The False-Hearted Teddy

by John J. Lamb

  “And I’ve got mine. Thanks, sweetheart and I’ll explain later.”

  Hanging up, I made another quick telephone call. I walked out into the office area a minute or two later and met Delcambre, who’d just locked the interview room door. On the other side of the door, I could hear Tony complaining, but couldn’t quite make out the words.

  Noticing my quizzical glance at the door, Delcambre said, “There apparently wasn’t enough for lunch. He’s still hungry.”

  “Remind me to notify Amnesty International. Hey, a couple of things occurred to me when I was talking to my wife on the phone.”

  “What’s that?”

  “For starters, while we’re in talking with Wally Walrus, you need to contact your people at the hotel. Have them round up the fifth-floor cleaning crew for interviews, because I’ve got a pretty good idea of how Todd planted the evidence in our room.”

  “So, tell me.”

  “Detective Callahan strikes again. I just called the hotel and learned that there were only two card keys issued for our room…both of which are accounted for.”

  Delcambre tapped his forehead as if frustrated he’d missed an obvious clue. “And there was no forced entry, so the only way he could have gone in was while the maids were cleaning the rooms.”

  “Probably with a teddy bear in his hands, posing as me. I never saw the maids, so they wouldn’t know me from Todd.”

  “And in fairness, they might have thought he was your son…or grandson.”

  “You’re a cruel man, Richard. I guess that’s why I like you. But back to the question of room access: the scenario also fits the time frame, because the maids cleaned our room between the time I was doing the computer searches and when I interviewed Donna.”

  “So, we’re also going to need a photo lineup. I’ll call the Pennsylvania State Police and ask them to send us a digital DMV photo of Litten ASAP.”

  “And here’s something else you might want to jump on quickly: those latex gloves that were recovered from my room? I’ll bet Todd doesn’t know that it’s possible to recover latent fingerprints from the inside of gloves.”

  “With the superglue fuming process.” His eyes widened with surprise. “Oh man…”

  “Uh-huh, the method of murder might also be the exact same process by which you identify the killer.”

  “And if we do recover latents, we can compare them immediately, because his prints will be on file in Pennsylvania.”

  “Because he’s a public safety worker.”

  “Right. I’ll also get the State Police to fax me a copy of his print card.”

  Mulvaney came into the detective bureau with a sheet of paper in her hand. She nodded in the direction of the interview room door. “Is he in there?”

  “Yeah,” said Delcambre.

  “Before we get started, I need you to sign this.” Mulvaney handed me the sheet.

  “My secret agent credential. I might need it in Karachi.”

  “You might need it at the nuthouse. Or maybe I belong there,” Mulvaney said with an anxious sigh, “because this is so far outside our policies and procedures, that I can’t believe I’m doing it.”

  I said, “I know you’re worried, but this is going to work out all right. It’s always easier to explain why you crowded a department regulation if you’ve got the killer in custody. Trust me, I’ve been there.”

  I read the document. It was a boilerplate form on Baltimore City Police Department letterhead that essentially said I was temporarily acting as an agent of the police and that this didn’t entitle me to break any state or federal laws. At the end, there was a statement saying I henceforth and forever surrendered any rights to sue the City of Baltimore or its employees if I were to be injured or killed during my time of service. The last bit was the standard “hold harmless” waiver that always gives a personal injury attorney a fit of the giggles, because it isn’t worth the ink with which it was printed.

  I signed the form, dated it, and handed it back to Mulvaney, who tossed it on a nearby desk.

  I held my cane out for Delcambre to take. “It’s probably best if you hang onto this. Just in case he cops to something criminal, we don’t want some defense attorney later claiming that the only reason he confessed was because I threatened to cudgel him.”

  “Good idea, and here.” She pulled my wallet from her jacket pocket and tossed it to me. “I forgot I had it.”

  I caught it and shoved it into my jacket pocket. “Thanks, Lieutenant.”

