anyway, as much noise as we were making. Only one door wouldn’t open for us. The landlord passkeyed the uniforms in, seeing as how this was an emergency.”
He gave me one of those corner-of-the-mouth smiles, watching my eyes. I didn’t blink, but I didn’t play stare-down with him, either—that’s for punks.
“And your place … well, you know it was empty,” he went on. “Looked like nobody had been there for a while. Not that it was all filthy or anything; just the opposite, in fact. You can always tell a convict’s apartment. A man who’s done real time, he keeps his house clean. Neat and clean. Always seem to like those studio apartments, too.”
The younger cop looked calm, but his hands kept clenching and unclenching.
“Why am I telling you this?” the older guy said. He was looking at me, but I know he was trying to show his partner something.
“I don’t know,” I said. Honestly.
“Two reasons, Caine. One, you’ve been around the block. More than once. You knew your room had been tossed the second you walked in, am I right?”
I just nodded.
“Two,” he said, “I really don’t like you for this one. So just give us something that stands up. For once in your life, make a good decision. Give us that alibi; it could turn out to be the smartest thing you ever did.”
“Fuck me,” I said, lighting the last of my cigarettes. They’d taken them away when they booked me, but the older guy brought them back when he and his partner took over. He was smart enough to know I’d appreciate a little thing like that.
“What?” the older guy said. “You think your backdoor girlfriend’s gonna deny everything, try and save her marriage, something like that?”
I just looked at the ceiling. A pack of legit smokes costs a fucking fortune in this city, but I’d be paying a lot more than that for a single where I was going.
“I’m done,” I told them.
These guys were pros; they weren’t going to blow a confession by talking when it was my turn. And they weren’t going to get up and walk out—I still hadn’t told them I wanted a lawyer. “I’m done” could mean anything. But all it meant to me was exactly what I’d said.
It stayed quiet until I finally told them, “I’ll save the alibi for the trial.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” the younger one told me. “You just as good as told us you don’t have an alibi. And anything you can put together over a three-way phone call is never going to hold up.”
“Yeah.” I nodded at him. “You’re right. I’m not even going to try. I mean, I don’t have to give an alibi, right?”
“You dumb—” the younger guy started, but the older one shook his head to shut him up.
“You really are fucked,” the older one told me. He turned a little so he could look at his partner. “Mr. Caine here, he’s got an airtight alibi for when that rape was going down, Earl. Ask me, I’ll tell you.”
The younger one shot his partner a “What the fuck?” look. Me, I didn’t bother. I could see the older guy had already figured it out.
“Our boy here was working when that girl got raped,” the old guy said. “Him and, what, four, five other men?” he said, suddenly looking at me with cop eyes. I don’t mean blue—which they were—I mean how they went from soft to ice in a finger-snap. “The drill-through job at that little jewelry store over on Eighty-ninth? They probably started real late Friday night. When Sugar opened his door Tuesday morning, he was just coming home from work.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Now, that’s Mr. Caine’s kind of work, Earl. Wouldn’t surprise me, we find out that the owner’s in on it, too. Told the papers he lost over eleven million in stones … which means probably more like seven. And what’s a jewelry store doing in that part of town, anyway? Nobody’d go there looking for a deal on diamonds. That’s what the District is for, right?”
“You’re saying this mutt was part of that crew, Tom?”
“Bet my pension on it.”
The younger one turned to me. “And I’m betting my partner’s right. Which means you just hit the exacta, buddy. You give us the other guys in on the job with you—the owner, too—and you not only walk away from that one, but the rape charge has to get dropped.” He made his voice sound bitter that I could get