Sunrise Highway Page 24

  She was absolutely sure, on the other hand, that the sphere-shaped brown man with the long neck sticking out of dusty farmer’s overalls was the ex-con they were looking to speak to. She could see it in the hesitant way he parked his wheelbarrow, looked around, and bent down to heave a rusty bed frame off a flowerbed. Like he was waiting for a guard’s permission before every move.

  “Delaney Patterson?” She pulled back her jacket, to show him the shield clipped to her belt, which somehow felt a little less real since her night in custody.

  “Joshua Ben-Levi.” He straightened up.

  “Your name’s Ben-Levi?” she asked, starting to share an incredulous look with B.B. and then stopping herself, since they no longer had that kind of rapport.

  “My lawyer’s name is Ben-Levi.” Delaney Patterson reached for a rake. “That’s who you should contact if you want to speak with me.”

  “You’re not in any trouble,” B.B. said.

  “You don’t say,” Patterson drawled, hand on hip in a mocking Scarlett O’Hara stance. “Well, let me just drop everything I’m doing because the po-lice have always been so good to me.”

  B.B. gave Lourdes a hooded told-ya-so look. They both knew this was going to be a heavy lift. No one does twenty-five years in a state prison and jumps at the chance to assist an investigation.

  “It has to do with the Kim Bergdahl case,” Lourdes said.

  “Everything in my whole damn life has to do with that case.” Patterson leaned on the rake. “From the time I was nineteen until I was forty-four. And now you want me to talk about it some more? Oh, happy day.”

  He was a big leathery man who’d developed lots of layers. Like most people she’d met who’d been in prison. Including her own father. There was a layer of sarcasm, and just beneath that a layer of searing, defensive anger, which barely covered a layer of inconsolable hurt and a layer of fear. It got to where you had so many layers that you had no idea what was underneath them all except an emptiness you didn’t dare show anyone.

  “We’re looking at something more recent that might be connected,” B.B. said, falling into the reflexive impatience of a cop talking to a former inmate.

  Patterson fished a cell phone out of the front pocket of his overalls and displayed it to them—an iPhone 4, maybe, with a cracked screen.

  “See this?” he demanded. “I did twenty-five fucking years. I’ve been out of prison since 2003 and I always have one of these with me. You want to know why? It’s so I can always prove where I’ve been. In case one of you people comes around asking questions again.”

  B.B. clicked his tongue unhelpfully, no doubt still keyed up from the tense conversation in the car. This was starting to harden up into a useless confrontation, Lourdes realized. Bad enough that they weren’t getting as much cooperation from the rest of the task force since her arrest on Long Island. Even with the charges dismissed, the chilling effect on the investigation had been achieved, and it was going to take some effort to get the momentum going again. She pulled out her own cell phone and showed him the picture she’d downloaded from the newspaper website.

  “You know who this is?” she asked.

  Reluctantly, Patterson put away his phone and pulled out a pair of reading glasses. The lenses were crooked and a strip of gray tape on the centerpiece held the frame together. She sensed he was one of those quietly dignified men she’d encountered at homeless shelters, who preferred to mend their own things and keep their sad stories to themselves.

  “White police chief with a dumb-ass moustache,” he said after a cursory glance. “Supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Do you remember a Joseph Tolliver?” Lourdes asked.

  “What kind of question is that?” Patterson drew back. “Of course I remember that lying motherfucker. He got up in front of that dumb-ass grand jury and made up a story about something that never happened. Ruined my whole life.”

  “Could this be him?” Lourdes thrust the screen at him again. “Just asking you to look.”

  Patterson gave a little sigh as if questioning the value of his own forbearance and then angled his frames. His eyes focused. His features became very still. His nostrils puffed out with a quick angry expulsion of air. He took the glasses off and wiped his eyes with his forearm.

  “Well?” Lourdes asked.

  “Yeah, that’s him.” His lower lip came out and covered his top lip; then he turned away with a sharp sniffle.

  “You’re sure now?” asked B.B.

  Patterson turned his back to them, his fingers slipping through spaces in the chain-link fence, gripping the wires and shaking them.

  “You didn’t know he’d become a cop after the trial,” Lourdes said. “Did you?”

  “Nope.” Patterson still wasn’t turning around.

  “You gonna look at us while you speak to us?” B.B. asked.

  Lourdes gave him a headshake. After all, they had no leverage on this dude. But some cops and street guys were like cats and dogs. They went at each other instinctively with no regard to practicality or common sense.

  “Sir, I do not want to turn around,” Patterson said, his voice growing firm and deliberate over the honking of Bronx traffic. “Because I do not want you to see the full extent of my reaction.”

  “Why’s that?” Lourdes asked.

  “Because I thought nothing could cause me as much pain as having both my parents die while I was locked up. But seeing what you just showed me…” He gripped the fence harder and shook it. “Seeing how this so-called man was rewarded for destroying my life…”

  His voice got choked off and a couple of the white middle-aged ladies who managed the garden started over with concerned looks. B.B. scared them away with a stern glance.