  Tony was seated at the table, his face buried in his hands. It was warm in the room and he’d taken off his heavy jacket, revealing the periwinkle I WUV CHEERY CHERUB BEARS T-shirt. When he looked up, he wore a heartbroken expression and it seemed as if his eyes were red from prolonged crying. However, I’d been a cop long enough to know that you can achieve the same effect by vigorously rubbing your eye sockets. His gaze flicked from the lieutenant to me and I noticed Tony’s jaw tighten. My presence made him angry, which suited my purposes just fine, because if he wasn’t in control of his emotions, someone else was going to be…namely me.

  Tony snapped, “What the hell is he doing in here?”

  “Mr. Lyon is helping us with our inquiries,” Mulvaney said as we both sat down.

  “I told you, I’ve got nothing to say. I want my attorney.”

  “Then don’t say anything, you pinhead. Just listen for a few minutes,” I said, knowing that the surest way to get someone like Tony to talk was to tell him to be quiet. “We think that Todd framed you for Jennifer’s murder, but with your stellar background as a wife-beater and the way the evidence is stacked against you right now, you’re in the same shape as a cork from an open bottle of wine.”

  “Huh?”

  “Screwed.”

  “Todd? That little punk killed Jen?”

  “That little punk’s middle name should be Burlington-Northern, because he not only murdered your wife, he’s railroaded you.”

  “I’ll kill him!” Tony bellowed, as he jumped up from the chair.

  Although Tony was a consummate actor, I realized that the explosion of unreasoning rage wasn’t a performance. He was behaving in precisely the same manner I would if Ash had been murdered and I’d just learned the identity of the killer. Furthermore, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the violence of his response, because, in their own twisted ways, abusers do love their spouses.

  Tony began hammering at the door, shouting, “Let me out of here! I’ll hunt him down and rip his goddamned heart out with my bare hands!”

  I sat back in the chair and crossed my fingers on my chest. “Dude, you’re missing the big picture. You’re going to be in prison for a long time, so you aren’t going to do anything to him.”

  “I’ll—”

  “You’ll shut up and listen to me. Unless you like the idea of spending twenty-three hours a day in a tiny cell with the banjo player from Deliverance, while Todd assumes squatter’s rights over the Cheery Cherub Bears, you’ll give us the background information we need.”

  Tony turned on me with balled fists. “You think this is funny?”

  It took every ounce of fortitude I possessed to maintain my relaxed posture. “No, it’s just a sordid and very avoidable tragedy that began a couple of years ago when Jennifer stole a bunch of teddy bears from a dead kid’s bedroom. Was that her idea or yours?”

  The big man suddenly sagged a little, and his eyes wouldn’t meet mine. “You know…”

  “Yeah, I talked with Donna earlier today and she told me the whole heartwarming story. But what I don’t understand is why you didn’t accuse her of murder when the cops arrested you.”

  “For what, yelling at us at the breakfast? Hell, I figured we had that coming.”

  “Are you trying to say that you didn’t know that Donna went into your room during the cocktail reception last night?”

  “What?” The look of shock appeared genuine. “Then, couldn’t she have killed Jen?”

  “No, she just went in t
here to drop off a picture of her son to remind you grave robbers of what you’d done.”

  “I never saw a picture.”

  “Tell me what happened when you went back to your room last night.”

  “I unlocked the door. Jen went in first and I put the pizzas on the table.”

  I glanced at Mulvaney, who nodded. “There were two pizza boxes in the trash.”

  “And after you went into the room, what did Jennifer do?” I asked Tony, who’d lowered himself into the chair.

  “I don’t know. She was sitting on the bed, messing with a bear. I wasn’t paying much attention because I was hungry and I’m not supposed to go near the bears with anything greasy.”

  “And she didn’t mention finding a picture of Benjamin Jordan in your room?”

  “No.” There was a pause and then Tony continued in a softer and shame-filled voice, “But then again, Jen wouldn’t have.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was my idea that she take the angel bears and I kind of used to lose my temper when she talked about what a crappy thing we’d done.”

