talked to him a couple of days ago. He wanted to help me get to Mexico. He thought he owed me a favor.”
We were at Jackie’s apartment She had cleaned my cuts with iodine, and now I looked at my battle scars and marveled at myself. I had never fought like that before. How wild I had been, how utterly I had devastated that poor little junkie.
“Jackie, was he telling the truth?”
“He must of been. He would lie, but not give us somebody like Turk Williams. He might make up a name or give us somebody small. But to pin it on Turk, it would have to be the truth.”
“You know Turk?”
“I know who he is.”
“Didn’t I tell you about him?”
“Not his name. Alex, I-”
I stood up, paced the floor. “He had no reason to frame me,” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense. Unless… well, maybe it was something like this. Suppose somebody had something on him, something that would put a lot of pressure on him. So that he had no particular choice. You see what I mean? I don’t think anyone could have hired him to frame me, but someone might have blackmailed him into it.”
“Maybe.”
“What else could it be? Unless Phillie lied-” I thought back to my conversation with Turk, ran it through my mind again. “No,” I said, positive. “Phillie wasn’t lying. I didn’t pay any attention at the time, but Turk was very interested in finding out if I had recognized the killer. He wanted to know what the arm looked like. I remember he asked if it was white or colored, and when I said I didn’t know he said something to the effect that I couldn’t even say for sure if it was a man or a woman. And he suggested that it might come to me later. He didn’t let up until I told him I was sure I would never dig up any more of it.” I took a breath. “And then he started telling me how I ought to get out of the country, at least until the air cleared. Phillie wasn’t lying. It was Turk. I’m damned if I know why, but it was him.”
“Alex-”
“But who put him up to it? That’s the question.”
She got to her feet. “Alex, I don’t see how we can go up against him. I scored off him once but I don’t even think he would remember. And he’s supposed to carry a gun all the time, you know. Somebody like Phillie is one thing, but to go up against Turk in Harlem-”
“Forget it.”
“I suppose I could pretend to make a buy from him. That’s what I thought before, but if he knows you-”
I waved the thought aside. “You’re missing the point We don’t have to get to him. The buck stops with him, he’s the one. He killed Robin, true?”
“Yes, but-”
“And we have evidence. We have a witness, although the doctors will have to put his mouth back together before he can testify. An eyewitness who saw Turk come out of that room with Robin’s blood on him. We’ve got another witness who can establish that Phillie Schapiro had my watch, which marks him on the scene at the time. The police can shake out the rest. We have all we need.”
“Then what do we do? Call the police?”
“Exactly.”
She thought this over, then began to nod slowly. “Sure,” she said. “I never thought of that, isn’t that funny? Cops, we spent so much time staying away from them, I never even thought of going to them. Not until we had it all wrapped up with a bow on it.”
“But we do.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I guess we do.”
But I didn’t call them myself, or wander on down to the nearest precinct house to turn myself in. There had been too much running and hiding of late, too much of disguises and lurking in shadows, too much of being the hunted man. Instead I used Jackie’s phone to call Warden Pillion.
“I solved it,” I told him. “I know who killed the girl I can even prove it.”
“You’re positive, Alex?”
“Yes. I want to surrender to the police, but I want them prepared to listen to me and to put out a pickup order for the killer right away. Can you arrange it?”
“That shouldn’t be difficult.”
I gave him the address of Jackie’s place and some of the details. After I hung up we checked her stash of drugs and made sure the capsules of heroin and the hypodermic needle were not where the police would be likely to stumble upon them. Jackie said it wouldn’t be any problem, that homicide cops didn’t bother shaking down junkies. I didn’t want to take any chances.
And then we sat around and waited. I felt as I have often felt when I have had too little food and too much coffee, excitement bubbling nervously within me, my stomach shaky, my body fidgety, incapable of remaining long in one position. I paced the floor and waited, and then we heard squad cars coming, their sirens wide open, and then the cars pulled up in front and someone rang Jackie’s bell.
She went downstairs to let them in. She led them upstairs, and they came in with guns drawn, and I surrendered with a smile. The soldier suit surprised them somewhat. But they were distinctly hostile at first. I had been a fugitive for a long time, and as far as they were concerned I was just a murderer with a far-out story. They took me to the station house and Jackie came along.
There they put Jackie in one room and led me off to another, and a group of detectives clustered around and kept asking me questions. I answered everything, and I explained just how I knew that Turk Williams was the killer, and how he had done it and how they could prove it. About halfway through they put out arrest orders for Williams and Schapiro and sent someone to question the roundfaced fence who’d had my watch. Around that time I knew they were ready to believe me, and from that point on we all relaxed. They still didn’t like me. As far as they were concerned I should have given myself up Sunday morning and let them take it from there.
“Playing detective like this,” one of them said, “all you make is trouble.”
“And if I turned myself in right away?”
“We’d have found Williams.”
“Sure you would. You had me cold, you wouldn’t have looked any further.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“Well,” I said, “I like it the way it turned out I played it your way the first time. Evangeline Grant And I stood trial and got a life sentence. They’ll reverse that when you bring in Williams. Just find out who hired him. That’s all.”
“We never pegged him as a hired killer-”
“No, and I can’t see it that way either. But someone put pressure on him, someone with a reason.”
“Any ideas who?”
I thought it over until my head ached. I shook my head. No ideas, none at all.
They fed me, then sat me down again and had me dictate a formal statement In the course of this a uniformed cop came in and announced that they had picked up Phillie. “He’ll talk,” the cop said. “He knows better than to hold out. But somebody sure beat the hell out of him. The doctor’s looking at him now.” He flashed me a look of the sort that generally gets described as grudging admiration. “But I don’t guess he’s about to press charges.”
I went on with my statement. And I finished it, and they brought Jackie in, and we were all of us sitting around over cups of coffee, when another policeman burst in with news about Turk Williams.
They had surprised him at his Harlem apartment. He said, “Now what’s the difficulty, gentlemen? You know the place is always clean and pure.” And they said, “A girl named Robin, Turkey. Murder.”
And the Turkey went for his gun.
He shot one cop in the arm. Nothing very serious. And they shot him once in the chest and twice in the stomach, and at the moment he was in St Luke’s Hospital with doctors working on him. They didn’t expect him to live.
23
