The Hearse You Came in On (24 page)

“You never say ‘cheese’ anymore.”

I
considered heading straight over to Kate’s after dropping Julia off, but then I remembered that by now Alcatraz would be debating which of the many corners of my apartment he should pee in and so I hurried home and let him outside to lay down his love trail. Back inside, I picked up the phone and dialed Kate’s number. Her machine answered.
Hello, you’ve reached the home of Kate Zabriskie. I can’t come to the phone right now
—My doorbell rang. I took the phone with me to the door—
so please leave a message and a number and I’ll get back to you.
I opened the door just as the beep sounded. Kate was standing in front of me. I muttered into the phone.

“I’ll talk to you later.”

Kate stepped past me into the apartment. I was too slow in closing the door; the dark cloud that was trailing her wafted in as well. I followed her into my living room where she had already dropped onto my couch and was pulling the sleeves of her loose sweater up past her elbows.

“You are pouring me a drink and I am telling you a story,” she said.

“Kruk?”

She let out a sharp laugh. Almost a bark.

“Yeah. Kruk. Good old goddamn John Kruk.”

I went to my liquor cabinet. Which is also my Cheerios and peanut butter cabinet. I fetched a bottle of Jack and a pair of glasses. Kate patted her hand on the couch next to her.

“Here. Sit.”

Before I could get there, Alcatraz had hopped up onto the couch.

“How do you do that?”

Kate didn’t answer. She was scratching Alcatraz under the chin. With her other hand she pointed at my easy chair. “Over there. Sit.”

I did. I poured out a pair of drinks and took mine over to my chair. Two could play this game.

“Speak.”

John Kruk was just outside the entrance of the Sparrows Point warehouse last November 18 when he heard the short volley of gunfire come from inside. Kruk and his partner, Officer Kate Zabriskie, had responded to an emergency radio call—
officer down—
and hightailed it over to the Sparrows Point address given out by the dispatcher. They found Detective Mike Connolly just outside the warehouse trying to staunch the blood flow from his right thigh. Kruk had been the first to reach him. He stopped to help as Kate Zabriskie charged into the warehouse.

A well-trained cop, especially a well-trained cop with good instincts, can follow a trail of silence as readily as a trail of sounds. Officer Zabriskie got her
whiskers going and she moved steadily and cautiously through the unlit warehouse—gun drawn—down a hallway, through a pair of swinging doors, into a room full of concession machines, out through the swinging doors at the other side, past a glassed-in office and a loading dock and around a corner to a large room about the size of an airplane hangar. Metal shelving ran some sixty feet up to the ceiling.

This was where Kate found Detective Lou Bowman, who was standing stock-still against a large crate, his service revolver poised by his ear. Bowman was tense. His partner had been hit. There were two men out there in the dark warehouse with guns, feeling cornered. Bowman never smiled much anyway, according to Kate. Especially at women cops. If he at all considered that Kate Zabriskie represented the arrival of the cavalry, he didn’t show it.

There are two versions of what happened next. Far and away the more popular (and highly fictitious) version is that Detective Charley Russell, present in the warehouse as part of an ongoing undercover investigation, stepped out from behind a stack of boxes, in clear view of Zabriskie and Bowman. He stepped into view and then—in police lingo—a spark and a bark came from somewhere up in the black tangle of the warehouse walkways. Russell fell. As Kate Zabriskie spun in the direction of the shooter, a second shot was fired. This one grazed her left shoulder. Kate fired. The gunman, Earl DeLorenzo, fell. He was dead. Kate had allowed her husband’s killer to enjoy all of three additional seconds of life before putting him down. It was later determined, in this version, that Charley Russell’s cover had somehow been compromised
and that is why DeLorenzo had taken him out. The End.

Version Two of the events in the warehouse lines up precisely alongside Version One, right up to the point where Detective Russell has stepped out from behind the boxes. As with the previous version of the story there is also a spark and bark. But this one comes from the service revolver of Officer Katherine Zabriskie, responding instinctively to a man in a cap raising a hand with a gun. A second shot rings through the warehouse, grazing Kate Zabriskie’s left shoulder. And then two quick shots as veteran Lou Bowman fires up at the figure on the walkway. One shot misses Earl DeLorenzo. The other takes him out.

