In the mirror behind the bar, Baird saw himself in his Husky sweatshirt, a middle-aged collegian caught between the Ancient Mariner and a prematurely embittered thespian. And though he knew he looked trapped and pitiful, he also knew he at least wasn’t face-to-face with Kathy, wasn’t standing helpless before her, about to drown in her wounded, beautiful eyes. Daddy, is it true?
Then too there was the simple matter of physiology: the amount of alcohol in his blood. Since even lighting a cigarette had become a challenge, the task of getting up and going home seemed insurmountable. Once, heading for the men’s room, he staggered into one of the Vizigoths and almost bowled the poor man over. Instead of being angry, the hairy beast righted him and even steered him through the door toward the urinal, which Baird was almost positive he hit.
Eventually, though—while he could still stagger—he took his leave. He bade good-bye to his new friends, neither of whom knew a thing about him, or apparently cared to know. The old man cautioned him that his story was strictly “off the record,” and Baird promised not to tell a living soul. Then he went on outside, where the cool fresh air washed over him like a breaker, almost knocking him off his feet. The parked motorcycles glittered like jewelry, and he thought that if only he knew how to start one, he would have gone for a ride—probably off a cliff or into a tree. Smiling, feeling almost happy, he wandered down the street to where his car was parked and patiently wrestled the key into the door lock. When he finally started for home, he drove very slowly, not sure he ever wanted to get there.
Behind his garage, Baird vomited so forcefully he set the neighborhood dogs to barking. Entering the house, he neglected to lock the door behind him and knocked over a chair in the kitchen and bumped against the dining-room doorway. In the downstairs bathroom, he stripped and stepped into the shower, briefly scalding himself before he was able to regulate the water mixture. He kept turning it colder until it felt like ice pelting him, and then he left it that way, for what reason he could not imagine, since he knew that only time would make him sober.
When he was finished, he found his winter robe hanging behind the door, an anomalous stroke of luck he gave no thought to, putting it on while he was still dripping wet. He walked on through the museum to the family room and stretched out on the couch, pulling an afghan over himself. Hours later, he dreamed he woke in the dark and that Kathy was there with him, stroking his forehead and his hair. Then he came fully awake and realized that it was not a dream and that she was actually there, sitting on the edge of the couch in her pink-silk pajamas, her eyes moist in the darkness, full of anguish. He started to get up, but she put her hand on his shoulder and he settled back.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I heard you down here.”
He groaned. “Go back to bed, honey. I’m really drunk. Christ, I must stink.”
“Daddy, you were kind of crying—”
“Oh, Jesus.” He put his arm over his face.
She lightly pushed it off and, leaning down, kissed him on the cheek, even as he tried to pull away.
“I’m still drunk, baby,” he said. “Please leave me. Please.”
She began to cry. “You were calling my name, Daddy. Well, I’m here now. And I need you too, just like always. I love you. I don’t care what you did or didn’t do. It makes no difference. Whenever I’ve needed you, you were always there. So if you need me now, please let me help. Let me stay with you a while.”
Even in the darkness he could see her eyes streaming. He reached up and touched her face, caressed the wetness.
“Mom told you,” he said.
She nodded. “What that disgusting Lucca thinks, yes. And whether he’s right or wrong, I don’t care, Daddy. I love you either way, just the same. It makes no difference.”
He took her in his arms then and she began to cry on his shoulder, just as he had with her, up in her room. He kissed her hair and patted her.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” he got out. “I’ve made such a total mess of everything.”
“No, you haven’t. It’s going to be all right. I just know it’s going to be all right.”
As drunk as he was, he still knew that he had never loved her more than he did at that moment. He hugged her tightly, and a wave of nausea swept through him. Bile rose in his throat and he choked it down. The room began to spin and it seemed impossible to keep his eyes open. He became terrified that if he did not hold Kathy tightly enough, she would drift away from him, like one of the mutilated underwater babies in his dreams. His eyes fell shut again, and he heard a kind of sob or moan. Then he was gone.
Later Baird would vaguely remember looking up and seeing Ellen standing just inside the doorway, or at least a shape like hers, a silhouette in the darkness. And it seemed to him that he was alone then, or perhaps, as drunk as he was, he had merely forgotten that Kathy was there with him. At dawn, though, as the first light began to seep like fog into the room, he awoke with a start, suddenly aware that the girl was indeed still there with him on the couch, lying asleep in his arms, her back pressed up against him. And he also realized that because he was wearing only a robe, and because he was in the usual condition of a man waking in the morning, the only thing between his flesh and his daughter’s was her silk pajamas.
He moved quickly, covering himself and shaking her awake at the same time. “I guess we fell asleep,” he said. “You go on back to bed, honey.”
A heavy sleeper, Kathy got up slowly and did not move at first, just stood there beside the couch in a daze. Getting up himself, Baird kissed her on the cheek and patted her bottom, sending her on her way. He followed her to the front stairs and watched until she was safe in her room. Then he went into the downstairs bathroom and huddled over the stool, retching violently. Though all he brought up was phlegm, its passing nevertheless made him shudder with relief. He urinated and took three aspirins and drank water and Pepto Bismol. Then he went up to his own room and got into bed. He slept through most of Sunday.
