Suspects

by Thomas Berger

  The liquor store was for once not in a mall but on a street of middle- to small-sized shops, heavily traveled, the metered parking places always filled. It was probably because of the difficulty of access by motorist customers that the store advertised sizable markdowns in its placard-covered windows. In a quick eyeballing of the facade, Marevitch managed to register that his prosperous brother’s brand of sour-mash bourbon was discounted here by almost 15 percent.

  He double-parked the unit, the first to arrive, and he and McCall approached the liquor store, Marevitch with the old-fashioned, familiar .38 revolver, an empty shell in the chamber under the hammer, making it only a five-shot, and his partner with the twelve-gauge pump gun.

  “Goddamn those signs,” McCall complained. “You can’t see inside.” One that advertised jug wine covered even the glass of the front door. He took his billed cap off, put it under his left arm, and, bending, went along the glass looking for a hole in the paper or an open joint between two panels.

  A poodle-haired white-blond woman stepped out of the beauty salon next door, and Marevitch waved her back inside with his free hand, though all she could look at was the gun in the other.

  He told her not to let anyone else come out until they were told. He spoke into the radio at his epaulet, asking the ETA for backup units. But it was still a long moment before he heard the sirens. Meanwhile, McCall had come back to the obscured front door in his reconnoitering tour.

  “Here they are,” Marevitch said, with reference to their distantly audible support. “Wait up, willya?” He could never understand, looking back, why his partner did not do so. McCall had never been a hotdog or showboat, eager for commendations or promotion. Not to mention that his wife was seven months pregnant.

  Yet Art chose this moment to be foolish for the first time in his career. He returned the cap to his head, extended the barrel of the shotgun before him, and with its muzzle pried a narrow gap between the edge of the glass door and the metal frame of the doorway.

  At his own angle Marevitch could not see into the gap. He was reluctant to shout another warning, lest someone inside be alerted to his partner’s presence. Therefore he was watching silently when McCall’s cap was blown off by a burst of heavy-caliber automatic fire that also pulverized the glass of the door. McCall’s body was twisted and hurled aside by the impact.

  Seeing the spray of blood and brain matter, Marevitch for an instant believed Art had lost the entire back of his head, but finally recognized he was looking at where his partner’s face had been.

  Artie still had a faint heartbeat when they put him into the ambulance, Marevitch accompanying, but it was gone by the time they reached the hospital.

  Lloyd slept well in jail, despite the noise and the lights, which were not extinguished or even dimmed as day became night and vice versa, as he had to assume continued to happen, though there was no window by which to confirm it. If he had had a watch it would surely have been taken from him, as was everything else removable except his underwear and socks, in return for which he received a shirt and a pair of pants dyed navy blue and slip-on shoes with pale canvas uppers and black rubber soles. CITY JAIL was stenciled in white across the back and on the breast of the shirt and, in smaller letters, down the seam of both trouser legs. His cell was furnished with a combination washstand and toilet, with the basin where the water tank of a normal toilet would be, an ingenious fixture new to him, efficient and space-saving. The cot, with a continuous metal frame, was fixed to floor and wall and covered with a gray blanket over a firm pad that was no less comfortable than some of the surfaces he had slept on when free.

  Here in jail he slept better than he had for quite some time on the outside, except when watched over by Molly (guilty memories of whom he tried to suppress now), and he ate breakfast from the compartmented plastic tray with better appetite than he had known for days.

  He was aware that the detectives used certain techniques of manipulation that really had nothing to do with him as an individual except in the role as specimen. He returned the favor, having no personal interest in them or in fact anyone else alive. They were doing what they had to do. He had refused a lawyer despite the judge’s stern advice at the arraignment. He said he had listened to and understood the charges against him, which was not true, and pleaded guilty, which did represent something closer to the truth, if not to the letter thereof, but then what was? The truth was that he had first unloaded the pistol and then gone to shoot Larry with it, and that was an impossibility, but no more of one than that Donna and Amanda had been violently murdered, of course not literally by Larry, who could have had no motive. What Larry was guilty of was consorting with other women while his wife and daughter were alive: for this he deserved to be shot, but Lloyd could not have done that, for they were brothers, hence the unloaded gun. He could never have explained this to the police without compromising Donna’s memory.

  Not long after he had cleaned up the breakfast tray Lloyd was manacled at the wrists and shackled at the ankles and taken by elevator to a room on the floor below.

  The older detective was waiting for him there. “Hi, Lloyd.”

  “Your name is Moody.”

  “Thanks for remembering.” Moody asked the guard to remove the prisoner’s restraints. “How they treating you here?”

  “Okay,” said Lloyd. “All right.” The guard pushed him down onto the chair so the leg irons could be removed.

  “Getting fed?”

  “The food is good.”

  The guard smirked as he unlocked the handcuffs. “You must like the taste of spit.”

  “Knock that off,” Moody said, scowling. The guard left with the clinking hardware.

