Suspects

by Thomas Berger

  “Then Larry can kiss the job good-bye,” Lloyd said, his lip curling. “There’s always some dirty inside stuff, wherever you go. Unless you’re in on it, you haven’t got a prayer.”

  Donna had been about to leave and wake her child, but was detained by his bitterness. “Now, that’s not always true, else how could anybody get a start? Your brother didn’t have any connections when he joined Glenn-Air. He soon made them, though, by hard work, and he’s done mighty well.”

  Donna wouldn’t be Donna without the naïveté. That was much of what Lloyd loved about her. She was older than he in the chronological sense, but as innocent as Amanda, and it was by nature, for she had worked a few years in the world before meeting Larry: she could have seen what went on there, but was blind to it. Lloyd knew little about Glenn-Air, but he was certain that if his brother had prospered in the association, it was by the same means used by everybody else who succeeded anywhere and had nothing to do with real talent or true quality.

  He sneered. “I’ve heard that too often.”

  It didn’t seem all that offensive to him, but Donna was suddenly incensed. Her body grew rigid, and her soft face had become hard. “And you’ll hear it a lot more if you come here! Don’t use that tone with me!”

  “All right,” he said, pushing back his chair and rising in one stark movement. She was not the only one who could be hurt. “You don’t have to listen to it any more.” He wanted to get away from her as soon as he could and therefore headed for the back door. Even so, he thought she might call him back before he took the four steps to get there, but she did not. She had coldly left the kitchen by the time he turned, before stepping onto the back porch, to thank her at least for the coffee and pie. His resentment was not so great as to eradicate his manners. But she was not there to hear him. He left town without attending the funeral.

  3

  Detective LeBeau was trying to locate Lawrence Howland, husband of the deceased female, father of the murdered child, but as of six hours after the homicides had been reported, he had had no success. The Jones woman had stated that Howland was out of town on some business matter, but she could not name the firm for which he worked, nor had such information yet been discovered in the search of the house. She did, however, say he had “something to do with air conditioners,” and one of the neighbors across the street, an accountant named Lundquist, confirmed this, but in the same general way without a brand name.

  While Moody was phoning the local airline offices, LeBeau went to the yellow pages and began to call firms listed there under “Air Conditioning.” By the time he was able to get started on the quest it was well into evening. He received no answers at any of the local offices. He then tried the 800 number of the best-known maker of window units and got a woman who worked for the national twenty-four-hour service that provided suggestions for self-help in the case of emergency breakdowns at night or on holidays. She was not equipped to find every employee of the firm, and anyway there was no reason to suppose that Howland worked for that particular company, but like many civilians nowadays, the woman was eager to help the police even when, as in this case, they were halfway across the country from where she said she lived. She gave LeBeau a phone at which the chief engineer could be reached, and this man was able to supply a number for the central personnel office, which, conveniently for LeBeau’s purposes, was on the West Coast, where the time was only four forty-five.

  The result of all this effort was only that he finally learned Howland was not employed by the firm in question—at least not under the name given: you had to allow for all possibilities, though most crimes, murders especially, had no mystery about them. They were almost always committed by the most obvious suspect. Both LeBeau and Moody assumed, routinely, that Donna Howland had been murdered by her husband. True, the killing of the little girl was a complication, but not to have suspected Howland would at this point have been unprofessional. And that the man could not promptly be found was hardly at odds with the routine assumption.

  “Isn’t it funny,” LeBeau asked Moody across their facing desks, “nobody knows the name of his company? The neighbors usually do on a street like that.”

  Moody was about to respond when his phone rang. He hardly spoke again after identifying himself, but he took some quick notes on a pad of yellow paper. “Thanks, Doc,” he said finally. “Sure. Okay.” He hung up and spoke across to LeBeau. “Pollack’s going to do the autopsy tomorrow morning. I guess it’s my turn to observe?” Neither enjoyed watching a postmortem, but someone had to, to protect the chain of evidence for legal purposes. Else a defense lawyer was not above suggesting that the medical examiner opened up the wrong body, thus discrediting the whole case against his client. “Meanwhile, it looks like, in addition to the cutting, she’s got a bad head wound from violent contact with something more or less blunt. No visible semen anywhere on the body.” He went over his jottings. “The little girl probably died of the clean slash at the throat. No other signs of damage on her.” He looked across at his partner. “Let’s hope it was while she was still asleep.”

