The Interrogation (10 page)

“Bottom line, Terry, we got to clean this place up. So let’s just get to it. Okay?”

Once again, Siddell didn’t move. “I’m not going in that tunnel.”

Eddie stepped toward him, ready to argue the matter, but a sudden glint in Siddell’s eye stopped him cold. The look was sharp and pointed, like a fang, and Eddie knew exactly what it meant:
Get the fuck out of my face, you worthless shit, or when I take over, you’ll be out on your ass!

He stepped back. “Look, Terry, we don’t have no choice in this thing. Your father made that real clear, right? We got to do it, otherwise I get fired.”

Siddell stared at something in the tunnel, his eyes fixed upon it with a dark intensity.

“What are you looking at?” Eddie asked.

When Siddell gave no answer, Eddie turned, shined his light into the pipe, and saw for the first time what Siddell had glimpsed in shadow. A crayon drawing of a girl, her thin body draped in a white robe. He peered closely at the face but didn’t recognize the features.
Who is this kid? he wondered. Only one thing was clear. Something was wrong with her. Terribly wrong. There was no light in her eyes. Her skin was pale and bloodless. There was no luster to the skin nor any movement in her limbs.

“She looks dead,” Siddell said.

Dead.

Eddie thought of Laurie, how he’d never forgive himself for not being at her side when she got sick, for letting work come first, though he had to work, so that in the chilling silence and the darkness, there seemed no way to do the right thing, no ground a man could stand upon between fatherhood and survival, no way to support a little girl and not take something precious from her life.

P
ART
II

You remember what we found?

9:37
P.M.
, September 12, Interrogation Room 3

Cohen took off his jacket and draped it over the chair, watching Smalls as he did so. A shadow of a man, he thought, skeletally thin, pale. Not ghostly, because a ghost, having lived, had a certain substance, the accumulated residue of a life. Smalls had nothing of this sort. He floated emptily, like no experience had ever stuck to him. Without the weight of that experience, he seemed feathery, something the most tremulous puff of air could sweep across the floor.

Every aspect of Smalls’ character gave off this willowy insubstantiality but one. His steadfast denial that he’d had anything to do with the death of Cathy Lake. On that issue he had demonstrated the impenetrably opaque surface of a granite slab. Beneath that slab,
enclosed in adamantine secrecy, Cohen was certain that something shameful lay hidden. He could see its guilty shape swimming behind Smalls’ eyes like a fish in a tank of murky water, swift and unreachable, well-adapted to the shadowy depths.

But during the forty minutes since Pierce had left for Seaview, Cohen had failed in every attempt to bring Smalls’ sunken guilt to the surface. He’d gone over all the people who’d seen Smalls in the park, hammered him with details, darted from this witness to that incident. He’d told him about talking to the Krafts, the people who’d hosted the birthday party Cathy had attended, then everyone at the party, all the parents who’d later arrived to collect their children, and that none of them, not one, could possibly have had anything to do with Cathy’s death. He went through all the other stages of the investigation—the interviews with school friends, teachers, the search that had been made for any suggestion that someone might have been stalking Cathy before her murder or had any reason to do her harm, the fruitless search for the man Smalls claimed to have “scared” Cathy Lake, a search that had yielded so little, the man himself had been dubbed “invisible.” All of that professional, by-the-book labor, wearing out the shoe leather, covering all the bases … and nothing.

During all this time, Cohen had gone over the course of the investigation with Smalls in precisely the way Pierce had wanted it, fast and furious, throwing out the time line, coming in at a slant, dodging, weaving, slashing, but at the end of it Smalls had remained unshaken, repeating again and again that he had done no harm to Cathy Lake.

For all his frail appearance, Cohen thought, Albert Jay Smalls was smart, clever, and so far he’d slithered out of every trap they’d tried to catch him in.

Even so, he might yet stumble, and for Cohen, this constituted the final hope of the interrogation, the possibility that Smalls might slip. He would never willingly swallow the bait, but he might yet be hooked.

