The Interrogation (22 page)

“We looked through everything he had, but we didn’t find a key,” Pierce told him.

Garrett shrugged. “Maybe he lost it.”

“Or hid it,” Pierce said.

“Why would he do that?” Garrett asked mildly.

But Pierce had already turned away and was moving rapidly down the midway toward his car.

2:51
A.M.
, Interrogation Room 3

Cohen looked at his watch and felt time as something physical, a vise squeezing out his life, making him hot and sweaty, so that he’d finally rushed to the window, cranked it open, and stuck his head into the night air.

When he turned back, Smalls was still sitting in his chair, his hands in his lap, his eyes downcast, resigned, or so it seemed to Cohen, to whatever happened to him next, broken, left with nothing more than the energy it took to proclaim by some look or gesture, the weary tenor of his voice, that he was innocent.

“You know, Jay, I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier. About people not having choices.”

Smalls made no response.

“Take me, for example.” He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and swabbed his neck. “I’m a detective. And take you. A suspect. We can’t change that. So I have to go at you. Sometimes hard. Sometimes not so hard. But I have to go at you. Because that’s my job.” He returned the handkerchief to his pocket, went back to his chair. “But suppose we changed all that. Just the two of us. Suppose I stopped being a detective and you stopped being a guy I have to interrogate, and instead of those two guys, we just became ourselves. Norm Cohen and Jay Smalls. Just talked, like a couple of normal guys.”

Smalls’ gaze drifted upward as Cohen leaned back.

“Would you like that, Jay?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, so what should we talk about?”

“I don’t know,” Smalls answered, his voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t talk to people.”

“Okay, how about when you were in school, what did you talk about then?”

“I didn’t talk much.”

“But you listened, I’ll bet. What were the other kids talking about?”

“Girls mostly. The boys, I mean. They talked about girls.”

“Did you ever have a girl?”

“No.”

“I don’t have one either,” Cohen said. “I’d like to, but I don’t.” He waited for Smalls to respond, but Smalls remained silent. “There’s this woman in my building, for example,” Cohen added. “Sometimes I think of her.”

What if nothing is?

3:01
A.M.
, Dunlap’s Collectibles

“Okay, I’ll do it.”

“That’s great, Ralph,” Dunlap said excitedly. “You won’t be sorry, believe me. Come in, I’ll give you the details.”

Blunt followed Dunlap to the rear of the store, once again stumbling through the darkness, raking whatever lay in his path before him like a huge black wave.

“Have a seat, Ralph. You want a beer?”

“I ain’t got all night, Harry.” Blunt’s small eyes whipped back and forth. “I got to be back in town by six.”

“Oh, yeah?” Dunlap asked brightly. “You got some broad waiting for you?”

“Shit,” Blunt grumbled. “Broad, my ass.”

“So, you want to sit down?”

“Fuck, no. Let’s get on with it.”

“Yeah, okay, no sweat, Ralph,” Dunlap said. “Let me show you the deal.”

Blunt watched glumly as Dunlap sprinted to a desk, jerked a folded map from one of its cubicles, and spread it out across a square card table. “Okay, here it is,” he said. “Titus.”

“I know where Titus is,” Blunt growled.

“Sure you do, Ralph,” Dunlap said. “But it ain’t Titus I’m showing you.”

“You said that fucking locker was in Titus.”

“Basically, yeah. But not exactly in town.” He ran his finger along a green line marked Route 6. “You go along here until you get to the outskirts of town, see?”

Blunt nodded sullenly.

“You come to Brighton Avenue,” Dunlap went on. “There’s an Esso station on the right. The corner, I mean. You can’t miss it. You go past the station. Maybe a mile.” He drew his finger toward the eastern side of the map. “You get to Covenant. There’s a church there on the corner. Saint something’s. Got a Madonna out front.”

“Madonna out front,” Blunt repeated, now with a sense that things were getting crowded inside his head. “Fucking boonies, this place.”

“It’s the nutcase that picked it, not me.”

“All right, just go ahead,” Blunt said, waving a beefy hand.

