The Program Page 18

  Jack tilted his tea glass up to almost vertical, trying to dislodge an ice cube from the bottom. The tactic didn’t work. He said, “Mickey Redondo was the worst fucking partner I ever had, and I had some assholes over the years. That doesn’t mean I want to cause him any trouble over scum like Khalid.”

  Dave said, “I understand that, Jack,” hoping that Jack wasn’t about to become uncooperative.

  “Well, I meant what I just said. I’m pretty sure that Mickey switched out the GSR before it got to the lab.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You drove all the way down here. Now your belly’s full. So I suppose you have time for me to tell you a story. Well, here’s what happened that day.”

  4

  The story Jack Tarpin told Dave Curtiss the day that Dave visited Jack and his wife Pamela down in Plantation Key went something like this. Keep in mind that I heard it from Andrea, of course, and not from Dave.

  JACK SAID, “AFTER the uniforms stopped him and detained him, Mickey and I interviewed Khalid together. We did the interview at the station, and right away we already liked him for the murders of those two old people at that store. Khalid fit the description of our only witness, he had the right amount of money on him, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he had a list of priors longer than my long line. Plus, he was full of attitude. Pissing on us every chance he got. But he’s been busted like a thousand times before and he knew how to play us, and the truth is, we didn’t get much from him that helped us develop the investigation. My take was he figured he was gonna walk.”

  As he began to tell the story, Jack had pulled a crinkled bag of sunflower seeds from his pocket and immediately started throwing them into his mouth in fives and sixes. He was able to shell the seeds with his teeth and tongue, not using his fingers at all, but the pile of soggy hulled shells he was collecting on a napkin on the table in front of him was quickly growing large and relatively disgusting.

  Dave was quiet while he waited for Jack to spit out some seeds and find what felt like a good place to pick up the story.

  “Then Mickey got a telephone call. A uniform stuck her head into the room where we were working on Khalid and told Mickey that someone wanted him on the phone. He told her we were busy, to take a message. Instead, she comes on in and whispers something directly into his ear. He laughs out loud and says, ‘No shit,’ and he tells me he better take this call. I told him no problem, I’d do the GSR while he was gone. And I did. I already had a kit with me and I swabbed Khalid up real good, right according to the book. The whole time I’m swabbing, Khalid was doing his song-and-dance about how I’m wasting my time, that everybody knows he’s a knife-man, not a gun-man. Give him back his knife and he’ll be happy to show us his skill. He was kind of a funny guy, a regular Chris Rock. Whatever, I got the test done. Then I marked the samples, sealed the envelope, filled out the stupid form, and I signed the thing.”

  The pile of spent sunflower seeds grew bigger as Jack talked.

  “Anyway, Mickey comes back a few minutes later and his whole attitude has changed. He doesn’t want to bust Khalid’s chops anymore. Suddenly Mickey’s just all polite and businesslike, and he doesn’t have any more questions for Khalid about the double murders. Before I know it, Khalid’s on his way down the hall to get his ass booked for two counts of first-degree murder and assorted lesser charges. Khalid’s like going ape-shit; he can’t believe it. Totally lost his sense of humor. But Mickey’s happy. He takes the GSR that I did on Khalid and some other forms and shit from me and says he’ll make sure everything gets checked in.

  “Me? I’m wondering why this guy—who in the two years we’ve been together won’t even pour me a cup of coffee when he’s already up getting one for himself—is suddenly being so generous and helpful to me. I say something like, ‘That must have been some call you took.’

  “Mickey’s eyes flashed at me for a second, then he said, ‘Just someone letting me know that I’ve got my man.’

  “I asked him what that meant, and he told me to forget about it.”

  Jack paused as though he thought Dave should be able to piece it together from there. Dave told Jack he still didn’t see the problem with the GSR.

