The Interrogation

by Thomas H. Cook

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “And after that you took the locket.”

  “I didn’t take anything!”

  “What was it, a souvenir? Is it because a guy who kills a little girl maybe wants a little souvenir?”

  Smalls stared at Cohen in silence, clearly disturbed by what he’d just heard, studying Cohen intently, as if trying to see into his brain, determine exactly what information it contained.

  But why was Smalls disturbed, Cohen wondered as he studied Inmate 1407. Was it because the accusation was absurd? Or was it because in a scattershot of dreadful charges, he had hit upon a truth?

  8:18 P.M., Police Headquarters, Sixth Floor Lounge

  “You break that bastard yet?” Blunt asked as he lowered himself onto the worn brown sofa.

  Pierce shook his head.

  Blunt lit a cigar and tossed the match on the linoleum. “I heard you got till morning or he walks.”

  “That’s right.”

  Blunt pulled a handkerchief from his jacket and wiped his face. “They bake us in this fucking place.” He stared about, seeking relief, then said, “A little kid, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Anna Lake’s daughter,” Pierce said, and suddenly he was at Anna Lake’s door as it opened to his knock, standing, oddly stricken, by the terrible question in her eyes: Is my daughter dead?

  9:34 P.M., September 1, 545 Obermeyer Street

  He’d known that he would soon give her the answer she dreaded, and after that, nothing would ever be the same.

  “Are you Anna Lake?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew the badge. “My name’s Pierce. Jack Pierce. This is my partner, Norman Cohen.”

  Cohen nodded but didn’t speak.

  “May we come in, Mrs. Lake?” Pierce asked.

  “Miss,” she said. “I’m not married.” She drew open the door. “Have you found her?”

  “We found a little girl,” Pierce told her softly. “She was in the park. We’re not sure it’s your daughter.”

  “Why didn’t you ask her?”

  “I’m afraid we couldn’t do that,” Pierce said.

  Anna Lake’s face tightened. “Is my daughter dead?”

  “We don’t know if the girl we found is your daughter,” Pierce said. “That’s why we’re here. To find out.”

  With no further word, Anna led them into the living room. “Please, sit down,” she said, indicating a dark blue sofa.

  Pierce sat but Cohen walked to the window and peered out into the chill autumn darkness. Anna Lake sat opposite Pierce, her eyes fixed steadily upon him.

  “The little girl we found, she was wearing a red dress,” Pierce told her. “You said that Cathy was wearing a red dress.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she have a bandage on her right hand?”

  Anna Lake’s face grew very still. “Oh, God.” She stopped as if by a wall of pain. “It’s her, then.”

  Pierce expected her to sink her face into her hands the way Jenny had when he’d told her about Debra. But instead Anna remained upright, her face eerily still.

  “We need a positive identification, Miss Lake,” Pierce said after a moment.

  “Yes,” Anna Lake replied. “Of course.” She rose and walked into an adjoining room, closing the door softly behind her. When she returned, she was wearing a black wool coat. “All right. I’m ready.”

  Outside the morgue, Pierce opened the car door. Anna Lake got out, and as she did so, her eyes touched him—or at least that was how it felt—not that they settled upon him, he thought, but that they touched him, like fingertips.

  “This way, please,” he said, directing her toward two wide metal doors.

  “I’ll stay here,” Cohen told him, avoiding the morgue as he had since returning from the war, the cold air inside it, the stainless-steel refrigerators, knowing that the good thing he sought would never be found there.

  Pierced nodded, then motioned Anna forward.

  She followed him into the morgue, moving briskly, like someone determined to get the next step over with.

  “Down here.” Pierce led her along a brightly lit corridor to where the ME had already placed the small body on a gurney and draped it with a sheet. He stepped over to the gurney. “Are you ready, Miss Lake?”

  She nodded stiffly, her eyes leveled on the covered profile.

  Pierce drew back the sheet.

