designated-hitter rule, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, National Public Radio — all these were bullshit. There was quite a lot of bullshit in the world, Kelly believed. It wasn’t always clear what this Wrong Stuff was, but Kelly could spot it readily enough to divide the world into the bullshit and the not bullshit. It was all pretty simple to him, just ones and zeroes. I did not yet have the knack of distinguishing the bullshit from the non-, especially in the nonbinary world that cops inhabit. So it came as a surprise to me when Kelly pronounced Gittens’s behavior that afternoon bullshit.
True, when we met him at the Homicide office around two o’clock, there was an exuberant, cocky swagger to the detective. ‘Ben Truman!’ Gittens beamed at me. ‘Looks like I just saved your sorry ass!’ He hugged me, welcoming me back to the fold. No hard feelings. All a big misunderstanding.
And it wasn’t just Gittens. In the Homicide office, cops sat on desks and smiled and laughed over their paper coffee cups. The corked-up anxiety of a stalled investigation had finally been released.
Gittens announced to the room, ‘I’m getting tired of carrying you all on my back!’
‘Bullshit,’ Kelly whispered to me.
I was not so sure. Didn’t Gittens have a right to be exuberant? He had plunged into Mission Flats like a pearl diver with a knife clenched in his teeth and emerged with the solution. It was a tour de force. And the fact that — by finding Danziger’s killer and maybe Trudell’s too — Gittens had cleared my own name only magnified his accomplishment. So I wrote off Kelly’s comment to old-fartism and, inside at least, joined in the general celebration.
The cause for all the self-congratulations sat in an interview room, a doughy, caramel-skinned kid squirming with a case of phantom hemorrhoids. Andre James struck me as one of those boys who radiate vulnerability, sensitive boys at the edge of the playground whose victimhood is so inevitable it evokes both pity and its opposite, a desire to distance oneself, to avoid the oncoming crash. How on earth did such a kid get tangled up with a roughhouse crew like Braxton’s? The boy’s father sat beside him, earnest, slight, a churchgoer in tortoiseshell glasses.
Gittens swept past us and, in the high spirit that pervaded the office, invited us to ‘come check out this kid’s story. It’s fuckin’ dynamite.’
I shook the kid’s damp hand, then his father’s. Gittens introduced Kelly and me as ‘the officers leading the investigation’ and instructed Andre to tell us the story ‘just the way you told me.’
Andre squirmed until his father chastised him, ‘Do what the officer told you.’ The father assured us, ‘He wants to help.’
Clearly the kid wanted anything but. He spoke only after another bout of fidgeting and a sharp look from his father. ‘It’s like I told ‘Tective Gittens. I seen Harold like a couple weeks ago. His mother lives in this apartment next to us in Grove Park. That’s like the project. Harold doesn’t live there no more, but his mother still does. I don’t really know him. I know his mother. She’s a nice lady. I used to know Harold a little, back in the day, like before he blew up. He still comes around sometimes, he helps out people in the neighborhood, like he gives money to people sometimes if they can’t get groceries and stuff, like old people, you know?’
Gittens rolled his finger in a circular motion. Get on with it.
‘Anyway I’m coming out of the elevator and I see Harold coming out the stairs. So I say like, “Yo, Brax, wuzzup?” Like, “Why you taking the stairs?” cuz we live on the eighth floor, right? So he doesn’t really say anything. Or maybe he just says like, “Hey, Dre” or something like that. And he goes in his mother’s apartment and I just figured, like, whatever, and I go into my apartment.’
‘Did you notice anything about his appearance?’ I asked.
He glanced nervously at Gittens.
‘It’s alright, Andre,’ I reassured him. ‘I’m just asking. Did you see any marks on him?’
‘What kind of marks?’
‘Scratches, stains, rips in his clothes, anything.’
‘No. I don’t remember anything like that.’ He gave Gittens another glance, then continued. ‘Anyway, I heard Harold like banging stuff around in there, like pots and pans, you know. Because the walls are really, really thin. We hear everything. Sometimes we hear the TV shows playing next door and we can just sit and listen, you know?’
Gittens rolled his eyes and rolled his finger.
‘So I’m thinking Harold isn’t acting right, and then I hear him go back out into the hall. It made me kind of curious, like maybe something was wrong. So I open the door and I see Harold out there in the hall with this bucket and a bottle of Clorox. It was weird. I knew Harold didn’t go running up all them stairs just to do his laundry out in the hallway.’
Andre smiled at his own joke and looked around for one of us to reciprocate. His desire to please was as plain as a dog’s wagging tail. ‘So Harold, he had water in the bucket and he pours in this bleach and he sticks his hands in there and he starts washing his hands in it. I figured it must burn but he washes it around, like on his hands and arms. So I stick my head out and I ask him, “Brax, what are you doing? That stuff isn’t for your skin,” and I make some joke like “The black won’t come out” and “Who are you, Michael Jackson?” Only Harold doesn’t answer, he just tells me, “Shut the door and never mind.”’
I interrupted again: ‘Did you see anything on his hands? What was he washing off?’
‘I didn’t see nothing. Whatever it was, I guess he didn’t want it to get on the floor in his mother’s apartment so he took it out in the hall. Anyway, when he was done with that, he went back inside.’
I looked at Gittens and shrugged. So?
‘Keep going,’ Gittens instructed.
‘Like I said, this was all kind of buggin’, so I kept on listening. And the walls are real thin, right? So I could hear everything. And I hear Harold get on the phone and he tells somebody, ‘We don’t have to worry about that DA no more.’ And then he keeps talking and he says like, “I put a cap in him and then I jelled up.”’
‘Jelled up?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, that’s what he said, “I jelled up.”’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I don’t know. I guess he, like, froze.’
‘Did he say anything else?’
‘No. He just said, “I capped that DA and then I jelled up and I took off and I drove his car into the lake so nobody would find him for a while.”’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that.’ The kid looked at Gittens to confirm he had not left anything out.
‘What else did he say?’ I pressed.
‘I don’t know. I guess I didn’t hear the rest.’
‘I thought you could hear everything.’
‘I could. I mean, I guess I just don’t remember every word he said.’
‘But you remember that part?’
‘Yeah. I definitely remember that part.’
Kelly was listening from a corner of the room. ‘Did you ever tell this story to anyone before today?’ he asked.
‘Nah. I didn’t want to tell anybody cuz this was MP and everybody knows you don’t want to get mixed up with them. But then Officer Gittens came by this morning and he asked, so I just decided to tell the truth.’
‘You waited all this time and then all of a sudden you decided to tell the truth?’
‘Nobody ever asked before.’
I studied the kid’s full-moon face.
Gittens broke in to explain. ‘Andre has been doing some work for me. He got caught up in a little drug thing. He got talked into doing something stupid. These sliders recruit the good kids to act as mules because they know the cops won’t bother them. Andre got caught with a little coke. I’ve been letting him work it off.’
The kid looked at Gittens with an eager expression.
‘He’s been doing some undercover stuff for us, some buys outside the Flats where no one knows him. Sometimes if he hears something, he passes it to us. He’s doing just fine. In six months if he holds up his end, we’ll drop the charge. Andre has a clean record. He’s got a three-five at English Academy. He belongs in college, not jail.’
