Falls the Shadow Read online

  “But you said facts that might have affected credibility aren’t enough to get a new trial.”

  “The facts themselves, no. But who else knew those facts? If the police were aware of his background, then the prosecutor might have known about it, too, and her failure to turn over the information to Whit would be a Brady violation.”

  “Let’s subpoena her records.”

  “They won’t show anything. Whatever anybody knew wouldn’t have been written down. We’re going to have to make the connection ourselves.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Victor, we’re not getting anywhere.” There was something in her voice, a line of frustrated desperation.

  “Calm down,” I said slowly. “Don’t take this all so personally. It’s just another case. It’s been three hours today already, times two lawyers, times our usual fees, plus expenses, including mileage on the car. We’ve got a retainer to run through, and with our morning’s work we’re making a good start.”

  She laughed. “My God, you get more cynical every day.”

  “It’s just that over the years I’ve learned that most people in prisons deserve to be there.”

  “I don’t believe that of François.”

  “And you could tell by looking in his eyes.”

  “Yes.”

  “See, but you can’t. That’s just the way of it, Beth. He might be innocent, he might be guilty, he might be a saint, he might certainly be a sinner, but whatever he is, you can’t tell by looking in his eyes. The eyes aren’t the window to the soul, they are just sacks of jelly.”

  She stayed quiet for a moment, unhappy, I could tell, with her cynical partner.

  “You want to stop for lunch?” I said.

  “And charge it to the client?”

  “Sure, but we’ll consult about the case over Cokes and a burger. I could use a burger.”

  “Victor.”

  “All right, no lunch, but we still have one more visit.”

  “Where?”

  “The intersection of Whitaker and Macalester, just next to Juniata Park,” I said.

  “What’s there?”

  “Someone who might know how Seamus Dent was killed.”

  The sergeant sat hunched at his desk, heavy eyebrows raised wearily. He looked as tired as the entire squat brick building, swamped as it was with a steady torrent of crime. There are twenty thousand auto thefts a year in Philadelphia, twenty thousand a year, every year, year upon year. And against all odds, the great majority of these cars are recovered. What condition they are recovered in is another story, but they are recovered still, and the center of this Sisyphean effort is the Philadelphia Police Department Auto Squad.

  “Did you file a report with your local district?” said the sergeant when he saw us walk in the door.

  “No,” said Beth.

  The sergeant breathed in heavily. He seemed too exhausted to get upset at this failure of protocol, too exhausted even to shrug. “You have to file a report with the local district.”

  “I don’t want to file a report,” said Beth.

  “You don’t got no choice. It’s procedure.”

  “But my car wasn’t stolen.”

  The sergeant scratched his nose with his thumb. “This is the auto squad, lady,” he said. “We don’t do televisions.”

  “My television wasn’t stolen either.”

  The sergeant wiggled his eyebrows. They looked like caterpillars sliding along a pale leaf. I almost felt sorry for him.

  “The way I remember it,” I said, leaning on his desk, “it was Who on first, What on second, and I Don’t Know on third.”

  “Mister,” said the sergeant, “I might have some idea of what you’re talking about, except I don’t speak Greek.”

  “I’ll make it easy on you.” I slowed down my speech, as if I were talking to a Frenchman. “We’re looking for Detective Gleason.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so from the start?”

  “You didn’t give us a chance,” said Beth. “Is he in?”

  “Yeah,” said the sergeant, picking up his phone. “Elvis is in the building. Who’s looking for him?”

  “Tell Detective Gleason that Victor Carl is here for a visit. That will be sure to make his day.”

  14

  “Hey, hey, hey,” said Detective Gleason, not deigning to rise from behind his desk and greet us. “My old bad-luck charm, Victor Carl, here to ruin an already lousy day.”

  “How have you been, Detective?”

  “Taking care of business,” he said, his voice deep and slightly southern. “I haven’t seen you since you called me a liar on the stand in the DeStafano murder trial.”

