The Shell Scott Sampler (19 page)

“Routine. Rawlins and Kidd went out, gave her the story, asked a few questions. She was in pretty bad shape, according to Rawlins.”

“Yeah, I saw her start going into shock. True love, I guess.”

“Never mind that. We can't get a damn thing out of Moulder.”

“You mean he's still too sauced up?”

“Not that. He's still half-stewed, yeah, but we're keeping his eyes open. I mean he's clammed. Doesn't want a lawyer—in fact, refuses to see one.” Sam paused. “You know where that puts us.”

“Well, he's been in Q a year. You can bet he talked to some of those smart stir-lawyers they've got up there.”

“I told you on the phone what we've got on this bum. It's a good case.”

“Cold, Sam. But you don't need to tell me —”

He told me anyway. “Suppose he absolutely refuses to accept counsel? Tonight, tomorrow, couple days. Then—when he gets into court—he says, ‘I didn't know what I was doing, they cursed at me, I got confused. I didn't even have an attorney.' Hell, the court kicks the case out. And we're stuck.”

Sam kept going but I only half listened. I'd heard it all from him—and a lot of others—many times before.

But I couldn't blame Sam, the old war-horse. He'd given most of his life to clean, honest, damned-hard-working law enforcement. He was dedicated to that abstract thing, justice, which to Sam—and me, for that matter—meant not only that the innocent go free, but that the guilty do not. And now he was seeing the edifice built over years, by him and men like him, crumble into chaos, undermined—in a paradoxically accurate phrase—from the top.

Cases cold, cut-and-dried—some built up over months or years by dozens and scores of policemen, some of them caught-in-the-act classics of incontrovertible guilt—were being tossed out of court in obedience to a long line of U. S. Supreme Court decisions. Decisions made not by gods on Olympus, not quite, but by nine, or eight, or seven, or six—or even five—men, men wiser, so much wiser, than the rest of us.

“Dammit,” Sam was going on, “pretty quick we won't be able to arrest a hood unless we've got a lawyer and social worker and piece of cake along with us. We don't have to kiss their butts yet, but who knows when they'll tell us to pucker up?”

I let him run down. Then I asked him, “Moulder's not saying anything at all?”

“Yeah, he's saying something. The guy's a nut. I think he's really a nut. He
must
be stir-crazy.”

“What's Moulder saying? That he didn't kill Blaik?”

“Hell, he's been telling us that ever since he could talk clear enough so we could understand him ten percent of the time. He says he couldn't have killed him, couldn't have killed anybody. He was in a motel all afternoon. Get this—with his wife.”

“With his—Georgina?”

“He's got some more wives?”

“Why the hell would he claim something like that?”

“Will you quit asking stupid questions and get down here?”

“You want me to come down? Now? I was about to call Jazz —”

“
Jazz
—damn you! Get down here, will you?”

“Sam, if you really want me, if you truly
need
me —”

“Arrgh, I wish I'd never see you again.
He
wants you.”

“Who?”

“Moulder. Leslie Moulder. The killer—the suspect. Who in hell do you think I've been talking about?”

“Why would Moulder want to see me? I've never even met the guy. Are you nuts?”

Silence for several seconds.

I'd better watch it, I thought. Sam is big and hard and tough, and usually can bear the weight of mountains. But I could tell. He was experiencing one of his rare, very rare, about-to-flip times.

This Moulder must really be a cutey, I thought.

Sam said, “No, Sheldon, dear boy, I am not nuts.
He
is nuts. Leslie Moulder is nuts. Or else he is a very clever cookie.” Sam paused again. “Fact is, I think he might be working up to a not-guilty by reason of he's psycho. Whatever he's pulling, you're part of it. He insists on seeing you.”

“He insists, huh? Why?”

“He doesn't say.” Sam's voice was weary. And no wonder. Ignoring Moulder, I knew he'd been on the job since before eight o'clock this morning. “No, he doesn't say,” Sam continued. “He just says you're the only one he'll talk to.”

“Well, some of us have got it, and some of us —”

“If you're not here in half an hour —”

“I'll be there in twenty minutes, Sam. If I get any tickets, you'll fix them for me, won't you?”

