Mission Flats (31 page)

Kelly loomed over him. ‘Don’t ever call yourself a cop. I’m a cop. This man is a cop.’ He pointed at me. ‘Artie Trudell was a cop. You’re nothing. Understand? You’re
nothing
.’

‘I loved Artie.’ Vega’s voice was disappearing.

‘I can’t listen to this bullshit anymore,’ Kelly sighed. He went to the window.

For a time nobody spoke. We heard the sounds of kids nearby, teens maybe, needling each other, laughing.

Vega’s soft voice: ‘I never knew who Raul was.’

More young shouts from outside, a radio, a distant siren.

‘I never met him.’

I shot Kelly a glance. He was staring out the window, shaking his head.

Vega again: ‘It was just a tip.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I sputtered. ‘This whole thing – Braxton skated because you wouldn’t give up Raul. The whole point was to protect Raul from getting killed. Wasn’t it?’

Vega stared at the blank television screen.

‘You couldn’t find him, you said. You testified – You said you drove around looking for Raul but you couldn’t find him.’

‘Maybe there never was a Raul.’

‘What?’

‘I never met him.’

I knelt down in front of Vega so I could look into his eyes.

‘Julio, it’s real important you tell the truth. No more lies. Everything that’s happened up to this point – none of it matters now. You can’t go back and do anything any different. You see what I’m saying? But you can do the right thing now.’

Nothing.

‘Julio, if Braxton killed Artie Trudell, we’ll get him. But we need to know what really went on that night. If the tip about the red-door coke did not come from Raul, where did it come from?’

Nothing. I had the sense the real Julio Vega was retreating like a boat on the horizon.

I prodded, ‘Listen to me, Julio, it’s not too late. You can still make this come out right. You can go back and make it right for Artie.’

Then, unexpectedly, Vega’s reserve simply collapsed. Maybe he gagged, finally, on the acid he’d been forced to swallow. Remorse and guilt and longing over Artie Trudell’s death. The thumbs-down of policemen, the loathing of the city, the finger-pointing – the community wheeling on one of its members, the many encircling the one. Of course all of this is my own supposition. Vega gave no outward signal, no movement in his face, no tears, no melodrama. The only motion he made was an involuntary tremor in his hand. But all at once, the truth poured out and out.

‘Everybody knew about it,’ he said evenly. ‘It was like, that summer everybody in the Flats was scoring coke from that place. Everybody had this red-door coke. And everybody knew it was MP dealing out of there. We all knew it. We had to close the place. The whole neighborhood was terrified, with all the sliders and the drugs and the gangs. But nobody would say anything. We tried to do a few buys but nobody would help us. They didn’t want to get mixed up with it. So we couldn’t get a snitch in there, and without a snitch we couldn’t get a warrant.’

‘So you just made up Raul?’

He shook his head no.

‘Where did the tip come from?’

‘Gittens.’

My jaw literally dropped.

‘Gittens always had snitches, man. When he was in Narcotics, it was like he knew more than anyone else. He was like the king of Mission Flats. Me and Artie, when we come along and we got to Narcotics, sometimes he’d help us out, like he’d give us some tip one of his snitches gave him. He was just helping us out so we could get a few pinches, right? You got to understand, nobody talks in the Flats. No-body It’s like the Code of Silence, like the Mafia or whatever. So we went to Gittens and asked if he could help us out. We told him, we got to close down this red-door place but we can’t get a CI – a confidential informant, you know? You need a snitch for the warrant. So Gittens tells us he’ll ask around. A few days later he comes back and he says this guy Raul told him all this stuff about the red door and Braxton. Gave up the whole thing. So we used it. We just wrote it all down and we used it. It was a good tip. The warrant was good.’

‘How do you know he was a good snitch? Maybe Gittens made him up.’

‘Gittens didn’t have to. He had guys would just talk. Everybody talks to Gittens. He’s just got a way. Besides, I’d heard about Raul before. Gittens used him in other cases. I don’t think that was his real name, Raul, but I know Gittens used him in other cases, called him Raul.’ Vega’s voice was flat, his tone did not waver.

