Suspects

by Thomas Berger

  “Do you mind?” Lloyd asked the detectives. “Can I just go see what he wants?”

  Moody gestured with his left hand. “Why not?” LeBeau turned his head away in apparent disgust.

  Joe was standing in the doorway when Lloyd reached him. “Is that a car back there?” His van was blocking most of it from view. “Somebody to see me?”

  Lloyd had neglected to ask Molly what she had told Joe of his problems. “They’re some guys I know,” he said, which was strictly true.

  “Oh, sure. Go on back. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

  “That’s okay. They’ll wait. Did you want something else?”

  “Your room okay?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “It’s not much,” said Joe. “The whole place needs work, I know that, but I just can’t seem to find time for it.”

  “Maybe I can do something,” Lloyd brightly offered. “Maybe I could finish painting the front room.”

  Joe’s mouth was thin-lipped but broad. He used all of it now in a full smile. “Hey, that’s an idea.”

  “I’ll start in on it as soon as I get finished with these guys.”

  “Swell.”

  Lloyd returned to the car and appealed to Moody. “Since I’m ready to take my punishment for what I did, can’t you just let it go at that, without involving anybody else?”

  LeBeau asked eagerly, “You’re admitting you killed your sister-in-law and niece?”

  “Why don’t you just stop asking that?” Lloyd said. “You know I’m talking about having the gun.”

  “Where’d you get it, Lloyd?” This was from Moody.

  “I stole it.”

  “What became of the knife you threatened the produce manager with?” asked LeBeau.

  “What’s the use of talking to you?” Lloyd said. “You don’t listen to anything.”

  “What do you suppose happened to that utility knife?” Moody asked.

  “Some cops took it away from me.”

  “Cops?” LeBeau shouted. “What cops? What are you trying to pull?”

  Moody’s face was close to the front seat. “Now we’re interested,” he said. “Tell us what you mean, Lloyd.”

  Lloyd told them about the aborted shoplifting of the rubber duck.

  Even Moody now seemed irritated. “Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

  “I didn’t think of it! They didn’t arrest me. They let me go. The manager didn’t press charges, so I thought the whole thing was over. It didn’t seem important enough to tell you about.”

  “Lloyd,” said Moody, his face still there, “you let us decide what’s important. Now try real hard to remember anything else that happened to you that you haven’t told us about.”

  “Was the knife in your pocket when you went to see Donna?” LeBeau asked with a sneer.

  Lloyd kept telling himself the detective was only doing a job, but it was hard to keep from disliking him. “You can keep that up as long as you want, but I already told you everything I know.” He saw no point in revealing his theft of the bottle from the liquor store. Policemen desperate to make an arrest could not be trusted to make fine discriminations. “If I remember anything else, I’ll be in touch.”

  Moody patted him on the shoulder, but it was not a friendly gesture. “Oh, we won’t be far away, Lloyd. You want us any time, just turn your head and look.” Both detectives had taken out their notebooks. Moody said, “Let’s go over the shoplifting incident again.”

  * * *

  In their tracking of the utility knife, which for them took precedence over all else at the moment—the search of the dump was postponed—the detectives soon determined that the patrolmen who had made the confiscation were Marevitch and the late Art McCall, but neither had turned the knife in at their precinct.

  “Lot of coincidences,” LeBeau said at the wheel as they went looking for the car, which was back on patrol with a new team. “Same two officers: first at the Howland crime scene, then this business with Lloyd, then McCall is killed.”

  “You get coincidences now and again,” Moody said from his wealth of experience. “Guy was a contract killer for the mob. He did something they would never ordinarily do: took a diamond ring off a guy he whacked. You know those pinky rings they all wear? This hit man goes on to the track. He has enough sense not to wear the ring at a place like that, where he might run into somebody who knew the victim, who was another wiseguy, needless to say, so he takes it off and puts it in his pocket—where a pickpocket lifts it off him, takes it to a fence, a fence who’s also used by the mob and knows a couple brothers, soldiers in the DeCorsia family, one of them wears a pinky ring and the other’s been looking for a match to it, and you know the type: it wouldn’t occur to them to go to a legit jeweler and have him copy the piece. So when the surviving brother sees the ring, he doesn’t yet know his brother’s got whacked, so he buys it off the fence and puts it on his pinky.” Moody stopped, remembering way back. “Bill O’Connor was my partner at the time.”

