Suspects

by Thomas Berger

  Daisy’s expression went quickly from affectionate concern to an apparent lack of emotion made even more pallid by her fair coloring. “I’m not on a date. I’m with the bunch from Ident, eating dinner.”

  “The corned beef is real good,” Moody said, mendaciously implying he had had some. “Get back before your food gets cold.”

  She tried once more. “Nick…”

  He opened the car with authority and slid in. He felt almost sober now that he had talked with Daisy, who was the kind of child he would have had if he could have. Maybe he would not have run around so much if he had had a daughter to love and respect him, at least until she was old enough to have boyfriends.

  8

  Molly was finishing up the piece of steak that Lloyd had no room for, about a third of the sizable portion served him, so he had eaten twice as much as he left, a heroic accomplishment, hunks of red meat never having been his favorite form of nourishment. Molly was also generous with sauces, inundating the sirloin with an oleaginous brown liquid from a bottle specially requested from the waitress, floating the French fries in ketchup, and drenching her iceberg lettuce in a bright orange dressing.

  The café attached to this truck stop was only about half as large as Dee’s, though the parking area was probably larger. The motel was adjacent on the west and was perhaps under the same management, though Molly could not say for sure, never having stayed there and in fact not knowing anybody in authority at this establishment, which for her was largely unknown territory.

  About halfway through the meal she said, “If you want to hit the road after eating, go ahead. You don’t have to be polite.” She chewed a moment and then revised her previous utterance. “What I mean is, you want to go on, wherever you’re heading, just do it. You don’t have to provide me with company.”

  The food he found most palatable was the roll, eaten in dry fragments. The idea of butter was nauseating, for some reason. “I’m glad to be here,” he said. “Really. I’m just not crazy about sponging off you. What makes me mad is I had some money coming from where I worked, but I couldn’t get it.”

  Molly gestured at him with a sauce-smeared steak knife and squinted affectionately. “You wouldn’t be some kind of hothead, would you? It’s not healthy to keep it to yourself till you explode.”

  “Not much I can do about it.”

  “Well, there, in my opinion, you’re wrong.” She leaned back and ate a French fry with her fingers, but rather daintily, holding it by the quarter inch not covered with ketchup. “You can always do something about anything, though maybe you can’t do everything about any one thing”—she swallowed—“or however it goes. What I mean is, you can try. Do I have ketchup on my face?”

  “No,” said Lloyd. “None at all.”

  “You could try saying something right away.” She rolled her eyes. “‘Voicing an objection.’ I saw some lady say that in an old movie. I wish I could talk like that, but I couldn’t get away with it, the kind of people I’m around. Present company excepted.” She smirked. “Anyway, if somebody blows cigar smoke in your face you can say, ‘Hey, don’t do that!’ You don’t have to kill him.” She managed to add, “Wait till he does it a second time!” before breaking up in laughter. After a moment she solemnly peered at the unsmiling Lloyd and observed, “But I can see it’s no joke to you.”

  “It’s not that,” said he. “I was just thinking. I wouldn’t get mad if the smoke was blown my way by accident. But what about when it’s done on purpose?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They’re always taking me on,” Lloyd said. “Seeing how much they can get away with.”

  “Who?”

  He threw his chin up. “People. Guys, usually. Like I have to keep fighting to keep from getting walked all over.”

  She reached across to put her hand on the back of his. “You don’t have to put up with that.”

  “I don’t! But that’s how I get in trouble.”

