The Hearing (19 page)

Cullen flashed an empty smile. “Hey, good, maybe you oughta be a cop. You got it all figured out.” Something in Banks’ face backed him away, though, changed his tone. “So he was gonna go score, bring me back the piece and fifty bucks on top for my trouble. But I didn’t know he was going to kill anybody with it. He wasn’t planning anything like that. That’s not who he was normally.”

“So who was he?”

A shrug. “A guy to hang with. Party. You know.”

“I don’t know, actually. I understood he lived on the street. Most of those guys don’t go to a lot of parties.”

“Yeah, but he lived with his mom. He could get his hands on some wheels when he wanted them. He just liked to party, that’s all. Score, get high for a few days. Then maybe he wouldn’t get home and crash somewhere else.”

Banks was digesting this, but not comfortably. “Okay, but you got arrested last time. When was that?”

“Maybe Tuesday morning. I don’t know. You could look it up easier than me.”

Half an hour later, Ridley Banks was at his desk. His elbows were planted on the blotter in front of him, his hands steepled at his lips. A couple of times a minute he blew into them heavily. His eyes burned with fatigue. It had been a long day in the field and then, returning to the office after nine o’clock, he’d picked up his messages and heard about Glitsky’s heart attack and also Cullen Leon Alsop, the purported source of the gun that Cole Burgess had used to kill Elaine Wager.

He hadn’t felt right since he’d gone up against his lieutenant on the Burgess confession. Then came the startlingly swift decision to put Glitsky on administrative leave, now the cardiac arrest. Ridley couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all related and part of it was his fault.

Abe had been his most ardent supporter, helping to get him promoted into homicide from robbery. Then, once he was aboard, he’d acted as Ridley’s mentor—getting him up to speed, keeping him from at least a dozen egregious errors in his first year or two. And, he asked himself, was this his payback to Abe for all of that loyalty and concern?

He hated it, hated himself.

This was why he’d seen this lowlife Cullen immediately. If at least some new evidence came to light that could make the case stronger against Cole Burgess, Ridley would be able to console himself with the fact that he was even more right than he’d been before. It wasn’t all going to come down to the confession.

He’d played that over, both on the physical tape and in his mind, almost continually since they’d busted Abe. In his career, Ridley had sweated maybe half a dozen other suspects into confessions. He kept asking himself whether he’d treated Burgess any differently than any of those. He couldn’t really say he had, except maybe for the heroin connection, the supposed withdrawal. But he’d done the same kind of thing before by simple persistence, by using whatever leverage worked. The pressure applied by a trained, relentless interrogator could be great. This didn’t make for false confessions.

In his experience, while people sometimes would confess to something they didn’t do, usually this was when they weren’t even suspects in the first place. Some lunatic would walk in or call the station and say that they’d committed some crime. Banks had once seen a man come in and confess to a murder because he’d become enamored of the published pictures of the woman who was actually on trial for the murder and he thought she’d be grateful to him for taking the heat off her, putting it all on himself. Greater love than this. And perhaps later when the guy got out of jail or acquitted at trial (because after all he hadn’t really done it), he and the woman could date or get married or something, raise little murder suspects of their own.

But Ridley believed that the Burgess confession—which he’d carefully wrung out of him—did not fall in this category. He believed that if you had a suspect at the scene of the crime when the crime was committed, with the weapon nearby and physical evidence that gave him a reasonable motive, and that person finally got persuaded to admit he’d done it, it was a virtual certainty that he had. People wanted to confess, to tell what they’d done. This was human nature, although sometimes you had to use a mental cattle prod to get down to basics.

It was far more a cerebral endeavor than a physical one. And even on the physical plane, it hadn’t gone nearly so far as to be cruel and unusual. There was discomfort perhaps—Cole hadn’t been on a picnic up here—but Ridley’s interview, in his mind and memory, had been a true interrogation, a far cry from the pain-induced confessions of the world’s myriad torture chambers.

Even given all that, though, another link in the chain of culpability was always a nice thing, and Cullen Leon Alsop might have been just that. This was why, late as it was, tired as he was, Ridley had wanted to bring him up here and interview him right away. If he was convincing, if he had something truly substantive to add about the provenance of the gun, maybe
tonight
Ridley wouldn’t toss in bed until the fitful dawn broke.

Big ifs, and neither had panned out to Ridley’s satisfaction.

Which was not to say that Cullen’s evidence wouldn’t get a lot of attention. Apparently it did eliminate one of the unanswered questions in the prosecution’s case—where Cole Burgess had acquired the gun.

It also strengthened the argument for murder.

If he believed it.

He did believe in the truth of the rest of the facts in this case. That was the irony. He’d been there, sitting four feet across the table from Cole Burgess, when he’d said he’d done it after all. He was sorry. He didn’t know why. He didn’t really remember. But he did do it. He was sure of it. And Ridley had believed him, believed they’d finally come to the truth.

But now Cullen’s vague, unsubstantiated testimony, which seemed to fill a hole, but which was really unprovable testimony of the “he said, but then he said” variety. And the timing of it bothered him, the snitch appearing at such an opportune moment. It didn’t make him doubt that Cole had killed Elaine, but it did make him wonder.

A yawn overtook him and he stretched like a cat, his whole body. All right, he had to get some sleep. Enough was enough.

But the interview with Cullen hadn’t gone on for too long—maybe fifteen minutes. He should listen to the tape once through and make better notes before copying it for the D.A. They wouldn’t get the transcript back to him for at least a week, and he wanted a clear memory of what had been said.

