by John Dunning
He tried Denise from the pay phone just outside the store, but their line was busy.
By then the streets were dark. He had gone on a long, circular drive and was heading back to Globeville with almost nothing to show for it. There were still a couple of stores on the list I had given him, and he was lured on by his success of the afternoon. He wanted to find one more. Just one good one. The bookscout’s curse.
The stores closed at nine and he picked up Interstate 70 and headed east toward home.
He felt good about the day in spite of the evening. Maybe this could turn into a new line of work, an avocation that would give him the freedom he hungered for above all else. If he got good at it, he might get Denise out of that crappy motel job and not have to kiss the Man’s ass to do it.
He turned off the highway on Washington and a few minutes later rolled into his block. The lights were on, giving him a warm feeling of anticipation. He came through the gate and clumped up onto the porch.
He opened the door and heard Denise’s favorite music on the classical radio station. The phone was off the hook but this was not unusual: she often left it off when she had a headache. But in that moment he felt the dark man cross his path: the same Grim Reaper Mrs. Gallant had seen was still in the room, and he shivered, then he quaked, and had his first vivid sense of the unthinkable.
“Hey, doll,” he said to the empty room, and his voice broke in his throat.
He crossed to the hall quickly now. He looked into the bedroom and felt his life drain away at what he saw.
CHAPTER 11
I was just reaching for the phone to turn it off for the night when it rang under my hand. “Hey, Cliff.”
“Who is this?” I said belligerently.
I knew quite well who it was: I could pick his laid-back voice out of a crowd, but this late at night it could be nothing but trouble. Neal Hennessey had been my partner in homicide. We had been close friends a few years ago, and for a while after my abrupt exit from the Denver cops we had kept up the pretense that nothing had changed between us. Occasionally I bought him a lunch for old times’ sake; sometimes we would go for a beer in a bar we liked on West Colfax near the Rocky Mountain News. But those times had become fewer and farther between. Months had passed since I’d last seen his beefy face, but I was an outsider now and that’s how cops are.
“We got one on the north side,” Hennessey said. “It’s not my case but your name came up and the primary officer remembered what a dynamic duo we used to be. So I got a call on it.”
I still didn’t put it together. Who did I know on the north side? A few years ago it had been a hotbed of local mobsters and I had helped put one of them away, but how could that come back to haunt me after all this time?
Then Hennessey said, “Do you know a fellow named Ralston?” and suddenly I felt sick.
“What happened?”
“His wife’s dead.”
I sat numbly and in a while Hennessey read my silence.
“I take it you actually do know these people?”
“Sure I do. Jesus Christ, this is awful.”
Now came a second reaction, disbelief, and slowly by degrees I felt diminished by what Hennessey had said. He was still a homicide cop; I knew he wouldn’t be calling if her death had been a natural one.
“What happened?” I said again.
“Well, the boys are still trying to figure that out. The husband’s not in any kind of shape to be helpful. Apparently he hasn’t said ten words to anybody.”
“That’s because he’s in shock, Neal. Hell, I’m in shock, I can’t imagine how he feels.”
I heard Hennessey breathing on the other end. After a moment, he said, “You got any ideas who might do this?”
I thought of Denise, her smiling face, and my voice quivered. “No,” I said.
“If you’ve got anything you think might help, they’d like to see you downtown.”
I stared into the dark corners of the room.
“Tonight, if you think of anything. They’ll send a car for you. Otherwise they’d like you to come in tomorrow.”
“Who’s the primary?”
“Randy Whiteside. Your favorite guy.”
Wonderful, I thought. Mr. Personality.
I looked at my clock. “Where’s Mike now?”
“Who’s Mike?”
“Her husband, Neal. Who the hell have we been talking about?”
“Hey, don’t bite my head off. All I’m doing is making a phone call.”
I heard myself say, “Sorry,” and a moment later, “Damn, this hits hard.”
“You knew these people well?”
“No.”
I felt him waiting for some reason.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” I said at last. “Denise was…” I gave up after a moment and said, “I just met them recently.”
“Well, to answer your question, I don’t know where the husband is. They’re probably still trying to talk to him out at the scene.”
I felt a wave of sudden anger. “Goddammit, Hennessey, I hope you boys aren’t treating this man as a suspect.”
I could feel him bristle. “Of course he’s a suspect. What would you think if you got to a scene and nobody’s there but the husband and he won’t talk?”
“I told you why.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you know that for a fact, but me, I never met the man. Maybe he is overcome with grief, and maybe the grief’s a hundred percent real and he still did it. Come on, Cliff, you’ve seen enough of these things to know that. I could tick ‘em off on my fingers, the number of times the grieving husband did it and you and me brought the bastard in and you got him in the box and ripped the confession out of his lying ass.”
I remembered those times: all the faces of the guilty and the damned came back in one shivery moment, and now I felt my skin crawl at the thought of someone like me, the cop I had once been, tearing at Ralston’s open wounds. I remembered another case: Harold Waters, who had signed a confession for me and had been on the brink of a life behind bars until the real killer made a mistake. Harold Waters had signed everything we put in front of him. Why? He simply didn’t care what happened to him after his wife was murdered.