  Molly nodded. “Maybe being as nice as you are brings out the worst in people with weak characters, because of the contrast, see?” She continued to press the back of his hand. “I know this: very few guys can take being thought of as not basically in the right. Sometimes one of the other drivers will say something to me so vulgar, so filthy dirty, that I can’t let it pass. So I stop and ask, ‘What would you think if somebody said that to your mother? You’re no kinda man at all.’ ‘Keep my mother outa this.’ ‘How can I, when she made you what you are?’ You’d be surprised at the guys who can’t stand up to that. They’ll say, ‘Listen, I’m not a bad person.’” Molly took her hand off his and moved herself against the back of the booth. “To make it worse, nine times outa ten a jerk like that is wearing a wedding band. Bet he lets his wife push him around, too!” She had been grinning all the while. She now added, “And if that doesn’t straighten them out, I always got my three-fifty-seven. Like my dad says, ‘You try good sense before you blow ‘em away.’” She sipped some coffee after puffing it cool and asked, “So if you’re going to stay around, what do you wanna do all day?”

  Lloyd was weary. The fitful sleep on the truck seat during the night had only exhausted him further. “I’m really tired out.”

  Molly dug out her roll of bills from a pocket of her jeans. “You won’t get rested till you can stretch out.” She peeled off some money. “If you catch the girl’s eye…”

  He was facing the right way, and he beckoned to the waitress.

  “Couple hours in the bunk is what you need,” Molly went on. “It’s real comfortable back there.”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to leave me alone in the truck.”

  “You’re pretty self-centered, you know, Lloyd.” But she was winking. “I done all the driving, but you’re the one’s worn out. What about some sleep for me, too?”

  When they got out to the rig Molly drew aside the curtain that was stretched across the bunk and gestured for Lloyd to precede her. He felt an access of panic with the recognition he would be the farther in, imprisoned between her and the back of the compartment.

  “Do you mind?” he asked. “I’ve got to be on the outside. I have this claustrophobia. I’m sorry. That’s just the way I am.”

  “That’s okay,” Molly said quickly, but he believed she had lost a very slight part of her inveterate good humor, if only by a hair, though perhaps it was his imagination. “But I might have to crawl over you if I have to get out to attend to the rig before you wake up.”

  “Sure.”

  She boosted herself up, crawled in, and stretched out, her thick shoes splayed. The mattressed space seemed almost as wide as a standard double bed. Molly found a rumpled blanket and, in her supine position, folded it into a neat packet. “Here’s your pillow. The regular one is pretty grungy. Sometimes I remember to bring a case for it.” She displayed the object in question, covered with dirty striped ticking. Before inserting it under her head, she sneered at it in the light of the compartment, into which the bright morning sun came via the windshield.

  Lloyd climbed in. He was unfamiliar with the experience of sharing a bed with anyone, having had no live-at-home brothers and no childhood friends with whom he spent the night. It seemed to him not out of the question that with space at a premium there might be some conflict while both parties were asleep. He had not suffered a nightmare for some time, but Molly was armed.

  She asked, “Would you mind?” She was struggling with her shoes, while trying to keep from kicking him. “Just drop these down on the seat?”

  Was the gun still in her belt? But he would not ask, lest so many references to the weapon make him seem cowardly. He would just have to keep his distance. He removed his own shoes.

  Molly spoke behind him as he was reared up on his side, dropping the footgear. “Better pull the curtain closed, unless you can sleep in that light. I can’t.” When he had done as requested it was quite dark in the compartment. Molly added, “It’s also good for privacy.” When he made no response she said, “Don�
�t worry about fresh air. There are these vents up here.”

  Closeted in this way, he could again smell her flowery scent that he had first detected in the restaurant. He murmured drowsily, hoping the sound would suffice.

  But Molly was not ready to let him sleep. “You should give me a shove if I try to hog the bunk. I’m not accustomed to sharing it, you know, and I might forget once I’m asleep.”

  She really was considerate to think of the very problem he had anticipated, but he decided if necessary to drop down to the seat, where, with it all to himself, there would be plenty of room. He mumbled again and stayed on his side, facing the curtain. His claustrophobic apprehensions were concerned not with enclosed places, but rather with people who crowded him. He kept his eye on the slit between the end of the continuous curtain and where, had it been tightly drawn, it would have touched the metal wall.

  “The doors are locked,” Molly said close behind him. “It’s real snug, don’t you think?”