Fact and fiction. They slammed together, blended, bonded, snarled together and then came roaring out of that warehouse like a tidal wave. Certainly Detective Zabriskie got knocked over by the tidal wave. And certainly when it had receded, she found herself on a shore that she only partially recognized. A widow. A hero. A liar. In another month or so Kate Zabriskie would find herself literally on another shore, a real one, a Mexican beach. She would watch the water coming in and going out over and over and over. Her husband would seem like a man who had never really existed, not in the real world. He would seem like an idea that Kate had planted in her own head, an idea that she could use for her own pleasure as well as for the exorcising of her own shame; she would have an additional means of feeling wholly miserable about herself as well. She would not always require the shifting memory of a dead husband. And the tides brought in a handsome brutal older man who wrapped her in his arms
and punished her just fine, thank you. In Version Two of the story, Kate Zabriskie’s murder of her own husband did not go unpunished. Not really. Not in the least.

John Kruk played a minor role in both versions of the story. In both, he helped apply a tourniquet to Detective Connolly’s wounded leg. In both, he heard the gunfire and he ran inside and found two bodies down and dead, and one body slightly wounded. In either version you choose, Kate Zabriskie is already bent over the still body of her husband, sobbing into his chest, her tears mixing with his blood.

The very next morning, Kruk was summoned, along with Lou Bowman and Detective Mike Connolly—on crutches—into Commissioner Stuart’s office for a frank discussion, a frank rearrangement of the facts, a frank reassigning of the truth. Stuart was grim and he was firm. Nothing good will come out of this event, the men were told, if it is exposed to the light in its current form. Officer Zabriskie—who has lost enough already—loses. The department loses. In a way, Stuart calmly told them, the city of Baltimore loses as well. Allowing the unfortunate truth of what happened in that warehouse to be spun into rabid headlines and infect the bloodstream of the television media would be in the best interests of neither serving nor protecting.

Kruk and the others were then presented with a few alternative facts. These facts squared with Version One. These facts
created
Version One. The coroner was due in Stuart’s office in about an hour. He would be informed by Alan Stuart himself as to the
caliber of the bullet that had killed Detective Russell. Conveniently, the caliber would match that of the pistol pried out of the hand of Earl DeLorenzo. As for DeLorenzo, he had been felled by a police bullet. No need to play fast and loose there. That bullet, Kruk and the others were instructed, had come from the service revolver of Officer Zabriskie, not from Lou Bowman’s. A slight adjustment, that’s all. Then Stuart gave his warning. Any intimations, under
any
cir-cumstances—and this included watercoolers, local bars and the privacy of their own bedrooms—any intimations that something other than the scenario just laid out took place, Alan Stuart calmly guaranteed, would result in swift and most unhappy reprisals. “Let’s stay on the same page. Let’s serve and protect, not expose and destroy. Can we all live with that?” Nobody had said that they couldn’t. Stuart had then dismissed them, all except for Lou Bowman, whom he said he needed to talk with privately for a few minutes. Kruk and the others assumed that the boss felt the need to go one-on-one with the veteran detective. Bowman was, after all, about to lose a notch on his belt. His quick and appropriate response under fire was about to go unmentioned and unrewarded. Certainly Stuart owed him a little quality time.

Kruk didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one bit. He told no one that he didn’t like it, least of all Kate, to whom he spoke only briefly at her husband’s funeral. He didn’t like what he saw in Kate’s eyes at the funeral. Alan Stuart’s everybody-wins scenario certainly was not taking Kate Zabriskie into account. She looked
horrible. She looked haunted. There was no winning there.

“Kruk is a good detective,” Kate said, finishing off her drink and indicating that she wanted another. “A good detective’s mind works like a natural sieve. Images and evidence just pour into it day and night. You don’t even will it to happen; it just happens. That’s how you eventually solve your cases. You sift and sift and sift and you keep your eye out for the nugget. It’s always there. Somewhere. You just have to load enough information into the sieve and then learn to keep alert. Old Johnny boy kept alert on this one.”

