The Judgment (17 page)

“Then there’s been no confession?”

“Not yet, but he’s already changed his story once.”

“Sue, you’ve had him three hours. It would be unethical
for me to do what you’re asking. He needs counsel. Don’t blow your case by infringing his rights.”

“He’s right, Sue,” said Olesky. “Let’s get out of here and leave the two of them alone.” He was already on his feet, heading for the door.

“Not in here, Stash, if it’s all the same to you,” I said, pointing at the big mirror on the wall. “Any private office will do for us.”

He nodded his assent. Sue looked from him to me, suspicion and betrayal in her eyes.

“What’re you going to do, tell him to plead the Fifth?”

“I always advise my clients to tell the truth.”

If looks could kill, I’d be a dead man. She turned on her heel and clicked sharply out of the room. Bud Billings left, shaking his head. Stash paused, frowning. “I think Sue’s gotten awfully close to this, maybe too close. It’s put us all through the ringer. You, too, Charley, if I remember right.”

“Me, too,” I agreed.

“Well, you can use that office across the hall. Nobody’ll be around there for a while.”

“We’ll only need about ten minutes.”

“That’s okay. We can all use a break.” He nodded back at Sam Evans. “Your boy’s in pretty bad shape.”

I waited until Stash had cleared the door and turned down the hall, then I turned back to the sorry figure seated at the table and said, “Okay, Sam, let’s take a trip across the hall.”

All I got in response was a sniffle or two, but he heaved himself up out of the chair and started for the door. Mission accomplished. His eyes appeared to be open but only as narrow ‘slits. I wondered if he might not be exaggerating his condition a little for my benefit. Playing along, I took him under the elbow and led him across the hall to the office we had been promised. Glad to find the door unlocked, I put him inside and let him find his way to a chair. He collapsed in it, perhaps a bit too dramatically.

I took a chair opposite him, pulled it close, but before
speaking, I looked him over and tried to get some sense of just who I would be talking to. He was an ordinary sort of kid, skinny, badly in need of a haircut. He had a face inherited from his father—a prominent nose and a receding chin—the kind that might be called rat faced and probably was by the kids he grew up with. In any case, he seemed younger than his age. At nineteen, he was an adult in the eyes of the law, yet to me he seemed to be a child, probably because he was slow. Could he have murdered Catherine Quigley? I really had no idea. He hadn’t shown me his eyes yet. Could he have laundered her clothes, dressed her up, and wrapped her in transparent plastic like a little doll to be found at the side of the road? Anything was possible. I looked at his hands. Although they were thin, and his fingers were long and slender, there was no grace or control in them. They seemed to coil and twitch as he began folding and unfolding his fingers nervously in his lap. Not a good sign. He was far too twitchy, his hands reflecting his instability.

“What have you told them?” I asked him.

“Not much.” His voice was thin and cracked, like a twelve- or thirteen-year-old kid. Theoretically, he was just leaving it. “That’s ‘cause there ain’t much to tell.”

“You’d better let me be the judge of that.”

He was still sniffling. I pulled out my handkerchief and handed it to him. He blew hard then and opened his eyes wide for the first time. He wiped them and blinked a couple of times. He may have gotten his features from his father, but his eyes were his mother’s—a light blue, liquid, almost milky, the kind to which tears come easily. They seemed to be the eyes of a victim, rather than a victimizer, but maybe that was too hasty, a bit too easy.

“The first thing I told them,” he began, “I said I wasn’t even out there at all. I didn’t know nothin’ about it.”

“But that wasn’t the truth, was it?”

“Naw, but that’s what I kept tellin’ them because I didn’t want to talk about what I seen out there. But they were real tough with me, especially that woman. She was
real mean, said they had someone saw me out there on Clarion, had my footprint out there in the mud near where … well, you know.”

“You didn’t want to talk about that?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Too weird, man. Give you bad dreams.”

“Yes,” I said, “it might. I was out there. I know what you mean.”

“You get bad dreams from it?”

“Not yet. But dreams are funny. They sneak up on you.”

