“I don’t know what you mean.”
“She was getting cocaine from you and selling it uptown,” Brother Anthony said. “To Paco Lopez.”
“I don’t know anybody named Paco Lopez.”
“But you do know Sally Anderson, don’t you? You wrote to her in August saying you’d made a big cocaine buy in Miami. Where’s that cocaine now, Mr. Moore? The cocaine Sally was dealing uptown.”
“I don’t know anything about any cocaine Sally was—”
“Mr. Moore,” Brother Anthony said quietly, “I don’t want to hurt you. We got Sally’s name from a lady named Judite Quadrado, who got hurt because she wasn’t quick enough to tell us what we wanted to know.”
“Who’s we?” Moore asked.
“That’s none of your business,” Brother Anthony said. “Your business is telling me where the coke is. That’s the only business you have to worry about right now.”
Moore looked at him.
“Yes, Mr. Moore,” Brother Anthony said, and nodded.
“It’s all gone,” Moore said.
“You bought eight keys—”
“Where’d you find that letter?” Moore said. “She told me she’d burned it!”
“Then she was lying. And so are you, Mr. Moore. If all eight keys are gone, where was she getting the stuff she sold uptown?”
“Not all of them,” Moore said. “I sold off six.”
“And the other two?”
“I gave them to Sally. She took them out of here, I don’t know where they are.”
“You gave away two kilos of cocaine? For which you paid a hundred thousand bucks? Mr. Moore, you are full of shit.”
“I’m telling you the truth. She was my girlfriend, I gave her—”
“No,” Brother Anthony said.
“Whatever she did with it—”
“No, you didn’t give away no two keys of coke, Mr. Moore. Nobody loves nobody that much. So where are they?”
“Sally took them out of here, they’re probably still in her apartment. Unless the police confiscated them.”
“That’s a possibility,” Brother Anthony said. “I can tell you for sure they’re not in her apartment, so maybe the police did take them, who knows with those thieves?” Brother Anthony smiled. “But I don’t think so. I don’t think you’d have let a hundred thousand bucks worth of coke out of your sight, Mr. Moore. Not when it would’ve already been worth twice what you paid for it in Miami, nossir. So where is it?”
“I told you—”
Brother Anthony reached out suddenly. He grabbed Moore’s hand in his own right hand, pulled Moore toward him, and then joined his left hand over Moore’s so that the three hands together made a sort of hand sandwich, with Moore’s hand caught between both Brother Anthony’s. Brother Anthony began squeezing. Moore began yelling. “Shhh,” Brother Anthony cautioned, and began squeezing harder. “I don’t want no yelling, I don’t want no people coming up here,” he said, still squeezing. “All I’m going to do is break your hand if you don’t tell me where the coke is. That’s for starters. After that, I’ll figure out what to break next.”
“Please,” Moore whispered. “P... please... let go.”
“The coke,” Brother Anthony said.
“The bed... the bedroom,” Moore said, and Brother Anthony released his hand.
“Show me,” he said. “How’s your hand?” he asked pleasantly, and shoved Moore toward the open door to the bedroom. A suitcase was on the bed.
“Were you going someplace?” Brother Anthony asked.
Moore said nothing.
“Where is it?”
“In the bag,” Moore said.
Brother Anthony tried the clasps. “It’s locked,” he said.
“I’ll get the key,” Moore said, and went to the dresser across the room.
“Taking a little trip, were you?” Brother Anthony asked, smiling, and then the smile froze on his face when Moore turned from the open dresser drawer with a gun in his hand. “Hey, wh—” Brother Anthony said, but that was all he ever said because Moore squeezed the trigger once, and then again, and both bullets from the .38 caught Brother Anthony in the face, one entering just below his left eye, the other shattering his teeth and upper gum. Brother Anthony reflexively clawed the air for support, and then fell in a mountainous brown heap at Moore’s feet.
Moore looked down at him.
“You stupid son of a bitch,” he whispered, and then he tucked the gun into his belt and went out of the bedroom, through the living room, and into the kitchen. There was no time to pack anything else now, the shots would bring suspicious neighbors. He had to get out of here fast now, take the diamonds, take what was left of the coke, just get out of here as fast as he could.
He opened the door on the refrigerator’s freezer compartment.
There were two ice cube trays on a small shelf toward the rear of the freezer. He pried the tray on the left loose, and turned on the sink’s hot water tap. He let the water run for several minutes before putting the tray under the faucet. The ice cubes began to melt. They took forever to melt. He kept listening for sounds in the hallway outside, someone coming, anyone coming, waiting for the ice cubes to melt. At last, he turned off the tap, carefully spilled the water from the tray into the sink, and removed the plastic dividing grid from the tray. The diamonds glistened wetly on the bottom of the tray. He spread them on a dish towel on the counter top, and was patting them dry when he heard the sound of wood splintering. He turned toward the living room. A voice shouted, “Moore?”
He came out of the kitchen with the gun in his hand, recognized Meyer and Carella, saw that both men were armed, saw two other armed men behind them, one white and one black, and might have put up a fight even then if Carella hadn’t said, very softly, “I wouldn’t.”
He didn’t.
14
They realized, by 11:00 that Thursday night, that he was going to tell them only what he wanted to tell them, and nothing more. That was why he waived his right to have an attorney present during the questioning. That was why he was flying in the face of the Miranda-Escobedo warnings, telling them whatever they wanted to know about the dope they’d found in his apartment, and the letter he’d written to Sally Anderson back in August, knowing they had him cold on the dope charge, but figuring he’d bluff his way out of the murders. They were looking for four counts — maybe five, if he’d also killed the Quadrado girl — of Murder One. He was looking for a Class A-l Felony charge for possession of four or more ounces of a controlled substance, punishable by a minimum of fifteen to twenty-five years and a maximum of life. With a good lawyer, he could plea it down to a Class A-2 Felony, hoping for a minimum of three, and expecting to get out in two. As for having shot and killed Brother Anthony, he was claiming self-defense and hoping to get off scot-free. They were looking for him to do consecutive time on at least four homicide raps. He was hoping to be out on the street again within the imminently foreseeable future. They were somewhat at odds as concerned their differing aspirations and their separate versions of what had happened over the past nine days.
“Let’s hear it one more time,” Carella said.
“How often do I have to tell you?” Moore said. “Maybe I should’ve asked for a lawyer.”
“You still can,” Carella said, making sure for the record that Moore was volunteering all this information of his own free will. They were sitting in the Interrogation Room, a tape recorder whirring on the table between Moore and the four detectives with him. From where Carella sat, he could see past Moore to the two-way mirror on the wall behind him. Moore’s back was to the mirror. No one was in the viewing room beyond the wall.