chapter twenty-two
THEY DIDN’T BOOK me. They just took my belongings, including my gun, and stuck me in a cell by myself, in the Alton County Courthouse. Nobody said anything much. But the deputies hovered close and looked as alert as they were able to, until I was locked up. Then everybody departed and I was alone in a cell about 8 by 10 feet in the cellar of the courthouse. There were no windows and only a single light in the ceiling of my cell, and one in the corridor outside. There was a toilet in the corner of the room, and a concrete bunk built out from the wall. On the bunk was a thin, bare mattress, a pillow, and a wool blanket that looked like it might once have been worn by a plow mule.
I lay on the bunk and propped the pillow under my head and looked at the ceiling for a while. There was no noise in the cell block. Either Alton County was a low-crime zone or the other prisoners were somewhere else. The arrest wasn’t legal. I hadn’t been charged with anything, I hadn’t appeared before any magistrate, I’d not been given access to counsel. I hadn’t been read my rights, probably because at the moment I didn’t have any. They probably hoped that when they came, I’d resist, which would give them a charge. But I didn’t. I went without a word. There was no point in asking. They wouldn’t tell me. It was quite possible they didn’t know. But I’d done something to motivate somebody to something, and maybe it was something stupid.
I ran over my all-time, all-seen team again: Koufax, Campanella, Musial, Robinson, Smith, Schmidt, Williams, DiMaggio, Mays. No one was out of position except Mays, and certainly Willie could play right field. And I’d have Red Barber broadcast the game. And Red Smith write about it.
The lights went out silently. The darkness was absolute. No trickle of light from anywhere until, eventually, as my eyes adjusted, I could see the hint of light from under the door to the cell block at the end of the corridor.
My basketball team was easy for the first four: Bird, Russell, Magic Johnson, and Jordan. But who’d be the other forward? Should I choose Wilt and play Russell at power forward? It seemed a cop-out. Maybe Bob Pettit. Or DeBusschere, or make Bird the power forward and play Elgin Baylor. How about Julius?
I wondered if anyone was going to give me supper, and decided that they weren’t. They wanted me to be isolated and hungry and in the dark down here while my resolve atrophied. I groped to the sink next to the toilet and ran the water. There was only a cold-water faucet. I drank some from my cupped hand and began to walk back and forth in the cell, feeling for the bars and wall at first, and then, coming to know the size, keeping a hand slightly out, but walking and stopping and turning at the right time by the floor plan in my head.
I remembered the first woman I’d slept with. Her name was Lily, and I remembered her naked body in detail as explicit as if I had seen her yesterday. That was sort of interesting, so I began to remember the other women I’d slept with and found I could remember all of them exactly: how they looked, how they acted, what they said, what they liked, what they wore, and how they undressed. Some had liked me a lot, some were lost in a private fantasy and I was a vehicle for its expression, some had just liked lovemaking, all of them had been fun.
I thought about Susan. She was the most fun.
I thought about football, and whether Joe Montana would finally replace Unitas. Jim Brown was eternal, and certainly Jim Parker. Sarah could sing, and Mel Torme, and Dave McKenna was the piano player, and The Four Seasons, in New York, for that one meal, and Sokol Blosser Pinot Noir, and Catamount beer, and German shorthaired pointers, and Ali maybe was the best heavyweight, though Ray Robinson was, of course, the best ever, any weight, and Krug champagne, and Faulkner, and Vermeer, and Stan Kenton and Mike Royko, and fitful sleep.
chapter twenty-three
I HEARD THEM coming and was sitting on the bunk when the lights went on and six of them carne into my cell. Four of them were big Alton, County Deputies with nightsticks, two of them were in suits. My friend with the hairdo and the almond-shaped eyes was not with them. All six were men.
A guy in a three-piece, blue pinstripe suit said, “On your feet, asshole.”
Bust in suddenly, after hours of isolation, while I’m still asleep, scare me witless, and ask me questions. It was not a brand-new approach. I sat on the edge of my bunk with my hands relaxed in my lap and looked at him. His vest gapped at the waist, leaving two inches of badly tucked-in shirt showing over the belt line.