“They sure do!” He said it so emphatically that it made me wonder what he had locked up in his unconscious. And given what a creep his father was, I also thought about what kind of repressed rage this Sam Evans was carrying around.

“But eventually you admitted that you had been out there on Clarion Road, and you told them what you’d seen. Is that correct?”

“Yeah, I told them.”

“Tell me now.”

And he did. In a halting way, prompted from time to time by questions from me, Sam Evans told his story. He said he had been out on Clarion Road coming back from a cleanup job for Mrs. Belder, a widow, who lives alone in a farmhouse about ten miles outside Hub City. It was a chicken coop he’d knocked down to haul away in the old Datsun pickup truck that his father let him use for such odd jobs. His father drove the family’s big Ford pickup. It was pretty old, too, but in much better shape than the Datsun. The Datsun was badly in need of a clutch and had been giving them trouble for a long time. Finally, with the heavy load Sam was hauling away from Mrs. Belder’s place, the little pickup broke down completely. He had managed to get it over to the side of the road, but that was as far as it would go. He was five miles from home, it was well after dark, and snow had begun to fall,
but he had no choice but to go the rest of the way on foot.

As Sam had tramped along the road, he had noticed that traffic was thick and mostly in his direction. He’d stuck out his thumb a couple of times when cars passed going his way, but none had stopped. So when one coming from the direction of Hub City did a U-turn and stopped by the side of the road about a quarter-mile ahead, Sam thought that if he hurried, he might be able to catch the driver and talk him or her into giving him a ride home. He began to jog along, but as he got closer and saw the driver get out of the car, go to the rear, and open up the trunk, something persuaded him to slow down, proceed quietly, and try not to be noticed. He ducked down into the ditch that ran beside the road.

Quite some distance separated him from the car and its driver when Sam came to a complete halt and decided that this was close enough. He squatted down and stared. The darkness and the light snow made it difficult to see, but he thought he saw the driver pull something, a big package was what it looked like, out of the trunk. Whatever it was, it was difficult to carry, yet the driver managed it. Got it across the ditch, and just into the field next to the road. Then the driver hurried back to the car and tore off in the direction of Hub City.

Sam thought he had the place fairly well spotted, and when he set off to find it, he discovered it easily because of the fresh tire tracks in the new-fallen snow. There were footprints, too. He followed them down one side of the ditch and up the other, and there he found the plastic-wrapped package. He couldn’t tell exactly what it was at first, because some snow had gathered over it, but it looked like a big doll, which struck him as a funny thing to leave beside the road. But when he wiped the snow off with his gloved hand, he saw the face of a little girl, unmistakably real and unmistakably dead.

“What did you do then?” I asked him.

“I ran! I ran real hard. Only thing was, when I scrambled out of the ditch, a car come along right behind me
and saw me take off running. He pulled over then, and I guess he wanted to see what I was running from. So at first I just kept on running, but then it come to me that he’d prob’ly think I put that there. He could come after me and catch me real easy in his car, and so I went off the road and just took off across the field. Nobody saw me there, I guess, but I like almost froze my feet because the snow was getting lots thicker then and I was just in my sneakers and they got real wet.”

“Did you tell your parents what happened, what you’d seen?”

“You think I’m crazy? I was in enough trouble the way it was.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why were you in trouble?”

“Well, I was real late home, and I had to tell Pa I left the pickup out there on Clarion Road because of the clutch. I thought he’d give me a whack because of that, but he didn’t. He knew the clutch was gonna go, I guess, so I didn’t get no whack. We went out, the two of us, in the Ford, hooked up the Datsun, and towed it back. There was cops air over the place by that time. They wasn’t gonna let us through on the way back, but I guess Pa talked our way outta there. I don’t know what he said because I was in back in the Datsun. But while we was waitin’, I got a look at everybody crawling around where I’d been. I just wanted to get away from there. I was afraid they’d pull me out and start askin’ me questions.”

“Is this the story you told them in that room across the hall?”

“That’s what I been tellin’ them over and over,” he said. “Only they say I’m lyin’ because it ain’t what I said at first.”