  “Nothing personal,” I said. “Just doing my job.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “Nothing personal on my side either, when I called you a scum-sucking piece of crap with his head up his ass, to that reporter waiting outside the courtroom.”

  “I wanted to thank you for the plug,” I said. “They spelled my name right, which is all I care about. You’re looking swell.”

  “I got lucky. After ten years of humping homicide, I finally pulled a cushy spot here in the auto squad. Two years to my twenty, and then I can sit back, smell the roses. Can’t you see how happy I am?”

  “You’re positively glowing.” Except he wasn’t, was he? Beyond the false smile, I could sense something defeated in him. He was a tall, thin man with arrogant sideburns that tapered wide at the base, but there always seemed to be something anxious in the surface of his hatchet face. With his bulging eyes, he had never presented the cocksure arrogance of the usual homicide dick. Instead he had the perpetually startled expression of a man who had just accidentally swallowed a squirrel. And it looked as if the squirrel had finally gotten the best of him.

  “Can we sit?” I said.

  He stared at me as he rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, and I caught a brief whiff of something sweet, sweet as bourbon. The thing about Gleason was that, despite his dated style and startled expression, he had always been a pretty sharp cop, first on vice and then at homicide. But there was something going on with him now, something not right. Maybe he had started drinking and that had thrown him off his game, or whatever had thrown him off his game had started him to drinking. It didn’t matter much, did it? He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand and then pointed at a couple of chairs in front of other desks.

  I pulled two around to face him, and we sat. “Detective Gleason, I’d like you to meet Beth Derringer.”

  “Hello, little darling,” he said. “How’s the world treating you?”

  “Other than the fact that I’m not little and not a darling,” she said, “it’s treating me just fine.”

  “Relax,” he said. “I didn’t mean nothing. Prickly, isn’t she?”

  “Beth’s my partner,” I said.

  “Well, that explains that. So who are you here for today, Victor? Another drug dealer? Another leg breaker? Or is some hard-luck angel looking to slime his way out of grand theft auto?”

  “Today it’s your garden-variety murderer,” I said.

  “Homicide’s in the Roundhouse.”

  “We’re in the right place.”

  “Is that so? The perp anyone I know?”

  “François Dubé,” said Beth.

  Did something flit through his eyes at the name, some fearful sense of recognition? Or was I only imagining it? It wasn’t easy to tell with his strangely haunted expression.

  “I remember the Dubé case,” said Gleason, leaning back in his chair, crossing his hands over his chest. “Wife killer, tried about three years ago. Went down hard, I believe. Life. That was Torricelli’s case. Talk to him.”

  “But Seamus Dent was yours,” I said.

  It looked for a moment as if the squirrel he had swallowed was trying to scamper back up his throat. “There’s no connection,” said the detective.

  “Sure there is. Seamus D
ent testified at the François Dubé trial, put the defendant smack at the scene of the crime.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. There might have been something about that in the file. But it didn’t have anything to do with what went down with the kid.”

  “What did go down, exactly?” I said.

  “Not totally clear. It happened in a crack house in Kensington, one of the floaters that flit from abandoned house to abandoned house. There was a rip-it-up about something. One rumor said it was over territory, another said it was over money, another said it was over a girl. Or maybe it was just because. There’s always a reason, isn’t there? It’s hard to find out what’s happening when the only witnesses are addicts, who scatter like cockroaches at the first pop of pistols. But we got a pretty good description of the fight before the shot.”

  “Who was arguing?”

  “The victim, Dent, and some self-styled gangster and rap impresario, went by the street name of Red Rover. There were hard words, hard knocks. Then, as Red Rover took a swing, Dent side-kicked him in the face. Hurt him bad, but not bad enough. On the floor now, Red Rover rolled over, pulled a Glock 9 from his belt, and shot Dent in the forehead. Western Unioned him to Nothingville.”

