The old man hesitated before taking Vega’s hand — did he remember the pariah’s name? — but he shook it, then returned to his post at the door like a Beefeater.
The presence of this interloper seemed to inhibit Vega. He studied the floor as if he’d dropped a coin there. ‘Anyway, like I said, I had the radio and there’s blood all over and I can hear Gittens calling the turret. I knew Gittens was going to be around because it was kind of his warrant. You know, in the sense it was his snitch’ — a glance at Mr Kenison — ‘I mean informant. Plus, he was our friend, he watched out for Artie and me. So I hear him call in and he says he’s coming up. Next thing I know, here comes Gittens up the stairs. Out of nowhere, he’s just here. It was like some cartoon, like “Super Friends” or something. So Gittens comes up behind me and he says, “What the fuck happened?” And I tell him, “Artie got shot through the door.” So Gittens is all pissed. He stands up and he grabs the pipe and he starts breaking down the door himself. No vest. He just jumps in front of the door and starts banging away. He kept slipping because of the blood on the floor, and he had Artie lying there around his feet. But he was going in that door no matter what. It took a while, but Gittens got through and we followed him in.’
Vega moved to enter the apartment, but Mr Kenison was blocking the door.
‘Excuse me.’
The old man stepped aside. His eyes never strayed from Vega’s face.
Vega led us into the apartment just as Gittens had led the search-warrant team a decade before.
‘We get in and it’s empty. Nothing. No shooter, no gun, no coke. Not even furniture. Just some little stuff in the cabinets, cereal, shit like that. Paper and shit all over the floor. It was dark too. The only light was from the street outside.’
Vega’s description jarred with the bright, well-scrubbed apartment we stood in. The walls were freshly painted in a creamy yellow, there were new appliances in the kitchen, even the windows had been replaced with up-to-date vinyl-sash models.
‘Did you do all this?’ I asked Mr Kenison.
‘Yes, I did.’ His tone carried the hint of a challenge.
‘It’s really nice.’
Vega went on: ‘Like I said, we’d never been inside this place. We didn’t know what the fuck it was going to look like in here.’ To Mr Kenison: ‘Excuse me, we didn’t know anything about what it was going to look like. Sorry. We come in, we secure it, next thing I know Gittens is running down a back staircase and everyone is running after him. We did not even know there was a back staircase. After that I’m kinda unclear. I didn’t go with them. I went back to stay with Artie.’
‘But do you know what happened?’
‘Yeah. Gittens found the weapon in the back of the apartment near the door. Big pump-action shotgun. Ballistics made it the murder weapon, fingerprints made it Braxton’s. We tore the place up, found all kinds of other evidence Braxton had been here. There was a back stairway and a back door, which was how the shooter got out. Simple case. It was Braxton, no doubt about it.’
Mr Kenison said, ‘That boy admitted he’d been here other times. So you found his fingerprints or whatever; doesn’t mean he was here that night.’ His tone was neither angry nor deferential. He was simply stating a fact, unabashed by the fact that we were police officers.
‘His fingerprints,’ Vega exclaimed, ‘were on the gun!’
‘They could have taken that gun from the boy anytime and dropped it in the yard.’
‘Oh come on!’ Vega said.
‘It happens.’
‘You really believe that?’
‘I believe it happens, yes.’
‘But do you believe that’s what happened here? We planted the gun? I mean, you live here, you see what goes on. Do you really believe that’s what happened?’
‘I don’t know who of you-all to believe. I don’t believe that boy and I don’t believe the police. That makes him not guilty.’
‘You think he’s innocent.’
‘I didn’t say innocent. I said not guilty. Could be he did it. But you police officers should have done a better job.’
Vega’s chest and shoulders drooped perceptibly. After all, this was the common wisdom on the Trudell case. Braxton’s guilt or innocence was almost beside the point. It had become a case about civil rights and police lying — Vega’s lying — not murder. A morality play for the masses, with Braxton the incidental beneficiary.
Vega looked around the apartment, searching for something familiar, a portal back to that night. In the kitchen, he ran his palm over the Formica counters. It was as if the refurbished apartment disoriented him. It mediated between himself and his own history. Vega had replicated the coordinates along the Y-axis of place only to find the X-axis, time, completely blocked, the grid itself inaccessible. The moment of fracture — August 17, 1987, 2:25 A.M. — was lost.
He murmured, ‘That kid killed Artie.’
No one responded.
‘That kid killed Artie.’
Vega was drenched in remorse, and it occurred to me that he’d reached a terrible decision: He intended to kill Braxton. But it was a fleeting suspicion, crowded out almost immediately by a more pressing concern.
Framed by the apartment windows, the strobe of a cruiser’s lights glinted from the street below. I looked down to see Martin Gittens and a backup car, three cops in all. They had come for me.
34
‘Ben, we need to talk again.’
‘Am I under arrest?’
Gittens hesitated when he heard the question, and I felt compelled to make an explanatory little wave toward the two uniform cops and the strobe flashes from the cruisers’ light bars.
‘No.’
‘Then why the backup?’
‘People tend to get emotional,’ Gittens replied, ‘when things start to look bad.’
‘Is it starting to look bad?’
He gave a pained shrug. ‘I’m sure you can explain.’
The Area A-3 station was just a few blocks away. We returned to the same painted-cinder-block interrogation room where Lowery and Gittens had confronted me twenty-four long hours earlier. This time, Lowery was not there. Kurth had taken his place.
‘I want Kelly in the room.’
‘No,’ Gittens said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Then I have nothing to say’
‘However you want to play it, Chief Truman. You can just listen, if you want. Or talk. Your call.’
‘And if I just leave? Invoke my right to remain silent?’
‘Then we’ll have to wonder. Which is our right, Chief Truman.’
‘And what about-’ I was thinking of the fact that I was a cop and was owed a measure of professional courtesy. But something in Gittens’s demeanor warned me it was too late for that. Something behind all that elaborate courtesy, all those respectful Chief Trumans.
‘What if Kelly watches from the glass?’ I nodded toward the one-way mirror.
Gittens considered a moment before deciding to allow it.
Kelly urged me not to participate in the questioning at all. There was nothing to be gained by it. But I felt — foolishly — there was nothing to gain by lawyerly dithering. I wanted to show my innocence; I wanted to walk the walk. More important, I had a fatal curiosity about Gittens’s continuing suspicion of me. Why me? What did he have? The whole thing was inexplicable. I had to see the evidence against me, even took morbid pleasure in it.
