by Leslie Glass
“I get the feeling the Captain doesn’t have a fix on what’s going on,” Joyce muttered. “They could still ask for the file.”
They turned into the squad room. With all the phones in use, the noise level was very high. Still frowning, Sergeant Joyce stopped at April’s desk. “What’s new?” she shot out.
April looked up from her notes. It was the first time she had seen Sergeant Joyce that day. The Sergeant was all dressed up in a lime-green shirtwaist dress and black linen blazer with gold buttons. Apparently for good luck she had put on her gold four-leaf-clover earrings, which were thin discs the size of small pancakes. Her thin, pink-frosted lips were pinched together as she glowered at April, passing along the distrust of women, from boss to underling.
April glanced at Sanchez as if he had betrayed her for the thirty-fourth time, then turned to Sergeant Joyce. “We have a confession,” she said.
“No shit. Who is it?”
April referred to her notes. “A bookkeeper, and get this. It’s the guy who does the accounts for the store across the street.”
“Where is he?”
“I’ve got him downstairs in a questioning room. I thought you’d like to hear what he has to say.”
Joyce nodded. She motioned at Sanchez. “Let’s go.”
April raised an eyebrow at the guy who kept saying he wanted to be her best friend and kept edging her out every time he got the chance.
Sanchez shook his head. She just never got it. Women.
“So what happened up there?” April asked, her voice neutral as they trooped to the stairs. It was hot out in the hall. The heady smell of precinct sweat filled the corrider.
“Asses on the line.” Sergeant Joyce gave her a hard look. “It would be nice if this were the guy.”
In the questioning room, Albert Block sat in a metal chair, chewing on his nails. A chubby blue uniform the size of a fullback guarded the door.
“Howya doin’, Herne?” Sanchez said.
Hernando Silvera nodded. “He’s a live one all right.”
Sanchez looked in through the wired window at eye level and snorted, then opened the door for Sergeant Joyce.
“That was my initial reaction,” April said softly.
They filed into the green room, with its ancient peeling paint, one lone table, four chairs, and smudge marks on the wall. Albert Block jumped to his feet. He was all of five five and weighed in at no more than a hundred twenty-five. His scraggly brown hair was gathered into a short ponytail that just brushed the collar of his bright red-and-blue checkered shirt, which was tightly buttoned at the wrists and open at the neck. Black jeans, black motorcycle belt with silver studs. On his feet were a pair of expensive green lizard cowboy boots. In contradiction to the boots, the ponytail, the motorcycle belt, and the strongly colored shirt, his face was shuttered down and timorous in the extreme. Block had watery blue eyes, thin chapped lips, and a receding chin. He was small and pale. His hands were tiny and freckled, the size of a child’s. He looked a lot like Woody Allen after the fall.
April put the tape recorder she had brought down on the table. “Mr. Block,” she said politely, “this is Sergeant Joyce and Sergeant Sanchez. You can sit down.”
He nodded and plunked himself back in the chair, eagerly regarding the tape recorder. “Thank you,” he said.
Sanchez and Joyce looked at each other. What the hell was this? This guy couldn’t lift a five-pound sack of flour, much less press a hundred-and-five-pound corpse a foot and a half over his head and hang it up on a chandelier. What’d he do it with, a winch? Sanchez coughed into his hand.
April ignored him.
“Mr. Block, why don’t you tell the sergeants here what you told me about Saturday night.”
Albert Block nodded again, stuck his thumb in his mouth, and looked from one cop to the other, checking out their faces, three, four times, as if testing their patience. No one moved. He had them in thrall.
Finally he removed the thumb from his mouth and started to talk.
24
What’s that for?” Albert pointed at the tape recorder.
“So we can remember what you said.”
“I’m confessing.” Albert frowned at the tape recorder. “Where’s the D.A.? If I confess, I know the D.A. is supposed to be here. I don’t want to talk to that. I want to talk to him.”
“We have to do everything properly, Mr. Block,” April said pleasantly. “Right now we’re talking. We’re establishing what, if anything, you know.”
