There was a long pause. Abe waited it out. Finally Alphonse said, “I got rights.”
“No question.”
“I don’t like one lawyer, I can get another.”
“Righteous. Right on!” Glitsky gave him a sarcastic black power fist, then folded his hands on the table and just sat there. After about thirty seconds Alphonse said, “What?”
“What do you mean, what?”
“What you just starin’ at?”
“I’m just waiting. I thought you were thinking about it.” Alphonse strained, stretching against the cuffs. Glitsky, Mr. Nice Guy, turned to the deputy. “Can’t you undo those?”
Alphonse rubbed his hands together when the cuffs were off. He gingerly touched the bump on his forehead. “Thinking about what?” he asked.
Abe thought he ought to get his attention again. “You know Sam Polk’s dead, too.”
“Sam ain’t dead.”
“He ain’t breathin’.”
Abe grinned now, the tight-lipped grin that showed his scar. His eyes didn’t grin. His hands were still folded, calm, in front of him. He twiddled his thumbs, slowly, finally resting his eyes on them, his thumbs.
“Hey, I didn’t kill any Sam Polk. You not layin’ that on me, too.”
Glitsky shrugged. “I didn’t say that.”
“Who killed him?”
“I didn’t say he was killed. What made you think he was killed?”
“You just said…”
Glitsky shook his head. “Uh-uh. I didn’t say anything about him being killed. You did.”
Glitsky had him on the ropes. It was almost depressing, how dumb these guys were. Alphonse didn’t even know what was happening, but Glitsky knew that Alphonse understood one thing-he was in deep shit.
“Alphonse, talk to me, man. If you didn’t kill him, I’m the only friend you got.”
“Shi…”
“No shit, for real.”
Alphonse put his hands back up to his face, rubbing his eyes, craning his neck. “I didn’t kill no Sam Polk.”
“Okay.”
Abe sat there. Sometimes sitting was the best technique in the world. He looked somewhere midway between them with no expression at all on his face. He kept twiddling his thumbs. Alphonse fidgeted as though he had a hemorrhoid. “How we work something out?” he asked at last.
“We trade.”
“Trade what?”
“You tell me what happened. You didn’t kill him, I prove it and you don’t go to the gas chamber. That sound fair?” Glitsky kept smiling. It was good, he knew, to drop the old gas chamber in there. Keep the intensity at the proper level. “You know we got a new court now, Alphonse. We got judges now believe in the death penalty.”
Alphonse swallowed hard, touched his forehead again. He was beginning to sweat. Glitsky was, if anything, cool. The tape recorder spun around and around, squeaking, a little like the steady drip of Chinese water torture. It was the first time Abe remembered having a squeaky reel-to-reel in an interrogation, but he thought he might request one in the future. He wondered, waiting for Alphonse, whether there might be something like WD-4O in reverse-make things squeak. That made him smile again. He ran with it, the humor. “Alphonse, I got to draw you a picture or what?”
“What? What you want? I don’t know nothin’.”
Truer words, Abe thought, were never spoken. “See, the thing is, when we got multiple murders in the course of a crime, like we do here, it’s the death penalty. Special circumstances, they call it, like if you kill a cop, that kind of thing.” His eyes crinkled up. “You hear me? They find you guilty and you could fry. If you’re lucky, you go to the joint and you never get out. They don’t even talk about it.”
It was shaking him, Glitsky could tell. Whatever passed for logic in the brain of this poor sorry son of a bitch was being whacked out of kilter. “But I tole you I didn’t kill Sam Polk. An’ what crime?”
“Hey, Alphonse,” said Abe, his close personal friend. “You had a bag with like a hundred grand in it. You sell Girl Scout cookies for that? Sam give it to you?”
“Linda got it out.”
Abe shook his head. “Nobody’s gonna believe that. To a jury it’s gonna look like you stole it. You killed Linda for it, then you slammed the safe.”
“I didn’t mean to kill Linda! I mean, that was an accident.”
“You cut her throat by accident?”
Alphonse paused, maybe catching up to the fact that he’d just confessed to a killing. He shrugged as if to say “Hey, it happens.”
“So the thing is,” Abe continued, pressing his advantage, “that much money around, you’re dealing, right? You know it, I know it, so why argue about it. You didn’t kill Polk, maybe somebody else did, but it was about the dope. That’s what we want to know.”
What the hell, Abe thought, might as well go for it. They had him cold for Linda’s murder. Might as well collect some bonus points for DEA if he could, then work it around to the Cochran thing. He looked at his watch, then at Alphonse. “And I don’t got all night, okay?”
Alphonse was wrestling with the problem. The sweat was now pouring off him-Abe could smell it across the table-and his nose was running slightly. He sniffed and ran the back of his hand over his upper lip.
“I know what you’re thinking, Alphonse,” Abe said in his most gentle voice. “You’re thinking you talk and your friends find out, they’ll kill you, right?” The eyes across the table told him that’s what he was thinking. “Okay, that might happen. It might, you understand. But you don’t talk, and I guarantee- guar-an-tee-that you’re going down. No maybe, no if. You go down. We don’t get you for Sam Polk’s death, we definitely hit you for Eddie Cochran’s.”
Alphonse’s mouth just hung open.
“Now you’re going to tell me you didn’t kill Eddie. I know, Alphonse, you didn’t mean to kill anybody. Save it, though, huh, I’m tired.” Glitsky looked at his watch again. He wasn’t particularly tired, but it was closing in on four A.M. and he had his confession. He ought to go home. He pushed his chair back from the table and stood up.
“Where you goin’?”
“I said I’m tired. If you’re not gonna talk, I’m going home.”
Alphonse reached his hand out across the table. “Hey, I mean it. I didn’t kill Eddie. Sam mighta kilt him, but I didn’t.”
Abe pulled the chair around backward and straddled it. “We got your hairs in his car, Alphonse, the same ones we found on Linda. So don’t give me any more of this shit.”
“Hey, I swear to God.”
How many times had he heard this? Everybody was innocent of everything. Unknown was the man who said, “Yeah, I did that, and I did it because…” No, it was always an accident, or a mistake, or somebody else’s fault. Often, the denial got so vehement that the perp actually came to believe he hadn’t done it. And since more than four out of five were either drunk or on some controlled substance when the crime occurred, it wasn’t surprising that it might all seem like an hallucination or dream, that it hadn’t really happened.
“You swear to God,” Abe replied wearily. “But you got a better chance of talking yourself out of Sam Polk. We got you at the scene of Eddie’s murder.” Almost, he added to himself.
“I wasn’t there!” His eyes had widened. Abe found himself forced to look closely at him. There was something about this denial that was different. “Look, I rode in Eddie’s car most days, maybe even that day, I don’t know. But you gotta believe me. I liked Eddie, I didn’t kill him.”
Abe wasn’t about to get suckered by sincerity. He shook his head, made a production out of checking his watch. “You sure as fuck did.” Then he stood up, motioning to the deputy to turn off the recorder. “Take him upstairs,” he said.
He got his hand on the doorknob before Alphonse called out again. “Hey!”
Slowly, acting frustrated and exhausted (though his adrenaline was still pumping away-he wouldn’t need any sleep the rest of the night), Glitsky turned back.