“It’s no crime to buy paint. You can’t link that paint to any crime.”
“Unless the murder weapon is in that apartment.”
“Buying paint isn’t a crime.”
“Murder is. Why’d you put that paint in your partner’s closet? To make sure everybody thought…?”
“I put it there because I didn’t have room for it in my own apartment. All I have is a studio downtown.”
“The day after your partner got killed…”
“Yes…”
“…while allegedly spraying a wall with graffiti …”
“That had nothing to do with…”
“You run out to buy twenty-twocans of spray paint, and you store them…”
“I needed that paint for…”
“Yeah, you needed it to prove Wilkins was really a graffiti artist instead of a big-shot downtown lawyer.”
“There was some furniture I wanted to…”
“Isthe gun in that apartment, Mr. Colbert?”
Colbert said nothing.
“Throw her to the lions,” Parker suggested.
Colbert was silent for several moments.
Then he said, “What’s in it for me?”
“You talk to us, maybe we’ll talk to the D.A.”
“No maybes.”
“We’ll ask for a federal prison instead of a state pen,” Parker said.
Colbert knew the code. It was as simple as black and white. And he was white.
“It was her idea,” he said.
Q: tell us how it started.
A: it started in bed. Where does anything start?
Q: bed where?
A: in a motel across the river. The next state.
Q: when?
A: before Christmas.
Q: you and Debra Wilkins in bed together. In a motel room.
A: yes.
Q: how long had that been going on?
A: since shortly after she married Peter.
Q: all right, what happened in that motel room?
A: she told me about his will.
Q: about her being sole beneficiary of the will?
A: yes. I hadn’t known that. She’d seen a draft copy, it hadn’t yet been witnessed. Actually, several people in our office witnessed it the very next day. But she told me she stood to inherit some money….
Q: how much money? Are we talking millions here, thou…
A: millions? No, of course not. Thousands, yes. Maybe a few hundred thousand, something like that. The money was a secondary consideration. She was planning to leave him, anyway, you see. But this meant she’d walk out of the marriage with a little something. This wasn’t money, you see. This was love.
Q: you loved each other, is that what you’re saying?
A: yes. That’s why we worked out the plan.
Q: which was?
A: to kill him.
Q: did you, in fact, kill Peter Wilkins?
A: it was her idea.
Q: but are you the one who actually shot him?
A: yes.
Q: and killed him.
A: he was the second one.
Q: who was the first one?
A: the Spanish kid. I forget his name. I read his name in the paper the next day. I didn’t know who he was when I shot him. I only learned his name later. Like with the others. Carrera? Was it Carerra?
Q: herrera.
A: whatever.
Q: when you say the others…?
A: the other graffiti writers. We wanted to make it look like someone was after graffiti writers. That was Debra’s idea. People hate graffiti writers, you know. It’s easy for people to believe that someone would go after graffiti writers. I was in Toulouse last summer, in France. And there was graffiti on the walls there, too. Not the political slogans you used to see in Europe, but the same kind we have here. The markers, the tags in spray paint. It’s disgusting. People hate it there, too. People hate it everywhere. Debra’s idea was a very good one. We even thought people might begin cheering whoever was doing it. Confuse the issue even more, you see.Really hide what we were doing.
Q: hide the fact that you were out to kill Peter Wilkins…
A: yes.
Q:…so his wife would inherit under his will.
A: no, no. So she’d be free to marry me . I told you, this wasn’t money. It was love.
Q: so her husband goes to the movies…
A: no, no, that was our story.
Q: he didn’t go to the movies?
A: no, he was home. I told him I was coming over, there was a case we were working on. I killed him in the house there, and then wrapped him in a blanket, and carried him down, and drove him over to Harlow Street. Found a good wall there…
Q: a good wall?
A: covered with graffiti. Dropped him in front of the wall. The idea was to make it look like someone was killing graffiti writers, you see. That’s why I bought that paint the next day. Because there was all this skepticism in the papers about a lawyer being a graffiti writer, remember? I bought the paint to nail it home. That Peter was a secret writer. That’s why I left the note when I did the one outside the bookstore. To nail the point home. To make it look like some crazy person was committing the murders.
“You succeeded,” Kling said.
IN THE CORRIDOR OUTSIDE, he said, “Even if the gun isn’t in there…”
“It’s in there, all right,” Parker said. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have told us a fuckin thing.”
“But even if it isn’t ,” Kling insisted, “the apartment is where Wilkins caught it, there’ll be all kinds of forensic evidence. The minute we find the gun, the door’s wide open. We bust the wife as an accomplice and call it a day. Which’ll be nice for a change, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“That nobody walks,” Kling said, and grinned like a schoolboy.
THE GARBAGE TRUCKS were lined up in rows behind a cyclone fence topped with razor wire. Fifty, sixty trucks in there behind the fence. The trucks were white, the color favored by the city’s sanitation department, perhaps because it represented pristine cleanliness. Unfortunately, the city’s various graffiti writers had already got to the trucks, spraying them from top to bottom and creating instead an image of urban decay. At one o’clock in the morning, the lot was silent and dark.
The wire didn’t bother Carter. He had no intention of climbing the fence. He wasn’t going to cut a hole in it, either, because you can’t drive a garbage truck though a hole in a fence. To drive the garbage truck out, Carter had to roll back the sliding gate, which was fastened to a post with a thick chain and a heavy padlock.
Carter was going for the padlock.
A padlock is merely a flat lock, and a lock is a lock, and anybody who knows how to pick one lock knows how to pick any other lock. He worked in the dark with his set of picks, jiggling and juggling, working the lock like a woman, urging her to open for him. No security here. He guessed they figured they didn’t need anything but the razor wire and the big macho padlock to keep out any graffiti writers. He had the lock open in four minutes. He rolled back the gate, walked swiftly to the nearest truck all beautifully decorated with spray-paint shit, crossed the ignition wires under the hood, climbed into the cab, put the gears in reverse, made a huge turn, and then drove right on out through the gate.