  LeBeau’s youngest daughter was only a year and two months older than the dead child. He said, “I’m going to drop around home, maybe get a hot meal. There’ll be more than enough for you, Nick. I’ll give Crys a call.”

  Moody was given to saying, and sometimes even believing, that if he could find a wife like Crystal LeBeau, he would settle down forever, but when in the depths of drunkenness he could identify and accept the truth, he knew he would never recognize such a woman if he did meet her. “Thanks, but you go on. Maybe I’ll get a bright idea meanwhile.”

  “How about I bring you back a sandwich? If she doesn’t have some nice meat, I’ll get her to make one of those bacon-and-eggers you like, on white bread with lots of ketchup.”

  “Swell,” said Moody, for whom the described sandwich was a favorite only because it was one of the few dishes he could cook for himself. If a woman was feeding him, he preferred almost anything else. He knew LeBeau’s real reason for stopping off home was to tuck in his little daughter even though she was probably already asleep. When Moody had first seen the Howland child, he would have liked to keep Dennis out of the room, but there was no way that could be done, and his partner would anyway have resented the effort as an implication that his competence was at the mercy of a selfish emotion. LeBeau had three kids and would likely father more. Moody’s lone offspring, by his first wife, was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student, living with his mother in Oregon. He was a left-winger and despised the police, though he was civil enough when his father phoned him every Xmas.

  Hardly had LeBeau gone out the door when Dennis’ phone rang. If the call was important, Moody could catch him by raising the back window and yelling down to the parking lot. Homicide occupied the second floor of the Tenth Precinct stationhouse: one big shabby space full of paper-cluttered desks, with a couple of private offices for the brass up around the perimeter, a squalid locker room with adjoining shower, and two interrogation rooms in the rear.

  Moody stood up, leaned over, and seized the phone from his partner’s desk. He did not identify himself.

  The voice was female. “Denny? I found the address book.”

  “Daisy, it’s Nick.”

  “Oh, well, okay,” she said with somewhat less enthusiasm. “I found their address book. Know where it was? The little girl’s room, on a shelf with kids’ storybooks.”

  “You’re real good, Daze.”

  “I wish I could claim it was more than luck. I wasn’t looking for evidence at that point. I was just seeing if any of the books were ones I had as a girl.”

  “I won’t tell anybody,” Moody said, in the tone he sometimes used to cultivate the confidence of arrested felons. “Besides, you would have found it sooner or later anyhow. You’re doing great.” She was not long out of the Academy.

  “It looks like the husband’s employer might be something called Glenn-Air. Here’s the number.”

&n
bsp; Moody took it down. “There won’t be anybody there tonight. What about relatives?”

  “The book is full of names.”

  “I’ll run over to get it.”

  “I’ll drop it off,” O’Connor said. “We’re finished here. Small’s taking a few last prints, down cellar.”

  “I’ll be here,” said Moody.

  But it was her partner, Harry Small, who delivered the address book about a half hour later. It was tagged as evidence, and Moody had to sign a receipt for it.

  Small looked more like a professor than a cop. He was an authority on fingerprinting, who kept up with all the latest technology in that area. The department even once found the money to send him to a national convention of fellow specialists in the craft.

  “Daisy go on ahead?” Moody asked.

  “She wanted to get started with the prints,” Small said. He had a perpetual squint under bushy dark eyebrows.

  “She’s doing good?”

  Small nodded noncommittally. “There’s a lot to learn about prints.”

  “But she’s doing okay? She’s pretty young.”

  “Sure,” Small said and left.

