The Interrogation

by Thomas H. Cook

  “But what about the other guy, the one Getz chased out of the alley?” Pierce turned back toward the alley that bordered Clairmont Towers. “If he were still at the gate, he would have seen Cathy cross the street at seven. He might even have seen if the other guy was after her, followed her into the park.”

  They walked to the alley in the hope that the man Getz had chased away might have returned, but they found only the deserted overhang and clumps of sodden newspapers that had been gathered into what resembled a bed.

  Cohen peered beneath the overhang. In the murky light he saw a crayon drawing of a young girl, her body draped in white, long dark hair falling to her waist.

  “Look at this, Jack,” he said.

  Pierce settled down upon his haunches.

  “It’s the same picture we found in the tunnel,” Cohen said. “That bum we questioned last night.”

  “Questioned and let go,” Pierce said. “Smalls.”

  They reached the tunnel six minutes later, but Smalls was not there. And so they waited, sitting on a wooden bench, the duck pond and Dubarry Playground distantly visible through the surrounding trees. An hour passed, then another. It was approaching noon before they saw him.

  “Look,” Cohen said, pressing his elbow into Pierce’s side.

  They got to their feet and watched as the man continued toward them. He was dressed in the same rags he’d been wearing the night before, and as he walked he peered left and right into the underbrush as if expecting someone to leap out of them, seize him by the throat. He was only a few feet away when he saw Pierce and Cohen rise from the bench. He stepped back fearfully, then stopped and waited as they came toward him.

  “Albert Smalls?” Pierce asked.

  The man nodded.

  Pierce flashed his badge. “Mind coming with us?”

  “No.”

  They led him back up the path to Clairmont Towers, then into the building and back to the apartment of Herman Getz.

  “Is this the man you saw coming out of the alley yesterday afternoon?” Pierce asked Getz.

  “Yeah, that’s him,” Getz said without hesitation.

  Pierce took Smalls’ wrists, brought them behind him, and cuffed them together. “Did you kill Cathy Lake?” he asked Smalls. “The dead girl we found in the park yesterday?”

  “Was that her name?”

  “Yes, that was her name,” Pierce said impatiently.

  “No. I didn’t kill her.”

  Pierce grasped Smalls’ arm and guided him forward. “Okay, come on. I want to show you something.”

  9:59 P.M., September 12, Interrogation Room 3

  “And we led you back down to the tunnel, Jay,” Cohen reminded him. “And I showed you that picture you’d drawn on the wall. The picture of a little girl. And I told you that we’d found the same picture in the alley by Clairmont Towers. You told us, Pierce and me, that you’d drawn both of those pictures. The one in the tunnel and the one in the alley. You admitted that right away.”

  “I drew them,” Smalls admitted again. He peered at his hands as if he wished to be rid of them.

  “And so we didn’t let you go, Jay,” Cohen told him. “Not like we did that first night when the woman saw you. Do you know why we didn’t let you go? Because we found those two drawings in two different places. Places that made it clear to us that you’d been near Cathy at the time of her disappearance, and that you’d also been near the place where we found her. Still with me here?”

  Smalls continued to stare down at his hands. “Yes.”

  “We arrested you,” Cohen continued. “And since then we’ve been coming to talk to you, asking you questions. And during the time you’ve been with us, Detective Pierce and I have shown you a few things, right? Like the wire we found on the path between Cathy’s body and the playground. And we’ve had other people come in and take a look at you. In a lineup, I mean. And one of those people identified you right away as the man she’d seen near Cathy’s body.”

  “I scared her,” Smalls said quietly.

  “Yes, you did.” Cohen wondered if it might actually be working, if coaxing out small, seemingly inconsequential admissions might finally lure Smalls into a trap he couldn’t weasel his way out of. Careful, he thought. “You remember telling me that when Cathy came to the bench a couple of days before her murder, that maybe she was real scared of this guy who hangs around the playground?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about the time in the rain? Two days before the murder. When you saw Cathy in the rain. Could she have been scared of somebody then too?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look, Jay, at some point Cathy leaves the building where she’d been at a party. She walks across the street and she stands at the gate at the entrance to the park. You saw her there. You told us that.”

