COHEN: Is there some particular guy you’re afraid of?
SMALLS: There’s one near the playground.
COHEN: Has this guy ever bothered you?
SMALLS: Not me. Someone else.
COHEN: Who?
SMALLS: A little girl. She plays there.
COHEN: What’s the little girl’s name?
SMALLS: I don’t know.
COHEN: How old is she?
SMALLS: I don’t know for sure.
COHEN: You know, a little girl was murdered not far from the playground this afternoon.
That’s why we’re talking to you. To see if anybody saw anything.
SMALLS: Murdered? She was murdered?
Burke read Smalls’ final response over again. He had asked two questions. And both appeared to have within them an element of surprise. He studied the last question, focusing on a single word She. It seemed clear that Smalls believed that the little girl who’d been murdered was the same one who’d been frightened by a man in the playground, and clear, too, that the news of her murder had surprised him. Of course Smalls’ surprise could be a ruse. What better way to suggest his innocence than by pretending to be surprised by a murder he had himself committed?
With that caution firmly in place, Burke turned the page.
COHEN: So, if you know anything more about this guy, the one in the playground, the one who scared one of the little girls, you need to tell us.
SMALLS: I don’t know anything else. Just that she was afraid of him.
COHEN: Where did you see this little girl?
SMALLS: I was sitting on a bench. She came up the path from the playground. She sat down on the bench across from me.
COHEN: Could you see the playground from where you were sitting?
SMALLS: No.
COHEN: Okay, this guy. The one in the playground. Did this little girl tell you who he was?
SMALLS: No.
COHEN: Did she describe him?
SMALLS: No.
COHEN: When did this happen?
SMALLS: Two days ago.
COHEN: Okay, what did the little girl do after you saw her?
SMALLS: She went back to the playground.
COHEN: Why? If there was a man there she was afraid of, why would she go back to the playground?
SMALLS: I guess he’d left the playground by then.
COHEN: How much time elapsed between when she saw this guy and when she went back to the playground?
SMALLS: I don’t know for sure.
COHEN: Come as close as you can.
SMALLS: I don’t know. Five, maybe ten minutes.
COHEN: So this guy must not have stayed very long.
SMALLS: No, I guess he didn’t.
COHEN: What did you do after the girl left?
SMALLS: I went to the playground.
COHEN: Why?
SMALLS: I go there sometimes. I sit outside the fence. I don’t go in. I don’t bother anybody. I just watch the children.
COHEN: Watch the children?
SMALLS: I don’t go in the playground. There’s a sign. I’m not allowed. You have to have a kid with you, or you’re not allowed.
COHEN: Okay, about what time was it when you went to the playground?
SMALLS: I don’t know. I don’t have a watch.
COHEN: Was it morning or afternoon? How long did you stay?
SMALLS: Until after dark.
COHEN: That’s a long time.
SMALLS: I stay until the children leave. When it’s just me at the playground. Or other men.
Other men.
What, Burke wondered, could Smalls have possibly meant by that, save that these other men were the ones he was on guard against? He returned to an earlier exchange:
COHEN: What do you do in the park?
SMALLS: Nothing.
COHEN: Just sit around? All alone in that tunnel?
SMALLS: I have to be on guard.
COHEN: Against what?
SMALLS: Other men.
COHEN: What other men?
SMALLS: The ones in the park.
COHEN: You mean other guys like you? Jay? Did you hear my question?
SMALLS: Yes. Other guys like me.
Burke studied Cohen’s final questions.
Other guys like you?
Jay?
Did you hear my question?
From the transcript it seemed clear to Burke that prior to this exchange Smalls had answered Cohen’s questions quickly, directly, with no need of prompting. Then a question had suddenly stopped him: Other guys like you? Had Smalls answered the question immediately, Cohen would have had no need to add the next one: Jay? This question suggested that Smalls had not replied, that he had hesitated. The third question in the series made this even more obvious: Did you hear my question?