“But you’re not lying now? This is the truth?”

“It’s the truth. Yeah.” He said nothing more for a moment, then he looked at me questioningly. “You believe me, huh?”

I considered his question for à minute, trying to sort out any reservations I had. This guy had a big-time history
of lying. Not only had he unjustly accused poor Father Chuck, he’d made other allegations about sexual abuse that turned out to be outright lies, purporting that people everywhere were trying to “grab his thing.” Jesus, according to him, you’d think that his “thing” was about as sought after as the Holy Grail.

True, that ghastly, greedy father of his had probably trained him well in the ways of extortion, if either of them could even understand what the word meant, so maybe money was what was behind all those false accusations. This slow, goofy Sam Evans didn’t seem like the most stable dude to come down the pike. It would be interesting to know his psychiatric history. Was he capable of committing this bizarre and heinous crime? And what, except madness, would be his motive?

I decided I really didn’t know if he was telling the truth. But as a lawyer, I knew one thing for sure: Sam Evans had been brought in for questioning as a witness. He hadn’t been charged, and yet here he was being treated by everyone like a suspect. Even if I did have any reservations about whether or not he was telling the truth, I had too much respect for the law not to kick some ass around here and tell Sue and Olesky and Bud Billings that I wasn’t going to let them continue on with their little game.

“We’ll talk about that later, but I do have a question. Did you or your father ever do any work for the Higginses or the Quigleys?”

He looked at me blankly. “Who’re they?” He really didn’t seem to know.

“Never mind.”

“Are you some kind of special cop or something? You’re real different from the other ones.”

At first I didn’t understand his question. Then I wondered if he would understand my answer: “I’m your lawyer. I’m on your side. Your father hired me to represent your interests.”

“Can you get me outta here?”

“I can sure try.”

I took Sam Evans across the hall back to Interrogation Room Three. I glanced at my watch as we went back inside and saw that we had gone over by about five minutes. Our little conference had lasted fifteen minutes, no more, no less. Stash and Bud Billings were there waiting. I looked from one to the other, then pointed down the hall to where Sue had disappeared. Stash shrugged. I put Sam Evans in a chair and pulled one over so that I would be seated beside him. I gave him a pat on the shoulder and took my place. Nothing was said. We simply waited.

A couple of minutes later, we heard the steady click-click-click of her heels on the tile floor. When she made her appearance, it was obvious she had freshened up a bit, hair combed, makeup applied. She would have looked just fine, except that her full lips were set in a tight line. She went over to the wall, leaned against it, and folded her arms.

Billings sat down on a chair across the table from us. “Now, Mr. Evans,” he said, “Pd like you to go through your story again. Give us all the details you can. Details are important. If you leave anything out, I’ll be there to help you with a question or two. Go ahead.” Typical good-cop approach—low-key, businesslike, professional.

Sam looked at me. I nodded and gave him another pat on the shoulder. He began talking and covered exactly the same ground he had with me. Actually, this recital was an improvement over the one he had given just minutes before. The questions I’d asked him along the way seemed to have helped him put it all together. His telling was as detailed and orderly as anyone could expect from a kid with his obvious mental deficiencies. In the course of it, Billings questioned him on only three or four points.

One exchange gave Sam pause. He had come to the point in his story at which the driver had dropped off the mysterious package in the field, gotten back into the car, and driven off.

Billings stopped him there. “Did you recognize the person?”

“Well, I was pretty far away,” said Sam.

“You were so far away I’m surprised you could see anything, Mr. Evans. Snow, a dark night like that. Your eyesight must be pretty good.”

“I don’t need no glasses!”

“But not good enough so that you could recognize the person or give us a description?”

Sam held back then, not for long, just for a moment, but long enough to make me momentarily curious. “Naw, I guess not.”

“You guess?”

In response, Sam shook his head vigorously. “Naw, I couldn’t see that good.”

“And you can’t tell us what kind of car it was?”

“Naw.”

“And you didn’t get the license number?”

“Naw.”

“How far were you from that car? That driver?”

“I don’t know. Pretty far.”