  “And what happened to Red Rover?”

  “He was tracked down at his mother’s place in Logan.”

  “He say much when they found him?”

  “Enough. He was told to put his hands up and surrender. He pulled out a weapon instead. Three in the chest.”

  “So you never got a statement?”

  “You’re catching on fast. We figured the way he played it was confession enough.”

  “Maybe so, but you know the way we defense attorneys are, with all our hang-ups and all. We like the execution after the trial, not before. And a statement would have made things clearer. Anything dirty about the shooting?”

  He shook his head. “Righteous. He was a hood, he killed that boy, he pulled a weapon. Not too many cops lost any sleep over it.”

  “You learn much about the victim?”

  “We knew he was dead, which was pretty much all we needed.”

  “What did the autopsy show?”

  Gleason leaned forward, curled half his upper lip in a sneer. “What’d I say? The autopsy showed a bullet through the forehead.”

  “What I was asking, Detective, is whether or not the victim was clean at the time of the shooting?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes, it matters.”

  “There was evidence of past drug abuse.”

  “But his blood came up clean, is that it?”

  “So they said.”

  “You figure that one out?”

  “Maybe he was strung out, maybe that’s what made him so ornery. Maybe he was looking to score, and Red Rover told him to pound asphalt. It doesn’t matter what he was on with a bullet in his head.”

  “We heard that before he was killed,” said Beth, “Dent was taken up by some older guy. Someone who was trying to clean him up, straighten him out. It might have been a sexual thing, but apparently for a time he was straightened. Did you hear anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “Did you try to find out Dent’s situation at all?”

  “Well, he wasn’t a sweet Leilani, if that’s what you’re saying. Look, we did what we needed to do. We investigated what we needed to investigate, we found the shooter, we took care of it. Now, I appreciate the visit, but I got work to do. In the time I wasted with you, another two cars were stolen off the street.”

  “It’s nice to see they keep you busy.”

  “If any other questions come up,” said Beth, “would you mind terribly, Detective, if we give you a call?”

  “Do me a favor, little sister,” he said, “and don’t.”

  15

  It was the last sentence of Detective Gleason’s that stuck in my mind for some reason. His voice, like I said, was deep and southern, and he gave that last word a melodious lilt that struck me as something strangely familiar.

  I let it rattle around in my head as I drove Beth back to the office. She wasn’t so encouraged by our outing, Beth, and not so happy with me, I could tell, and I could tell why, too. She was like my seventh-grade gym teacher who told me, when I refused to climb the rope, that he didn’t like my altitude. Well, Beth didn’t like my altitude either.

  “Dent’s dead,” she said, “his killer is killed, that line of inquiry is buried. It was a wild-goose chase from the start.”

  “I like wild goose. A nice pudding and some cranberry sauce and it’s like we’re in the middle of a Dickens novel.”

  “Not to mention the billable hours.”

  “Not to mention.”

  “We don’t have anything, do we?”

  “I told you at the start it was useless.”

  “But still you took his money.”

  “It wasn’t his, but yeah, I took the money. And if it’s hopeless, it’s not our fault. He’s the one who killed his wife.”

  “Did he? Are you sure?”

  “In the eyes of the law and jury, that’s just what he did. But see, look at me, I can cheerfully say I don’t give a damn. I don’t have to believe in my client; I just have to believe in the legal tender he’s tendering. A lawyer is really nothing more than a mechanic. Bring in your life, with all its troubles, and I’ll open the hood, poke around, see if any of the legal tricks at my disposal can fix the problem. It isn’t personal, I don’t make judgments about the quality of the car. I just roll up my sleeves. When was the last time your auto mechanic took it personally when your engine needed a valve job? He shakes his head, sure, clucks his tongue, and says all the right things when he tells you the bad news, like an oncologist with really dirty hands, but trust me, he doesn’t take it personally. Instead he takes Visa or MasterCard.”

