‘Ben, I’m asking you to forget the Trudell case. Leave it alone. Ten years ago, that case split the city in two. It hit every button: black defendant, white police victim. Now it’s just sitting there like a big vat of gasoline, Ben. For the sake of this city, don’t throw a match in the gasoline.’
John Kelly said, ‘I think we understand.’ He managed somehow to inject the faintest undertone of fuck you. He’d seen Andrew Lowerys come and go; this one would pass too. Kelly stood and said, ‘Let’s go, Ben.’
Lowery turned his back on us again to look out over the city. He shook his head. ‘It’s always just below the surface.’
Outside the courthouse an African-American kid played a makeshift set of drums. He sat on a milk crate with an array of plastic buckets in front of him plus a few metal objects (an ice tray, a cookie sheet) for cymbals. The beat was insistent, joyous. I could not help thinking it was more eloquent and more honest than anything Lowery had just told us — closer to the true heartbeat of the city.
Kelly and I found ourselves, inevitably, pacing to that beat.
‘What did you make of all that, Ben Truman?’
‘It was bullshit.’
‘Precisely You are my prize pupil. That was one-hundred-proof, high-octane bullshit. Now, why would Lowery not want us poking around the Trudell case?’
‘Because there’s something he wants kept quiet.’
‘I’d say that’s a very good theory. Perhaps it’s time we paid another visit to Julio Vega. He knows more than he’s given us.’
We did not know it, but it was already too late. Julio Vega was dead.
48
Vega was hanging in the kitchen of his tiny house. He had used an electrical extension cord which he’d looped around a ceiling light fixture. A slipknot behind the ear forced the head to slump forward. In front, the cord disappeared into the fatty folds of his neck. The chair he had stepped off lay on its side.
Kelly touched the back of his own hand to Vega’s hand. That slight contact caused the body to twist a bit before resettling under the noose. ‘Cold,’ he said.
Kelly called it in. The machinery had to be started. BPD Homicide and a State Police team would be here soon. Even suicides are considered ‘unnatural deaths’ and must be examined.
Julio Vega’s death could not have been more natural, though. It was the logical conclusion to a decade of shame and recrimination and exile. It was the only way for Vega to repay his debt. It was the only way, too, for Vega to escape a second go-round with the Trudell case. A new round of questions to account for the fresh victim: How might the raid on the red-door crackhouse have led to Bob Danziger’s death ten years later? Even Vega’s body suggested the naturalness of his suicide. Unlike the rifle-blasted, gas-swollen remains of Danziger and Ratleff, Vega’s body might plausibly have been sleeping. His bowed head, the chin on his collarbone, eyelids slightly ajar, fingers curled at his sides, even the belly button that winked out from under his sweatshirt — every detail suggested the humanity of Vega’s corpse. Whatever the police may have called it, this was anything but an ‘unnatural death.’ Death naturalized Julio Vega.
But dead bodies must be inspected like so many sausages, and so the processors came: uniform cops, then detectives, photographers, forensics people. A black van from the Medical Examiner’s office waited to take the corpse. Cops who had known Vega showed up too, including Martin Gittens. ‘I figured it would come to this someday,’ Gittens sighed. ‘It was cruel, what they did to Julio.’
Gittens was obviously in pain. In the mid 1980s, Vega and Trudell had been his proteges. He’d fed them information, lent them his street-corner credibility, helped them get established. For a long time Gittens stood apart from everyone, silent. I thought about approaching him but decided against it. My relationship with Gittens was tenuous enough already.
Kelly pulled one of the detectives aside and asked what they were finding out.
‘It’s a suicide,’ the guy said. ‘We’re just dotting the is.’
In the middle of all this hung the body. It could not be cut down until it had been photographed, a job that was delayed by the fact that Crime Scene Services was needed in several places that morning.
When the activity around the body had ebbed, Kelly and I stood under it and stared up. I tried to follow Kelly’s eyes, to see what so fascinated him. Up close, Vega reminded me of a paratrooper caught in tree branches.
‘Look at the ligature marks, Ben Truman.’
Two stripes scored the neck where the cord had dug into the soft skin. The larger of the two ran from ear to ear across the crease of the throat, above the Adam’s apple. The cord was embedded in this mark, and above the cord was a smudge of lividity, the rosy blush of settling blood trapped by the cord’s pressure. Above this mark was a second, smaller line. Here the cord had actually cut the skin in places and blood had beaded and dried along its track. There was lividity around this mark too, though it was not as distinct.
I made an uncertain grunt, hm.
Kelly looked down at me with a disapproving expression. ‘Do you notice anything unusual about that?’ He sounded annoyed at having to point out something so obvious, as if he were talking to an obtuse child.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen anyone who hung himself.’
‘Well I’ve seen people who hung themselves. But I’ve never seen anyone who did it twice.’
We waited around in the anemic atmosphere of that house to see Vega cut down and laid on a gurney. They zipped him up with the electrical cord still wound around his neck like a scarf. Entrenched as it was, the cord could not be removed without damaging the skin.
Caroline arrived. She handed me a pink phone-message slip with a number but no name.
‘Why didn’t you write down the name? I don’t know this number.’
‘Because,’ Caroline informed me, ‘it’s Max Beck.’
49
The mallards in the Public Garden were agitated. From the little island in the middle of the lagoon where they were gathered came a cacophony of honking. The males in particular, with their shimmery green necks, were on edge. They ran at one another, braying and slapping the water.
Max Beck was watching them. He sat on a bench under a sagging willow, absently munching on a sandwich. The paper wrapper from the sandwich was tucked under his thigh to prevent it from blowing away. Beck seemed to have shucked his Defender of the Despised persona, with its strutting righteousness and combativeness, just laid it down on the bench beside him like a coat. Here by the duck pond, he became ordinary — an office worker creeping toward middle age, overweight, curly salt-and-pepper hair riffling in the wind.
‘Mr Beck?’
He startled. ‘Yes? Oh, Chief Truman, thank you for coming.’ He jumped up and cleared a space on the bench facing the lagoon. ‘Have a seat. You want a sandwich? I got you tuna-fish.’
I took the sandwich and turned it over in my hand.
‘It’s okay,’ he said, ‘it won’t turn you into a defense lawyer.’
I sat down. ‘Do you take your lunch here a lot?’
‘Nah. I don’t usually eat lunch. There never seems to be time. I’m either in court or on the way to court. I have to watch it anyway.’ He patted his belly. ‘I picked this place because I thought we could be alone here.’
The ducks kicked up another round of honking. Rhonk rhonk.
‘They’re upset about something,’ Beck said.
‘It’s getting cold. They’re anxious to leave.’
I opened my sandwich and the two of us ate in silence. An awkward etiquette pertains at lunchtime meetings. It requires occasional conversational pauses for chewing, and it disfavors asking questions of someone
