Authors: John Katzenbach
He yelled: ‘Freeze!’
Jefferson turned, looked up at the window, and then wheeled and ran.
‘Goddamn it!’ Robinson shouted. ‘The bastard jumped.’
And in that moment he realized there was no one outside the apartment, except Espy Martinez.
‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘Espy! Watch out!’ he screamed helplessly through the shattered window. Then he pivoted and ran desperately for the front door.
Alone at the edge of the darkness, Espy Martinez started forward, then stopped. She just barely made out Walter Robinson’s shouted warning, coming, as it did, out of the night and the noise, but it merely underscored the confusion that she already felt.
Watch out for what?
She had seen the assault on the apartment from her vantage point at the assembled police vehicles; it had played out like some distant theater performed in a strange language, elusive in its meaning. The gunshots, the shouts and yells, the deep booming sound of the sledgehammer against the door - she knew that something had gone wrong, but was incapable in her position of deciphering precisely what that was.
Again she started forward. She thought it important to do something - to move, to act. She could feel insistence racing through her body, making a din within her, smashing up against all the abrupt sensations of doubt and fear that wanted to throw chains around her limbs. As these warring emotions struggled for control, she saw a shadowy figure bounding fast toward her.
Leroy Jefferson sprinted barefoot across the rough dirt and patches of cement that formed the entranceway to the
King Apartments. He had no real idea where he was heading, possessed solely by the idea of escape. Slices of broken glass tore at the soles of his feet, but he ignored them.
He had a sudden flashing memory of being on the court, ahead of everyone, the ball in his hands, rising alone toward the basket. The shouts from the policemen behind him faded away, mingling with distant remembered cheers from a jam-packed gymnasium. The air around him seemed to rush past his ears, like a tropical storm flexing its muscles; he was surprised to realize that for the first time in what seemed like months, he felt cool.
The figure that loomed up in front of him seemed an apparition.
He could see it was a woman; see she was crouched over and that she held something in her hands; see that the something was a weapon. He saw, too, that the woman’s mouth was open, and he understood she was screaming something at him, but all these somethings only forced him to move faster. He swerved, but saw her weapon track him. He tried to dodge, to switch direction, but his momentum carried him headlong forward, and he realized, in the same moment, that he had lifted his own pistol and was tugging at the trigger. There were three shots left in the cylinder, and he fired them all. The booming sound of the pistol crashed through the heat.
Espy Martinez saw Jefferson’s gun, saw too that it seemed aimed directly at her, and yelled ‘Freeze!’ for what she thought was the millionth time, and had the sudden idea that the word was completely ridiculous, because it had no effect on the tall, wiry figure that was descending upon her.
She hesitated, and in that moment he fired.
She thought instantly: I’m dead.
And without really recognizing what she was doing, she started pulling hard at the trigger of her own weapon. She did not know if she closed her eyes or not, or if she lifted her hand to shield herself or not, or if she ducked or sidestepped, or whether, in truth, she remained rigid, locked into her crouch, fully expecting a small projectile to pick her up and toss her abruptly into death’s eager embrace.
The three bullets from Jefferson’s gun buzzed about her. One grabbed at her purse, severing the leather strap, ripping it from her arm. The second tugged like a bored child at the sleeve of her light jacket and passed by harmlessly. The third, howling in what she later supposed was frustration, smashed into the window of the police cruiser behind her, exploding the glass.
Sweat dripped down her face, stinging her eyes, and she was filled with astonishment: no - I’m alive.
She realized that she was still pulling the trigger of her weapon, only the clip had long been emptied. She was unaware that she had fired. There should have been noise. She should have felt the gun bucking in her hand. A faint smell of cordite rose about her, like an unwanted perfume. She had to force herself to stop her finger twitching against the trigger. She looked down at her body, as if taking a quick inventory, astounded that she wasn’t bleeding somewhere. In that instant, she abruptly wanted to laugh, and she lifted her eyes. Only then was she able to focus on Leroy Jefferson.