The image of Kate Zabriskie hunched over her husband, sobbing as his life literally bled from him, was one that apparently wouldn’t sift through Kruk’s sieve. It wouldn’t drain away. Granted, it is a chilling and bitter image. But Kruk was playing the scene over and over again for a reason he couldn’t identify. It wasn’t even something he was choosing to think about. The image simply kept landing in his brain and rattling about in the sieve. And what finally came to Kruk was simple. There was too much damn blood. The puddles of blood around Charley Russell’s body had grown swiftly. Kate’s tears, as voluminous as they were, stood no chance of competing with all that blood.
All that blood.

“I met with Kruk this afternoon,” Kate said. “At the cafe at the museum.”

Kruk told Kate how he had followed Alan Stuart’s directives to the letter. He had spoken with no one about the events of that night in Sparrows Point,
except to mouth the version that—as Stuart would have it—was best for everyone. But he had been unable to shake the image of her and her dying husband out of his head. The blood. Kruk then made a decision that was not easy for him to make. He decided to arrange a bump-in with the coroner and to fall into an innocent chat with him. Kruk’s chat with the coroner violated the directive Alan Stuart had placed on the Russell case, but he managed to do so in a manner that never once left the coroner suspicious. And John Kruk came away with confirmation of what he had come to suspect.

Two bullets had entered Charley Russell’s body. Not one. Two.

Kate paused to allow me a moment to take this in. She also paused because—I think—this was the first time that she had spoken this fact aloud.

“Two bullets?” I said.

She nodded and held up two fingers, waggling them in the air.

“Uno. Dos.”

Two bullets had ripped though Charley Russell. And Kate knew full well that she had only fired once.

“If another shot was fired it was fired at the exact same time. I never even heard it. Or maybe I did. I just don’t know. I’ve gone over that scene in my head a thousand times. It just gets more and more surreal each time.”

Kruk told Kate that he had guessed a second bullet was involved even before the coroner confirmed it. And it didn’t take a veteran of fifteen years to run through the elimination process and come up with the
only two possible persons who could have fired that other shot. Lou Bowman or the walkway gunman, Earl DeLorenzo.

Kate told me that—to put it mildly—she could barely believe what she was hearing. This entire fiction that had been draining her for nearly six months now … it was partially true all along. Alan Stuart’s fiction of Earl DeLorenzo shooting Charley… it wasn’t a fiction after all. The truth and the lie had collided and now they really were the same thing. Yes. A cruel joke. A punch line right to the gut.

“Kruk must have seen it on my face,” Kate said. “I can’t imagine what I must have looked like when he told me this, but he suddenly did a very un-Kruk-like thing. He reached across the table and touched me on the arm. ‘Hold on, Kate,’ he said to me. ‘You’re not lined up here.’ It turns out that the coroner told him that there were indeed two bullets in Charley, and that it was odd that I had only remembered firing one shot at my husband.”

“But you did fire one shot.”

“I know I did. And Kruk does too. After his talk with the coroner he checked the ballistics report on my service revolver. And on Lou Bowman’s.”

“Bowman’s?”

“Bowman didn’t miss his first shot at DeLorenzo up on the walkway,” Kate said grimly. “He got him with a single shot. Bowman’s a top marksman. He can take dead aim better than any detective on the force. And… he would be able to squeeze off a shot in incredibly close approximation with someone else shooting.”

“What are you saying?”

“The other bullet that the coroner found in Charley … Well,
both
bullets is a better way of putting it. Neither of them was the same caliber as DeLoren-zo’s gun. They were both the same caliber as mine. As my service revolver. It was a cop bullet.”

“But I—”

“It came from Bowman’s gun,” Kate said flatly. “Lou Bowman shot my husband.”

Kate came off the couch like a snake. Her feet and her legs glided out from beneath her and took a liquid course to the floor, the rest of her body effortlessly lifting as she went. Without so much as a glance in my direction she finished off her drink in a single hard gulp, then stepped into the kitchen. Two seconds later I heard a crash. I leaped out of my chair.

Kate was standing on the white tiles of my kitchen floor looking like she had no clue where she was. The glass was in shattered pieces all over the floor. Kate’s chest was heaving. Tears welled up as the blood rushed into her pale face, bruising it crimson.