The Interrogation (2 page)

Klemper was a bookkeeper for a shoe factory on Dawson Street, and to Cohen’s eye, he looked the part. His dark hair glistened with Brilliantine. His gold-rimmed glasses had lenses so thick they magnified the calculating eyes behind them. His suit was pressed, his vest buttoned, the crimson bow tie an unexpected gout of color. Everything was properly placed … and to Cohen all of it rang as false as two sets of books.

“I don’t know why I’m being questioned again,” Klemper told them.

“Because you have a record, for one thing,” Pierce replied. “That little matter of attempted murder, remember?”

“That was over twenty years ago.”

“The girl you tried to kill was the same age as Martha Dodd,” Cohen reminded him.

“The method was the same, too,” his partner added. “Strangulation.”

“I was twenty-four, for God’s sake.” Klemper looked offended by the very notion that such an old offense was being used against him now. “And besides, I paid my debt to—”

“Martha Dodd worked for Dawson Shoes,” Cohen interrupted.

“There must be forty or fifty girls in that factory,” Klemper scoffed.

“Have you ever been to Braxton Apartments?” Pierce asked.

“Never.”

“But you know where they are, don’t you?” Cohen asked.

“No, I don’t.”

“Martha Dodd lived in 8-D.”

“So you’ve told me.” Klemper drew a shiny watch from his vest pocket, and flipped the lid. “I really need to be going….”

Cohen sat across the table from Klemper. He looked him dead in the eye. “Tell me, Art, you want to live or die?”

“That question is absurd.”

“The chair, that’s what we’re talking about.” Pierce leaned over to take the watch from Klemper’s fingers. “Whether you fry in it or not.”

“You’re wasting your time with these outlandish—”

“What’ll it be, Art?” Cohen broke in sternly. “Life? Or the chair?”

Klemper brushed his right sleeve. “If you have some reason for keeping me here, Detective, I’d like to hear it. Otherwise, I intend—”

“Remember Patricia Clayborn? Eileen McDowell? Both strangled in their apartments.” Cohen dropped the easy banter. His voice turned as wintry as his eyes. “You
and Patty Clayborn both worked at Lambert Hospital Equipment. Patty was murdered. The same with Eileen McDowell, only that was at Klein Metal Shelving.”

“Coincidences. So what?”

Cohen leaned forward. “Here’s the deal. You tell us exactly what you did to Martha Dodd, or we’ll tell you exactly what you did to her. If you put us to the trouble of doing that, the D.A. won’t settle for anything less than death. If we tell you first, you’ll go to the chair. It’s that simple.” He waited for a response, and when none came, he said, “There’s this old German movie. A guy kills a kid, and somebody finds out, and the guy who finds out takes a piece of chalk and writes a great big M on the killer’s coat. M—for ‘Murderer.’ You ever see that movie, Art?”

“This is nonsense.” Klemper lifted his head haughtily. “If you have nothing further, I’d like to be on my way.”

Cohen drew an envelope from his jacket pocket and tapped it lightly against the table. He opened the envelope and scattered a few pink specks onto the battered surface of the table.

Pierce raised his wrist and glanced at his Timex. “You have sixty seconds, Klemper.”

“To do what?” Klemper demanded.

Cohen was studying the specks on the table, no longer looking at Klemper. “To tell us what you did to Martha.”

“Do you honestly believe that—”

“Fifty-five seconds,” Pierce said.

Klemper glared at Pierce. “You can stop that melodramatic countdown.”

“The apartment building where Martha lived is owned by Robert Braxton,” Cohen said, nudging one of the specks with his fingertip.

“Fifty-one.”

“Mr. Braxton is something of a horticulturist.”

“Everyone needs a hobby,” Klemper said with a slight chuckle.

“Forty-five.”

“He grows rare flowers,” Cohen continued. “There’s a particularly rare one right at Martha’s door. A vine. It has big white flowers, remember?”

“I was never anywhere near that girl’s apartment,” Klemper said evenly.

“Thirty-five.”

“Braxton gave me the scientific name, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that those flowers are the only ones in the city.”

“Thirty.”

“That’s why we got a warrant to search your apartment this morning,” Cohen continued. “Our guys are there now.”

Klemper’s face tensed.

“Looking in your closet.”

“Twenty.”

“Looking for pollen from those big white flowers. Seems it’s real messy, that pollen.” He raised a pollen-smeared finger and turned it toward Klemper. “Sticks to anything the wind blows it on. Like your coat, Art. Or your shoes.”

