The Interrogation (19 page)

“When was this?”

“About a month before he left Seaview. I seen him out on the pier. He stayed there all the time. Didn’t fish or nothing. Didn’t talk to nobody. Just set out there at the very end, like I told you. Anyway, I figured he’d come home when it got dark, but it got to be eight and then nine, and still he didn’t show up. So I went out looking for him. I asked everybody I could find if they’d seen him, but nobody had. Then it hit me—he jumped in the ocean. That’s what I figured. He just finally jumped right off the pier.”

“The lost boy,” Yearwood said.

“Figured the sea took him,” Cindy added. “That’s what we all thought. Then he just showed up all of a sudden. Said he’d walked through Titus and English-town, all the way to the city. Then he went to his room and that’s when I heard it. Like a bump, something like that. I went to the door, knocked. No answer, so I shoved the door open and there he was. Hanging. He’d got up on a chair and kicked it over and he was just hanging there.” She dropped the butt of her cigarette into a nearby ashtray and thumped out another. “I yelled for Carl, this guy I was living with back then.” She waved out the match. “He come in and grabbed
Jimmy by the legs and lifted him up. I climbed onto a chair and got so I could get the belt loose.” A wave of smoke drifted from her mouth. “Anyway, he made it. He didn’t want to, kept saying how he wanted to be dead. Soon as he was able, he went off again. This time he never come back.”

“Do you know why he tried to kill himself?” Pierce asked.

“He wouldn’t give me no answer to that. I asked and asked, but he never give me no answer. Probably never give nobody an answer.” She took another draw on the cigarette. “Unless it was Avery Garrett.” Cindy’s face soured. “Of all the people for Jimmy to start hanging out with, he couldn’t have picked nobody worse than Avery. A guy that, you know … a drunkard. Anyway, after Jimmy tried to kill hisself, he took up with Avery for a few weeks. Maybe Avery felt sorry for him, I don’t know. All I know is that during that last month he was here, them two spent a lot of time together.”

“Is Garrett still around?” Pierce asked.

Cindy nodded. “Far as I know, he’s living on the boardwalk, like he always has.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?” Pierce asked.

“Been over five years now,” Cindy answered. “He come over a couple of weeks after Jimmy left that last time. Looking for him, you know.”

“Why was Garrett looking for him?”

“Because he figured Jimmy was in some kind of trouble. I asked him. I said, ‘What kind of trouble you mean?’ He said he didn’t know. But he was afraid Jimmy had maybe done something and didn’t know how to deal with it.”

“Done what?” Pierce asked urgently.

“He said he didn’t know,” Cindy answered. “Just that whatever it was, Jimmy seemed awful ashamed of it.
Couldn’t get it out of his mind. It was chewing him up alive, Avery said. Wouldn’t give him no rest. Like a dog trailing him, this thing in Jimmy’s mind, like a dog trailing him, you know, biting at his heels.”

12:59
A.M.
, Interrogation Room 3

“Slime,” Cohen said. “Why do you call yourself that, Jay?”

“It’s the way I feel, that’s all.”

A breeze curled in through the window, cool but not refreshing, so that Cohen felt it as little more than a cheating respite from the room’s increasingly oppressive airlessness. He randomly turned a page in the Murder Book, hoping that it would give him some direction, knowing it wouldn’t.

“Why do you live this way?” Cohen asked, indicating the photograph of the tunnel. “You’re a smart guy. I can tell that from talking to you. You’re not … crazy, are you, Jay?”

Smalls was silent.

“So, tell me, how did you end up living in a tunnel?”

A bitter spark fired in Smalls’ eyes. “No choice.”

Cohen shook his head. “You’re wrong, Jay. Everybody has a choice.”

“No, they don’t,” Smalls insisted with a force of conviction that struck Cohen as surprisingly firm, the bedrock of some understanding of life that he’d accepted without comfort or repose, like evidence he wanted to deny but couldn’t, because the proof was there, stony and unimpeachable.

“Suppose I told you that I had a choice, Jay,” Cohen said. “I wanted to be a cop. My father hated the idea. I was supposed to be a rabbi. Like my father. He was set
on that. We broke up over it. I haven’t seen him since before the war. The point is, I didn’t want to be a rabbi. I wanted to be a cop. That was my choice. So what I’m telling you is, a guy can choose what he does, what he is.”

“What he is?” Smalls asked softly, his tone oddly gentle and accommodating, like a parent questioning some childish illusion. “You chose not to be a rabbi, but could you have chosen not to be a Jew?”