I hung up while he was still swearing. He'd fix the tickets for me. In a pig's eye. It was a hard world for Sam.

“OK, Captain,” I said to Sam as I walked in, “where is the culprit? Lead me to him. I'll show you fuzz how to handle a creep. Where's my billy? Where's my rubber hose? Man, give me that old police brutality!”

Believe it or not, he grinned. Must have recovered somewhat in the twenty-one minutes it had taken me to get there.

“Lovely,” he said. “He's all yours. Do you mind if I watch?”

“You didn't think I was going to let such a splendid opportunity to infuriate you slip through my fingers, did you?”

He got up and walked around his desk. “Let me,” he said, “lead the way.”

We went into an interrogation room in which stood Sergeant Kidd, whom Sam had mentioned to me earlier, and in which sat, in a wooden chair on the other side of the long table, Leslie Moulder.

He was a mess.

It was obvious he'd been lying in his own vomit not long before—within recent memory, at least. The police had apparently tried to clean him up but hadn't done a really spic-and-sanitary job of it. There was even a smear of brown stickiness still on his chin and the underside of his sharp jaw.

I couldn't refrain from saying, very softly, to Sam, “Look at the guy. What's got into you? All by itself that's enough for a smart lawyer to get him turned out.”

Sam spoke in a normal tone. “I keep forgetting you just got here. He declined—disdained?—to let us help him tidy up. We can't force the gentleman, now, can we? He said if we touched him he'd hit us. He knows his rights.”

I looked at the gentleman. Some gentleman.

I had no clear idea of what Moulder had looked like before doing his time in the state prison, but I did know he was now forty-eight years old. Maybe he'd looked forty-seven when he went in; I didn't know that, either. But he'd come out looking fifty-seven. At least.

He was a tall, lean man with a thin and slightly lopsided face, very pale, prison-pallor pale, balding, with a fringe of brownish-red hair extending an inch or two up from his ears. The ears were just the right size for his head, if he wanted to hear faint whispers from forty paces; otherwise they were a bit large. His lips were very thick. His eyes were the color of roses, but not nearly as pretty. He did not smell like a rose, either.

One of his front teeth was missing—knocked out by a fellow con at Q, I learned later, too near his release date for expert repair unless Moulder wished to stay over for the friendly dentist, which he did not wish to do.

He was a fearsomely unpleasant specimen of humanity, and knowing he'd flicked a .45 caliber slug close enough to burn skin from my hand didn't make him look better to me.

“Theyzz,” he said.

I glanced at Sam, who looked innocent, but not back at me.

A little later I started to decipher the code. Moulder's missing tooth didn't help—and apparently his lips appeared unusually fat because the con who'd knocked out a piece of his grin had done his smile no good, either—but the main thing was that Moulder was drunk. He was still as drunk and dopey as an alcoholic going down for the third time in gremlins.

He was staying awake, it seemed, partly because he'd wanted to see me, and partly because the cops kept joggling him—gently, of course—to rouse him from approaching stuporousness; but not because he himself thought it a marvelous idea.

“Theeyzz,” Moulder said. “Yazr, izzim.”

Well, I couldn't understand it all until a minute or two later, but by thinking back to how it had begun I was able to decipher most of his mumbles. It would be futile to report the weird dialogue either verbatim or as it buzzed on the ear. But his last comment had been, “There he is. Yes, sir. That's him.”

Even allowing for the tooth and lips and booze and possible dementia, the statement oddly assaulted intelligence, because he was looking straight at me when he said, as though to several other people, “There he is.”

After a moment he buzzed on, “You're Scott, right? Couldn't be anybody else. You're Scott?”

“That's right. What'd you want to see me about, Moulder?”

“You got shot at tonight. Right? That's what the fuzz tell me. They act like I'm supposed to know about it.”

“Yeah, I got shot at.”

His words became a little more distinct when he next spoke. He leaned forward and fixed the rosy eyes on me and said, “You see who it was shot at you? See anything at all?”