Hennessey knew how that case had always haunted me. “Do me a favor, Cliff,” he said. “Don’t give me that Harold Waters shit. How many times has that ever happened?”
“It happens, though, doesn’t it?”
“It happened once.”
“All right, I’m interested in Ralston now. And I don’t want him browbeaten.”
I heard him cough softly, turning his head away from the phone.
“I mean it. There’s no way he could’ve done this.”
Hennessey said nothing. Exactly what I’d have done under the circumstances.
“Help me out here,” I said.
This was an offensive thing to say to a cop and Hennessey was properly offended. “You know better than to ask me something like that. I told you it’s not my case, I’ve got nothing to say about how it’s run. I’m making a courtesy call to an old comrade-in-arms and that’s all I’m doing. I should’ve just stayed out of it and let them drag you out of bed at midnight.”
“All right,” I said in a softer voice. “Are you interested in my opinion?” “I’m sure Detective Whiteside will be, at the proper time.” There was a gulf between us now and Hennessey was as bothered by it as I was. I heard him sniff, then he said, “One thing about your opinion, Cliff, you always had one. They were pretty good too, as opinions go. But the man has said nothing to us, just that he walked in and found her sprawled across the bed. The only other word anybody recognized out of him was your name.”
“He was talking to me on the telephone not thirty minutes before he went home. He was way the hell out in Golden at the time. I don’t know when she…” I took a deep breath. “I don’t know when she died but he couldn’t have gotten home in less than half an hour.”
“Assuming that’s really where he
was when he called you.”
Again the moment stretched. Hennessey was saying what I would have said in his place.
“I’m sorry this wasn’t better news,” he said. “It was bound not to be, wasn’t it? But thanks for the call.” “Sure. We should grab a beer sometime.” But I was thinking of Denise and I barely heard him.
I knew he wouldn’t tell me but I tried anyway. “Any idea of the time of death?”
“That’ll take some time. The boys are still out there and will be for a while.”
“Do they know yet what the cause of death was?”
“Nothing you can take to the bank.”
Then he gave me this for old times’ sake. “It looks like she was smothered.”
CHAPTER 12
Ralston’s block was full of cars, the usual scene when something bad happens. There were two patrol cars and some unmarked vehicles, a green Chevy belonging, I knew, to an assistant coroner named Willie Paxton, and Ralston’s old Ford Fairlane. No obvious sign of news coverage. The TV idiots had taken a pass on this one: no wires or cams or blow-dried hairdos cluttering up the block. A Cherry Hills murder would have brought them out at midnight but this just wasn’t that important. There were two seedy types in jeans, guys I knew from the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, and plenty of plain people milling around. Even at that hour word had spread across the neighborhood: two dozen neighbors watched from the distance and a row of kids sat gawking on the roof of a house across the street.
A young uniform stopped me at the sidewalk. “You can’t go in there, sir.”
“Is Whiteside here?”
“He’s busy right now. You got something to tell him?”
“I might, yeah. My name’s Janeway.”
The cop summoned another cop, a guy I knew. “Go inside and tell Detective Whiteside that Mr. Janeway is here to see him, when he gets a break.”
I waited.
Minutes later the cop came out and motioned to me from the porch. The first cop nodded and held open the gate. On the porch the second cop said, “I know you know the routine, but I’m supposed to tell you anyway—don’t touch anything.” A moment later, to my own amazement, I was in the living room, sitting on a chair well out of the way.
It looked different now—not at all like the place where I had met Mike and Denise Ralston in the beginnings of friendship just a few days ago. Tonight it was cold in the harsh white strobe lights and loud with impersonal voices of the men who probed through its cracks and corners. I saw Whiteside pass the open doorway and he met my eyes before he disappeared in the crowd of people gathered around the bed. I tried to push away my prejudices and hope for the best. Whiteside had always seemed like a good enough cop; hell, his record of clearing cases was at least as good as my own and maybe that was at the root of it, why we had never liked each other much. He had come in five years ago, trading on a big reputation from some department back East, but to me he was a hot dog from day one. In a way he was like Archer. His badge was his Pulitzer and somehow that set him above the sorry race of men. I could still hear my voice and the words I had said to Hennessey years ago: “I’ll bet he sleeps with that shield pinned to his nightshirt.”
After a while he came out of the back room. “Well, goddamn, Janeway, imagine meeting you here.” He loomed over my chair but I knew that technique and I didn’t let it bother me. I looked up at him from the darkest part of his shadow, his face in silhouette, framed by lights behind him and above. “So what’ve you got to tell me?” he said, and I told him what I knew about Ralston’s day hunting books. I told it to him short and direct, wasting none of his time. “He called me at nine o’clock,” I concluded. “He was still out in Golden and he’d just found a book.” I knew what he’d ask next and he did. “What book did he find?” I told him and he said what I knew he’d say: “Then that book might still be in his car.” He called the uniform over and told him to go out to the car and see if there was a book by somebody named Irwin Shaw in it.
