Suspects

by Thomas Berger

  “I brought the only one I saw.”

  “It’s in the black binder, for God’s sake. I use the tin cover only for the current jobs.” He turned to Moody. “You guys don’t have any idea what you’re doin’. You’re just wastin’ my time.”

  LeBeau went down to the van to fetch the binder.

  Moody decided to ingratiate himself with the plumber. “Thanks a lot, Marty. How about a cup of coffee while we wait?”

  Marty’s mood had changed. He looked suddenly as if he were about to cringe. “I think I should tell you something just to get it out of the way.” He pressed his dirty thumbs together. “You might find out about it on your own, and it wouldn’t look good, so I’m telling you. Some woman back three, four years ago didn’t want to pay her bill, and said she was going to file a complaint against me for exposing myself to her daughter. This kid was fourteen years old. She wasn’t even home when I did the work! But what could I do? Who would of believed me if she got together with the kid?”

  “So you made a deal,” said Moody.

  Marty nodded. “And this woman had a lot of money, big house out on Worthington! I offered twenty percent off, and she bought it.” He punched the air. “She was the kind who would of taken a deal even if I did what she said.”

  “Did you, Marty?”

  “I’m telling you I didn’t, ain’t I? You wouldn’t know about it otherwise.”

  “Yeah, that’s what puzzles me,” Moody said. “Why are you mentioning it now? She took the deal.”

  “I’m just covering my ass in case she welshed. People can be rotten. You don’t know what they might do. What if it gets around that you’re talking to me now?”

  “You mean she hears about it and decides to tell us about the incident you referred to? Three, four years later?”

  Marty grinned bitterly. “I got her back, see. I screwed up the dishwasher before I left. That’s why I was there, to repair it, see. I ran it through a speeded-up cycle while I wrote up the adjusted bill. I had time to do a dirty little job on it.”

  Moody was silent for a moment and then without warning he said, “Marty, you oughta know that we’ve got eyewitnesses who place you at the Howland home around three P.M. on Tuesday.”

  Marty’s mouth twitched soundlessly for an instant. “That’s what this is all about? You finally tell me?”

  “I thought we’d take a while to get to know one another first,” Moody said. “So whadduh you got to say?”

  “It’s a dirty lie is what I say. Those people are lying or they’re nuts. What was I supposed to be doing there?”

  “Pulling out of the driveway in your van.”

  “Which my name’s written all over. That makes sense, don’t it?”

  “Yeah, if you acted on impulse, if you did the killing and panicked and had to get away fast.”

  The plumber was violently shaking his head, perhaps not so much in negation as to clear it. “I don’t know, you just work all the time to make a living, and you get into something like this, somebody can say anything they want, and you’re hauled off to jail…”

  “You’re not in jail, Marty,” Moody said almost genially. “You’re just giving us a hand here, like the good citizen you are. Now, you really haven’t answered the question. Were you or were you not at the Howland residence or property on the seventeenth?”

  The plumber made his back rigid. “I was not there. I never murdered anybody.”

  “Another little thing, Marty,” Moody said. “Give me the name of that woman you just told me about.”

  10

  Lloyd had the uncomfortable feeling that Molly had designs on him of a personal nature, that friendship would not be enough for her. She began to touch him at dinner, reaching for his hand to make a point, nudging him with her knee under the table. There was no graceful way to avoid her without possibly hurting her feelings, and he had a horror of doing that even to strangers, let alone a benefactor.

  Afterward, walking to the movie theater, she bumped him occasionally, and then she leaned lightly against him as he examined the posted film titles.

  “I don’t know about you,” she said. “But there are five pictures, and not one I would really like to see. But I’ll go along with your choice. What do you think, the vampire one?”

  Lloyd groaned.

  Molly squeezed his arm. “A killer sent from outer space to do a hit in present-day California?” She cocked her shining face at him. “Ever watch those old black-and-white movies from years ago, on TV? With ladies and gentlemen, all dressed up, hats and all? Course, I should talk. But then I don’t want to see myself after being me all day. I want to see somebody with class.” She touched shoulders with Lloyd.