Only then, at this second prompt, had Smalls answered:
SMALLS: Yes. Other guys like me.
These other men were the ones Smalls had to guard against. But who were they? They were men who came to the park. And they were, in Smalls’ words, “like me.”
Like me, Burke repeated in his mind. But how?
12:47 A.M., Ragtag Bar
Blunt slid his large frame into the booth. “Okay, I’m here,” he said gruffly.
“How’s it going, Ralph?” Dunlap tried to smile but failed. “You okay, you doing all right?”
Blunt took a draw on his cigar and stared at Dunlap. “This ain’t no social call, Harry.”
“Yeah, I know,” Dunlap muttered. Nervously, he turned toward the bar and lifted his hand. “Hey, Pete, bring us a couple of beers, huh?” Back to Blunt. “Schlitz okay?”
“Who gives a crap?”
A quick, tentative smile spasmed across Dunlap’s face. “So, everything okay with you, Ralph?”
“What’s on your mind, Harry?”
“Well, to tell you the truth, Ralph, I was wondering about that guy that got picked up in the park.”
“What guy?”
“The one you picked up about the little girl. You know, the kid who got killed. I was wondering about that guy.”
“What about him?”
“Like if it was going anywhere. Nailing him, I mean.”
“They keep at him,” Blunt said indifferently.
“Are they getting anywhere?”
“What do you give a shit if they’re getting anywhere, Harry?”
Dunlap knitted his fingers together, his thumbs twirling. “I got an interest, you might say.”
“What kind of interest?”
Dunlap leaned forward. He lowered his voice. “We’re cousins, Ralph, you and me, we can talk, right? I mean, we used to do a little business, and so—”
“Shut up about that business,” Blunt snarled.
Dunlap blinked rapidly. “Yeah, okay, Ralph. No sweat. History, I know.”
“I don’t want to hear nothing about that business,” Blunt warned.
“Okay, sure, Ralph. No sweat, like I said. So, okay, about this fucking pervert they picked up. I was thinking maybe I could help out a little.”
“You mean you know something?”
“I mean help you out.”
“I don’t need no help.”
“Sure you do, Ralph. Everybody needs help. And us being cousins and all. One hand washing the other, you know what I mean?”
Blunt’s eyes narrowed. “What’s on your fucking mind?”
The bartender stepped up to the table, slapped down two beers. “Six bits.”
“Run a tab, will you, Pete?” Dunlap said cheerfully.
“No way,” the bartender said.
“Jesus, Pete. It ain’t like I ain’t good for it.” He dug into his pocket, paid for the drinks. “There, feel better now?”
“Six bits better,” the bartender told him as he turned and shuffled away.
Dunlap took a sip, winced, then said, “Okay, Ralph. It goes this way. I had some dealings with this fucking loony, the one they picked up. Nothing big, you understand.
He’d bring shit in, you know? To sell. Junk mostly.”
“What kind of junk?”
“Just the shit he brings in. Boxes of crap. Keeps it all in that tunnel where he lives.”
“You been there, where he lives?”
“Yeah, couple times. Looking through whatever crap he’s got. Jesus, what shit, you know? Fucking busted up, all of it. Toys and crap. Rubber balls. Busted up, like I said.” Dunlap took another hasty sip of beer, swallowed hard, and tried to offer his cousin a pair of sorrowful eyes. “Anyway, the thing is, he fingered me, Ralph.”
“Fingered you? To who?”
“The cops. He give the cops my name.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know ’cause not long after the killing two of ’em came over to my place, asking questions, you know, did I know this wacko. I told ’em, ‘Fuck, no, I never heard of the fucking creep.’ But he give ’em my name, like I said, so they got to wonder how he come up with it. I mean, I told ’em I don’t know the fuck, but you know how it is, no cop ain’t ever believed me. Even when I tell ’em the truth, they don’t believe me.”
“So what happened?”
“They go on a tour of the place. At least the young one does. Pierce. The other one, his partner, he just asks questions.”