I was playing a wild card, a little too sure that the book would be there and would easily be traceable to that store in Golden. If we were lucky there’d be a receipt with a date and maybe even a time printed on it, and there’d be a price sticker on the spine, color-coded to tell approximately when the book had been put out for sale. Each week in stores like that, books were marked down according to the sticker colors. It wouldn’t be conclusive: just another small piece of evidence that the man was telling the truth.
So far I had been playing Whiteside’s game his way. Now I said, “Where is Mr. Ralston?” and Whiteside backed out of the light and looked at my face, keeping his own in shadow. “He’s where I want him to be.” “Okay,” I said pleasantly.
“What’s your connection with Ralston? Other than this hunt for books you sent him on, what’s he to you?” “I’m his friend.”
“I guess that’s good. He’s gonna need a friend.” I felt my anger boiling up but I kept it in check. I heard a movement and the uniform came in carrying the book, suspended from a pencil under its spine like a pair of pants draped over a clothesline. I saw the blue thrift-store sticker on the jacket and the receipt peeking out of the top pages, and I thanked the book gods that it hadn’t dropped out when the cop picked it up that way.
I said nothing for a moment: it would be far better to let White-side discover these things for himself. But when the cop continued holding the book that way, I said, “I imagine that’s the receipt sticking out of it.” Whiteside said, “Bag it,” and the cop dropped the book, receipt and all, into a plastic bag.
“Well, Mr. Janeway, it was swell of you to come in. If we have any more questions, we’ll be in touch.”
I knew I was being dismissed with malice but I nodded, still the soul of reason, and said, “I’d like to see Mr. Ralston, if that’s okay.” Whiteside gave a dismissive little laugh and that’s when I knew it was going to turn ugly.
“Are you charging him with something?”
“That remains to be seen, doesn’t it?”
“Well, until you decide, you have no right to detain him.”
“I don’t have to charge him with anything in order to question him.”
“You’ve got to inform him of his rights if you intend to detain him. And he doesn’t have to answer anything if you come at him with a hard-on. Come on, Randy, we both know the rules.”
I had never called him Randy in my life. I held up my hands in a peace gesture. “Look, I’m sure he’ll talk to you, I know he will. But the man just lost his wife, for Christ’s sake. Give him some time to get the wind back in his sails. Can I see him?”
“Not till I’ve talked to him first.”
“Then how’s this for a deal? You talk to him in my presence. You be civil and I promise to be quiet.”
“No way. I can’t believe you’d even ask me something like that. How long were you a cop, Janeway?”
Long enough to know a prick with a badge when I see one, I thought. But I said, “Look, I promise you this man didn’t do this. His heart’s just been ripped out and I can’t sit still while you rip it out again.”
“You’ve got jackshit to say about what I do.”
“Maybe not, but I can have a lawyer downtown by the time you get there. Then you can go piss up a rope and talk to nobody.”
“Shit,” he said. But he thought about it a moment.
“You just sit there and keep your fuckin‘ mouth shut. That the deal?”
“Absolutely,” I said with my great stone face.
I moved out to the kitchen table and watched as they wound up their work. The house seemed incredibly small for the number of people bustling about. I looked into the bedroom and felt an almost crushing wave of sadness. I could see Willie Paxton in the other room talking to a woman I knew, Joanne Martinson, also from the coroner’s office. I could see Denise’s arm, flopped over the edge of the bed, and the sight of it filled me with heartbreak. Son of a bitch,
I thought. Some miserable son of a bit
ch did this, probably a cheap neighborhood spider looking for pocket change. How many times does it happen? Someone returns home, walks in on a thief, and bingo. Suddenly in my mind I was a cop again.
Paxton came out of the bedroom and Martinson was right behind him.
“Hey, Cliff, how ya doin‘?” they said almost in the same voice.
“Ah, you win some, lose some.” I had lost this one big-time, but I left that unsaid. I kept up the bullshit until Whiteside went into the bedroom. Then, in a low voice, I said, “So what’s the story, guys?”
“Smothered with the pillow,” Paxton said. “We’ll know more later, but that’s how it looks.”
“How long?”
“I dunno. My guess is somewhere between five and seven o’clock.”
“No later than seven, though, huh?”
“Not much chance of that. Rigor was already setting in when we got here.”
Joanne looked at Paxton and said, “Look, I know you boys go back a ways and I love you too, Cliff, but Jesus Christ, Willie, this is inappropriate as hell.”
“It’s all gonna be in the report,” Paxton said.
“Then let him read it like everybody else.”
I nodded at them. “Yeah, don’t get your tit in a wringer on my account, Willie. But thanks.”
It had still been light on the street at seven o’clock. People had been coming home from work. That meant there was a chance the perp had been seen, and maybe Whiteside already had a witness under wraps.
Now there was nothing to do but wait. Cops can take hours at a murder scene and these guys were in no hurry. I thought of Ralston, alone on the hot side of Mercury, sealed off in his own private hell. This was the first of many hellish hours, and all I could do for him was try to make it less awful than it had to be.