  “Is that a sanitized way of saying you went Mike Tyson on her if she made the mistake of saying something you didn’t like?”

  “I have anger-control issues.”

  “That sounds like a big ‘yes.’ Why did you make her take the bears?”

  “We needed the money. I wasn’t making enough at that lousy job and there was no other way.”

  “Enough money for what? Were you in danger of losing your house?”

  “No.”

  “And you obviously have plenty of groceries, so what was the financial situation that made you decide there was no other way?”

  “Is it such a big crime that I wanted a Harley?”

  Tony’s voice was growing increasingly whiny and I snapped, “Please forgive me for sounding a little judgmental, but if you don’t make enough money to buy a motorcycle, you get a second job, or become a gigolo, or even sell one of your kidneys at an online auction. You don’t solve the income problem by stealing teddy bears that were supposed to be donated to the freaking children’s ward of a hospital!”

  Todd winced. “You don’t understand.”

  “And thank God I don’t, because if I thought there was even the remotest possibility I could, I’d put my head in an oven and blow out the pilot light. Was it also your idea that Jennifer go into business making the pirated versions of the Cheery Cherub Bears?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And then Todd came into the picture.” I pulled the bag of M&M’s from my pocket and tossed it onto the table in front of Tony as a peace offering. “I heard you didn’t get enough lunch. You want some dessert?”

  “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure. Now tell me about Todd.”

  Seventeen

  Tiny bonfires were ignited in Tony’s eyes. “Everybody thinks that Todd is the greatest thing since canned beer. A paramedic, writes kiddy books, loves teddy bears…oh, he’s Lance Armstrong, all-American boy, but he’s a slimy son of a bitch.”

  Considering that only a few seconds earlier, Tony had rationalized his forcing Jennifer into a new profession in grave robbery as an unavoidable economic necessity, I was eager, and I’ll admit it, a little creeped out at the prospect of learning what he thought constituted slimy behavior. I nodded for him to continue, deciding not to point out that he’d confused the Tour de France winner with a fictional character from an old radio show.

  “That scene at breakfast…I wasn’t being paranoid about him trying to put the move on my wife. He was always hovering around Jen, trying to show her how much better he was than me.” Tony tore the M&M’s bag open and poured several of the candies into his mouth.

  “Yeah, it was obvious he was attracted to her. Did she feel the same way about him?” I asked.

  “No…at least that’s what she told me.”

  But the doubt in Tony’s voice led me to deduce that Jennifer’s denials of being attracted to Todd hadn’t been very convincing—whether or not she actually was, it would have been an exquisitely cruel and satisfying mind game to play on the man who abused her.

  “So, if you loathe him and Jen said she didn’t have any feelings for Todd, how did he become such a big part of Cheery Cherub Bears?”

  “The only way he got involved with our bears was because he forced his way in.”

  I was taken aback by the sheer effrontery of Tony’s last statement and wanted to say: Your bears? However, I didn’t want to interrupt his story by goading him. So, I bit my tongue and said, “How did he do that?”

  “He blackmailed us. Me.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “It started about fourteen months ago.” Tony dumped another bunch of candy into his mouth and began crunching away.

  “Was that when you met him?”

  “Yeah. One night, Jen and I were having an argument and she started having trouble breathing.” Tony raised his hand to ostensibly rub his nose, but he was actually covering his mouth, a Body Language 101 clue that he wasn’t telling the entire truth.

  “Asthma?”

  “No. I uh…”

  Suddenly, I understood why he was hesitant to continue. “Did you choke her?”

  “She was calling me names and I reached out and accidentally grabbed her here.” Todd motioned vaguely toward the front of his neck.

  “Like this?” I asked incredulously, positioning my right hand in the same shape I would if I were holding a large glass tumbler.