“Ten.”

“Your clothes are marked,” Cohen said ruthlessly. “Just like that guy in the movie.”

“Five.”

Klemper shifted in his seat. “Listen, maybe—”

“Marked by pollen.” Cohen blew gently on his fingertip, sending a fine pink spray into the air.

“Four.”

“Stop it!” Klemper snarled at Pierce.

“Three,” Pierce said evenly.

“So what’s your choice?” Cohen inquired, as if willing to do Klemper a very big favor.

“Two.”

“Live?” Cohen asked.

Klemper stared around frantically.

“Or fry?”

“One.”

“Live!” Klemper yelped.

Cohen’s gaze swept over to Pierce, caught the satisfaction in his partner’s dark eyes. He turned back to their prisoner. “Don’t leave anything out, Mr. Klemper, or our deal is off.”

Klemper was blinking frantically behind his thick lenses. “Pollen,” he whispered.

Cohen looked down at the face powder he’d borrowed from one of the secretaries. He thought of the small gust that had stirred the sterile white blooms, a little breeze, nothing more, but one he suddenly imagined as rising from deep within the scheme of things, a gift to the good guys, dropped from on high into their outstretched hands.

City/Autumn/1952

P
ART
I

Are we alone in this?

6:00
P.M.
, September 12, Trevor and Madison

Eddie Lambrusco pressed down on the brake and steered Siddell Carting Truck 12 over to the curb. Five metal garbage cans stood in a sloppy line at the edge of the street. All were swollen with the day’s refuse, but Terry Siddell, Eddie’s shift partner for the night, made no effort to deal with them.

“Well, you getting out or not, Terry?” Eddie asked.

Siddell didn’t move, but that didn’t surprise Eddie. Siddell wasn’t used to taking orders. Eddie was used to nothing else. Except when he was with his daughter, Laurie, saw himself reflected in her adoring gaze and suddenly felt like a man again. He thought of Laurie now, the way her eyes had followed him out the door of her room that morning.
Don’t go, Daddy.
Any man
would do anything for such a sweet kid, Eddie thought. Anything he had to do to make her happy. And yet he’d not been able to stay with her. He knew that other fathers would be with their kids tonight, all curled up on the family sofa, watching Sid Caesar or Uncle Miltie. But not Eddie Lambrusco. Old Man Siddell would never have given him the night off just because his daughter was sick. With that bitter recognition, Eddie returned his thoughts to the job at hand.

“Look, Terry, we got a full twelve-hour shift,” Eddie said, making sure that the raw hostility he felt for Terry Siddell didn’t show.

Siddell peered morosely into the night. “Twelve hours,” he griped. “Twelve fucking hours.”

It wasn’t just the hours, Eddie knew. It was that Terry had to spend them with a guy like Eddie, a little guy, going nowhere, without power or influence, a guy who could never make Siddell pay for anything he did, which Eddie yearned to do … just once.

“Nobody likes a twelve-hour shift,” Eddie said. Again he thought of Laurie. Her sickness. Her fever. The way she’d vomited through the night. Then his mind shifted to her mother, snatched from the secretarial pool, screwed, and tossed aside. He’d scooped something out of her, the guy who did that, so that she’d collapsed from the inside, abandoned her husband and daughter, leaving nothing behind but the lingering smell of her afternoon gin.

The terrible loss that had been inflicted upon his life abruptly swept down upon Eddie Lambrusco, a grown man who couldn’t hold on to a wife or stay home with a sick daughter or say “Go fuck yourself” to anyone at all, not even the little punk who sat whining at his side.

“So, you getting out?” he asked.

“Okay, okay,” Siddell answered sourly. He grasped
the door handle, jerked it up, and pulled himself out of the truck, leaving the door open behind him.

“Fucking wimp,” Eddie growled under his breath. He leaned over and violently jerked the door closed, imagining Siddell’s right hand smashed by the impact, screaming for him to open the door, release him, gazing in horror at his mangled fingers when he did. The only problem was that such vengeful fantasies were brief, and in their wake Eddie felt only smaller and more powerless.

In the wide rearview mirror, he watched as Siddell lumbered toward the bulging cans. Christ, he thought, what a lousy break. A twelve-hour run ahead of him, every second of it with a rich kid who’d be his boss in five years, another jerk he’d have to answer to. He imagined Terry Siddell behind a big desk, dressed in a suit and tie, pinkie ring on his finger, puffing a big cigar as he handed him the pink slip.
Sorry, Eddie, but we just can’t keep you on.