“Why would I want to?”

“Well, suppose everything people who hate Jews say about them is true, and you
know
that it’s true.” Smalls’ voice took on an unexpected confidence and subtle strength it had not exhibited before. “Suppose all these bad things are true about every Jew there is. True about you. Even if you knew that, could you choose
not
to be a Jew?”

“What does any of that have to do with you, Jay?”

“You couldn’t,” Smalls said with certainty. “You’d hate being a Jew. You’d want to be something else. Anything. You’d hate what you were, but you wouldn’t be able to change it. Then you would be like me.”

“How would I be like you?”

“You would want to die,” Smalls answered quietly.

“Or maybe want to kill?” Cohen suggested tentatively.

Smalls shook his head. “No,” he said. “But you’ll never believe that.”

1:35
A.M.
, Dunlap’s Collectibles

Dunlap swung open the door. “Okay, come on in.”

Blunt didn’t move. “Not till you put on a light.”

Dunlap fired up a cigarette lighter. “Better?”

“Why don’t you just turn on the fucking light?”

“Please, Ralph, not till we get to the back room.”

They made their way toward the back of the shop, Dunlap doing his best to guide Blunt down its cluttered center aisle.

“I can’t see a fucking thing,” Blunt grumbled.

“Watch your step, there.”

“What the fuck is that?”

“Handlebars.”

“Who the fuck’s gonna buy handlebars?”

“You’d be surprised.” Dunlap stopped and drew back a curtain. “Here we are.”

“Now can you put on a fucking light, for Christ’s sake?”

“Yeah, okay,” Dunlap said. He hit a switch and a single bulb flashed on. “Have a seat.”

Blunt stared around at the mountains of clutter, boxes overflowing with moldy books, chipped ashtrays, mismatched cups and saucers. “Where?”

“Just a second, I’ll clear a space.” Dunlap began removing boxes from a battered yellow sofa.

“This better be worth the effort, Harry, ’cause if it ain’t …”

“It is, believe me.” He tossed the last bit of debris into the nearest corner. “There. Have a seat.”

Blunt surveyed the back room once again, his eyes roving from the mattress on the floor to the filthy sink to the plastic shower curtain through which he could see a rusty toilet. “You got a real dump here.”

Dunlap shrugged. “You want a drink?”

“I want to get the fuck out of here is what I want.” He dropped onto the sofa with a grunt. “You got five minutes.”

Dunlap looked as if he’d been hit by an electric current. “Okay, okay, but you got to swear—”

“Fuck that,” Blunt said. He started to get to his feet.

“No, wait,” Dunlap said hastily. “It’s just that this is, you know … it’s dangerous, Ralph. It’s a dangerous situation I’m in.” He looked at Blunt sorrowfully. “Maybe I’m already fucked is what I’m saying.”

“Fucked how?”

Dunlap hesitated, then said, “I went to see Burke.”

Blunt stared at him.

“Chief Burke,” Dunlap said.

“You what?”

“At the hospital,” Dunlap said. “Where his kid is. The kid was a bum, Ralph. A fucking dope fiend. Slept on the steps out there till I give him a room.”

“You gave Chief Burke’s kid a room?”

“Well, not exactly give,” Dunlap admitted. “But I didn’t charge him that much. That’s what I wanted to tell you before. But not in the bar, you know?”

A look of utter bafflement seeped into Blunt’s eyes. “What the fuck are you getting at, Harry?”

“What I’m telling you is that I figured, okay, I knew the kid, so I can go and sort of, you know, pay my sympathies.”

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

“’Cause I figured it was a way I could maybe find out a little something. I mean, I was desperate, Ralph. I had to find out if the cops were getting anywhere with that freak, you know, about the dead kid. So the thing is, I went over to Saint Vincent’s. I figured I’d tell the Chief that I was maybe friends with his kid, you know, and then maybe we’d get to talking, and I’d maybe find out a little bit about that wacko they got locked up. But the Chief, he hated my guts right off. I could see it in his eyes. The bastard. He don’t even know me, and here I pay a sympathy call on that dope fiend son of his, and he don’t even give a shit about that, and hates my guts
right off, so he don’t tell me nothing about what they got or ain’t got on that fucking freak they picked up in the park. So, anyway, that’s where I am with the Chief.” He sighed. “Fucked.”

A small light illuminated the wooly depths of Blunt’s mind. “What I’m hearing is that you pulled all this dumb shit just to find out about that guy we picked up in the park.”

