All These Ashes, page 21
Henniman looked flustered. I was usually a fan of anyone who could fluster him.
“Hey, uh, Jaquan, right? My name’s Russell, my partner here’s a little pissy this morning. We hit traffic, you know. Why don’t we start over? You want anything, like a coffee?” I asked, turning toward the CO. “Can we get him some coffee?”
The CO looked at me like I’d just asked him to shit out the Hope Diamond.
“What are you supposed to be?” Crowley asked.
“I’m Russell…”
“No, I got that. That’s who. I asked what,” he said. “You ain’t a cop. And if you’re a lawyer, you ain’t mine.”
Now I was flustered. Announcing myself as press or a PI was always a coin flip. It was just as likely he’d shut down and end the meeting as it was he’d talk more. But the lawyer comment had touched a nerve in my head. If he knew he was talking to cops, why didn’t he have one?
“You remember Isiah Roust?” Henniman asked. “Skinny piece of shit you got arrested with. You ran with him a bit in Jersey before that.”
“Sure. Izzy. He ain’t been up to visit. And they don’t let us use Facebook in here, so it’s been hard to keep in touch,” Crowley said.
“Izzy? That was his nickname?” I asked.
“Nah, not Izzy. Like, Is. He. Two words,” Crowley said back. “Is he gonna puke? Is he gonna cry? Is he gonna run? Izzy was fun to have around, but he was kind of a bitch.”
Crowley swiveled in his seat, positioning himself to look at Henniman. The movement was sudden enough that the CO took a half step forward.
“So, what’d ol’ Izzy do? And how much did y’all fuck up that you actually need help finding a punk like him?” Crowley asked.
“He tried to kill us,” Henniman said.
Crowley started laughing under his breath.
“I once saw Izzy get punched in the mouth in a bar and apologize for it,” Crowley said. “He ain’t never tried to kill no one.”
Henniman pointed to the bruising around his face.
“This is him,” Henniman said.
Crowley scratched at his chin. If nothing else, he was at least interested. Maybe Bill had been playing with him when we got there. Setting the hook. Getting him curious enough to talk too much. Just like he’d done with me the first time he brought up the Twilight Four.
“You seriously sitting here and telling me Izzy messed you up?” he asked. “This I gotta hear. At least tell me he hit you when you wasn’t looking.”
Now it was my turn to let out a little laugh, even though I felt it in my burned shoulder.
“You could say that,” Henniman said.
“What’d he jump you with, a bat?” Crowley asked.
“He dropped a house on us,” I replied. “Blew up his own goddamn apartment when we came knocking.”
Crowley leaned forward, eyes bouncing from me to Henniman and back again.
“Bullshit,” he said. “Izzy would never take a shot at a cop. Hell, what would he even do worth taking that shot anyway?”
“Killing four kids qualify?” Henniman asked.
Crowley turned back to me now.
“If you convince him to get me that coffee, you’re gonna need to pour something in it for me to believe that nonsense,” he said. “Izzy couldn’t kill no one. Definitely not a kid, much less several. When the fuck…why?”
Henniman reached into his suit jacket’s breast pocket and started laying down Polaroids, one by one like a poker flop. They were the pictures from the case file. Shayna. Adriana. Kurtis. Lavell.
“Bullshit,” Crowley said. “I grew up in Newark. Don’t come at me with that. Izzy did not…the Twilight Four? You coming in here telling me Izzy did the Twilight Four? He the one who really shot JFK too?”
“What I’m telling you, Jaquan, is that you’ve been in here for eight years and Isiah Roust hasn’t because he spun us a bullshit story about this case,” Henniman said. “I’m telling you we need to find him, and I’m betting you might know some places to look. I’m telling you that you do that, maybe you and him switch places.”
If there was a deal on the table, there would have been an assistant U.S. Attorney out of the Newark office in the room. Henniman was lying.
Crowley started chewing on his pinky nail, sucking his teeth, thinking.
“So, you’re telling me I can be on my way home sooner, and all I gotta do is point you to where Izzy might go to hide out?” Crowley asked.