In the old days he’d been partnered with Charlie Sweeney, and the two of them had laughed the night away. If Eddie hadn’t lost his job with the city, they’d have still been partners, gotten the work done, cleaned up the whole area around police headquarters, the park, Briarwood, where the big Dumpsters bulged with the dreadful garbage of Saint Vincent’s Hospital, and finally the crumbling tenements of Cordelia. They’d have laughed their way through the whole damn thing because Charlie was a jokester, a guy who made faces and could imitate the people he saw on the street. Charlie moved the clock forward one gag at a time, lightened the load for everybody else. Every shift run, Eddie decided, needs a comedian, and he knew that without Charlie, tonight would be long, the work arduous, and there’d hardly be a moment when he wasn’t brooding
about Laurie, chewing at the fact that he wasn’t with her, despising himself for leaving her alone.

A clatter sounded behind the truck, the intentionally vicious noise Siddell always made, rolling the cans back and forth and banging them against the metal sides of the truck as if trying to get even with Old Man Siddell for making him work for his supper. Amazing, Eddie thought, what some guys feel entitled to. He reached in his pocket and drew out the battered pocket watch he’d inherited from his father, a laborer’s timepiece with its chinks and scratches and slightly skewed hands that circled turgidly around the yellowing dial. After a lifetime, he thought, this.

Siddell groaned as he crawled back into the truck. “Okay, let’s get out of here.”

Eddie glanced in the mirror. A trail of garbage lay strewn across the wet street. “Next time try to get some of it in the truck, Terry,” he said, relishing what he knew would be only a fleeting moment of authority over Terry Siddell.

Siddell’s lips jerked into a scowl. “Fuck you, asshole.”

Eddie gave no indication that he’d heard Siddell’s insulting reply. After all, what could he do about it? Punch the little shit’s lights out and get fired for it? No. He couldn’t do that. He’d gone that route before, been fired by the Parks Department and the Sanitation Department and even the private carting service where he’d worked before being hired by Old Man Siddell. No, he had to control himself now. For Laurie’s sake. Because she needed things.

And so he swallowed his rage, grasped the black knob of the gearshift, stomped the clutch, and stirred the truck back onto the deserted avenue, his eyes locked on the street ahead, where, at the end of it, the great stone facade of police headquarters loomed.

As the truck lurched forward, Eddie let his gaze drift up the side of the building. On the top floor, he could see a solitary figure in a lighted window, staring down at the darkening street, head bowed, shoulders slumped, as if beneath a weight he could not carry anymore.

6:12
P.M.
, Office of the Chief of Detectives, 227 Madison Street

Chief of Detectives Thomas Burke peered through the arched window of his sixth-floor office, hands clasped behind his back, staring down at the city’s tangled streets. At the corner of Madison a garbage truck made a clumsy rocking turn, a spume of trash blowing behind it. Is that what dooms us in the end, he wondered, a million small neglects?

He had no answer to this question, and he looked out across the city, where lights had begun to flicker in the distant apartment houses as the day workers returned to their rooms like birds to their nests. The image, he knew, was from one of his son’s poems. What had Scottie called the city?
A rookery of scars.

He closed his eyes briefly, tried once again to fathom his son’s fall. Where had it come from, Scottie’s utter lack of nerve, the way he’d curled into a ball of defeat and let life squash him like a can in the street? A little spine would have saved him, Burke thought, but there’d been no sign of that. No sign of muscle, sinew, the strength required to take a punch. He thought of Rocky Marciano, the championship bout that was coming up. That’s what Scottie had needed, a touch of the fighter in his soul. But Scottie had hit the mat in the first round, and never gotten up.

When Burke opened his eyes again, the great bridge
rose mutely before him, its stone ramparts towering above the unreflecting waters of the harbor. The bridge was often lost in spooky fogs, but this evening, as night fell, it glowed in a pale blue light. Burke thought of ghost ships in the mist, of the coffin boat that had disgorged some half-starved ancestor at the harbor door a century before, a scullery maid or landless tinker. Scottie had failed to grow the thick hide and sharp fangs of these wolfish forebears. If subjected to some final interrogation, Burke wondered what answer his son would give to the one question he should have asked him.
Why didn’t you fight back?