I hung up before he could answer.
Mulhane stared at me uneasily from where he was still
sitting on the couch. "This is dangerous. Shouldn’t we call
the FBI?"
I glanced at my watch, which was showing a quarter of
eight.
"I’d like to make a case first. Unless I can
find someone who will testify about the beating, this won’t fly."
"What makes you think Sabato will talk to you?"
"I’m not sure that he will. But we’ve got to
start somewhere."
31
I GOT to Arnold’s bar a little past eight, found a
booth in the back, and ordered a Scotch. It was a rainy weekday
night, and I was almost alone in the tap room. Just me and a
college-aged couple having their dinner.
Around eight-thirty, Ron Sabato came into the bar. He
looked right and left, spotted me, and came over to the booth,
slipping into the seat across from mine. He studied my face for a
time, straightening the shirt cuffs beneath his sport jacket.
"You wearing a wire, Stoner?"
I shook my head.
"Open your shirt."
I unbuttoned my shirt, enough so that he could see
there was nothing taped to my chest.
"Roll up your sleeves."
"I’m not wired, Ron."
A waitress came up, and he switched on a smile.
"Double Chiv, straight up, honey."
She went off to get his drink. Sabato looked back at
me as I rebuttoned the shirt.
"It’s on me," he said, pointing to my
drink.
The girl brought him back his double. He pulled some
bills out of his wallet and waved his hand across the table. "Take
out for both," he said. "Run a tab with the change."
"That’s generous of you, Ron."
He slicked his gray hair down, running his hands back
from the corner of his hatchet face. "Yeah, well, I’m a
generous guy." He cribbed the drink in his hands and stared into
the shot glass. "This shit is going to kill me. I like it too
much. You know?"
I nodded. "I’ve got the same thirst."
"That night we’re talking about, for instance.
Too much hooch. You stop thinking, reacting." He breathed out
heavily through his nostrils, picking the shot glass up and taking a
sip. "The stuff you see."
He took a long swallow, almost emptying it, then
lowered the glass on the table and ran his right forelinger around
its rim.
"Let me put you a hypothetical. Just—two cops
talking shop in a bar. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Let’s say you and your partner catch the
night watch up on the Hill. You ever work night on the Hill?"
"No."
"Well, let me tell you, right away you’re not
crazy about the duty, ’cause of the queers and the hassle." He
dug into his coat pocket and pulled out a wrinkled pack of Raleighs,
shaking one out onto the table. Stowing the pack, he picked up the
cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. "A lot of these guys have
the virus nowadays, but they don’t tell you they have it. You bust
them, and they start to holler: Why me? Why me? You try to cuff them,
and they go nuts because they’ve been down most of their lives and
they’ve got nothing left to lose. I mean, they can throw screaming,
clawing fits you wouldn’t believe. Just lay a hand on them, and
they spit at you, bite you, get blood on you. Try to give you their
fucking life history. I mean, it happens all the time."
He plucked a book of matches from the ashtray, opened
it, and struck a match, lighting the cigarette in a cloud of acrid
smoke and tossing the matchbook back on the table. "So you and
your partner are on a lousy shift," he said, wincing at the
smoke. "It’s late, toward the end of a long night. You’re
cruising St. Greg, and your partner spots a queer he busted for
soliciting—years back. The kid’s talking to another queer in an
alley off a bar. There’s some money showing. You figure drugs and
pull over to roust them. The kid sees you, and right away he runs—I
mean, he bolts like he’s holding. He ducks into the side door of
the bar, and when you run him down in the john, he’s flushing shit
down the toilet. Now you know he’s a guilty son of a bitch. But you
don’t have a case, because he flushed the shit down the toilet. So
what do you do?"
He held the cigarette between his thumb and
forefinger, scribbling the air with it like it was a piece of chalk.