So he rewound the tape, pushed the button and began listening. After his intro and Cullen’s first interruption, the next words he heard were: “I got a deal going here with the D.A., and . . .”

He played it again.

Ridley himself hadn’t made any deal with Cullen. The D.A. hadn’t mentioned a deal to him. The message from that office had been that an inmate at the jail had information on the Cole Burgess case and Ridley might want to interview him. But no one had said they had made a deal, although it seemed as though Cullen was under that impression.

One thing was for sure—Ridley was going to look into it and find out.

“Mom?”

Treya was in her tiny breakfast nook—six elongated windows in a semicircle off her slightly larger kitchen. There was one light in the nook, off now, a fan under it, spinning gently, although the night outside was cold and the house cool. She was sitting on the first four inches of her chair, ramrod straight, both palms flat on the table. She might have been trying to make it levitate.

“Mom?” Raney stood silhouetted in the dim light from somewhere in the back of the duplex. She was already taller than Treya’s five feet seven, skinny with no hips and just-budding breasts. She wore her hair shoulder length and had it tied off to one side in a kind of pigtail. Tonight she’d worn jogging shorts and a Giants sweat-shirt to bed. “Is everything okay?”

Treya had tucked her in nearly an hour before and come out here, turning out lights as she went. She poured herself a glass of tap water, sat down at the table, hadn’t moved.

“Oh, I’m fine.” Treya often thought that it was her fate to exist in a limited world with a single acceptable public posture, crisp and, when possible, cheerful efficiency. All the rest of her feelings, emotions, aspirations and opinions had best remain unspoken, unexpressed. It was safest that way, where nobody could fault you for a bad attitude, an unguarded remark. She had always most keenly felt this need for control in the presence of her daughter. In this complicated world, Raney didn’t need a role model who complained, who couldn’t cope, who might die like her dad had. Raney needed strength, all of Treya’s strength. She didn’t need to see anything else.

Treya put a false brightness in her tone. “But what is my girl still doing on this side of dreamland on a school night? You’re going to be dragging come morning.” She started to force herself up, ready to tuck her in again.

“I’ve been standing here in the kitchen for ten minutes, Mom. You haven’t moved a muscle. What are you thinking?”

Another smile. “I guess I just don’t know, hon, to tell you the truth. I don’t suppose I’m much for thinking this time of night. Maybe I was sleeping sitting up.”

“Your eyes were open. You were just staring straight ahead.”

“Well . . .” An embarrassed shrug. She sat back down, tried to smile, although it came out a little crooked.

Raney moved up next to her and put her arm around her shoulders. Keeping it there, she pulled a chair up close and sat in it, then laid her head against her mother’s. “Are you sad about Elaine?”

Treya didn’t know if she trusted herself to talk. She cleared her throat, forced a matter-of-fact tone. “People die, girl. The living have to carry on.”

For an answer, she felt her daughter’s arm tighten around her shoulders. She felt her lips kiss her temple. “I love you, you know.”

She let out a deep and labored breath. “There was a policeman at the service this morning,” she said. “Lieutenant Glitsky.”

“About Elaine?”

She nodded, waited, whispered. “He was her father.”

Raney straightened up. “I thought her father was dead.”

“No,” she replied. Another sigh. “It’s a long story, but her mother—the senator, Loretta Wager? Well, she and Lieutenant Glitsky were lovers when she was young, before she got married.” She paused. “Just before. Anyway, Loretta was pregnant when she got married, and she made her husband believe that Elaine was his.”

“Did she tell Lieutenant Glitsky?”

“No. Not ’til much later, just before she died.”

“You mean all that time he didn’t know his own daughter?”

“Right.”

“That’s horrible. I’d be so mad if that happened to me.”

Treya wasn’t much in the mood, but she had to smile. “Well, that’s yet another great thing about being female, girl. You generally know it when you have a baby.”

“But Elaine didn’t know it, either? Didn’t know her own dad?”

“No, not until after her mother died. She’d left her a letter.”

“A letter? About something like that?” There was a lengthy silence. “So then what did she do? Elaine. Did she go and see him?”

“No. She didn’t think it was her place. She thought he should come to her. Which he never did.”

“Never?”

She shook her head. “It never happened. He’s just a cold man. He didn’t care.”

“Was that why?”

“Why what?”

“Why he didn’t tell her? Didn’t he care?”

“I would think so.” Treya reached for her water glass and took a drink. “Why else wouldn’t he?”

She shrugged. “Maybe the same reason she didn’t tell him. He might have thought it wasn’t his place. He didn’t want to butt in.”

The simple truth of it rocked Treya and she shook her head. “No. You’d have to meet him. He’s just hard as nails.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t show things. I know somebody like that.” The arm tightened again, and Treya leaned into it. “So he was there this morning? What happened?”

She was back to the thought that wouldn’t go away. “I think I might have killed him.”

At Jupiter, things were hopping.

At earsplitting volume with the bass boosted to rattle the bones, Shania Twain was telling her honey she was home and wanted a cold one, and the way the bartender was hopping behind the bar, she wasn’t the only one.

It was a rectangular room, sixteen feet wide and a good bit more than twice that long. The stools at the bar itself were all taken—fifteen men and six women, all of them between twenty-nine and thirty-five, none of them destined to go home alone tonight. Another three or four dozen people stood behind them on the thin stretch of floor between the bar and the booths or in the bull pen opening just behind them. Shoulder to shoulder and hip to crotch, the young professionals drinking here were mostly in law enforcement—police and attorneys, law students and clerks. A smattering of excitement groupies who loved the scene.