The Weight Read online

  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.

  “I’m done,” I told them.

  These guys were pros; they weren’t going to blow a confession by talking when it was my turn. And they weren’t going to get up and walk out—I still hadn’t told them I wanted a lawyer. “I’m done” could mean anything. But all it meant to me was exactly what I’d said.

  It stayed quiet until I finally told them, “I’ll save the alibi for the trial.”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” the younger one told me. “You just as good as told us you don’t have an alibi. And anything you can put together over a three-way phone call is never going to hold up.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded at him. “You’re right. I’m not even going to try. I mean, I don’t have to give an alibi, right?”

  “You dumb—” the younger guy started, but the older one shook his head to shut him up.

  “You really are fucked,” the older one told me. He turned a little so he could look at his partner. “Mr. Caine here, he’s got an airtight alibi for when that rape was going down, Earl. Ask me, I’ll tell you.”

  The younger one shot his partner a “What the fuck?” look. Me, I didn’t bother. I could see the older guy had already figured it out.

  “Our boy here was working when that girl got raped,” the old guy said. “Him and, what, four, five other men?” he said, suddenly looking at me with cop eyes. I don’t mean blue—which they were—I mean how they went from soft to ice in a finger-snap. “The drill-through job at that little jewelry store over on Eighty-ninth? They probably started real late Friday night. When Sugar opened his door Tuesday morning, he was just coming home from work.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Now, that’s Mr. Caine’s k
ind of work, Earl. Wouldn’t surprise me, we find out that the owner’s in on it, too. Told the papers he lost over eleven million in stones … which means probably more like seven. And what’s a jewelry store doing in that part of town, anyway? Nobody’d go there looking for a deal on diamonds. That’s what the District is for, right?”

  “You’re saying this mutt was part of that crew, Tom?”

  “Bet my pension on it.”

  The younger one turned to me. “And I’m betting my partner’s right. Which means you just hit the exacta, buddy. You give us the other guys in on the job with you—the owner, too—and you not only walk away from that one, but the rape charge has to get dropped.” He made his voice sound bitter that I could get such a sweetheart deal, but I knew that was just game.

  And now I also knew why this team had come in to talk to me when the sex-crimes cops were finished.

  I looked at the black cop like he was a wall with last year’s calendar on it. And no pictures.

  “Don’t you fucking get it?” he said. “If the DA’s gonna use your testimony, he has to drop the rape charge. You can’t be in two places at once.”

  “Ah, our boy here, he gets it, all right, Earl,” the older guy said, sounding sad again. “Thing is, what he gets is that he has to take it.”

  That old cop had it right. Rules are rules. You go down, you go down alone. Walking into any joint carrying a rat jacket is bad enough, but walking out with one would be even worse—I’d never find decent work again.

  It hadn’t been any four- or five-man job; just three of us. I’d only worked with one of the other guys before, Big Matt. He was some kind of engineer, so he could come up with ways to get around stuff we didn’t expect. He always knew what tools we’d need, too.

  I didn’t know the other guy, but he’d been vouched for by Solly, the planner. Him, I trusted. We went back a long ways, and I knew he’d hold my share until I finished my bit.

  Any way you stacked it, I was going down. Only question was … for what? Yeah, they said rape, but I still didn’t know anything else about what those sex-crimes guys thought I’d done.

  The Legal Aid in Night Court was one of those frazzled old wrecks—dandruff all over the shoulders of his cheap suit, bad teeth, liver spots on his hands. He smelled like the holding cell I’d been waiting in. Just putting in time until he could retire. Didn’t have a clue about my case, and gave even less of a fuck.

  Everybody knew their role. I pleaded not guilty. Judge threw me a telephone-number bail. They sent me back to the Tombs to wait for the bus.

  The lawyer they sent over to Rikers was an 18-B—the lawyers they put on a panel to take cases that Legal Aid can’t handle when they’re overloaded. Which is pretty much always.

  A lot of fools think 18-Bs are better, being “private lawyers” and all. Truth is, that panel is loaded with losers who can’t make it on their own. They get paid crap compared to real lawyers, but it’s enough to buy them desk space in one of those Baxter Street dumps right behind the courthouse.

  But this guy didn’t look the part. A young Puerto Rican guy, all sharkskin and leather. Slicked-back hair—not cut, styled; gunfighter’s mustache so thin it was like two black lines over his mouth. One of those big wristwatches with too many dials.

  “Hector Santiago-Ramirez,” he said, handing me his card. I ran my thumb over it as I slipped it into my shirt pocket. Engraved. That’s Old School. Expensive, too.

  I figured he got himself on the panel to get trial experience, putting in a few years before he could grab the big-score cases. Maybe had a girlfriend who kept him looking that successful while she waited for it to happen.

  “What can you tell me?” he finally said, after he saw I wasn’t going to say anything.

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Okay.” He smiled. “Now give me something I can use.”

  “I got nothing,” I told him.

  “Neither do they,” he said.