“On your fucking feet,” he said.
“You want to wear a three-piece suit,” I said, “you gotta get good tailoring. Otherwise the vest gaps.”
Vest jerked his head and two deputies yanked me to my feet. I grinned at him.
“Or not,” I said.
“Sit down,” Vest said and shoved me with both hands. I didn’t sit. I rocked back a little and kept my feet. Vest jerked his head and the same two deputies who yanked me up put a hand on each shoulder and pushed me down. I didn’t go. Vest balled a fist and drove it into my stomach. He was slow. I had time to tighten my stomach and keep it from doing full damage. But it staggered me enough so that the deputies could push me down. I sat.
“Who’s your trainer?” I said. “Mary Baker Eddy?”
He didn’t know who Mary Baker Eddy was, but he tried not to let it show. His partner, wearing a seersucker suit and a straw snap brim with a colorful band, stood against the far wall with his arms crossed. Neither one showed a badge.
“We don’t care,” the partner said, “if you’re a smart ass, or not. We’ll take that out of you. Sooner or later, don’t matter none to us. But we’ll take it out of you, and you know that we can.” He had a soft, almost uninflected voice, with no sign of a regional accent.
He was right. They could, and I knew it. Anybody can be softened up; it’s all a matter of time and technique, and if you have the time, the technique will eventually surface. Didn’t mean it had to be soon, though.
“We’d like to know,” the partner said, “what it is you’re doing around here, and what you’ve found out about Olivia Nelson.”
“You guys got any badges or anything?” I said.
In a perfectly flat and humorless voice, the partner said, “Badges, we need no stinking badges. What have you found out about Olivia Nelson?”
“She went to Carolina Academy. She liked horses,” I said.
There were no other sounds here under the courthouse in the windowless room, only the sounds of our voices and the breathing of the deputies. The overhead light, unshaded and harsh, glared down at us.
“And what else?” the partner said.
He remained perfectly motionless against the wall, in a pose he’d probably practiced a thousand times. Arms folded, hat tilted over his eyes, so that the overhead light put his face in shadow.
“That’s all,” I said. The room was silent.
The partner eased himself languidly off the wall and slouched over toward me. Vest gave way and moved back and replaced him on the wall. The chorus line of deputies stood motionless, while the pas de deux took place. The partner put a hand out toward the nearest deputy and the deputy slapped a nightstick in his hand like a scrub nurse.
“You are in so deep over your head, asshole,” the partner said, “you’re about to drown.”
He was a tall man with high, square shoulders and a wide, slack mouth.
“You don’t seem like you’d be an Alton County Deputy Sheriff,” I said.
The partner laughed.
“No shit,” he said.
And whacked me on the side of the left knee with the nightstick. The pain ran up and down the length of my leg.
“I’ll help you think,” he said. “Maybe you heard something, ah, government-related.”
“Like what?” I said and he whacked my knee again and I felt the inside of my head get red, and, from a seated position, I punched him in the groin, which was about eye-level for me. He gasped and doubled over and staggered back. The nightstick clattered on the concrete floor. The deputies grabbed me. Vest lurched off the wall in a
shooter’s crouch with a small handgun. The partner stayed doubled over. I knew what he was doing; he was fighting off the nausea that came in waves.
“Cuff him,” Vest said. His voice was raspy. “Cuff him to the bars.”
The deputies hesitated. Vest stowed his gun, bent over and picked up the nightstick his partner had dropped.
“This ain’t our deal,” one of the deputies said. He was a beefy guy with sandy hair and freckled arms and a big, untrimmed moustache.
“Do what I tell you,” Vest said. “This is a fucking federal matter.”
“You say so,” the deputy said. “But I ain’t seen shit to prove it.”
“You never hung nobody on a cell door before?” Vest said.
“Sure, but Sheriff don’t much like us rousting white people ‘less we have to.”
“Fuck the Sheriff,” Vest said.