  Anna shuddered, as if hit by a small jolt of electricity. Then she stepped closer to the gurney and pressed her hand against the dead child’s cheek. “Cathy,” she said softly. “Cathy.” She bent forward and lifted her daughter into her arms.

  Watching her, Pierce recalled how his wife had cradled a picture of Debra for days, even sleeping with it through long, tearful nights. Then he thought of Costa, who had caused Jenny such pain, then of the nameless vagrant who’d been found lurking near the duck pond only yards from the body of Cathy Lake, a man who lived like an animal, by means of animal cunning, passive in arrest but predatory, a vagrant in a crudely painted cave littered with smashed toys, peering out at the path that wound among the trees.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Anna Lake’s brown eyes lifted toward him. “What will you do with her now?”

  “There’ll be an autopsy. Then she can be released to you.”

  “I want to bury her quickly,” Anna said. “I don’t want her … like this.”

  “I understand.”

  She pressed her lips to her daughter’s dark brown hair, then returned the body gently to the cold steel of the gurney.

  Pierce began to draw the sheet back over the girl’s face, but Anna stopped him. She took the cloth from his hand. “Let me cover her,” she said, and then, with what seemed to Pierce an otherworldly grace, she did.

  In the car five minutes later, Pierce and Cohen drove Anna Lake back to her apartment on Obermeyer Street through a light rain, the measured thud of the windshield wipers beating softly in the silence. Through the watery glass, Pierce watched the city streets in an agony of remembrance, trying to focus on the work at hand, what needed to be done to find Cathy Lake’s killer, but returning instead to Costa, his release, the sneer in his voice as he’d thanked the judge “most kindly” for unleashing him once again upon the children of the world.

  “We’ll find the man who did this,” Pierce said. “Won’t we, Norm?”

  Cohen nodded.

  “I’ll need to ask you a few questions, Miss Lake,” Pierce told her when they reached the door. “Of course, I know you need a little time to—”

  “No, I don’t need any time,” Anna interrupted. Her voice didn’t waver. “If I can help you, I want to do it.”

  “You mean now?” He thought of Jenny, how Debra’s death had drained her of that very energy he could see building now in Anna Lake, driving her forward, as if they shared the same purpose, sought justice laced with vengeance with the same dark need.

  “Yes.” She opened the door and flipped on the light. “Come inside, please.”

  8:23 P.M., September 12, Police Headquarters, Sixth Floor Lounge

  We’ll find the man who did this.

  The promise circled in Pierce’s mind as Blunt pulled himself heavily from the sofa with a loud grunt. “Well, good luck cracking that fuck,” he said as he lumbered out of the room.

  Pierce took a restless draw on his cigarette before he crushed it in the chipped glass ashtray on the table. He could feel himself revving up for his last round of interrogation. Round, yes, like he was going into the ring, determined to defeat an opponent in a game of combat with strict rules and established time limits. He would have another round with Smalls, then if nothing came of it, he’d drive to Seaview and see what he could dig up.

  He made his way down the corridor, concentrating on this final confrontation, thinking of Anna Lake, of how, for her, he had to make it work. The clock at the end of the corridor was silent but relentless, the seconds fall
ing like stones, burying him. He opened the door and noted with pleasure the way Smalls looked up and shrank away from him. Fear, he decided as he stepped into the room, that must be his tactic. He would scare Albert Smalls to death.

  Do you have to leave me here?

  8:28 P.M., Interrogation Room 3

  Cohen nodded slightly as Pierce came through the door. “All yours, Jack.” He rose from the chair and stepped away from the table.

  Pierce swept into the empty chair as if on a wing of fire. “Look at this, Smalls,” he snapped. He drew a photograph from his jacket. “This is Catherine Lake. She was eight years old. She was murdered eleven days ago. In the park. By the duck pond. The path she took through the park went right by where you were … what … sleeping? Isn’t that your story? That you were sleeping in that drainage pipe?”

  “I was asleep.”

