Where earlier there had been no need for what in bigger cities is called a detention cage, there is now a rather large so-called Conditioning Unit, which makes the cell sound like a brainwashing center, but staid, sedate Calusa has never quite admitted to itself that crime is as rampant here as it is anyplace else in the United States. Calusa would rather believe that the miscreants dragged into this facility day and night are not “criminals” in the strictest sense but merely misguided souls who’ve somehow fallen afoul of the law and must be temporarily “conditioned” until the matter can be straightened out.
This morning, there were half a dozen recently arrested individuals in the C.U., as the huge cage was euphemistically called. One of them was a black woman wearing pink satin shorts, a red bikini bra, and red high-heeled shoes. I imagined she’d been picked up for soliciting sex on US. 41, near the airport. The other five people in the cage were men, three of them black, two of them white. The biggest of the black men was obviously drunk and kept shouting to anyone who’d listen that he wasn’t no African American, damn it! He was a plain ole American same as anyone else born in this country.
“Do I look like I drink goat’s milk and blood? You see flies eatin my eyes, man? Fuck Africa!” he shouted to me as I went by. “You hear me? Fuck Africa!”
One of the white men said, “Fuck you, man!” and then threw a finger at me when he realized I wasn’t the detective, lawyer, or state attorney he was waiting for. Nobody else paid any attention to me.
I found Morris Bloom in his office at the far end of the corridor.
“Got yourself another winner, I see,” he said, and grinned and extended his hand.
I told him I thought Lainie Commins was innocent.
He said, “Sure.”
I told him Pete Folger had already offered me a deal.
“What has he got, Morrie?”
“Is this on the record?”
“He suggested I talk to his grand jury witnesses.”
“Well, I was one of them,” Bloom said, nodding.
“Can we talk?”
“No tape.”
“However.”
“Sure”
In every man’s life, there are two cowboys who once beat him up and taught him the meaning of fear. I keep expecting my particular cowboys to show up again one day, to pay me back for what Bloom taught me to do to them. That is the kind of thing cowboys never forget. So one day I’m sure they’ll be waiting around the next corner. In fact, when those bullets came banging out of that parked car last April, I thought it might have been my cowboys coming to get me at last. I can tell you this. I will never be able to repay Detective Morris Bloom for what he taught me to do. What he taught me to do was almost kill them.
The walls of his office pretty much told the story of his life. Resting on a shelf was a boxing trophy he’d won while serving in the United States Navy. Hanging on one of the walls were a pair of laminated front-page stories from the New York Daily News and Long Island’s Newsday, headlining the daring capture of two bank robbers in Mineola, Long Island, by a young police officer named Morris Bloom. Hanging on another wall were several framed photographs of the detective squad he’d subsequently commanded up north, together with a citation plaque from the Nassau County chief of detectives. On yet another shelf was a Snoopy doll his then-nineteen-year-old son had given him on a Father’s Day some years back, the hand-lettered sign around its neck reading: To the best bloodhound in the world. Love, Marc. A framed picture of Bloom’s wife Arlene, a smiling dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty, rested on his desk alongside a humidor of Cuban cigars he offered to rank but never smoked himself.
A heavyset man in his mid-forties, an inch over six feet tall and weighing either side of two hundred pounds, depending on how many pizzas he’d had this week, he stood waiting for my first question. There was a look of ineffable sadness on his face, as though he were certain my case was already a lost cause. But the look, exaggerated by shaggy black brows and soulful brown eyes, was always there, a bad failing for a cop. Arms folded across his chest, he waited. He was a blunt, plainspoken man. I knew there’d be no bullshit in this office today.
“Etta Toland says that you and Cooper Rawles were the first detectives to respond when the blues called in a homicide.”
“That’s right,” Bloom said.
“What time did you get to the boat, Morrie?”
“Twenty to one.”
“Can you tell me what you found?”
“Sector patrol car angle-parked into the walk running past the boats, I think it was Charlie Car, it’s in the report. Patrol sergeant’s car was alongside it, also angle-parked. Coop and I were driving one of the squad’s sedans, we parked alongside the sergeant’s car, his driver still behind the wheel. His name’s Brannigan, he’s supervisor in Sector Three. He took me to where the victim’s wife...”
“Etta Toland.”
“Yeah, was sitting in this little sort of outdoor... I don’t know boats, Matthew, I don’t know what the hell you call it. A little outside area with a table and banquettes around it, what looked like banquettes.”
“The cockpit,” I said.
“I thought that was airplanes.”
“Boats, too. But different.”
“Anyway, she was sitting there alone, her hands in her lap, staring down at her hands...”
“Lights on, Morrie?”
“What?”
“In the cockpit.”
“Oh. Yeah. Why?”
“Just wondered. Go ahead.”
“Coop and I went to her, and he handled the questioning while I took notes. You get a feel whether the white guy or the black guy should do the talking. I didn’t get a sense it would make any difference at all here. So he talked, and I wrote.”
“What’d she tell you?”
“How she’d gone on the boat around a quarter past midnight and found her husband dead downstairs. Coop asked her did she touch anything and she said No, just the phone, and Coop asked did she call anyone but the police, and she said No, just the police. So we all went downstairs to take a look.”
“Mrs. Toland, too?”
“No, no, she stayed upstairs in the cockpit, whatever. I went down with Coop and the M.E., who’d arrived by then.”
“What’d you find?”
“A dead man lying on his back on the far side of the bed, blood all over him. Looked like he took two in the face, which the M.E. said either one could’ve been the cause of death. We later found another spent bullet. Because we were looking for it, Matthew. There were three ejected cartridge cases, you see. We figure the third bullet missed him entirely, maybe it was the first one she fired, maybe her hand was shaking, who knows, you ought to ask her. Anyway, we later dug out the bullet from the wall behind the bed, near the door to the bathroom. Your client must’ve pumped the slugs into him from two, three feet away, very nice, Matthew.”
“And left the gun behind,” I said.
“Yeah, on the bed.”
“You think she shot him and then placed the gun neatly on the bed?”
“I just report the facts, Matthew. The S.A. decides what’ll play to the jury.”
“Does Folger think that’ll play, Morrie?”
“Gee, I guess not, since you say he’s already offered you a deal.”
“Was the gun on the bed the murder weapon?”
“That’s what Ballistics says.”
“You have a report?”
“We had it before we brought your client in.”
“Was the gun test-fired?”
“Of course.”
“What were the results?”
“The ejected cartridge cases and the bullet we recovered on the boat were fired from the .45 Colt automatic pistol we found on the bed. The bullets the coroner removed from the victim’s head were also fired from that gun. It’s the murder weapon, Matthew, no question about it.”