“I told you I did it.” He became belligerent. “What else do you want?”
Sanchez and Joyce glanced at each other.
“Why don’t you just tell the two sergeants here what you told me about Maggie,” April prompted, “and we’ll worry about the D.A. later.”
“Who are they?” Block crossed one black-jeaned knee over the other and jiggled a green lizard cowboy boot nervously.
“I told you. This is Sergeant Joyce, Supervisor of the Detective Squad in this—”
“Did you read him his rights, Detective?” Sergeant Joyce interrupted.
“Yes,” April said, “I did. Twice.”
“Do it again, Detective. For the record.”
Albert kneaded his freckled hands.
April read his Mirandas for the tape. “You have the right to remain silent, you have the right to be represented by a lawyer. If you cannot afford one, one will be provided for you. Anything you say can and will be used against you. Do you have any questions, Mr. Block?”
“No,” he said faintly.
“Would you like a lawyer?” Sergeant Joyce asked gently.
“Who’s doing this, you or her?” Block flared up, his moment of weakness gone in a flash.
“Who would you like to do it?” Sergeant Joyce asked.
Sanchez coughed.
“Shut up!” Albert slammed his hand on the table.
Okay. The guy was a nut with a temper.
April took a deep breath. “Why don’t you just tell us about Maggie, Mr. Block. You knew Maggie.”
“Maggie?”
“Yes, tell us how you met Maggie.”
Block sniffed. “Will you get the D.A. in?”
“No promises. Just tell us the story.” April kept her eyes on him. He was weird. Earlier the words had just come tumbling out. Now he was acting like a hardcase. She should have taped him then.
“Okay.” He lapsed into silence, staring off into the far distance, where the green wall had a long crack down the side that resembled the California coastline. “Fuck you” was scrawled over Mexico. There was no window in the room except the wired window at eye level in the door. It was getting stuffy and tense.
“I met Maggie last winter.”
Silence.
April licked her lips. They waited.
“Uh-huh. Could you give us the time frame on that?”
“Huh?” Block shifted his gaze.
“When you met Maggie.”
“Oh, in February. Right after she moved here. I decided to go out on my own.”
Silence.
“What do you mean, Mr. Block? Did Maggie convince you to go out on your own?”
“I was working for a firm. You know the kind of tight-assed kind of place.” He looked at them expectantly. They didn’t.
“I’m an accountant. Harry encouraged me to go out on my own. Harry’s the owner of All Dressed Up. That’s the store on Columbus next to the bookstore.” He waved a tiny hand in the direction he thought it was.
Sergeant Joyce nodded. They knew where it was.
“I had his account. He told me to go up and down to all the stores and restaurants on Columbus and ask if they were happy with their accounting. Nobody’s ever happy with their accountant, you know.” He challenged them to disparage accountants.
Sanchez and Joyce kept their faces neutral. It was the last thing they would do. They didn’t know a lot about accountants. Their taxes were easy. One source of income, no bookkeeper necessary. Joyce gl
anced at April. April had the feeling she’d be toast if this guy kept Sergeant Joyce there for hours and gave them nothing. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Don’t rabbit on me now, Block, she prayed silently.
“Harry said to tell everybody I could do it faster and cheaper and he’d back me up. Then I should go to Amsterdam and Broadway, you know.”
“So you went to The Last Mango, looking for work,” April said softly, “and there you met Maggie.”
He shook his head. “No, first I quit my job. Got some new clothes. You know, for my confidence.”
“Then you went to The Last Mango, looking for work.”
“Yeah.”
He relapsed into silence.
“Jesus,” Sanchez muttered.
“Hey, you want me to tell the story or not?” Albert turned on him furiously. “I don’t like this guy. I want the D.A.”
April took a deep breath. “The D.A.’s office is very busy. We can’t just get somebody to come over every time someone comes in to talk to us. Please, Mr. Block, just tell the sergeants here what you told me about Maggie.”