  “I’ll tell you something you maybe won’t understand,” said he. “I still laugh out loud at those old cartoons. I mean the really silly ones, where the cat gets blown up with dynamite over and over again by the mouse, and houses fall on people. Well, not humans but cartoon animals, and a litde canary can lift an iron safe and drop it on its enemies, but nobody ever gets hurt in a permanent way. In the next scene they’re back to normal.”

  “You can only find that in a cartoon.”

  “Yeah,” Lloyd said ruefully. “I probably ought to get over it.”

  “Watching a cartoon isn’t going to hurt anybody.” Molly pulled him with one arm while pointing down the highway with the other. “See that motel sign? It says they got cable. Why don’t we go over there? I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t mind sleeping in a real bed tonight, with a private bathroom.” She raised her eyebrows. “There’ll probably be cartoons on TV.”

  “All right.” It was not as if he could have suggested an alternative.

  After they had checked in and inspected the room, which was luxurious by contrast with his recent accommodations, with a huge television set and what would seem to be twin double beds pushed together into one enormous soft surface, they fetched their overnight gear from the rig.

  As soon as Lloyd closed the door, Molly presented him with the TV remote. “I know I had that shower, but I’m going to take myself a bubble bath now.” Apparently she had already inspected the bathroom. “They give you a little complimentary bottle of it, along with a basketful of other stuff, shoe-shining cloths and sewing kits. When I pay these prices, I try to get my money’s worth.” She had dropped her duffel bag on the right-hand segment of the bed. She delved inside it now and found a toothbrush in a plastic container. “I didn’t expect to be spending the night under these conditions. All I got to sleep in is this extra shirt.” She displayed a rumpled workshirt of blue chambray.

  “That’s fine,” said he, sitting down at the foot of the left-hand bed, brandishing the remote.

  “Okay then. So I’ll be in the tub for a while: there’s no sense in doing it unless you get a good long soak. If you want to get a Coke or anything from the machine down the hall, the change is right here.” As Molly spoke she was transferring a handful of clattering coins from her jeans pocket to the top of the low, blond-finished piece of furniture that followed the wall for almost the length of the room. “If you do go for soda, just remember to take the key: door’s the kind that always locks when it shuts.”

  He smiled at her. “Enjoy your bubble bath. I’ll be fine.” He slipped off his shoes and propelled himself to the top of the bed with his stockinged heels. He pummeled the bolstered pillows into a cushion to support his neck against the headboard. He pointed the remote at the now distant television screen and began to manipulate the buttons at random, running through a series of pictures and alternating between sound and silence, in an exercise that provided satisfaction in the degree to which it was pointlessly compulsive, like thumb-twiddling or a child’s kicking the back of a theater seat.

  He was suddenly hallucinating. He could see nothing but Donna’s face. In desperation he closed his eyes. When he opened them the image was gone, but sweat continued to well from his forehead. He rolled onto a hip and groped for the handkerchief in his
back pocket. It should have been reassuring to hear water running behind the bathroom door, but instead he was terrified that Molly would come back for some forgotten item and find him in this condition, which was made worse by his inability to identify it. Was he simply insane?

  He sponged his forehead with the balled handkerchief and looked again at the television screen, on which a hand-held microphone was being thrust toward the face of an elderly man. There was no sound whatever. With his indiscriminate button-pushing, he had apparently pressed the mute.

  In the next moment the camera pulled back from a close focus on the man’s grave countenance to pan across a front yard and the driveway between it and the house at 1143 Laurel Avenue.

  * * *

  The two bodies had been released by the medical examiner, and a funeral was held as soon as possible thereafter, with no preceding wake. Moody and LeBeau observed the comings and goings of the mourners from a car parked across the street from the nondenomi-national chapel of the undertaking establishment, Dennis sipping decaf from a container garishly logoed by the fast-food place where they had lunched. Moody’s was filled with real coffee, but, dyspeptic, he drank little.