‘You waited ten years to say this? Why?’ Kelly was incensed. ‘Why didn’t you just tell the truth and then let Gittens find Raul? Jesus, you let a cop killer walk!’

Vega shook his head. His pupils moved with his head like the buttoneyes in a stuffed animal. He was not seeing anything. ‘We had to,’ he said. ‘We had to stick with what we said in the search-warrant application. If it came out that we lied in the warrant, they’d have thrown out the whole case. My partner got killed, man. This was my brother. How could I let them throw out the case? We had to stick to the story. We needed that warrant to stand up.’

He pleaded, ‘What did it matter where the tip came from? What difference did it make? The tip was true. Every word of it was true! What was I supposed to do? Admit we cleaned up the warrant a little? Braxton would have walked right then and there!’

But Kelly wasn’t mollified. ‘Why didn’t you just ask Gittens to give you Raul? All you had to say was, We need to give up the snitch because this is a cop killing and all promises are off. Gittens would have understood that.’

‘I told him that. He said he did not know Raul’s real name, he only knew his street name.’

‘OG,’ I prodded, remembering the file in Danziger’s office.

‘That’s right. Old Gangster, some bullshit like that. Gittens and me, we looked for that guy, Raul, OG, whatever. He took off. He didn’t want to get caught between the cops and the Posse. I’d have done the same thing. Raul was dead no matter which side found him. Even if the cops had found him, he knew we couldn’t protect him, especially after the trial. So he took off. We were locked in,’ Vega said.

‘We?’

‘Me and Gittens. Well just me, really. Gittens didn’t have nothing to do with it.’

Kelly sighed wearily.

‘I don’t suppose there’s no way we could just keep this between us?’ Vega asked.

‘No chance,’ I said.

‘No. Didn’t think so.’ One of Vega’s hands sought out his forehead and began to knead the slack skin there. He said, ‘It wasn’t like you said, you know. It was all for Artie. I was trying to save the case. I’d do anything . . .’

I nodded. There was nothing to tell him, no comfort to offer.

‘I’d do anything.’

‘Julio,’ I said finally, ‘maybe there is something. You can take us back to that night.’

33

The triple-decker at 52 Vienna Road in the Flats had been vehemently rehabilitated. What had once been a fortress with a crack dealership on the top floor was now a trig little three-family home with October-colored mums out front.

On the third-floor landing – where crackheads had stood and passed rolled-up bills through a slit in the red door – there was a bristly mat so visitors could wipe their shoes. The red door was not even red. It was beige. The beautiful battered-down, rifle-blasted, wood-pane red door of my imagination had been replaced by a hollow-core steel job. The landing was tiny, about four by four – much smaller than I’d pictured it – and the two of us cha-cha’d around each other as different details caught our attention. When we were through, Kelly and I climbed up the next few steps, vaguely relieved to be out of the killing zone in front of the door.

Vega, who had been obliged to wait below on the staircase, stepped up onto the little stage. ‘Man, they really cleaned this place up,’ he said apprehensively, as if we would not believe him. ‘It didn’t look like this.’

‘It’s alright, Julio,’ I reassured. ‘Just tell us what happened, start to finish.’

Vega recounted the raid in detail. He named the cops on the entry team, where they were positioned, he described the dripping heat of that summer night, even the apparent strength of the door itself. Yet he did it all in the same hollow manner I’d noticed when he’d met me at the door an hour earlier. It was like listening to a dead man.

‘When Artie got shot, at first I didn’t see nothing. Just the sound. Like
boom.
People always say guns sound like firecrackers, like
pop pop.
This was no firecracker, this was
BOOM!
I was looking at the door, and the top of it just kind of blew out, like from the inside. I remember I’m thinking,
That’s weird, the way the top of that door exploded like that.
The things you think about, you know? I was kneeling beside the door, down here like this. I looked up and Artie had kind of turned around, like his back was to me. And then he just dropped, man. There was a lot of blood. I mean a
lot
of blood.’ Vega rubbed his eyes, which were dull and world-tired. ‘I figure the guy must have been standing right behind the door, right up close so he could aim at Artie’s head. He must have waited to figure out where Artie was hitting the door so he could line him up. Then he just shot through the door where he figured Artie’s head was at. Only it doesn’t make sense, because if he wanted to kill him and be sure of it, he’d have aimed at Artie’s chest, where the target was biggest. It’s like he knew Artie was wearing a vest . . . Sometimes I think, Artie was just such a big dude. I’m talking maybe six-two, six-three, two-sixty, two-seventy-five –
big.
And the shooter, he aimed so high, like maybe he did not want to hit him, just scare him. Only he did not know Artie was gonna be so damn big . . .’

