The Black Book Read online

  “We done?” she says.

  “Fuck, yes, we’re done, we’re done.”

  “Then apologize to my brother.”

  “I apologize.”

  She lowers the gun and says, “C’mon.” It’s a moment before I realize she’s saying it to me. We walk out of the Hole, now stunned into silence.

  “What was that about ‘I remember now’?” she asks me as we beat a path from the bar.

  “What was that about drawing your weapon?”

  “You first.”

  “Like you said before, who’s to say I don’t remember?” I say. “Fuck trying to regain my memory. I’ll just remember whatever I decide I remember.”

  “Good; great,” she says. “Doesn’t mean you had to announce it to a roomful of cops. Was that smart?”

  Maybe not, I think to myself as I raise my hand for a cab. Maybe so.

  Sixty-Six

  I LOOK out my bedroom window, watching a man and woman, young lovers, staggering home from a night of partying, the woman holding her heels in her hand, the man singing some pop song in a falsetto voice, trying to sound awful, the cool air filled with their laughter. I take a swig from my beer, but it tastes wrong, bitter, rancid. Booze has tasted that way since the shooting, since I recovered from the coma. Food has, too, as though the damage to my brain screwed up the connections to my taste buds, rearranged them while I slept.

  I’m supposed to eat four meals a day to get my weight back, but I can hardly stomach three squares. Some days the only things I eat are plain pieces of bread and water. Maybe, in some weird way, I’m readying myself for prison, for the tasteless paste they will slop on my plate every day.

  I look at the handgun on the bedside table. I won’t deny that it’s crossed my mind, at my darkest moments, when my memory loss drove me to the precipice, when I wanted to tear my hair out and peel off my skin and scream until I had no voice, when I was convinced that I must have committed murder, that the evidence didn’t add up any other way, and that I will spend the rest of my life in a living hell of prison. I thought about tasting the steel on my tongue, the muzzle so deep in my mouth that I gag, squeezing my eyes shut and willing my thumb to pull the trigger.

  I thought about it. But I’m too stubborn to do it. The Irish don’t commit suicide; we just let ourselves be miserable forever.

  I have a story. It’s not what I remember, and it may or may not be true, but it’s a story: Kate walked in on Amy and me having sex and opened fire in a jealous rage. That’s what everybody thought at first, before the test results came back, before they had completed their investigation.

  Before they discovered that my gun, not Kate’s, was used to kill Amy.

  Before they recovered the text messages from Kate’s missing phone.

  But it’s the best story I can think up. It matches the crime scene to some extent, and it’s pretty straightforward. A jealous rage, a woman scorned who happens to be heavily armed at the time of said scorn, doesn’t require me to prove a number of different facts. Even if jurors might not do it themselves, they can understand the sting of betrayal and the temptation to act on it, to kill the person who stole your lover from your arms and shoot the cheating bastard, too. It’s been the stuff of movies, of songs, of novels for a reason—everyone can relate to it on some level.

  Either that or I put on no defense at all, a sure loser. Or I take the witness stand and sit there like a dumbass, shrug at Margaret Olson’s questions, and simply say, Good question; wish I knew. Don’t remember. Can’t argue with you there. Boy, I agree, that sure looks bad, but there might be an innocent explanation IF I COULD JUST FUCKING REMEMBER—

  Enough. Enough of that crap.

  I look once more at the log of those text messages, the ones that Wizniewski showed me with such delight, the ones Kate sent as she stood outside Amy’s apartment door only minutes before everything happened.

  Open the door, she was texting me:

  Need to talk to u

  Why would I do that I said in response, as if Kate had picked a terrible time for a chat. And Kate’s answer, those words, those simple words in black and white on the page I hold in my hand, but not black and white, full of fire and fury, rising off the piece of paper and floating in front of me, dancing and taunting me:

  Bc she knows u idiot. She knows about u and so do I

  I have tried to decipher this message for the seven and a half weeks since I was charged with murder. I’ve tried to remember, and I’ve tried to think logically. But the two things are sewn together. I can’t fit the pieces together when I don’t have the pieces, when I can’t remember what happened. The more I call out for my memory, begging, pleading for it to return, the farther it burrows into the shadows.

  I will have to learn to live with it, like a patient with a spinal injury who has to accept that he’ll never walk again. I have to accept that I’ll never remember, that I’ll never really know, that it will lie buried inside me until the day I die.

  So I’ll be a good soldier. I’ll learn to cope with it. But still I will wonder—every hour of every day, every day of every year I will wonder.

  What did Amy know about me? What could I have done that was so bad?

  The Past

  Sixty-Seven

  “DO YOU solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

  I do. Or at least that’s what I told the clerk before I took my seat on the witness stand. I straightened my tie. I looked over the courtroom, so crowded with reporters and spectators that it felt like the walls would bend outward. The defense table was thick with lawyers, while their clients, including Mayor Francis Delaney and Archbishop Michael Xavier Phelan and a cast of other VIPs, sat behind them in the front row.