“That’s right.”

“The one that killed the kid.”

“Him, yeah.”

“Which I still can’t figure out why you give a shit anyway.”

“’Cause I got an interest, like I told you.”

Blunt looked at Dunlap with cold menace. “You do something to that little girl, Harry?”

“Fuck no,” Dunlap squealed.

“’Cause if you fucking put one finger on that kid, I’ll—”

Dunlap thrust his hands up. “Jesus, you think I’d do something like that? Jesus. Fuck, no, Ralph. Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with you? It’s just that, like I said, I lied to them cops that come over … and—” He stopped and struggled to calm himself. “And, well, I got this problem, you know?” He waited for Blunt to speak, but the detective only stared at him dumbly. “This problem with the cops.” He walked to a splintered rolltop desk and fished around in one of its murky drawers. “He come into my store, the fucking wacko. He come in a few days before that kid got killed. I took some stuff off his hands. A box full of junk. I went through it all, and I found this.” He opened his hand to reveal a tarnished metal key. “It’s for a storage shed.”

Blunt bent forward and looked closely at the key but did not touch it.

“It says right on the side there. Number twenty-seven,” Dunlap said. “A storage shed at AJS Storage. Way back when, I used to use them sheds myself.”

“When you was fencing?”

“Yeah, that’s right. If something was really hot, I’d put it in one of them sheds and let it cool off before moving it. Hot, Ralph. That’s the problem. I got some real hot stuff in that fucking shed.”

“What shed?”

Dunlap shook the key.
“That
shed, for Christ’s sake! What shed you think?”

Blunt glared at Dunlap. “You better watch your fucking mouth.”

Dunlap ducked his head. “Yeah, sorry, Ralph. It’s just that I’m under a lot of pressure here. I mean, this stuff I got in that shed, it’s fucking hot is what I’m trying to tell you.”

“What is it?”

“It’s money, that’s what it is.”

“Money?”

“You know, fake stuff.”

“Counterfeit money?” Blunt said. “You never done nothing like that.”

“I didn’t fucking make the stuff. I just took it off a guy’s hands. He asked me could I find a place to stash the stuff, and I said yeah, sure.”

“How much money we talking about?”

“Guy said it was fifty grand.”

A light flickered again in Blunt’s eyes. “Holy shit.”

“Guy give me a grand just to stash the fucking stuff. I figured that was a good deal. But now I got to get it back. Today, Ralph. I got to get it back to him today.”

Blunt stared at Dunlap dimly. “So, what’s any of this got to do with me?”

“Okay, here it is,” Dunlap said. “When I found this
key, I didn’t say nothing to the creep. I figure, maybe one day I’ll go out, see for myself what the wacko’s got stashed out there. Then he gets picked up, and I know goddamn well he bumped off that kid, right? So the bastard’s going down for a long time, you know, so that fucking shed, he ain’t gonna have no use for it. So I figure, it’s perfect, right? A shed in somebody else’s name. So, I went over to check it out. And it was empty, Ralph. Plenty of room, you know, for my stuff.” He shrugged. “So that’s where I put the money. Fifty grand, can you believe it? I figured it’s safe ’cause the word is, that pervert ain’t never gonna see the light of day again, you know? So, okay, he’s fucked. Better for me, right? Then the fucking cops come by. So, I get real nervous, you know, ’cause they’re snooping around, nosing into this and that, and I figured they was sure to come back, and I had this stuff, you know, that I already took over to this shed I’m telling you about. So, okay, all right, I figure I’ll just go back and get the money and drop the fucking key in the river and that’ll be the end of it. But, you know how it is, Ralph, one idea leads to another, and so before long I’m totally rattled. I mean, you got murder in the deal here, and you got the money, which is a federal fucking rap. And me a three-time loser if they nail me. And I already got these fucking cops on my ass. So, the thing is, I freeze up, Ralph. I freeze up and so the money stays put and the cops, I figure, are getting closer and closer, you know?” His voice turned confiding. “I ain’t had a wink of sleep, Ralph. Not a wink since they picked that bastard up. I keep thinking, these fucking cops must be grilling the shit out of him, and I keep thinking it’s gonna come up, he’s gonna spill something about how he’s got this shed and all, and then the cops go over to the fucking shed and they ask around and they find out that some guy
come over a few days ago. A short guy, you know? A guy that stashed some goods in this shed, see. A guy, Ralph. Meaning me and all.”