No good! I just can’t see it. Or maybe I just don’t want to.
Ruth puts down the phone and looks up at me.
“It’s horrible!” she says. “Just horrible!”
I don’t have to ask her what she’s talking about. It has been three weeks since Ringman and I visited Jeannie Quail in hospital and, for most people in town, the shock had begun to wear off. Then, two days ago now, there was a second attack – and the victim this time was Chuck Wagstaff, a 3rd Grade boy who attended P.S. 7.
“What was a little kid like that even doing up by the Interstate on his own?” asks Ruth, who has got kids of her own.
“He told his friends he was going to MacDonald’s,” I tell her.
“If he wanted a hamburger, why didn’t he go to Papa Roy’s, which is right here in town. You know Roy – he’d have given the kid a burger for free, and then called the parents.”
“Chuck didn’t want a burger,” I tell her. “What he wanted was to talk to Ronald MacDonald.”
There are tears forming in the corners of Ruth’s eyes – something I don’t think anybody in headquarters has ever seen before.
“You know what gets me?” she asks. “The poor little mite didn’t even know what was real and what wasn’t. Well, he sure enough knows now.”
Oh yeah, he’s hit reality in a big way, I think. When the patrol car found him lying between two trash cans behind MacDonald’s, he’d been sodomised, his face was badly scratched from being forced into the ground, and his arm – which had been twisted behind his back during the rape – had been broken.
“We’ve been living in a fool’s paradise,” Ruth says. “Ever since Jeannie got hurt, we’ve been telling ourselves it couldn’t be one of us. But it has to be – doesn’t it, Mike?”
I nod. Ruth is not the only one to reach the conclusion that the attacker is no stranger, and suddenly the peaceful town where I have lived for three years is stinking of fear.
“I meet both my boys out of school now,” Ruth says. “I don’t care if they are in junior high – I don’t want them out on the streets alone.”
“Makes sense,” I tell her.
“I’ve even stopped Ellen May from going out on dates. And she’s nearly 18!” A look of uncertainty crosses Ruth’s face – and that’s another first. ‘Do you think I’m going over the top?” she asks.
No, I don’t. It’s unlikely that Ellen May is in any danger from the guy, but nobody knows for sure.
Nobody knows anything for sure! Which is why middle-aged ladies have stopped dishing out dirt and cheesecake in each other’s houses after dark, why the local locksmiths are working 16 hour days, and why even the retro-beatniks who swagger outside the Blue Note Café have given up moody solitude for safety in numbers.
The intercom on Ruth’s desk buzzes, and then I hear Ringman’s voice say: “You got Kaleta there?”
“Yes, Chief.”
“Send him in.”
I knock, then open the door and step into Ringman’s office. The Chief is sitting at his desk, the town’s two newspapers spread out in front of him.
“Seen these?” he asks.
I shake my head. Neither paper is due to hit the streets till noon, and for Ringman to have gotten them so quickly, he must have sent someone round to the printers.
The Chief holds up the Tribune for me to look at.
“‘City of Terror’,” I read aloud. “Not very classy, but fairly accurate.”
Ringman gives me a look which says he wishes I was somewhere else – preferably under a couple of feet of concrete – then holds up the Times which leads with the headline: ‘Police Chief Baffled!’
“Baffled!” he says. “What kind of cock-sucking, faggy fucking word is that? What they’re tryin’ to do, Kaleta, is they’re tryin’ to crucify me.”
And they couldn’t have made a better choice. But right now, I don’t want to see the Police Department fall apart – right now what I want is for this pervert to be behind bars before he can hurt any more kids.
Ringman starts to fold the papers, then loses patience and just sweeps them off his desk. They land on the floor with a dull thud.
“So it turns out you were right about the sick bastard bein’ somebody from Harrisburg,” the Chief says.
“Looks that way,” I agree.
But I take no pleasure from it. If anything, I’m weighed down by my failure to make Ringman to see it my way before Chuck Wagstaff was attacked.
“Course, I might have spotted that myself if I’d had your Noo York City trainin’,” Ringman points out.
This is not a compliment, and we both know it.
I say nothing.
“I’ve just got off the phone with Mayor Pine,” Ringman continues. “The mayor’s real concerned about the bad image all this is givin’ the town. He wants an arrest an’ he wants it yesterday, an’ since you’re such a hot-shot detective, I’m gonna hand the case over to you.”
Imagine my surprise! I trace my way along the same twisted path his mind must have traveled. The press and voters are screaming for results, so Ringman puts me in charge. If I catch the guy, he grabs all the credit. If I don’t, then who else is there to blame but me – and I’m out on my ass. This is Ringman at his best. This is how he got to be Chief – and has stayed Chief.
I should tell him to stick it, but I don’t. I am a hot-shot detective – or I used to be before I married Pine’s daughter and moved to Harrisburg – so if anybody in the Department is qualified to handle this case, it should be me. Anyway, I’ve got a personal interest in all this, because however much I try, I can’t wipe the picture of Jeannie Quail out of my mind.
“Who will I be working with?” I ask.
