The Art of Deception

by Ridley Pearson

  Neal said, “We come home after dinner . . . to my hang, you know? And went to bed. I watched the sports while she . . . you know, she was busy.”

  “Busy, how?”

  “You know?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Busy.” He pumped his cupped hand up and down. “Beneath the sheets.”

  “Ms. Walker was performing oral sex on you while you watched the sports news.”

  Neal grinned proudly, but he couldn’t keep his eyes still. “That’s it.”

  Lies, she thought, as LaMoia caught her attention and rolled his eyes.

  “What time would that have been?” LaMoia asked.

  “After dinner, like I said.”

  “That would be the local news?”

  “Q-13.”

  “That would be Fox.”

  “That would be correct.” He mimicked LaMoia, and the sergeant impressed Matthews with his ability to remain calm and not rise to the bait.

  Neal liked to hear himself talk. That played in their favor. “She wanted some of that action for herself—if you know what I’m saying—and I wasn’t exactly complaining, but—”

  LaMoia interrupted. “We’ll skip the play-by-play, if you don’t mind. You did, or did not have intercourse with Mary-Ann Walker on Saturday, March twenty-second?”

  “That’s a ‘did.’ For sure.”

  Matthews asked, “Using a condom, or without?”

  “That would be without.” Neal gave her a tennis pro smile.

  LaMoia said, “Following the intercourse, you watched more television, or read, or went to sleep, or what?”

  “Slept. At least I did. Mary-Ann might have gone out the window.”

  “You want to explain that?”

  “For a smoke,” Neal clarified. “Can’t stand that shit. She used the fire escape. Used it all the time. I saw her out there on the fire escape. It was later, a lot later. Probably for a smoke. Right? I saw her out there, yeah. I just said I did.” Confusion fanned the edges of his eyes.

  “Approximately what time was this?”

  “Later.”

  “Can you be more precise?”

  Neal glanced first to Matthews, then to LaMoia, as if hoping one of them might help him out. He pinched his temples between the fingers of his right hand and apparently appealed for divine intervention. She was beginning to put more faith in Walker’s suspicions. Lanny Neal was a self-centered egotist who had a record of abusing his girlfriends. He didn’t lie very well, despite what must have been a great deal of practice.

  “I remember her out there . . . seeing her out there. I didn’t like it when she went out there dressed like that. She never seemed to give a shit what she was wearing. Claimed no one could see her, so high up and all. And that’s another thing—she don’t even like heights, but for a smoke, shit, she’d climb the Space Needle. Anyway, she’d go out there in like a T-shirt and underwear, showing skin and all.

  “She was talking,” he continued. “At first I wondered who the fuck was out there with her. Then I saw the cordless phone was missing. She was out there on the fire escape on the goddamn phone with someone. Maybe it was the phone ringing that woke me up in the first place. And I do remember what time it was.” This seemed to dawn upon him, and Matthews thought he was making it up as he went. “All twos flashing at me. Two twenty-two. The clock by the phone on her side of the bed. I remember that. Two, two, two. Flashing away. And I looked out the window, and there she was on the goddamn phone.”

  “Two twenty-two A.M.”

  “You ought to be talking to that brother of hers. Always begging her for money, bugging her. Punk-ass kid, blaming her for everything bad happening to him. Probably him on the phone. Probably him who did this to her.”

  “What exactly do you think happened to Mary-Ann?” LaMoia asked.

  “How should I know? All disgusting like that, the way she was. Looked like she drowned or something. Is that right?”

  “What exactly was Mary-Ann wearing at the time? Out on your fire escape.”

  “I just told you! Next to nothing.”

  “A description of that clothing could prove useful to the investigation.”

  “Well, she sure as shit wasn’t going to go out there bare-ass again, you understand. Not after the last time. I’d caught her again—”

  He stopped himself.

  LaMoia met eyes with Matthews, communicating that they had their first real look at Langford Neal’s inner workings. Interrogators lived for such moments.