  He stoically rolled onto his back. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s really nice.”

  “Lloyd…sure you’re not married or something?”

  He answered in as dull a voice as he could produce. “No, I’m not married.”

  “Not that it’s any of my business.”

  “That’s all ri—“ While thinking he would not be so rude as to fall asleep while speaking, and resenting the obligation being so imposed upon him, he did indeed drift away.

  Moody had no special hangover next morning and felt no worse than usual, maybe because he always felt lousy, with a sour stomach, congested head, and nervous tension that often caused his hands to tremble. He arrived at work before LeBeau, who as a married man and father had more to take care of than someone in Moody’s position. Dennis quite rightly was a much better father than Moody himself had been twenty-odd years earlier. Moody could admit as much, but it might have been a different story had his wife from the first not turned the boy against him, so by the time the kid was old enough to do male things—go to ballgames, hunt pheasant, etc.—Franklin did not want to. He was not sickly but he preferred to stay inside and read books rather than hang out with his dad. It was abnormal, and Moody predicted to Ruthann that the boy would grow into a full-fledged you-know-what one day, but in fact that had not happened, so far as his father could gather, twice a year, on the longdistance telephone, despite that sissy form of the name that Franklin, like his mother, continued to favor. Since the divorce, years earlier, Moody had called him Frank.

  When LeBeau showed up, Moody passed across a sheaf of papers. “Lab reports.” But Dennis took so long to take off his suit jacket, after first searching unsuccessfully for something in his pockets, probably the glasses he wore only when reading, that Moody retrieved the papers and said, “There was semen on the sheets.”

  “Wife’s bed?” LeBeau had sat down and was rooting through his desk drawers.

  “Only. But I guess semen’s not a rare find on the sheets of a married couple. O blood type.”

  “What’s Larry’s?”

  Moody smiled. “The medical-insurance people who handle Glenn-Air employees furnished it. It’s O.”

  “Uh-huh.” LeBeau had completed his search of the desk and started again on his jacket. “Donna’s body didn’t show any sign of recent sexual activity, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Moody, “so far as they could tell, but she was cut through the pubic area, so it would be difficult to say for sure.” He had had no sexual urge whatsoever since observing the autopsy. “Remember the guy, couple years ago, who beat that girl to death, then whacked off alongside her on the bed? His come was on top of her blood. That’s not the case here. This guy shoots his load, then cuts her? But there’s a possibility it’s old semen: maybe the stain was already there for a while. It’s hard to say how fresh it was, because the blood would have dampened it.”

  LeBeau speculatively cleaned his front teeth with the tip of his tongue. “He might have used a rubber and pulled it off there, and most of the stuff ran out.”

  “They took both the toilets apart and probed the drains,” Moody said, though of course his partner knew all of this. “You know, it sometimes takes more than one flush to send something like a condom all the way out to the sewer.”

  “Marty the plumber would be well aware of that. Is that what you’re thinking?”

  Moody put his head at an angle suggesting briefly intensified thought. “Not to mention that with all that blood the killer must have got some on him. You’d think he would have to wash, at least in one of the washstands or the sink, maybe a complete shower. But they took all the traps apart and didn’t find a trace of diluted blood or semen.” He picked up a pencil and shook it. “It’s what else they didn’t find that’s interesting, too. The drain caps in the washbasins: they were real clean; there wasn’t even a single hair wound around that part that goes down, you know?”

  LeBeau certainly knew. He was a homeowner who did his own repairs if possible. “Maybe Donna was a good housekeeper.”

  Moody shrugged. “Well, it’s a thought.” The DNA tests, sent out to a private lab, would not come back for weeks. If they needed to wait that long for an arrest, they would be in trouble.

  LeBeau resumed his search and finally, going again to the wide middle drawer that he had already ransacked, resorted to a pair of narrow-lensed generic spectacles kept for such emergencies. These were much stronger than Dennis’ prescription eyeglasses, and he blinked when he first looked through them.

