The Weight (2 page)

But he’s only in a few hours when the girlfriend waltzes in and tells the cops she’s decided not to press charges. Stupid broad, she thought it was
her
case. When they tell her it’s not up to her, she loses it again. By the time she’s done running her mouth, they’ve got enough probable cause to take her home and have a look around. That was all it took.

I’ll say this for that guy: maybe he played big-shot, but he paid for doing it, and he didn’t ask anyone he ever worked with to split the tab.

When a whole crew gets pulled in at the same time, the first thing they do is cut you off from the other guys. There’s all kinds of ways to do that.

But these cops hadn’t even mentioned the job, much less any of my partners on it.

When they left me alone in the interrogation room—a lot of them try that—I had plenty of time to think.

So, when they finally came back in, I thought I’d try that same trick myself, dividing them up.

“Those other guys, they watch too much TV,” I said to the older cop.

“Is that right?”

“They found my
DNA
?” I said, making a joke of it. I knew these cops must have been watching while the sex-crimes buffoons took the first crack at me.

The older guy’s partner—a black guy, closer to my age; clean-cut, sharp dresser—said, “DNA doesn’t lie,” making his voice all deep and serious, the way the sex-crimes clown had said it to me.

“And I
still
didn’t start yelling for Legal Aid,” I reminded them.

“Meaning …?”

“I figured—I
hoped
anyway—they’d send in the A-Team sooner or later.”

“You wouldn’t be stroking us now, would you, Sugar?” the older cop said.

“I’m just saying, there’s cops and there’s cops. I mean, come on, if they really had any of that CSI stuff, they would have shown it to me by now. Waved it in my face.”

“You think that’s what we’d do?”

“No, I mean those other guys. Like I said, TV cops. But I know you couldn’t have anything—”

“You were gloved?” the black guy cut me off, like he just saw an opening and needed to move fast before it closed.

It was my turn to look disappointed. “That’s cold, Officer,” I said to him. “I thought we were going to play this straight.”

“Cheap shot,” the older guy said. A cop’s apology, sure, but I trusted it at least enough to see if I could get
them
to say the wrong thing.

So I baited the trap: “Something’s screwy here. Listen, I absolutely
know
you don’t have any of that stuff. You know why? Because I know it wasn’t me who did it.”

“Simple as that?”

“It’s the truth,” I said, dropping an even bigger hint. What I had in mind, it had to be their idea. It couldn’t come from me, or they wouldn’t trust it.

“Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right,” the older guy said. “Say we don’t have one single piece of physical evidence to tie you to the rape. That’d make it a tougher case in court, sure. But we’re still holding the ace.”

“I got picked out of a photo spread?”

“Got it in one,” he said. Smiled a little, too.

“I don’t know what to say about that,” I said, real quick—before they realized they’d told me something I didn’t know. I’d already been in a lineup, but I’d just been guessing about the mug-shot book.

So I kept going: “I mean, I’ve been in lineups where I was the only white guy on the stage, but this one was fair. Hell, a couple of those guys looked enough like me to be my twin brother.”

The black cop laughed. Not the first time he’d heard that one, I guessed. “Probably so,” he said. “Only thing is—”

“Yeah, I know. They were cops, right? And no cop ever did a rape.”

They looked at each other for a second—just a quick glance. I was walking pretty close to the edge of their line with that last one. They must have had some way of signaling each other. Or maybe they’d worked together so long they didn’t need to.

“But you didn’t ask for your phone call,” the black cop said. “Which means you think you’ve got a shot at getting us to buy your story.”

Yeah, I was right—he was smart, just like his partner. Maybe I
would
get that shot. “It’s no story,” I said, making sure I didn’t sound resentful.

“You know what would turn it for you, Caine?” the older one said. “An alibi. That would pretty much trump our ace.”

I’d been hoping for something else, but I rolled with the punch, and tried again. “For you, or for a jury?”

“For
you
,” he hit back. “You know there’s no point giving us a piece of cellophane—that’d just make it worse. But you give us a
real
alibi, we’ll check it out. Check it out deep. Turn it upside down and sideways. If there’s a hole in it, we’ll find it; trust me on that. But if you’re telling the truth—and, like I said, I kind of think you just might be—that’d be
good
for you.”

It’s not just the hard eight; now I’m down to my third throw
, I thought.
Why wouldn’t they just ask me to take a—?

The older cop broke into my thoughts. “Here’s the good part for you, Caine. It’s not only you who knows how good we’d check out your alibi—the DA knows it, too. Believe me, my partner and me tell them your alibi’s rock-solid, no way those Ivy League wimps are going to take a chance on messing up their conviction rate.”

“Hard enough to get them to prosecute
good
cases,” the black cop said. His mouth twisted when he said that. I took it for real,
not a play. Probably watched some solid cases tossed out, and he hadn’t liked it much.

I remember thinking what a fucked-up mess things were. See, I believed those cops. Mostly because they weren’t telling me anything I didn’t know. Every pro on both sides of the line knows the DA’s Office’ll always deal away the courthouse on a sex crime. Specially if the woman was the wrong kind. Like a hooker, or slow in the head, or even dressed too sexy. Or maybe she had booze or drugs in her blood when they ran the tests.