  LaMoia supplied, “You’d smack her around, let her know who was boss.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Did you smack her around that night, Lanny? Hit her upside the head, or knock her off the fire escape, or what? She was bleeding, wasn’t she? She was bleeding and you didn’t know what to do.”

  “That’s bullshit. I seen her out there and I went back to sleep. End of story. She would’a had on butt floss. White butt floss. She always wore the same thing.”

  Matthews said, “Thong panties. And what about on top? A T-shirt? A blouse? A robe?”

  “One of those camel-things.”

  “A camisole.”

  “Two humps right where they belong. Nice and tight.”

  Matthews cringed at his reckless confidence. “A camisole and thong underwear. No sweatshirt, no robe?”

  “She’s hot-blooded, I’m telling you. Went out there all the time in next to nothing. For a smoke. A sweatshirt—how the hell should I know? Does she own one? Yes. But that night it was a freak show anyway. Warm for a change. You can check that, right?”

  LaMoia said, “We’ll check all of your statement, Lanny. Every last word.”

  He looked briefly bewildered, but then regained his confidence and restated that the last time he’d seen her she’d been out on the fire escape. “Woke the next morning and she wasn’t there. Not that that was all that unusual. She went to sleep later than me and got up earlier. Probably headed straight for a coffee hit, a Seattle’s Best, down a few blocks. You should check with them. Right? They open at six, and she’s always one of the first through the door.”

  “So her clothes were gone,” LaMoia stated. “In the morning, I’m talking about—when you woke up, whatever else she’d been wearing—those clothes were gone?”

  “What clothes? How the fuck would I know?” Clearly flustered, Neal shook his arms in front of himself as if his hands had gone to sleep. “She wore them to bed, that’s all I’m saying.”

  LaMoia reviewed his notes. “A moment ago you said you fell asleep after having sex with Ms. Walker. That you fell asleep after the sex. Now you’re saying she wore panties to bed? Can you be more precise?”

  “She wore them to bed before I took them off her.” He added, “And that would have been after the sports, after the hummer, to be more precise.”

  “And what clothes if any, did she leave behind at your apartment that morning?”

  “She’s the one picks up, not me.”

  LaMoia said irritably, “So you’re saying she cleaned house that morning, before she left for the coffee?”

  “Listen, she had clothes at my place, okay? How the fuck do I know what was there and what wasn’t? She lived there with me, don’t forget. Right? Clothes? What? On the floor or something? How the hell would I know?”

  Matthews thought the story was getting away from him. The little pauses. The rapid eye movement. She excused herself and left the conference room, returning a few minutes later with autopsy photographs of two different women.

  She wasn’t hoping to win a confession, to cause some Perry Mason moment in which Langford Neal hung his head, weeping, and detailed the events of that night. She did, however, intend to run Neal through a litmus test. If she came away with anything, she hoped to at least identify his lies and to make sense of his motivations for telling them. Making a legal case was not her responsibility. All that she wanted was the truth. Until the attorneys were invited in—Neal had yet to request one�
�she could basically say anything she wanted, could match him lie for lie. She knew how to use her looks against guys like Neal. Just before reentering the conference room, she tucked in her blouse and squared her shoulders, emphasizing her chest. Let him look all he wanted to. Let him be distracted.

  She placed the photos in front of Neal. LaMoia knew they’d made the handoff—Neal now belonged to her. She said, “We had a similar fatality last year. Also a young, attractive woman. We’re investigating possible connections.”

  “The connections being bridges and water,” Neal said.

  “And/or the men these women dated.”

  “You’re looking at me for some head case that jumped off a bridge a year ago?”

  “No, we’re looking at you for Mary-Ann Walker, Mr. Neal.” She made a stage show of looking over at LaMoia. “Who said anything about Mary-Ann jumping?”

  “Not me,” LaMoia answered.

  “Nor did I,” Matthews said.

  “Try the papers, the television,” Neal protested.

  Matthews said, “Mary-Ann Walker did not jump, Mr. Neal.”