Henniman nodded. His face went blank. His breathing slowed, like he was hunting something and closing in.
“That ain’t the worst deal I ever been offered. Wanna hear about the worst one?” Crowley asked. “’Cause I do remember you, Detective. Course I do. You tried to run the same game you must have run on Izzy. Telling me I’d get put in some lock-up in North Dakota. That my family wasn’t gonna be able to see me without getting on a plane, like my people have money for that. That you’d make sure I got the max if I didn’t help you. That you’d make sure word got out to wherever I went that I was a snitch, even if I wasn’t.”
Henniman’s face flushed red. I couldn’t tell if he was blushing because he hadn’t remembered how he’d treated Crowley, or that he hadn’t expected Crowley to remember it himself.
“Eight years I sat up there, did my time, shut the fuck up. I got less than two to go. I’m gonna be home before my fortieth birthday. I can wait that out, especially if it means leaving you as fucked as you left me,” Crowley said. “What’s that thing they used to say in church? Unto others, right? Should’ve thoughta that, Billy. ’Cause you could tell me Izzy shot up a school. You could tell me Izzy was running the KKK. And I’d still tell you to go fuck yourself.”
I was waiting for the explosion. Few people had talked as much shit to Henniman as I had, so I knew his limit and I usually knew when I was approaching it. When he hit that red line, there wasn’t much time between you thinking you had the last word and him having the next two hundred.
Except he wasn’t talking. Or moving. I was only sure he was breathing because he looked up at the CO, nodded and stood.
“You sure?” the guard asked.
“Absolutely,” Henniman replied.
The guard moved toward Crowley, calmly reaching for his wrists and producing a key. Henniman took his suit jacket off, folded it in half and draped it neatly over his chair.
“Uh…Bill?” I asked. “What are we sure about?”
“Same question,” Crowley said as the guard fiddled with the anchor point on the table. “The fuck is this?”
“You said before this wasn’t the worst deal you’d ever been offered, right?” Henniman asked.
He rolled up his sleeves, stopping at the forearm on each.
“Bill. What the fuck are you doing?” I asked.
“This doesn’t concern you.”
“I’m standing so close to you I can smell the coffee on your breath,” I replied. “It fucking concerns me.”
Henniman turned to me. Eyes dead. Fists balled up. Despite being in his fifties, his arms still had definition. The guard stopped messing with Crowley’s shackle, adopted the same glare and let his hand wander to the chemical spray at his side. His arms were thicker than Henniman’s.
I felt the room get smaller. Crowley looked at me for help.
But all I did was take a step back from Henniman.
It sucks learning you’re not a hero.
Henniman turned back to the CO, who finished unlocking Crowley from the table. His handcuffs were still on, but he wasn’t anchored to the metal furniture anymore.
“I had a feeling it was going to go this way. Like you said, you did eight years, you can do two more,” Henniman said. “But what about twenty?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Crowley asked.
The guard set his feet apart, one foot back and to the right of the other. Henniman stood up tall and jutted his chin out, just in time for the CO to throw an overhand right that came across Bill’s cheek hard enough that the lieutenant’s legs went spaghetti for a second.
I backed up against the wall. Crowley did the same, hitting the door loud enough that someone probably heard it.
“Yo, what the fuck!” Crowley shouted. “The fuck is going on in here?
Henniman looked at the guard and nodded again. The CO tagged him with a left hook, painting the lieutenant’s mouth with blood. The shot turned Henniman’s face toward me, crimson framing an unnerving smile.
Henniman turned back to Crowley. The guard moved to the side as the lieutenant closed the distance between them. He reared his right arm back. Crowley reacted, swinging his cuffed hands in the air. I don’t know if he was trying to block or attack, but his clasped hands caught Henniman’s face.
They came back bloody.
“Twenty years is what they give you for assaulting a federal corrections officer,” Henniman said, his voice coming out in a hiss, slipping between the spit and blood in his mouth. “Maybe they give you the same for hitting a cop while in custody.”
