As Artis headed to the rear of the car, Carter hesitated. If I get out of this car, it could be the worst mistake I’ve ever made. Artis opened the trunk, and a cop rummaged through Carter’s boxing gloves, shoes, headgear, and gym bag.
Another officer motioned to Carter to step out. Carter opened the door, but he had held his tongue long enough. “What the hell did you bring us here for, man?”
“Shut up,” the officer shouted as he cocked the pistol. “Just get up against the wall and shut up, and don’t move until I tell you to.”
As Carter and Artis walked toward the bar at the corner of Lafayette and East Eighteenth, a hush settled over the crowd. With bystanders forming a semicircle around the two men, Carter and Artis stood facing a yellow wall bathed in the glare from headlights. Artis turned his right shoulder and searched for a familiar face, maybe someone from racially mixed Central High School, his alma mater, but he saw only white strangers. The police frisked them brusquely but found nothing on them or in Carter’s car or trunk. Another ambulance arrived, and Artis felt the hair on his neck rise when he saw another body, draped in a white sheet, roll past him on a stretcher.
Finally, a paddy wagon pulled up and someone shouted, “Get in!” Carter and Artis stepped inside and were whisked away. Sitting by themselves, the two men were once again speeding through Paterson, heading to the police headquarters downtown. No one had asked them any questions or accused them of anything. They could see the driver through a screen divider but were otherwise isolated. “Something terrible is going on, but what’s it got to do with us?” Artis asked.
Carter, disgusted, told him to stay calm. “Don’t volunteer anything, but if someone asks you any questions, tell them the truth. The cops are just playing with me, as usual. It’ll all be cleared up soon.”
The paddy wagon stopped downtown, and the doors swung open at police headquarters. Built in 1902 after a devastating fire wiped out much of Paterson, the building is a hulking Victorian structure with dark oak desks and wide stairways. But Carter and Artis had barely gotten inside when there was another commotion. “Get back in!” someone shouted, and the two men returned to the wagon, which peeled off again. Now they headed on a beeline south on Main Street, eventually stopping at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Paterson’s oldest, where plainclothes detectives were waiting. Carter and Artis were hustled out of the truck and into the emergency room. Everything seemed white, the walls and curtains, the patients’ gowns and nurses’ uniforms, the floor tile and bedsheets. The room had that doomy hospital smell of ether and bedpans and disinfectant. The only patient was a balding white man lying on a gurney, a bloody bandage around his head, an intravenous tube rising from his arm, and a doctor working at his side.
“Can he talk?” asked one of the detectives, Sergeant Robert Callahan.
The doctor, annoyed at the intrusion, shot a disapproving glance at the detective, then at Carter and Artis. “He can talk, but only for a moment.” The doctor lifted the lacerated head of William Marins, shot in the Lafayette bar. The bullet had exited near his left eye, which was now an open, serrated cut. He was pallid and weak.
“Can you see clearly?” Callahan asked the one-eyed man. “Can you make out these two men’s faces?”
Marins nodded his head feebly. Callahan pointed to Artis. “Go over and stand next to the bed.” Artis walked over.
“Is this the man who shot you?” Callahan asked.
Marins paused, then slowly shook his head from side to side. Callahan then motioned for Carter to step forward. “What about him?”
Again, Marins shook his head.
“But, sir, are you sure these are not the men?” Callahan asked in a harder voice. “Look carefully now.”
Carter had been relieved when the injured man seemed to clear him and Artis. But now he concluded the police were going to do whatever they could to pin this shooting on them. Previous assault charges against Carter had been dismissed. Police surveillance had yielded little. Now, this: pell-mell excursions through the night, an angry mob outside a strange bar, a one-eyed man lying in agony, and Carter an inexplicable suspect. He had had enough. As Marins continued to shake his head, Carter closed his eyes, clenched his fists, and spilled his boiling rage. “Dirty sonofabitch!” he yelled. “Dirty motherfucker!”
Back at police headquarters, in the detective bureau, Carter found himself in a windowless interrogation room. It was familiar ground. He had been questioned in the same room twenty years earlier for stealing clothing at an outdoor market. (His father had turned him in.) Two battered metal chairs and a table sat beneath a cracked, dirty ceiling. Artis was left to stew in a separate room, which had green walls, a naked light bulb, and a one-way mirror in the door. Artis could see, between the door and the floor, the black rubber soles of the officers outside his door. He knew they were watching him.
Both men lingered in their separate rooms for several hours, their alcoholic buzz long worn off. They simply felt exhaustion. At around 11 A.M., the door to Carter’s room opened and Lieutenant Vincent DeSimone, Jr., walked in. The two men had a history. DeSimone joined the Paterson Police Department in 1947 and had been one of the officers who questioned the teenage Carter after he assaulted the man at the swimming hole. DeSimone was a coarse and intimidating old-school cop, who would quip about suspects, “He’s so crooked, they’ll have to bury him standing up.” A relentless interrogator, he was known for his ability to elicit confessions through threats and promises. He would do anything for a confession, including pulling out a string of rosary beads to bestir a guilty conscience. He hated the 1966 Miranda decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that no confession can be used against a criminal defendant who was not advised of his rights. The ruling, DeSimone feared, gave confessed criminals a loophole.*
In the 1950s he joined the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office as a detective specializing in homicides, and he was known for keeping index cards in his pocket so he wouldn’t have to carry a notebook. His bosses viewed him as the finest law enforcement official in the state, their own Javert, and his power and reputation were unquestioned.
But on the streets of Paterson’s black community, DeSimone had a different reputation entirely, for he embodied the racist, bullying tactics of an overbearing police force. His confessions had less to do with gumshoe police work than with intimidation, and he was feared. Frankly, he looked scary. In World War II he had taken a grenade blast in the face, and despite several surgeries, his jowly visage was disfigured. A scar inched across his upper lip, which was pulled tightly back, and drool sometimes gathered at the side of his mouth. He had thick eyeglasses, spoke in a gravelly voice, and wore an open sport jacket across his thick, hard gut, revealing his low-slung holster.
DeSimone was tense when he entered Carter’s holding room. He had been awakened at 6 A.M. with news of the shooting, and he stopped off at the crime scene before going to the police station. Despite his many years in police work, this was his first interrogation for a multiple homicide.
“I’m Lieutenant DeSimone, Rubin. You know me.” He sat down heavily and pulled out his pen and paper.
“You can answer these questions or not,” he continued. “That’s strictly up to you. But I’m going to record whatever you say. Just remember this. There’s a dark cloud hanging over your head, and I think it would be wise for you to clear it up.”
“You’re the only dark cloud hanging over my head,” Carter said.
DeSimone was joined by two or three other officers. Over the next couple of hours, Carter recounted his whereabouts on the previous night, from the time he left his home after watching the James Brown special to his two encounters with Sergeant Capter. He mentioned his trip to Annabelle Chandler’s and various club stops. When DeSimone finally told Carter that four people had been shot, Carter waved off the suspicion: “I don’t use guns, I use my fists. How many times have you arrested me around here for using my fists? I don’t use guns.”
Carter