The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [15]
Kloska wondered if the truce might be broken before he finished this sandwich.
For the last ten years, Bobby had privately tumbled over and over in his mind the story Reggie told the night of Gold’s murder and had come to the conclusion that it never quite dried. It wasn’t impossible, but it didn’t exactly conform to the evidence or to Kloska’s theory of the murder. The killing itself didn’t trouble Kloska so much. Solomon Gold had barely enough human inside him to count in a government census, so you could hardly even call his death a murder. More like a misdemeanor cruelty to animals. Every day, Kloska and his fellow cops happily looked the other way while lesser shitheads than Gold were eliminated with drive-by gat fire from this South Side gang or that one.
And anyway, they got their man. Or their man got himself. As officers responded to a desperate 911 call from Erica Liu’s mother, Erica’s father, Michael Liu, killed himself one day after Liu murdered Gold. Still, it pissed Bobby off to think Reggie might be holding out on him. Reggie had been in the room when it happened, had seen it all from beginning to end, and had even been wounded by Liu himself, suffering such extensive nerve damage that he could now barely move his right arm. Nevertheless, he refused to identify Michael Liu as the killer. Reggie said Liu had been wearing a mask, but after months of depositions and testimony and all the media bullshit around the Gold trial, Reggie should have recognized his voice, his build, his posture. Reggie never said it wasn’t Liu, but he never said it definitely was, either.
Lawyer crap about confidentiality aside, Kloska couldn’t finger a reason Reggie might have lied, but he also thought motive was overrated as a tool of police work. Motive was to a murder investigation what dew point was to the weather forecast. It was probably a useful thing for somebody to know, but Kloska really couldn’t give a shit.
He said, “How’s the Gullibility Gang these days?” This was Bobby’s name for the Believers Project, a group of law students and young attorneys working pro bono under Reggie’s direction to help win reversals, or at least reprieves, for convicts on death row.
Reggie was probably making untold numbers of millionaire clients circle his office in chauffeured Town Cars while he and Bobby had lunch. Nevertheless, he let the conversation proceed at a casual pace. Reggie Vallentine was always the coolest guy in the room. “You like the death penalty, don’t you, Bobby?”
Kloska waved a hand and said, “I got no problem sticking bad guys with long needles. But out on the street, most of these shitheads know their life expectancy isn’t much past thirty.” “Shithead” was what Bobby called anyone with even the slightest taint of criminality. Never “suspect” or “perpetrator” or “defendant.” Only “shithead.” “When you throw in ten years of appeals, death row starts to sound like a health plan.”
Reggie held back a laugh while he swallowed.
“That’s a sweet little con you got going,” Kloska said, his voice a few decibels lower. “All those hotties with the heart-shaped asses and the flannel skirts who went to law school both to save the world and to worship at the altar of Reggie Vallentine. Like that one intern you got. Della? I tell you what, I don’t think my pants could stay up under that kind of temptation. Probably wouldn’t even bother to zip them in the morning if I were you. I’d put a rubber on same time I put on my socks.”
Married for ten years and divorced for two, Kloska hardly let a woman cross his line of sight without a comment. A lot of the cops Kloska knew were the same way, but a lot of them were just blowing steam before heading home to their wives. Kloska, on the other hand, had been a serial adulterer during his marriage, and the pace of his conquests hadn’t slowed now that he was single. For him, every night held the potential for a mad grope in a dark bar with some oversexed Bridgeport