He writhed on the ground, perhaps twenty feet in front of where she stood, kicking up spurts of dirt as he twisted in pain. He clutched at his leg, and she could see blood welling between his fingers. He tried to rise once, bent over, still grasping his smashed kneecap, and he stumbled forward a few feet before falling back, like a thoroughbred
with a broken foreleg, trained by instinct to finish a stakes race but unable to comprehend why it cannot run.
She stood, watching him, also unable to move, in that moment equally crippled. She listened to his screams of pain, blood streaking the dusty sidewalk, empty as the clip in her pistol.
Time has a curious elasticity; she was unsure whether she stood looking at the wounded suspect for minutes or seconds before Walter Robinson streaked across the open courtyard and threw himself onto the thrashing man. Sergeant Lion-man was only a few steps behind him, as were the other officers. The gunshots - those fired at her and those she had fired - still rung in her ears, deafening her. She only slowly became aware of the crescendo of sirens that were scoring the night; the bursts of red and blue strobe lights from other police vehicles and ambulances; the squealing of tires.
She watched as Walter Robinson pummeled Leroy Jefferson, finally twisting the suspect’s arms back and tightening handcuffs around his wrists savagely. She looked away as Robinson rose and aimed a kick at the” shackled man. Her eyes met Sergeant Lion-man’s. He was standing in front of her, and it took her an extra moment to realize that he was shouting at her.
‘Are you all right? Are you hit? Are you okay?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I’m fine,’ she replied matter-of-factly.
Anderson threw a huge arm around her shoulders and gently pushed her back a half-dozen feet. He steered her onto the seat of the police cruiser with the shot-out window, sweeping shattered glass away with one hand as he pushed her down.
‘Sit here,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna get the paramedic’
‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I’m fine.’
She watched as Leroy Jefferson was flipped over onto his back like a beast about to be branded. Two emergency medical technicians wearing blue jumpsuits were tending to his leg. Another, a young blond-haired man, hovered in front of her.
‘I’m fine,’ she said a third time, before he had a chance to ask the obvious question. She looked up and saw Walter Robinson behind the man. His face was rigid with a succession of pale angers and fears. She smiled at him.
‘He missed,’ she said.
‘Jesus, Espy, I’
‘I got him, though. Is he going to die?’
‘Not unless they leave me alone with him. The bastard
‘He was running and he missed. I wonder’
‘Don’t think about it. You’re okay.’ He bent down beside her. ‘Jesus,’ he said. He wanted very much to put his arm around her, the way the big sergeant had, but he held back. She seemed very small, sitting half in, half out of the patrol car.
And then, to his surprise, she looked at him and laughed out loud. After a second he joined her, hesitant at first, but then giving way. Sergeant Lion-man and Sergeant Rodriguez came up. They started laughing as well, as tension fled from within all of them. It was like the greatest practical joke in the world: to be alive when you should be dead.
After a moment their laughter tapered off, and Espy Martinez let out a deep sigh.
‘I’m gonna drive you home,’ Walter Robinson said.
‘Yes,’ she replied. She could feel adrenaline fading from her and a massive exhaustion setting in. She saw the paramedics lifting Leroy Jefferson onto a stretcher,
moving him to the open door of an ambulance. She saw another ambulance moving off, its siren cutting through the lights.
‘There goes the Lumberjack. Poor bastard ain’t gonna be lifting weights no more,’ Anderson said. Sergeant Lion-man glanced over at the stretcher crew. ‘Hey, hold it!’ he called out. ‘Walter, buddy, you do the honors, huh. Right here. And Miss Martinez, you come witness him getting his rights right now, please. Then maybe we can all get the hell out of here before we have a riot.’
Espy Martinez looked up and saw that a crowd had started to gather on the edge of the lights, milling about.
Walter Robinson nodded, and stepped to the side of the stretcher. ‘Leroy Jefferson,’ he said, in an even, angry tone of restrained fury, ‘you’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney’
‘I know all the shit,’ Jefferson interrupted between pain-clenched teeth. ‘What you think I did?’
Robinson stared down with fury that was restrained by only the barest strands of self-control.
‘You had to kill her, huh, Leroy? Couldn’t just take her stuff. Maybe even knock her out. You could have managed that no problem, right? Big guy like you. She was just a little old lady and you had to go kill her…’
‘What you talking about?’