“That fuck’s full of questions.”
“He busted me before, you know. The bastard. Anyway, I told him I never heard of this guy they picked up. I didn’t know how he got my name. They left, and I ain’t heard nothing since.”
Blunt took a long drink. “So how come you’re so fucking spooked? Some nut says he knows you, you say he don’t. That’s the end of it. Who gives a shit whether Pierce and that fucking kike believe you or not?”
“Yeah, I don’t give a shit about that. But there’s a problem, you know, more to the story.” He glanced around, his fingers drumming the table. “You hungry, you want a burger?”
Blunt glared at Dunlap. “What the fuck’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing, it’s just that I don’t want to go over it here.” Dunlap released a nervous laugh. “The walls have ears, you know. So, what I’m saying is, maybe have a burger, then we’ll go to my place.”
Blunt thought Dunlap’s suggestion over, the wheels turning slowly. “Okay,” he muttered finally, “why the fuck not.”
Why do you live this way?
12:53 A.M., Seaview, Fairgrounds
Cindy Eagar’s story had been a long, somewhat rambling but ultimately harrowing tale of a boy whose mood had become steadily more withdrawn from the age of fourteen. He had left school at sixteen, but even before that he’d more or less stopped attending. Instead, he’d sneak back to the midway to burrow beneath it, sitting alone all day, listening to the steady drum of the foot traffic overhead. He’d been found repeatedly by truant officers and returned to school, only to flee it again at the first opportunity. Then, at the age of eighteen, he’d vanished altogether.
“But as far as him hurting somebody,” she said when she’d finished her story, “I never had no reason to believe he’d do nothing like that.”
Pierce looked up from his notebook. “So he never acted violently toward anyone?”
“Not that I know of. He just stopped talking or having anything to do with people. He had this look in his eyes. Not faraway, like a kid on dope or something. More like he always had this bad taste in his mouth.”
“But he never gave you any idea of what he was thinking about?”
Cindy shook her head. “All I know is, it must have been bad, ’cause it eat on him so much, he finally tried to kill hisself.”
“When was this?”
“About a month before he left Seaview. I seen him out on the pier. He stayed there all the time. Didn’t fish or nothing. Didn’t talk to nobody. Just set out there at the very end, like I told you. Anyway, I figured he’d come home when it got dark, but it got to be eight and then nine, and still he didn’t show up. So I went out looking for him. I asked everybody I could find if they’d seen him, but nobody had. Then it hit me—he jumped in the ocean. That’s what I figured. He just finally jumped right off the pier.”
“The lost boy,” Yearwood said.
“Figured the sea took him,” Cindy added. “That’s what we all thought. Then he just showed up all of a sudden. Said he’d walked through Titus and English-town, all the way to the city. Then he went to his room and that’s when I heard it. Like a bump, something like that. I went to the door, knocked. No answer, so I shoved the door open and there he was. Hanging. He’d got up on a chair and kicked it over and he was just hanging there.” She dropped the butt of her cigarette into a nearby ashtray and thumped out another. “I yelled for Carl, this guy I was living with back then.” She waved out the match. “He come in and grabbed Jimmy by the legs and lifted him up. I climbed onto a chair and got so I could get the belt loose.” A wave of smoke drifted from her mouth. “Anyway, he made it. He didn’t want to, kept saying how he wanted to be dead. Soon as he was able, he went off again. This time he never come back.”
“Do you know why he tried to kill himself?” Pierce asked.
“He wouldn’t give me no answer to that. I asked and asked, but he never give me no answer. Probably never give nobody an answer.” She took another draw on the cigarette. “Unless it was Avery Garrett.” Cindy’s face soured. “Of all the people for Jimmy to start hanging out with, he couldn’t have picked nobody worse than Avery. A guy that, you know … a drunkard. Anyway, after Jimmy tried to kill hisself, he took up with Avery for a few weeks. Maybe Avery felt sorry for him, I don’t know. All I know is that during that last month he was here, them two spent a lot of time together.”