  That one blindsided me. “How do you know? I mean, I just got here.…”

  “They already talked to me about a plea. If they’d had prints, fluids, security-camera tape—anything—they’d never do that. But they’re way too eager to close this one. It’s like they put up a billboard: WE DON’T WANT A TRIAL!”

  “Do they ever?”

  “Maybe when they have a videotaped confession, couple of eyewitnesses,” he said, with a thin smile.

  “So I’ve got a shot?”

  “The victim picked you out of a lineup.”

  “I know.”

  “Huh!” he said, surprised. “You know her before or something? Please don’t tell me she’s an old girlfriend.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “She put sexy pictures of herself up on Facebook or something, and the cops found your laptop?”

  “I don’t have a computer.”

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  “You’ve got two priors. Violence priors, even if one was a misdemeanor. You know what that means?”

  “Yeah, I know. I lose at trial, I get maxed.”

  “And Strike Two on top of that.”

  “I know,” I said, thinking back. A few years ago, I got into something. If I hadn’t lucked out, I’d already have that second strike. I remembered how that snotty little ADA said “one-punch homicide” about two hundred times while I was taking that manslaughter-down-to-assault plea. He just liked the sound of his own voice—everyone had agreed to the deal before we ever walked into court.

  Sure, I was a lot older and smarter than after my first fall. But I didn’t have the skills to slide away from the situation while it was still just an argument, the way a real pro would have done. I hadn’t started the fight, and I sure didn’t set out to murder anyone. But I believed the Legal Aid when he said a jury would take one look at me and come back with a murder rap.

  Why wouldn’t I believe him? He looked scared just being alone in the room with me.

  A ninety-day county slap, that was sweet enough. But them letting me plead to misdemeanor assault, that was pure gold. Probably helped that the other guy had a lot of priors. And a knife.

  It was even fair, sort of. I had dropped that other guy. I didn’t set out to kill him, but he was just as dead.

  Only I knew it wouldn’t go that way again. Even with the DA already talking about a plea, I knew I was looking at felony time. All I cared about was keeping that as short as possible without giving anyone up.

  I already missed smoking—I’d had to trade my whole first commissary draw for a decent shank. Rikers is no place for a white man, especially one with no Nazi ink.

  “Could I see your right forearm?” the lawyer asked me.

  I pulled back my sleeve to the elbow. He motioned for me to turn my hand so he could see the underside. He couldn’t be looking for track marks—otherwise, he’d have wanted to look at both arms.

  “I knew it,” he said, nodding like he was agreeing with himself.

  “What?”

  “No tattoo. The victim said the man who raped her had one. Big one. Right forearm. She didn’t get a close look, but she remembered it had a lot of red in it.”

  “So I’m off the—?”

  “Experienced rapists always use them. Decal tattoos, I mean. It’s the kind of thing victims remember.”

  “Yeah. They’ve got an answer for everything,” I told him, remembering what the black cop had said about me wearing a rubber.

  “But you still want to roll the dice?”

  “What’s the difference?” I said. “I’m going anyway. I was carrying when they grabbed me.”

  “Operable?” he asked. Showing me he’d handled carrying-concealed cases before. But telling me something else: that the DA hadn’t exactly opened their files for him, like he thought they had.

  “Yeah,” I said. “With one in the chamber.”

  “You know they’re going to write it up that the safety was off, right?”

  “For once, th
ey wouldn’t be lying if they did. But I guarantee you there’s nothing on that gun. Brand-new. Never been fired.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Bet my life,” I told him.

  That would have been a safe bet. Solly always supplied the hardware on his jobs. I remember one time when one of the crew Solly put together wanted to bring his regular carry piece. Said it was his lucky lady. “That’s no lucky lady,” Solly told him. “In fact, that’s no lady at all.”

  Before the guy could say anything, Solly snatched the piece out of his hand and held it up under the lightbulb hanging in the basement where we were meeting. “What’s this hold, about nineteen rounds? Where’re you even gonna carry it, fucking monster like that? You’re planning on a gunfight, swell. But this job, it goes right, nobody shoots at all.”

  “Sometimes—” the guy started to say.

  “Sometimes isn’t this time. That’s what I get paid for. On my jobs, every man carries the same. Show him, Sugar.”

  I took out the one Solly had given me. Short-barreled, kind of ugly.

  “Ruger in forty-five,” Solly said. “Whatever you hit with this, it’s not getting up. The only thing that ‘lady’ of yours would be good for is a firefight. You want one with a SWAT team?”

  “I still don’t see why we all have to carry the same—”

  “Because one guy also carries a little bag with him. That’s Sugar. Soon as you start work, Sugar puts the bag down, opens the zipper. There’s two hundred full magazines in there.

  “You all carry the same, so you all got your ammo supply right there. Every round checked before it went into a clip—you’re not gonna have to worry about jams. Even better, nobody has to worry about what the other guy’s carrying. That’s because none of mine got a past. Pure virgins, every single piece.

  “See, that’s no lady you’re carrying, my friend; that’s a whore. And you know whores: if she’ll sell her pussy, she’ll sell you. Get it now?”