Andrew Vachss: The Weight

It’s not just the hard eight; now I’m down to my third throw , I thought. Why wouldn’t they just ask me to take a-?

The older cop broke into my thoughts. “Here’s the good part for you, Caine. It’s not only you who knows how good we’d check out your alibi-the DA knows it, too. Believe me, my partner and me tell them your alibi’s rock-solid, no way those Ivy League wimps are going to take a chance on messing up their conviction rate.”

“Hard enough to get them to prosecute good cases,” the black cop said. His mouth twisted when he said that. I took it for real, not a play. Probably watched some solid cases tossed out, and he hadn’t liked it much.

I remember thinking what a fucked-up mess things were. See, I believed those cops. Mostly because they weren’t telling me anything I didn’t know. Every pro on both sides of the line knows the DA’s Office’ll always deal away the courthouse on a sex crime. Specially if the woman was the wrong kind. Like a hooker, or slow in the head, or even dressed too sexy. Or maybe she had booze or drugs in her blood when they ran the tests.

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.