Suspects

by Thomas Berger

  “What thing?”

  “A bottle. Real thick glass.”

  “Like a perfume decanter?” asked LeBeau.

  “You tell me,” Keller said, appropriately this time. “I can show it to you.”

  “You kept it?”

  “Under the sink.” He pointed kitchenward, over his shoulder, then waggled the finger in front of him. “I just wanted to slow her down, for heaven’s sake. She was out of control. I didn’t know what else to do. She wouldn’t listen to anything I said.”

  LeBeau had been pacing, but he halted now. “The cutting—why did you do that?”

  “Yeah.” Keller’s eyes showed a pain that was probably real enough to him, because its object was wholly himself. “I should probably not of done that, though it didn’t matter to her by then. When I saw she was dead—I couldn’t see any breathing, anyway—I knew I’d get blamed if anybody found out I was over there. Like the nosy old Jones lady. But if nobody saw me, then who would ever suspect a man of my reputation? I turned Presbyterian for her when we got married”—he pointed up—“and was an elder down at the church on Greenwood for many years.” He grunted. “I wanted you to think it was a sex maniac. I didn’t realize how that might make me look if you ever traced it to me, but I didn’t think you ever would, see? Now you might think I’m weird. The other was an accident, but—”

  “The other?” Moody asked.

  “The thing with the bottle.”

  “Murdering her, you mean,” said LeBeau. “That’s what killed her: getting hit with the so-called decanter.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “No, you’re not. Can’t you say it?”

  “Say what?”

  “You killed her with the decanter.”

  Keller shrugged. His eyes were cold again. “It was an accident, I tell you. I’m admitting the other business, the cutting, might of been a mistake. I know it doesn’t look right.”

  “What kind of weapon did you use?” It was Moody.

  Keller leaned to the left so that he could reach into his right-hand pants pocket. He brought out an object. “It’s not a weapon. It’s just this. I always carry it. Comes in handy. The blade slides out.” He was about to demonstrate when LeBeau quickly moved in and relieved him of the knife, handing it to Moody, and then ordered the man to his feet and frisked him.

  Moody examined the tool that had been used as a weapon: it was a utility knife, but unlike the one taken by the patrolmen from Lloyd Howland, it was made of plastic and its blade could be extended by a thrust of the thumb, not being locked in place by the setscrew of Lloyd’s model. He found an evidence bag in the third pocket he explored, and put the knife into it.

  LeBeau meanwhile had reseated Keller on the couch and moved a few steps away. “Tell us about killing the child.”

  Keller nodded briskly and patted his long thighs in the gray suit pants he wore above the big striped sport shoes. “She was sleeping. The blanket was pulled up to her nose. I just reached under and did it. She couldn’t of felt a thing.”

  “Why?”

  Keller elevated his chin. “Because her mama was gone, and what kind of father was that guy? I couldn’t of lived with that on my conscience. She would of been an orphan. We couldn’t take her in. We’re too old, and she”—again he pointed at the ceiling—“well, need I say more?”

  Moody spoke quickly, so that Dennis would not dwell on the little girl’s killing at this time. “You cut somebody like you did Mrs. Donna Howland, there’s gonna be blood all over the place.”

  “Well, now, that’s true.” Keller spoke affably. “But I looked around and found one of them real big towels in the cupboard, the kind they sit on on the beach? I was going to use it to cover me, but then I saw it could go over her and I could work underneath. If my sleeves was rolled up, I wouldn’t get the blood on me except the hands. I saw that on a TV show. When I was done, I rolled up the towel along with her robe and the bottle and brought ‘em over here. I put the stuff in the washer, but I washed the bottle off and kept it, because it’s real nice, might be worth something. That was dumb, I guess, but I was raised a poor kid and can’t destroy something of value.”

  “Where’s the towel and the robe?” Moody asked.

  “Threw ‘em out in the garbage that night.”

  “Can was picked up by Sanitation?”

  “Next morning.”

  It occurred to Moody that this confession would send him and LeBeau back to the dump after all. He stood up. “Let’s get that bottle.”