  He was probably worried she might be promoted over him, what with the department’s new policy, instigated by a pushy female city councillor, of giving preference to women wherever feasible. Moody was opposed to the policy on general principles, but when it came to particulars of which he was aware, as in this case, he saw some justification for it. Daisy after all was extremely bright and very pretty, whereas Small was without personality and seemed to have no existence beyond fingerprints. And Moody had known Daisy since she was born.

  Small on the way out passed LeBeau coming in. LeBeau was carrying a plastic bag.

  He said to Moody, “Don’t tell me he’s classified and identified all those prints already. That’s guy’s a wonder.”

  “He just dropped off the address book that Daisy found,” Moody said. “She’s the one working on the prints.”

  LeBeau handed over the plastic bag. It was pleasantly warm to the touch, and when Moody opened the flap his nostrils were greeted with a delicious aroma. The sandwich thank God was not fried egg but roast meat, exuding gravy into the bread.

  “Here,” Moody said, gesturing with his elbow, “take this book away, willyuh, before I drop something on it.”

  “Roast pork,” LeBeau said. “If you had come along, you would have gotten mashed potatoes and red cabbage too. I won’t mention dessert or it would bring tears to your eyes.”

  Moody had noticed that married men always cared more about food than single guys: it had in fact been true of himself when he was married, even though his second wife could hardly boil water and in fact rarely visited the kitchen except to get cans of soft drinks and packaged junk snacks.

  “‘Glenn-Air’ looks like it might be his place of business,” Moody said, trying to hold the sandwich through the plastic bag. “I called it but didn’t get an answer.”

  LeBeau frowned. “But you just got the address book.”

  “You don’t miss anything, do you? Daisy called me from the house.”

  LeBeau was looking through the book. “Most of them are first names only.”

  Moody had already eaten half the sandwich. Carrying the other half, he went to the water cooler. At the moment, only he and LeBeau were on the floor, but other homicide detectives were at work elsewhere in the city, especially the team handling the case of the high-school girl whose raped, mutilated, and murdered body had been found three days earlier in a public park. Moody wished he had reminded Dennis that the coffee machine was out of order: he had to wash the sandwich down with water.

  When he returned to his desk, he and LeBeau divided up the phone numbers, Dennis taking A through L. It was Moody therefore who got the painful job of calling the number listed for “Mom.” The most he could hope for was that the number was that of Lawrence Howland’s mother. But it was one of the established truths of homicide work that the kinder alternative was rarely the operative one.

  Had the number been local, he would have gone to the residence personally. That was departmental policy, but he liked to think he would have done so even when not under orders. He knew the public erroneously supposed that those whose work concerned appalling crimes therefore were soon made callous by them, whereas precisely the reverse was true: the hundredth sight of fresh blood might be less shocking to the nerves than the first, but it was much harder on the soul, representing as it did not novelty but rather the inevitable, reminding you once again that you could do nothing to keep it from happening.

  He was granted a temporary reprieve now: the number failed to answer after a dozen rings.

  He gave the area code to LeBeau and asked, “Where’s that? Downstate someplace?”

  “Dunno.” LeBeau was taking down some of the numbers from the address book, before handing it back over to Moody. He looked up. “Why don’t we just Xerox this? Wouldn’t that be simpler?”

  “Why did it take us so long to come up with that idea?” asked Moody, striking his forehead with a flattened hand. “Not an example of our usual laserlike approach.”

  “No, it’s a perfect example,” LeBeau said, rising. They often disparaged themselves as a team, but would not suffer others to do so. He went to the corner where the copying machine stood. The bulb in the nearest overhead light had burned out two days earlier but had not yet been replaced. He shouted back, “I can’t see a thing!”

  Before surrendering the book, Moody had penciled several numbers on his notepad. There was one for “Marty,” another for “Muriel,” and a third for “Mr. and Mrs. C. K. Mitchell,” with a street address in the state capital. Like all other entries throughout, these were written in the same rounded, precise hand as the stubs in the register that accompanied the book of checks imprinted with the names of Lawrence and Donna Howland. Similar writing appeared on a grocery list that had been held to the refrigerator door with a magnet. It was likely to be Donna’s.

