The Cop

by R.J. Ellory

  “Anyplace she liked.”

  “But she sat next to this guy?”

  “Right.”

  “Like she wanted to sit next to him. Would you say?”

  “Sure. She looked like the sort of dame who enjoyed company.”

  “Why d’you say that?”

  “I figure she spilled her coffee on purpose. Got his attention, you know? He was there minding his own business, reading the paper, she spills her coffee, she gets him all involved in cleaning it up, and there we have it. The meet-cute.”

  “The what?”

  “You know, the hook, the hitch, the pick-up. She picked him up, that’s what I reckon.”

  “She was pretty?”

  “Sure she was. You seen her, right? Same girl as in your picture there.”

  “Except now she’s dead.”

  “And he did it?”

  “We believe so, Mr. Hayes, we believe so.”

  Stanley Hayes went quietly pale, evidently very upset by the revelation. “Well, kick me into a cocked hat,” he said. “So maybe you want his paper then?”

  “His paper?”

  “Yes, he left his paper behind. He’d circled a couple or so jobs on the classifieds page, and I figured he might come back for it so I left it aside.”

  I looked at Pete Quinn.

  Stanley Hayes went in back and returned with a copy of the paper. Just as he’d said, half a dozen jobs had been circled with a black pen. There were a couple of margin notes in an almost-indecipherable scrawl.

  “What’s that say?” I asked Pete.

  Pete squinted, held the paper at a different angle.

  “It says eight,” Hayes interjected.

  Hayes pointed at another scrawl. “And that one says fifteen, and that one says twelve. I figure it’s the number of blocks he lives from those places, or maybe the time for the bus journey. He’s working out how far he’s got to travel if he takes any of these jobs.”

  I looked at Quinn, and the question was right there in my expression.

  “I don’t know,” Quinn said, “but maybe a math teacher could do it.”

  “Kramer,” I said.

  We went through the routine with Hayes, gave him a card, thanked him for his help.

  It was already eleven. Quinn phoned Dispatch from the car, had them call the school where Carole Shaw had worked and find Martin Kramer. Kramer was in a lesson, would be available a few minutes after we got there.

  Once we arrived, I took a map from the car, the newspaper from the restaurant, and me and Pete Quinn sat in a classroom by ourselves while the deputy principal collected Kramer from wherever he was in the building.

  We were sat at tablet-arm desks, no place else to sit, and we didn’t fit so good. I reckoned this was precisely the kind of room where Carole Shaw had taught the little ones. Smaller desks, sure, but the same kind of room.

  I had the map spread out in front of me, the margin notes, and I hoped like hell that some sense could be made of this.

  Kramer came in. He looked rough, but he impressed me. He’d showed up at work the day after learning his girlfriend was dead. I could tell from his eyes that he hadn’t slept.

  I explained the situation, and he got it immediately.

  “Blocks is easy,” he said. “Bus journeys I can do as well, but it’ll give you a much wider perimeter.”

  “Do the blocks for now,” I told him, and Kramer sat there with a compass and a scratch pad, and he figured out the circumference of blocks from each address in the paper, and he circled them on the map with his compass, and there was a segment right there in the middle shaped like a football and he shaded it in with a pencil and handed me back the map. It was the same area as the diner where Carole had met her man. The diner we’d just left was right there in that zone. The cross-section spanned maybe eight or ten blocks, no more, and—if our theory was right—our man lived right in that football somewhere.

  “I reckon this is it,” Quinn said. “I reckon he lives there. He goes to the diner, he has breakfast, he meets Carole, he spends the day with her, and then it all goes horribly wrong.”

  “You’re going to find him?” Kramer asked.

  “We’re doing all we can, Mr. Kramer,” I replied.

  The only thing Kramer wanted to hear was that we had him locked up and prepped for the chair.