And so Cohen decided to abandon his earlier method of interrogation in favor of one that allowed for the unexpected emergence of seemingly inconsequential facts. This was a noose that could be drawn in slowly, almost invisibly, until it was tight enough to squeeze the truth out of Albert Smalls.

But where to begin? Cohen wondered. He decided to press the simple fact that Smalls had not been randomly plucked from the park and brought to police headquarters.

“You know, Jay, we talked to a lot of people about Cathy,” Cohen began. “About her murder, I mean. We didn’t just pick you up and bring you in for no reason. And even after we brought you in that night, we didn’t stop looking for other people. We did a full sweep, Jay, a full sweep of the park early the next morning after those first cops found you in the pipe. I was there for the sweep, so I know we looked for other people. Chief Burke made sure of that.”

4:37
A.M.
, September 2, City Park, Central Field

Burke stood silently before the ranks, erect and full of authority, the pose required of him at such a moment. He well understood that his men did not look forward to carrying out the order he was about to give. There was a world no one wanted to see. It existed in the nether regions of the park, a realm populated by people broken beyond repair. This world was lit by fires made
from slats and burning tires, and around those pathetic hearths, as Burke had too often seen during his years on the force, the lost ones huddled in their intractable misery, all ambition or desire reduced to the cindered hope of being left alone.

“When you go into the park,” Burke told his men, “remember that although some of these people may be criminals, the vast majority have done nothing but”—he did not utter the phrase that pierced his mind—
but fall beneath the blade.
Instead, he said, “Most of them have done nothing of a criminal nature.” He let his eyes drift over the uniformed officers who stood in ranks before him, then to the few plainclothes detectives who were to accompany them through the park. He noticed Detectives Pierce and Cohen just off to the side. Pierce in his dark suit, shouldering his daughter’s death, and so perhaps the perfect choice, Burke decided at that instant, to track down the man who’d ripped Catherine Lake from her mother’s care.

“It is unlawful for anyone to be inside the park after midnight,” Burke continued. “But this is not a roust. We are not here to make arrests. We are not looking for vagrants tonight. We are looking for a murderer, someone who killed a child here in the park at approximately seven o’clock last night. We are also looking for something he might have taken from this child. A small necklace.”

He stopped, waited for questions, continued when there were none.

“The locket on the necklace is silver, in the shape of a heart. It was on a short silver chain. You are to search for this locket as thoroughly as you deem necessary. Any questions? All right. Proceed.”

And so they moved, the blue lines fanning out along the far perimeters of the park, then closing in, step by
step, upon the unsuspecting men and women who lived, for the most part unseen, within it, sweeping down deserted lanes and under the stone bridges that arched over them, the soft beat of their footfalls drumming through the melancholy dark. Quietly, methodically, the officers pried the park’s bedraggled inhabitants from beneath shrubs and out of boxes. They called them from their muttering sleep and urged them out of drainage pipes and from the woody culverts where they lay balled like infants, clinging to the roots of trees.

Once brought to their feet, the vagrants were gathered into groups of five and escorted to the center of the park, a strange, straggling herd that staggered meekly beneath the dripping trees to the designated place of concentration.

Here the men were assembled in ragged, shifting lines, then searched one by one. The officers said little to the men they searched; they rarely looked them in the eye. The method had long been established, and the officers followed it meticulously, explaining briefly that someone had been murdered, something stolen in the process, something they were looking for now in pockets and waistbands and the frayed cuffs of filthy trousers, spilling what they found onto the wet grass so that after a time curious pools began to grow at the feet of the derelicts and drunks and madmen who now stood, dazed and murmuring, a mounting detritus made up of half-gnawed crusts of bread, the milky remains of ice cream cups, wine bottles, cigarette butts.

