“You don’t look like no cop,” the kid said.
“You don’t look like a reliable witness,” Dartelli countered. “You looked stoned out of your gourd. You want this patrolman and me to search your person?”
The kid shifted nervously. “Just making conversation, Jack,” he said.
It was true, of course, Dartelli looked more like a Disneyland visitor than a robbery/homicide cop, but it was important not to let his witness gain a sense of superiority or confidence. Walter Zeller, Dartelli’s mentor and former sergeant, had once schooled him to quickly judge the witness-right or wrong. A cocky witness was to be kept off guard, a reluctant witness nurtured and comforted.
Dartelli had the nervous habit of thrusting his tongue into the small scar that he carried on his lower lip where a tooth had once punctured through. The accepted explanation for this scar was that an out-of-control toboggan had met a birch tree when Dart had been a twelve-year-old with too much nerve and too little sense. The truth was closer to home. The old lady’s swollen claw had caught him across the jaw in the midst of one of her delirium-induced tantrums and had sent him to the emergency room for four stitches and some creative explaining.
Dartelli wore his curly head of sandy hair cut short, especially over his forehead, where the front line was in full retreat. He had gray eyes and sharp bones and fair Northern Italian skin that most women envied. In the right light, Joe Dartelli looked mean, which came in handy for a cop. The artificial street lamp light produced just such an effect, fracturing his features into a cubist, impressionistic image of himself, masking his otherwise gentle features. “Tell me what you saw,” Dart complained, irritated by the heat. He barked up another cough, his lungs dry despite the humidity. It was something he had come to live with.
“Like I’m parking that Buick over there, Jack, you know? And the suit has left his sunroof open, right? So I’m making it shut, okay? — looking right up through it-when that boy done dives out the damn window and smears his ass all over the fucking sidewalk. Blood everywhere.”
“Dives?” Dartelli questioned, doubting the statement immediately. There was no such thing as a reliable witness. No such thing.
“Right out the window, Jack: I’m telling you.” He arched his big hand with its long fingers and pink skin under the nails, and imitated a dive as he whistled down a Doppler scale to indicate the fall. “Bam!” he said when the hand reached the imaginary pavement. “Fucked himself bad.”
Dart was thinking about bed. About how it had been a long day, and that he had been stupid to stop and involve himself. A piece of shit witness. Some sorry piece of dead meat oozing from a suit across the street. Who cares? he asked himself, trying to convince himself to give it up.
But he knew that he couldn’t walk away. “Did he jump, or did he dive?” Dart attempted to correct for the second time.
Inside his painful head came that unwanted voice: I did my job.
“I’m telling you that the motherfucker dove.”
“Head first?”
“Damn straight. Just like the fucking Olympics.” He raised his hand for the reenactment, complete with the sound track. He was definitely stoned out of his gourd. Shitty witness, Dart thought again.
But then there was the Ice Man, whose injuries also indicated a headfirst dive, though the body had been struck by at least one snowplow and moved several blocks before lodging in a snowbank for anywhere between four days and two weeks, making any positive conclusions about his sustained injuries a matter of conjecture. But he had taken a dive; and this guy had taken a dive. Coincidence? Shit!
What Dart had seen stuck to the sidewalk seemed to support this witness: The jumper’s head was caved in, most of his face gone, his upper body a broken mess. What had once been his left shoulder and arm were now folded and crushed underneath him. Doc Ray and Ted Bragg would have more to say about the exact angle of impact, though neither was likely to spend much time with the case. Suicides cleared quickly.
But Dartelli knew: Jumpers didn’t dive, they jumped-even off of bridges, where water presents the illusion of a soft landing. There were exceptions to everything, of course, he just didn’t want to have to explain them. He felt like tearing up the sheet of notepaper and burying this sordid detail right there and then. You did it once, you can do it again, the unwelcome voice inside of him claimed, punishing him, forcing him to do anything but.
Dartelli instructed the patrolman to take the kid down to Jennings Road and wait for either him or Kowalski in order to make the statement count.
“I can’t leave my crib,” the kid complained.
Dartelli told the patrolman, “He gives you any shit, search him and bust him and let him sort it out.”
“I can cut me some time,” the kid offered quickly.
Dartelli eyed him disapprovingly. Piece of shit witness, he thought. Piece of shit case.
Dartelli returned to the De Nada, passing his sergeant, John Haite, who was currently holding court with the smattering of media. Haite did not like the night shift-the two Crimes Against Persons squads rotated into the slot, and for those weeks, Haite was worthy of avoiding. Dartelli did just that.
By the time the detective reached the room, Teddy Bragg, the civilian director of the Forensic Sciences Division, was standing in the doorway smoking a cigarette and looking impatient. “Working with a girl can be a nightmare.”
“Woman,” Dartelli corrected. Samantha Richardson, the other half of Bragg’s team, was no girl.
“Whatever. She’s like my wife-always telling me what to do. Bossing me around. I mean who needs it? I get enough of that at home.”
“She’s in there?” Dartelli asked rhetorically, hearing the vacuum running on the other side of the door.
“Running the aardvark, treating this thing like we got the Simpson case or something. The guy decided to kiss the cement-so what’s to vacuum? What’s the big deal?”
Bragg was mid-fifties, short and lean with penetrating brown eyes and a top row of fake teeth. He had the disposition of a high school science teacher. His skin was overly pale and he looked tired. Dartelli knew that the man wasn’t feeling well, because Bragg was usually the first to demand thorough evidence collection.
“Some Jordon offs himself,” Bragg continued, smoke escaping his lips. “Who really gives a shit?”
Race, the detective realized. Half the department referred to blacks as “Jordons,” and although they left the Italians alone, they called the Latinos “Panics.” Four gangs controlled the north and south ends. There had been fifty-eight homicides over the last twelve months, in a city that five years earlier had seen fifteen. The gangs and their violence, divided along ethnic lines, had stereotyped their races in the minds of most cops; there were very few police operating without some form of prejudice. To make matters worse, the gang problem had become so severe that Hartford-prior to the task force crackdown-had been singled out on 20/20, a network prime-time news magazine, as being one of the worst cities in New England. Now the department had its own dedicated gang squad-although the territory wars continued, and the body count mounted weekly.