  “I didn’t go to law school to be a mechanic.”

  “Yeah, but Atticus Finch was fiction and Darrow is dead. Ow.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Your self-righteous whining is starting my tooth to aching.”

  “Good. Want me to give it a twist?”

  That’s how we left it, with my tooth throbbing and the cracks in our relationship starting to show. And the truth was, I didn’t understand for certain where the new tension was coming from. I was the same cynical, opportunistic asshole I had always been. Since when had it bugged her so?

  I thought about that some, and then, back in my office, I thought some more about Detective Gleason. There was something in the story he had told, in that desolate building and futile department in which now he worked, something in the way he defended the killing of Red Rover, something in the way he protested Beth’s insinuations about Seamus Dent’s sexuality. And somehow it was all contained in that last sentence, in that very last word.

  Do me a favor, little sister, he had said, and don’t. Don’t. That’s what he said. Each time I held that word in my mind, it seemed to sing to me. And then, quick as a “Hey, baby,” I listened, and the raw possibility came clear.

  So I called up Torricelli. Tommy Torricelli was a lunkhead, absolutely, and we weren’t exactly buddy-buddy, but he was the homicide detective who had investigated the Leesa Dubé murder, who had found the bloodied shirt and gun, who had concluded that François Dubé was the killer, who had testified convincingly at the trial in which François Dubé was convicted. He would be oh so delighted to learn that I was looking into his case. But before I told him that little gem, perfectly designed to make his day, I had a few other questions.

  “How you doing there, Detective?” I said.

  He wasn’t inclined to tell me. He wasn’t inclined to tell me anything except to get lost, which is exactly what he did. I had never worked one of Torricelli’s cases before, but we knew each other enough to be wary. I was acriminal defense attorney with sharp teeth and a well-honed shamelessness. He was a cop known to cross a line or three in order to get the results he was looking for. Not quite oil and vinegar,
more like fertilizer and diesel fuel.

  “I only called to say hello,” I lied, “and to give you some news that might interest you. But first I thought we’d gossip a bit.”

  Torricelli lied back when he said he wasn’t one to traffic in gossip. Torricelli trafficked in gossip like I-95 trafficked in cars.

  “I was just at the auto squad on Macalester,” I said. “Ran into Detective Gleason. How’d he end up in that backwater?”

  He told me.

  “Wow,” I said, acting surprised. “But they didn’t pull his badge?”

  He told me that they hadn’t, that everything had checked out, but still the transfer.

  “Well,” I said. “At least it turned out okay. What’s with those sideburns, though? Yeah, and that southern twang in his voice?”

  He laughed and made a snide comment.

  “Right,” I said, “more like South Street. You have any idea where he drinks?”

  He gave me the name and a description of the place.

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “I didn’t know they had a place like that outside of Memphis. You ever go down there, have a drink with him?”

  He said no, he said they couldn’t drag his fat Italian ass into a place like that with a team of horses.

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said.

  He growled something at me.

  “You know, Detective, I’ve been thinking about you. We ought to have dinner sometime. Someplace nice. Candles and violin music. Someplace romantic that makes up a nice pasta fazool. My treat.”

  He was quiet for a long moment and then let out an expletive I have tactfully deleted.

  “And maybe we can talk about a new client I’ve just been hired to represent. François Dubé. Remember him?”

  I held the handset away from my ear to save my eardrum the wear and tear as he told me, in his own way, that yes, he did remember François Dubé and how delighted he was that I had decided to take up his cause. That was one of my favorite things about my job as a defense attorney, the way I was able to create pleasant and meaningful relationships with the noble members of the city’s police department. But even as I suffered the detective’s abuse, I still felt the shivery thrill of discovery, the same thrill you get when you slide in the final pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It was coming clear for me, the story of Seamus Dent, not all of it, I would learn more in the course of my investigation, but now maybe just enough was coming clear to get François Dubé that new trial he so desperately sought.