  We departed, headed back to the precinct. I wanted a sketch artist to go down and see Brenda at Hannigan’s, then Howard Schumann at the museum. I planned to skip Mrs. Gerrity, because she looked at our guy and only saw Montgomery Clift. The waitress at The Blue Parrot could have confirmed, but The Blue Parrot would have had much lower lighting. I figured Brenda and Howard Schumann got the best look at him, and I was too short on time to be doing another citywide tour.

  If the sketch artist went fast we could have a good likeness within an hour and get copies made for as many uniforms as could be deployed to that zone of the city. If our man hadn’t already run, then we had a prayer.

  It was close to one by the time we reached the precinct. There was an artist on shift. We went with him, had a squad car accompany us so we could use bells and whistles if there was traffic.

  While we waited in the restaurant we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. We didn’t say a word. The artist was good. He had a steady hand and a good ear. He listened, asked question after question—A nose like this, or thinner? Eyes closer together? Further apart? Hairline now . . . where was the hairline? Blanche your mind of any face you know, and just concentrate on the man you saw with the girl . . .

  Once we were done we headed back to the museum and found Schumann.

  “That’s your boy,” he said when we showed him the artist’s impression. “Eyes a little deeper set, a little more shadow, but that’s your man.”

  Ten minutes back at the precinct, a photo taken of the drawing, the film off to be processed, prints to be made up for the uniform deployment, and Quinn and I took the original and went back to restaurant where Carole Shaw and her killer had eaten just a little more than twenty-four hours before.

  We stood there on the sidewalk ahead of that place, and then we got a call.

  “They found her sister,” Pete said. “Her name’s Maryanne Shaw. They just told her that Carole is dead.”

  “Be good to go see her, but we can’t. If Carole did meet this guy for the first time yesterday morning, then the sister won’t be able to help us.”

  Pete and I figured on starting with the convenience stores, places where our boy might buy his groceries in the neighborhood. Then we’d move on to the remaining restaurants, diners and bars. En route we’d check newsstands and magazine kiosks. If we exhausted all of that and were still none the wiser, then it would be time for the uniforms to start checking apartment buildings and hotels. It was a six or seven-block radius. It was big, but it could have been worse. Instinct and common sense told me he was in this area. Most people didn’t walk across town to take breakfast.

  I looked at the artist’s drawing. I imagined looking at him in the flesh. Montgomery Clift or not, this boy was guilty of killing a schoolteacher, and I wanted him in a box before nightfall.

  Tell you now, I wouldn’t pay a nickel to see a movie about real police work. These Hollywood pictures and dime-store paperbacks don’t do justice to the banal and truly mundane nature of most of what we do. It’s a great deal of shoe leather, I’ll tell you that, and not so much running around in hats with snub-nosed .38s and wisecracks for every scenario. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed a good Cagney film as much as the next man, and an episode of Joe Friday and Frank Smith chasing down sweaty hoodlums with big lapels and facial scars always raised a smile, but it was comic book stuff compared to the real world.

  That afternoon, walking those blocks, speaking to people who’d seen nothing, knew nothing, didn’t want to know anything, was as dispiriting as it got. I kept thinking about Carole Shaw, about her sister, about whether or not there were parents, other siblings, whether the sister had made
calls and the ripple effect of the schoolteacher’s death had now spread out across the city, the state, further states beyond. It wasn’t just one life that was irrevocably changed, it was many. Even Stanley Hayes, the short order cook who’d served breakfast to Carole and her killer, would think back on that morning, those brief moments as he’d witnessed their meeting, and wonder what would have happened if he’d said something, done something, if the girl hadn’t been a little less forward in attracting the attentions of that guy. And Howard Schumann, and Marvin Letts at The Blue Parrot, Brenda at Hannigan’s. Before that Mrs. Gerrity at the Shangri La Towers. Maintenance would be called in. They would clean out the apartment, maybe give it a lick of paint, advertise it in the local paper, and not until weeks or months later would anyone have the nerve to tell the new tenant that the very kitchen where they stood to make breakfast was where a pretty girl with bright red lipstick had taken her last breath at the hands of a killer who looked a little like Montgomery Clift. Real people, real lives. That was what it came down to. Nothing more nor less than the simple fact that most deaths are pointless, like I said.

