The Interrogation (16 page)

“Yeah, not all perfumy like it is in Winchester Heights,” Eddie said. He kicked the clutch, yanked the floor shift into first gear, and stomped the accelerator.

The truck lurched forward, Eddie guiding it down the narrow street, the park on one side, a long line of dingy apartment houses on the other. For the first few blocks he saw no one. Then, out of the shadows a short little man suddenly appeared, moving rapidly along the park side of the road, the wind billowing out the sleeves of his dark green parka.

Another loser, Eddie thought as he watched the little man grow small in the rearview mirror, then disappear around a dark corner at Vandermeer and Cordelia.

Didn’t stop who?

12:09
A.M.
, September 13, 379 Vandermeer Avenue

Dunlap whirled around the corner and headed down Cordelia, moving feverishly, like a small powder keg trying to outrun its own burning fuse.

So, okay, fuck the Chief
, he told himself.
So, okay, I didn’t learn nothing. What now?

He stopped and tried to think it through, but the clatter of the garbage truck that had just lurched past had distracted him so that he had to get his mind around the problem once again. So, okay, I got to get somebody, he thought.

His short, squat legs scissored rapidly down the avenue while his mind reeled off a list of possibilities. There was Louis Farkus. Louis had the balls. No, not Farkus, he decided. Louis Farkus didn’t have a car ever
since that midnight visit from the repo man. Okay, so, all right, what about Skeeter McBride? He had a Pontiac. A Pontiac but no balls. The job required a set of balls. Not brass ones. It wasn’t that tough. But a set of balls nonetheless. Other names surfaced, then fell away for various reasons, men too sick, men who couldn’t be trusted, men too smart to be conned into doing it.

He reached the corner of Bradford and Cordelia, and still no one emerged who really fit the scheme. So all right, okay, the second string, guys he’d have preferred not to use but now had no choice but to consider. Ziggy, maybe? No. Bill Dexter? Forget it. Spike Patucci? Perfect save for the little matter that he was psycho. Then suddenly, a name separated from the pack. A guy with a car. A guy who had balls. Best of all, a guy who could provide a reason for being where he was. Dunlap smiled.
So, okay … him.

12:17
A.M.
, Interrogation Room 3

“So, how old is she, Jay?” Cohen asked. “The girl in the picture.”

“I don’t know.”

“It was the only picture you drew in that tunnel,” Cohen said. “You could have drawn a boy. A grown-up. A dog. Anything, right?”

“I guess I could have.”

“So why did you draw this little girl?”

Smalls shrugged.

“It’s not a bad drawing, Jay. A lot of detail. Like she was standing in front of you. A model. It’s hard to imagine that you never spoke to this kid.”

Smalls said nothing.

Dead end, Cohen thought, his heart sinking. He
leaned back in his chair, placed his hands behind his head, and to his surprise Blunt’s voice sounded in his head, talking about how Cathy hadn’t been sexually violated, the fact that this had, in Blunt’s mind, signaled a more difficult case to break.

“You know, one of the detectives has been wondering about something,” Cohen said. “About why Cathy wasn’t raped.”

Smalls drew in a breath.

“We figured maybe she’d been killed as part of a robbery, but would a man kill a little girl for nothing more than a little silver trinket?”

Smalls remained silent.

“So this other detective thinks that the killer hadn’t been a thief at all. He’d planned to rape Cathy. That was the whole idea. Of course, if that were true, why didn’t he do it?”

“Maybe he got scared off.” Smalls spoke with what struck Cohen as a curious assurance.

“You mean the guy heard somebody coming, something like that, and got scared off?”

“If someone saw him, then that person should have stopped him.”

“I didn’t say that someone saw him, Jay.”

Smalls’ hands spasmed on the table.

“What’s the matter, Jay? You look a little … upset.”

Smalls shrank back, glanced about, as if searching for a place to hide.

“You’d like to just disappear, wouldn’t you, Jay? Become invisible. The Invisible Man. That’s what we call him, you know. That first guy you told us about. The one in the playground. The one you said Cathy was afraid of. The Invisible Man.”

“He wasn’t invisible,” Smalls muttered.