Sixteen
The following Tuesday Sergeant Lucca and Lee Jeffers, accompanied by two other detectives, showed up at Baird’s house at seven in the morning. They rang the bell and banged on the door. Not yet dressed and wearing only a bathrobe, Baird went downstairs and let them in. Lucca served him with a search warrant.
“The boys here are gonna comb your house,” the sergeant said, indicating the tall black with the shaved head and a second detective Baird had not seen before, a stocky young man with curly brown hair and a pugnacious Irish mug. Lee, wearing a raincoat, lagged behind Lucca like a bashful child.
“And you, Mister Baird,” the sergeant went on, “we’re gonna have to take you downtown. We need to have a few questions answered.”
“I’m under arrest?”
“No,” Lucca said. “Not yet.”
Ellen, already dressed, had followed Baird down to the foyer. But Kathy was fresh from the shower and wearing only a robe. She stopped midway on the stairs.
“I can have a few minutes to get ready?” Baird asked.
“Sure. And if you’re hungry, we can pick up some doughnuts on the way.”
“We’d like to follow in our car and wait for him,” Ellen said.
“That won’t be necessary,” Lucca told her. “He’ll be with us the whole time, and we’ll bring him home when we’re finished. Anyway, you better stay and watch these guys. They could make a mess.”
Baird suggested to Lucca that they all could wait in the living room while he got ready. He liked the idea of the four of them trying to sit on Ellen’s Empire settees. The minutes would seem like hours. But nobody moved. The four detectives stood there looking at him as if he were speaking in tongues.
“Shouldn’t you give Tom a call?” Ellen said to Baird, referring to their neighbor, Tom Dagleish. Though he was basically a divorce lawyer, he had handled the Bairds’ occasional legal needs.
“Yeah, I suppose so,” Baird said.
“Your lawyer?” Lucca asked. “Sure, go ahead. If it m
akes you feel safer. But remember, you’re not under arrest yet. You give us the information we want—clear up a few little points—and you could be free as the wind. On the other hand, you clam up and take the fifth, and a lot of people—including the D.A.—they’re gonna think you got something to hide. Then you will be arrested. I guarantee it.”
“Your concern is touching.” Though Baird said it to Lucca, he was looking at Lee, who was obviously not very comfortable in Baird’s house, at least not with Ellen so near.
Baird went back upstairs. While he dressed, he tried to figure what Lucca was after, the reason for the search warrant. The gun, of course. Bloody clothing. Maybe a credit card slip from the Oolala on the night of the murder, if the sergeant had progressed that far, which Baird doubted. And since they would find none of those things, he was not too worried about the search warrant.
The interrogation, however, was a different matter. Of course he was not buying Lucca’s characterization of it as “just a few questions.” In the same vein, the sergeant would probably have described death by hanging as “a period of discomfort.” Baird had little doubt that the interrogation would be a minefield, with Lucca encouraging him to step lively. But Baird also believed he had a distinct advantage: he knew exactly what had happened, and there was no solid evidence against him—no gun, no fingerprints, no witnesses, no items left in Slade’s car—nothing but motive and opportunity. And this last he took care of now, as Ellen looked in on him while he finished getting ready.
“Monday, the night of the twenty-fourth,” he said. “As I remember it, I came home around ten that night and we went to bed a little after eleven. That’s right, isn’t it?”
Her expression was beautiful in its complexity, saying so many things at once, most of which he could not have begun to translate into words. He could not even tell if she was going to go along with him, not until she spoke.
“Sure,” she said. “That’s how I remember it.”
As he moved past her, he bent to kiss her, and she turned away. But Kathy, at the head of the stairs, flew into his arms. He kissed her on the cheek and she held him tightly for a few moments, her eyes filling.
“I’ll be all right,” he told her. He looked over at Ellen. “I love you both,” he said.
Then he went down the stairs, toward Lucca and Lee, who were still waiting in the foyer.
They drove the two miles to the Public Safety Building in total silence, no one saying anything, not even about the heavy traffic. They parked in a garage under the building, then took an elevator to the fifth floor, where Baird was booked and fingerprinted and photographed. When he complained about this, saying that he had thought he was not under arrest, Lucca explained that it was routine with possible suspects. If Baird suddenly died of a coronary, the case would still have to be solved and his fingerprints might well figure in that solution.
“And might well not,” Baird said.
After that, he was put in a holding cell, a room with large windows looking out on the bull pen.
“It’ll just be a few minutes,” Lucca told him, probably enjoying his little deception. For in reality Baird waited over an hour in the small, stuffy room. Other arrestees came and went, most of them surly young black men who, for all he knew, could have been robbers or pimps or drug dealers, or even killers like himself. They stretched and yawned and cracked their knuckles, but said virtually nothing.
It was Lee who came and got him. On the way to wherever they were going, she finally spoke. “Remember our deal. You don’t mention our affair, and I’ll help you all I can.”
