The Interrogation

by Thomas H. Cook

  A thin mist lay over the sandy beach. Pierce could make out only the jagged lines of surf that tumbled ashore a few yards away. After a moment, he wheeled and faced the weathered facade of the Boardwalk Motel, its rusty metal sign creaking in the ocean breeze. Twenty minutes before, he’d roused the motel’s sleeping owner only to discover that Avery Garrett was not in his room. As to when he might return to it, the owner had had no idea, since Garrett had no set pattern for his comings and goings.

  “Avery used to live under the boardwalk,” Yearwood said. “But the cops were always harassing him, so I guess he finally moved indoors.”

  “How does he pay for his room?”

  “Sells things. Scrap metal. Whatever junk he can find.”

  Pierce’s restless gaze cut to the left, where, in the distance, the boardwalk came to an abrupt end. “Smalls had a box full of crap in that tunnel where he was living. We looked all through it, but we couldn’t find anything that tied him to the murder.” He paced restlessly along the rail, then back again. “This could take all night.”

  Yearwood leisurely slung his arm over the back of the bench. “I used to be the way you are. Jumpy.”

  Pierce laughed. “Well, you’re calm enough now. What’s your secret?”

  “No secret, really. You just get old and learn that you’re not as smart as you think you are, and that you never were.”

  Pierce kept pacing.

  Yearwood watched him intently. “What happened to you, Detective Pierce?”

  Pierce felt that he’d abruptly been nailed to a wall. He reached for a cigarette and lit it.

  Yearwood’s gaze continued to bore into him.

  “You like asking questions, but you’re not much on answering them, are you?” the old man asked.

  Pierce said nothing.

  Yearwood shrugged. “Okay, fine, no more questions from me. But here’s a piece of advice you might use. Technical advice, you might call it.”

  Pierce blew a column of smoke into the dark air. “I’m listening.”

  “When you talk to Avery Garrett, don’t just start firing questions at him like you’re a big shot and he’s nothing. Treat him with some respect. Because that’s all he wants.”

  Pierce started to speak, but Yearwood lifted his hand and silenced him.

  “So you do it the way I do it. You let Avery talk, and you don’t rush him, and you listen to his story, and you listen in that story for something you can use. But more than anything, let him be a man talking to a man.”

  Pierce pressed his back against the rail. A breeze touched his hair, and briefly he imagined Anna Lake doing the same.

  “You married?” Yearwood asked.

  “Divorced.”

  “Kids?”

  “Daughter.”

  “How old?”

  Costa’s face swam into Pierce’s mind, but rather than tell the story of what had been done to Debra, he said only, “She died,” and returned his gaze to the sea.

  2:21 A.M., Interrogation Room 3

  It was an odd flash of resentment, quick, bright, and unmistakable, and Cohen replayed the question that had incited it, and which he now repeated.

  “You heard me, Jay. What did you have against Cathy Lake?”

  Smalls sat ramrod straight, his back pressed firmly against the chair.

  “You didn’t have anything against Cathy, is that what you’re trying to tell me, Jay?” Cohen asked. “I mean, you looked pissed when I suggested that you did.”

  “I didn’t know her,” Smalls said. “I had nothing against her.”

  “Well, think about how she was killed,” Cohen pressed. “The wire around her neck. How tight it was. Brutal. A guy has to have a lot of hate bottled up in him to do something like that, right?” He flipped through the Murder Book until he found a photograph of the girl’s crumpled body, the ligature marks visible on her throat. “A lot of hate bottled up, don’t you think, to kill a little girl this way?”

  “I didn’t do that.”

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the man in the playground. The man she was afraid of.”

  “The Invisible Man, right,” Cohen said with a hard laugh. “Okay, let’s suppose it’s this guy. What can you tell me about him?”

  “I never saw him.”

  “I don’t mean what he looked like. I mean inside. What’s he feel like? In his heart.”

  Something imprisoned deep within Smalls’ mind emerged as visibly as a needle piercing through his skin. “Terrible.”