  So me and Pete walked, and then we walked some more, and we asked questions until we were tired of hearing our own voices, and by the time it got to six I’d had my fill twice over, but I knew we had to keep on going until people stopped answering their doors. Pete called in to Dispatch, was told that there might be another uniform available by seven, but there were high demands on personnel. I called home, told Evie what I was up to, said I’d be back as soon as I could, but it was going to be a late one.

  “Your dinner will be charcoal,” she warned.

  “I’ll get something on the way,” I replied.

  We walked some more. We started on the bars, got a rise from a barkeep who said he knew the guy’s face but didn’t know his name. We started to wonder if we’d missed the boat completely, if we’d jumped to this wild assumption about the classifieds in the paper and had gotten all excited about Kramer’s football-shaped cross-section, and our boy was actually from an entirely different part of the city. Maybe he’d just been in that breakfast diner en route to someplace else. Maybe he was over there for a job interview. Maybe he was visiting someone, had stopped off to get something to eat, and Carole Shaw had waylaid his plans with her cheery smile and natural charm.

  “I think we’re screwed,” Pete said. It was close to eight. It was dark. “Not only are we looking for a needle in a haystack, we’re probably looking in the wrong haystack.”

  I knew that, had known it from the start. Canvassing was successful because of repetition. You went to the same places day after day, you saw the same people most of the time, and then—seemingly by chance—you ran into someone you’d not spoken to before and they answered your question the way you needed it answered.

  And then it happened. Half past eight. A bar on Decatur called Hanratty’s. Some old-time gin joint that had seen better days, a throwback to the speakeasies that used to appear and disappear in different buildings on different days of the month throughout the Prohibition era. His name was Frankie Morrison, and he was three sheets to the wind already, but he looked at the drawing, and said, “That looks a little like the painting guy.”

  “The what?”

  “He’s painting the apartment building where I live. I think that’s him. It looks like him.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Couldn’t tell you. I just say ‘Hi fella’ when I see him, and that’s that.”

  “And where’s your apartment building?”

  “Just over here on the other side of the street.” Frankie managed to slide off the barstool and make it to the window. He pointed right across the street, and there it was—the lighted canopy over the doorway, the entranceway beneath.

  “That’s where I live,” Frankie said, “and your man there is painting the stairwell, I’m sure of it.”

  We got him back to the stool, took his name and address, asked him how long he’d be in the bar.

  “Until they throw me out,” Frankie replied. “Which ain’t gonna be real soon ’cause I had a good day on the horses and I’m drinkin’ all of it tonight.” He laughed coarsely.

  Pete and I went over the street, and—sure enough—there were ladders and dust sheets, a stack of paint cans right there to the left of the entranceway.

  There was no painter, but then we didn’t expect there to be. He was either lying low or living life like nothing had happened, in which case he wouldn’t be back until the following morning.

  “We need to know who owns the building,” I told Pete. He called Dispatch from the car while I hit enough buzzers to get someone to open up. Once inside, I started at the first apartment. I asked after the super, the owner, anything anyone could tell me. Like the Shangri La, the super lived downstairs, but he was out for the evening. I got his name, went to find Pete. We were going to sit outside the place until the super turned up, and then we’d know who this painter was. The drunk in Hanratty’s might have given us our boy, or it might be a bum steer. Whichever way, it was the closest we had to an ID the whole day.

  I headed back to the car.

  Pete Quinn was standing there on the sidewalk, an expression on his face the likes of which I had never seen before, and have not seen again to this day.

  “They’ve got him,” he said, and his voice was so quiet I had to ask him to repeat himself. Either that or I’d heard him correctly and just didn’t believe my ears.

  “His name’s Lewis Woodroffe, and they have him at the 14th.”

  Still I had no words that seemed appropriate.