It sent a little ripple over the vertebrae of my spine. It was the same question, in almost the same words, that his wife had asked me.

I hesitated, then said, “No.”

“Nothing?”

“Only the car. And not much of that.”

He said a foul four-letter word. Then, “OK. Screw.”

The word “screw,” to certain elements of the hoodlum-world, means, among other things, “Get lost,” or “Beat it.” Even while trying to figure out what he was up to now, it occurred to me that Moulder was unquestionably not the same man who'd gone behind prison walls a year and a little more ago. I doubted that he would so casually have used the four-letter word, for one thing; but I knew very well he wouldn't have said “screw” for beat it or “fuzz” for police. Undoubtedly he'd picked up a lot of other colorful language, and attitudes, from the prison-wise cons and many-time losers he'd met in stir, been with, lived with, in a very real sense gone to school with. Significantly, the cons themselves call it a “college.”

Anyhow, Leslie Moulder had been there. And clearly he had graduated, if not cum laude, at least wiser in the ways of the con than when he'd been involuntarily enrolled.

He had withdrawn his attention from me. His eyes were closed now. His puffed lips flapped gently, as if he was beginning to work up a snore.

“Hey,” I said sharply.

His wrinkled lids slid up like puffy Venetian blinds.

“Yeah?”

“Is that all, Moulder? I thought you wanted to see me.”

“I've seen you.” I was dismissed.

Maybe that's what he thought.

“Listen, saphead,” I said. “Keep those goddamn glimmers open and —”

He bounced a little on his chair, maybe an eighth of an inch, when he heard the entirely different tone of my voice. But Samson had a hand on my arm.

“Can it,” he said. “I know it's not loads of fun, old tiger, but —”

“Can it yourself, Sam. I'm not a cop. No police brutality here, buddy, just one dumb private citizen talking to another, OK?”

“Just take it easy.”

“I won't lay a hand on him. But he asked for me, didn't he? OK, he's got me.”

Sam raised one shoulder an inch, let it drop.

I stepped closer to the table, put my hands flat on its top, and bent over it toward Moulder. I stuck my face about two inches from his, and since I have been told it is a face which, when I am not amused, is not an exceptionally soothing collection of features to behold, and I was not amused, his glimmers were wide open now.

The reek of him oozed into my nostrils and burned. But I kept looking down at him and said, “Moulder, Leslie Moulder, you hear me?”

He could hear me, all right; they could hear me in the Homicide squadroom.

I roared on, “If you can't, sweetheart, start shoveling the crud out of your ears, because you're going to be listening a while, and my words may pound dingleberries clear into your biscuit.”

It wouldn't happen again, most likely, but for those few seconds he was very nearly hypnotized, and he actually lifted a hand with a long finger extended and dug into one of those big whisper-catchers of his, bloodstained eyes fixed on the bridge of my nose.

“I've talked to a thousand like you, Moulder,” I went on. “And I've got a very good record of listeners. You got it? I'd hate it like hell if you put a blot on that record. You got it, sweetheart?”

He nodded, very slightly, drawing away from me a little. So I cut the two inches between our chops to one and gave him another half minute of words, then finished with, “So we're friends now, right, Moulder? And we're going to have a very friendly conversation.”

Well, in a way we did.

Moulder didn't dummy up on me again, but his cooperation wasn't a lot of help. As I've indicated, it took about twenty-five minutes to decipher and interpret a five-minute dialogue. At first I wondered how the guy could still be so plastered after all this time, but then I realized it hadn't been a long time, it had only seemed long to me.

When I'd called Samson from Mrs. Moulder's he told me they'd had Leslie for about ten minutes. Add half an hour for me with Georgina and in the Skylight Lounge, a shade over twenty minutes to reach the Police Building, plus another ten minutes till now. Moulder had been in custody for only a little more than an hour.

At any rate, the friendly conversation—deciphered, and with obscenities deleted—went about like this.

“Now we understand each other, Moulder, maybe you'd like to explain why you tossed those friendly pills at me.”

“I didn't shoot at anybody.”

“Where were you about quarter of eight tonight?”

“With my wife.”

“Georgina?”

“Georgina.”