  There was a window in this room, but behind thick bars the glass was covered on the interior with dense mesh and was barely translucent, masked on both sides with a veneer of filth. The only effective light came from the embedded ceiling fixture inside its protective cage.

  Moody sat some distance back of the table between them, maybe so he could cross his legs. But he uncrossed them now and brought up an attaché case from the floor. “Do I have your permission to tape-record our conversation? I’ll ask you the same question when the tape gets rolling. This is what we have to do nowadays…. And I’m going to level with you, Lloyd. It will probably have to be done all over again if you get a lawyer.”

  “What could a lawyer do for me?” Lloyd asked. “I’m guilty.”

  Moody stopped fiddling with his little machine. “Are you willing to repeat that on the tape?”

  “How could I deny I had the gun when you and the other detective took it away from me? And my brother was there too.”

  “You’re just talking about the gun,” Moody said, as if disappointed. He apparently had started the recorder, because he spoke some ritualistic language at it, identifying himself and Lloyd, along with the time and place.

  “Now, you admit you are guilty of the gun charges.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I was wondering”—Moody writhed in his chair and grimaced slightly—“I was wondering if there’s anything else you would like to admit to doing. Right now, you know? Like they say, get free of the burden.”

  Lloyd frowned. “I can’t think of anything.”

  Moody smiled at him. He was old enough to be Lloyd’s father. Lloyd often failed to get along with other men, but the conflict was never started by him. He usually felt neutral toward them until they began to criticize him. He had nothing against Moody, who had thus far been fair.

  “What we’re really interested in is not so much the gun charges, Lloyd—though they’re serious—but there’s something else you might give us some help with. Matter of fact, that’s why we’ve been looking for you.”

  Lloyd lifted his chin. “I didn’t know that. I wasn’t running away.” Which was true only in the sense that he had not been intentionally evading the police.

  “What did you mean at the funeral parlor?” Moody asked. “You were accusing
Larry of something. His wife and little girl were murdered, had their throats cut, the bedside rug like a sponge, the little girl’s mattress was soaked through to the spring, you wouldn’t think a three-year-old child had so much in her. What kind of person would do a thing like that? Your brother?”

  Lloyd had covered his eyes with his hands. He felt a boiling in his depths, and his fingers were icy against his eyelids. His answer was a sobbing no.

  “No? Then what did you mean?”

  Eventually he lowered his hands. “I don’t know. I didn’t realize what I was saying.”

  “Lloyd,” Moody said in an avuncular tone, chin lowered, “I’m going to have to ask you a question that might upset you, particularly the second part, but I hope you will answer it truthfully. Did liking Donna go a little bit further? Did you ever have any intimate relations with her?”

  Lloyd shook violently. “Oh, my God—”

  But Moody, though still friendly, was implacable. “I want an answer.”

  “For God’s sake, no,” Lloyd said softly, addressing the tabletop.

  “Now, here’s another question I’ve got to ask. How about little Amanda? Did you ever do anything with her you shouldn’t have?”

  Lloyd was less disturbed by a question that was essentially worse, perhaps because it was so absurd. “Of course not. They were my sister-in-law and my niece. I’m no pervert.”

  Moody leaned away, placing his hands on the edge of the table, and asked, almost idly, as if it were not important, “Do you like women?”

  “Yes, of course.” Lloyd paused, and then said, “I’m not a homosexual, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You’re not. Uh-huh.” Moody nodded. “You mean you don’t go to bed with men. But that’s not what I asked. I asked if you like women. I didn’t mean for sex.”

  “Certainly.”

  Moody pushed himself back in the chair and stood up. “I’ve known a lot of gay guys in my time—we’ve even got one or two on the police force nowadays: that’s the law, you know—and I’ll tell you, I have never known any of them to not like women. On the other hand, you take the men who kill females, nobody but females, your Ted Bundys for example: they’re not gay. They’re only interested in women! You might say they’re fascinated by women, else why kill so many? But you can’t say they like women, now can you?” He sat down again, pulling his chair so close that the table made a crease across him, just below the chest.

  “I like women as friends,” Lloyd said, “if that’s what you mean. In fact”—perhaps rashly, he suddenly trusted the detective—“I’ll go so far as to say I prefer them as friends.”

  “Meaning—?”

  “Not for sex. No, I’m not gay. I like sex, but not with girls I like.”

  “Wait a minute, Lloyd,” Moody protested. “You’re getting out of my depth. I’m a cop, not a psychologist. Go over that one again.”

  “Then love is something else,” Lloyd said. “There’s liking, there’s sex, and then there’s love, so-called. At least that’s the way I see it.”

  “Where would murder fit into the pattern, would you say? Take Bundy—you know who he was: a guy who killed lots of girls out West, then went to Florida and killed some more—would he have had these different compartments?”

  Lloyd shrugged. He did not recognize the name; he had no interest in crime. “You’ll have to ask him.”

  “I’d have to go to hell to do that,” said Moody. “They burned him in the Florida chair, couple years back.”

  “For killing women?” Lloyd asked.

