A Nasty Piece of Work Read Online Free PDF Page A

arrested named Emilio Gava. Miss Neppi thinks Gava may be about to jump bail, leaving her holding the $125,000 bag. Turns out the condo deed Gava’s girlfriend put up to cover the bond was phony. My company’s in for half of Neppi’s eventual loss, so they sent me out to jump-start the eventual investigation. According to the court records, you were the arresting officer.”
    “Damn right I was.” Awlson moistened a thick thumb on the tip of a pasty tongue and thumbed through a loose-leaf desk calendar. “I’m also the chief prosecution witness. Stanley Malone over at the prosecutor’s office asked me to show up in court at ten o’clock on—where the hell is it?—uh-huh, the Friday after next Friday.”
    “I’d appreciate it if you could walk me through the arrest.”
    “Not much to walk. We staked out a joint called the Blue Grass, which is a seedy bar the other side of the tracks even though we do not have tracks in Las Cruces, if you see what I’m drivin’ at. The county narcs been tryin’ to close the place down for centuries but somebody knows somebody in the state capitol. At least that’s my take on the situation. On or about eleven on the night of the second, the Blue Grass is dark but not so dark you cannot see once your eyes get accustomed. I am nursin’ a drink at the bar. Officer Rodriguez is playin’ pinball near the door. Officer DiPego is feedin’ quarters into the juke which he claimed on his expense account and they refused to reimburse because they said he was listenin’ to the music for his own personal pleasure. In breezes the perpetrator, who we later identified as one Emilio Gava, age forty-two. He is an American citizen but central castin’ Italian, which is to say dark-skinned, lean and leathery, with what I would describe as a smirk but someone else’d likely call a smile pasted on his too-handsome face. Dark good looks, oily black hair swept back, good shoulders, narrow waist, head held at an angle as if he was hard of hearing in one ear, which it turns out he was—he’d been hit in the ear with a brick once when he tried to peddle protection on the wrong block. His eyes were busy flickin’ here and there takin’ in everythin’. I make him to be six foot even, one hundred seventy-five, and hit it on the nose. He is wearin’ a white silk shirt buttoned up to the neck, no tie, a dark green double-breasted jacket unbuttoned.”
    “Was he carrying?”
    “We see the open jacket and we think he may be, so we all have got our handguns in our hands when we make the arrest, but he turns out to be clean as a whistle. Where was I? He slides into a booth in the back near the toilets across from a skinny kid with long sickle-shaped sideburns and a three-inch knife burn on one cheek. We later identified the second perpetrator as one Oropesa, Jesus, age twenty-seven, a Chicano with a record as long as Interstate 25 from here up to Santa Fe. I make the kid to be five foot seven and a half, a hundred thirty-three. In the mirror behind the bar I see him glance around nervous-like, then he slips a small rectangular-shaped package—now listed as prosecution exhibit A—across the table. The first perpetrator slides a long white envelope—prosecution exhibit B—back across the table to the kid. I nod to Officers Rodriguez and DiPego and we move in and collar them in the act.”
    “Did either of them resist arrest?”
    Awlson smiled a razor-edged smile. It said, You need to be real dumb to resist arrest if Sergeant Awlson is the arresting officer.
    “How’d he take it when you read him Miranda?”
    “Perpetrators all have got poker faces these days, you never know what they’re thinkin’, do you?”
    “Then what?”
    “The rest is pure routine. We cuff them and bring them in and photograph them and ink-pad them and hold them overnight. We let them each make one phone call on the house. By noon the next mornin’ they have both made bail and are out on the street.”
    “Detective