  “So,” Dennis asked, eyes on the road, accelerating. “What happened?”

  Moody shrugged. “It’s an example of coincidences.”

  “Well, don’t leave it hanging,” said LeBeau. “Did the mob guy go ballistic when he found out about his brother?”

  “Yeah, he—Hey, there they are.” He pointed at a black-and-white patrol car that was slowly turning a right-hand corner in the next block.

  LeBeau caught up with the unit halfway down the residential street and beeped. The cars stopped in tandem. Moody got out and went to the passenger’s side of the marked vehicle, flashing his shield.

  He spoke to the officer riding shotgun, a heavyset sergeant wearing a sandy brush mustache. “Your precinct says this is the unit Marevitch and McCall used?”

  The sergeant looked apprehensive. “Yeah, it was.”

  “We’re looking for a blade those officers might have taken off a subject. One of those utility knives, you know? They didn’t turn it in, because he wasn’t charged, I guess. Could you take a look and see if they left it in the car someplace?”

  “Can we just pull up there?” the sergeant asked. He gestured at an open length of curb, up the block.

  Moody walked to where the unit came to rest. Both the uniformed officers got out, and he saw that the driver was a large black woman. She was huskier than he and taller than either he or the sergeant. As with all the female officers Moody had ever seen, her uniform had knife-edge creases and her cap was squared away; and her posture, at least when around male colleagues, was as if on parade. The sergeant, on the other hand, was nearing slobdom, with a slack necktie knot and a spongy gut that overhung his pistol belt. The former regulation against excess weight had been abandoned as a consequence of a suit brought against the department by a fat patrolman at the prompting of the usual civil-liberties activists who did what they could to frustrate law enforcement.

  “Sir,” the black officer asked Moody, “did you want me to do the search or did you want to do it yourself?”

  “You’ll do a good job,” he told her. “A movable-blade utility knife.”

  “I know what one is,” said she. She inserted her large upper body into the car, her substantial navy-blue rear sticking into the street.

  The sergeant did not offer to join the search. He planted himself heavily in place on the sidewalk and said, “Checking her out in the unit for a couple days. She’s fresh from the Academy.”

  “Looks like she could handle the perps,” Moody said, watching the husky woman in her careful search of her side of the interior of the car, which involved moving the driver’s seat forward from the position in which she had put it to accommodate her length of leg.

  “Did you know Art McCall?”

  “No,” Moody told him. “But I’ve known Jack Marevitch for years.”

  The sergeant smiled. He pushed his epauletted shoulder, with its attached radio, toward the curb. “She’s his new partner.”

  “She is?”

>   “He’s on leave for a few days.”

  The big officer left her side of the car and came around to open the door that the sergeant had closed on climbing out. She glanced at Moody as he stepped aside, and he nodded genially at her.

  “You know Warren Payton?” asked the sergeant, whose name-plate, above the left pocket, read STOCKMEYER. “Worked with him last year on that torso homicide. One of my men found the canister.”

  “Yeah. He’s in the squad.”

  The towering rookie pushed herself from the car and triumphantly held an object in the air. It was a utility knife.

  After a glance at her nameplate, Moody said, “Good job, Ravens-wood. I hear you’re going to be Marevitch’s partner. He’s a good man. Look after him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Moody had both Sergeant Stockmeyer and Officer Ravenswood sign a receipt for the knife. The latter’s first name was Felicia. He returned to his car, waving his acquisition at LeBeau. When he was inside, he found a plastic bag in the glove compartment and put the knife therein.

  The detectives decided to show the tool/weapon to Larry Howland, and Moody called him and said that if he wanted to get into 1143 Laurel the time was now.

  They waited in the car for his arrival, parked in front of the Keller house. The yellow tape still discouraged the use of the sidewalk before the Howland residence. Larry showed up within twenty minutes of the phone call. When he started to climb out of his car, Moody gestured him back inside and went to join him.