“And then you’ll get the D.A.?”
What was his thing about the D.A.?
“Look, I watch TV. I know you don’t indict without the D.A.”
He wanted an indictment. The guy had no priors, no sheet of any kind. He hadn’t ever caught so much as a speeding or a parking ticket in his whole life, and he wanted to be indicted for the murder of Maggie Wheeler.
Sergeant Joyce checked her watch and made a move to get up. “Why don’t you give me a call later,” she said.
Block twitched. “Okay, okay. You don’t give a guy a break, do you?”
“Yeah, you have our full attention,” Sergeant Joyce told him, leaning back in her chair. “I’m here if you want to talk. I’m gone if you don’t.”
He looked at the wall again, rubbing his palms together. Now April could see he was sweating into his plaid shirt.
“Like I said, I went into The Last Mango, looking for the owner. Maggie had just come to work there, maybe a week before. She wasn’t the manager yet.”
“Did she become the manager?” Elsbeth Manganaro never said she was the manager.
“Oh, yeah, Maggie did almost everything in the store. Except she couldn’t fire that stupid bitch.”
Sanchez raised an eyebrow at April. Well, that part was true. Olga Yerger was no rocket scientist.
“Who would that be?” April asked for the tape.
“Olga, the helper. It’s her fault Maggie’s dead.”
“How is that?”
“I don’t know.” He looked down at his hands. “We used to have lunch together—oh, every couple of weeks. It was kind of a regular thing. I stopped in on Saturday. Last Saturday, the day she—uh, died.”
April nodded.
“See, she liked to eat late—but Saturday she wouldn’t go out. That bitch hadn’t turned up again.” He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe it. The ponytail bobbed from side to side, and his face flushed with rage at Olga. “I told Maggie to just close the store for an hour, what’s the big deal? But she wouldn’t do it. She was scared Elsbeth might come by, see the store closed in the middle of the afternoon, and fire her. I don’t know. Elsbeth would do anything for Olga, but Maggie—I don’t know, she took advantage of Maggie. It happens to short people. It made me—” His little hand curled into a fist.
“So why didn’t you order in?” April had noticed there were no food containers in the wastebasket in the store.
“She was working. She didn’t want me around,” he said bitterly.
“So you left.”
“Yeah, I left.”
“When was that?”
“Around one-thirty.”
Again Sergeant Joyce shifted in her seat. Her stomach growled.
“But I came back,” Block added quickly.
April nodded. Okay, now they were getting to it.
“I was really upset. I, you know. I liked her. She was—different.” He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “She was from Massachusetts. Anybody in the world ever heard of Seekonk, Massachusetts?” He shrugged. Nobody.
“We had a fight, kind of. We’d go out to lunch like I said. We’d talk. We had to talk. I was going to do the accounting, at least I think I was. Maggie introduced me to Elsbeth, and you know. Elsbeth was going to try me out.”
“So what happened?”
“So I felt bad. I kind of ripped into Maggie about Olga. I told her if she wasn’t going to tell Elsbeth about Olga, I was. And then we got into this fight. So I came back later to make up.”
Nobody moved. The room had become hot and still. He liked the girl. There was the ring of absolute truth about that.
“I, uh, wanted to take her out to dinner. I knew she was hungry, she didn’t have lunch. So I—asked her.” He flushed, trying to swallow down the humiliation. “She said she already told me she wasn’t going out with me. I guess I lost it. I went crazy … I killed her.”
He was flushed all over, face purple, nose running unchecked. Hands shaking. He had confessed, and he was finished.
“Now can I see the D.A.?”
“How did you kill her?” April asked.
“What do you mean?”
“How did you kill Maggie?”
He looked at her as though she were stupid, pulled a red handkerchief out of his pocket, and blew his nose twice. “I, uh, strangled her.”
He could have read that in the newspapers. It was not good enough. April shook her head.
“How did it happen? When you got mad. What exactly did you do? What did Maggie do?”
