The Interrogation

by Thomas H. Cook

  Smalls picked up the photograph and gazed at it intently, running his finger tenderly over the surface of the picture, as if adding colors and textures, using the tip of his finger like a painter’s brush.

  Cohen felt a spurt of impatience. “Well?” he asked.

  “It could be him.”

  “Could be, but you’re not sure?”

  “No.”

  Cohen snatched the photograph from Smalls’ hand, shoved back his chair, and walked to Burke’s office.

  “I showed the picture to Smalls,” he told the Chief. “He says he doesn’t know if this was the man he saw in the park.” He placed the photograph on Burke’s desk. “Anything else, sir?”

  “No,” Burke told him.

  Cohen eased himself back into the corridor, closing the door behind him.

  Smalls had risen and was standing at the window when he walked back into the interrogation room.

  “Sit down,” Cohen snapped.

  Smalls obeyed without hesitation, his feet scuttling across the wooden floor until they brought him once again to the table.

  Cohen stepped to the window, cranked it closed, and locked it. “Stay in your seat unless you’re told to leave it,” he snarled.

  Smalls nodded slowly. “Yes, sir.”

  Cohen pressed himself against the wall and glared down at the pallid, frail figure who sat, arms curled around his belly, a few feet away. What an act, he thought, the whole routine, the childlike delicacy of his features, the pale hands, the liquid blue eyes. Butter wouldn’t melt, he thought angrily, butter wouldn’t melt in his goddamn mouth.

  He looked at the clock. Twenty-six minutes until he had to leave the interrogation room, twenty-seven minutes until someone replaced him there, took Smalls downstairs, and set him loose. Where was Pierce? he wondered. But it was not a question he could dwell upon. He had to think about Smalls. Only Smalls. So little time now. Twenty-seven … no, twenty-six minutes. He pulled himself from the wall. One more go, he urged himself, one more.

  “Why did you kill her, Smalls?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Why did you kill her?” Cohen repeated.

  “I didn’t kill Cathy.”

  “How about some other little girl?” Cohen asked. “That’s why you won’t tell me about yourself, isn’t it? Where you lived before you came to the city. Where you came from. It’s because you killed a kid, isn’t it? Some kid in some park.”

  “I never killed anybody,” Smalls insisted. His eyes drifted to the clock.

  “Don’t look at that fucking thing,” Cohen raged. “Look at me. Look in my eyes.”

  Smalls did as he was told.

  “And don’t give me that sad-sack look,” Cohen snapped. “I’m sick of it. Poor, sad Jay. Poor, misunderstood Jay. All the sorrows of the world on your shoulders. Do you really expect me to swallow that? That you’ve never done anything wrong? Poor Jay, yanked out of a tunnel where he was sleeping, just minding his own damn business. Dragged to jail, accused of murder, but so, so innocent. Well, forget that crap. You’re a goddamn child-killer, and you and I both know it.”

  “I never killed a child.”

  “Just molest them, is that all you do?”

  Smalls’ eyes caught fire. “I didn’t touch her,” he insisted. “I never touched anybody.”

  Cohen instantly remembered an earlier moment in the interrogation. They’d been talking about Cathy’s murder, how it could have been prevented if someone had chanced upon the killer before it was too late.

  “If someone had been there, he would have stopped. Isn’t that what you told me, Jay? That no matter how much this guy might have wanted to hurt Cathy, he would have stopped if someone had been there. Didn’t you tell me that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know that’s true, don’t you? Because at some other point, in some other place, someone stopped you. That much wasn’t a lie, was it?”

  Smalls hesitated, but Cohen saw his shoulders suddenly lift, as if a great burden had just fallen from them, and knew he had struck upon the truth at last. “I wouldn’t have hurt her.”

  “Another little girl?”

  “I just wanted to draw her.”

  “Draw her?”

  “She’d let me do it before.”

  “Who?”

  “She let me do it before. She was … so pretty.”

  “And you … what, Jay?”

  “I didn’t touch her. Someone else did.”

  “Someone else?” A brutal laugh broke from Cohen. “So now we have yet another man, right? And what did this one look like, Jay? Did he look like you?”

