PART 35 Read Online Free PDF Page A

said Sam. “Okay, tell me about that burglary. If your fingerprints are on the goods from that job, you haven’t got a prayer. You know that, don’t you?”
    â€œI know that, Mr. Bemer. But I wasn’t there. My prints can’t be there, unless these cops can put them there. I know when a cop is killed, they can do anything. I don’t even know the block where it happen.”
    â€œOne fifty-three Stanton Street,” Sandro supplied.
    â€œThat’s the block where Hernandez lives, but I don’t know that block. I wasn’t there. I read that Hernandez car was double-park there and a woman, I think she’s a whore, you know—and she does the womans’ operations—she told the cops the car belong to Hernandez.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, operations?” asked Sam.
    â€œWhen they got a kid, you know?”
    â€œAbortions?”
    â€œYeah. She live on that block in Hernandez house. She told the cops the double-park car belong to Hernandez cause she knows Hernandez robs apartments and she thinks he hit her apartment once. I think she tell them she see me too.”
    â€œHow do you know these things?” Sam queried.
    â€œCause they bring people when I waiting for the D.A., and the people, mostly womans, are on the other side of a glass, a mirror…”
    â€œA two-way mirror?” Sam asked.
    â€œThat’s right. They could look at me, but I don’t see them. But I hear them, I know people are there, lookin’, and I’m bendin’, sideways.”
    â€œYou don’t know who was there?” Sandro asked.
    â€œNo. Only the one I say, the whore, cause I heard the cops on the other side talkin’, thinkin’ I can’t hear, like they know this one. Asunta, that’s her name.”
    Sam made a note. “Anybody else you know was there?”
    â€œNo, that’s the only one. They were others there. Womans. But I don’t know their name.”
    â€œOkay, then, if you didn’t commit this crime,” said Sam, “where were you?”
    â€œI got up late. I seen some guy. I do a couple things. I eat. In the afternoon, I go to my room. I go downstairs to see Jorge, the super.”
    â€œThe same Jorge you spoke to when you came home?” queried Sandro.
    â€œRight, that’s the same guy. And I had this whiskey, and I ask him, ‘Jorge, you want to buy this?’ And he says, ‘How much?’ So I told him, two bucks, and he says, ‘Okay.’ Then I stayed and talked to him for a while, and then I went down the block, and after, I took the subway over to Times Square.”
    â€œWhere were you going?”
    â€œI was going to Times Square, to the movies.”
    â€œWho was with you?” Sandro asked hopefully.
    â€œI was by myself.”
    â€œGo ahead,” Sam suggested.
    â€œThat’s all.” He lifted his hands in a gesture of finality.
    â€œWhat are these marks?” asked Sandro, pointing to a small cluster of pinhole marks on the inside of Alvarado’s arm near the elbow. “Are these fix marks?”
    â€œNo. They from a scab when I failed down in the station house, when these guys are beating me.”
    â€œYou are a junky?” Sam said rather than asked.
    â€œYes, sir. I have no fix now since I’m here, three weeks, so I’m pretty clean.”
    â€œBefore, you were using the stuff?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œHeroin?”
    Alvarado nodded.
    â€œHow about pushing the stuff?” Sam continued.
    â€œI was hustling in the street. I wasn’t pushing, but sometimes a guy needed something, and he didn’t know where to get it. I help him out, deliver it. Stuff like that.”
    â€œYou serve any time for it?”
    â€œYeah, I got busted three times.”
    â€œWhen.”
    â€œOnce in ’60, I did ninety days. Another time in ’62, I did ninety days. And another in, I don’t know, I guess that was ’62,