He didn’t recall her having put the second part in exactly those words, but he nodded anyway. “So be it,” he said.
Lucca was waiting for them in an interrogation room, smoking and pacing, his heavy, dour face looking almost animated for a change. The room was essentially the same as those Baird had seen on TV and in the movies: bare except for a table and chairs, with a large mirror set into one wall, probably a one-way window through which others could observe the interrogation as well as listen in, though Baird saw no sign of a microphone. Up in a corner of the room, the lens of a TV camera pointed down. On the table there was a small tape recorder next to a pair of plastic ashtrays. Lee sat down at the end of the table, Baird took the chair that Lucca indicated, and Lucca sat down across from him.
“You don’t mind if we tape this, do you?” he asked, turning on the recorder.
Baird shook his head. “No problem.”
Lucca went ahead, telling the recorder the time and date and identifying himself and Lee, then naming Baird as the person being interrogated in regard to the James Slade homicide. He offered Baird a cigarette, took one himself, and lit them both.
“Well now, what say we get started, Jack?” he said, adding, “It’s okay if I call you Jack?”
“Sure. Let’s be pals.”
“All right, then—Jack. First, Jack, you’re here of your own free will, right?”
Baird gave a wry laugh. “Oh sure,” he said.
“No, really,” Lucca insisted. “You’re free to go if you want.”
“All right, then. Yes, I’m here of my own free will.”
“And you understand that you have a right to counsel and that you don’t have to answer any questions we may put to you today?”
“Yes, I understand that.”
“And you waive these rights?”
“For now.”
“Good enough.” Lucca dragged on his cigarette and considerately exhaled away from Baird. “Okay then, Jack. The first meeting you had with Slade—the first one we know about anyway—when was that?”
“Early July sometime.”
“Detective Daniels in our squad—he’s the one saw you outside of Harold’s strip joint—he puts it June thirty, a Saturday.”
“He could be right. I don’t remember exactly.”
“You just ran into Slade there, or what?”
“I parked outside his apartment,” Baird said. “Then I followed him to Harold’s. Inside, he came over to my table. I didn’t go to his.”
“Well, he must’ve been curious, right? Somebody following him around. How’d he know who you were?”
“I think you know that as well as I do. After the restraining order we got on him, he kept parking outside our house. I imagine he saw me there.”
“And what did you hope to accomplish at the strip club, meeting him like that, face-to-face?”
Thinking, Baird dragged on his cigarette, exhaled, stubbed it out. “At first I thought that maybe if he got to know me as a person—you know, as just another human being—I figured it might have some effect, maybe make him stop harassing us and terrorizing my daughter. I knew by then that the police weren’t going to do anything about him, so I figured it was worth a try.”
“But it didn’t work?”
“No. It amused him, I guess.”
“So what happened then? Did you threaten him?”
Baird knew that he’d denied this in the past, threatening Slade. But he also knew that Lucca now had the testimony of Slade’s gay friend, Lester Wall, to the contrary.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not? I lied to him about having a contact with a Samoan gang. I told him that if he didn’t lay off, he could get hurt.”
“Did he believe you?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t act like it.”
“So what did you do, up the ante?”
“In what way?”
Lucca smiled. “Like, did you mention guns?”
Again Baird had to consider Lester Wall’s testimony. “Could be—but in an oblique way, that’s all.”
“Oblique?” The word seemed to amuse Lucca.
“Meaning I didn’t threaten to shoot him. I just told him I used to be a hunter and that I still had some rifles and shotguns.”
This information seemed to please the sergeant considerably. He smiled and nodded, as if a slow student had come up with a correct answer. “Just that you owned rifles and
shotguns, huh? Not that you might use one on him.”
“That’s right. I left it vague.”
“But a clear threat nevertheless.”
“I said vague, not clear.”
“Okay. Vague it is. But still a threat.”
“I guess it could be construed as such.”
“I guess.” Lucca put out his cigarette and promptly lit another. Waving the match out, he looked at Lee. “Is there anything you want to add?”
She shook her head. “No. Not so far.”
Cocking his head at his partner, Lucca smirked at Baird. “My strong right arm,” he said. “Lately it keeps falling asleep.”
“You want me to take over, just say the word,” Lee snapped.
“Only kidding, Detective.”
Baird was still surprised at the immense difference in Lucca, this man who normally looked so wary and dyspeptic, as if a good belch was all he had to look forward to. Now his eyes fairly gleamed behind the thick glasses, his slack mouth worked voraciously, and he could not keep his hands still. They drummed, scratched, and picked at things: a shred of tobacco, even a speck of something stuck to the tabletop—dried paint or fly dung, he didn’t seem to care.
Meanwhile Lee sat back in her chair, her arms folded, as if she were a disinterested spectator. Whenever Baird would look at her, her eyes would skitter away.
“Now, where were we?” Lucca said. “Oh yeah, we’re up to your second meeting with Slade. When was that?”
Baird gave him the date and told him how the meeting had come about, as pure happenstance, simply because he had spied Slade’s car while he was driving past Gide’s.
A Man's Game Page 27
