“Should have called it Fat Chance,” Mike said. “Fat chance anything but the max and a little attitude adjustment works on these bastards.”
Mike left Gaskin in the sanctuary and by the time we opened the door to the small office, Mercer was sitting on the edge of the long table, forcing his attention on Luther Audley.
“Twice, juvenile. Three more since I turned sixteen.” Mercer’s first question had obviously been about the number of Luther’s arrests.
“How much time have you done?”
“Two years. Got out in December.”
“You like it upstate?”
Luther Audley tilted his head and screwed up his mouth, looking at Mercer like he was crazy.
“You like it enough to go back?”
“I ain’t never going back.”
“Then who are your friends? These other three guys?”
“I don’t know.”
“You stupid, Luther, or you just look like you’re stupid?” Mike asked, pulling up a chair to sit opposite Mercer.
Mercer held out his arm to tell Mike to back away. “The two guys inside, who are they?”
“I only know their faces. Not their names.”
“How about the dude that ran off?”
Luther just stared at the tabletop. “Don’t know him.”
“Shit. So when you want to hang out with him,” Mike said, “you just ask around for the ugly mother with the big scar across his cheek? That how you find him?”
“What’s he running from?” Mercer asked.
“Just running, I guess.”
Mike slammed the table and Luther sat up. “Olympic trials, don’t you think, Detective Wallace? Fastest ex-con with his butt crack showing, sprinting away from a murder rap.”
“What you mean, murder?” Luther swallowed hard and looked to Mike, who stood up and turned his back.
“Scotty?” Mike called out into the sanctuary. “Any blood downstairs? Body parts?”
“Not so far. A crack pipe and a dusting of white powder. Smoke and coke.”
“Your buddies are giving you up, Luther. They’re sitting inside the church, telling the other cops why they’re here,” Mercer said. “And they’re here because of you. Because your grandfather was kind enough to let you crash inside this church. Risk his job and everything he cares about. So who are they?”
“They just guys. We hang out sometimes.”
“PacMen,” Mike said. “Gangsta-wannabe assholes. What’d you do time for?”
Luther licked his lips.
“Let me guess. At least once for drugs. Then, two years? Armed robbery, I’m figuring. Botched job at best. Nobody got hurt, you weren’t the one carrying heat. You were too dumb to get away clean. Copped to the attempt and got a deuce up the river. Am I warm?”
“My lawyer made me take that plea.” Luther Audley rolled his head around and looked up at the ceiling.
“Always the damn suits that make you do things you don’t wanna do, isn’t it?” Mike asked. “Ms. Cooper here, she’s a mouthpiece too. She finds out you know something about this murder and she’ll have your parole revoked, then ship you right back up to the yard. She actually enjoys doing that.”
Luther’s head dropped and he fixed his vacant gaze on me. “What you keep talking about murder?”
“There was a body found on the steps of the church tonight,” I said, trying to edge Mike farther away from the young man. “A woman was killed and—”
“We didn’t kill nobody.”
“I’m going to start easy, back it up a few hours, and find out what brought you here,” I said, pulling my chair closer to the slow-to-anger interloper.
“Whoa, Ms. Cooper.” Wilbur Gaskin had appeared in the doorway. “How about Miranda? How about the right to—”
Mike interrupted him and rose to back him away from the room. “Nobody’s in custody, Mr. Gaskin. Let’s not put a plug in the works yet.”
“Not in custody? You’ve got the kid closeted in back here, while his God-fearing grandfather is going to pieces right outside,” Gaskin said. “You hear that, Luther? Get your tail out of this place.”
The young man’s mouth was open but he didn’t move fast.
“I’d sooner lock up Grandpa for aiding and abetting,” Mike said. “I’d get my answers damn fast, and they wouldn’t be full of lies and laced with crack.”
Luther lit up like he’d had a snake bite. He stood and shouted at Mike, his finger jabbing at the air. “You can’t be all gettin’ on Amos. You can’t be all—”
Mike was walking out the door and directing Gaskin to come with him as he looked back for a last comment. “You’d be surprised at the things I can do, Luther. Hold tight and tell Ms. Cooper what she wants to know. Who comes and goes is up to me.”
Luther Audley stared at me and laughed.
“Talk to her,” Mercer said.
Mike’s bluff had worked. If the kid was agitated about nothing else, he still wanted to protect his grandfather. He snarled at me but took his seat.