“No, he wasn’t, Jay. Because Cathy saw him, didn’t she? She saw him look at her, notice her, single her out.”

Smalls’ gaze fled to the window.

“She saw him move toward her, close in on her, reach for her. She looked him in the eye, didn’t she, Jay?”

Smalls did not respond.

“She felt his hands on her throat, didn’t she.”

Smalls began to rock forward and backward.

“But nobody else saw this invisible man, right, Jay?”

Smalls dropped forward with a soft moan and pressed his face against the table.

“And so nobody stopped him from killing Cathy.”

Smalls whispered something, but Cohen couldn’t make it out. “What?” he asked.

The whispering continued, Smalls’ cheek against the table, smothering the words.

“Sit up, Jay.”

Smalls did not move.

“Sit up,” Cohen said hotly.

Smalls’ vehement whispers continued.

Cohen leaned forward, grabbed Smalls’ shoulders, and forced him upright.

“Slime, slime, slime.” Smalls’ face was transfigured by disgust.

“Who?” Cohen asked. “Who’s slime?”

“Me. Because I didn’t stop him.”

“Didn’t stop who?”

“The man who scared Cathy.”

Dead end, Cohen thought. “The Invisible Man,” he murmured, his voice edged with contempt. “Bullshit, Jay. We both know who the Invisible Man was.” He glared at Smalls mercilessly. “It was you.”

12:21
A.M.
, City Park

Sanford and Zarella were waiting at Drainage Pipe 4 when Burke arrived.

“We have information that something pertaining to the murder of Cathy Lake might be buried at some point along the path that runs from here to the duck pond,” Burke told the two cops. “So we’re going to walk the path slowly, checking for any sign that the ground along the way has been disturbed. This is very important. You need to be alert to anything that looks out of the ordinary. Anything at all. Understood?”

The two patrolmen nodded.

“Okay,” Burke said. “Zarella, take the left side of the path. Sanford, you take the right. I’ll walk along behind both of you and recheck right and left.”

And so they passed through the tunnel, flashlights on high beam as they moved along the edges of the pathway, carefully brushing back anything that got in the way of a clear view of the ground.

They’d made it halfway to the pond when Zarella stopped abruptly in front of a small marble statue of a dog. “Sir. This might be something.”

Burke peered at the ground. In the gravelly earth he saw evidence of claw marks, a place where something, perhaps human fingers, had raked the earth back.

“It could just be some animal digging,” Zarella said. “Dog. Squirrel.”

Burke put out his hand. “Give me the spade.”

Zarella instantly obeyed.

“Keep the light on the blade,” Burke said. He bent forward, inserted the blade carefully, then withdrew and inserted it again. As he dug, he could feel nothing but the ground’s gritty texture.

After a moment, he straightened and stepped away. “Try the shovel.”

Zarella dug energetically, pressing the blade cautiously into the earth, then bringing up one small clump of ground at a time and depositing it on the path, where Sanford probed it with a gloved hand.

“Widen the hole,” Burke commanded once Zarella had reached a depth of nearly a foot. “See if you can find anything around it.”

Zarella did as he was told, a mound of earth growing on the pathway.

But nothing was found, and so they moved on down the path until they reached the pond.

At the water’s edge Burke looked back down the path. He tried to imagine what Smalls claimed to have seen, a man digging in the earth, trying to bury something he hoped might be Cathy Lake’s missing locket. It had been a long shot, of course, and now the muddy spades and empty hole suggested just how desperate their effort to hold Smalls had become, the blind leads they were forced to pursue because they had no others. During the previous twelve days, they’d dredged the pond, searched through the undergrowth, rousted the park’s bedraggled population, and found nothing. But for Burke this last failure suggested that any further search for physical evidence would prove no less fruitless.

“You want us to go farther up the path, Chief?” Zarella asked quietly.

Burke handed him the spade. “No, go on with your usual duties,” he replied.

The two patrolmen walked away, talking softly, leaving Burke alone in the park.

For a time, the Chief stood in place, considering this
latest failure, wondering if Smalls was capable of devising such false diversions, running out the clock one hollow lead after another.

