A Nasty Piece of Work by Robert Littell Page B

Jesus’s eyes as he gasped, “Go ahead, break my arms, even if I knew who set up the sale, which I don’t, I wouldn’t tell you because they’d break my balls.”
    I released my grip on the cuffs and took several deep gulps of air to calm myself. I had come off adrenaline highs before, namely in Afghanistan, so I was not surprised by the free fall. When I could talk again, I said, “Let’s say for argument’s sake you’re telling the truth for the first time in your life. How could a guy like Gava, who is not local, score cocaine in this town?”
    Jesus was breathing hard. “He must have called the right number and named the right names.”
    “Was he a junkie?”
    “Christ no. The minute I seen him coming through the door, I could see he was not a user of the cocaine he was buying. You can spot users a mile off—they got this gleam in their eyes, they got dilated pupils, they can’t wait to pay you off and get their hot hands on the shit. When you finally pass it over they’re like kiddies in a candy store. Gava was laid-back like an undertaker at a funeral. I figured right off he was buying for a friend.”
    “Or buying in order to get caught in the act.”
    “You are one crazy hombre, you know it? Why would somebody in his right mind set up a buy to get caught in the act?”
    “What if I told you the police were tipped off about the sale in the Blue Grass? What if I told you that a third party has identified the voice tipping off the police as Gava’s?”
    “You got a wild imagination,” Jesus said. “You ought to go and write movie pictures.”
    Later, with Jesus safely back in the holding pen, I took Awlson to a local bar for a beer. “What did you find out?” he asked.
    “I found out his arms bend back more than most people’s. I found out I’m not in the right line of work—I ought to be writing scripts for films.”
    Awlson was one of those old-fashioned cops who learned the trade before electric typewriters existed. He flipped open a small notebook and set it down on the table. He uncapped a thick fountain pen, the kind that sucks up ink from an inkwell, the kind that he might have gotten for a birthday present when he graduated from high school. “Let us summarize the situation,” he suggested.
    “We are dealing with a joker who moved into the East of Eden Gardens eight months ago and kept a low profile,” I said.
    Awlson moistened the ball of a thumb and flicked through the notebook to another page. “He ordered in from a pizza joint, he ate out once in a while, he played poker with neighbors Sunday nights, he shacked up two, maybe three times a week with a blonde who made funny noises during sexual intercourse.”
    “Now I know who interviewed Alvin Epley before me,” I said. I picked up the thread of the summary. “Then, seemingly out of the blue, Emilio Gava sets up a purchase of cocaine, after which he puts in an anonymous call to the police to make sure he would be nabbed in the act.”
    “After his arrest,” Awlson went on, “he makes a single phone call from the police station. The next morning a big-city lawyer turns up to plead him not guilty. At which point Gava is released on bail and disappears into the woodwork.” Awlson raised his eyes, his mouth scrunched up in thought. “If he wanted to disappear, why didn’t he just up and disappear? Why did he have to go to all the trouble of getting himself arrested for buying cocaine?”
    We both nursed our beers thinking about this. Finally I said, “Gava needed to disappear in a way that made it look as if he had a good reason to disappear. He wanted someone or some organization to think he was running away from a drug conviction and jail sentence. Which must mean he had another reason to disappear but wanted to mask it.”
    “Maybe Jesus was right after all,” Awlson said. “Maybe you ought to write for the movies.”
    “If we can figure out why Gava wanted to disappear,” I said, “maybe we can figure out where