“Okay, so, you go maybe a mile, two miles down Sumpter. It gets to be like woods, you know? Like trees and shit. Nothing the fuck around. Then you come to this gate. A sign on it. AJS Storage. That’s the place you’re looking for. Where the goods are.”

“The gate locked?”

“Nah, you just swing it open. Drive right in. At this time of night, nobody’s around.”

“Okay, what then?”

“There’s this bunch of little houses. Like sheds, you know? Made out of wood. You’re looking for number twenty-seven. The number’s painted right over the door. Big black number. Twenty-seven.” He reached into his pocket and drew out the key. “The creepo hadn’t bothered to lock the fucking thing, but I did. So, that’s it. You bring the stuff back here. I give you the five hundred bucks like I said. End of story.”

Blunt folded his paw around the key. “It fucking better be the end of story, Harry.”

Dunlap’s hands fluttered like small pink birds between them. “Oh, it will be, Ralph. Believe me. It will be.”

Blunt dropped the key into the pocket of his trousers, stepped over to the curtain, and flung it back. “This better go smooth, Harry. ’Cause if it don’t—”

“It will, it will.” Dunlap used all his inner strength to hold up a smile. “You can trust me on this one, Ralph.”

Blunt grunted doubtfully, then stepped through the curtain and into the unlighted interior of the store.

Dunlap followed him for a few feet. “See you later, Ralph.” He watched his cousin’s huge frame lurch toward the door, scraping and banging all the way. Like a fucking bull, he thought, fucking bull in a china shop.

3:07
A.M.
, Route 6

The road was dark, with few lights burning in the houses or nondescript roadside shops that swept by on either side of the car. It was a bleak area, but Pierce remembered that it had been quite beautiful once, the
silver waters of the tidal marshes teeming with birds, golden reeds weaving in the breeze.

“I grew up around here,” Pierce said. “Met my wife here. She was from the Midwest. Just in Seaview on vacation.”

“Where were you from?”

“Englishtown,” Pierce answered.

“So you could just walk over to the river and look right across to the city,” Yearwood said. “Did it call to you?”

“No.”

“Then why did you go there?”

“I don’t know,” Pierce answered, though he knew quite well that he’d left Englishtown for one reason only, because Costa had left it, moved into the city, rented a house in a nice, quiet neighborhood, a house near a school and a playground, just the way his house in Englishtown had been.

“You weren’t following a dream?” Yearwood asked lightly.

“No,” Pierce answered.
A nightmare
, he thought.

A brief silence, then Yearwood asked, “So, what do you do in the off hours?”

“Nothing much.”

“A loner, then.”

Pierce imagined Anna Lake in her tidy apartment, curled up on the worn blue sofa, her legs drawn beneath her, a woolen sweater draped across her shoulders. “Not because I want to be.”

“So let me ask you again,” Yearwood said. “What happened to you, Detective Pierce?”

Rather than answer, Pierce said, “What do you think might be in that shed Garrett told us about?”

“What if nothing is?”

“Then I’ll go back to the city.”

“And give up?”

Pierce relived his long hours of stalking Costa, watching him from the distance as he drunkenly weaved down the streets of Harbortown. What would Anna think of him if she knew just how deep the poison had finally sunk? And yet, what choice did he have but to tell her how night after night he’d followed Costa to his seedy dockside haunts, then on weekends when the little mechanic had strolled to the playground near his house and sat feeding squirrels and pigeons while Pierce watched him in the distance, red-eyed with hatred, hoping with all his raging heart that once, just once, Costa would lose his grip and in that instant of lost control approach a solitary child.
Just once
, he’d thought at the time,
just once, and you’re mine.

“No, never,” Pierce said.

Yearwood cracked the window, and a blast of wet air swept into the car. “But what happens when you reach the end of the line? When you’ve done all you can but you just can’t get your man?”

“Then you have to let him go,” Pierce answered. He pressed down on the accelerator.
Or cross the line yourself
, he thought.