Ringman smiles, like he is savoring the one bright spot in his day.
“You’ll be workin’ with Sergeant Williams,” he tells me.
“Williams!” I explode. “Is that some kind of sick joke?”
But even as I’m saying the words, I start to see Ringman’s logic. The Chief doesn’t want me here, but since I’m the Mayor’s son-in-law, he hasn’t much choice. And he doesn’t want Williams either, but she’s another of the Mayor’s appointments – brought in to prove to all the Northern industrialists we are trying to lure to Prosperity Park that this town is real progressive when it comes to equal opportunities. So why not team us together? Why not get two fall-guys for the price of one?
That doesn’t bother me, because if we catch the sicko – and we will – there won’t be any fall-guys. What does bother me is Williams. If I have a partner, I want it to be a partner who is willing to take a bullet for me, like I took one for Marty. And maybe Williams would – but she’d have to consult the rule book first, to see if that was all right, by which time I’d probably be dead.
“Give me somebody else,” I say.
“I want you to use Williams,” Ringman says. “I think you’d make a real good team.”
“And if I refuse to work with her?”
“This ain’t no democracy, Kaleta. Me Chief, you Lieutenant. You work with who I fucking order you to.”
“Yeah,” I agree, heading for the door. “I guess I fucking do.”
*
Williams is at her desk in the corner of the squad room. She is going over a report – probably making sure that it is the best organized, deadly accurate and most uninspired document that the Department has ever filed.
I take a seat at my own desk, push the piles of uncompleted paperwork to one side, and say: “Got a minute, Williams?”
She lifts her head. For a second, the expression on her face is a mixture of annoyance and dislike. Then it is gone – wiped off – and all that is left is the blank, official look which I have come to find so endearing.
“Did you say something, Lieutenant?” she asks, so proving – in case I missed it – that she has been deeply involved in her work.
“I asked if you’d got a minute.”
“Official business?”
“Yeah, offic
ial business.”
“Sure, Lieutenant,” Williams says, making it plain that while she has no time to waste on me, Mike Kaleta, she’s got all the time in the world for Lieutenant Kaleta, her superior. Jesus, she must love rank almost as much as Ringman does.
Williams stands up and starts to walk over to my desk. She’s wearing a severe black suit. The skirt comes down below her knees – everybody in the Department believes she has sensational legs, but no one knows for sure. The jacket is loose, so that neither her shoulder holster nor her ample breasts make much of a bulge. Her shirt is plain white and around her neck she has an almost-macho string tie. All in all, it’s not the most attractive outfit in the world to model – but I’ve got to admit that she moves well.
She reaches my desk, and I motion her to sit down.
“We’re on the Quail-Wagstaff case,” I tell her.
“Who is?”
“You and me.”
“Just the two of us?”
“Yeah.”
The split-screen expression again, half of it saying she is not exactly over the moon about working with me, the other half screaming that she wants the case badly enough to kill for.
“Why us?” she asks.
“Because we’re expendable.”
She nods, like that makes sense, then says: “But if we can clean this one up, we’re made with the Department.”
“Sure,” I agree. “And maybe we even get to stop some more little kids being put through hell.”
“I care about that, too,” Williams says defensively.
Maybe she does, I think – and maybe she doesn’t.
I find myself looking at her closely for the first time in months. Her hair is ash-blonde, but the way she’s got it tied up at the back, it’s impossible to say how long it is. She has a slim nose which just misses being pointed, and a mouth which is maybe a touch too wide. She’d never make the centerfold of Playboy, but if they ever ran a pictorial on Female Cops With Attitude, she’d be right in there with the best of them.
“Are we going to get started, Lieutenant?” she asks.
And her tone suggests she thinks that even if I do consider her a cold-hearted bitch, I’d still love to get into her pants – just like every creep in the Department.
And she could be right.
3
Jackson Square – named after Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans and the seventh president of the USA – is at the heart of the old town. It is here that the citizens gathered to celebrate the end of the Second World War, and here where aspiring politicians choose to hold their rallies. It is a pretty square, overlooked on the west side by the City Hall and from the east by the Police Department, which are two of the oldest and most elegant buildings in Harrisburg. It features on most of the picture postcards of the city, and occupies a prominent space in the booster literature that Mayor Pine sends out to captains of industry all over America.
And here I stand, in the squad room, looking down at the trees on Jackson Square, which were just sprouting sticky buds when Williams and I were first assigned to the Jeannie Quail and Wagstaff cases – and are now sheathed in mature green leaves.
“Six weeks!” I groan to myself. “Six fucking weeks.”
I take a deep breath and try to recapture just a little of the confidence I felt at the start of the investigation – but it’s no good, I can’t.
*
It all seemed so easy back then. There we were, two smart cops conducting an inquiry in a town which is the size of a small city but has the feel of an overgrown village, where everybody is always watching everybody else. There had to be someone in Harrisburg, we argued, who held the one vital piece of information which would lead us to the attacker. Sure, this as-yet unidentified witness might not even realize that he or she was holding the key, but when we found him or her, we would recognize it for what it was. All we had to do was make the right connection, and the case would be wrapped up, Williams would be in good with the Department – and I might be able to forget the look on little Jeannie Quail’s face.
