Gage wasn’t surprised he didn’t recognize the deputy on the other side of the bulletproof window on the seventh floor of the Hall of Justice. It had been over twenty years since Gage had been a regular visitor booking murderers into the jail. And like a snake that sheds its skin, it was almost a new sheriff’s department. Only a few from Gage’s generation were left, now in the upper ranks.
The deputy accepted Gage’s PI license as a ticket inside, then activated the locks on the barred gate and the sliding metal door.
Gage stepped into the hallway and signed in on the visitor’s log. He heard a baritone voice call out his name from behind the booking counter to his left. He looked over to find its source: a sixty-year-old freckled face below a bald head. It was a sergeant from the old days, now wearing a captain’s insignias.
Gage walked over and stuck out his hand.
“I used to know a guy who sort of looked like you,” Gage said. “We called him Red, but I don’t see the red anymore.”
Red shook his hand and smiled. “Your day will come. You ain’t gonna keep all that hair forever.”
Red glanced at the sign-in sheet across the hallway, and asked, “Who you here to see?”
“John Porzolkiewski.”
“The poison guy?”
Gage nodded.
“Weird dude.”
“Weird dude?” Gage laughed. “Haven’t you been out of this place in the last thirty years? No one says ‘weird dude’ anymore. That went out with ‘put a cap in his ass’ and ‘what’s up bro.’ ”
“Okay, forget the dude part. He’s still weird. He didn’t say peep other than ‘I want my phone call’ after Spike hooked him up at his market. He never even invoked. Spike says he read him his rights and the guy just stared back like a beached whale.”
Gage looked down the hallway through a gate separating the visiting rooms from the rows of cells facing each other fifty feet away. He could see hands and forearms extending from the cells, some resting on flat cross pieces, others gesturing. Mostly brown and black. A staccato of hard voices, knife-sharp cackles, and assaulting laughs reverberated against the concrete and steel.
“He’s not in main line.” Red jerked his thumb toward the other end of the hallway. “We put him on suicide watch last night.”
“You have a shrink talk to him?”
Red shook his head. “No point if he’s not gonna talk back.”
“I didn’t do it,” Porzolkiewski said, just as Gage crossed the threshold into the interview room.
“Then what were you doing with a pound of sodium monofluoroacetate in your storeroom?” Gage pulled back a plastic chair and sat down across the table from him. “That’s enough to kill everyone who works at TIMCO.”
“I never saw it before.”
“It was on a shelf. Eye level.”
“In a bag of flour. I don’t open every bag of flour to see what’s inside. Those cops planted it. Brandon Meyer and Marc Anston must’ve paid them off.”
“Spike Pacheco isn’t buyable.”
“Then it was the hazmat woman.” Porzolkiewski folded his arms over the front of his orange jumpsuit. “You going to vouch for her, too?”
Gage shook his head. “I don’t need to.”
He pulled out the timeline Porzolkiewski faxed over to attempt to prove his innocence after the newspaper reported the discovery of Karopian’s body.
“I went out to talk to the woman you visited in the Delta. You told me she called you. She told me you called her. You put yourself within ten miles of Karopian on the day he was murdered, then lied to me about why you were there.”
Porzolkiewski stared at the page, face rigid.
“I also talked with Karopian’s wife,” Gage said. “She hasn’t touched the boat since he died. SFPD and Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputies are dusting the cabin for prints right now.”
Gage dropped the chronology on the table. “What do you think they’re going to find?”
Porzolkiewski looked up. “So I went to see him.” He smirked at Gage. “It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. I figured out what else was on the recording you played for me. No one would’ve believed Hawkins unless Karopian had backed him up with the OSHA report. He had to be in on it. I wanted to see the look on his face.”
“No, you wanted to see the last look on his face.”
Porzolkiewski gripped the edge of the gray metal table.
“I… didn’t… kill… the guy.”
“I know. That was the poison’s job. Just like with Charlie Palmer. You’re lucky it’s too late to recover fingerprints from his house. I’m sure his wife has cleaned up the bedroom, but then again… maybe not.”
Porzolkiewski rubbed his hands together on top of the table. Lips compressed. Eyebrows narrowed. A bouncing left leg caused his body to vibrate. He scratched his head, then rubbed his nose. Gage sensed him trying to dam something inside himself, hold it back.
Then the floodgates broke open.
“I didn’t go to Palmer’s the day he died. It was three days earlier, and I didn’t go there to kill him. I went there because I felt bad about… about…”
“Shooting him in the first place?”
Porzolkiewski’s voice hardened. “I’m not going to talk about that or somebody’ll plant a gun in my house. Look. I… didn’t… kill the guy. Somebody’s setting me up.”
“How come everything you say to defend yourself sounds like a confession?”
Porzolkiewski rose and glared down at Gage.
“What a waste of time.”
He took a step toward the visiting room door, looked out through the wire mesh window for a passing deputy, and began pounding.
W hile walking down the front steps of the Hall of Justice, Gage realized he had the answer he came for: Handing Porzolkiewski the truth was just like putting a gun in his hand.
It was a good thing Porzolkiewski didn’t know where Wilbert Hawkins was living.
Gage heard something grate in the back of his mind like misaligned gears: Boots.
Was there a connection between Porzolkiewski and Boots Marnin? How did Porzolkiewski know to send Boots to India to find Hawkins, and how did he get hooked up with Boots in the first place?
But what if there wasn’t a connection between Porzolkiewski and Boots?
Then what?