Then, obeying a nameless impulse, he strode back along the path, through the tunnel, and up to the gate where a little girl had waited for her mother twelve days before. Across the empty street he could see the alley that ran alongside Clairmont Towers, and out of which Smalls had staggered on that fateful day, a ragged figure who’d frightened a solitary child, pressed her into the tangled folds of the park, where she’d rushed through the rain, beneath the dripping trees until, at last, she’d reached the pond’s edge and there, faced with a fork in the path, allowed herself a moment’s hesitation, glanced left and right, unable to decide which way to run, a fraction of a second, but long enough for Smalls to fall upon her.

A bank of clouds drew apart, and in the reverse chasm they defined, Burke could see the faint glow of the moon. He’d read somewhere that light travels infinitely through the depths of space, and wondered if, far beyond the moon, the murder of Cathy Lake flickered eternally in the nightbound sky, her killer’s face eerily revealed in distant flashes of exploding stars.

Still lost, then?

12:27
A.M.
, Seaview, Fairgrounds

They reached the fairgrounds gate, and behind the high storm fence Pierce observed what remained of the midway, a few tumbledown wooden booths, and beyond them, up a slight incline, the skeletal Ferris wheel.

Only a few years before, the midway had bustled with crowds from the city. Pierce recalled the prattle of the calliope, the crackling fire of the shooting galleries, the line of people that snaked up toward the black maw of the House of Horrors, and on the wave of that memory, he smelled cotton candy and fried onions, and yet for all the sensory vividness of these recollections, his boyhood remained like an episode from someone else’s life.

It was Debra’s death that had done this to him, he
knew, and now he remembered the sticky summer day when he’d first brought her here. She’d been only three years old that summer, but full of bravado as she’d clambered into the bumper car, wrestling her metal brace into position as she nestled into his lap and gripped the wheel. She’d gasped at the first collision, but after that she’d shown not the slightest fear. As the minutes passed, she’d grown ever more aggressive, happily ramming other cars, yelling “Got him, Dad!” each time she plowed into one. He’d felt a surging delight in her courage, a feeling wholly different and more intense than any he’d ever known. So this is what it feels like, he’d said to himself, to be proud of your child. Did he really have to put away such memories to reach out to life again? he wondered. Or was it possible to find a resting place for grief that did not utterly obliterate the one you’d lost?

The gate released an aching cry as Yearwood nudged it open, then glanced back to where Pierce stood staring out over the deserted grounds.

“You coming?” Yearwood asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Pierce replied.

The two of them made their way across a muddy track to where a gray trailer sagged alone at the edge of the midway.

A yellow light shone from one of its small square windows, and as he grew nearer, Pierce noted a rusty car, a washing machine with a hand wringer, and a drooping clothesline from which a single unexpectedly white towel hung, its ragged edges trembling in the wind from the sea.

At the door, Yearwood paused. “Let me start things off,” he warned Pierce. “Cindy might not want to talk if a stranger just starts asking her questions out of the blue.”

Pierce nodded.

Yearwood rapped at the metal door. “It’s Sam, Cindy. Sam Yearwood.”

Something stirred inside the trailer, then the door opened and a woman stood backlit in the doorway, her body in black silhouette save for an explosion of wiry red hair that formed a glowing aura around her skull. She looked quizzically at Yearwood. “Ain’t it mighty late for you to be out, Sam?”

Yearwood touched his hat. “Sorry to disturb you at this hour, Cindy.”

“Been a long time since you come out this way.” Her voice was raspy, a barker’s voice gone to seed.

“Yes, it has,” Yearwood answered. “Cindy, I have a fellow here with me. His name’s Pierce. A detective from the city. He may have some news about Jimmy.”

Cindy’s head dropped to the right but remained in shadow so that Pierce could draw nothing from her expression. He saw only that she wore a shapeless dress that fell over her like a collapsed tent, white with overblown flowers whose colors had faded with countless trips through the wringer.

“Is he dead?” she asked Pierce.

“No,” Pierce told her. “He’s in trouble though.”

Cindy eased back into the trailer, and its watery light washed over her, revealing a skeletally thin face, with meager eyes, a red, jagged mouth, and leathery skin that hung slackly from the bone.