"You can’t let him walk—not after you’ve seen him flush
the shit away. And you can’t rightly hold him for possession. So
you bust him for whatever—for peddling his ass, which with this kid
is a pretty sure bet. You go to cuff him, and the kid gets
hysterical. I mean, like he’s lost his parents at the fair. You try
to talk to him. But he won’t hold still and he won’t listen. In a
minute or so, there’s going to be trouble from other fags in the
bar. What’re you supposed to do? Your partner, who maybe isn’t as
patient as you are, gets tired of this shit and gives the kid a hard
shot in the belly—just to freeze him up so you can slip the cuffs
on. You don’t know it, but this kid is sick and the shot makes him
throw up all over the fucking place. He bites his tongue. He pisses
on himself. I mean, we got blood and shit all over us. And with this
shit, you’re not so sure it’s gonna wash out—you know what I’m
saying?
"Anyway, the aggravation puts your partner in a
real bad mood about this kid. I mean, he’s going to put him away.
Period. End of case."
"So a few weeks go by," he said, dashing
the cigarette into the ashtray and gesturing with his other hand to
the waitress. "The kid makes bond. A trial date is set. You’ve
talked to the DA and it’s going to be a cakewalk. Then out of the
blue you get a call from one of the kid’s friends."
The waitress came up again, and Sabato ordered
another double.
"How ’bout you?" he said to me.
I nodded. "I’ll take another."
She went back to the bar to fill our orders.
"Anyway, the kid’s friend asks you to meet him
for a drink. Talk about the kid’s case. You really don’t want to
bother, you know? But you look into it out of routine, and it turns
out this friend has a record of his own—short eyes, you know? Plus,
it’s this very kid he queered the time he was busted. Kind of got
the boy started on the road to ruin. And now the kid’s got the
virus and a world of trouble, and it doesn’t sit so well with your
partner that the friend didn’t do time. That he wriggled out of it.
It doesn’t sit well at all. It never did."
The girl came back with the drinks and set them on
the table, picking up the empties.
Sabato swallowed half of his booze before she’d
turned to go.
"All right," he said, cribbing the glass
again. "So you go to meet with this guy, wanting him to fuck up,
half praying for it. And what does the guy do? He tries to shmooze
you—like you’re a fag, like you don’t know the score: the kid
is really all right, he’s had a tough time, he’s sick with the
virus, couldn’t we turn our backs just once? On and on, like this.
Like he’s this great humanitarian, and you’re just a couple of
pieces of shit who need a lecture on decency from a child molester. l
mean, this is the same guy who queered the kid in the first place.
"You think it’s funny because this guy doesn’t
really seem to know how out of line this is. But your partner doesn’t
think it’s funny. He’s a hard-nosed Catholic with a real strong
sense of right and wrong—and an attitude about fags, especially
fags who molest children—and he is definitely not amused. Plus, the
way the guy is acting, you can’t help thinking maybe he has
something to hide in the way of a sex thing or a drug thing with the
kid you busted—like maybe he’s afraid that the kid’s going to
blow the whistle on him again, like he did the first time around.
Anyway, after a few too many drinks, your partner goes ballistic."
Sabato picked up the glass and downed the other half
of his drink. "Ballistic," he said again, putting the glass
down. "He tells the poor son of a bitch that he’s going to
bust him for attempted bribery, for solicitation, for every goddamn
thing he can think of He’s gonna make him into a public spectacle,
drag him into the papers and on TV, then put his ass away for the
five to ten years he should have done in the first place. On the top
of this, your partner, who’s way past thinking clearly at this
point, tells the poor bastard that he’s going to drag the kid in
again, too—because he thinks the kid’s hiding something now,
something about the guy himself. So he’s going to get the
bail rescinded and put the kid in the justice center until he tells
him exactly what it is this guy is afraid he’s going to tell us.