  “Sure,” said Keller, rising from the couch with the aid of only one hand. Moody could not have done that.

  “Stay there,” he told Keller and drew LeBeau aside, asking him in an undertone to phone for some help with Mrs. K.: there was a protocol for such matters; social-service liaison personnel would come to look after the old lady. He turned back to the suspect. “Where’s a phone?”

  “Kitchen,” Keller said. “Bottle’s there too. C’mon.” He led the way at a fast lope.

  They went past the stairs and through a dining room that was made smaller by a large table covered with a lace cloth in the center of which was a big cut-glass bowl empty except for a single paper clip. Moody glanced across at the house next door and saw the closed Venetian blinds on all the windows. When they reached the kitchen, he asked LeBeau also to call the Howland number and tell the patrolman on duty there to come over.

  Keller pointed to a wall phone identical to that in the kitchen of 1143. “Help yourself.”

  LeBeau too noticed the similarity. “You saw Miz Donna Howland went into the bedroom to use the telephone. What about the one in the kitchen?”

  Keller smiled. “That’s simple,” he said brightly. “I wouldn’t let her.” He opened the cabinet door underneath the sink and, squatting, fished around in a cardboard box filled with empty cans and bottles until he found and brought forth what proved to be, when it was surrendered to Moody, a globe of thick green glass in the walls of which were embedded golden stars fashioned apparently of another substance, glittering, perhaps metallic. It was empty and had no stopper. “How about that?” Keller said. “How do they get them in there?” Meaning, presumably, the stars. He stood up and gestured down at the box. “I’m religious about recycling.”

  “Oh, here you are.” It was Mrs. Keller, entering the kitchen with her distinctive walk. Her gray hair was arranged otherwise than when Moody had last seen her, more formally, as it were, swept up no doubt in the interests of the large disklike earrings. The dress was black, with fancy puffed sleeves and a long skirt. Evening attire? She was dressed for the TV interview, which he had not forgotten but was thinking of in another way: namely, that he wanted to get Keller away before the television people showed up, and time was running out. “Gordie,” she chided, “you haven’t changed yet? Better get going. I’ll take over with these gendemen.”

  Moody, summoning up all the courtliness at his command, took her arm in his. “You look beautiful, ma’am,” said he. “But there’s been a change of plans. Let’s go in the living room and talk things over.”

  She pulled around to stare at the perfume bottle in the flat of his far hand, her eyes sparkling like its embedded iridescent stars. “Is that a litde present for me?”

  “Not really.” LeBeau had already finished with the phone, and Moody asked him to escort Keller. He would wait for the reinforcements before he arrested and cuffed the man, though that event was overdue.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Keller. “It’s for your own lady.”

  “No, ma’am.” He dropped her arm and found another plastic evidence bag in the same pocket that the other one had come from. “I need it for my work.” The bottle was the size of a small grapefruit or large orange, and hung heavily first in the bag and then in his jacket pocket.

  “Your work must be very interesting,” Mrs. Keller said when he had deposited her on the living-room couch. “What is the nature of it?”

  LeBeau had broug
ht Keller along behind them, and now put him in the big chair.

  “I’m in law enforcement,” Moody told her, supporting the skirt of his jacket with a hand, compensating for the sag of the weighty bottle.

  “Gordie was in wholesale office supplies,” said she. “I did substitute teaching. We’re both retired.” With the black evening dress she was still wearing the worn loafers in beige. She continued to smile as her husband was asked to stand up, turn around, and put his hands in the small of his back.

  Keller’s wrists proved so thick that the cuffs had to be fastened at the second-to-last notch.

  When the social-service people, a solemn man and a young woman with a matronly air, arrived to deal with his wife, the detectives took Keller upstairs and had him show them the bathroom window from which he had looked down on Donna Howland’s bedroom. Then they took him out to their car. They pulled out of the eleven hundred block just as Moody, on a cue from LeBeau, who was watching the rearview mirror, turned and saw the van from Five Star Report swinging into the other end of the street.