  “Man.” Patterson took a deep breath, still not letting go of the fence. “I know it shouldn’t matter after everything I’ve been through, but it still hurts me to know that’s how it is.”

  “What can you tell us about him?” Lourdes said.

  “Joey?” Patterson tried a laugh, but it stuck in his throat. “He wasn’t shit.”

  “How well did you know him?” she asked.

  “We were the FNG at Shiloh High School.” Patterson finally turned around. “The fucking new guys, both come out to paradise from the city. Because our folks wanted to make a better life. See how well that worked out?”

  Lourdes exchanged a look with B.B., warning him not to break the rhythm.

  “We were both on the football team,” Patterson said. “He was the center who was supposed to snap the ball to me and then block. But he only did the first part, so there went my knee when I kept getting sacked and then there went my scholarship to Rutgers. So then he comes to me and says, ‘Hey man, I got a connection with this white girl out here in the tenth grade. You should go back to the projects, get some pot to bring out here, and we can make a fortune selling to these suburban brats, enough money to both buy cars for college.’ And you want to know who his tenth-grade connection was?”

  Lourdes kept up a deadpan to hide her reaction. “Kim Bird Dog?”

  “She was a white girl, but she was a straight-up punk.” Patterson took off his glasses and pocketed them. “And I don’t mean that in a music way. I mean that in a street way. That girl was nasty. Her mother let her run wild because she had no control over herself. Carried a Swiss army knife she liked to wave in your face and a Zippo lighter that she let Joey use to light cat tails on fire. I never knew they made little white girls like that. But she didn’t deserve what happened to her. Sticks and branches down her throat. Who even thinks of that?”

  “You weren’t interested in her as a girl?” B.B. raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh hell no,” Patterson said emphatically. “She’d cut your dick off if she even thought you were looking at her that way.”

  “So you didn’t kill her?” Lourdes said, just making it official.

  “No, I wasn’t even near the football field that night. Tell you the whole truth, I was helping to rob
someone’s house two miles down the road. Which was why my lawyer didn’t want me to testify, but…”

  “Then why’d you plead guilty?” B.B. interrupted, not buying it.

  A look of childlike befuddlement cleared the creases from Patterson’s face. “Because I thought I had no choice. This Detective William Rattigan got a partial statement out of me, saying I was there, by beating me up and squeezing my balls while I was handcuffed to a pipe. The judge refused our motion to suppress it. Then Joey goes and tells the grand jury—the all-white grand jury—that he saw me in the woods with blood on my hands. My lawyer said I’d get life if I didn’t take the offer that was on the table that day only. And my family was going broke paying him. I didn’t find out until later that both the judge who took my plea and the DA, Mr. O’Mara, had been his law partners. That’s why I used to blame Joey for everything. But now I think he was just part of the system that had been set up.”

  Lourdes noticed that B.B. had stopped taking notes, like this was just the usual skell nonsense. But she could hear the sound of truth in it as plainly as a bat hitting a ball at Yankee Stadium nearby.

  “Why do you think Joey lied about you?” she asked, being careful not to make it too much of a leading question.

  “To cover up his own part.” Patterson fussed with a frayed denim strap of his overalls. “Before he made me throw in the towel, my lawyer said there was a good piece of evidence for our defense. The police found one of those red bandanas Joey used to wear at the crime scene.”

  “They did?” Her jaw went slack and she looked at B.B. So much for the poker face.

  Her mind was already rocketing toward getting subpoenas for retired officers and laying her hands on every other piece of evidence imaginable before the chief caught on and had it deep-sixed. For someone who’d been in public life more than three decades, he was surprisingly elusive and hard to get a grip on. They’d recently confirmed that Tolliver had been married once, to a woman with three kids, who had dropped off the grid at some point in the last ten years.

  “Yeah, don’t get too excited,” Patterson said wearily, wiping the back of his neck with a handkerchief. “My lawyer’s dead now, and he probably wouldn’t have cooperated with you even if he was alive. I found that out when I tried to file papers to rescind my plea. And you know what else I found out? Most of the physical evidence from that case is gone. A flood at the warehouse. Funny how the water always lands on the boxes they don’t want you to see.”

  Lourdes found that she couldn’t look at B.B. this time. Knowing if he had anything to do with fucking this case up, she might be tempted to shoot him.

  “He did it again, didn’t he?” Patterson said.

  “Did what?” B.B. asked, a hint of a challenge in his voice.

  “He did something else fucked up.” Patterson looked back and forth between them. “Otherwise you all wouldn’t be here, asking about him.”

  “Sir, we’re not at liberty to talk about an active investigation,” B.B. said, retreating into cold police language. “You’d be wrong to make assumptions based on anything we’ve said.”

  “Except you told me this had to do with something more recent,” Patterson reminded him. “I always knew there was something wrong with J. Just the way he looked at you sometimes. Like you were a thing, not a person to him. You know what I just remembered? What he told me once, when we were in high school. He said, ‘I wanna be a cop. Not because I want to help people. And not for the benefits. But so I can do whatever I want.’”