  “No.”

  “Not another bum, living in the park?”

  “He worked in the park, but he didn’t live there.”

  “Oh, great. Now we really have something to go on. We have us a whole lot of guys to check out, don’t we? And just how do you know this guy worked in the park?”

  “He had on a uniform.”

  “Like every other guy who works for the Parks Department.”

  “He wore a baseball cap.”

  “What kind of baseball cap? What team?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How convenient. Okay, tell me something else about this guy.”

  “I thought he saved her.”

  “Saved her? From what?”

  Smalls’ admission seemed to crack his heart. “From me,” he said.

  “From you?”

  “She saw the way I was looking at her. It scared her so she ran away. Toward this guy. He’s the one who hurt her.”

  “What makes you so sure of that?”

  “I heard her … cry,” Smalls answered quietly.

  “Ah, so that’s it,” Cohen said mockingly. “You didn’t hurt this kid. Someone else did. Your only crime was not stopping it.”

  “I don’t expect you to believe me,” Smalls murmured.

  “Well, good,” Cohen snapped. “Because I don’t!” He started to speak, but fell mute before the sheer weakness of mere words to do what had to be done in the minutes that remained for the interrogation. He didn’t want to ask Smalls any more questions. He wanted a pair of pliers. He wanted to put Smalls’ thumb between its metal teeth and squeeze the truth from him. And with that thought, Cohen realized that he’d reached the end of the road. The place you arrive at when you no longer believe that something may yet intervene on your behalf; some particle of luck or a blaze of intuition, that forestalls the death of hope.

  5:29 A.M., Route 6

  The scream of the siren, the sense of moving very fast, gave Yearwood hope that they might make it to the city in time.

  Inches away, Pierce lay on a stretcher, his eyes closed, his body utterly still. A spot of blood spread out from beneath his head, but it was small and no longer growing.

  Watching him, Yearwood felt the urge to take his hand. He didn’t for fear of interfering with what struck him as the increasingly desperate movement of the attendants who now worked feverishly around Pierce’s body. He noted the grim glances they exchanged while they talked tersely of “shock” and “decreased respiration.” He had seen all of this before, and it had always signaled a deepening distress, the ebbing, ruthless and irreversible, of a human life.

  5:30 A.M., Dunlap’s Collectibles

  Dunlap glanced nervously at the battered Coca-Cola clock that hung at a slant on the opposite wall, beside a poster of Elvis, which someone had decorated with kisses.

  “Where’s that dumb-ass cousin of yours?” Stitt demanded.

  “I don’t know, Burt,” Dunlap said edgily. “He should have been here by now. I gave him good directions, but maybe he got lost.”

  “Well, he better get found,” Stitt replied coldly. “And soon.”

  Dunlap got to his feet, walked to the curtain, and peered through the slit. Light was building on the street now, and he didn’t like it. Business of this kind, he’d long ago decided, was best done in the dark. Within an hour the early risers would be on
the street. Some of them would probably see Blunt when he arrived, then Stitt and Blunt when they left. Shit, he thought, goddamn.

  “Sit down, Harry,” Stitt barked.

  Dunlap immediately did as he was told, at the same time hating himself for it. How, he wondered, how had he become such a cringing, cowardly thing? He saw his father’s eyes cut over to him. What are you looking at—then his massive, factory-worker hand, swift and hard, shoot out, bloodying his mouth—that way?

  “That little fuck pick the hophead’s shit up?” Stitt asked.

  “Yeah,” Dunlap replied. He laughed, but it didn’t sound real. “You sure told him off, Burt. You sure gave it to that bastard.”

  Stitt grinned mockingly. “Yeah, I scared the shit out of him. Bet he had to change his shorts.” The grin vanished. “You’ll be changing yours, too, if I don’t get my fucking money.”

  Dunlap turned away. How could he change his life? he wondered. In high school they’d called him Mouse, he remembered, Mouse because he was like a mouse, scurrying, frantic, panicked. Not a man, he thought, never a man. Still a virgin, for Christ’s sake. At thirty-four.

