Suspects

by Thomas Berger

  Moody drove home and parked his car in the basement garage. He left the elevator at the fourth floor and walked to the adjacent east wing, in which his door was first on the left. He found his key ring and opened both locks. The living room was dark, but light shone from the entrance to the bedroom, off the shallow hall. His weapon was in his hand as he stepped across the threshold. He never forgot to throw a switch when leaving. Anyway, the sun rose before he did in this season, and the bedroom window looked east. He had not needed electric light that morning.

  He kept quietly to the carpet, avoiding the obstacles in the darkened living room. He had reached the top of the hallway before he heard a sound, and then it was a slight rasp of labored breathing. He lifted the .38 and quickly stepped into the open doorway.

  On Moody’s bed a naked man with a hairy behind was violently thrusting himself between the legs of a nude woman, whose face under the tousled short blond hair, eyes squeezed shut, nostrils flaring, pink mouth gasping like that of a beached fish, could, despite the distortion of feature and the incongruous venue, be recognized as Daisy O’Connor’s. It took him another moment to identify the man servicing her as Dennis LeBeau, for though Moody had showered alongside his partner, he had never seen him from the rear at such an angle.

  “Oh, Christ.” It was Daisy, her bright blue eyes wide open now.

  What immediately occurred to Moody, absurdly, was how her father, his first partner, would threaten to slap her face when as a child she used the Lord’s name in vain. He holstered his gun and left the room.

  He was in the kitchenette, rinsing out a dirty glass, when Dennis arrived, wearing the striped boxer shorts his wife bought when there was a sale at Jones & Jones, the expensive menswear shop on Main, and punching into a V-necked T-shirt, so white it seemed fluorescent.

  The glass slipped from Moody’s wet hand and fell into the sink and did not break, but he seized the rye bottle by the neck and drank straight from it.

  LeBeau said nothing, just stood there in his underwear, frowning with exaggerated eyebrows.

  Moody swallowed slowly so that his throat would not be overwhelmed.

  At last Dennis said, “I should have checked at Walsh’s. But I was so damn sure you’d be there all evening.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Moody took another pull on the bottle. “That’s why I gave you a key: so you could bring pussy here at your convenience.”

  “Come on! You’re out of order.” LeBeau’s jaw was thrust forward, but Moody knew this was bluster.

  “Come on yourself, partner.”

  “You got it wrong, Nick,” LeBeau said. “I was going to tell you, I swear.” He had already abandoned his show of pride, but Moody was not pleased by the surrender.

  “Have a drink,” he said falsely, waving the bottle at LeBeau but not offering it to him.

  Dennis waved a hand, whatever that was supposed to mean.

  “No?” Moody cried. “Then get dressed and get out. I want some privacy.”

  “I interrogated Lloyd Howland for a good hour,” LeBeau said. “In case you think I came here instead.” He gritted his teeth in an odd way. “In fact, we just arrived.”

  “Oh, forgive me,” Moody moaned. “Then go back and finish. I’ll be so quiet you’ll never know I’m on the premises.”

  “Gimme a break, Nick.”

  Daisy came around the corner. She was fully dressed in civilian shirt and jeans, but her hair could have used more combing. She began, “Nick—”

  “Good-bye,” said Moody.

  “Nick, don’t be that way.”

  “Just leave.” Moody turned a shoulder to her.

  “Come on,” said LeBeau, but Daisy pulled her forearm away before he could touch it.

  “You’re going to hear me out,” she cried savagely to Moody. When Dennis asked her again to come along, she said angrily, “You go. I’ll do better on my own.”

  LeBeau now displayed sheepishness toward both of them. Daisy was not looking at him, so he shook his head at her back. He trudged toward the bedroom, presumably to find the rest of his clothes.

  “How about a drink?” Daisy asked irritably.

  “Get a glass,” Moody said, taking the bottle with him to the coffee table in the adjoining living room. He dropped himself into the worn armchair that had been one of the few items of furniture he could claim as his own in the last divorce. Its stained upholstery was concealed under an elasticized pink coverlet generically sized, slightly too large for the piece: the gift of one of the few women he had brought home more than once.

  By the time Daisy had indeed found a glass and washed it thoroughly and then asked where the clean dish towels were and he said no place, and she went next door to the bathroom and came out, drying the tumbler with a ball of toilet paper, LeBeau was emerging from the bedroom, in his sports jacket and wearing a badly knotted necktie. With a feeble wave at Moody but without a word or gesture for Daisy, he left the apartment, closing the door as if it were a delicate object.

  Moody did not offer the bottle to Daisy, so she helped herself. When she leaned over the coffee table just beyond his knees, he smelled her perfume and found it nauseating. But with her small gold earrings, the scent was her only specifically feminine touch. Otherwise it was jeans, the button-down oxford shirt, the white running shoes. She unscrewed the cap, wiped off the mouth of the bottle with the heel of her hand, and poured herself a good three fingers. So she was a boozer as well as a slut.

  Moody glared at her. “Where’s your weapon?” Even when off duty, all police officers were required by the department to carry a gun unless they were inside on their own premises.

