The Interrogation (24 page)

He walked to the end of the bed, then returned to the chair beside the bed and sat again. He was still seated at his son’s bedside when Father Paddock arrived.

“Hello, Tom.”

“Father.”

The priest took a chair a few feet away, his hands in his lap, clasping a Bible. “Scottie will soon be home, Tom,” he said.

Burke had never convinced himself of such a possibility, so he said nothing.

The priest’s fingers tightened around his Bible. “It’s all a wilderness, Tom, so we’re bound to get lost here and there.”

“I wanted a different son,” Burke admitted. “That’s my confession. I wanted a different son, and he knew that. And it destroyed him.”

“You didn’t destroy Scottie, Tom.”

“Sean, as a priest, if you believed that God wished you’d never been born, wouldn’t that destroy you?”

Father Paddock leaned back as if pushed by an invisible hand. “You can’t eat yourself alive, that’s what I’m telling you.” He waited for Burke to respond, and when he didn’t, got to his feet. “I’ll give him the Last Rites now.”

Burke listened as the priest administered the Last Rites, but the words rang hollow, and he felt a hollowness at the very center of himself. He had been given a child, a life, and had irreparably damaged that life, twisted and distorted it. That was his legacy, this brutal destruction.

“Would you like me to come back after morning Mass?” Father Paddock asked.

“No,” Burke answered. “No need.” He walked the priest to the door, shook his hand, thanked him, then returned to the chair beside his son’s bed.

After that Burke did nothing but wait, casting his eyes toward Scottie only long enough to make out the ghastly pallor of his skin, the blue lips, eyelids that had begun to flutter in what Burke took to be a final spasm
of life and which he expected to diminish quickly, then vanish behind a rigid mask of death.

But the movement only grew more violent, so that Burke finally parted the curtain and pressed his hand against his son’s forehead. “You can go now, Scottie,” he whispered.

Scottie’s fingers clawed at Burke’s hand, digging frantically as he tossed his head from side to side and began to mutter incoherently.

“You can go,” Burke repeated brokenly.

But Scottie did not go. He twisted to the right, shuddered, then wheeled about, his mouth jerking wildly, the movement beneath his eyes growing ever more violent as his hands dug fiercely at the covering sheet.

“Please, Scottie,” Burke pleaded. “Please go.”

But still Scottie wheeled and turned, tormented, burning, twisting back and forth in an agony of stifled speech until his anguished whisper broke the air in a final plea.

Bury me.

3:55
A.M.
, Route 6

“Jesus,” Blunt muttered.

He glared blearily at the black sea that churned a few yards from the car, the yellow beams illuminating tumbling lines of foam. Covenant? Brighton? Sumpter? Shit! Which one was he supposed to follow to which one?

One thing was sure; he wasn’t supposed to be here, staring at the goddamn fucking ocean, with no light to be seen, not even some goddamn fisherman’s hut. He was lost, goddammit, and there was no one around to help him get found again.

A steaming wave of rage washed over him, hateful
and malignant, the kind that had so often swept over him in school, especially when some bitch teacher had called on him. Called on
him
, goddammit, as if she hadn’t fucking seen that his hand wasn’t up. As if she hadn’t noticed that his hand was never up, the bitch. Not like that fucking Weinberg kid, the puny little kike, always with the answers.

He grinned, remembering the afternoon he’d trailed Weinberg down the deserted corridor, come up behind him and nailed him with a swift ferocious blow to the back of the skull.
Now how do you feel, you little fuck? You feel smart now? Huh?
The kick had come before he’d been able to stop it, hard and vicious, then another and another until …

Well, he got over it, the little weasel, Blunt said to himself now. A few days in the hospital, but he got over it. Probably a good lesson for him. Probably taught him not to be such a smart-ass. And the good news was that that first whack had knocked him cold, the little pussy, and so he’d never been able to piss and moan and say it was Blunt who did it.

