Free No Show of Remorse by David J. Walker Page B

two cops went up in the crib, and I was movin’ the bags into Lonnie’s car, with that Jimmy one watchin’ me. I was almost done, man, an’ then I heard some shots from upstairs.
    And what did you do?
    I didn’t do nothin’. I didn’t even close the trunk shut. I was, like, scared, man. Then this here Jimmy, he told me don’t go nowhere and he run up the steps. I mean, I stood there like a second and then I tore ass down the alley and outta there. They bust me on this an’ it be my third strike, man. I be up in the shithouse till I be dead, an’— Anyway, that’s it, man. That’s all of it.
    Yeah. Well, that’s … uh … that’s a lot. But we need to go over it again, okay?
    Yeah, awright man, but first I gotta go to the baffroom again.

CHAPTER
    14
    B Y THE TIME I GOT HOME it was dark and the storm had spent itself. I’d rewound the tape and sat there in the Forest Preserve for a long time, then listened again and sat there some more. After that I ate a supper I didn’t taste at a restaurant I hardly noticed, then rewound the tape again, but didn’t play it. It wasn’t going to get any better.
    The iron gate to the Lady’s drive was closed and chained, which it never was. A woman stepped out of the shadows, though, and unlocked the padlock and opened the gate. It was Layla, the Lady’s graduate whom I’d met the night before. I drove through and parked the Cavalier half under the wide eaves of the coach house. Farther down the drive, at the Lady’s house, the shade was up in one of the attic windows, where I’d never known the shade to be raised before. I stared up, and even though I couldn’t see into the darkness beyond the glass, I could feel another graduate sitting up there, staring back down at me.
    There was a message on my answering machine from Barney Green’s secretary. She’d done a computer search and found an antiques dealer in San Francisco who might have a lead on an Expulso toilet bowl. In the meantime, she said, I better get a plumber to install a substitute. I took a few Polaroid shots of the tank and wrote down the measurements the dealer needed. I’d mail them in the morning.
    I threw out the pizza, fretted and moped over a bag of pretzels and at least one beer too many, and went to bed. An hour later, I got up and trudged down to the bathroom in the garage for what I hoped was the last time that night. On my way back up the stairs, I finally came to a decision.
    There was only one reason to go ahead with my petition. That was to prove that I couldn’t be frightened into dropping it. If I stayed with it and there was a hearing, there’d be testimony about the shooting, its devastating effects on several families, and my continuing refusal to obey the supreme court and cooperate with the police investigation. I was thoroughly convinced now that a hearing would bring the cops’ involvement in a drug deal out into the open. Put Jimmy Coletta under oath and he’d tell the truth.
    That’s why they were trying to bully me into dropping my petition. And Maura Flanagan had told Clark Woolford that if intimidation didn’t work, I might not survive for there to be any hearing. Meanwhile, though, Flanagan was pressuring Woolford—bribing him, in fact—not to contest my reinstatement. But why?
    With no contest, I’d still have to show I was rehabilitated, but there’d be no testimony from any cops. So there’d be no need to kill me. Maybe Flanagan was trying to do me a favor. Yeah, right. On the other hand, maybe she had her own reasons for not wanting testimony about the shootout at Lonnie Bright’s.
    There’d be statute of limitations and evidentiary problems, but three people had died—Sal Coletta, Lonnie Bright, and Lonnie’s girlfriend, Fay Rita Jackson. So even if the cops hadn’t started the shooting, the killings occurred in