  The first defense lawyer—the mayor’s lawyer—stood and buttoned his jacket. This wasn’t the trial itself; this was the hearing where the defense would try to convince the judge that I lacked probable cause to enter the brownstone. If they won, the arrests were invalid, and all these guys would walk free. This was their only shot. After all, we caught these defendants in various states of undress with young women. They had no plausible defense at trial—nobody was going to believe that they snuck into a discreet high-society sex club to play Parcheesi with scantily clad women. Their only hope was to wrap themselves in the Bill of Rights, the Fourth Amendment. Their only hope was to tear me to shreds.

  Amy’s eyes were on me, but I looked away when I saw her. It was all business now, so it wasn’t the time for me to discuss other matters—other matters such as the glossy full-color eight-by-ten photograph of Amy walking up the steps to the brownstone, the photograph that someone put into a plain envelope and propped against my door last night. The photo that I brought with me today, that was too big to stick in my pocket, so I put it in my briefcase next to the prosecution table. It was hidden, tucked away inside a flap, but it felt radioactive, sending out signals to me that something was not what it seemed—

  But no time for that now. Now was all business.

  “Detective.” The mayor’s lawyer, Shaw DeCremer, once served under the first President Bush as his attorney general. He had since joined some powerhouse law firm—Readem and Weep, or maybe it was Woulda, Coulda, and Shoulda—and handled cases from coast to coast, usually high-stakes trials involving celebrities and politicians.

  “You didn’t have a warrant when you entered the brownstone, did you?” he asked.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Could you…” DeCremer waved a hand, strolled a bit in front of the defense table. “Could you describe the brownstone?”

  I did my best. An old place, freestanding, sandstone and dark wood, arched entry, three stories.

  “How many exits and entrances?” he asked.

  “One entrance in the front, another in the back.”

  “Anything else? Secret tunnels? Any kind of elaborate escape routes?”

  I shrugged. “Not that I knew of. But you never k
now.”

  “But the point is you didn’t know. At the time of the raid, you didn’t have any reason to believe there was some clever way that the people in the brownstone could escape or anything.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “In fact, Detective, you’d never set foot in that brownstone, had you? Before the raid, I mean.”

  His point was fairly obvious if you understood the Fourth Amendment, which I pretty much did as a cop. Amy had hammered it into me during trial prep. If you don’t have a warrant when you enter, you better have a good reason. The most common reason is that you’re aware of criminal conduct—you saw drugs or weapons, for example, through a window—and you fear that if you don’t go in immediately, if you take the time to go before a judge and secure a warrant, the offenders will have time to destroy the incriminating evidence if not escape altogether. DeCremer is trying to demonstrate that I didn’t have any such concern the night of the raid.

  “I had never set foot in that brownstone,” I said.

  “In fact,” he said, wagging a finger, as though the thought had just occurred to him, “the reason you were there that night in the first place had nothing whatsoever to do with prostitution, did it?”

  “No, it did not.” I explained the initial reason for the stakeout—that I was investigating a murder, that I had a suspect, that I wanted to catch him in the act of sleeping with a prostitute so I’d have some leverage over him and get him to answer some questions about the murder.

  “Sounds like a smart plan,” DeCremer said. When a lawyer pays you a compliment, look up. There’s probably a guillotine poised to drop down on your neck.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “So you had this murder suspect, and you had already followed him to this brownstone the previous week, and your plan was to catch him in a—a compromising position, shall we say?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And yet having had this plan in your head for a week, you did not ask a judge for a warrant.”

  “I did not.”

  “You didn’t ask the state’s attorney’s office to help you apply for a warrant.”

  “I did not.”

  “And that’s because you weren’t worried about making a case against this guy for prostitution. You were concerned about bigger stuff. A murder.”

  “Correct.”

  DeCremer nodded, glanced down at his feet, at his polished Ferragamo shoes. There was no jury for this hearing. If this case went to trial and he had twelve in the box, he wouldn’t be wearing thousand-dollar shoes. He’d try to dress like a man of the people.

  “If you had been trying to put a case on this suspect for prostitution, if that had been your plan all along, you’d have applied for a warrant, right?”

  “Objection.” Amy Lentini popped halfway up from her chair. She knew the question was proper, but she was trying to disrupt his flow and also signal to me, if I didn’t already know, that the water was getting choppy.

  “I might have,” I said after the judge overruled the objection. “But you’re making this sound like some elaborate advance plan. It wasn’t. I’d been looking for a chance to confront this suspect about the murder. I saw this as an opportunity, and I took it. I asked a few of my fellow detectives to ride along for support. That’s all.”

  DeCremer nodded as though he expected my answer. He neither expected it nor liked it, but he’d never admit to either one. These guys were as smooth as butter.

  “Fair enough,” he conceded. “Let’s talk about how you knew this was a house of prostitution.”

  Sixty-Eight

  “LET ME see if I have this straight,” said Shaw DeCremer. “The week before, you trailed this suspect to the brownstone. You saw him go in. You saw him leave an hour later.”

  “Yes.”

  “You stayed and watched the brownstone.”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw several attractive young women leave. Women dressed provocatively.”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw nobody engaging in sexual intercourse.”