Great theory!
We’d started where the trail was hottest, out at the Interstate MacDonald’s.
“Were you working here yesterday afternoon between the hours of four and six?” I asked the kid with the wispy moustache who was standing behind the counter.
“Sure,” he said.
“Did you see or hear anything unusual?’
‘Nope. Seemed like just a normal day to me – until the cops turned up.”
“Chuck Wagstaff was dumped right behind the restaurant,” I told him. “Are you saying that just slipped by you?”
“Between four and six is our busiest time of the day. See, we got the high school kids on their way home from school, the truckers who figure it’s time for a break, the commuters who’ve decided they might as well sit out the rush—”
“But surely somebody must have gone out to the trash cans at the back?”
“Got our own trash cans inside. Don’t empty them till the place closes.” The boy grinned. “And please don’t call me Shirley.”
The last thing I needed at that moment was some snot-nose kid just out of high school trying to be funny.
“We’d like to speak to the manager next,” I said coldly.
The boy grinned again. “I am the manager,” he said.
*
We spent the rest of the day at the MacDonald’s, questioning its regular customers, delivery men and even the passing trade. Like the manager with the wispy moustache, nobody had seen or heard anything.
We weren’t discouraged – not then. So what if there were no leads on the Chuck Wagstaff case? We could always go at the investigation another way – through Jeannie Quail. Sure, that ground had already been covered, but by Hughes and McMahon, two dipshit detectives who couldn’t solve a crime if they were handed a signed confession.
We hit Beauregard Park the next afternoon – round about the time Jeannie had been attacked – and when we saw the twenty or more potential witnesses who were using it, we knew we’d struck pay dirt.
And then we started asking questions!
“Come here nearly every day,” said one old guy who was sitting on a bench and doing the crossword in the Harrisburg Times. “I ain’t got no choice in the matter. My old lady don’t like me bein’ at home when she’s cleanin’.”
“And were you here the day Jeannie Quail was attacked?”
The old man shook his head. “Even Ethel wasn’t going to drive me outta the house that day. As far as I can remember, it was cold enough to freeze your nuts off.” He looked apologetically at Williams. “Sorry, lady, but that’s how cold it was.”
We talked to a skinny-as-a-rail black kid, dressed in purple shorts and tee-shirt, who was skateboarding down the slope which leads away from the General’s statue.
“Sure, I always come here,” he said. “Man, it’s the place to be.”
“So you were here the day the little girl was raped?”
“When was that?”
“The middle of April.”
The skateboarder looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
“April, man! Nobody in Harrisburg brings his wheels out in April. Other studs hear you bin out in the park in April, they’re gonna think you’re some kinda fool.”
We stayed on in the park long after the hour at which Jeannie had been discovered, because who was to say that there weren’t some people, like dog-walkers for example, who varied their visiting times?
Who was to say? The woman with the large mutt she called Prince – that’s who!
“I walk him twice a day,” she told us. “First time before I go to work – that’s eight in the morning. Second time when I get home – say round about six-fifteen.”
“And you’re always that regular?”
“I try to be. Dogs get nervous if things don’t happen when they’re supposed to, don’t they, Princey?” She glanced down at the dog, who looked back like he’d been e
xpecting to be on the grass by now, and was wondering why the hell she was wasting good crapping time talking to us.
“Check with the other owners,” the woman continued. “I’m sure they’ll tell you the same thing – we’re all of us slaves to our pets’ routines.”
We did check, and the woman with the mutt called Prince turned out to be dead right.
*
I am still in front of the window, staring at the green leaves on the trees in Jackson Square and wondering if, when they have turned shriveled and brown, we will still be working on this god-awful case. Behind me, on my desk, is a mountain of files – a monument to my failure. There are records of interrogations of known sexual offenders – flashers and Peeping Toms, sickos who get their jollies from jerking off into their neighbors’ laundry, creeps who pretend to be doctors making a free house call. There are transcripts of interviews with sociopaths, ranging from car thieves and burglars to wife-beaters, guys who (we suspect) would no more think of raping a child than they would consider joining the Neighborhood Watch – guys who we only bothered talking to because, for once, we are the ones who are desperate.
We are working sixteen – seventeen – hours a day. We don’t notice what we eat. We don’t notice what we look like. I don’t even notice how often I go down to the Korean store for a fresh bottle of bourbon – but the supply of dead ones in the kitchen of my shit-box apartment is sure enough building up.
“Somebody’s got to know something,” Williams says, maybe three or four times during the shift.
“Yeah,” I always agree with her. “Somebody does.”
*
It was three weeks after the attack on Chuck Wagstaff that Jerry Schmitt became the pervert’s third victim.
“The drug store’s only on the corner,” his mother explained. “I’d have gone myself, only I had this headache.” She shrugged, helplessly. “The girls came over, and maybe I had one martini too many with brunch. But I never thought for a minute that anything would happen. He shouldn’t have been away for more than five minutes.”
Violation Page 2