  Moody dialed the number listed for “Marty.” A man answered on the first ring. Moody identified himself. “I’m calling from an address book found at the Howland residence at eleven forty-three Laurel. Do you have some connection with Donna or Lawrence Howland or both?”

  “Howland…Laurel…Yeah, I installed a washstand and com mode in the new lavatory they put in, about a year ago. And they called me once, I think, for a repair to an existing fixture—kitchen sink, I believe. What’s this in reference to, Detective? Am I being accused of something wrong?”

  “No,” Moody said. “There’s been a problem, but not about the plumbing. When was the last time you were to the house?”

  “Gee, I’d have to look at my books.”

  “Sure. Listen, you think you’ll have a minute maybe to talk a little to us tomorrow if we need to?”

  “Any time at all,” the plumber said. “I ain’t got a problem cooperating with the police.”

  “That’s nice to hear, Marty. It is Marty, isn’t it? Marty what?”

  “Marty Conway.” He spelled it out.

  “Can I call you Marty? Or do you want ‘Mr. Conway’?”

  “Please, Marty’s fine. ‘Mr. Conway’ is my old man.”

  “Swell, Marty. Uh, you can’t say more or less when you were to the Howland place the last time? Put me in the ballpark?”

  “Lucky for me, I been busy as hell the last few years, putting in ten hours, maybe, six days a week. I’d need to look at my books.”

  “You don’t have them at hand? This is your business number?”

  “Yeah, but I’m on the extension in the house. I work outa my converted garage, out back. My books are out there. You want me to go out there?”

  “Naw,” Moody said almost scoffingly. “We’ll be talking to you again: you’ll know by then.”

  “Absolutely. I can give you a call.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Moody. “Listen, Marty, are you what you would call social friends with Donna and
Larry?”

  Marty hesitated briefly, then asked, “The Howlands? No, I just did that work for them, is all.”

  “You remember Mrs. Donna Howland? I guess she was there when you did your work.”

  Marty answered after a long moment. “Not much.”

  “A nice-looking woman.”

  “A lot of them around these days,” Marty said. “But looking at ‘em too much can get a plumber in trouble.” His laugh was hollow. “If you know what I mean. I’m a married man, Detective.”

  “Well, okay, Marty, we thank you for your help.”

  “Got a wife and two boys, eleven and nine.… Uh, would you mind telling me what this is about?”

  “We’ll talk again, Marty,” Moody told him. “Could you just give me your address?”

  LeBeau had returned from the Xerox.

  “That was swift,” said Moody, taking his share of the proferred sheets.

  “There weren’t that many pages to copy. There’s not a lot of numbers here.”

  “I was talking to this plumber, Marty,” said Moody. “He did a couple jobs for the Howlands, but he claims he doesn’t know them socially. Is that the usual thing? Write down just somebody’s first name when he’s just your plumber, not a personal friend?”

  LeBeau, now seated opposite him, lifted brow and shoulders simultaneously, as if dubious, but said confidently, “Sure. We got this kinda handyman, jack-of-all, you know, named Hal. We don’t know him like a friend, exactly, but he does stuff for us once in a while, paints the porch and so on. Crystal will just say, ‘I’ll give Hal a ring,’ and everybody knows who she’s talking about. But me, I don’t even know what his last name is. I doubt she remembers.”

  “You sold me,” Moody said. “Say, that sandwich was fantastic. It was even salted just right.”

  “She knows your ways as well as she knows mine.”

  “Only way I can keep a wife,” said Moody, “is if she’s someone else’s.” He added hastily, “You know how I mean that.”

  The addendum was needless. Your partner was closer than your brother—closer certainly than Moody’s, with whom he had fought bitterly when they were boys, and whom he simply did not see now adays—and was not likely to misinterpret anything you said.