The Blind Witness

The courtroom was warm and smelled of old wood and floor wax. I sat in the back row, third from the aisle, where I always sat. I could not see the prosecutor or the judge or the witness stand, but I could hear everything. I always hear everything. That is my job and my curse.

The prosecutor was making his opening statement about a gangland shooting on the docks three weeks ago. Two men dead. One survivor in custody. The case was straightforward on paper - a rival gang hit, clean and professional. But paper is not people, and I have learned over the years that people are never what they seem on paper.

I heard what the prosecutor did not hear. The hesitation in the chief witness's voice when he mentioned a particular name. The way his words sped up when he talked about seeing the shooter. The barely audible tremor that said this man was testifying under duress.

I had been hired by a small-time bookie named Frankie O'Sullivan, who claimed his brother Tony had been wrongly implicated in the shooting. Frankie came to my office two days earlier, sitting in the chair opposite my desk, hands shaking. "Jack," he said, "Tony didn't do it. But the guy who's testifying against him - he's telling the truth about what he saw, but he's seeing the wrong person."

It was not the first time someone had come to me with a story like that. I am a blind private investigator in a city full of liars, and people assume that because I cannot see them, they can see me clearly. They are usually wrong about both parts.

The witness's name was Morano. Nick Morano. I knew that name. Slick Nick Morano, as everyone called him. My former squad mate from the 4th Infantry. We had shared rations in the Hurtgen Forest, when the rations were snow and we were so hungry we tried boiling our boot leather.

After the court session ended, I walked to a parking garage near Little Italy and waited for Nick to show up. He did. I recognized his 1953 Cadillac by the deep rumble of its V8 engine - a sound I had not heard in seven years, since Okinawa.

We sat in his car. The interior smelled of leather and expensive cologne and something else - something sweet and cloying that I could not place.

"Jack Mercer," he said. His voice had changed. In the army, it had been young and uncertain. Now it was smooth and practiced, the voice of a man who has spent years learning how to say anything without saying anything.

"Nick."

"You look good for a dead man."

"You look good for a wanted man."

He laughed. It was a bad laugh - forced, too loud, the laugh of a man who is trying to convince someone who already knows the truth.

"What do you want, Jack?"

"I want to know what happened on the docks."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then: "Nothing happened that matters anymore."

"In court today, a man named Morano testified that my brother Tony pulled the trigger."

"It's not my business whose brother it is."

"It's my business."

He reached into his coat pocket. I heard the rustle of paper. He held out his hand. I felt something being placed on it. Bills. Fifty-dollar bills. Three of them.

"For your trouble," he said.

I held the bills for a moment. They felt warm from his hand. Then I placed them back on the seat between us.

"I don't need your money, Nick. I just want to know what happened."

He started the car. The Cadillac's V8 purred. "Then you're asking the wrong guy, blind boy."

He drove away. I stood in the parking garage and listened to his taillights fade.

Vera Chen found me at a diner on Sunset Boulevard. She was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times - Chinese-American, sharp, ambitious, and one of the few people in this city who treated me as an equal rather than a curiosity.

She sat across from me and ordered coffee. I could hear the clink of the cup and saucer, the rustle of her notebook as she opened it.

"I know who Morano is," she said without preamble.

"I figured."

"His brother ran numbers in South Central. His uncle is on the police force. And there have been three deaths connected to the docks investigation that nobody else has connected. Not yet."

"You've been digging?"

"I've been listening. Same as you."

She had. Between us, we built a picture of Nick Morano that was nothing like the one the city knew. The public knew Slick Nick as a mid-level mobster with Teamster connections. What we found was a man connected to a series of murders that went all the way up to the LAPD - to Deputy Chief Harold Briggs, a man whose clean record and public photographs hid a private career of burying evidence and protecting the guilty.

The crucial piece came from a wiretap transcript Vera had access to through a contact in the district attorney's office. Nick Morano had recorded a phone call - not intentionally, but because he was paranoid enough to keep a recording device in his office and had forgotten to turn it off when Chief Briggs called.

I listened to the recording on Vera's portable player. Nick's voice, Briggs's voice, and the words that connected the dockside murders to a pattern of corruption that stretched back over a decade. Three policemen suspended. Nick disappeared to Chicago. Briggs transferred to a desk job in Long Beach.

The story ran in the Times the next morning. It was the biggest story in Los Angeles that year. And it changed nothing.

I sat in my office that evening, listening to the radio coverage, feeling nothing particularly dramatic. No triumph. No bitterness. Just the same hollow exhaustion I had felt since coming home from the war.

Vera visited me after the paper came out. She sat in the chair across from my desk and was quiet for a while.

"It mattered," she said.

"I know it didn't matter nearly as much as it should have."

She was quiet again. Then: "Same time tomorrow?"

I tapped my cane on the floor. It is not a victory. It is not a defeat. It is just what I do. I listen. I figure out what happened. And I tell the truth, even when nobody listens back.

============================================================ OBJECTIVE TENSOR MEASUREMENT AND EVALUATION SYSTEM v2 (

Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: