Andrew Vachss: The Weight

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 kind 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.