”

“Big man. Yes, ma’am. Gray maybe-the car.”

“And what did you do then, Lewellan?” Dart asked, hoping to discover some inconsistency that might invalidate her as a witness and at the same time explain why Kowalski had left out her statement. Hope built inside him that Abby’s instincts were right: perhaps the connection was Kowalski, not Zeller. What a pleasure it would be to bring down Roman Kowalski.

“I watched,” the girl answered. “The Man come sneaking around our alley late at night, and I figure somebody gonna get arrested, maybe kilt.” She nodded at Dart, and he felt a chill down to his feet. Bellevue Square entertainment-arrests and shootings. Said with excitement, as if this window were just another television screen.

Dart considered the possibilities. Gerald Lawrence could have been a dealer, his white visitor a customer. Kowalski could know something about that, having been Narco once. The buyer could have been a cop, Dart realized, looking for Kowalski’s motivation. A cop buying drugs near Bellevue Square, or performing a shakedown was just the kind of information that Kowalski would attempt to keep quiet. If he handled it on his own, if he hushed it up, he could protect a fellow officer and pick up some chits to barter later in his career.

“The white man was upstairs about five minutes,” Abby repeated.

“Yeah, and no shooting.” She told Dart, “My mama tell me when there a shooting to get under a table. Head down and under a table.”

Five minutes was enough time to make a buy and get back down to the car, Dart thought. It didn’t seem to him near enough time to fake a suicide. He experienced another wave of relief-he had jumped to conclusions by considering Zeller. Guilt, he thought, is a form of illness.

He looked at Abby and saw sadness. Someone so young, her eyes said to him. Someone innocent. And innocence, he thought, is like a balloon-once punctured, it’s gone. There is no making it whole again. No making it well. His mother had stolen a different innocence from him; he felt empathy for this young girl.

“What time of night was this, Lewellan?” Abby asked.

“Between eleven and eleven-thirty.”

“You were up that late?” Dart asked. He wondered if this was a possible crack in her story.

“I don’t sleep so good. My mama reads to me after the news is over, then maybe I sleep for a little while.”

“Why don’t you sleep well?” Abby asked.

“Bad dreams.”

By the name of Gerald Lawrence, Dart thought.

He glanced at Abby. How could a person volunteer to work Sex Crimes? How could she live with this day after day?

Abby asked the inevitable question, and as it registered, Dart looked away. “Did Gerry Law ever ask you over to his place?”

“I don’t know.”

“We won’t tell your mother,” Abby promised.

She knows exactly what to say, Dart thought.

He looked back as Lewellan Page shrugged and focused her attention on the cracked linoleum again. She nodded sheepishly. “He had bunnies,” she said. “White bunnies.”

Dart felt a stinging in his eyes, and caught himself with fists clenched. Why bother asking this? he wondered. He didn’t want to hear any of this. But then he realized how important a question it was-perhaps enough animosity and hatred toward Lawrence had built so that a neighbor had killed the man and made it look like a hanging. Maybe there was no white man involved at all. Maybe Kowalski had discovered the hint of a murder and decided a scum like Lawrence wasn’t worth the taxpayer’s money.

Abby’s face held an expression of infinite patience and compassion. Dart admired her; his own face probably