“I told you—she didn’t want to be with me—you know, that way. So I lost it. I strangled her. What else do you want?”
Information that did more than put him on the scene. Something more than a slender motive. Something that connected him physically, directly with the crime. Something he could tell them that no one but the killer could know.
“Details,” April said quietly. “We want details.”
“You mean about the dress?”
“What dress?” Sanchez blurted out.
“The printed dress, size fourteen, she was wearing when I hung her on the chandelier.” A look of pure triumph galloped across Block’s homely, pinched little face at their electrified reaction. Got ’em. “Can I have a sandwich? I’m starved.”
Again he looked from one to the other.
April jumped up and went to the door with the window in it so she could place a lunch order with Officer Silvera. “Of course. What would you like?”
Neither Sergeant Joyce nor Sergeant Sanchez moved. Suddenly they had all day.
25
But I did it,” Block protested, his whole body twitching with anguish and outrage when April finally said he could go, three hours and forty minutes later.
“Life’s tough, but stick around. We’ll get back to you,” she said as if he were applying for a job. Which in a sense he was.
“Stick around here?” he asked hopefully, lagging behind at the door of the stale questioning room guarded by a uniformed cop big enough to break his neck with one hand if he got out of line.
April shook her head. Why anybody would want to be indicted for murder, stand trial, and go to prison was beyond her. “Unh-unh, just don’t leave town.”
“But what else do you want?” he whined. “You know I did her.” Tears flooded the corners of his eyes and threatened to fall down his pale cheeks. He wiped them with the now-damp red handkerchief.
“Unh-unh,” April said again. “We just know you were there. You didn’t tell us how you killed her, Albert. Or what you used, or where her clothes are. Lot of things we still don’t know. You tell us everything, and you’re our man.”
“You’re letting me walk right out the door. I don’t believe it.”
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time the police questioned a killer and let him go. It wouldn’t be the last. April stood on the sidewalk outs
ide the precinct with some blue uniforms, watching Albert trudge dejectedly to the corner, just to make sure he really left. She was pretty sure he didn’t do it, even if he knew something no one else knew.
April saw him reach Columbus and turn the corner, then she went back inside. Three detectives would now start checking the background and activities of Albert Block. He’d eagerly agreed to a search of the rental apartment where he lived. Maybe something would turn up.
She wearily climbed up the stairs to the squad room, thinking it over. Block had the motive and the opportunity. He had the temper, and he felt guilty. But she didn’t figure him for a killer. She just didn’t. And she knew Sanchez didn’t either. She headed down the hall to the ladies’ room.
It smelled like a war zone. There was some kind of pink face powder peppering the bottom of the sink. It reminded her of the makeup smeared on Maggie Wheeler’s face. Not exactly done by an expert. Could that be Albert’s work? April wiped out the basin with some toilet paper, then splashed cold water on her face.
Since there didn’t appear to have been a robbery at the boutique, she figured it had to be someone who knew Maggie. Either Albert Block, or Bill Hadgens or some other guy they hadn’t a line on yet. April made a mental note to ask Elsbeth if anything—anything at all—was missing from the store.
She dried her face with more toilet paper. It was the cheapest city issue and felt like sandpaper. Still, they were lucky to have it. In the ladies’ rooms in the criminal courts downtown, there often wasn’t any paper at all.
On the other hand, maybe this was something else altogether. The murder had the composed look of a ritual, something a crazy would do for reasons of his own that weren’t rational, or easily explainable like Albert’s reasons. Most people who committed murder didn’t do weird, sadistic things to their victims afterward.
Well, Block was nuttier than Hadgens. She’d gone back to see Bill Hadgens a second time with a tape recorder an hour after her first visit to ask if he had any further recollections about Maggie. He hadn’t changed his clothes or gotten up since she first spoke to him, and didn’t seem to have many thoughts about anything. She taped his surly answers. She’d compared his voice with the one on Maggie’s answering machine. It was negative for a match. She had the suspicion Albert Block’s would be, too.