  Keller continued to be agreeable when interrogated at the Homicide Bureau. The video camera was back in working order, and the partners used it to record the confession that the man willingly repeated. He seemed to be enjoying himself, perhaps considering this as at least moral compensation for missing the Five Star Report deal. After several hours of such, he was asked whether he’d like a bite to eat, and he gleefully gave his order: two cheeseburgers with the works, apple pie à la mode, strawberry shake. But the detectives, who had to pay out of their own pockets for the treats, explained what they had in mind was coffee and sinkers. LeBeau made the run, bringing back a six-pack of mixed plain and powdered. Keller ate four and a half doughnuts.

  Keller signed the typewritten version of the confession and several other forms averring that everything he said was of his free will, without official duress, and giving permission for the videotaping. He was also reminded from time to time of his constitutional rights but continued to dismiss the idea of a lawyer.

  When the interrogation was finished at long last, at least in this phase, and all three men stood up from the table, Keller, cuffless throughout the questioning, extended his large right hand, that which had, reinforced by the fancy perfume bottle, killed Donna Howland with a single blow.

  “You fellas do one whale of a job,” he told Moody before including Dennis with a twist of his chin. “I’m glad to give what help I could, even if I did have to postpone the Five Star interview.”

  “What were you gonna tell them?” Moody asked. “That you did it?”

  “I got to take care they don’t get the wrong impression. I’m not going to let them call me a criminal. I’ve got to defend my good name. Okay, I might not of gone about it in the right way, but this was something new for me: I’m not some street-corner trash. Call it an error in judgment, but don’t blow it out of proportion. Mistakes were made on both sides. A lot of any situation hinges on how it looks.” He smiled again and extended his hand to Moody for a shake.

  Moody, however, deftly used it to revolve him, and seizing Keller’s left hand as well, manacled both in the small of his back.

  “Is this necessary?” Keller asked when facing the detectives again. “I’ve got to get over to the TV station. It might not yet be too late for tonight’s show.”

  “You’re going to jail,” LeBeau said. “You’re under arrest.”

  “But I been cooperating with you. I thought we had a deal!”

  After elaborating on his complaint and getting nowhere, he now demanded a lawyer.

  “Place never looked this good before,” said Molly, admiring the paint job. Lloyd had finished the living room.

  He opened the door to the screened-in porch. “Come and see your bird.” The sparrow landed on his extended finger while he was still speaking, and after a brief explosive flutter of wings established a balance that was not affected when Lloyd moved the hand to Molly’s shoulder, onto which the bird gravely stepped.

  Molly turned her head to try to get eye-to-eye with the sparrow, but it prudently moved around to the base of her nape, plodding, on its big but delicate feet, back toward her shoulder when she looked forward again.

  “It will be cautious for a while,” said Lloyd. “It trusts me now because I feed it.”

  Molly winked. “I know how birds are.”

  “I didn’t want you to think I was alienating its affections.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Oh. Well—”

  “I was just kidding you, Lloyd: I can figure it out. It was never my bird.”

  “You saved its life.”

  “You can’t own something living, no matter what,” Molly said. “Not even if you save its life.”

  “It can leave any time it wants. Look at all the holes in the screening.”

  Molly looked around, hands on hips. She had left her baseball cap behind and instead of a workshirt wore a thin sweater in bright blue. “He wouldn’t lose much if he pulled this whole darn thing down.”

  “Don’t say that. It’s my next project.”

  Molly snickered. “Fixing up this porch? That’s big-time skilled labor. Joe has to pay you decent money for that. He oughta put you on hourly. I hope he don’t think you’re gonna do all his dirty work for just room and board.”

  Lloyd could chide her now. “You got him wrong. All I want is to do a good job. That end of the floor has to be jacked up. Then we got to think about putting some support underneath: railroad tie, maybe, Joe says. All the screening should be replaced, and this floor painted with deck enamel. I just hope I have enough time to finish it before—”

  Molly impatiently broke in with, “Summer?” He had not meant that, and she probably knew it. “Don’t put yourself on a deadline. This porch has been completely neglected for years, along with the rest of the house.”

