“You were lucky.”
“I been lucky all my life,” he said. “My poor fucking brother’s had no luck at all. He’s a man who walks away from confrontations, but all the same he could find himself in a fight, given the right set of circumstances. Life he led, violence is always waiting for you around the next bend in the road.” He straightened up in his seat. “But what happened last week,” he said, “it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t fit George.”
“How do you mean?”
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s how the police reconstruct it. Holtzmann’s on the corner making a call from a pay phone. George approaches him, asks him for money. Holtzmann ignores him, tells him no, maybe tells him to go fuck himself. George pulls out a gun and starts blasting.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You saw George around the neighborhood. Did you ever see him ask anybody for money?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“Believe me, you didn’t. George didn’t panhandle. He didn’t like to ask anybody for anything. If he was really broke and he wanted to scrape a few bucks together and he couldn’t do it hustling bottles and cans, maybe he’d go up to cars at a stoplight and wipe windshields. But even then he wouldn’t press hard for the money. He certainly wouldn’t disturb some guy in a business suit talking on the phone. George walked right by guys like that.”
“Maybe George asked the time of day and didn’t like the answer he got.”
“I’m telling you, George wouldn’t even have spoken to the guy.”
“Maybe he had a flashback, thought he was in a fire-fight.”
“Triggered by what? The sight of a man making a phone call?”
“I see what you’re saying,” I said, “but it’s all theoretical, isn’t it? But when you look at the evidence—”
“Okay,” he said, leaning forward. “Good, let’s talk about the evidence. As far as I’m concerned, that’s where their whole case breaks down.”
“Really? I thought it was pretty persuasive.”
“Oh, it looks solid at first glance,” he said. “I’ll grant you that. Witnesses placing him on the scene, but what’s so remarkable about that? He lives just around the corner from there, he must walk past that pay phone every day of his life. They’re supposed to have another witness says he was talking about guns and shooting, but who are these witnesses? Other street people? They’ll tell the cops anything they want to hear.”
“What about the physical evidence?”
“I guess you’re talking about the cartridge casings.”
“Four of them,” I said, “matching the four nine-millimeter slugs they took out of the victim. They would have been ejected automatically from the murder weapon when the shots were fired, but they weren’t at the crime scene when the cops got there. Instead they turned up in the pocket of your brother’s army jacket when the police picked him up.”
“It’s strong evidence,” he admitted.
“A lot of people would call it conclusive.”
“But to me it just proves what we already know, that he was there at the approximate time the shooting took place. Maybe he was just steps away, standing in a doorway. Holtzmann wouldna seen him and neither would the killer. Holtzmann’s on the phone, the killer shows up, maybe on foot, maybe he hops out of a car, who knows? Bang bang bang bang, Holtzmann’s dead and the killer’s out of there, takes off running or jumps back in his car, whatever. Then George comes forward. Maybe he watched the whole thing, maybe he was nodding and the shots woke him up, but now there’s a man down and the light from the streetlamp is glinting off four pieces of metal on the sidewalk.” He broke off, lowered his eyes. “I’m getting carried away here. I better stop before you figure I’m crazier than my brother.”
“Keep talking.”
“Yeah? Okay, so he steps forward to get a good look at the victim. That’s something he might do. And he sees the casings, and he was in the military, he knows what they are. You remember what he said to the police? ‘You have to police the area,’ he told them. ‘You have to pick up your own brass.’ ”
“Doesn’t that suggest that he was responsible for their presence? That they’d come out of his own gun?”
“It suggests to me that he was confused. There was a dead man on the ground and cartridge casings alongside it and his only reference for that was Vietnam. He remembered right off what they told him about picking up shell casings on patrol and that told him what to do in the present situation.”
“Isn’t it simpler to assume he was trying to conceal evidence of his own involvement?”
“But what the hell did he conceal? He dropped the goddamn things in his jacket pocket, he walked around with them for a full day until they picked him up. If he wanted to get rid of them, he had plenty of chances. They say he walked over to the river to get rid of the gun, that he flung it off a pier into the water. He threw away the gun but kept the casings? He could have tossed them anywhere, a trash can, a Dumpster, a sewer grate, but instead he carried them in his pocket all day? Where’s the sense in that?”
“Maybe he forgot they were there.”
“Four brass casings? They’da rattled around in there. No, it’s senseless, Matt. Senseless.”
“I don’t think anyone’s tried to argue that your brother was behaving rationally.”
“Even so, Matt. Even so. Look, speaking of the gun. The murder weapon was a nine-millimeter pistol, right? The bullets they dug out of Holtzmann were nine-millimeter, and so were the casings in George’s pocket.”
“So?”
“So George had a forty-five.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw it.”
“When?”
“Maybe a year ago. Maybe a little less than that. I came looking for him, I had some stuff for him, and I drove around until I found him. He was in one of his usual spots, near the entrance to Roosevelt Hospital.” He drank some coffee. “We walked back to his room so he could stow what I’d brought, clothes mostly, and a couple of bags of cookies. He always liked those Nutter Butter cookies, with the peanut-butter filling. From the time we were kids, that was his favorite kind of cookie. I always brought him some whenever I went looking for him.” He closed his eyes for a moment, opened them and said, “We got to his room and he told me he had something to show me. The place was a mess, piles of crap everywhere, but he knew right where to look and he moved some junk out of the way and came up with a gun. He had it wrapped in this filthy hand towel, but he unwrapped it and showed it to me.”
“And you were able to identify it as a forty-five?”
He hesitated. “I don’t know a lot about guns,” he said. “I’ve got a revolver I keep at the store, a thirty-eight, it sits on a shelf under the cash register and I don’t even touch it from one month to the next. We’re on Kings Highway west of Ocean Avenue, household appliances, we’ll sell you anything from a Waring blender to a washer-dryer, and there’s not a whole lot of cash comes over the counter. It’s all checks or plastic nowadays, but they’ll hold up anything, they smoke a little crack and they can’t think straight, and if the cash register’s empty they’ll shoot you to make a point. So the gun’s there, but I pray to God I never have to use it.
“It’s a revolver, I don’t know if I mentioned that. The gun George showed me wasn’t, it didn’t have a cylinder like mine. It was L-shaped, rectangular.”
He sketched its outline on the tabletop. I told him it sounded like a pistol, but how did he know it was a forty-five?
“George said that’s what it was. He called it a forty-five-caliber pistol. What was the other phrase he used? A military sidearm, that’s it. He said it was a government-issue military sidearm.”