  “Well here comes your problem. Next day I get the results of the GSR from the lab. And it’s obvious that despite all his ‘I’m-a-knife-man not a gun-man’ denials that our man Khalid had been busy firing a firearm. Results show that he has residue everywhere I swabbed him. Everywhere. As evidence goes, it’s circumstantial, sure, but if you recall, Dave, it was a damn good piece of our case against Khalid. Still, I have other work to do and don’t think much about the GSR after that. It’s not going to convict him, right? You with me?”

  Dave was.

  “Okay. Next time I’m thinking at all about that GSR is when I’m sitting in court up on the witness stand at Khalid’s trial and your friend Andrea Archer is putting me half to sleep showing me reports and forms and evidence and asking me over and over again am-I-familiar-with-this and am-I-familiar-with-that and am-I-familiar-with-this-other-damn thing, and I’m saying yes, I wrote that, or yes, that there’s my signature. Then she hands me the receipt that I filled out that went along to the lab with the GSR I did on Khalid, and she asked me if I recognized it. I said yes before I even looked at it, but then out of the corner of my eye I could see that it wasn’t the same form I’d filled out on Khalid. So as nonchalant as could be, I quickly added, ‘Yeah, I signed that.’”

  Dave sat forward, avoiding the teetering pile of sunflower seed shells on the table between him and Jack. “What do you mean it wasn’t the same form?”

  “It wasn’t my handwriting. It was my signature on the bottom all right, but it wasn’t my handwriting on the form. It was Mickey’s.”

  Dave leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table, careful to avoid the Vesuvius of sunflower seed carcasses. “I assume you asked Mickey about the discrepancy?”

  “Course I did. During the next recess.”

  “And?”

  “He told me he spilled coffee all over the other envelope, and that he gave me a fresh form to sign and he sealed it back up himself in a new envelope.”

  Dave pressed. “Jack, did he really give you a fresh form to sign? Do you remember?”

  Jack shook his head. “I’d be lying if I said I did. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. But if my partner had asked me to sign a form like that, I probably would’ve signed it. Even if it was Mickey Redondo doing the asking.”

  “But now? You’re saying you think Mickey actually switched out the samples? Why do you think that?”

  Pamela had finished rinsing dishes at the sink and she rejoined the men at the table. Jack immediately stopped eating sunflower seeds. Some unwritten code between them, Dave thought.

  “I told you already, I was suspicious about Mickey, about that call. I went back to the lab to see what time the evidence had been checked in for Khalid. Turns out that the GSR didn’t make it to the lab until almost eight o’clock that evening.”

  “That’s unusual?”

  “He took it from me at what, three-thirty? Lab’s in the same building we were in. So what was Mickey doing with it for over four hours? Damn right it was unusual. It’s even more unusual when you consider that sometime between six and seven that evening Mickey Redondo had spent thirty minutes of those four hours taking practice at the police firing range.”

  “He was at the range? I take it that’s unusual, too?”

  “Mickey hated the range. Had to be dragged there most of the time. Didn’t even want to go out there when he was due to qualify. And for him to take time out of a day when he has two fresh homicides to investigate to go to the range?” Jack laughed. “Yes, that’s unusual.”

  Dave asked, “How do you know he was there?”

  “Like I said, I got suspicious. I checked the logs.” Jack smiled for his wife’s benefit. “Hey, I used to be a detective.”

  Dave wanted to hear Jack voi
ce his suspicions. Dave said, “So you’re thinking that after he went to the firing range he did a GSR on himself and that’s what he turned into the lab?”

  Jack said, “Yeah, that’s what I think. He switched out the GSR he did on himself after he was at the firing range with the one I did on Khalid at the station. Which has left me with one inescapable conclusion. Why go to all this trouble unless Mickey somehow already knew that Khalid’s GSR was going to be negative? And unless he absolutely didn’t want that to be true.”

  “The phone call he got,” Dave Curtiss said. “That must have been one important phone call.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Jack said. “What I figured later, after the trial, is that whatever Mickey heard on that phone call included the actual identity of the person who killed those two old folks in that convenience store. Only way Mickey could be so sure that Khalid didn’t do it is if he knew who really did, right?