  “What’s terrible?”

  “What he wants.” Smalls’ voice trembled like something at the edge of a precipice.

  “To kill a kid, you mean?”

  “To want a … to feel …”

  “What?”

  “Not normal.” Smalls’ face was wreathed in shame.

  “Not normal, how?”

  “Because he wants …”

  “A kid?”

  “Yes.”

  Now is the moment, Cohen thought, Smalls curiously exposed, his shoulders slumped, his voice tremulous, so that he seemed suddenly exhausted and overwhelmed by his own dreadful hatred of himself, primed and ready to collapse. Now was the moment to swing his questions like a sword, drive Smalls to the wall. “What would a guy like that do, Jay? A guy who … wants a kid? Would he hang around playgrounds?”

  “Yes,” Smalls answered softly.

  “Would he watch kids?”

  “Yes.”

  “And while he watched them, would he try to be invisible?”

  Smalls lowered his head.

  “Would he follow a kid to some lonely place?”

  Smalls said nothing.

  “Would he make sure nobody was around and then …”

  Smalls lifted his head. “I didn’t do any of that,” he said quietly. His earlier sense of shame dissolved and his face took on a fierce certitude that seemed itself borne upward on a wave of wounded pride. “I didn’t,” he repeated firmly. “I never hurt that little girl.”

  So is that what it finally comes to, Cohen wondered as he watched Smalls draw in a breath, that out of nowhere you suddenly believe a man you’ve worked so hard not to believe, believe him not because you’ve found something that exonerates him or because some completely different man has confessed to the crime, but because he has abruptly exhibited that unspeakable exhaustion that only the innocent may know? He thought of his own kind, the centuries of their trial, accused of devising plots, poisoning wells, killing children, and wondered how many of them had sat before their interrogators as Smalls sat before him now, silent, alone, utterly helpless. Did they, too, have nothing to declare their innocence save what he now saw in Smalls’ face, the towering moral certainty that they had done no wrong?

  2:30 A.M., 981 Tremont Street

  Eddie Lambrusco steered Siddell Carting Truck 12 over to the curb in front of Molly’s Café. “Time for lunch,” he said.

  Siddell sat staring straight ahead.

  “What’s the matter, you not hungry?” Eddie asked.

  “It’s two-thirty in the morning. You call that lunch?”

  “It is when you work the night shift,” Eddie said.

  Siddell shook his head. “Just hurry up, will you?”

  Eddie waved his hand. “Okay, suit yourself.” He heaved himself out of the truck, slammed the door, and strode into the café. Next time, he thought, next time, no matter what, he wasn’t going to get stuck with Terry Siddell as his shift partner. He thought of Charlie, wished they still worked together. A joke would save him, he thought, a joke would end this sick feeling of being small and helpless, a nothing. If he just hadn’t slugged the guy in Sanitation, he’d be having a laugh now instead of … what he had to do.

  “So, how’s tricks?” Molly asked as he sat down at the counter.

  “They could be better.”

  Molly wiped the counter with a dirty rag. “Ain’t that the way of it?” She smiled her gap-toothed smile. “So what’ll you have, h
andsome?”

  Eddie watched her in amazement that such a big, ugly broad could be so happy. Didn’t she know how rotten she looked, that no guy would touch her? What in all the world did Molly Pulaski have to be cheerful about? She’d lived her whole life mopping up spilled coffee, a fat, warty kid who’d expanded into a floral balloon of a woman, unmarried and unmarriageable, childless and with no hope of children, destined to be found facedown on the tenement floor, or burned to a crisp by her last cigarette. And yet she gave every evidence of being perfectly delighted with how it had all turned out. Eddie shook his head in bafflement. Did a really bad hand contain some invisible card, he wondered, one that worked like a flash of light, blinding you to the lousy cards you’d drawn?

  Molly stopped wiping the counter and stared Eddie dead in the eye. “Cat got your tongue, gorgeous?”

  “Uh, no. Coffee. Couple eggs.”

