The Night Fire (Renée Ballard, #3)(76)

Ballard waited until Valens finished cuffing him to his chair and left the interview room.

“I set you up?” she said then. “How’s that?”

“All I know is, you drag me in here, next thing I know I’m in solitary with a snitch jacket,” Dorsey said. “Now people out to kill me.”

“Well, people are out to kill you but it isn’t because of me.”

“That’s some bullshit right there. I was doing fine till you come see me.”

“No, you were doing fine until you called Elvin Kidd. That’s where your trouble started, Dennard.”

“The fuck you talking about, girl?”

“We had Elvin up on a wire. We heard your call and then, guess what? We have him setting up the hit. On you.”

“You runnin’ a bullshit game now.”

“Am I, Dennard?”

Ballard opened her laptop on the table.

“Let me walk you through it,” she said. “Then, if you think it’s a game, I’ll tell them to put you back with your friends in the module. So you can feel safe and at home.”

She opened up the file that contained the recordings of calls made to and from Elvin Kidd’s phones.

“So the first thing you need to know is that we had a phone tap on Kidd,” she said. “So when you called to warn him about me asking questions, we got the whole conversation down on tape.”

She started playing the first recording and waited for Dorsey to recognize his own voice and Kidd’s. He unconsciously leaned forward and turned his head as if to hear the recording better. Ballard then cut it off.

“That ain’t legal,” Dorsey said.

“Yes, it is,” Ballard said. “Approved by a superior-court judge. Now, let me just jump ahead to the important part for you to hear.”

She moved the recording forward a minute to the part where Kidd asked Dorsey who gave him his number and Dorsey revealed that it had been Marcel Dupree. She turned the playback off again.

“So you tell Kidd that Marcel Dupree gave you his number and what does Kidd do? He hangs up on you and then sends a text to Marcel saying he wants a meet.”

Ballard now held up her phone and showed Dorsey a freeze-frame that clearly depicted Kidd, with Dupree in profile, sitting at the table at Dulan’s.

“I took this picture yesterday when they met at Dulan’s,” Ballard said. “You know the place down on Crenshaw? At that meeting Kidd gave Marcel three thousand dollars. What do you think that was for, Dennard?”

“I suppose you’re gonna tell me,” Dorsey said.

“It was to set you up for a hit in Men’s Central. To have you whacked by one of your fellow Crips. You know Clinton Townes, right?”

Dorsey shook his head, as if he was trying to keep the information Ballard was laying on him from getting inside his ears.

“You’re just spinning stories here,” he said.

“That’s why we had you pulled out of the tank, Dennard,” Ballard said. “To save your life. Then we picked up Marcel and flipped him as easy as a pancake. Got him to call Kidd back and tell him it was all taken care of and you weren’t going to be a problem. Take a listen.”

Ballard cued up the scripted call between Dupree and Kidd and played it in its entirety. She sat back and watched Dorsey’s face as he came to realize his own people had turned against him. Ballard knew how he felt, having once been betrayed by her partner, her boss, and the department itself.

“And wait, I’ve got one more,” she said after. “Kidd even called the Medical Examiner’s Office to make sure your cold dead body was there, waiting to be cut up in autopsy.”

She played the last recording. Dorsey closed his eyes and shook his head.

“Motherfucker,” he said.

Ballard closed the laptop but kept her phone on the table. It was recording the conversation. She stared at Dorsey, who was now staring down at the table, his eyes filling with hate.

“So …,” she said. “Elvin Kidd wanted you dead and now thinks you are dead. You want him to get away with that? Or do you want to tell me what you really know about what happened in that alley where that white boy got murdered?”

Dorsey looked up at her silently. She knew he was an inch away from breaking.

“You help me, I can help you,” she said. “I just came from talking to a prosecutor. She wants Kidd for the murder. She’ll talk to your parole officer, see about getting your violation lifted.”

“You were supposed to do that,” Dorsey said.

“I was going to, but having a prosecutor do it is money. But that doesn’t happen unless you help me out here.”

“Like I tol’ you before, he told us to stay out the alley that day. Next thing I know, there was a murder back in there and police shut down our operations. We found a different location on the other side of the freeway.”

“And that was that? You never spoke to Kidd about it, never asked any questions again? I don’t believe that.”

“I did ask him. He told me some shit.”

“What shit, Dennard? This is the moment where you either help or hurt yourself. What did Elvin Kidd say?”

“He said he had to take care of this white kid he knew from when he was away.”

“Away? What does that mean?”