  “A woman found her,” Pierce said hotly. “A young woman who was walking near the pond. Do you remember that woman, Smalls? The woman who found Cathy Lake’s body? We told you about what she saw in the park on the night of September first. Eleven days ago. Let me tell you what she saw.”

  8:32 P.M., September 1, City Park, Duck Pond

  She saw a figure, ragged and unkempt, scuttling across the shadows of the path just as she rounded the long curve at the southern tip of the duck pond, and for a moment Nancy Lisbon stopped and simply watched as the figure lumbered along the edge of the path for a few yards, then wheeled around to face her so that she saw his features clearly beneath the streetlamp, noted the snarled beard, the leaves and dirt that clung to it. For reasons she didn’t quite understand, she remained still, resolutely facing the filthy, bedraggled creature who peered at her from a distance of thirty feet.

  He stared at her, motionless, like some animal frozen by her gaze. Then he began to undulate in a curious slithering motion that sent a chill through Nancy Lisbon, turned her around as forcefully as a hand, sent her racing back at a dead run around the duck pond, panicked and gasping, until she saw two uniformed patrolmen and told them what she’d seen.

  “He scared me,” she told Zarella. “Like a snake scares you.”

  “Okay. Show us where you saw this man.”

  Lisbon led the two officers back down the path, darkness closing in around them, lacing the trees in complicated shadows. On the way, she thought of the figure who’d confronted her on the path and knew absolutely that she would never again walk in the park, that this good, healthy, relaxing thing had been stolen from her forever.

  “Right there.” She pointed to the curve in the path. “Just beneath the light. That’s where he came out of the bushes. Then he started moving in that weird way.”

  “Where did he go after that?” Sanford asked. “Did you see?”

  “He walked along the edge of the path,” Lisbon answered.

  “How far down the path?” Zarella asked.

  “I don’t know … ten yards maybe.”

  The two cops headed down the path together, past where Lisbon had first seen the bearded man, then ten yards beyond it to a break in the shrubs.

  “About here?” Zarella asked her. “This is where he stopped?”

  “Yes. He stopped and turned back toward me,” Lisbon replied. “That’s when I got scared.”

  “Okay,” Sanford told her. “Just stay here on the path for a minute. We’ll go take a look, make sure this guy’s nowhere around.”

  “Do you have to leave me here?”

  “Just for a couple of minutes,” Zarella assured her. “We’ll come back right away and escort you out of the park.”

  Lisbon nodded stiffly. “Please, hurry.”

  “If you see this guy again,” Zarella told her, “yell for us and we’ll be back in a flash.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  She watched as the two patrolmen walked down the path, turned to the right at the spot where she’d told them the bearded man had slid off into the brush. Alone now, with nothing but the light from the street-lamps to pierce the darkness, she felt her fear steadily building, a chill wave that rose like water around her, lapping first at her ankles, then rising higher and higher. Come back, she pleaded silently. But the officers did not return, and in their absence she began to shiver in the autumn darkness.

  Then suddenly, a voice broke the silence, and she gasped.

  Someone was calling in the distance, words clear and firm and full of warning.

  Don’t move.

  Lisbon stepped backward, as if shoved there by a protective officer, told to get down, take cover.

  The voice sounded again, still harsh in stern command.

  Stay where you are.

  Lisbon adjusted the thick glasses she wore and peered out into the darkness, listening intently to the distant voices.

  Put your hands on your head.

  Get to your feet.

  Okay, real slow now.

  She stepped back and felt something coil around her ankle. She jerked her foot from the ground, shaking at the coil, then lost her footing and tumbled backward, twisting helplessly to the right, knees buckling as she keeled sideways through the shrub, cleaving the branches until her body finally thudded hard onto the ground.

  Keep your hands above your head.

  She sucked in a quick breath and realized that her glasses had fallen off. She reached out, blind now, in a universe of smudged glass, and felt something hard but pliant, like a thick, soft root.

  Keep your hands above your head!

