Robert Andrews - A Murder of Justice

“Come on,” Jose prodded, “guess.”

Crawfurd said nothing.

“You not a guessing man, Pencil? Nobody’s name comes to mind? Nobody who’d want to take over the business you and Skeeter built up?”

Again, nothing.

Jose bent closer, bringing his face inches from Crawfurd’s. “Let me ask it this way, Pencil… Who you gonna watch out for when you get out? Who you gonna worry’s out there, waiting for you?”

Crawfurd ran his tongue across cracked lips. “Take care a myself.”

“Unh-hunh,” Jose said, “like you and Skeeter took care of yourselves on Bayless Place. Somebody caught you two badasses like sittin’ ducks.”

Pencil Crawfurd’s eyelids closed, then opened, then fluttered. “I’m tired,” he murmured, and fell off the edge of consciousness.

In the hallway, Frank turned to Arrowsmith. “He still need to be in ICU?”

The doctor shook her head. “Not really. It’s a precaution I take with all gunshot cases.”

“You keep him there another couple of days?”

“I can… Why?”

“Visitors have to sign in, don’t they?”

Arrowsmith nodded. “And you want to know who?”

In the car, Jose settled into the passenger seat.

“Bad-nigga wannabe.” He sighed.

“Scared bad-nigga wannabe,” Frank amended.

“I could use some hash browns.”

Frank started the car.

“With a couple eggs on top, sausage sides,” Jose added.

“It’s Sunday night.”

Jose gave Frank his “So what?” look. “Get us a running start on the week’s cholesterol quota.”

Monday morning, Frank and Jose sat at their desks, facing each other, Eleanor’s printout between them. Beside the desks, a battered institutional-green rolling file cabinet the size of a refrigerator held stacks of thick reddish-brown case folders.

“Dreamed about that, last night,” Jose said. He stuck his lower lip out at the file cabinet. “Thing was suffocating me. Tried to get it off, but it was like a big octopus.”

Yesterday at the flea market came back to Frank. His father… the Plimsoll line. He looked at the cabinet and wondered how much its files weighed. How many more could it take before everything tilted over, never to come upright again?

He took a deep breath. “Get started?”

Reluctantly, Jose stood, reached into the cabinet, and pulled out two folders. He offered one to Frank. “You think we’ll know when we get to the last one?”

“The last one…?” Frank was drawing a blank. “When we get to the bottom of that stack,” he said, pointing to the cabinet.

“No,” Jose said, “will we know when the last case comes our way-‘This is it, we’re hanging it up’?”

Frank thought about cabinets of case folders. The cases stretching back went a long way. The ones ahead didn’t. Couldn’t. There was a first case. There had to be a last one. He and Jose were damn sure closer to dealing with the last than they were to the first.

“I don’t know,” he told Jose. “What do you think?”

Jose studied the folder on his desk, then looked back at Frank. “Yeah… yeah, I sort of think we will.”

“Why’s that?”

“I think we’re close.”

“How’s that?

Jose sat down and patted the folder. “We ever talk about it before? The last case? Our last case?”

“No.”

Jose pointed a thick index finger at Frank. “See? Never talked about it before. Now… now we are talking about it.”

Frank thought about that. A Kenny Rogers fragment ran through his head. Time to get out of the game? Time to walk? Not yet. Soon, maybe. But not yet.

He sat there, staring at the folder before him. Alfonzo Betters. Somewhere inside his memory, a relay tripped. A small door opened into a partially lit compartment. He and Jose had helped with the canvassing.

Betters. Was it ’99? Maybe ’98? He opened to the first page-the summary. Alfonzo Betters, resident Orleans Place, NE, DOA Hospital Center, 25 July 1995. Frank got a vague feeling of unease. Couldn’t have been almost six years ago. Seems like ’99,’98 at most. He looked through the rest of the folder-reports, interviews, neighborhood canvassing notes. He looked across the desk to Jose.

“We get some music?” he asked.

Jose got up. The CD player was on a file cabinet behind him. Over on his side, Frank had the coffeemaker. They had a rule. Whoever complained about the coffee got the job of making it. The last switch had been seven years before, when Frank had muttered something about the coffee needing to be stronger.

“What you want?”

“Gould?”

Jose found the CD, and moments later, Glenn Gould’s rendition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations filled the small office.

Whenever he heard the Variations, Frank imagined Bach, maybe with a glass or two under his belt after dinner, sitting down to amuse himself, composing music that didn’t have a beginning or an end. The musical equivalent of playing solitaire. Like Monet doodling or Rodin whittling. He looked at the Betters folder. It seemed to have gotten thicker.

“Know what I’m going to do when we retire?” he asked Jose.

“When we retire” was a game they played. They hadn’t played it at the start, twenty-six years earlier, when they’d gotten out of the academy. They began eleven years later. After the hostage thing that had gone so badly wrong. In their game, they had ridden motorcycles through Mexico, taken flying lessons, run a deep-sea fishing charter out of Key Largo.

“What this time?” Jose asked, obviously not enthusiastic about digging through the papers.

Frank motioned toward the CD player. “There’s what, thirty-some of those?”

Jose looked at the CD label on the jewel box. “Thirty-two.”

“Well, I’m gonna memorize them. Get so I can say, ‘That’s number twenty-four.’ ”

“Sure. That’ll win us a lotta bar bets.”

Frank thought about it.

“Now, the Platters,” Jose went on, “or Armstrong… if you could name everything they did…”

Frank nodded. “Yeah. In sequence.”

Simultaneously both men knew the game was over. Their eyes met, then went to the folders in front of them.

Alfonzo Betters’s folder lay opened to the first page, the Form 120. In the file cabinet, folders for Michael Darnal. Louis Fleming.

The names went on: Frederick Hankins. Ambrose Murray. Joseph Jameson. Deshawn Simkins. James Rivers. Eight cases. Eight out of the fifteen hundred in Eleanor’s printout.

From his desk drawer, Frank took a wire-bound steno pad, the narrow kind used by reporters. He turned it lengthwise, opened it, and penciled a horizontal line from left to right across two pages.

He worked until ten, slogging through the Betters folder. Photographs, canvass questionnaires, sketches, phone records, the initial report, media clip files, the autopsy report, and investigator notes, notes, and more notes. Making sense out of other people’s words-brutal going.

As he worked, he marked the line in the steno pad, ticking off events in Betters’s life and in the investigation after his death. On pages following the timeline, Frank compiled a list of witnesses and others interviewed. Just after ten, he closed the folder and stretched to ease his tightened neck and back. He stared at the closed folder. Not quite seeing it as much as looking beyond it.

Picturing the killing of Alfonzo Betters. Imagining how the people, places, and times-like so many jigsaw pieces-fit together. He’d opened the folder and Betters was just another name.

Now Betters-Alfonzo David Betters-had shape and substance. It was as if he, Frank, had run time backward, like a reversed videotape.

He’d reassembled the disconnected body splayed out on the autopsy table. Reversed the trajectories of the four nine-millimeter slugs that had demolished heart and lungs. Ridden with Alfonzo as he drove his silver ’93 Lexus along the Strip on Tuesday night, July 25, 1995.