“This is bullshit! There’s a fucking camera right there,” Crowley said, pointing over my head.
“Doesn’t work,” the guard said. “Repair requisitions aren’t fast around here.”
“He saw it!” Crowley said, turning to me. “You’re not gonna let them do me like that, right?”
I wasn’t, but I wasn’t going to point that fact out in a locked room with two cops and zero recording devices.
“He can’t help you. I can,” Henniman said. “Someone heard you yelling. Someone definitely heard you bang against that door. And when that someone gets here, they’re going to see blood coming out of me and blood on you. They’re gonna hear a story. One is you got loose and attacked us. That puts you in here for twenty more. The other is Russell over there got into a fight with me, he tends to be emotional, so it’ll add up, and you just got caught in the middle of it. Tell me what I want to know, and it’s the second story.”
Crowley was fuming. He had every right to be furious, but no time to be. He was fucked. Henniman had checkmated him before he even knew he was in a game. I’d have been impressed if I wasn’t livid.
“You’re fucking insane,” Crowley said. “I ain’t seen Roust in years. You know that. How the hell am I supposed to know where he is?”
“Clock’s ticking,” Henniman said.
“Alright, Jesus, fuck. Jesus. Okay. Okay. Ummm…okay…”
Crowley’s voice was shrinking. He was quaking. He knew how close he was to being in prison until he qualified for AARP.
“It’s only your life, Jaquan,” Henniman said. “Don’t rush.”
“Newark! When, before you, like 2010. We did a few smash and grabs outside the city. Maplewood. South Orange. But someone saw enough of us that there was a sketch on the news and…”
Henniman looked at the guard.
“Maybe you should radio for help?”
“NO!” Crowley shouted. “There was a woman. Lived near Branch Brook. He said he grew up with her! Or used to work for her. Both maybe. Either way they was close. That’s where he went when shit hit the fan last time! Laurie or Lacy or Lauren. Italian last name.”
“Lorena?” I asked. “Lorena D’Agostino?”
“Yeah. Yeah!” Crowley shouted. “That’s it. Lorena! If he’s hiding anywhere, it’s there.”
I’d been where we needed to go a few days earlier. The foster home where Kurtis and Lavell Dawkins lived before they vanished. The home Lavell claimed he’d been beaten inside of. The one where the young boy looked scared enough like he’d experienced the same.
“You know who he’s talking about?” Henniman asked.
I nodded.
“Now, you gonna tell them I didn’t do anything to your face, right? Right? We good, right?” Crowley asked, basically pleading.
Henniman wiped some of the blood away, stared at Crowley for a second, then let out a shark’s smile.
“Yeah, we’re good,” he said, before turning to me. “We’re good, right?”
We were not good.
Sixteen:
I let Henniman feel clever for a good chunk of the drive back to Newark.
Bill spent most of the ride rambling about how he had a friend or two in the New York chapter of the Council of Prison Locals, the union that represents federal corrections officers. How that contact was able to arrange Crowley’s visit to the private, unmonitored room in MCC where Bill had just terrified both of us. How an assistant U.S. Attorney in Newark had lubed up the process to get Crowley transferred south for a chat.
I stayed quiet the whole time, except for a question here or there to spur Bill along. My phone was in my lap, under the guise of its GPS guiding us to Lorena D’Agostino’s address in Newark. The recorder was running in the background, making sure to capture any name or detail Henniman let slip, anything that might prove useful when I decided to make him answer for this later.
While he rambled, I checked for new messages from Angel. There was just one.
“You want the interview?” he’d asked. “It’s gotta be today.”
Sources never want to connect when it’s convenient. But I couldn’t meet now, not if we were this close to Roust. Maybe tracking down the erstwhile snitch would answer my questions about why he and Angel were in a photo together, rendering Angel a problem I’d only care about if I chose to keep working for his sister.