  “So I went back and found the uniform who originally brought him the phone message during the interrogation and asked her if she remembered who it was who had called that day.”

  “And she did?”

  “Oh yes. She did. It was Pat Lieber.”

  Dave’s heart skipped a beat or two, then started racing. “Really? You kidding me? The football coach?”

  “Think I’d bullshit about this? She said the guy called right up and said he wanted to talk to Mickey Redondo.”

  “And even though he was interrogating a homicide suspect she immediately went and she found Mickey?”

  “She did. You would have, too, if he had called you. You know how big Pat Lieber is in Florida. Even back then. Bear Bryant and Vince Lombardi all rolled into one.”

  Dave Curtiss sat back and balanced his weight on the back two legs of his chair. His chest burned. He chewed on a Pepcid and asked Pamela for a glass of cold water.

  She smiled politely, stood, and moved to the sink.

  “Pat Lieber, huh?”

  Jack nodded. “Pat Lieber.”

  “He asked for Mickey? Not for whoever was working the case? I got that right?”

  “Yeah, she said he asked for Mickey by name.”

  “Did Mickey know Lieber?”

  “Over the years, I came to believe they knew each other before that day. Nothing I could prove. Occasionally Mickey’d get football tickets I would have died for. A couple of times I fished a little bit about where they came from. The impression I got is that they came from Lieber.”

  Dave wondered what interest the most revered football coach in the State of Florida could have with Khalid Granger. He said, “You can’t prove any of this, can you, Jack? Any of what you think happened?”

  Pamela delivered the water.

  Dave thanked her.

  “Prove it? Prove what? I testified honestly at the trial—that was my signature on the receipt for the GSR. And Mickey going to the range that evening? I imagine you can still get those logs and prove that yourself ’cause he was there. And that he got that phone call from Pat Lieber during Khalid’s interrogation? The officer who came to get him is still on the force. I’d bet she still remembers getting a call like that. But even then, you have all that, so what you going to do? Mickey will never admit to what was said during that phone conversation. And Lieber? He’s going to deny any call ever happened. Mickey’s no fool. If he took money from Lieber, you’re never going to find it. What I got? It’s not nearly enough to get a judge to give Khalid another look. We both know that.”

  Dave knew that Jack was right.

  “You never looked into Lieber’s connection to all this?”

  “You kidding me? Investigate Pat Lieber in Florida?” He laughed. “That’s like investigating the Pope in the Vatican. I don’t need that kind of trouble,” Jack said. “That’s the beauty of it. I can stay down here in the Keys and keep my hands clean—”

  Pamela interjected, “Jack Tarpin, your hands haven’t been clean since the day I met you.”

  Jack smiled at his wife. “… and allow people like you to do what you can to save Khalid’s sorry ass from Old Sparky. And you know what’s even better? Now that I’ve told you all that happened, maybe I can sleep all the way through the night again. That’d be something positive.”

  “He doesn’t sleep well,” said Pamela. “Tosses and turns so much that sometimes I get seasick in the bed next to him.”

  5

  It took Andrea almost an hour to finish telling me about the letter and Dave’s visit to Plantation Key.

  No surprise, but by the time I hung up the phone I had already begun jousting with my whales.

  Usually, the whales that visit me on the surface come to my attention as picture memories, visual images evoking something I either yearn to relive or dread to remember. Sometimes the whales turn my head and arrive in the form of familiar scents—vanilla or magnolias or the smell of Robert’s hair. And sometimes they swim in the dark and I only recognize them by their sounds. Most rarely they swim in tight waters beneath my skin and flicker into my consciousness as feelings. This time, it was the feeling whales that ruled the pod.

  THERE ARE FEW moments in my life when time has actually slowed. I can count them and recall them all. Vividly.