This final thought filled Blunt with a satisfaction so intense, it came close to ecstasy. But it was short-lived, as all joy seemed to him, and at its departure he peered out into the mute, unhelpful darkness and cursed himself for getting lost. How had he gotten to this fucking nowhere place? he wondered, now laboring to retrace the route. Had he turned left on Brighton, then right on Covenant? Or had he done the opposite of that? Maybe it was Dunlap who’d gotten it wrong. After all, the jumpy little bastard was talking so fast, whipping that pudgy finger all over the map. Sure, it could be Dunlap that fucked it up, Blunt reasoned. And if he had, he decided, then his moron of a cousin was going to get a quick kick in the ass.

He felt his mind careen around a blind corner and he laughed suddenly, remembering how he’d sometimes gotten the addresses wrong on patrol, showed up at the wrong place. O’Hearn had tried to fire him for that, but Dolan always kept him on. Later Burke had tried to fire him, but by then O’Hearn had found out that he could be depended upon for certain jobs. Just like Dolan had found that out. With pleasure he recalled the words Dolan told him that he’d said to O’Hearn. He could almost hear him saying it, Dolan’s voice all cheery and lilting, that twinkling smile:
There’s one thing the nuns never taught us, Francis, that a hard fist can be as useful as a sharp brain.

Blunt drew his hands from the wheel, curled his fingers into fists, and stared at them admiringly as he remembered Dolan’s words.
No shit
, he thought, now imagining what those two massive fists could do to Dunlap for getting him into this fucking mess.
Take that, you little prick.

Is this the man?

4:10
A.M.
, City Park

Burke knelt beside the path and ran his finger over the rough ground. Much as he hated it, he could not get the image out of his mind. Neither the image nor the words. Scottie’s fingers digging into his hand, clawing at them relentlessly, repeating the same prayer over and over again.

Bury me.

He thought of the man Smalls claimed to have seen shortly after Cathy Lake’s murder. The one he’d told Cohen about. A man on his knees, at this very spot where Burke now knelt, staring at the ground, muttering the same words Scottie had muttered. The question dug incessantly at Burke’s mind.
Could it have been Scottie?
And if it had been Scottie, had his son committed
the crime of which Smalls was accused? Could Scottie have been in the park, crouched in the rain, watching a little girl move down the sodden path, seen the silver necklace that dangled from her throat … and struck? In his vast neglect, in his failure to accept his son, had Burke forged the killer of a child? Was this evil his own Evil had finally made?

He looked down the path. At the end of it he could see the tunnel in which Smalls had been apprehended. It was completely cleaned out now, no longer the hovel it had once been, strewn with debris. Smalls had sat hunched in that tunnel, shivering in the chill, peering out into the park, and seen a man digging at the earth, repeating over and over the words Scottie had released on his dying breath. Again the question assailed him:
Could it have been Scottie?

He rose and strode rapidly down the path, then through the tunnel and back out of it, toward the entrance to the park, the ornate Victorian gate where Cathy Lake had spent the last dwindling moments of her life. The unlighted facade of Clairmont Towers faced him from the opposite curb, and he recalled the interviews Cohen and Pierce had conducted first with the building’s superintendent, then with a second man who’d told them about an argument he’d had with yet another man, a dope addict, desperate for money, one who’d attacked him in the lobby of the building.

He felt a jolt of urgency, walked briskly to Clairmont Towers.

The superintendent groggily opened the door of his apartment.

Burke displayed his gold shield. “Two officers questioned a man in this building regarding a murder case,” he said. “He’d had some kind of argument with another
man here in the lobby. Do you remember who they spoke with?”

The superintendent blinked drowsily. “Stitt,” he said. “Burt Stitt, 14-F.”

One minute later the door of 14-F opened. Burke saw two small brown eyes peering at him through the slit. He took out his badge.

Stitt groaned. “Jesus H. Christ, it’s four in the morning.” He drew the chain from its cradle and opened the door. “What’s this all about?”

“You told two detectives that you were in the lobby downstairs at around seven in the evening on September first,” Burke said.

“So what?” Stitt snorted. “I’m in the lobby every day at around that time. I live here.”

“You told the detectives that on this particular day you had an argument with somebody.”

“So that’s it,” Stitt said with a grim smile. “That fucking hophead again. You catch the bastard yet?”

“Tell me what happened in the lobby.”