  “Yes, I saw her.”

  Slow, Cohen thought, very slow. “Okay, and if Cathy saw you, she probably recognized you too, right? Maybe she nodded hello, something like that, smiled. Gave you some sign that she had seen you before. Did Cathy do that, Jay?”

  “No.”

  “But why not? I mean, if she’d seen you before, wouldn’t she naturally have given you some indication of that when she ran into you that day?”

  “She didn’t see me that day.”

  “Of course she did, Jay. You were standing right there, right by the gate. She had to have seen you.”

  “No. She didn’t.”

  “Look, Jay.” Cohen took a notepad from the windowsill near the table, turned to a blank page, drew a gate, then a building, and finally a line from one to the other. “You were here.” He put an X by the gate. “Cathy was here.” Now an X by the building. “She came this way.” He drew the point of the pencil down the straight line from the building to the gate. “See what I mean, Jay? Cathy came directly toward you. She had to have seen you.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she was looking behind her.”

  “Behind her? You mean over her shoulder?”

  Smalls’ eyes narrowed, like someone struggling to bring a blurry image into focus. “Yes.”

  Cohen saw the scene, Smalls leaning against the park gate, Cathy emerging from the building into cold sheets of rain, glancing over her shoulder as she made her way toward the park, glancing back toward … what?

  “Why would she have been glancing back toward Clairmont Towers, Jay?” he asked.

  Again Smalls appeared suddenly to grasp a detail that had previously escaped him. “It’s terrible the way they look,” he said, his voice very low.

  “The way who looks?”

  “Kids. When they’re afraid.”

  “Are you talking about Cathy?”

  “She looked afraid. When she was coming across the street.” He considered something a moment, then said, “In prison, they kill them, don’t they?”

  “Kill who?”

  “The ones who … hurt children.”

  Cohen felt a chill. “Sometimes,” he answered softly.

  Smalls nodded resolutely. “Good,” he said. “They deserve it. And the ones who let them get away. They deserve it too.”

  “The ones who let them get away?” Cohen repeated. Was this Smalls’ way of taunting him, mocking the fact that after ten days of interrogation neither he nor Pierce had made any progress? “They never get away with it, Jay,” he told him, though he knew that he believed no such thing.

  “Yes, they do,” Smalls replied firmly.

  “How do you know that?”

  Smalls gave no answer, so Cohen supplied one of his own. They got away because there was no method of capturing them save the flawed and desperate one he and others like him used to find the guilty and put them away. They got away because at the critical moment a witness had heard a glass break, turned toward that sound, and missed the figure in the brush. They got away because knives and guns were washed clean by the indifferent rain. They got away because time ate memory and m
aggots ate flesh, and nothing worked to preserve the footprint in the melting snow or the telltale drop of blood. They got away because nothing in the spinning void gave the slightest assistance to those who sought to bring them down. The war had brought him to this grim conclusion, Cohen knew, but how, he wondered, had Smalls arrived at this same unloving place?

  Is there some news?

  10:37 P.M., Seaview

  The lights of Seaview blinked from the enveloping darkness, and as he closed in upon the town, Pierce could smell the musty brine of the sea. He’d grown up in Englishtown, a riverfront village nearly fifty miles away, but as a young man he’d often come to Seaview, and he recalled now the long, lazy summer afternoons he’d spent strolling its crowded boardwalk. He’d met Jenny on one of those afternoons, and as he entered the outskirts of town, he thought of that first encounter, her quietness, how shy she’d been. At first he considered it a flirtatious pose. But later he understood that instead, it was the outward demonstration of her inner fragility. More than anything, that was the difference between Jenny and Anna Lake, he realized. In the latter, he’d felt something solid at the core. What more could he want in a woman, he wondered, than this firm ground, someone the wind could not tear, nor the tide sweep away, someone who’d fallen into the same abyss and with whom he could claw his way out again?

