VII
[ONE]
The Roundhouse
Eighth and Race Streets, Philadelphia
Saturday, December 15, 3:45 P.M.
The enormous black thirty-six-year-old homicide detective standing at the two-way mirror of the Homicide Unit’s Interview Room II turned at the sound of the door opening.
Harold Kennedy nodded as Sergeant Matt Payne entered the small, dimly lit viewing room.
“Hey, Sarge,” he said.
“I miss anything, Hal?” Payne gestured toward the interview room on the other side of the two-way mirror. “How’s he doing in there?”
Payne saw that Detective Dick McCrory was in the slightly larger-ten by twelve feet-harshly lit room with a male teenager. McCrory stood leaning against the far wall, looking down at the teen, who was seated in one of two metal chairs, both of which were bolted to the floor on opposite sides of a bare metal table, also bolted to the floor. A manila folder was on the table, next to an open plastic bottle of water.
Payne studied the unkempt teenager, who was handcuffed to the chair, one cuff on his left hand and the other around a thick bar on the seatback. He had matted hair and filthy clothing-a black sweatshirt, ragged blue jeans, scuffed leather boots. The hood of his sweatshirt was down, exposing a hard face with hollow eyes behind thick black-framed eyeglasses and framed by a scraggly beard.
Kennedy’s massive shoulders shrugged as he raised his eyebrows, making a look of frustration.
“So far it’s looking like you wasted your time coming. All I can say for certain is the kid’s got a clear case of rectal cranial inversion.”
Payne grunted.
“Don’t they all have their head up their ass?” he said, then added, “So, this guy is supposed to be our big lead, but now my time’s wasted?”
Kennedy grimaced.
“Key word supposed. Say hello to eighteen-year-old Michael Hayward, aka Jamal. Turns out Antwan ‘Pookie’ Parker lied-”
Payne, making his eyes wide in mock horror, slapped his hand to his chest and said, “A CI lied? I’m shocked!”
“And-brace yourself-one of the things he lied about was this guy wanting to see the famous Wyatt Earp of the Main Line.”
Payne thought: I knew the bastard was blowing smoke.
He said: “Well, in addition to being shocked, now Jamal the Junkie has really hurt my feelings.”
Kennedy chuckled.
“What’s more,” Kennedy went on, “Jamal said he doesn’t have a clue who the famous Wyatt Earp of the Main Line is. In fact, with his high level of maybe an eighth-grade education-he got thrown out of Mansion barely into his first year-it wouldn’t surprise me if he ever heard of the actual Marshal Earp and/or the Main Line.”
“Mansion”-Strawberry Mansion High School, its student body of four hundred coming from deeply impoverished families-struggled to overcome a reputation as one of the most dangerous schools in the entire United States. The addition of metal detectors manned by armed school police officers, and the running of students through them throughout the day, had helped create a somewhat safer learning environment. But that hadn’t stopped the fights in the hallways and the cafeteria from breaking out daily.
“When we frisked him,” Kennedy went on, “he had that belly pocket full of packets of smack and pills. And in his waistband there was a.40 cal semiauto, a Smith amp; Wesson M-and-P with-get this-only one cartridge. The fifteen-round magazine was empty. When I asked him about it-while doing my little show you said to do-he told me that one bullet was all he had left.”
“Did Jamal get tested for gunshot residue?”
“Yeah, and there was none on him. And it’s not like he washed his hands and clothes of it. I mean, look at him. Washing would have actually cleaned some part of him. And I’m not going to ruin your day and describe what we saw passes for a toilet on his street.”
“The street probably is the toilet.”
Kennedy grunted.
“Right. Close enough. .”
“Well,” Payne said, pointedly getting back on topic, “if there was no GSR on him, then someone cleaned the gun.”
“Yeah, but only wiped down the exterior. When I glanced down the barrel, the bore was filthy. Someone ran a lot of rounds through it. Way more than just the one magazine.”
“He say where he got the gun?”
Kennedy shook his head.
“He hasn’t really said anything. But I’m betting it was from Pookie. He has a reputation for that. Where Pookie got it is another story. We do know that the street and sidewalk at the scene of Dante’s drive-by was riddled with.40 cal casings.”
“And nine-millimeter, right?”
“Right. And there was plenty of lead recovered, by the Crime Scene guys and a couple during Dante’s autopsy. That’ll keep ballistics busy looking for a match. Especially if they find any of the recovered.40 cal bullets are full metal jackets that had been scored.”
“Cut so they can flatten more like hollow points?”
Kennedy nodded. “Looks that way. That’s what the lone round in Jamal’s gun had. Obviously, a match won’t point to the shooter, but it would at least place the gun at the scene.”
“Sounds like it would be a helluva lot easier having a heart-to-heart chat with ol’ Antwan ‘Pookie’ Parker and getting him to confess,” Payne said, then glanced above the mirror.
Mounted on the wall at the top of the mirror’s window frame was a twenty-inch flat-panel monitor. There were six images, two rows of three, on it, the cameras of the interview room showing its entire interior from various angles. A line of text at the bottom of each image had a date and time stamp and showed the names of the officer conducting the interview and the person being interviewed. All of it was being digitally recorded.
Payne looked at Jamal through the two-way mirror. He knew that the thermostat for the interview room was generally set around sixty degrees. Yet the teenager had beads of sweat on his forehead and the armpits of his sweatshirt were darkened by more moisture.
“What’s Jamal the Junkie on?” Payne said.
“We thought smack. He’s pretty much got needle tracks on his needle tracks. But he said he smoked some wet. Whatever he took, we didn’t get much out of him on the drive over here. Dick wanted to see if he’d open up to him in here-and to you, but that was before we learned Jamal doesn’t know any Marshal Earp exists. Now we’re just about to hand him over to the Detention Unit-let him dry out downstairs and try again later.”
“Look at that body language,” Payne said. “He’s closed-off, defensive. Legs crossed, his free arm hugging his chest. And he’s clearly anxious-he’s about to chew off his lower lip.”
“Uh-huh. He’d probably really be a basket case if it wasn’t for the drugs making a zombie of him.”
Payne reached toward the control panel and turned up the volume to the interview room microphone. From the speaker in the ceiling came McCrory’s voice: “Okay. . remember me asking, back in the car, how familiar you are with McPherson Square, Jamal?”
“With what?”
McCrory pointed at a sheet that was a desktop computer-printed map, his fingertip touching a square that had been marked in yellow highlighter.
–
The park-off Kensington Avenue, at F and Indiana, just two blocks from an elementary school and another two from a magnet middle school-was well known as an open-air market for the dealing and consumption of drugs.
When police patrolled it, the junkies slipped away into the shadows, looking like so many cockroaches suddenly exposed to light, and leaving the park grounds littered with empty glassine packets and dirty syringes. When the patrols left the park, the waves of junkie zombies rolled back in for another high.
Not all fled. Some were so severely wasted-it was not uncommon for the heavily addicted ones to shoot up ten to twenty hits of heroin a day-that they could not move, and simply sat or lay on park benches in a drug-induced state that bordered on the comatose.