“He asked me for a handout. This was out front. I said no, and the bastard followed me inside, screaming and grabbing at me, begging for money. I said hell no, and he threw a chair at me. Desperate. Grabbing for my wallet, my briefcase, anything he could get his hands on.”

“Had you ever seen this man before?”

“How would I know? He’s just a hophead. You know, skin and bones. Do anything for a fix. They all look alike, dope fiends.”

“Where did he go when he left the building?”

Stitt shrugged. “Last I saw, he headed up Clairmont.”

Burke studied Stitt’s narrow features, the feral nose
and sunken cheeks. “I have one more question.” He drew out his wallet and showed him a picture. “Is this the man who attacked you?”

“Well, he didn’t look all cleaned up the way he does there. But, yeah, that’s him.”

Burke drew the picture from Stitt’s hand.

“What’d he do anyway?” Stitt asked. “I mean, you’re not here over some lousy panhandler.” Recognition broke like a light over his face. “It’s that kid, right? The one that was killed. You think the hophead did it.” He glanced at the photograph that now trembled slightly in Burke’s grip. “Who is he anyway?”

“My son,” Burke answered quietly.

Outside, standing in the dark air, Burke could see the iron gate that stood at the park entrance, and where he suddenly imagined Cathy Lake as she dashed through it, fleeing a man who staggered after her in the rain, frightening in his disarray, wild-eyed and desperate for money, perhaps glimpsing a way to get it in the glint of the silver locket that hung from her slender throat. The terrible question sounded a third time.
Could it have been Scottie?
And for the third time Burke forced himself to deny the terrible suspicion that was growing in his mind.
Not a little girl
, he thought,
please, not a child.

4:22
A.M.
, Interrogation Room 3

Cohen closed the Murder Book. No more questions about Cathy Lake, he told himself. No more questions about Smalls’ past either. With so little time left, none of that mattered.

The awful truth cut through his mind.
Smalls is going to go free.
If Pierce found nothing in Seaview, then
in little more than ninety minutes, Smalls would be released into the city, to prowl its parks and playgrounds, looking for a child.

So what was left? Cohen asked himself desperately. What could he do in ninety-eight minutes that he had not been able to do during the last ten hours? Only one possibility occurred to him. He might trick Smalls the way Smalls had tricked him earlier, get him talking mindlessly. About his goddamn feelings. The whole self-loathing act. All that bullshit about thinking of himself as slime. If he could convince Smalls that he was buying any of this, Cohen thought, then maybe, just maybe, he could pry something out. A single guilty morsel that might be enough to slam the cell door on Smalls for a few more days.

“I’m not going to ask you any more questions about Cathy, Jay,” he said, keeping his speech measured, holding back the anger. “Her murder, or anything about her. So just take Cathy out of your mind. Can you do that, Jay?”

“I’ll try,” Smalls said meekly.

“Good, because I want your mind clear to think about what I’m going to say to you.”

“It’s hard not to think about the little girl. I know you think I hurt her.”

“Don’t be so sure of that,” Cohen told him, choking back his rage, his fierce need to jerk Smalls from his chair, slam him into the wall.

“I know you think I hurt her,” Smalls repeated, his tone, to Cohen’s ear, dripping with false innocence. “Everybody does.”

“Yeah, but I want to talk about you, Jay,” Cohen insisted. “Your future, I mean.”

Smalls lowered his eyes delicately, let the lids flutter. “I don’t have a future.”

“Sure, you do,” Cohen said.

“No, I don’t.” He offered a short sigh. “I never had a future.”

Cohen leaned in close. “Listen, Jay. There’s a way out for you.” He felt Smalls’ breath on his face and itched to pull away, rush to the bathroom down the hall, scrub the very scent of him from his skin. But instead, he tenderly pushed back an errant strand of Smalls’ long, dark hair. “You can’t give up on yourself, Jay.”

“I already have.”

“Listen to me,” Cohen said intently. “You can decide what happens to you.”

“I know what’s going to happen.” Smalls’ voice fluttered, gossamer thin, in the air between them. “I’ve always known.”

“What? What’s going to happen to you?”

“I’ll be arrested again.”

“For what?”