  And so now, as he proceeded on, he recalled that firmness, the direct look in Anna’s eyes when he’d shown up at her apartment three days after her daughter’s murder, standing alone in the bleak hallway, not at all sure why he’d come, save that in this grieving woman he’d sensed someone with a steely capacity to endure whatever life offered. He’d seen all of that at the moment she opened the door, both the depth of her wound and her will to heal it.

  5:30 P.M., September 4, 545 Obermeyer Street

  The door opened and she stood, facing him, her gaze unflinching. She wore a plain green dress with narrow sleeves, and she’d pulled her long hair back and wound it into a bun. She drew her arms around her as she waited for him to speak.

  “I’m Detective—”

  “I remember you,” she interrupted. “Is there some news?”

  “No,” Pierce replied. “I just wanted you to know that we still have him in custody. The man we arrested two days ago.”

  “Has he said anything?”

  “No. They never say much at first. But in the end, we’ll get it out of him.”

  He wanted to add something, a word of consolation, but what would that word be? How could he help her find peace when he had not found it himself? When he could not so much as imagine some future moment when Debra’s murder no longer tore at his soul, releasing the unquenchable rage that drove him now.

  “Thank you,” Anna Lake said. “For coming by.”

  He felt he should leave, put on his hat, turn, and leave. He didn’t. Instead, he remained, facing her, his hat in his hand, wanting to probe the curious serenity he saw in her eyes, needing to know if it might be something she could help him find.

  “Would you like to come in?” she asked unexpectedly.

  “I know you’re … I mean, I wouldn’t want to … bother you.”

  “You’re not bothering me. I just got home from work. My first day back.”

  He followed her into the apartment, noticed that the door to what had once been Cathy’s room was closed. He’d searched that room the day following the murder, Anna silently watching as he and Cohen went through her daughter’s few possessions. They’d not really expected to find anything but had followed the established rules of investigation anyway. Even little girls had enemies, the rule book said, so they’d looked for letters, diaries, a name doodled somewhere. In pursuit of this phantom clue, they’d pawed through Cathy’s desk, leafed through her school notebooks. Outside, a small brown dog had scurried along the sidewalk, raced behind a tree, spun heedlessly in the autumn air, things that Cathy Lake would never do again.

  That had been the moment, Pierce recalled now, the exact instant when Cathy Lake had risen from the crowded shore of doomed children to become the singular and irreplaceable little girl she had surely been. He glanced toward her closet, the dark space where her spare wardrobe hung, clothes to play in and go to church in, clothes for all the changing seasons she would never know, clothes which, in their lifeless droop, could only suggest other clothes she would never wear, a graduation gown, a wedding dress. All of that was gone, as she was gone, this child who would never feel rain, sunlight, a warm summer breeze, this little girl whose smile would never lift anyone’s spirits or change an ordinary day into something infinitely blessed. She would never toot on the little plastic trumpet she’d placed beside her bed, nor tap on the toy typewriter on her desk, nor rearrange the furniture in the doll house on the floor. She would never whisper “I love you” to her mother, or to a husband, or to the child she might have borne. Every sound, every touch, every motion of this once living little girl was now locked in stillness and silence, destined only for decay.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” Anna asked him now.

  “No. Thank you.”

  She sat down on a dark blue sofa beside the window. Pierce took the chair opposite her. He noted the plain dress, the ordinary shoes, the bobby pins that held back her hair, and in all of these things saw the humble nature of her life. Her deepest hope, her greatest ambition, he thought, had been nothing more than to keep and protect her daughter. When you had wished for so little, and lost even that, what was left but rage? And yet he saw nothing of his own smoldering resentment in this woman’s eyes.

  “I haven’t gone out,” she told him. Her smile was thin as rain. “For anything. I don’t have anything to offer you. Cookies. Nothing.”

  Pierce glanced around the apartment. He knew how bare and lifeless it now seemed to her. For it was gone, all of it, abruptly and forever gone, the love and delight once added by a child. His eyes fell upon a white uniform that hung by a wire hanger from one of the doors.

