PART 35 Read Free Page B

record, a cop killed, and he’s supposed to have confessed. Well, let’s see what this fellow has to say for himself. You can’t always trust these newspaper accounts. Sometimes you have to wonder how the hell anyone could have invented some of the stuff they write.”
    Sandro didn’t speak. He sat watching Sam and then the Negro guard, who continually thrust his keys into the gate or the door, maintaining a flow of traffic. Presently, a slip of paper was passed through the Judas eye in the door in the far wall. The guard took it and read. “Alvarado?”
    â€œYes,” said Sam. They walked to the door on the right, which the guard unlocked for them. It led into a large room with frosted windows covered by steel bars. Doorless cubicles, each furnished with a small table and two chairs, lined both side walls. There was a bench against the wall at the end of the room. On it, a short, trim Negro with a pencil-thin moustache sat studying the two lawyers as they entered. A guard sat in one of the rear cubicles, reading a newspaper.
    â€œAlvarado?” asked Sam.
    â€œI’m him,” said the man on the bench, rising, walking toward them. He was about five feet six. He had short hair and was quite dark. His features were Caucasian. He wore chino pants and a white T-shirt, no belt, and laceless scuff slippers; most prisoners held for serious crimes are never allowed laces and belts, in order to discourage suicide attempts.
    â€œI’m Mr. Bemer, this is Mr. Luca.” Sam motioned toward an empty cubicle. “Grab another chair, will you, Sandro?” said Sam. Sandro took a chair from another cubicle, and the three men surrounded one of the small tables. They looked at each other silently. The adventure of life and death was about to begin.
    â€œAs you probably already know, Mr. Alvarado,” Sam plunged in, “we’ve been appointed by the court to defend you on the charge of murder in the first degree. We don’t know anything about what happened, or what this is about. We can only go by what you’ll tell us. Now, what’s the story?”
    Alvarado had not stopped studying them. His eyes went from one to the other, watching. He listened attentively as Sam spoke, his tongue just poised on the edge of his bottom lip.
    Now he shrugged, his two hands shrugging too. “I know little as you,” he said with a Spanish clip to his English. “These guys arrest me, beat my ass, and I here. They keep sayin’, ‘You know, man, you know what happen on that roof.’ And then one of these gentlemens, a big fuck, a baldie, he do like that”—Alvarado gave a short, violent straight punch to the air—“and they get me right here.” Alvarado placed his fist at the center of his chest, just beneath his breastbone. “They gave me a lot of punches. I told them nothing. They gave me more. Then I go out.”
    â€œYou went out where?” Sam queried.
    â€œOn d’floor. An’ I gasps for breath. But I couldn’t get none.”
    â€œWhen you say you went out, you mean unconscious?” Sandro suggested.
    â€œUnconscious, yeah,” Alvarado nodded, looking at Sandro.
    â€œWait a minute,” said Sam. “Let me get some facts from the beginning. Where do you live?”
    â€œI was have a room on South Ninth Street, Brooklyn.”
    Sam took out a pad, wrote July 26, 1967, on the top, and then began to make detailed notes of everything Alvarado said.
    â€œMarried or single?”
    â€œI got a wife in Puerto Rico, but I ain’t living with her for years.” His word years , Spanish-clipped, sounded like jeers . “I living with a woman here for a while though.”
    â€œChildren?”
    â€œSure. Two in Puerto Rico, and four here.”
    Sam looked at him. “Four children with this other woman?”
    â€œYeah. I got two other childrens with some other woman, but I don’t see her for a long