  He stood up again. Fuck Stitt, he thought, this is my place. I can fucking get up when I goddamn want to. I can walk to the curtains and part the goddamn things and stare out at the goddamn street anytime I goddamn please.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Stitt barked.

  “Nothing, I was just—”

  “Sit down!”

  Dunlap felt the familiar cringing fear grip him. “Okay,” he said meekly as he returned to his seat. “Okay, Burt, anything you say.”

  5:32 A.M., Route 6

  “How much farther?” Yearwood asked.

  “We’re at the bridge.”

  The attendant who spoke was bent over Pierce’s body, tying something or inserting something, Year-wood couldn’t tell.

  “Okay, that’s all we can do for now,” the attendant announced, then drew away. “Head shots are always bad.”

  “I didn’t know what it was at first,” Yearwood told him. “The sound. Not even loud. Like snapping a dry stick.”

  “Any idea who did it?”

  “Just his car.” He saw the old gray Studebaker speed across the dark field. “So fast. The way it happened.”

  The attendant wrestled with a length of tubing. “So you didn’t get a look at the driver?”

  Yearwood shook his head. “No,” he said. “Too dark. Everything.”

  He felt the rumble of the bridge beneath him and knew that they were passing over the river, would soon be racing down the avenue toward Saint Vincent’s. “Hold on just a little longer, Jack,” he told Pierce. “We’re almost there.”

  Are you listening to me?

  5:34 A.M., Dunlap’s Collectibles

  The knock at the door was brutal, like a cow kicking a barn wall, and so Dunlap knew instantly that it was Blunt.

  “Jesus Christ, you don’t got to wake up the whole neighborhood,” he said as he swung it open.

  Blunt stepped into the murky light, and Dunlap saw that he was sweating.

  “Jeez, Ralph, you look like you been—”

  Blunt jabbed a finger hard into Dunlap’s chest. “Don’t say another fucking word.”

  “Okay, okay,” Dunlap said, raising his hands defensively. “Come on back.”

  The two men made their way down the shop’s center aisle, and on the way, Dunlap swore to himself that he would never get his ass in this kind of sling again, that nothing was worth dealing with psychos like Blunt and Stitt.

  Halfway to the curtain Dunlap stopped. “Listen, Ralph, I got a visitor,” he whispered.

  “A what?”

  “The guy whose money you got,” Dunlap explained. “He come for it a little early.”

  Blunt reached for his pistol. “You little prick.”

  Dunlap felt the barrel of the thirty-eight like the nose of a serpent, cold and deadly. “Holy shit, Ralph,” he gasped. “Holy shit, put that thing away.”

  “Who’d you send out there?” Blunt demanded.

  “Send? Who? Out where?”

  Blunt jabbed the pistol into Dunlap’s belly. “Who’d you send out to that fucking shed, Harry?”

  “Me? Nobody,” Dunlap wailed. “What are you talking about?”

  Blunt shoved Dunlap hard, sending him stumbling backward through the curtain.

  Stitt leaped to his feet. “What the fuck!”

  “Shut up,” Blunt snarled.

  Stitt glared at Dunlap. “What the fuck’s going on?”

  “I don’t know, Burt,” Dunlap whined. “What’s the story, Ralph? We got no idea—”

  “Shut up.” Blunt jerked the pistol. “Sit down. The both of you.”

  Stitt and Dunlap lowered themselves onto the sofa.

  “You bring my money or not?” Stitt demanded.

  “Yeah, I brought it,” Blunt replied.

  “Where is it, then?”

  “It’s in the car.”

  “Well, why don’t you go get it, fatso?”

  Blunt’s eyes narrowed. “What’d you say?”

  “You heard me.”

  Blunt took a short step toward Stitt. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Me?” Stitt answered coldly. “I’ll tell you who I am. I’m the guy that paid this shithead cousin of yours three grand to hide my goddamn money.”

  Blunt’s eyes cut over to Dunlap. “Three grand?”

  Dunlap swallowed hard.

  Stitt laughed. “You stiff this lummox, Harry? No wonder he’s pissed at you.”

  “Shut up!” Blunt yelled.

  “You don’t have much of a vocabulary, do you, fat boy?” Stitt sneered.