  Daisy dropped to the couch and pulled up the right leg of her jeans, having some trouble owing to its narrow taper. Then she rolled down the thick-knit top of the white athletic sock, revealing a small ankle holster that held a diminutive automatic pistol.

  He sneered. “What’s that, a twenty-five? And by the time you got to it…” He leaned across and brought back the bottle from where she left it, near her side of the table, though he was not yet ready for another drink now that she had joined him. He wanted to do nothing in common with her.

  Daisy took no notice of his gesture. She sipped some whiskey while breathing deeply. She had her mother’s blue eyes and the short, not quite pug nose of her father. She had been a cute little girl, with many freckles that by now had vanished. She was attractive in the way you would like a daughter to be. Any connection between her and sex was too repugnant for Moody to consider.

  She began defiantly. “I could say it’s none of your damn business, Nick. You’re not my father, and anyway I’m well beyond the age of consent—let me finish! I know it’s your apartment, but…” She put down the glass she had thus far only tasted and put her hands before her. “I know, I know, he’s your partner and that makes it different and—”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Moody said. “He’s a married man with a family. He doesn’t get enough time as it is to spend at home with his wife and kids, and—”

  She wailed, “I know, I know!”

  “You don’t know anything at all,” said Moody. “You think you know, but you don’t.”

  She lowered her dropping hands and went back to resentment. “You should talk. What about your wives and families?”

  “I lost them,” he said. “I lost them just this way.”

  “Not this way,” Daisy cried. “We’re in love. I know you can’t conceive of anything between two people but sex, but it’s not like that with us.”

  He shook his head. “You dumb kid. You’re saying that guy who just ran home, with his tail between his legs, to eat the dinner his wife’s waiting to heat up in the microwave, you’re saying that’s a man crazy in love? You’re saying that guy who’ll check first to see if his kids are tucked in, that guy who’ll later put on the outside lights to see how his lawn is coming along—”

  “You ask him,” Daisy cried. “You just ask him if he’s in love. You’ll see. You’re talkin
g about what he has to do to be a responsible person. I love that about him. I want him to be that way. I certainly wouldn’t marry him if he wasn’t.”

  “Marry him?” Moody disdainfully blew air from his mouth and looked ceilingward.

  Her eyebrows were proudly lifted. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, if you’ll only listen. This is not some dirty, sneaky business. It might look that way at this point. But it’s not.”

  “Hell it’s not,” Moody shouted back. “You’re too dumb to see it’s the love that makes it dirty and sneaky. I’m not going to say so-called love, or what you think is love but isn’t, is only infatuation or what-have-you. No, I accept it as love. Remember, I’m an authority on the subject. I won’t say I fell in love with every woman I went to bed with, but I did with too many of them, and that was my problem. Sex in itself doesn’t mean that much, at least not to a man. But since he’s been my partner I’ve never seen Dennis much attracted in a sexual way to any woman we’ve run across, and you know most of the married guys on the squad get it on the side, if not from regular girlfriends or one-night stands, then freebies from hookers. Sex is easily available for cops: most of them think it’s part of the remuneration, like discounts at stores and free meals.” He would never use her dad, his first partner, as an example, but he could have; yet there had never been a better husband and father.

  Daisy’s lower lip was extended, reminding him more than ever of the little girl she had been. “Yeah, well, that’s them, that’s you. That’s not Dennis: you admit it isn’t. He doesn’t fool around. He doesn’t have to prove he’s a man.”

  “Are you listening to anything I say?” Moody asked. “I just said he wasn’t, didn’t I? And what I’m saying is: I wish he was. He ought to be. It’s normal. And what’s wrong with you is you’re not a whore, you’re a stupid kid and you don’t know what you’re doing. You ruin that marriage of his and I’ll never forgive you as long as I live.” He was aware that it was not much of a threat: since the age of puberty she had shown no interest in having his approval in any regard, not even—and that hurt him—when she was in the Academy. But at least it was a statement from his heart.

  She astonished him with quite another response than he expected. “Believe me, I feel awful about that. I lie awake nights. I wish I had the answer.” She smiled sadly. “Fact is”—a habitual phrase of her father’s, from whom Moody had picked it up years before—“fact is, I was trying to work up the courage to come ask you for advice.”

  He could not remember another occasion on which he was at once so appalled and yet so flattered. For a moment he lost his sense of outrage. But it returned soon enough. “If you’re serious, then I’ll give you my advice. It’s simple enough. Just stop what you’re doing. Knock it off with Dennis. Tell him to get lost, and go find yourself a single man. Don’t try to break up his marriage. And look, I’m speaking just as much for your interests as I am for his wife and kids’, because, between you and me, I don’t think you can break it up, which means you’ll be the one out in the cold. Either you’ll get dumped eventually or, worse, you’ll hang on with false hopes. You’ll be the one spends Christmas alone. He’ll keep on making more children.” From her expression he saw he was hitting the mark. It was cruel but no more than the truth.

  She finally took a real swallow of the whiskey. Over the glass, which she held just below her lips, she said, “I should have known better.”

  “Yeah,” Moody made the mistake of saying, “you should have.”