  Lourdes took the note and made sure B.B. heard it as well. Nothing admissible here, but they were moving in a definite direction.

  “You know what I just realized?” Patterson picked up a shovel. “I’m wasting my breath talking to you all.” He looked from Lourdes to B.B. “You’re not here to help me clear my name. You’re here to help J cover up for what he did.”

  “Sir, that’s not true,” Lourdes started to say.

  “Just get the fuck out of here.” Patterson turned his back to them and started digging into the soil. “I need to get some work done while I still have the sun.”

  37

  JANUARY

  2007

  Joey stumbled in late after Tommy Danziger’s retirement party. He parked the Jeep in the garage and switched the light on, intending to slip in quietly through the side door. There were tall stacks of cardboard boxes along the walls. The light went on in the kitchen and Beth came out wearing her blue terry cloth bathrobe, furry slippers, and a resolute expression.

  “What’s this?” he said, still so coked up from his private little after-party in the car that he could barely get his keys back in his pocket.

  “You’re done,” she said. “We’re done.”

  “Done with what?” He was having trouble modulating his voice. “You’re not making any sense.”

  “You’re moving out. It’s over. Your stuff’s in these boxes.”

  “What’d I do?” He raised his hands in mock surrender. “Read me the indictment.”

  “I don’t want to get into it.” She shook her head, the harsh overhead light showing that she was letting her roots grow out. “I must have been insane to let you move in here in the first place.”

  “Will ya…” He put a hand in front of his face, shielding his eyes. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”

  “I’ve realized this whole period of my life has been madness,” she said. “I had a husband who lost his job and then lost his mind. And then I let another man take over, because he seemed to know what he was doing.”

  He leaned heavily against the table saw, trying to get his bearings. In the distorted reflection of the blade, he saw a balding, baggy-faced man. Certainly not chief material. He realized he was sweating like an ox, even though it was freezing in the garage.

  “Could you please give me some fucking idea what you’re talking about?” he said deliberately.

  “I don’t know everything you’ve done, Joey. But I know enough, and I can guess the rest. I know you leave the house in the middle of the night sometimes when you think we’re all asleep and you come back right before dawn. I know you put something in my tea sometimes so you think I’ll stay down longer and not notice when you’re gone. I know you buy and throw away cell phones like Kleenex, and you have a bunch of bank accounts under other names. I know something funny has been going on with you and the DA for a long time. And I know you know more about some of those girls they found then you’ve let on.”

  “Shut the fuck up.” He smacked the table. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Keep your voice down. The kids are back from school and sleeping inside.”

  “They should know their mother is having some kind of psychotic fit.” He saw his breath in the cold garage air.

  “They know you’re leaving. And for your sake, it’s better if they don’t know why.”

  “Why are you doing this to me, Beth?” he said plaintively, thinking of getting the gun out of his ankle holster. “And why now?”

  “Why now?” She looked a little chipmunky, showing her front teeth as she laughed. “What do you care? You don’t need us anymore. You got to be chief. And we helped you look normal enough to pass.”

  He was slowly getting oriented, realizing that the fourteen or fifteen boxes had his name written in Magic Marker. Thank God he kept anything that could send him to prison in a storage facility in Huntington. But now that he was understanding that she was serious about this, his anger began to gather in earnest.

  “Let me ask you something, Beth,” he said. “If even a tenth of what you were talking about had any reality to it, why would I let you throw me that easily?”

  “Because of what I know about you, Joey.” She put her hands on her hips. “I’ve been keeping a diary for a long time, writing times and dates when you come and go. I’m sure if somebody smart put them together with times and dates for when some of these girls got killed, you might have a problem.”

  �
��Are you threatening me, Beth?”

  He let his arms hang heavily at his sides and turned his wrists out toward her, suggesting the primitive menace that he’d used to keep her and the kids in line in the past.

  “I’ve made copies of my diary,” she said calmly, like this was a speech she’d practiced in front of the bathroom mirror. “And I’ve put them in envelopes and given them to a bunch of people I know—and not the ones you would think of, Joey. If anything happens to me or the kids, there are instructions for those envelopes to get opened.”

  “Where did you get this from? Some stupid Lifetime movie?”

  “Never mind about that.” Her face got more deeply lined as her mouth got tighter. “What you need to worry about now is money.”

  “What about it?”

  “I’m going to sell this house and keep all the proceeds. Then I’m going to move somewhere and leave a bank account number. I know you’ve been making money on the side through all your crooked deals, so I’m going to expect monthly direct deposits. I think you can manage thirty-five hundred a month easily. And other than that, I don’t want to hear from you ever again.”

  “You’re shaking me down?”

  He scrunched his eyes three times and shook his head, like he was trying to recover from being sucker punched.

  “Don’t act so surprised,” she said. “And don’t try to claim the high ground.”

  “You fucking bitch.”

  “Poor you. You’re really the victim here.”

  “I’m not leaving this house,” he said.

  “You will. And you’ll give me a divorce without contesting it—with alimony along with the other payments—because you want to keep being chief and you know it’s not worth the risk to try me.”