‘Just tell us what happened next.’ My voice was cool, ministering.

‘Nothing happened. I, like, tried to reach out to Artie and see if he was okay. At the beginning I didn’t realize he was dead. I mean, I knew he was dead but part of me did not know for sure, you know? Then I had my radio and I called in and told them we were in trouble. I did not know what to do. The others were all up those stairs where you are now and down here, on the stairs down to the second floor. None of us knew what to do.’

‘Did you hear anything inside the apartment? Footsteps? Voices?’

‘It was all, like, crazy time in here. People were shouting and the radio was going and my ears were ringing and all this blood was coming toward me on the floor. I didn’t hear nothing.’

‘Did anybody look through the hole in the door to see who was in the apartment?’

‘No, man! Nobody was going to get in front of that door.’

I remeasured the little square of wood flooring in front of the door. Barely big enough to hold Trudell’s oversized body. No wonder Vega could not escape the spreading blood. He’d been paralyzed there, not brave enough to go forward, not cowardly enough to go back. How ordinary was his reaction, how like the way I would have reacted.

Vega stood up, sliding his back up the wall. ‘You know what I was thinking? I was thinking, “Artie, you stupid shit, you did this to yourself.”’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I mean. I just had this feeling the couple weeks before this all happened, like something was wrong. It doesn’t make sense. I know this wasn’t Artie’s fault, but it felt like it was. I felt like, Why did you do this? Why did you let this happen?’

Kelly, who had not uttered a word since we’d entered the building, said, ‘Why do you say Trudell did it to himself?’

‘Just the way he was acting: real quiet, like he was upset, nervous. I knew something was bothering him. I even asked him about it. Me and him used to talk all the time. But he swore it was nothing. I told him if he was in a beef with someone, did he need any help? Cuz Artie was my boy. I’d’a never let anything happen to him. Only he didn’t want any help. Maybe when you’re that big like Artie was, you figure you can do it all yourself because you’re untouchable. Like elephants, you know? They’re so big nothing can kill them, in the jungle. Then they get shot and it’s like, they must be surprised because they thought nothing could kill them and then there’s this little human with a little stick and, bang, they’re dying. They must be surprised. Because they’re so strong.’

I didn’t quite follow the point about elephants, but I did not blink at it. I did not want anything to interrupt the momentum of Vega’s narration. He’d held all this in for ten years.

‘I figured maybe it was something at home,’ Vega continued, ‘like it was none of my business. Artie had a wife and a couple of kids. Now I don’t know. Maybe he knew something he shouldn’t have known. There are things you don’t talk about. Anyway, I figured if he wanted to tell me what was up, he would. Artie always told you everything sooner or later. He wasn’t one of these guys that keeps shit secret. So I figured, just let it go. We were both so busy putting together this warrant for the red-door coke and there wasn’t time. This was it for us, man. This was
it.
I figured whatever it was, we’d talk about it later.’

Kelly shot me a glance to underline the importance of the point.
Remember that!

‘Go on, Julio,’ I coaxed. ‘Artie goes down. What happens next?’

‘Well, like I said, we were there, just like ten guys, no backup—’

‘Why wasn’t there any backup?’ Kelly interrupted.

‘That’s how we always did it. We had to get in here quiet. If they seen us coming with cruisers and all that, there’d be nothing left by the time we got inside. We had to surprise them. Plus, in the A-3 you didn’t tell anybody anything, not in that station. It was the Hotel No-tell. We had guys there that were tighter with Braxton than with you. Some of them were on the take, some of them just knew a kid from the neighborhood or whatever. If they heard about the warrant, they would have made a phone call. So we didn’t tell nobody about that raid till the night we did it, and we picked those guys by hand because we trusted them.
You
know what I mean.’ This last was directed at Kelly.