The younger guy was right: the sex-crimes DAs were all about plea deals. Everybody knows they make the sweetest offers. But once they said “alibi,” I was cooked.

And when they dropped that the girl had seen a photo spread, I knew this wasn’t a bad-ID case; it was a stone-cold frame. I must have fit the girl’s general description, so the cops showed her the mug-shot books
first
. Then all she had to do was pick the guy in the lineup who looked most like the picture.

Crooked, sure. But that old cop-trick didn’t make it a setup; the photo spread did.

You know how I was saying if they
really
had some forensic stuff they’d’ve shown it to me? I knew the girl who got raped never got a real look at the guy who did it. There’s my eyes: one’s blue, the other’s brown. And my hair’s what they used to call “dirty blond.” But my eyebrows are black like they’d been painted on with ink, so you can see the open spot in the right one, where the scar is.

That girl who got raped, if she’d said
any
of that stuff, they would have shown me her statement. Lots of big guys walking around, but how many with two different-colored eyes?

That’s how I knew for sure they were measuring me for a frame—they never even asked me to step closer when I was in the lineup.

The cops had grabbed me just after I got back from a three-day-weekend job. The second I opened the door to my apartment, I knew someone had been there while I was gone.

I stopped in my tracks, spun around, and took off. If I could get to the basement, there was a chance of slipping out the back.

But they were waiting for me.

Which meant I wasn’t walking out on bond, even if the real rapist walked in and confessed. When they took me, I was carrying. The worst gun charge you can draw is “felon in possession,” and I qualified, both counts.

So I knew I was going down even if I beat the rape case. I don’t know why it still mattered to me if these guys thought I was a degenerate. I didn’t give a fuck what those sex-crimes cops thought, but these other cops were … I don’t know how to say it, exactly. Different. More like … more like me, I guess. So I kept trying.

“When did it happen?” I asked.

“You don’t—” the younger one started, before the older guy stepped on whatever his partner was going to say.

“Sunday night, around two in the morning,” he told me.

“I was—”

“Please don’t say ‘home, watching TV, all alone,’ okay?”

“I got a TV. HBO, Showtime, all that.”

“You rolled snake eyes on that one, pal,” the older cop said, almost like he felt bad for me. “Just your luck, there had to be a domestic-disturbance call late Sunday night. A
bad
one. You know it’s got to be bad when two different 911 calls come in, and neither one from the victim.

“Three cars responded. The woman in the apartment two doors down from yours, she was a busted-up mess. Ambulance job—she was just barely breathing. Told the first-responders that the guy who did it to her—her boyfriend, naturally—he took off just before the first radio car got there.

“We’d gone in silent-approach, no sirens, and it worked. First we sealed off the building, then we started a door-to-door.”

He talked like all real cops do. “We” didn’t mean him personally; he was talking about the whole department. “You catch the guy?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Hiding in a stairwell, three flights down. Big guy, like
you. But only on the outside. His hands looked like he stuck them in a meat grinder. The fucking dirtbag was moaning and crying, like he was the one who got hurt. Those kind, they’re all alike.”

“The girl make it?”

“Yeah. Barely. She’s going to need reconstructive surgery, eat through a straw for a year.”

“And she’s not going to press charges, right?”

The black guy looked at me like he’d rather be measuring me for a coffin than a frame. “We don’t
need
her testimony. That kind of thing, it’s yesterday. Now the victim doesn’t press the charges;
we
do.”

I already knew that. I didn’t have anything more to say. I just sat there and waited to see if they did.

The older guy broke the spell. “Thing is, we had to make sure this guy wasn’t holed up in one of the other apartments … maybe even holding hostages.

“Everyone on your floor answered the door. A couple of them were pretty pissed off, it being past two in the morning by then. But they were all wide-awake anyway, as much noise as we were making. Only one door wouldn’t open for us. The landlord passkeyed the uniforms in, seeing as how this was an emergency.”

He gave me one of those corner-of-the-mouth smiles, watching my eyes. I didn’t blink, but I didn’t play stare-down with him, either—that’s for punks.

“And your place … well, you know it was empty,” he went on. “Looked like nobody had been there for a while. Not that it was all filthy or anything; just the opposite, in fact. You can always tell a convict’s apartment. A man who’s done real time, he keeps his house clean. Neat and clean. Always seem to like those studio apartments, too.”

The younger cop looked calm, but his hands kept clenching and unclenching.

“Why am I telling you this?” the older guy said. He was looking at me, but I know he was trying to show his partner something.

“I don’t know,” I said. Honestly.

“Two reasons, Caine. One, you’ve been around the block. More than once. You knew your room had been tossed the second you walked in, am I right?”

I just nodded.

“Two,” he said, “I really
don’t
like you for this one. So just give us something that stands up. For once in your life, make a good decision. Give us that alibi; it could turn out to be the smartest thing you ever did.”

“Fuck me,” I said, lighting the last of my cigarettes. They’d taken them away when they booked me, but the older guy brought them back when he and his partner took over. He was smart enough to know I’d appreciate a little thing like that.

“What?” the older guy said. “You think your backdoor girlfriend’s gonna deny everything, try and save her marriage, something like that?”

I just looked at the ceiling. A pack of legit smokes costs a fucking fortune in this city, but I’d be paying a lot more than that for a single where I was going.