  He read through the report and asked, looking up over his miniature specs, “Who can we put in the house?” He peered at Moody in a personal way. “Did you get any sleep at all?” He stood up.

  “Sure I did.”

  “You went to Walsh’s?”

  “Had a nightcap and went right home. Little Daisy turned up there, Daisy O’Connor, eating dinner with a bunch. We had a nice talk.” As he rose from his chair he felt whether his weapon was clipped at the left side of his belt. He often removed it and stowed it in the bottom desk drawer when he was doing sit-down work, because however he adjusted its position on his belt it proved uncomfortable. Such a practice defied a regulation that was instituted in the early 1970s, a few years before Moody’s career began, to the effect that all police officers must be armed at all times, a militant-radical group composed of black male criminals and white girls from wealthy families having invaded a precinct station on the South Side and wounded two desk cops with a spray of automatic-weapon fire. But that had happened so long ago that the regulation was nowadays ignored by many. LeBeau usually wore a shoulder holster with an elaborate harness, of which, however, nothing was visible unless he took off his suit jacket, which seldom happened except on the very hottest days, when the window air conditioners failed.

  Dennis had strode ahead, and Moody had just begun to follow him when the phone rang.

  “Are you the detective wanted to speak to me? I’m Paul Bissonette.”

  “Hold on,” said Moody, then covered the mouthpiece with his hand while he shouted at LeBeau’s back. But Dennis did not hear him and kept going. Moody moved his hand. “I believe Detective LeBeau talked to you yesterday morning, Mr. Bissonette. I was surprised when you left town later on.”

  “Wasn’t I supposed to?”

  “Let me ask you something, sir: where are you calling from?”

  “I’m in Miami.”

  “Miami, Florida?”

  “For a regional meeting.”

  “That’s your firm? Lawrence Howland, was he supposed to go to this meeting?”

  “No,” said Bissonette. “Not Larry. This is on the managerial level.” He had the kind of matter-of-fact voice that Moody once would have believed unlikely for a homosexual to produce, but it had got so in recent years that you were sure only that a man who spoke effeminately was almost certain to be straight.

  “Would you call Larry Howland a friend of yours?”

  “He works for me. I don’t see him socially.”

&nb
sp; “You don’t have him out to your house?”

  “Not for dinner or anything. He may have brought me some papers when I was sick. But I don’t remember even that. I think that was Reynolds.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bob Reynolds, somebody else on my staff.” Bissonette was silent for a moment. “No…”

  “Did you ever meet his wife?”

  “Aw, God,” Bissonette moaned. “What a terrible thing! And the little girl, too…. I can’t remember ever meeting his wife. I don’t fraternize much with my people, and we don’t have office picnics or whatnot. The national office discourages that sort of thing. We feel we make up for it with nice bonuses for anybody who produces.”

  “How is Howland at his work? It’s sales, right?”

  “About average. Maybe a little under.”

  “He wouldn’t know your family?”

  “I’ve just got a wife,” Bissonette said. “Unless you mean my parents, who are both alive, and I’ve got an older brother, and a sister—”

  “I meant your wife,” said Moody, who saw Daisy O’Connor enter the room and waved at her.

  “Now, there again I’d say not likely. She rarely comes to the office.”

  “Uh-huh. Listen, Mr. Bissonette, we’ll want to take a look at Howland’s files, his business papers, if they’re at your office. Would you mind letting your people know, giving them a call?”

  Bissonette’s voice acquired a stubborn note. “It’s not my decision to make, Detective. It’s head-office policy to keep all files confidential.”

  “This is a criminal investigation, Mr. Bissonette. We can get a court order for anything we need.”

  “I’d lose my job if I handed over the files just like that.”

  “Worse can happen if you defy the law,” said Moody.

  “I didn’t say I would disobey the law. What I said was I could not grant your request. Of course I’ll obey a search warrant.”

  Moody was annoyed with this man. He asked harshly, “When you coming back here?”