  “Asking you for advice, I mean,” Daisy cried, lowering the glass so forcefully that some of the liquid splashed onto the top of the coffee table. “I should have known what you’d say. The great authority on love! With the experience to prove it.”

  Moody became bitter again. “But my bedroom sure comes in handy.”

  Daisy had brought along the wad of toilet tissue she had used to dry the glass. She now used it to sponge up the spill of whiskey. Then she asked, in a resentful tone, “Why does he have a key?”

  “He’s my partner,” Moody said soberly. “If I drink too much some night and fall down and hit my head on something, he’s the only one would come looking for me. But it’s also a place for him to catch up on his sleep when the baby’s screaming all day and night at home, or have a quiet beer and watch a game if that leech of a brother-in-law comes visiting. He can’t stand anybody in Crystal’s family, for that matter. This is his hideout.”

  “That’s all okay, but you object that he sees me here.”

  Moody looked at the dirty, curtainless window behind her head. “Does what you just said make any sense?” He lowered his eyes to her. “You’re putting those things on the same plane? I offer my partner a place to catch a nap or whatever, to make himself at home—you’re saying I should cheer him on when he goes to bed with you?” He sneered. “When you came around the bureau the other day: that wasn’t to apologize to me, was it? You came to return his glasses. He left them behind last time he was with you. But you two would have left together if you had been here. So where’d he leave the glasses, in your car? Where you parked somewhere? Don’t you have any decency at all? What in hell has happened to you?” Tears were welling from her eyes. Maybe he had gone too far.

  She sprang to her feet. “I should have known better. You can always be counted on to let me down.”

  He too stood up. “What does that mean?”

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead here again,” she said in a voice that though of moderate volume had the intensity of a scream. “And from now on, it’s only professional between you and me.”

  “That’s what it ought to be between you and Dennis. Your superiors will be all over you if they find out.”

  “You going to tell them?” Rage altered her features: he might not have recognized her on a photograph taken at this moment. “You son of a bitch.”

  “That’s enough,” Moody said quietly. “Get out of here.”

  “Gladly,” Daisy said. “Soon as I get my linen.”

  “What?”

  She had already started toward the bedroom. Without turning she shouted, “Our sheets. Think we’d use those filthy things of yours?”

  * * *

  Joe made a tasty supper, crumbling hamburger into a skillet and adding a block of frozen mixed vegetables and, once the latter had thawed and the meat lost its pinkness, a couple of shots from a chili-sauce bottle.

  “This is really good,” Lloyd told him at the kitchen table, where they were eating off plates of porcelainized metal spatter-colored in blue and white.

  Joe chewed until he could swallow the food in his mouth. “I guess it’s healthy,” he said at length. “Though all the flavor comes from the chili sauce, I guess.… How about the plates? Molly give ‘em to me. I generally ate right out of the pot or even the can. Her and my uncle Bob used them camping, I guess, and then came his accident and they don’t go any more. Anyway, she brought ‘em over here.” He gave Lloyd a defensive glance. “She’s always getting after me to clean up my act.” He went for bread from an almost exhausted loaf, penetrating the deflated package up to mid-forearm. He withdrew and held up the piece. “You want this? There’s only the heel left.”

  “No, thanks,” Lloyd said. “I still have some.”

  “You’re doing a good job in the living room. God knows when I would of got around to it.”

  “I’ll get going on the second coat after supper.”

  “Well, it might feel dry,” Joe said now, with the surer fix of eye he employed when speaking professionally, “but it’s best to give it overnight at least, especially with this humidity.” He picked up his empty plate, which he had polished to a high sheen with bread. “That reminds me, I got some lumber I wanna bring in the shop before it rains.”

  “It’s going to rain?” The afternoon had been unconditionally sunny, so far as Lloyd had been able to see through the living-room windows.

  Joe showed his extra-white front teeth in his version of a grin. “I always get old
Molly with my weather predictions. I don’t take ‘em from the TV. I get ‘em from the feel of the wood. She don’t believe me that if you work with wood all the time like me, you can feel the moisture content. But you can.” He took his gleaming plate to the sink and ran hot water across it. He turned, still grinning in the chipmunk manner. “But I’ll admit I ain’t always right. Just because there’s a lot of moisture in the air don’t necessarily mean it’ll rain.”

  Lloyd carried over his own plate. “Let me clean up here and then I’ll be out to give you a hand.”

  The dishwashing was soon completed, involving as it did only one skillet, two plates, two forks, a spoon, and one ceramic mug and another of plastic. There was a crumb or two on the table and a few on the floor. In a closet Lloyd found an old broom, its head slanted from use, and a cracked plastic dustpan. He was about to put them to work when a telephone rang.

  By the time he located the instrument, on the wall beyond the refrigerator, the ringing had stopped. But a moment later he heard a shout outside and went to the door. Joe was waving from the entrance to the shop.

  “Pick it up! She wants to talk to you.”

  Lloyd returned to the kitchen extension. Molly was on the line. “So how’s it goin’?”

  “Okay. Fine.” He heard the sound as Joe hung up the workshop phone. “Your cousin’s a nice guy.”

  “He feed you?”

  Lloyd told her about the supper, and when she groaned in mock pain, he protested, “No, it was really good!”