“Sheriff don’t too much like people saying fuck him, either.”
“Okay,” Vest said. “Okay. But this is important. National security. We have to find out what he knows. And we have to find out fast.”
The partner had made it to the wall, and was leaning his forehead against it, trying to breathe deeply.
“You got the Sheriff’s call, didn’t you?” he said, wedging the words in between deep inhales. “It’s on him, and us.”
The deputy nodded, and looked at the other deputies, and shrugged. He put his nightstick under his left arm and took a pair of cuffs off the back of his belt.
“We got to do it,” he said to me. “Hard or easy, up to you.”
I said, “Hard, I think.”
The deputy shrugged again, took the nightstick out from under his arm, and Martin Quirk walked into the cell. Everybody stopped in mid-motion and stared at him. He was as immaculate as always. Blue blazer, white Oxford button-down, maroon and navy rep striped tie, maroon show hankie, and gray covert slacks. He had his badge in his left hand. And he held it out so people could see it.
The partner had gotten himself upright, still breathing heavily, and turned so he was leaning his back on the wall.
“Who the fuck are you?” he said.
“Detective Lieutenant Martin Quirk, Commander, Homicide Division, Boston, Massachusetts, Police Department.”
“We’re in the middle of an investigation, Lieutenant,” the partner said. “And, you know, this isn’t Boston.”
He had his breathing under control again, but he still leaned on the wall. And when he moved he did so stiffly. Quirk looked at him. There was something in Quirk’s eyes. The way there was something in Hawk’s. It wasn’t just dangerous. I’d seen that look in a lot of eyes. It was more than that. It was a contemptuous certainty that if there was any reason to he’d kill you, and you had no part in the decision. Under all the tight control and the neat tailoring, and the pictures of his family on his desk, Quirk had a craziness in him that was terrifying when it peeked out. Here in the cellar of the Alton County Courthouse it not only peeked, it peered out, and steadily.
“I don’t care what you shit kickers are doing,” Quirk said, and what you saw in his look you could hear in his voice. “I want this guy, and I’ve come to get him.”
Vest, who hadn’t caught the look, and was too stupid to hear the sound in Quirk’s voice, spoke while still looking at me.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” he said. “Tough shit, huh? He’s our prisoner and we are in the middle of interrogation. Whyn’t you wait outside? Huh? Or maybe wait in Bahston.”
Quirk stepped in front of Vest and put his face about an inch away from Vest’s.
“You want to fuck around with me, dick breath?” Quirk said softly.
Vest stepped back as if something had pushed him. Quirk glanced around the cell.
“Before I came down here to this hog wallow, I talked with the U.S. Attorney in Boston, who put me in touch with the U.S. Attorney in Columbia. They both know I’m here.”
He looked at me, and jerked his head. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Certainly,” I said.
And we walked unhurriedly out of the cell and down the corridor under the ugly ceiling lights and up some stairs and into the Alton County Sheriff’s substation. Quirk demanded, and got, my personal stuff, including my gun, and we walked unhurriedly out onto the courthouse steps, where the sun was shining through the arching trees and the patterns of the heavy leaves were myriad and restless on the dusty street.
chapter twenty-four
QUIRK HAD PARKED his car in the fenced-in county lot back of the courthouse. We got in, and he pulled the car out the only exit, and parked on a hydrant across the street. He let the engine idle.
“How’d you get in there?” I said.
“Bullied the desk clerk,” Quirk said.
“You’re a scary bastard,” I said.
“Lucky for you,” Quirk said.
We were quiet.
“This a rental?” I said. Quirk shook his head. “Federal guys in Columbia lent it to me.”
“So why are we sitting here in it?”
“I thought we ought to see if we could get a read on the two suits in there,” Quirk said. “I’d like to know who sent them.”
From where we parked, we could see the front door of the courthouse and the parking lot entrance on the side street.
“We going to follow them?”
“Yeah.”
“And they spot us?”
“They won’t spot us,” Quirk said. “I’m a professional policeman.”
“Sure,” I said.