3:11
A.M.
, Interrogation Room 3

“So, anyway, I haven’t had the guts to approach her,” Cohen said. “I just can’t seem to work up the courage to do it. Woman trouble. You ever had that, Jay?”

“No,” Smalls answered.

Before Cohen could say more, the door opened.

“I need to speak to you, Detective Cohen,” the Commissioner said.

Cohen joined the Commissioner in the corridor outside Interrogation Room 3.

“It’s been a long night, hasn’t it?” the Commissioner asked.

“Yes, it has.”

The Commissioner removed one of the white gloves of his dress uniform and examined a smudge. “So, are you making any headway?”

“Not as much as I’d like,” Cohen answered. “Pierce has gone to—”

“Yes, I know,” the Commissioner interrupted. He drew off the second glove. “Have you heard anything from him?”

“Not yet.”

The Commissioner placed his bare right hand on Cohen’s shoulder. “The race is not always to the swift, isn’t that so?” The Commissioner smiled. “That being the case, I want you to understand—both you and Detective Pierce—that I know you both did your best. Not just during this last interrogation, but in the whole investigation. You found your man, Detective. This fellow. Of that there is no doubt. And you are both to be commended for it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The Commissioner looked at his watch. “You’ve been at it for almost ten hours now. You must be tired. And so at six sharp, I want you to go home, Detective. You need rest, I can see that. I want you to get up from your chair and walk directly to your car and go home and get a full twelve hours of sleep before you come back here to headquarters. Don’t worry about that fellow in there. His release will be handled by others who haven’t been at him all night. The same goes for Pierce. When he leaves … where is it he went?”

“Seaview, sir.”

The Commissioner nodded. “He should go directly home from there.”

“Unless he’s found something we can use,” Cohen said.

“Yes, of course. In that case, he would come back. Do you expect him to call in?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When he does, tell him what I said. That I’m proud of what you two men accomplished in this case, and that I know you’re both dead tired, and that he should go directly home.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s at six
A.M.
You’ll leave the interrogation room.”

“Smalls will need to be guarded though,” Cohen said. “Otherwise he might …”

“Might what?”

“Might just walk out the door.”

“At six o’clock, Detective, this fellow is a private citizen again. He has no warrants against him and no charges have been filed. A private citizen. Nothing else.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Commissioner’s smile returned. “Well, good night, then, Detective.” He gripped Cohen’s hand. “Sleep well.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll try.”

With that the Commissioner turned on his heel and strode back down the corridor to his office, moving down it, Cohen thought, like something dark through an even darker vein.

3:12
A.M.
, Criminal Files Room

Burke glanced up from the transcript and glimpsed the Commissioner as he strode past the glass door, his
features curiously troubled. He started to rise, follow his old friend down the corridor, but the jangle of the phone stopped him.

It was Dr. Wynn.

“I wanted to let you know that Scottie’s condition has deteriorated,” the doctor said. “His breathing is extremely shallow.”

“So I should come there now?”

“I think so, yes.”

“All right,” Burke said.

On the way out, Burke saw the Commissioner standing at the window that looked out over the city.

“I have to go to the hospital, Francis,” he told him.

The Commissioner did not bother to face him. “There’s no need for you to come back, Tom.”

“But I should—”

“Stay with Scottie. That’s where you belong. I’ll handle this fellow from here on out.” The Commissioner turned around slowly, and Burke saw that his eyes were oddly imploring. “You know, Tommy, there’s something else the nuns never taught us. That sometimes there’s no way to do the right thing. If we always had choices, then we could be condemned. But we don’t always have choices, do we?”

“No, we don’t.”

A slender smile, soft as candlelight, rose to the Commissioner’s lips. “Go to your son,” he said.

And so Burke did.

What’ll it be?

3:25
A.M.
, Route 6

Blunt steered the car into the dimly lighted station. He’d not planned to stop anywhere en route to Titus, but during the last few minutes Dunlap’s directions had begun to blur. He needed to get his bearings, make sure he was headed in the right direction.

Through the fetid smoke trapped inside the car, he watched as the attendant lumbered forward, rubbing sleep from his eyes.