“Tell me why you’re here tonight,” I said.
“I’m here every night. My mother won’t let me be at her house. She got a boyfriend who don’t want me there.”
“And Amos?”
“He don’t have space for me. Him and my grandmother live in a studio. Ain’t no room.”
“How do you get in here?”
Luther fidgeted with the belt loops on his pants. “Amos. He the last one to leave every night, first one to come in the morning.”
“Your friends, he lets them crib here too?” Mercer asked.
“Not exactly. He don’t like most of them. Used to be you could sleep on the steps of almost any church. Even get food and all. Now every one got bars on them.”
The city’s religious institutions had long been havens for the homeless. That situation, neither safe nor sanitary, had ended with the gating of most of them when a homeless man who had lived outside a church on the Upper West Side for three years froze to death just feet from the entrance.
Luther described the habit that had developed because of his grandfather’s affection for him. Those nights that were too cold and raw, he called Amos and asked for shelter. His crew knew he would let them in later, when alone, and they’d leave at daybreak, before Amos arrived. In exchange for a warm place to crash, they would bring drugs to feed Luther’s habit.
“What time did you get here last night?” I asked.
“I don’t remember.”
“Don’t mess with her, Luther,” Mercer said. “She’s got more juice than I do.”
Luther closed one eye and studied me with the other.
“What time did your grandfather let you in?”
He didn’t like it when we brought Amos into the mix. “It was, like, midnight. A little earlier than that.”
There was no watch on either of his skinny wrists. “How do you know?”
“ ’ Cause of the bells. I was in here when they rang, when they done twelve times.”
“And the others?”
“I texted them when he left. Maybe fifteen minutes later.”
“Give me your cell phone,” Mercer said, holding out his hand.
Luther frowned.
“Give it up.”
The messages he sent to his friends, and their responses, would be captured in the memory of his phone. He drew the razor-thin machine out of his pocket and placed it in the large palm of Mercer’s hand.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Nuthin’.” He was watching Mercer scroll through the messages.
“What did you do, Luther?” I asked again.
“Me and them, we always hang in the basement. They brung me some food, is all.”
“And crack?”
He blew me off. “I don’t do that shit.”
“Coke?”
“L’il bit.”
“So these guys you don’t know,” Mercer said, reading the name off the cell history, “which one is Shaquille?”
Luther bit his tongue.
“Shaquille, the one you texted.” Mercer leaned in closer. “He one of the dudes inside, or is he the one who skipped out on you?”
The answer was slow and deliberate. “Inside.”
“Which one deals?”
No answer this time.
“Must be Shaquille or you wouldn’t have been so anxious to invite him to join you.”
Luther had nowhere else in the room left to look but at Mercer.
“Go talk to him, Alex. I’ll get Luther here up to speed.” Mercer handed me the phone. “What else did you hear besides church bells last night?”
“She gonna ask Shaquille. I don’t know nuthin’ else.”
As I turned the corner into the sanctuary, I noticed another kid was gone. The remaining one was still cuffed to the end seat of a pew. His knee was bouncing up and down, nervously, at a furious pace, and when Mike stepped away from him, I could see that tears were streaming down his cheeks.
“What happened?” I asked. “Where’s—”
“Scotty took the tall one back down to the basement for a once-over.”
“What’d you do to make this guy cry?”
“He’s fifteen, Coop. Wants his mama, I think.”
“Which one’s Shaquille?” I asked.
The knee jerked and the kid shook his head.
I held up Luther’s cell and texted a few words. I could hear the noise of the vibrating phone in his pocket over the insistent tapping of his foot.
“I guess you’re Shaquille,” Mike said. “That solves that piece of the puzzle. Now, why don’t you tell Ms. Cooper what you saw last night? And remember, she doesn’t believe in ghosts.”
“I was waiting for Luther to call me.” The kid wiped his eyes with the filthy sleeve of his sweatshirt. “I was around the corner, on 114th.”
“You know what time it was?” Mike asked.
Shaquille shook his head.
I looked at Luther’s outgoing messages. “A little bit before twelve forty-five.”
“All three of you there?”
“Nope. I was alone.”
The bounce in his leg was like a lie detector. It sped up whenever the topic got more sensitive. He didn’t seem to care about the time of night, or his companions.
“What’d you see?” Mike asked.