  “Ever seen this before?” He displayed the sealed bag.

  “What is that?”

  Moody sniffed. “You don’t recognize it?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  “You’ve never seen one of these?”

  “What is it?”

  “It may have belonged to Lloyd. Did you ever see it in his possession?”

  “I don’t think so,” Larry said, blinking.

  “You never owned it yourself?”

  Howland shook his big head. “I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

  “It’s a knife,” said Moody, tapping the plastic bag. “The blade’s inside right now. You release it by unscrewing the screw. When the blade’s out as far as you want—you got your choice as to the length—you tighten the screw to lock it in place. Or am I just telling you what you know already? No? You wouldn’t know anybody who had such a knife?”

  “I wouldn’t even know it was a knife unless the blade was showing. I’m not handy with tools. It was Donna who’d fix things that broke, or she’d try anyway. I never saw her with a knife like that.”

  Moody shrugged and inserted the plastic bag into a coat pocket. He left the car, carefully treading across the grassy strip so as to avoid two piles of dog droppings, one fresh, one old and crumbling. Larry came around to join him. Moody lifted the yellow police tape and ducked under, whereas Howland, with his long legs, found a sagging portion and stepped over it.

  LeBeau was waiting for them up the driveway. He now went to the back door and knocked to summon the uniformed officer guarding the premises.

  “Carmody,” said Moody, reading the name on the plate over the officer’s pocket. When they were all inside, he told Howland, “Okay, get your stuff.”

  Larry led them to the door of the bedroom in which his wife had been murdered, but he halted suddenly on the very threshold and turned back so abruptly that he almost collided with LeBeau. “I can’t do it. I can’t go in there. I thought I could but I can’t.” Nothing in his expression revealed the emotion that his actions suggested he was feeling, but that was a valid reason to believe it genuine. He appealed to Moody. “Could you get me a few items?”

  But Moody was cold to the request. “You wanted to do this, so do it.” Moody could still smell the blood, though the mattress, the box spring, and the bedside rug had been taken away and the floor wiped. The pale dust of fingerprint powder remained on many surfaces, though it was not conspicuous on the off-white woodwork.

  Howland took a deep breath and entered the room in a brisk manner that could have been a simulation of decisiveness. He pointed to the sliding doors of the clothes closet that extended across the entire south wall. “Can I go in there?”

  LeBeau slid open one panel and made the be-my-guest gesture of spread hands. Howland began to move rustling garments on their hangers along the horizontal rod. “Donna’s stuff is all mixed in with mine,” he said in a tone more wondering than complaining. “I guess you looked in here.”

  Neither detective made a response. Moody was standing at the foot of the empty bedframe.

  Larry brought out a gray suit. He held its hanger high, at arm’s length, for his own appraisal, then moved as if he was about to lay it on the bed while he made more choices. It was apparently only now that he discovered that the bed had no horizontal surface. He gazed helplessly at Moody, who stepped aside. “This is what I should have worn at the funeral, but I didn’t have it.…”

  Moody had had enough of Howland, and he went out to the kitchen, where Carmody was seated at the table. He pointed east, asking, “Does the old lady come over and bother you a lot?”

  “Not on my shift,” said the patrolman, sagging his chin.

  “She’s the neighbor.”

  “I never saw her,” said Carmody, unwrapping his thick fingers from the mug-top of the thermos he had brought along. “But the old guy on the other side”—pointing—“he seems to be looking out the window every time I get here, and also when I leave.”

  “Keller. He’s got a lot of time on his hands. I guess he’s figured out when the shift changes.”

  Howland emerged from the master bedroom, arms full of clothes, in a lumbering stride. LeBeau was just behind him.

  “Got everything you want?” Moody asked him. “Because we can’t keep doing this.”

  Howland now turned testy. “I’m going to seek legal means to get my house back for me. You’ve had it long enough. It’s not fair.” When the detectives escorted him outside, he bobbed his head at the empty driveway and asked peevishly, “When can I get my own car back? How long are you going to keep it? Renting costs a fortune. Why do I have to pay for all this? I’m the one who lost my family.” In his sudden agitation of the armload of clothing he carried, a pair of balled socks, riding unrestrained on top of the pile, fell to earth and rolled to the edge of the asphalted driveway.