  Once, when I was seventeen, I crashed my daddy’s new car into the back of a city bus. My head had been turned toward the radio, and I never saw the bus stopping in front of me. When I called home to tell my parents what I’d done to the car, the phone seemed to float in my hand and the moment that was actually only a fraction of a second seemed to last as long as my freshman year at Miami. My daddy broke the silence by saying, “Are you all right? Nothing else matters, baby. Are you all right?”

  The next instance that time stopped was my second experience making love to Robert. Not the first, but the second. Our first had been impulsive and awkward and almost adolescent in its intensity. We went from sharing a beer on my sofa to acrobatics on my coffee table in record time. I admit though, even now, that the memory holds a certain charm. But the very next time—oh Lord—there was a moment between almost there and there when my heart stopped beating and every clock on the planet ceased ticking for what felt to me like forever. The moment stretched before me like the light of a late-summer dawn. Wide and bright and infinite. Robert never quite took me to that place again, though bless him it wasn’t for lack of effort, but reaching that plateau at least one more time in my life became a goal for me, like reaching heaven.

  The third event that caused time to stop was after the birth of my baby. Right after I followed the dictates of my doctor and pushed for what she promised would be the last time—ha!—expending what I was certain were the final calories of energy that remained in my body, I heard Robert’s voice sing above the rest of the sounds in the birthing room. He said, “K, it’s a girl, a beautiful, beautiful girl,” and I swear it was an hour later, maybe even longer, before I was handed that little bundle and was able to lay my eyes on the tiny thing that had already started ruling my heart forever. Why it took them an eternity to hand me my beautiful baby I’ll never understand.

  Robert says it was actually two minutes, maybe three.

  Robert wasn’t always right.

  And the fourth instance that time stopped?

  It was, of course, the day that Robert was murdered.

  We were meeting for lunch at Galatoire’s in the Quarter, as we’d done every year we’d been in New Orleans. It was our anniversary.

  He’d arrived first and was holding a place in line. Robert was almost always taller than everyone else in his vicinity and I spotted his blond head as I was walking toward him from half a block away. I’d closed the distance between us to less than ten feet when I first noticed the man in chinos with the jacket held awkwardly over his bent arm. I don’t know why I found him curious enough to capture my attention. Maybe because his eyes jumped to Robert and then back to me and then once more to Robert, and I felt the traces of a smile begin to creep across his face. His smile burned me somewhere dee
p.

  I remember even now that I could feel the man’s smile as though it was a vial of acid being splashed into my eyes.

  Time stopped right then, there.

  For how long? It stopped long enough for me to transport myself back to court, to the very day I heard Ernesto Castro promise, “Remember this. Every precious thing I lose, you will lose two.”

  Time stopped long enough for me to know that this man on the sidewalk outside Galatoire’s was the embodiment of Ernesto Castro’s promise being kept. Time stopped long enough for me to know with great certainty that the man in the chinos and the jacket draped over his arm was about to try to kill my Robert. How did I know? I don’t know how I knew.

  I just knew.

  Time slowed and captured my shouted warning and my screaming protest and locked them somewhere in a prison in my chest, and time has never released them.

  Time stopped long enough for me to feel my certainty as a sense of inevitability that almost drained me of my will. Time stopped long enough for me to feel a total sense of inadequacy that I would be able to intervene before my husband was killed in front of my eyes.

  Time had slowed so much that day that to this day I swear I believe that I actually saw the leaded slugs as they exited the shadows below the draped jacket and crossed the few feet of lazy, humid Louisiana air that separated my husband’s unsuspecting head from the dull metal barrel of the silencer on the handgun.

  What I felt during the lifetime that I endured between the second I spotted the man in chinos and the instant I recognized that my husband was dying in my arms was an entire lifetime’s worth of the most debilitating mixture of responsibility and inadequacy I could imagine. I knew in the fibers of my heart that it was I who had lured the gunman to my husband’s side, and I knew that it was I who’d been unable to fly ten miserable feet to stop the assassin from killing him.