The knee was rocking now. “I told you, I don’t know. It was like a man, but then it didn’t move like any man I ever seen.”
“How’s that, Shaquille?”
“It was almost like he could fly. Like a cartoon character, you know?”
“I don’t know. You tell us,” Mike said. “What’d he look like?”
“Too dark to tell,” the kid said, sniffling back his tears.
“Black? White? Big? Small?”
“He was a big guy, that’s the thing. Big but he moved real quick and light. Couldn’t see his skin ’cause he had a hoodie on. Black hoodie and sweatpants. Just figured he black ’cause — I don’t know—’ cause it’s, ’cause. .”
“’Cause it’s the middle of Harlem in the middle of the night?”
“Why some white guy be breaking into Mount Neboh?” Shaquille asked.
“Breaking in?” I said. “Is that what he tried to do?”
“I didn’t stay to see that. I just know if he was any friend of Luther’s, he’d be goin’ by the back door.”
“Tell her what you saw. Tell her where he came from.”
“Don’t know where he came from. He was already near the gate when I got to the corner. He had a sack with him. Big sack, like a duffel. I mean, really big. First thing he did when the street got quiet, he reached up and dropped the bag over the gate.”
“Were you smoking yet, Shaquille?” Mike asked.
“Let him tell his story,” I said. “Stop interrupting.”
“I just want you to understand he wasn’t high. Okay, Coop? What’d he do?”
“He got himself up that fence. Like he hung on to the railing from the side, and then he kind of flew himself over.”
“Threw himself?” I asked.
“Flew, ma’am. He, like, flew.”
“Don’t roll your eyes at me, Coop. That gate is tall,” Mike said.
“We’ve tried lots of times to get over that fence, ma’am. You can’t do it. It’s really tall. Must be like ten feet, and there’s no crosspieces to climb on.”
“Did you watch him after that?” I asked.
“Yeah. I wanted to see what was in that bag.”
“The man opened the bag?” I asked, wondering how this kid — how anyone — could have watched somebody be set afire on the church steps and walk away from it.
“Yeah. He took it up the steps and unzippered it.”
“Anyone else around besides you?” Mike asked.
“Nope. There were cars on the boulevard, but it was too dark for people driving by to notice much.”
I positioned myself directly in front of Shaquille. “What did you see when the man opened the sack?”
The kid’s knee was going wild.
“I thought it was, like, a person. Like, I thought I saw legs coming out, you know? Then I figured out it couldn’t be a real person, like a body or anything. That it must have been some other thing he got flopping around. It was real creepy-like, so I just left, is what I did.”
“Why did you think it wasn’t a person? That it wasn’t a body?”
“’Cause there couldn’t be a body, ma’am, without no head.”
“WHAT time do you have to be in court?” Mercer asked.
“Not until eleven. The judge has to take care of an abscessed tooth first. Don’t worry, I’ll get to put my head down for a couple of hours.”
It was four a.m. and we were sitting in an all-night coffee shop on 125th Street. Luther Audley and his pals had been released after Mike’s Homicide Squad partners took statements from them. Sergeant Grayson had two teams looking for the fourth kid, who fled — with information from Shaquille, a willing snitch — in the unlikely event that he had any useful tidbits to offer. The Crime Scene Unit had started its painstaking work on the church steps and inside the sanctuary. And Amos Audley was left with the sad task of cleaning up behind them and his wayward grandson.
We left as the tabloid newshounds and photographers had clustered in front of Mount Neboh, grumbling to Grayson that they had missed their most salacious shots.
Murder never got in the way of Mike Chapman’s appetite or conscience. While Mercer and I sipped coffee, Mike was working his way through an order of scrambled eggs with onions and a slab of crisp bacon, using cornbread to mop up the grease on his plate.
“I know, I know,” Mike said. “You’re wondering how I can eat like this after what we saw this morning, and I’m wondering why you’re drinking black java when you’re already so wired you could tap dance in the well of the courtroom while you’re cross-examining your worst enemy and not even come up for a breath of air.”
The three of us had worked together on some of the city’s most horrific cases for more than ten years. We knew our respective foibles and strengths, considered ourselves family, could shoot barbs directly to the heart of either of the others without a second thought, but covered the others’ backs from any outside attacks. We came to this alliance from backgrounds so different that sometimes it was inconceivable to me that we understood one another as well as we did.