Quirk grinned. “And if they do,” he said, “fuck ‘em.”
Some cars came and went from the parking lot, but none of them contained Vest or the Partner. People went in and out of the courthouse, but they weren’t ours.
“Why didn’t you send Farrell?” I said.
“He’s got some time off,” Quirk said. “Trouble at home.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Guy he lives with has AIDS,” Quirk said.
“Jesus,” I said.
Quirk nodded, looking at the courthouse.
“How about him?” I said.
“He’s okay,” Quirk said.
“So you came because Farrell couldn’t?”
“Right, and Belson’s tracking down the other Olivia Nelson, or the real Olivia Nelson, or whoever the fuck that is in Nairobi, and the case is getting to be sort of a heavy issue… and I figure I better come down and save your ass, so Susan wouldn’t be mad.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” Quirk said. “I called Hawk and he said he’d keep track of Susan until this thing shook down a little.”
“You think someone might run at her to get to me?”
Quirk shrugged.
“Being careful does no harm,” he said.
The two suits walked down the steps of the courthouse, came down the side street and into the parking lot. In a minute they exited the lot in a green Dodge, and passed us, and headed out Main Street. Quirk let his car into gear and followed them easily, letting several cars in between. Quirk was too far back to stay with them if the suits were trying to shake a tail. But they weren’t. They had no reason to think they’d be followed. Quirk and I should be lickety-split for home. In ten minutes, they pulled into the parking lot of a Holiday Inn, out near the little airport, where Cessnas and Piper Cubs came and went several times a day, carrying Alton’s heavy hitters to and from important events. Quirk and I dawdled in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly across the street, while the suits got out and went into the motel. Then we pulled over to the motel and parked. Quirk adjusted his gun onto the front of his belt so that it showed as he let his coat fall open. Then we went into the lobby and walked briskly to the desk clerk. Quirk flashed his badge, and put it away. It could have said Baker Street Irregulars on it, for all the clerk had a chance to read it.
“Lieutenant Quirk,” he snapped, “Homicide. I need the room number of the two men who just came in here.”
The desk
clerk was a middle-aged woman with a lot of very blonde hair. She looked blank.
“Come on, Sis,” Quirk said, “this is police business, I don’t have a lot of time.”
“The two gentlemen who just passed through here?”
Quirk looked at me.
“Is she a smart one?” he said. “Is this one a quick learner?”
He looked back at her.
“That’s it, Sis. The two guys just passed through here. Room number and make it pretty quick.”
He drummed on the counter softly with his fingertips.
“Yes, sir,” the clerk said. “That would be Mr. O’Dell and Mr. Grimes. Room 211.”
“Okay, we’re going up.” Quirk said. “If you do anything at all, except mind your own business, I’ll close this dump down so tight it’ll squeeze your fanny.”
“Yes, sir,” the clerk said. “Stairs at the end of the corridor, sir. Second floor.”
“No shit,” Quirk said, and turned and hustled down the corridor toward the stairs with me behind him.
“So tight,” I said, “it’ll squeeze your fanny?”
We were going up the stairs.
“Cops are supposed to talk like that,” Quirk said.
“I liked `The Killers’ bit from Hemingway.”
“ ‘Is she a smart one?’ Yeah, I use that a lot.”
We were on the second floor and stopped in front of room 211. Quirk put his ear to the door. He nodded to himself. Then he knocked on the door. There was a moment of silence, then the door half opened and Vest looked out. Quirk hit the door with his shoulder and Vest stumbled back. The door banged open wide.
The Partner was sitting on one of the twin beds with his back to the door, talking on the phone. He half turned as we came in and I kicked the door shut behind us.
He said, “What the fuck?”
Quirk walked over and broke the phone connection.
“Exactly,” Quirk said.
A small holstered gun lay on top of the television set. Vest made a grab at it and yanked it from the holster. Quirk barely glanced at him while he chopped the gun out of Vest’s hand and kicked it under the bed. Vest threw a punch at Quirk’s head. Quirk slapped it aside and stepped away. He looked at me.
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