  “I’m a waitress,” Anna told him. “I used to bring Cathy a piece of coconut pie when I came home from work. Coconut custard. That was her favorite.” She glanced toward her daughter’s room. “I’m giving all Cathy’s things away.”

  Pierce saw Cathy Lake’s face materialize beneath the delicate features of her mother. So it was with murdered children. They didn’t elbow their way into your stranded consciousness—they bled into your entire helpless being. They never stopped reaching for you, crying for you. They crawled back into the safety of your sheltering arms and lay curled there, dead.

  “Except for a few little … reminders,” Anna continued. “You know, her first drawing. That sort of thing. The rest I thought someone else might use, so I’m going to take it down to the Salvation Army. That’s where I bought most of it anyway, so it seems the right place to take it back.”

  So quickly, Pierce thought. So different from the way Jenny had clung tenaciously to the last thread of the last sweater their daughter had ever worn. She had kept Debra’s room a shrine, so that in the end Debra’s murder had consumed each memory of the child, spotted every photograph and stained every garment with her spilled blood, a need to hold on to everything Debra had ever touched that had finally become so obsessive, it lashed at him with a relentless cruelty. Find that bracelet, goddammit, Jack. What kind of cop are you? Can’t you at least do that?

  Pierce drove this from his mind and asked Anna Lake, “I was wondering about Cathy’s father.”

  “Why?” Her eyes met his steadily.

  “We need to check on everyone who was close to the … to your daughter. Not that he would have … It’s routine.”

  “I don’t know where he is,” Anna replied. “But if you found him and asked him about Cathy, he wouldn’t know who you were talking about.” She answered the question he didn’t ask. “Soldier. It was the uniform, I suppose. Anyway, I never looked him up after that … one night.” She looked at Pierce closely. “Are you from the city?”

  “I lived th
ere before the war,” Pierce answered. “Then I moved to Englishtown.” It came out before he could stop it. “My daughter was murdered too. That’s why I came over. To let you know that I know what you’re … what it’s like.”

  He had come to listen to her story but told his own instead, told Anna Lake how Debra had gone to a playground with friends for a Fourth of July cookout. At some point she’d left the group. No one knew exactly when or why. She’d not been seen again until her body was found in a culvert a hundred yards away.

  “The guy who killed Debra lived in our neighborhood,” Pierce said. “His name was Costa. Nicolas Costa. He had a long record of … being interested in children.”

  A local car mechanic, Pierce went on, who’d lived in the neighborhood for years, an ordinary man whom no one would have thought capable of murder. He stopped there, left out the macabre museum that had been found in Costa’s basement, photographs of dead children, hundreds of children, in bloated files and taped to his basement walls.

  He shrugged, embarrassed. “My wife couldn’t stand living in our house anymore, our neighborhood. So she moved back to the Midwest. The little town she came from. That’s when I came back to the city.” He saw his small apartment, furnished with nondescript furniture, no pictures on the walls, a boxy radio endlessly droning. “I guess I wanted to keep busy.”

  “And the man? What happened to him?”

  “He went free,” Pierce answered. “There wasn’t enough evidence to … stop him.”

  A silence fell between them until Anna said, “I usually take a walk before dinner.”

  On the street, they strolled through the chill air, an unmistakable intimacy gathering around them as though, for all the crowds and the bustle, the city had emptied suddenly, and they now walked its streets alone.

  “What was she like?” Anna asked. “Your Debra.”

  Pierce realized that he had not actually spoken of Debra in years. “She was brave,” he answered. “She had polio. Wore a metal brace on her right leg. But she took it really well. Gutsy. Smart. She’d won the spelling bee in her class. We wanted to get her something. She’d mentioned this little bracelet. Red velvet. With a piece of purple glass in the middle. So we got it for her, an award. She was wearing it the day she was murdered. Costa took it for a souvenir.” Costa’s face appeared in Pierce’s mind, his eyes peering ratlike out of the shadows, not a man really, but a predator who’d felt no more for Debra than a fetishist feels for a high-heeled shoe, something to be used, then tossed aside. “I can’t stop hating him,” he blurted. “I can’t stop … hating.”