  “But you just said—”

  “She was beaten badly, possibly raped, and subsequently was discovered in water wearing a torn thong underwear and a cotton camisole top—just exactly as you’ve now described for us. How she arrived into that water remains under investigation.”

  Neal lost the shit-eating grin.

  “You’re clearly a smart man,” she lied. “A man who understands women. You don’t have to tell me that some women get themselves into difficult spots. Make promises and change their minds. Get a little too drunk and ask for it and then beg off the sex with the old headache excuse. They cocktease a guy and then refuse to put out.”

  LaMoia did a double take on Matthews.

  Neal looked uncertain.

  “Right?” Matthews said.

  “Yeah, sure. I’d buy that.”

  “And sometimes a guy’s got to tune her up a little, let her know who’s boss. Sober her up. There’s a way this works and there’s a way this doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work when she’s in some drunken, willing mood one minute, and then an ice maiden the next.”

  Neal saw the trap then. “I . . . ah . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “We’ve got a half dozen prior complaints against you, Lanny. All of them are for taking a heavy hand with your girlfriends. You logged a thirty-day stint at county. You put a girl named Eileen Rimbauer in the emergency room with a broken collarbone. Are you aware that Mary-Ann Walker had five such emergency room visits in the last six months? Did she happen to tell you about those? Her brother knows, I’ll tell you that. She claimed to have fallen down the stairs of the boat, said her hand got caught in a winch.” She read all this as if it were printed on the page, which it was not. “Pretty lame excuses, you ask me. She also had some woman problems that make a lot more sense if some guy is playing it a little kinky and rough. So what you need to look at, Mr. Neal, is not the door, not my chest, not the detective, as you have been, but what happened that night. You need to look at the underlying circumstances that started whatever argument resulted between you, the conditions that escalated that particular argument into violence. We’re cops, yes. But believe it or not we’re human. We’ve heard it all—there’s nothing you can tell us that will surprise us. This being your third strike, with the battered-woman law in effect you’re facing a serious uphill battle, if convicted. You want half a chance? Convince us that you and Mary-Ann had a disagreement that night, that things got a little out of hand. A disagreement takes two people, Mr. Neal. That’s a whole lot better than some guy pounding on his woman for no reason whatsoever. Can we start there?”

  “She was out on the fire escape. Talking on the phone maybe. I’m not sure about that. Smoking a cigarette, ’cause otherwise no way would she have been out there. I’m telling you, she did not like heights.”

  “Not to get away from you?”

  “We had sex is all. Maybe I was rough. I don’t remember. I was pretty loaded that night. But I’ll tell you one thing: You never heard Mary-Ann complaining about the sex, believe me. She liked it rough. She asked for it rough. That night, out there on the fire escape, that’s the last I seen of her.”

  “Two twenty-two A.M.,” Matthews repeated.

  “The woman hardly slept.”

  “You understand that where there are mitigating circumstances in a case—an argument, for instance—the investigating officer is required to take them into consideration. These things come out in trial no matter what. There’s no sense for a detective to push for capital murder if there’s a domestic case where the girlfriend was complicit—say, acting like a drunken slut one minute and going for a carving knife the next. You need to think about that, because a guy beats up a woman, the sides get drawn long before the jury sits down for the first time. Believe it.” Neal wore shock in his eyes, which Matthews took as a small victory. “Am I getting through, Lanny?” she asked rhetorically.

  “She was all fucked up in the head. All bent out of shape over her asshole baby brother. Said she’d let him down, losing the fishing boat and everything. That she owed him big time. But shit, he was just working her. Mooching. Crying in his beer. I wanted her taking care of things around home. For us to get something going. But I’m telling you, she was all fucked up.”

  “Okay.” Matthews took a deep breath and savored the surprise that he’d begun to open up.

  “She’d been drinking a lot that night, got herself all dumb and loopy. We had the sex, you know, just like I said. Her on top, all angry like. Fast and furious and, I don’t know, mean-spirited, you know? Like she didn’t want to be doing it.”

  Matthews didn’t like the next images that filled her head— sweating through the camisole, sticky hair, the slapping of flesh.