  In the blur, she dragged herself forward, her hands clasped to the tapered shaft until she felt a soft, rounded knob. She pressed down on the knob and lifted herself to a sitting position.

  Now move forward slowly.

  In the blackness she could see nothing. She fumbled along the earth until she found her glasses, then, turning back toward the root, put her glasses on … and screamed.

  8:31 P.M., September 12, Interrogation Room 3

  Pierce felt the flame leap triumphantly in him as he glared into Smalls’ pinched eyes. “You remember all this, don’t you? The woman who saw you on the path? The one who screamed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you threaten her?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “That move you made. What was that?”

  “I didn’t know what to do.”

  “You didn’t know what to do? What does that mean?”

  “Maybe I should run. Maybe I should just stay where I was. I couldn’t tell what to do. I was afraid.”

  “Afraid? Of a little woman like that. That’s real hard to believe, Smalls. Unless you had a reason to be scared of her. But you did have a reason, didn’t you? You were scared of her because you didn’t want her to get close, right? Close to you or close to the body of the little girl you’d murdered. What were the toys for? The ones we found in the pipe. Where did you get them?”

  “I found them.”

  “Found them? Where did you find them?”

  “Dumpsters.”

  “Why did you want to have toys?”

  “To sell to Dunlap, sir.”

  “Yes, you told us that before.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Yeah, when you first came up with that story we thought it might be the truth, Smalls,” Pierce said. “So we went over to Dunlap’s place to check it out … and guess what we found?”

  9:00 A.M., September 2, Dunlap’s Collectibles, 217 Cordelia Street

  Pierce peered through the dusty glass. Inside the store, he could see a chaos of colored bottles, rusted tools, shoeboxes overflowing with yellowing photographs and old postcards. “What a shit-hole. You know the guy who runs this place?”

  “Harry Dunlap,” Cohen said. “The name rang a bell, so I looked him up. Turns out he was a fence until he got hammered pretty bad.”

  “What’d he get?”

  “Three years. Out in a year and a half. He was released about five years ago.”

  Pierce continued to stare through the window. “And since
then?”

  “Clean, as far as I know.”

  Pierce stepped over to the door and rapped hard.

  A few seconds later a short, stocky man pushed through a beaded curtain at the rear of the store. He was dressed in flannel trousers and a stained blue sweatshirt with frayed sleeves and a collar that looked as if it had been stretched by angry hands.

  “That him?” Pierce asked.

  Cohen nodded. “Yeah, that’s Harry.”

  Dunlap opened the door, rubbing his eyes against the morning light.

  “I ain’t open till ten,” he whined.

  Pierce presented his identification. “We need to ask you a few questions.”

  Cohen smiled. “Remember me, Harry?”

  Dunlap’s small green eyes cut over to Cohen. “What’s this all about?”

  “A few questions,” Cohen said easily.

  “Questions? About what?”

  “About a murder,” Pierce said crisply.

  Fear leaped into Dunlap’s eyes. “A murder? Oh, Jesus, I ain’t—”

  “A little girl was killed, Harry,” Cohen interrupted. “So, you don’t mind if we come in?”

  “I don’t know nothing about no murder.” Dunlap wiped a line of sweat from his upper lip. “A little girl. Jesus.”

  Pierce took out a picture that had been taken of Smalls the night before. “Have you ever seen this guy?”

  Dunlap glanced at the photograph. “No.” He looked at Cohen as if they were old associates, someone who might cut him a break. “Should I?”

  “He says he sold you some toys,” Cohen said.

  “Toys?” Dunlap said. He tried to laugh, but it turned into a snigger. “Look around here. This look like a toy store?”

  “Well, maybe he just offered to sell you some stuff,” Cohen said. “Are you sure you’ve never seen him, Harry?”

  Dunlap returned his attention to the photograph. “No, I ain’t never seen him. Dirty-looking bastard like that, I’d remember, don’t you think?”

  “Could he have come into the shop when someone else was here?” Pierce plucked a postcard from a box, peered at it absently.