"Now the guy is like, beside himself. Can’t
believe he’s brought this shit down on his own head and on his
pal’s head, just by trying to be a good guy. He’s sort of dazed
and gets up to leave, like he’s in a dream, like he’s hoping
it’ll all go away. And I’m thinking that maybe we should let it
pass. But my partner doesn’t see it that way. He follows the guy
out into the lot. Fuck if I know what he does or says, but when he
comes back, he’s still pissed. Still talking about busting the
guy’s ass. You try to calm him down, talk him out of it. But he’s
serious. He really doesn’t like this guy—from way back, from the
first bust, which he squirmed out of. He’s talking about getting a
warrant for the son of a bitch and busting him where he lives—at
the school where he teaches, in front of all the little kiddies. Bad
shit."
He sighed a long sigh and gestured with his hand, as
if that was the end of it.
"Did you get the warrant?" I asked.
Sabato ducked his head, tired of the make—believe,
of the sound of his own voice. "Art didn’t mention it the next
day."
He stared at the empty glass on the table. "How
the fuck did I know the son of a bitch was going to kill himself that
night? I didn’t know."
"The fact is that he did, though," I said.
"Because of your partner."
"Look, I’m sorry it happened the way it
happened. But the guy was wrong to come on to us like he did. Like we
were for sale."
"The guy was a queer—isn’t that more like
it?"
Sabato sighed. "Maybe it was for Art. Maybe for
me, too, a little."
I stared at him. "So what are you going to do
about it?"
"What would you like me to do about it? Fucking
burn my partner? He got carried away. It happens."
"I’m not going to let this drop, Ron."
"You do what you’re going to do. But I’m
telling you~—Art is a fucking hard case. And he’s got lots of
friends. You take him on, you’re going to get hurt."
"And you’re going to let it happen."
"I’m not going to lose my pension over
Greenleaf, Stoner." He got up from the table, standing up pretty
straight considering he’d had two doubles in the space of a half an
hour.
"Shit happens," he said, as if that covered
it. Turning away, he walked out of the bar into the rain.
I sat in the booth for about ten minutes, nursing my
drink and thinking about Greenleaf about the way that the various
lines of his life had been gathered up and cut in that bar where he
shouldn’t have been, with those two tough men he shouldn’t have
been with.
It was unlikely I could prove any of the terrible
things that had happened to him—prove them to a grand jury’s
satisfaction. Nobody had been in that parking lot with Stiehl and
Greenleaf, nobody had witnessed the blow—probably with the butt of
Stiehl’s gun. It would come down to the cops’ word against my
circumstantial evidence. The best I could hope for was to prove that
there had been a cover-up, but even that wouldn’t be easy to do if
the cops stuck by their stories. Max Carlson wasn’t about to put
his neck on the line for Mason Greenleaf And neither was Larry
Connors. They had too much to lose, nothing to gain. I could go to
the papers, maybe make Stiehl and Sabato’s lives miserable for a
few months, maybe even get them each a black mark on their records
and in the public eye. But bringing them to justice—that wasn’t
likely.
So what was I going to do?
A man had died—a screwed-up man who, haunted by
guilt and AIDS, had tried to make amends for his real and imagined
sins by trying to save one lost soul, whose corrupt life he felt,
reasonably or unreasonably, responsible for. For years, he’d fed
Paul Grandin, Jr., money and second chances. In the end he’d risked
his own skin to save him. And when that risk had gone fearfully awry,
he had made a desperate end in a desperate place—believing that he
was going to lose his job, his friends, Cindy Dorn. Mason Greenleaf.
RIP.
Who knew whether he might not have made that same end
sooner or later? People were dying around him daily. And in some
peculiar toxic way, he blamed himself. So what was I going to do?
I’d killed a man once, in cold blood, for torturing
and terrorizing another man to death—a weak decent man, without any
of the guts of Mason Greenleaf. I’d killed the thug who had killed
Ira Lessing.
And ever since then I’d carried the guilt around
with me like Paul Grandin’s virus. I’d tried to drink it away.
I’d tried to talk it away, in bars and in bed. I tried to block it
out of my system. But the truth was still there, somewhere in the
river where I’d left it to rot. What right did I have to pass
judgment on Art Stiehl and Ron Sabato, two cops who’d had a bad
night on a hard job?