  As they walked down the driveway, Moody looked up and saw Keller at the window. The old man first shied away, letting the curtains swing together, but immediately he parted them again, smiled broadly, and showed an affirmative thumb-up to Moody.

  16

  Moody was at Walsh’s, alone at the bar, but tonight had only nursed a beer for a good fifteen minutes while conversing with Sal Borelli, and now was using the second mug to wash down the first real meal he had eaten in several days, a plateful of brisket with onion gravy, carrots, mashed potatoes, cole slaw on the side. It was not unprecedented for him to go off the hard stuff on occasion, but during the last year or so the intervals between the occasions had grown ever longer. What ruled him this evening was a determination that if Daisy O’Connor showed up again tonight he would not be in the weakened condition in which she had found him here last time.

  “Now you’re talkin’,” Borelli said as the plate of food was hand-delivered by Howie Hersh.

  Hersh rested one heavy hand on Moody’s shoulder as he leaned in to deposit the dish in place. “I hope they’re gonna get serious now an officer’s been hit.”

  The liquor-store gang had begun as primarily the responsibility of the robbery squad, with Homicide assisting since the first clerk had been killed some months earlier, but Moody’s allegiance embraced all cops on active duty, even when the criticism came from a former colleague.

  “They’ve been on it,” he told Hersh. “What they need is one good break. These bandits do their homework; they don’t just pick any store. They pick those with good escape routes, and they pick times when there aren’t many customers
for that particular store. The times differ, depending on the area. There hasn’t been one real description. They wear masks and gloves, so nobody even can be sure of their race. Nobody’s lived who heard them talk, for Christ’s sake. So far they’ve killed everybody in every store they’ve taken.”

  “How you and Dennis doin’?” Borelli asked, rattling within the ice-cube bin below the bartop.

  “Tell you soon, maybe.” Moody swirled his mug, foaming the two inches of beer.

  “So book the husband and be done with it.” Borelli was still doing something with both hands plunged into the ice: maybe looking for some object he dropped in.

  “I only wish!” Moody told him. “He gets on my nerves. You remember how that goes.”

  “Tell you this, though, Nicky,” Hersh said behind him, touching his shoulder again, “you want nerves, you run a bar. You tell him, Sal. The regulations, the insurance, the taxes: they drive you nuts.”

  “Now you’re disillusioning me,” Moody said, stepping down from the stool. He stayed to swallow the rest of the beer and smack his lips with greater satisfaction than he felt. “Good brewski. I should stick to it. … Going to make an early night of it. Funeral’s in the morning. I don’t want to show up all hung over.” He paid his tab with Borelli, winked good-bye to Howie Hersh, went back to the wall-hung phone between the restrooms, and called Dennis’ home number.

  Crystal answered, in her optimist tone. “He went over the Jackson Mall, Nick. Hardware Is Us got a sale on power mowers. Denny doesn’t like the sound of the motor in ours. Listen, he’s due back any minute now, and I’ve been holding dinner. Whyn’t you come over and get a good meal inside you for a change? Chicken-in-the-pot, hot gingerbread and, unless you’re watching your weight like me, real whipped cream.”

  “Kid, you got the same figure you had when cheerleading,” Moody said. “But now you tell me. I just ate.”

  “I only wish that was true. You live on junk food and your girls are always sluts. You’re an awful man, Nicholas. Why do I care about you?”

  “It’s the wardrobe.” She sounded a contralto chuckle, and they exchanged more chaff before he had to depress her by stating the reason for his call. “I forgot to check with Dennis if he’s going to the patrolman’s funeral Monday morning. Do you know?” Crystal did, and Dennis was. Moody then said he’d pick him up. “Crazy about you, kid,” he told her, and she uttered a reciprocal sentiment, along with still another invitation. “Thanks for the great sandwich the other night,” he remembered to add. “Next time I come for a meal, I’m bringing the steak. Your old man can grill it, but I’m buying.” She wouldn’t let him take them out for a meal, because little Bridget was a pain in the neck in a restaurant and Crys could not find a baby-sitter she would trust.