  Surveillance of those in attendance at the obsequies of a murder victim was standard operating procedure. Only a few persons came to the funeral of Donna and Amanda Howland, most of them neighbors from Laurel Avenue, for Donna was survived only by her ailing mother in the Indiana hospital, and apparently no one came from Larry’s side of the family, and nobody from his company, though several persons from the Glenn-Air firm, most with female names, had joined together in sending a floral piece, as did Mr. & Mrs. Paul Bissonette with a separate basket (the largest of all), though neither of the two appeared.

  It was Moody who checked the flowers at the mortuary, LeBeau having had an uncharacteristic problem with his automobile, which unlike Moody’s was always well maintained and furthermore had been purchased only two years before as the car named by a consumer poll as being the most reliable of the domestic models.

  When a child was murdered it was the unofficial policy of the men and women of the Homicide Bureau, even those not principally involved in the investigation, anonymously to drop contributions into a cardboard box thumbtacked to the bottom of the bulletin board near the captain’s office, and this money was used to send a floral piece to the funeral. In recent years the box had seen much traffic, what with children regularly slaughtered in the crossfire between gangs and those beaten to death by the boyfriends of their unwed mothers. Moody had shaken his head over the meager bouquet you got nowadays for forty dollars.

  “I didn’t expect many of the neighbors would show up,” he said now to his partner.

  “That’s something it took me a while to get used to,” said LeBeau. “How somebody loses a loved one in a violent crime and then is shunned by a lot of their friends and even relatives.”

  “Maybe some of the neighborhood thinks Larry did it.… They’re coming out now. … No, those guys work for the undertaker.… Here they come.… Who’s that?”

  LeBeau had his notebook out and turned to an earlier page. “I think that’s Manelli, Mr. and Mrs. T.J. They’re down at eleven twenty-five Laurel.” He looked up. “They told Brill they hardly knew the Howlands. I did the second interview. Mrs. Manelli said she wouldn’t even have recognized them if she had run into them away from the block.”

  “That’s the kind come to funerals, though,” said Moody. “The Kellers, right next door, stayed home.”

  “They had to give more media interviews, I guess.”

  “Now what’s the holdup?” No one else had yet emerged from the building. A modest-sized crowd was being kept back by uniformed officers. The television trucks were parked half a block away. Several shoulder-mounted cameras could be seen behind the police line.

  “Who’s that coming out now?” asked LeBeau.

  Moody squinted. The bronze-and-glass door had opened and a tall man strode out, but after only another step he turned and lingered. He looked in his early forties. He wore a snugly fitted double-breasted suit in navy blue and a very white shirt with a black tie. “I think that’s Mary Jane’s oldest son,” Moody said. “Yeah, and…there comes the old babe herself. Looks nice, doesn’t she?” He winked at his partner. “Your girlfriend.” Mary Jane was wearing a black hat and a black dress that made her seem taller than ever. She poked her arm under her son’s.

  “I guess that’s over now,” Dennis said. “She sure got mad when we brought Larry in for questioning.”

  “He’s a tall guy, but he’s not that much bigger than his mom,” Moody observed. The undertaker’s employees were serving as valet parking attendants, shuttling to and from a side lot. One of them now brought a long, low, sleek silver-gray car to the curb in front of Mrs. Jones and her son. “Look at that chariot, will you? What’s that? A Jaguar?”

  “It’s rented.” They knew that from the number on the plate.

  “Regal Rentals has got even higher-priced iron,” Moody said irreverently. “What do you suppose a Rolls costs for a day? But you wouldn’t want to drive a Rolls yourself: you’d want a chauffeur.”

  “Who is this guy?” LeBeau asked rhetorically, though they knew it was Mary Jane’s elder son, Alfred, a commodities trader in Chicago, who had been at the exchange in that city while the murders were being committed next door to his mother’s house: the detectives had by now checked out such matters with multitudinous phone calls. Her younger son, Duncan, a dermatologist, had been on vacation for a week in Hawaii, with his wife and six-year-old son. “Who’s that?’