By the time Henniman was done talking, we were already through the Lincoln Tunnel and into Jersey City, a short drive from our best shot at finding the guy who tried to burn us alive. We needed to focus. We needed a game plan. There would be a time and place to deal with the fact that Henniman had explicitly threatened to frame someone for assault while we were trying to hunt down another man who might have framed someone for murder. I needed to be patient.
Then I thought about how Jaquan Crowley looked to me for help, how I’d shrunk away from the moment.
“You know, maybe it’s a good thing they’re thinking about taking away your badge,” I said as we got onto the Turnpike south.
“It got us what we needed,” he replied. “I didn’t like what you did with Cynthia the other day either. But it got us what we needed.”
“So, what? You were just getting even?” I asked.
“No, I was getting us Roust,” he said.
“By torturing that guy?”
“Torturing…for fuck’s sake,” he said. “You know, I try not to generalize about the whole millennial thing. But your generation really turned out to be a bunch of pussies.”
I turned away for a second, looking out the window and watching the exits countdown. We were almost back to Newark.
“I’m a pussy because I got an issue with you threatening to steal a man’s freedom?” I asked.
“You act like that was my first move,” he replied. “You were there. I tried to see if he’d take a deal. I tried to see if he’d just be a decent human and help us.”
“If there was a deal on the table, how come there weren’t any lawyers in the room?” I asked.
Bill didn’t answer me, suddenly very focused on a lane change.
“Right. And that guard was in on it, so you clearly planned that in advance,” I said. “What was next, huh? If he didn’t crack, were you gonna start beating on him right in front of me?”
“I wasn’t going to hit him,” Bill said, the reply fast enough that I felt like it might be true.
“So then what? You let him stew on that charge? Let the CO report it as the assault you staged until he gives us Roust? If he doesn’t, or he just doesn’t know anything, what happens then?” I asked.
“Didn’t come to that,” he said.
“It could have! Are you even sure you could have walked all that back if it didn’t go how you wanted it to? Or does Jaquan just get twenty years added to his sentence while you go on with your life like nothing happened?” I asked. “Do you ever think about the consequences when you do shit like that?”
“I think about consequences all the time, Russ,” he said. “You were in that hospital room the other day. Cynthia. Musa. All that pain. All because I fell for a lie. What just happened in that jail was ugly. But it was an ugly thing done to an ugly person, Russ. That was a gun runner. Doubt he’s thought much about the consequences of the things he’s done. Chancing that piece of shit’s freedom to get Cynthia answers? To try to do one decent thing by Abel Musa after what I caused him? I’m okay with that. And I notice you’re not offering a Plan B here.”
“Excuse me?” I asked as the car came to a stop on Highland Avenue.
The last home that Kurtis and Lavell Dawkins had ever lived in was on our right, the two-story with the large-lacquered wood frame and wide porch that belonged to Lorena D’Agostino.
“How else were we going to end up here, Russell?” he asked. “You didn’t like my play. Fine. What was yours?”
Now it was my turn to stay quiet.
“What happened last time you came here?” he asked, waiting about a minute after I ignored his last question.
“I tried to talk to Lorena,” I said. “Approached her as a reporter. She was not interested.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of a storyteller?” he asked. “Was she mad? Afraid? Nervous? Panicked? Was anyone else around?”
“She was agitated. Not scared. She seemed more concerned with the kids than me,” I replied.
“So, she’s still fostering?” he asked.
“At least three kids,” I said. “Two of them were coming home on a bike. Little one maybe twelve, other one probably fifteen or sixteen. They were arguing over something, the teen knocked the younger one on his ass. The young one looked scared. He was wearing long sleeves. Made me think of—”
“Lavell Dawkins. The abuse complaint from back then,” Bill said. “That’s why you came here in the first place.”
Henniman chewed his lip and scratched at his nose. He’d dismissed the abuse allegation as a motive in the Twilight Four killings when we first talked about the case. It seemed like he’d done the same when Roust came forward in 2012. Even now, after Cynthia’s revelation that Shayna had been pregnant, it was hard to think the D’Agostinos and their foster care checks were actually the heart of the matter.