  The grip was what’s known among cops as a C-Clamp. Applied perfectly, the fingers briefly pinch off the flow of the blood to the brain, rendering the victim unconscious in seconds. However, it’s a physical restraint hold outlawed by almost every law enforcement agency in the United States. That’s because you can easily miss the carotid artery, crush the windpipe, and kill someone with such a grip. I glanced at Mulvaney, who’d dropped her hand out of Tony’s view and had unconsciously begun to open and close her hand into a fist.

  Tony nodded sheepishly and muttered, “Kind of.”

  “So…you, ‘kind of’ actually strangled her and it really wouldn’t be accurate to say that she was having trouble breathing when in fact, there wasn’t any…” I stared at Tony, trying to will him to finish the sentence.

  “Okay, she couldn’t breathe! I didn’t mean it.”

  “I know. It was that old anger-control problem. So, she’s lying there gagging on the floor. What did you do?”

  “I was scared, so I called nine-one-one.”

  “Good man. What happened then?”

  “I remember thinking we were lucky, because the EMTs were already out on a call and were only a few blocks away. They got there in just a couple of seconds.”

  “And Todd was one of the EMTs?”

  “Yeah, him and some real young guy who I could tell was a rookie.”

  “And then?”

  “He had this oxygen tank and put this plastic tube partway down her throat and a second later she was breathing again.”

  “Hallelujah. Good as new and ready for some more roughhouse fun, right?”

  Tony pouted. “It was an accident.”

  “Unlike all the other times. How did you explain how she got injured?”

  “This happened in the kitchen and I told them that Jen had slipped and hit her throat against the edge of the counter.”

  “Slipped? On what, a banana peel? Why did you think anyone would believe a comic strip idea like that?”

  “Because before the paramedics got there, I, uh…kind of poured some olive oil on the floor and…um…”

  Realizing where the tale was going, I held my hands up in supplication. “Stop! Please don’t tell me that you made slip marks through the oil with her shoes.”

  “They were slippers,” Tony whispered.

  “Yeah, I’ll say they were. Let me get this straight: you took her slippers off, ran them through the olive oil, and put them back on her feet while she was lying t
here choking to death?”

  I was laughing now as a defensive mechanism, because the interview had just descended into a new and lower level of horror in a Comstock Lode of squalidness. Beside me, Mulvaney was rubbing her forehead while glaring at Tony.

  “I was on probation! They were going to send me to prison if I was arrested again,” Tony wailed.

  I managed to stifle my chuckling, wiped my eyes, and said, “Which is exactly where you belong, you scumbag and you want to know the hell of it?”

  “What?”

  “After everything you’ve done, you’ll be a free man when you leave the police station. God, I wish I’d brought my cane in here.” The spasm of gallows humor was instantly gone. “So, when did the police arrive?”

  “How did you know about that?”

  “It wasn’t difficult to guess. One of the things that us mean ole cops do is make little notes of the houses where guys are victims of anger-control problems that cause them to hurt their wives.” I glanced at Mulvaney, who nodded in tight-lipped agreement. I continued, “In fact, if Basingstoke Township has computer-aided dispatch, I’d wager they’ve got your number and home address red-flagged in the system for an automatic police response, because you’ve already been arrested for domestic violence.”

  “Oh.”

  “So, answer the question.”

  “The police got there maybe five minutes after Todd got Jen to start breathing again.” Tony scowled, reliving an unpleasant memory. “He’d gotten her into a kitchen chair and he was kneeling there next to her, holding her hand and telling her that she was going to be all right and she was looking at him like he was so wonderful.”

  “How completely irrational of her. Did you think Todd believed the story about the olive oil?”

  “No. He didn’t say anything, but he gave me this who’re-you-kidding look.” Tony poured the remainder of the M&M’s into his mouth, crumpled the wrapper in his fist, and tossed it onto the table.

  “You think he knew you were on probation?”

  “Probably.”

  I nodded in agreement. Life in Remmelkemp Mill had taught me that there was no such thing as a secret in a small town. “Then you must have been shaking in your space-boots when the cops arrived.”