Robert Crais - Free Fall

I let the tape play for another thirty seconds or so, and then I turned it off.

Mark Thurman said, “Let it play and it shows us figuring out what to do. You can see Floyd planting a gun so we could say he was armed.”

I looked over at him. Thurman was in the bathroom door. I said, “I’ve seen enough for now.”

“Yep.” He killed the rest of the beer. “When I came into it everybody was screaming. I thought maybe the guy had a gun or something. It wasn’t like I was scared, I just didn’t know what to do.” He went to the little round motel table and took another beer. Twenty-five years old, looking for a friend, and there were no friends around. “What could I have done?”

“You could have stopped them.”

He pulled at the warm beer and nodded. “Yes. I’d say that’s pretty clear. But I didn’t, did I?”

“No. That’s something you’ll have to live with. You had an opportunity to behave well, but you behaved poorly. Had you behaved well, Charles Lewis Washington might still be alive.”

He sucked down the rest of the beer and you could tell that he was living with that, too.

I said, “You’re going to have to give up Dees and the other guys.”

“I can’t do that.” There was one beer left. He went for it.

“You don’t have a choice, Mark.”

“The hell I don’t.” Angry now. Walled in by circumstances and goddamned tired of it. “Jesus Christ, I feel bad enough. Now you want me to be a traitor? You want me to sell out my friends?”

“I want you to do what you should’ve done when it began. I want you to do the right thing.”

He raised his hands like he didn’t want to hear it and he turned away.

I took two fast steps toward him, grabbed the back of his shirt, and shoved him across the little table. He said, “Hey,” and dropped the beer.

I said, “Charles Lewis Washington was living with a woman named Shalene. They had a baby named Marcus. Now that baby is going to grow up without a father. Do you understand that?”

“Let me up.” He grabbed my wrists, trying to pry my hands off and push up off the table, but I wouldn’t let him.

“He had a brother named James Edward and a mother and a grandfather.” The muscles across my back and the tops of my shoulders felt tight and knotted. I dug my fingers into his face and neck and pressed. “You have been part of something bad. It’s unfair, and it’s ugly, and you didn’t know what you were supposed to do, but now you do, and you have to be man enough to stand up. If you don’t, Ida Leigh Washington will have lost two sons for nothing and I will not allow that.”

He wasn’t trying to pry me off anymore. He still gripped my wrists, but it was more as if he were holding on than pushing away.

I let go of him and stepped back, but he stayed on the table. He covered his face with his hands and then he sobbed. The sobs grew louder, and his body jerked, and he said things that I could not understand. I think he said that he was sorry.

I went into the bathroom, wet a towel, and brought it out to him. I helped him to sit up and gave him the towel, but it didn’t do much good. He sat in one of the cheap motel chairs, bent over with his face in his hands, crying.

Finally, I held him close.

He would hurt for a long time, though not as long as Ida Leigh Washington. Still, he would hurt, and maybe this was his way of getting used to it.

At twelve minutes after seven the next morning, I phoned Lou Poitras at home. Thurman didn’t want to listen, so he went outside and stood in the parking lot. Crime is certainly glamorous, isn’t it?

Poitras’s middle daughter, Lauren, answered and asked who I was. I told her Maxwell Smart. She said, “Nyuh-uh. You’re Elvis Cole.” She’s nine, and we’d known each other maybe seven years.

“If you knew who I was, why’d you ask?”

“Mommy told me always ask.” These kids.

“Lemme speak to your daddy.”

“Daddy was talking about you last night. He said you were an asshole.” She giggled when she said it. These kids are something, aren’t they?

“Let me speak to him.”

The phone got put down and you could hear her running away, yelling for Lou and yelling that it was me. Lou Poitras came on maybe twenty seconds later, and said, “Where you calling from?” His voice was tight in a way I hadn’t heard it before.

“Why, Lou? You going to have me arrested?”

“Maybe I should. You screwed up bad, Hound Dog.”

“If not me, who? If not now, when?”

“Stop with the goddamn jokes. This isn’t funny.” There was a kind of fabric sound that made me think he was moving with the phone, maybe getting away from his family.

I said, “I need to see you, and I need to be certain that I’m not going to be taken into custody when I do.”

“You gonna turn yourself in?”

“No. I’m going to talk to you about cutting a deal that involves myself and Joe Pike and an LAPD officer, and I need someone to take it up the line to the DA.”

His voice went harder, and low, like maybe he didn’t want his wife or kids to hear. “Are you telling me that an LAPD officer is involved in this?”

“I’ve got visual proof that Charles Lewis Washington was unarmed when he was beaten to death five months ago. I’ve also got eyewitness proof that since that time, Eric Dees and his REACT team have been participating with the Eight-Deuce Gangster Boys in an ongoing series of misdemeanor and felony crimes.”

Lou Poitras didn’t say anything for maybe forty seconds. Behind him, I heard his wife yelling for the kids to quit dogging it and get ready for school. Lou said, “You’re sure?”

“Sure enough to call you. Sure enough to think I can get the deal.” Nobody a good cop wants to bust more than a bad cop.

Poitras said, “What kind of visual proof?”

“Videotape from a black- and white surveillance camera.”

“There wasn’t a tape in the Washington thing.”

“It was a hidden camera.”

“And this tape shows the incident?”

“Yes.”

“In its entirety?”

“Yes.”

“Can I see it?”

“You going to come alone?”

“You know better than that.” Giving me pissed. Giving me Had Enough. “There’s a video repair place called Hal’s on Riverside just east of Laurel in Studio City. The guy owns it knows me. It’s early, but he’ll open up to let us use a unit. Can you meet me there in forty minutes?”

“Sure.” Most of the traffic would be coming this way.

Lou Poitras hung up without saying good-bye.

I put the cassette into a plastic Hughes Market bag, locked the room, and went out to the parking lot. Thurman was waiting in his car.

Thirty-five minutes later we pulled off the freeway in Studio City and found Hal’s Video in a shopping center on the south side of the street. Lou Poitras’s car was in the parking lot, along with a couple of other cars that looked abandoned and not much else. Eight A.M. is early for a shopping center. We parked next to Poitras’s car, but Thurman made no move to get out. He looked uneasy. “You mind if I stay out here?”

“Up to you.”

He nodded to himself and seemed to relax. “Better if I stay.” It was going to be hard, all right.

I took the plastic bag with the videocassette and went into Hal’s. It was a little place, with a showroom for cheap VCRs and video cameras made by companies you’d never heard of and signs that said AUTHORIZED REPAIR. Lou Poitras was standing in the showroom with a Styrofoam cup of coffee, talking to a short overweight guy with maybe four hairs on his head. Hal. Hal looked sleepy, but Lou didn’t.

I said, “Hi, Lou.”

Poitras said, “This is the guy.” Some greeting, huh?