Raffi Yessayan - 2 in the Hat

Not a word to anyone,” Connie warned Alves.

Alves was dumbfounded. Even with all the crazy thoughts he’d been having lately, his imagination hadn’t come anywhere near the real thing. “Is this what I think it is?”

Connie nodded.

“You built a courtroom in your basement? It’s the jury session at the South Bay courthouse. You’ve got the bench, the witness stand, and the jury box. But why?” When Connie didn’t answer him, he asked again, “Why would you build a courtroom in your basement?”

“To practice for my trials,” Connie explained, as though he were telling why he stretched before a workout. “How do you think I got so good at what I do? I used to practice in the living room or in front of a mirror. But it wasn’t the same. I wanted it to be as realistic as possible. So this is what I came up with.”

Angel was walking around the courtroom, running his hand along the rail in front of the jury box. Every detail was so realistic he could have been standing in an actual courtroom.

“It helps me visualize where the judge and the witnesses will be. I can pretend I’m practicing my openings and closings in front of a jury.”

“So you practice down here for all your trials?” Alves was trying to sound as normal as he could manage.

“Not quite as religiously as I used to. It depends on the case. If it’s a garden variety gun case, I can just wing it, but if it’s a serious shooting or a robbery I like to get down here and practice the whole trial.”

“This is a bit strange, you have to admit,” Alves said, thinking it was far worse than strange.

Connie didn’t respond and moved to usher Alves out of the room. “And that, Detective Alves, completes your warrantless search…I mean that completes the grand tour. Why don’t we go back up and drink that beer?”

Figgs finished the last of his club soda. He sat at the bar munching on the ice cubes, a dish of salted peanuts untouched in front of him.

The Red Sox were hanging in the League Championship Series, but he was too distracted to follow every pitch. Some nights he’d missed the game entirely. He finally had the gun he’d been looking for. No one else would end up dead because of it. But he didn’t have the answers he’d hoped for. He’d imagined someone getting arrested with the gun, getting a statement out of him, finding out where he’d gotten it, who had it before him, following the trail, connecting the dots, getting a complete history of where that gun had been and who had used it.

Instead, he had Stutter Simpson flipping out that the gun had been found in his mother’s car with him driving it. He denied ever seeing that gun. Said he’d never even touched a 4-0 in his life.

Sure, Stutter was a criminal, had been his whole life. His younger brother Junior had been a good kid, but Stutter was always into something, dealing drugs, stealing cars, robbing people. He had a four-page juvenile record. By the time he graduated to adult court, he’d established himself as a shooter.

So why should Figgs trust him now? Maybe because he was so scared when they’d first met in the barbershop. Maybe because someone with that much experience with the criminal justice system wouldn’t be stupid enough to drive around with a murder weapon in his car. Maybe because Figgs’s gut told him Simpson seemed to be telling the truth. This morning in the lockup at District 2, Simpson said he didn’t know anything about the gun. And Figgs was starting to believe him.

Then how did the.40 get there? Greene and Ahearn had the reputation of getting aggressive, maybe crossing the line now and then. But planting a gun? And not just any gun, a crime gun, hot, a murder weapon.

His witness, Leo, from his vantage point near the parking lot, saw another man step out of Greene and Ahearn’s car. Saw him look into Simpson’s running vehicle. Saw him turn off the engine. Figgs himself had gone to Operations and watched the Shot Spotter footage of a man walk up to that car and lean in.

That man was Conrad Darget. He seemed to have a hard-on for Stutter. But would he cross the line out on the street? It would take a lot of nerve to walk up and drop a gun, knowing that every patrol and unmarked car in the district would be on scene in seconds.

The crowd in the bar yelled, and Figgs glanced up at the screen. The Cardiac Kids, as his father used to call the Sox, were making a late inning comeback.

There were a couple questions he still couldn’t answer. If Conrad Darget did plant the gun in Simpson’s car, where did Darget get the gun? And why set up Stutter Simpson?

In the noise of the bar, Figgs tried out the last piece of logic. What kind of man would not only plant the evidence, but prosecute the patsy he’d set up? Answer? A very sick man.

Alves stepped out of Connie’s house into the cool evening air. He had a slight buzz going from the two beers. Fatherhood had turned him into a lightweight, he thought. Connie had killed off the rest of the six-pack and wasn’t showing a thing.

Alves stumbled a little on a crack in the walkway, his mind racing. How could there be nothing in the house linking Connie to the murders? He had shown up unannounced and Connie had taken him through the place from the attic to the basement. He didn’t seem to be hiding anything, except for his basement courtroom. Alves didn’t know what to make of that room. It was bizarre to have gone through the effort to build something like that in a basement, but lots of people did strange things. One of his neighbors built a Dale Earnhardt racecar bed for his son, actual size #3. The courtroom didn’t make Connie a killer.

Connie had explained how being in that room was his way of practicing. People didn’t think it was crazy when professional baseball players had batting cages in their houses, so why was it odd for a professional trial lawyer to have a courtroom in his basement? Especially someone like Connie, who preached the importance of trial preparation.

Still, to build an exact replica of a courtroom… And it was all there-from the American flag, the state flag of Massachusetts, the seal of the Commonwealth, right down to the eight seats for the jurors and alternates.

A little crazy, yes. But nothing he’d seen that night made Connie a killer.

What had Detective Angel Alves been doing in Conrad Darget’s house all that time? Drinking the alcoholic beverages Alves had hidden behind his back? What could they have been talking about? If they had discussed Sleep’s involvement in the murders, then the detective wouldn’t have come stumbling out of the house the way he had. He would have been walking with a sense of purpose, with a mission. And certainly Sergeant Wayne Mooney would have joined them in their victory celebration.

It appeared more as though Detective Alves had just come over to drink and socialize. But that didn’t make sense either. Which got him thinking. Maybe Darget really didn’t know anything. Maybe it was just a coincidence that he was at Natalie’s on Newbury Street. Had the store been robbed recently? Was Darget there on official business unrelated to the murders? That had to be it. Nothing else made sense.

He watched as Alves started his car and drove off. Sleep had to leave too. His Little Things had been in their trunks too long.

He could come back in the morning, early. He could follow Darget, see what he was up to.

He had eaten dinner earlier, but now he was suddenly in the mood for Chinese. He’d pick up a dinner plate at his favorite place, the Pearl Pagoda on Mass Ave. He’d learned that if he put in too large an order, he got too many fortune cookies. Then how could he figure out which one was the real one? Small order, one cookie, and he could save it for a bit, savor the fortune tucked inside. Delight for a while in the anticipation. And when he finally cracked open that brittle yellow cookie, he’d know for sure what to do about Conrad Darget.