  Blunt jabbed the pistol toward Stitt. “Shut … you … you better …”

  “Spit it out there, dumbo,” Stitt cawed.

  Blunt drew back the hammer.

  “Oh, fuck,” Dunlap gasped. “Please, Ralph. Let’s all think this through, okay? This guy you saw. Let’s figure this out, okay? ’Cause what I’m saying here is, I didn’t send nobody.”

  “What guy?” Stitt demanded.

  “Some guy showed up where the money was,” Dunlap told him. “That’s why Ralph’s so pissed. Ain’t that right, Ralph? So what I’m saying is, let’s figure it out. Go slow, you know? Figure it out, like I said. So, please, that gun there, Ralph, you can put that way.”

  “I ain’t puttin’ nothing away.”

  Stitt chuckled. “Just don’t shoot yourself in your big fat foot.”

  “Shut the—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Stitt yawned. “Get the money, Harry. Send this fat … whatever … out to his fucking car and get me my money.”

  “Take it easy, Burt,” Dunlap pleaded. “So, Ralph, this guy, what’d he look like?”

  Stitt kept his eyes on Dunlap. “I don’t give a shit about any of this, Harry. Are you listening to me? I want my money. Now!”

  “Burt, please,” Dunlap begged. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with here.”

  Stitt glared at Dunlap, then cut his eyes over to Blunt. “Your shit cousin says I don’t know what I’m dealing with. Well, here’s the bottom line. Nobody gets between me and my money. Anybody does, they’re dead. You got that, dumbo? I don’t give a fuck if some stupid bastard got in your face. I don’t give a shit what you did to him.”

  “I shot the fucking guy,” Blunt yelped.

  Dunlap dropped his face into his hands. “Oh, Jesus,” he moaned fretfully.

  Stitt laughed. “So you shot a guy, fat boy? So what? That fucking money’s already got blood on it.”

  Dunlap lifted his head. “Blood, Burt? You didn’t tell me about no blood.”

  “Who cares what I told you.”

  “But if that money’s got—”

  Stitt waved his hand. “It’s the hophead that fucked it up, grabbing at my stuff.”

  “So … what happened, Burt?” Dunlap probed timidly.

  “He fucking grabbed my briefcase,” Stit
t howled. “Tossed it all the way across the room. Flew open, the fucking thing. Cash scattered everywhere.”

  “Jeez,” Dunlap breathed.

  “Then he goes out the door, and on the way snatches a chain off this kid’s neck, the fuck.”

  Dunlap felt a blade of dread slide across his throat. “You mean …?”

  “Yeah, her,” Stitt said. “Snaps the fucking chain right off her neck and just keeps going. And me with that goddamn money scattered all over, and that kid scared out of her fucking mind. No way she’s not going to the cops.”

  Blunt blinked sluggishly. “Kid?”

  “Yeah, what of it, fat ass?” Stitt said.

  “You hurt that kid?” Blunt asked.

  Stitt stared at Blunt contemptuously. “You get in my way, you get the same. It’s just that simple. Real simple. So simple, a dumb-ass like you can—”

  The blast was deafening, and in its explosive charge Dunlap dove frantically for the floor, covering his ears and whimpering. “Oh, shit. Jesus. Jesus. Oh, shit, man.” He lay there, curled tight, his eyes squeezed shut. “Oh, Jesus,” he whimpered. “Sweet Jesus.”

  Stitt remained in an upright position, eyes open, his head cocked to the right, as if listening for a distant sound, a neat round hole at the center of his forehead.

  Dunlap cautiously opened his eyes, then drew himself from the floor, working desperately to compose himself, think things through. Blunt stood motionless, the pistol dead still in his hand, nothing moving but the curl of blue smoke that twined up from the barrel. “So what do we do now, Ralph?” he asked softly.

  Blunt said nothing, but Dunlap could see the tumblers of his brain working. What, he asked himself, what was he trying to figure out? His eyes fell toward the pistol, and he wondered if he could take a short, very slow step and ease it from Blunt’s fingers. He waited, thought about it a little longer, then stepped forward.

  “So, Ralph, why don’t you just—”

  A siren wailed distantly; something glimmered in Blunt’s eyes.