  Moody identified the skinny bald man in the baggy brown suit. “He lives down at the corner of Locust. Harry McClintock.” McClintock was the owner of a deli over on Hillside, where he’d stayed all day on Tuesday, from five-thirty A.M. to nine in the evening. He was a widower.

  “There you’ve got another one hardly knew the Howlands, right?”

  “Donna traded with him a little, but you know deli prices are sky-high.”

  “How’d our flowers look?”

  “Cheap-ass,” Moody said. “We’d do better, now the weather’s warming up, to cut some real flowers from somebody’s garden…. Hey, who’s that little guy going in?”

  “Probably somebody works for the undertaker or making a delivery?”

  It took another second for Moody to notice an irregularity in the outline of the newcomer’s clothing. By that time the young man, moving briskly, had stepped through the doorway of the building.

  Shouting, “He’s carrying a piece,” Moody was out of the car before he reached the last word. LeBeau’s sprint proved faster. They converged on the entrance, Moody slightly behind, breathing heavily from the run. Each checked the position of his own pistol but neither drew it. They entered the mortuary in tandem.

  “May I help you, please?” An unctuous-faced man stepped from a doorway in the softly lighted hallway, dry-washing his plump hands. He was wearing a white carnation.

  “A kid, a young man just came in here,” Moody said. “Where’d he go?”

  “I didn’t see him,” said the undertaker’s man. “I was just in the bathr—”

  The detectives ran to look in the viewing rooms, one off the hallway on the right, another to the left. Both were empty of humanity dead or alive, but the floral pieces remained in the right-hand room. Moody recognized the pitiful little basket sent by the homicide squad.

  They trotted to the end of the hall. Moody turned and shouted at the carnation man, who had followed tentatively behind them.

  “How do you get out this way?”

  The man gestured fussily and came to join them. LeBeau flashed the gold shield at him.

  “Oh, gosh,” the functionary gasped. “Right through there.”

  The detectives went down a flight of stairs, opened another door, and were outside, at the edge of the asphalt parking lot. The hearse was drawn up at a big door farther along, and into it men were sliding the smaller casket.

 
; “Where in hell is he?” Moody cried. “Did we miss him inside someplace? They bring the coffins down by elevator, I think.”

  He went to look in the hearse while LeBeau questioned the undertaker’s people. When they were back together, Moody said, “I can’t find Larry, either. Come on!”

  They returned to the building at the run. Acting on instinct, Moody now at last drew his weapon. They began a systematic search of the rooms on the main floor. The second door they tried was that of a tiny lavatory, a facility apparently used by the public, as opposed to the one from which the carnation man had come.

  Larry Howland was there, backed against the wall in the space between the washbowl and the toilet stall, by the young man they had seen at the entrance of the building a minute or two earlier. The latter was pressing a large revolver against the midsection of Larry’s dark suit.

  Moody put the muzzle of his own short-barreled .38 an inch from the back of the man’s skull and identified it for him as a gun. “We’re police officers. Now, very carefully, you put your weapon into the washbasin. Don’t drop it. Just reach over and put it down real careful, so it won’t discharge.”

  The young man failed to comply. It was as though he had not heard the order. He was short and slender, scarcely more than a boy. He could easily have been lifted off his feet from behind, or knocked off balance, but if his finger was on the trigger (Moody could not, at the close-quarter angle, see), such moves would be too dangerous to attempt.

  Four men were crowded into a space that would have been uncomfortable for two, unless one remained in the stall. There was no urinal here. Was it a ladies’ room?

  “Come on, son,” Moody said. His heart was racing, but he simulated calm in his exterior self. “Give it up. You’re not getting anywhere.”

  Cowering against the wall, Larry was trying to speak. He finally succeeded in producing a sound between a whisper and a scream. “He’s crazy.”

  The young man with the gun stayed silent. LeBeau was half behind Moody, half to his side. Moody could feel the tension in his partner. “Look, son,” he said in his avuncular tone to the fair-haired crown just beyond and below his chin. “Put the gun in the washbasin. Nobody’s gotten shot yet. Let’s keep it that way.”