  “No.”

  “Not a single person.”

  “I think I just answered that question. I didn’t have X-ray vision, no. I was outside.”

  That was good enough for the lawyer. Amy Lentini flipped a pencil in her hand.

  “Then you ‘sat on,’ as you put it—you sat on the brownstone a couple of times over the next week.”

  “Yes, correct. Twice that week, before the raid, I parked across the street and conducted surveillance.”

  “You saw the same types of things. Older men walking in. Young, provocatively dressed women walking in.”

  “Right.”

  “You didn’t see anyone having sex?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “Or exchanging money?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t see which floors these people went to, did you? I mean, this was a three-story building.”

  “No, I didn’t, but I saw an armed doorman greet each of them. The women he just let in, like he knew them. The men—he checked their names on a clipboard. I gathered from that—the way the men kept their heads down, acted like they didn’t want to be seen, and basically had to sign in to get inside the place—that they weren’t just making casual social calls.”

  “But you never actually saw what any of these people were doing inside—”

  “Men were parading in and out of there, Mr. DeCremer. The women came and stayed all night. Most of the men stayed for one hour—like clockwork—and some stayed for two hours. Then they left, acting just as suspiciously when they walked out as they did when they walked in. Was this a secret meeting of the Freemasons? Was it a Tupperware party? Maybe, but it sure seemed like a house of prostitution to me.”

  “It seemed like one.”

  I turned, surprised to see that the judge was addressing me. The judge, with sharply combed black hair and a thick mustache, a guy named Walter McCabe, who’d been on the bench for more than twenty years.

  The judge is allowed to ask questions. The judge can do whatever he wants. This is his tiny fiefdom. But it’s uncommon for a judge to interject himself into the questioning like this. It isn’t a good sign.

  “It seemed like one,” he said again, looking down on me, “based on the pattern of movement of the men, in and out by the hour?”

  “And based on the way they behaved. And the young women.”

  The judge didn’t look convinced. Had he ever been a cop? Had he ever had to play a hunch? And did anyone care, by the way, that everything my gut had told me ended up being one hundred percent spot-on correct?

  Judge McCabe said, “Detective, at any time before the night of the raid when you were staking out the brownstone, or on the night of the raid itself—at any point in time did you witness a crime in progress?”

  “Every time I saw a man enter that brownstone I witnessed a crime in progress.”

  “But you know what I mean, Detective. It’s not a crime to walk into a building.”

  “It is if the building is a house of prostitution.”

  “But you didn’t know it was a house of prostitution. It seemed like one, you said.”

  “But—”

  “Did you see sex? Or money change hands? Did you ever see one of the young women with one of the men? Did you see them so much as touch hands or wave hello to one another? Do you even know if they were on the same floor of the brownstone together?”

  “No, Judge. And if it had been just one guy walking in, or even a handful, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But it was a steady stream. And the guard at the door, he was very careful about discretion. He made sure nobody was entering if someone was leaving. He would look out, make sure the coast was clear, and then someone would hustle out. There was nothing about this that looked normal.”

  “Maybe not normal,” he said. “But criminal?”

  “That was my judgment, yes. And I didn’t have time for a warrant. By the time I
could find a judge and get her to sign off, these clients would have left. There wasn’t time. This is one of the crimes where you have to catch them in the act or you have no case. I had to move right away.”

  The judge sat back in his seat, looking unsatisfied.

  For crying out loud, I thought to myself. Talk about second-guessing police work. Everything about the way that place operated smelled like an upscale house of prostitution. And I was right—it was. Didn’t that count for anything? But here we were, in a pristine courtroom with walnut trim and shiny floors, listening to a guy in a robe who’d never spent a day on the street and a lawyer dressed in an outfit that I couldn’t afford on two months’ salary, who’d never spent a real day in the shit, either, acting like they knew better than me.

  The hearing wasn’t over, not technically. Amy hadn’t even had her chance to question me yet. But I could see it on the judge’s face. He wasn’t convinced. He thought I lacked probable cause. He was going to invalidate my search. He was going to toss this case.

  And my career along with it.

  Sixty-Nine

  LIEUTENANT MIKE Goldberger closed the door gently behind him before turning to address me and Kate, who would testify tomorrow. We were in a witness interview room on the same floor as the courtroom where I had just had my head handed to me.

  I stood and stretched; I’d been sitting all day. Seven hours of questioning from six defense lawyers, then Amy grilling me on every detail. Nothing seemed to make a difference. From the moment the judge addressed his questions to me, it was clear that he didn’t like our case.

  Goldie said, “Okay, so that didn’t go so well,” which was like saying the Titanic’s maiden voyage had some rough patches.

  “It was a righteous search,” I said.

  “Hell, I know that,” Goldie said. “But the judge isn’t with us. That’s obvious.”

  I shook my head. “Some clown in a robe who hasn’t—”

  “Who hasn’t spent a day on the job; I know, I know,” Goldie grumbled. “But we’re past crying in our Cheerios. Time to fix this.”