  The sparrow left her shoulder and flew toward Lloyd. When it disappeared from his line of sight, he assumed the bird had gone past him to another destination. But then he felt a slight pricking from its pointed toes as they took a purchase on his crown.

  “Bet it’s a female,” said Molly. “Jealous of me. It’s giving me a dirty look.”

  “Hey, how you doin’, Moll?” Joe came onto the porch, his weight having an effect on the floor. He proceeded to stamp on the worn boards, aggravating the tremor and scaring the bird off Lloyd’s head. It flew to perch on the folded-back edge of one of the openings to the outside, but stayed inside the screen.

  Molly complained to her cousin, “Are you nuts? It’s gonna fall in any minute.”

  Joe shrugged. “Only a two-foot drop. Just break a leg or something.” He smirked at Lloyd. “Save us jacking it up. Have to build a new one, which would make more sense anyway.”

  “When they handed out the brains, you must of been on vacation. I hope you don’t think Lloyd has to do all this work to earn the gourmet meals and luxury accommodations.”

  Lloyd was quick to say, “Come on, Molly.”

  “Listen,” said she, throwing a punch that did not quite meet Joe’s midsection. “I know this guy from away back.”

  “Who taught you how to box?” Joe cried, putting up his dukes and further agitating the porch floor with a heavy-toed prizefighter’s shuffle-dance.

  Molly addressed Lloyd. “He’s telling the truth for once. And he never heard of the idea that you don’t hit a lady. I saw stars more than a few times.”

  Joe too appealed to Lloyd. “She keeps begging me not to take it easy on her because she’s a girl. ‘Slug me,’ she says. ‘I can take it.’ She keeps this up till finally I throw a slow-motion left hook that takes about five minutes to get there, and I also pull it so I barely touch her chin. Jesus, you should of heard the blubbering!”

  “Damn you, Joe, I never cried once!” Molly said. “You big bully. I was eleven.”

  Joe stopped moving and lowered his arms. “You’re having a good effect on her, Lloyd. See how she c
leans up her English when you’re around?” Suddenly he thrust his head down and forward. “Is that the phone? … Yeah.” He dashed into the house.

  Molly looked fondly in the direction in which her cousin had gone. “Isn’t he the greatest guy? But I don’t ever flatter him to his face: that would spoil him rotten.… Did you hear the phone?”

  “Not really.”

  “I think he must of done something weird to the bell,” said Molly. “Only he can hear it if you’re outa the kitchen.”

  Joe returned in a moment. “It’s for you, Lloyd.”

  Lloyd did not ask who it might be. Only the detectives had this number for him.

  He went to the kitchen and lifted the handpiece that dangled from the wall phone. “Lloyd Howland.”

  “Detective Nick Moody. You might have heard the news. But then I figured the kind of person you are, you might not have, either.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “We made an arrest. I thought you’d like to know.

  Lloyd shouted desperately, “Not Larry!”

  Moody said, “No. Take it easy. Listen to me, Lloyd. Before I tell you, I want your promise you’re not going to do anything foolish.”

  “Foolish?” He was still desperate.

  “Do I have to spell it out?” Moody asked laconically. “Way you acted at the funeral? … You’ll be back in trouble if you do. We won’t put up with it.… Lloyd? You there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sound like you still have some doubts. Take my word for it, you’re off the hook. We’ve got our man. It all checks out.”

  “What a time to get blind drunk,” said Lloyd. “I could have saved them if I had gone there. It was where I was heading.”

  “No, you couldn’t. It was too early. If you had gone there mid-morning you wouldn’t still have been around when the homicides occurred. The little girl was taking her nap.”

  Lloyd groaned. “Donna would have thrown me out long before noon. She couldn’t stand bitterness. Donna hated anything negative, especially in me. She thought it held me back. Donna was always full of hope.” He kept talking so as not to sob. “But maybe she could have gotten me out of it. She was good at that. That was why I was heading there.” He resisted learning who had committed the murders: he would have to cope with knowledge no human being not a policeman should be forced to accept.