  Molly’s grin expanded, revealing missing teeth on either side. “Sunny-side up?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “Comin’ up, my lovely,” Molly chirped, then made a surprisingly graceful turn and sashayed away, humming brightly.

  Eddie watched her until she disappeared into the kitchen, the mystery of life growing more impenetrable with each oblivious sway of her huge buttocks. Then he let his attention drift out over the diner, lighting briefly on each of its early morning habitués, the fishermen and dockworkers and tugboat crewmen on their way to the river, dressed in shapeless work clothes and wool caps, the uniform of Harbortown. There were a few day laborers, though it was a full three hours before the flatbed trucks arrived to take them to worksites about town. And, as always, there was a scattering of men who’d not gone home at all, fearing, Eddie supposed, the wifely wrath that would inevitably greet them. For now they sat composing hopelessly ludicrous stories of how they’d spent the evening, careful to leave out the part about the frowsy whore they’d pounded into the grimy mattress of some buck-an-hour hotel.

  “Here’s your eggs and coffee.” Molly slid the plate in front of Eddie with a grand flourish, then plopped the steaming mug down beside it. “Anything else, dream-boat?”

  “No, thanks,” Eddie said, concealing his dislike for the little terms of endearment Molly habitually tossed him. He was not a dreamboat and they both knew it. She might as easily have said “What’ll you have, loser?” or “Anything else, you poor fucking jerk?” for all the comfort that it brought him in this, the final, weary portion of his working day.

  He stabbed a forkful of eggs, washed it down with a gulp of coffee, his gaze now on the figure of a man in a long black coat who approached the café from across the empty street. He gave off a sense of one familiar with the night, who had no fear of it, perhaps even preferred its shadows to what the day revealed.

  Eddie took another sip from the mug, watching as the man entered, then stood at the door, stripping off his gloves while he glanced about the diner’s interior until his attention lit upon a large man who sat in the back corner. Then, with a nod, he strode back to the big man’s booth and slid into it, taking off his hat as he did so, a great mass of hair winking silver in the light.

  “Who’s that?” Eddie said when Molly stepped over to him again.

  “That?” Molly said with obvious pride. “Why, that’s His Honor Francis X. O’Hearn. The Police Commissioner himself. You ever need anything, he’s the man to see.”

  Eddie laughed. “What would I need from a big shot like that?”

  “Protection,” Molly answered without hesitation.

  “From what?”

  Molly glanced toward the Commissioner, then back to Eddie. “From the law, sweetheart. From what it can do to the likes of us.” With that she slung the counter cloth over her beefy shoulder and moved away.

  Eddie took a gulp of coffee, paid the tab, then slid off the stool. On the way to the door, he shot a final glance toward the Commissioner and the man in the green suit. The Great Man had leaned forward and was staring at the other man intently, a single finger lifted regally as he made his point. What must it be like, Eddie wondered, to hold the reins of the city in your hands, to command other men and feel them tense at your approach, to know that all eyes turn to you when you come into the room, and that none among the throng within it can do you the slightest harm?

  “Take it easy, handsome,” Molly called as he opened the door of the café.

  He smiled thinly. “Just call me Eddie,” he said. “Just Eddie from now on.”

  Do you know where he was headed?

  2:38 A.M., Seaview, Boardwalk

  “There he is,” Yearwood said. He nodded toward a figure, barely visible through the haze, walking slowly, listing to the left, like a small, badly damaged boat. “That’s Avery. He’s been out collecting all night, I guess.” Yearwood indicated the large canvas bag flung over Garrett’s shoulder. He stepped forward and waited silently for him to draw near. Then he called, “Hello, Avery.”

  Avery Garrett stared at him without smiling.

  Yearwood motioned Pierce forward. “Remember what I told you,” he murmured.

  Drawing closer, Pierce saw that Avery Garrett was a man in his sixties. His jaws were covered with a scraggly graying beard. He wore thick glasses with wide black frames, and a baseball cap punched low on his brow so that his eyes disappeared in shadow.