  “Dispatch just told me. He turned himself in at 2:30 this afternoon. Turned himself in at the 14th and confessed to killing Carole Shaw.”

  “The 14th?” I said.

  “Whatever, Robert. It doesn’t matter. He’s the guy. He turned himself in at the wrong precinct and confessed, and it’s taken this long to get the information to us. All of this has been a waste of time . . .”

  “Jesus Christ Almighty,” I said, which was unlike me, never having been a man to take the Lord’s name in vain. “Jesus Christ and damnation . . . what the—”

  Exasperated, furious even, but beneath that believing that the sheer effort we had committed to this investigation had somehow contributed to the result we had achieved.

  The rabbit was in the box.

  We got in the car and drove to the 14th. I wanted our man back at the 9th tonight, I wanted the paperwork completed, the charge filed, the arraignment scheduled, and then I would go home, have a beer, give Evie a hug and a kiss, and look in on the kids before I collapsed in a chair and watched some TV. And if the TV was over, I’d listen to the radio. Anything to distract me.

  Lewis Woodroffe was a broken man. There was no doubt in my mind that this was our Montgomery Clift, though he looked somewhat older than his picture. I put that down to the nature of his situation. He was under pressure. He was tanked in the basement of the 14th, and he knew the deal was done. He had made a verbal confession to a member of the Chicago PD, witnessed by a second member of the Chicago PD, and there was little that could be done to save him now.

  But, beyond all that, he didn’t want to be saved.

  There were killers, and there were killers. There were those who intended to kill, who even relished the idea of killing again, and they spent all their waking hours figuring out how not to get caught. And then there were those like Lewis Woodroffe, those who had made a terrible, terrible mistake, and yet whose sense of conscience and responsibility would prevent them from ever going on with their lives beneath such a burden of guilt. It was a weight too great to carry. It would crush them—slowly, resolutely, relentlessly—and the only way to be rid of it was to confess, to tell the truth, to share that burden with someone else. And not just anyone. It had to be shared with someone who could levy a penalty, who could enforce a sentence they believed commensurate with the crime.

  Lewis Woodroffe was the second kind, and from th
e first moment he opened his mouth I knew he had killed that poor schoolteacher.

  That was his opening gambit: “I didn’t mean to kill her. I really didn’t.”

  Whether or not that was the case was yet to be determined, but the boy was broken up. I wanted to do little more than get him processed and transferred.

  14th was more than happy to offload him, and we were done with the paperwork within forty minutes. I drove back to the 9th, Woodroffe cuffed to Pete Quinn in the back seat.

  Woodroffe didn’t say a word as we drove. Quinn offered him a cigarette, but he declined. He asked the guy if he was hungry, but the guy merely shook his head and went back to looking out of the window. Eyes like a lost dog at the train station, Lewis Woodroffe was as compliant and cooperative as we could have wished.

  We had him in the box at the 9th by midnight, and only then did I share a few words with him.

  “You understand what’s happening here?”

  He nodded once. “I have been charged with the first-degree murder of Carole Shaw, and I will be arraigned tomorrow.”

  “We’ll do a full statement in the morning,” I said. “The guy that you saw briefly tonight, he’s your court-assigned public defender, and he’ll be present. As he said, don’t say anything unless he’s there.”

  Woodroffe looked up at me, his eyes wide, even tearful. “What else is there to say? She was a sweet girl. She didn’t deserve to die. I didn’t intend to kill her, but I did. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Okay, well you can put everything in your statement tomorrow, and we’ll take it from there.”

  I started towards the cell door, and he said one more thing that stopped me.

  “An eye for an eye, eh?”

  I turned and looked at him. He was seated, his hands beneath his legs. He was thirty-two years old, hailed out of Kendallville, Indiana if what he’d told us was true. Both parents dead, no living grandparents, a younger brother he hadn’t seen for a decade, whereabouts unknown, and here he was painting stairwells in Chicago for a working wage, strangling pretty schoolteachers by accident in the evening.

  “Seems that way,” I said.