  “Sometimes it was like that with her,” Neal said, quieter for the first time. “A little strange like that. Like she wasn’t really there, you know? Tripping out. The more I seen of her like that, the weirder it was, to tell the truth. She’d get herself off. It wasn’t about me. It was like I wasn’t there.”

  Matthews attempted to wipe those images from her mind, but they wouldn’t fade. She spoke over them. “Was there anything that night in particular that the two of you argued about? Anything said that maybe’d come up the other times you’d seen her like this?”

  “I’m telling you, she got the most pissed off when I brought up Ferrell, and how it was bugging me the way he never left her alone. Jesus, the guy was always showing up at the weirdest times. Sniveling about money and how she’d fucked everything up. And she didn’t like me talking about him. Bitching about him. She’d pretty much taken care of him since their old man bit it. Her mom—I don’t know nothing about her mom. Whether she bolted or croaked, or what. She could be dead, too, for all I know.”

  “So you argued about the brother,” Matthews said.

  “That night? Not that I remember. I’m telling you: We got back to my place and she went all horny on me. She’s half undressed and going down on me practically before I got the tube on.”

  “According to you, she was out on your fire escape in her panties and a camisole top. Maybe a sweatshirt; you don’t know. Can’t remember. I’m assuming barefoot. And now, fast-forward, she’s in the water.” Matthews paused. “There are problems with your story, Mr. Neal. Are you aware of that? We started out with you and Mary-Ann pretty much in the same miserable condition. You watching your sports broadcast while she services you. Now you say she was oversexed and practically raping you. We started out with her getting up in the morning and heading out for coffee. But we know for a fact she ended up in the water the night before. How’d she get there?”

  “How’d she get to the water?” Neal asked, as if he was suddenly on their side. “I’m telling you, I saw her out on the fire escape. Heard her talking on the phone.”

  He appeared les
s confident now. If there was a part of his story to exploit, it was Mary-Ann out on the fire escape. Matthews tried again. “How about this? Maybe she’s still drunk out there on the fire escape. Maybe you’ve got the time wrong. Maybe she’s drunk, tired, a little shaky still from the sex, and she smokes a cigarette and goes a little dizzy and goes right off that fire escape.”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m with you,” LaMoia said.

  “It wasn’t like that,” Neal objected.

  “She’s trying to help you out here,” LaMoia said.

  “She goes off the fire escape and she isn’t getting up, and you, Mr. Neal, realize with your history this is not going to look right. Not good at all. Your half-naked girlfriend, carrying your sperm, at the bottom of your fire escape? How you gonna explain that one?”

  LaMoia said, “But the condition of the body—that fits: going off the fire escape. That’s good thinking, Lieutenant.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Neal repeated.

  “But to a jury? What you’ve got to ask yourself is how it’ll look to a jury. ’Cause I’ve got to tell you—it’s pretty damn convincing to me.”

  “To me too,” LaMoia chimed in.

  Neal wore a full face of sweat now, his eyes jumping between his two interrogators.

  Matthews leaned into the suspect where he could smell her, where he couldn’t avoid her. “But sadly for you, the truth always plays better. You know what I think? I think you hit Mary-Ann. I think you got angry with her and you struck her, and things went badly for you. You thought she was passed out like the other times, but she never got up. Sometime that night, or the next morning, you discovered she was dead. You’d killed her. And now what? Maybe for whatever reasons, it turned you on. Maybe you’re like that. Maybe you did things to her after she was dead.” She lowered her voice. This was her ground now. “There’s nothing quite like that anger of yours, is there? It gets away from you, that kind of anger. It turns back on you, doesn’t it? Bites back. Then comes the moment you don’t understand. You’re riding a rocket while your little sweetheart’s gone all limp. You’re all over her with your stuff, because that’s how the arguments always end—right?—the two of you in the sack, clawing at each other and starting out all ugly before the sex starts to heal things. Only this time it doesn’t heal, does it? This time she isn’t coming awake.”