  Pierce flashed his badge.

  Avery Garrett let the canvas bag drop with a hard thud onto the slats of the boardwalk. “I ain’t done nothing,” he declared.

  “It’s not about you, Avery,” Yearwood assured him. “It’s about Jimmy Eagar. He’s in serious trouble.”

  “Murder,” Pierce said. “An eight-year-old girl.”

  Garrett’s eyes cut over to Pierce.

  Pierce took out his notebook. “When did you see him last?”

  “When he come back after being lost.”

  “Five years ago?”

  “Yeah. He was all upset. Said he was going off somewhere. That he was leaving for good. He was gonna change his name, stash everything that identified him. Disappear, he said. Be invisible. That’s what he wanted. To be invisible.”

  “But he didn’t tell you why he wanted that?”

  “No,” Garrett answered.

  “Did he mention anything that he might have done while he was … lost?”

  “No.”

  “Did he tell you where he’d gone?”

  “Said he was in Englishtown. Titus.”

  “Did he mention anyone he met or lived with in those places?”

  “I don’t think he met nobody.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “’Cause he looked like me when I didn’t have no place to live or nobody to help out. All ragged and dirty. Didn’t have nothing but an old bag full of stuff. Papers and things. The clothes on his back, that was it. I hated to see him that way. I told him he could stay with me if he wanted to, but he said no, he didn’t want to stay in Seaview.”

  “Do you know where he was headed?”

  “Said he was going into the city. I told him I had this shed he could bed down in if he got tired. It didn’t have no running water or nothing, but he could bed down in it for a night or two if he wanted.”

  “Did he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is the shed?”

  “Off Route Six,” Garrett answered. “Between Titus and Englishtown. AJS Storage. Number twenty-seven. I’d give you the key, but Jimmy never brought it back, so I figure he’s still got it.”

  “We looked through everything he had, but we didn’t find a key,” Pierce told him.

  Garrett shrugged. “Maybe he lost it.”

  “Or hid it,” Pierce said.

  “Why would he do that?” Garrett asked mildly.

  But Pierce had already turned away and was moving rapidly down the midway toward his car.

  2:51 A.M., Interrogation Room 3

  Cohen looked at his watch and felt time as something physical, a vise squeezing out his
life, making him hot and sweaty, so that he’d finally rushed to the window, cranked it open, and stuck his head into the night air.

  When he turned back, Smalls was still sitting in his chair, his hands in his lap, his eyes downcast, resigned, or so it seemed to Cohen, to whatever happened to him next, broken, left with nothing more than the energy it took to proclaim by some look or gesture, the weary tenor of his voice, that he was innocent.

  “You know, Jay, I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier. About people not having choices.”

  Smalls made no response.

  “Take me, for example.” He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and swabbed his neck. “I’m a detective. And take you. A suspect. We can’t change that. So I have to go at you. Sometimes hard. Sometimes not so hard. But I have to go at you. Because that’s my job.” He returned the handkerchief to his pocket, went back to his chair. “But suppose we changed all that. Just the two of us. Suppose I stopped being a detective and you stopped being a guy I have to interrogate, and instead of those two guys, we just became ourselves. Norm Cohen and Jay Smalls. Just talked, like a couple of normal guys.”

  Smalls’ gaze drifted upward as Cohen leaned back.

  “Would you like that, Jay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, so what should we talk about?”

  “I don’t know,” Smalls answered, his voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t talk to people.”

  “Okay, how about when you were in school, what did you talk about then?”

  “I didn’t talk much.”

  “But you listened, I’ll bet. What were the other kids talking about?”

  “Girls mostly. The boys, I mean. They talked about girls.”

  “Did you ever have a girl?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t have one either,” Cohen said. “I’d like to, but I don’t.” He waited for Smalls to respond, but Smalls remained silent. “There’s this woman in my building, for example,” Cohen added. “Sometimes I think of her.”

  What if nothing is?

  3:01 A.M., Dunlap’s Collectibles