Watching all this, Burke recalled how, at a similar sweep five years before, he’d seen Scottie stagger out of the ragged column, so thin and wizened, he’d looked more dead than alive. For a moment, Burke and his son had stared mutely at each other. Scottie had made no
attempt to distinguish himself from the rest, nor had Burke intervened. They had simply faced each other during the search Burke’s men were conducting, and when it was over, both had turned and walked away.

But this time Scottie was not among the vagrants, and once Burke was sure of that, he felt a curious relief wash over him, followed by a dread no less terrible.
If not here
, he wondered,
where?

Within an hour it was over. The park’s inhabitants retrieved what they wanted from the debris at their feet, then scrabbled back into the secret recesses of the park.

Burke waited until the last of them had disappeared into the misty wood and the officers once more stood before him. “Thank you,” he told them. “You may go.”

The policemen broke ranks immediately, and as they did so, Burke motioned for Pierce and Cohen. “I’d like the two of you to be in charge of this case,” he said when the two detectives joined him.

Then he turned and walked away.

9:44
P.M.
, September 12, Interrogation Room 3

“That’s when Detective Pierce and I were assigned to the case, Jay,” Cohen said. “That night in the park. We’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Cathy ever since.”

He remembered how he’d watched the helpless vagrants stagger into the ball field, and imagined his own people marched through narrow European streets and herded together in rain-soaked village squares, the trains already waiting in the distance. Had they been as faceless to their guards, he wondered, as the derelicts in the park’s gaseous mist had been to him? Never again, he decided abruptly, never again this particular duty.

“Anyway,” he continued. “For all that work we didn’t find anything that morning. We took a few men in and questioned them, but we couldn’t find any reason to believe they were connected to Cathy’s murder.” He waited for Smalls to respond, and when he didn’t, cleared his throat. “And so we had to take a closer look at you, Jay. Do you know why? Because of all the people in the park, you were the only one who lived near the duck pond. You’d had contact with Cathy. Recognized her. And there was more. Those toys you had. Plus, you were spotted just a few yards from where her body was found.” Again he waited for a response; again, Smalls offered nothing. “But even more important, we know that you were also near Cathy
before
she was murdered. Not just after she was killed, when the woman saw you. But
before
she was murdered. You know how we know that, don’t you, Jay? You remember what we found?”

9:30
A.M.
, September 2, Clairmont Towers, 490 Clairmont Street

Pierce rapped resolutely at the door.

It opened seconds later. A short, stocky man stood in the doorway, absently picking his teeth with a wooden matchstick.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“Homicide.” Pierce pulled out his badge. “You’re Herman Getz, the building superintendent?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess you know the Krafts?”

“Sure. They’ve lived here for ten years. Maybe more.”

Pierce pocketed his shield. “They had a birthday
party for their daughter yesterday afternoon. One of the little girls who attended the party was murdered in the park yesterday evening.”

“Jesus.” The man’s lips fluttered around the matchstick. “I heard a kid got killed. So that was the kid, I guess. The one her mother came looking for. The kid was supposed to wait for her in the lobby, she said.”

“But she didn’t wait for her,” Pierce said. “Evidently she went to the park. We don’t know why.”

Getz shrugged. “Me neither.”

Cohen surveyed the soiled wool shirt, rumpled trousers, and bare, unpolished shoes. Had Getz gotten up that morning with the idea of making himself as undesirable as possible, he could not have assembled a more fitting wardrobe.

“When did you see the little girl in the lobby?” Pierce asked.

“About a quarter to seven. She was standing close to the door. Long hair, right?”

“Yes,” Pierce said.

“I just went through the lobby. On my way out. Because there was this guy in the alley next to the building. There’s an overhang back there. Bums use it sometimes. A roof over their heads, you know? Anyway, I chased the bastard off.”

“What did he look like?” Cohen asked.

“Ragged,” Getz answered. “Beard. A bum, like I said. I went over and gave him a nudge with my shoe, told him to be on his way. He got up and done what I told him. Didn’t give me no trouble. Just got to his feet, walked away.”