‘You didn’t even know her name, did you, Leroy?’
‘Who you talking about? What little old lady?’
‘Her name was Sophie Millstein, Leroy. Just a little old lady, living alone on Miami Beach. Trying to live out her years nice and quiet and peaceful. No harm to nobody. And you had to kill her, you sonofabitch. And now you’re going away, you motherfucker.’
Leroy Jefferson looked both confused and pained.
Then, abruptly, his lips curled back, half snarl, half
laugh, and he said: ‘You more of a fool than I thought. I didn’t kill any old lady.’
‘Sure you didn’t,’ Robinson said, icy sarcasm in his voice.
But Leroy Jefferson shook his head. ‘All this,’ he said. ‘All this and it ain’t me done it. Damn.’ He appeared genuinely confused and saddened. ‘All this for the wrong me,’ he added.
He dropped his head back onto the stretcher as the paramedics thrust it up into the back of the ambulance none too gently, leaving Walter Robinson standing outside as the doors were slammed closed.
‘No, nobody ever does anything,’ he said quietly, almost to himself, but Espy Martinez overheard him. He turned toward her. ‘Sure he didn’t do it,’ he said. ‘We’re going. Now.’
Martinez nodded. She felt completely exhausted. She thought that if it were not for an odd sensation of something not unlike fear, but not precisely fear, that remained echoing within her alongside the suspect’s words of denial, she could fall asleep right there.
He watched the shadows on the whitewashed wall of the hospital corridor; the glow from the fluorescent lights at the nurse’s station caught the profile of anyone who walked past, sending a sudden, dark, vaguely human shape skittering across the flat in front of him. At one point he lifted his own hand, to see if he could add to the gray ghostlike forms, but the light angle was wrong.
Walter Robinson shifted in his seat, trying to find a comfortable position, knowing that none were available. He glanced at a clock and saw that the night had almost fled, and he supposed it wouldn’t be long before the shadows skulked away, as the day’s light penetrated the hospital hallways.
He was exhausted, but anger like adrenaline kept him alert.
He tried to remain fixated on the man occupying the recovery room, thinking it would be simplest to blame Leroy Jefferson for everything that had gone wrong that night. But inwardly Jefferson shared space in his rage with himself. Walter Robinson played over the sequence of events, trying to discern precisely where it had all gone r, where he had made the mistake that resulted in the shooting. The procedure had been textbook. The setup
had been perfect. But getting a cop shot and wounded on what should have been a routine, if tricky, arrest stoked his frustration. The preliminary word on the Lumberjack was not good; extensive muscle and bone tissue damage. A career that had evaporated in a single moment. He had spent a few minutes with the policeman’s wife, but his hackneyed words of apology had been ignored. He’d briefed the Beach police brass, and they had made a statement to the press. He had wasted time hanging at the back of the room as two dozen reporters and camera men asked questions, then he crept away to the hallway where he currently sat. He did not know what awaited Leroy Jefferson; in that moment, he wished Espy Martinez had blown the suspect’s head off. It would have made for some troublesome paperwork, but probably would have been considerably more satisfying for all involved.
He let this bloodthirsty thought linger within him. Even with everything that had gone wrong, he recognized he should have felt some satisfaction. After all, he’d cleared the case: Jefferson was charged with the first-degree murder of Sophie Millstein. In the Beach homicide offices there was a large chalkboard with active cases listed on it. Sophie Millstein’s murder would come off the board. He’d done his job.
Robinson let a whispered expletive slide through his lips.
He leaned his head back against the wall, closing his eyes for a moment, expecting to see the bedlam at the King Apartments played out again, like on a screen behind his eyes, but saw instead himself, holding Espy Martinez by the elbow, walking her slowly up the sidewalk to her duplex with all the stiff-edged formality of some eighteenth century courtier. On the long drive across town, she had fluctuated between a babbling, nonstop excitement, words coupled
with obscenities tumbling from her mouth, and moments of dark-ridged silence. One second she had blurted: ‘Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t believe it, I shot the fucking bastard, didn’t I? Right in the fucking leg, Jesus. I mean, it’s all so fucking unreal. The motherfucker fired and I fired and I got him. Just fucking well got him, didn’t I?’