Willa winced.
“If even one thing you told me is true,” I said, “then there’s bad news and murder to go all the way round.”
“But Manny’s innocent,” she cried.
“I thought he was married.”
“Huh?”
“The way you talk about him. It sounds like you’re his girlfriend.”
“No.”
“Really?”
The way she looked up at me almost made me grin. The magnetism between young lovers (even when they’re old) is the gravity of the soul; undeniable, unquestionable, and, sooner or later, unwanted.
“Only once,” she said. “When Stuart had another case to attend to and I was recording Manny’s deposition. I—I respect Marin. She’s the mother of their child, but because they aren’t legally married they won’t even let her visit except behind a Plexiglas barrier.… He needed somebody.”
“Johanna Mudd has really disappeared?”
“Yes.”
“And Braun has pulled back on the case?”
“He shredded the files,” she claimed. “He said that they were all lies.”
“So the evidence is gone?”
She reached over, putting her hand on the roller bag.
“When I got the job working for Mr. Braun, my college adviser, Sharon Mittleman, told me that I should always make copies in case something went missing. Mr. Braun didn’t want the files stored electronically. He said that hackers could get into any memory device. So I’d come in at night to use the copy machine.”
“How much do you have?” I asked, my respect for the prospective client rising with each word.
“Thirty-three hundred and seventeen two-sided sheets.”
“Six thousand pages?”
“Closer to seven.”
Seven thousand pages. Suddenly I was scared. Any evidence is a detective’s friend, but I imagined reading through the pages while some shadow crept up behind me with a loaded pistol in its all-too-solid hand.
“You know I can’t do work pro bono like Braun,” I said, flailing around for an exit strategy.
She put the briefcase on the table and opened it, revealing stacks and stacks of paper-slip-bound fifty-dollar bills.
“Almost nineteen thousand dollars,” she said. “It’s half of an inheritance I got from my grandmother. I know we can’t go to the police and also we can’t have any connection between us. I’ve been taking money out of the account a thousand dollars at a time. I want you to prove Manny innocent and get him released from prison.”
“What if he wants to go back to Marin?” I asked.
“If you love someone you set them free,” she said with all the force of the pop song.
Looking at the pretty young woman with the sad, sad face I thought about the last twenty-four hours and how much I had changed. Between Congressman Acres and Beatrice Summers I was on the verge of becoming someone, something new.
On the verge but not quite across the line.
“Hold on to that money for another day,” I said.
“Why?”
“I’m going to look over these papers and make up my mind then.”
“Everything I’m saying is true.”
“That may be, but still, I have to convince myself.”
“But you’re my only hope, Manny’s only hope.”
“Why do you even think you can trust me?” I asked, the divine words leaping from my lips like Athena from Zeus’s brow.
“Jacob Storell.”
7.
Jacob was the son of Thomas and Margherita Storell. The father owned and ran a small hardware store on the Lower East Side and the mother was the director of a private women’s club called Dryads. Tom sold hammers and nails while Rita and her friends prayed to the spirits of trees.
The wife called me after reading the top line of my ad in the Yellow Pages—KING DETECTIVE SERVICE—because of the word service. She felt that there was duty and dignity in the use of such a word.
That was eight years ago. The divorce was dragging, and Monica’s lawyer had threatened to have my new accounts attached if I didn’t pay her initial fee.
I needed a job, any job.
Tom Storell told me that his son had been arrested for robbery. He’d gone into a stationery store also in the East Village and emptied the cash register while the clerk was with a customer somewhere in a back aisle. The police were called and happened to be only seconds away. They arrested Jacob before he had made it to the corner.
“He needs a lawyer,” I advised, “not a detective.”
“The police have a videotape,” Tom said with hopeless conviction.
“But we are sure that he would never do such a thing,” Margherita added. “He’s so good-hearted that ever since he was a child the other children would get him into trouble. Go see him. Look at the evidence. It would be a service.”
So, for a down payment of eighty dollars on four hundred, I went to the precinct in the East Village and asked to see my client.
“You the one they got for misconduct, right?” the desk sergeant asked.
“Falsely accused,” I replied.
The fifty-something cop was beefy but pale. There were errant hairs on his otherwise clean-shaven jowls, and his eyes had almost given up on color altogether. I was standing three feet away from him but imagined a rank scent and took half a step back.
“Interrogation room nine,” the sergeant told me. I never got his name. He handed me a clear plastic badge with a red card in it. The card identified me as V9.
Walking down the corridor toward the interrogation room area, I was struck by sudden claustrophobia. The walls seemed to want to move in on me. The floor felt uneven, and the imagined smell of the unnamed sergeant was pungent in my nostrils.
I stumbled and righted myself with my left hand against the encroaching wall.
“Whoa, brother,” a man said, putting a hand under my left arm. “You okay?”
He was Asian, probably Chinese, wearing a patrolman’s uniform and black-rimmed round-lensed glasses. His eyes were friendly and he didn’t smell at all.
“Thanks,” I said. “I guess the days kinda add up.”
“And count down,” he added. “Aren’t you Joe Oliver?”
“Yeah.”
“Man, they fucked you. If I had been the detective on that investigation, nobody would have ever seen a tape. I mean, you didn’t hit her or nuthin’.”
Back then this was new fodder for my discontent. Of course a brother in blue would “lose” evidence like that. And the police were always the first eyes on the scene.
“Thanks,” I said, standing up straight. “What’s your name?”
“Archie, Archie Zhao.”
“Interrogation room nine up ahead, Archie?”
“Just around the corner.”
The IRs were no more than broom closets in that precinct. When I opened the self-locking door, the solitary occupant flinched in his chair and put his hands up as far as the restraints would allow.
He was a short, pudgy young man in jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt. He’d been beaten pretty badly by the look of his face. The left eye was completely closed and his lower lip had been busted up. There was a lump the size of a golf ball on his right cheekbone.
“I’ll confess if you want me to,” he said.
That was all he needed to say. I had been him not long before. There were moments when I would have said anything to stop the fear of what might happen next.
“Your mother sent me, Jacob.”
“She did?” One eye opened wide while the other strained for sight.
“You okay?”
“They hit me. They hit me hard.”
“Did you steal that money?”
“Are you going to take me home?”
From the looks of him I would have said he was mid-twenties, but he spoke like and had the manner of a child.
“Not right this minute, but if you answer my questions truthfully, I’ll do my best to prove you innocent.”
That’s when he started crying. He put his head in his chained hands and blubbered. I took the seat across from his side of the detainment table and waited. After a while the crying became fearful and louder. He started yelling and trying to pull himself free from the cuffs that were attached by a chain, threaded through a hole in the table, to a steel eye anchored in the concrete floor.
I remained silent, allowing him to vent. I knew the feeling.
After a while he calmed down and sat up, after a fashion.