Suspense Magazine November 2012

shirt guy. From where I stood behind the bar, I couldn’t see where he fell, only a spreading pool of blood, thick and wet on
the grimy floor.
The bourbon and ginger woman still covered her eyes. She was shaking. I was too. When I gasped for air my mouth filled
with a taste like rotting meat. In that moment, the bourbon and ginger woman passed out.
The cops came, asked questions, took golf shirt guy’s body away. The cop in charge looked at the open cash register,
empty.
“You did the right thing,” he told me. “Always give them the money.”
Still wobbly, I glanced at the beer cooler. No bank bag. And it wasn’t anywhere on the floor, either. I already looked,
before the cops got here.
The local newspaper ran the story two days later. “Man Killed in Robbery-Murder” the headline read. Golf shirt guy was
a salesman named Marvin, traveling on business from Cleveland. Survived by a sister, Maylene, living in Seattle.
And based on my description, the newspaper wrote, police were looking for two robbers. Two tall men with short dark
hair, olive skin, and muscular builds. Exactly what I told the cops.
I told Larry I couldn’t work at his tavern any more, after everything that happened. He said he understood. But of course
he didn’t understand everything. Mostly he didn’t understand how the bank bag fell into the open gap behind the beer cooler,
where the bar and cooler weren’t flush against each other. How it got stuck down there, but I found it right away. Then, after
the cops were done, how I reached and strained and pulled to get it. How I opened it and counted the money…$5,251.
Maybe not enough for some people, at least not enough to do what I did. But for somebody like me, born to live a hard
life, it meant everything. Because Larry also didn’t understand what it was like for me to work in his tavern, or any place like
it, night after night, where even a good night really wasn’t good and on a bad night somebody got killed and you felt grateful
it wasn’t you and ashamed you felt that. Dark, sad places with a faint odor you can best describe as desperation. Desperation
to escape to anywhere, to be anywhere except wherever you were. $5,251 gave me a ticket. Escape.
But right now I wasn’t going anywhere except the police station.
On the phone, the cops said they just needed to ask me a few more questions. Routine, they said. I’m not what you call
highly educated, but I’m not what you call stupid either. When they put me in an interrogation room, I knew they meant
business.
Police interrogation rooms are cramped, mean little places where cops lie to people they think lied to them first. I believe
this not because I lied to the cops about the robbery, which I did of course, but because I’ve read every Harry Bosch crime
novel ever published. I planned to stick to my story anyway, because everything I remembered about that night whispered
to me. Every detail.
The room smelled like sweat. The cops were the same two detectives that came to the tavern after the robbery, a lean older
man and an attractive younger woman. Now intent on exposing my lies by lying to me, they wore savage smiles. Suspicious
and distant, they seemed to despise me.
The older cop’s raspy voice was somewhere between a hoarse growl and a raw scrape. He told me another witness gave
a different description of the robbers. Mine was way off, too far off. And wasn’t it funny that I quit my job right after the
robbery Like maybe I just came into some money. I guess cops think like that.
Then he got right in my face with his raspy voice, his spit spraying me. They knew I was part of the robbery, he screamed.
Remember, they both told me, you didn’t shoot the gun but the murder’s still on you. The murder is on you, it’s on you, just
like if you pulled the trigger. They kept repeating it, screaming it. They knew all about it, knew everything, they said.
The older cop got frenzied, uncontrollable, screeching and spitting at me. Tell us the names of your robbery partners, he
shrieked. Is a three-way split from a chicken-shit bar heist worth a felony murder charge They knew all about it, the cops
kept saying. The murder is on me. But if I would just sign a statement, they confided, maybe I could get a lighter sentence.
Five hours later, they let me go. There was no other witness. No partners. No three-way split. Almost nothing but lies.
The cops didn’t apologize for the deceit.
“You were a suspect,” the woman detective said. “We always check somebody like you.”
Four days later, the cops arrested a short little rat-faced man after he robbed a liquor store. The prosecuting attorney told
me about it. He said the detectives put the rat-faced man in an interrogation room, where they told him they had a witness
to the robbery-murder at Larry’s Tavern and they knew rat-face did it. They knew all about it, knew everything, the cops told
rat-face, because their witness saw rat-face and another man take the money, and saw rat-face do the murder. It’s on you,
they told him, the murder is on you. But if he would just sign a statement, they said, maybe he could get a lighter sentence.
So rat-face figured cooperating made sense. He confessed to robbing Larry’s, taking the money, exactly the way the cops
told it. Except to get a lighter sentence he put the murder on another guy, a tall, skinny man with a pasty white face. The tall,
skinny man told a completely different story, of course. Said the cops and rat-face got it wrong. Said it didn’t happen like that.
Then ballistics matched the murder bullet to a gun the tall man was arrested with. That was the end of it. The robbers gave
guilty pleas, went to prison. And I made plans. To take the $5,251, leave the lies and be anywhere but here.
Case closed. The prosecutor said witnesses like me make mistakes because we’re traumatized from getting robbed, seeing
someone murdered. But confessions and bullet matches don’t lie, at least not the way guilty killers do.
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