“Is Garrett still around?” Pierce asked.
Cindy nodded. “Far as I know, he’s living on the boardwalk, like he always has.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?” Pierce asked.
“Been over five years now,” Cindy answered. “He come over a couple of weeks after Jimmy left that last time. Looking for him, you know.”
“Why was Garrett looking for him?”
“Because he figured Jimmy was in some kind of trouble. I asked him. I said, ‘What kind of trouble you mean?’ He said he didn’t know. But he was afraid Jimmy had maybe done something and didn’t know how to deal with it.”
“Done what?” Pierce asked urgently.
“He said he didn’t know,” Cindy answered. “Just that whatever it was, Jimmy seemed awful ashamed of it. Couldn’t get it out of his mind. It was chewing him up alive, Avery said. Wouldn’t give him no rest. Like a dog trailing him, this thing in Jimmy’s mind, like a dog trailing him, you know, biting at his heels.”
12:59 A.M., Interrogation Room 3
“Slime,” Cohen said. “Why do you call yourself that, Jay?”
“It’s the way I feel, that’s all.”
A breeze curled in through the window, cool but not refreshing, so that Cohen felt it as little more than a cheating respite from the room’s increasingly oppressive airlessness. He randomly turned a page in the Murder Book, hoping that it would give him some direction, knowing it wouldn’t.
“Why do you live this way?” Cohen asked, indicating the photograph of the tunnel. “You’re a smart guy. I can tell that from talking to you. You’re not … crazy, are you, Jay?”
Smalls was silent.
“So, tell me, how did you end up living in a tunnel?”
A bitter spark fired in Smalls’ eyes. “No choice.”
Cohen shook his head. “You’re wrong, Jay. Everybody has a choice.”
“No, they don’t,” Smalls insisted with a force of conviction that struck Cohen as surprisingly firm, the bedrock of some understanding of life that he’d accepted without comfort or repose, like evidence he wanted to deny but couldn’t, because the proof was there, stony and unimpeachable.
“Suppose I told you that I had a choice, Jay,” Cohen said. “I wanted to be a cop. My father hated the idea. I was supposed to be
a rabbi. Like my father. He was set on that. We broke up over it. I haven’t seen him since before the war. The point is, I didn’t want to be a rabbi. I wanted to be a cop. That was my choice. So what I’m telling you is, a guy can choose what he does, what he is.”
“What he is?” Smalls asked softly, his tone oddly gentle and accommodating, like a parent questioning some childish illusion. “You chose not to be a rabbi, but could you have chosen not to be a Jew?”
“Why would I want to?”
“Well, suppose everything people who hate Jews say about them is true, and you know that it’s true.” Smalls’ voice took on an unexpected confidence and subtle strength it had not exhibited before. “Suppose all these bad things are true about every Jew there is. True about you. Even if you knew that, could you choose not to be a Jew?”
“What does any of that have to do with you, Jay?”
“You couldn’t,” Smalls said with certainty. “You’d hate being a Jew. You’d want to be something else. Anything. You’d hate what you were, but you wouldn’t be able to change it. Then you would be like me.”
“How would I be like you?”
“You would want to die,” Smalls answered quietly.
“Or maybe want to kill?” Cohen suggested tentatively.
Smalls shook his head. “No,” he said. “But you’ll never believe that.”
1:35 A.M., Dunlap’s Collectibles
Dunlap swung open the door. “Okay, come on in.”
Blunt didn’t move. “Not till you put on a light.”
Dunlap fired up a cigarette lighter. “Better?”
“Why don’t you just turn on the fucking light?”
“Please, Ralph, not till we get to the back room.”
They made their way toward the back of the shop, Dunlap doing his best to guide Blunt down its cluttered center aisle.
“I can’t see a fucking thing,” Blunt grumbled.
“Watch your step, there.”
“What the fuck is that?”
“Handlebars.”
“Who the fuck’s gonna buy handlebars?”
The Interrogation Page 14