  “If they’d done it earlier, some of those girls would have been saved, but he escaped from a courtroom while being tried the first time. What do you think about capital punishment, Lloyd?”

  “In this case it certainly made sense.” He briefly felt more rage than sorrow. “Whoever did that to Donna and Mandy should be put to death.”

  “Even if it was your brother?”

  “Larry didn’t do it.”

  “Did your

  The question had come without warning, though no doubt he should have expected it. He felt as if slapped in the face. “You shouldn’t ask me something like that!”

  “But that’s why we’re here, Lloyd.” Moody’s tone, however, was soothing. “We’ve got to find who did this awful thing and take him off the street, don’t you agree?”

  “How could it be me?” Lloyd cried. “I loved them.”

  “I thought you just said you liked them as family, and then you said there were differences between liking and loving and sex was a third category. So what do you mean now by loving them? If you mean like sisters, which you said they were to you, then that’s a fourth category, isn’t it?”

  Lloyd sat in silence.

  Moody reached for the little black machine. “Let me run it back for you.”

  “No!”

  The detective smiled. “Can listening to yourself be that bad? … Or is that what you meant by love in the first place? Love for your mother, your family members, maybe some close friends, but not ever for what goes on between men and women, which is either just liking or just sex?”

  Lloyd felt nothing but resentment. “I don’t even want to think about it. Out of nowhere you accuse me of this awful—”

  “I haven’t accused you of anything,” Moody said levelly. “Except the gun charges that you admit to.…” He leaned to check the little top window of the recording machine, where Lloyd could see the reels turning. “But let’s get away from the theorizing and into what actually happened. Let’s set up a chronology.”

  Lloyd had not yet recovered his composure, but as this was an essentially neutral exercise, he complied, tracing the events of his morning, staying literal except for the episode at the liquor store, the relating of which would only have complicated matters and perhaps even got him accused of the robbery and the shooting down of the clerk. But in remembering the matter now, so as to evade it, he realized that he had put it utterly out of his mind until this moment. He had never before come so close to the consequences of violence. He must have missed the crime itself by only minutes. Could the loss of memory have been caused by shock? In any event, he had to admit to himself that the lapse was shocking, in another way than the crime.

  But Moody was sharp. “This liquor you had—scotch, was it?—how’d you get it without money? You told me the beef with your boss was about getting the pay they owed you, right away. Or did you have enough for a bottle?”

  “It was one of those half-gallon jugs,” Lloyd explained. “I had it around for a while. It was almost full. I’m not much of a drinker, ordinarily.”

  “You’re not much of a drinker—and you’re not the kind of big heavy guy who might be able to hold a lot—yet you emptied a half gallon of scotch and lived to tell the tale?”

  “Well, that’s just what I don’t know,” Lloyd said. “I couldn’t find the bottle next day.”

  “But you stayed home the whole afternoon and night? If you never left the place, where’d the empty bottle go?”

  “Maybe I didn’t look thoroughly enough,” said Lloyd. “Though the place is so small…”

  “Let’s get this out of the way, Lloyd,” Moody said earnestly. “Mind giving us permission to take a look around your apartment? If a botde’s there, we’ll find it.”

  “I don’t think you need my permission. I paid rent by the week, and the week was up. That’s one of the reasons why I left when I did. I couldn’t have paid.”

  “I understand,” Moody said. “But the legalities are so complicated nowadays that we have to be extra careful. Just give me the address if you will.” He wrote in a black-covered notebook, and while it was still open, he looked up and asked, “Oh, can we get a blood sample from you without going through a lot of hassle? All you have to do is sign a couple permission forms for all of this. Keep it simple. That’s my motto. Don’t you agree? You’re a reasonable guy.”

  Lloyd’s resentment had dwindled away by now. He willingly assented to all
that was asked of him. Not to have done so would be to suggest that he was a criminal rather than somebody whose situation was as yet too complex even for him to understand.

  12

  Even though Lloyd was well aware that Moody could hardly be a friend of his in the true sense of the word, he had not been able to keep from trusting and even liking him a little: that naturally happened when you were treated decently. And the reverse was as true. LeBeau was only doing his job, but it was impossible not to react adversely to him when he started right off on an obscene note.

  “This sister-in-law of yours,” the detective said. “She was a good-looking woman, and I never even saw her alive.” He leaned into the table, as if to receive a confidence. “How was she in bed?”

  Lloyd kept himself under control: this was only to provoke him. “I never touched her.” This was literally true. Though Donna sometimes put her hand briefly over his, when seated near enough, or steered him into a room, her fingers on his arm, and sometimes kissed him hello or good-bye on the cheek, he never touched or kissed back.

  “What did you use, a rubber?” LeBeau asked. “A condom? And then you pulled it off, spilling some gunk on the sheet? Or did you get so excited cutting her that you had to jerk off?” His grin displayed the lines of cruelty from nose to the corners of the mouth.

  “You’re disgusting,” Lloyd said.

  “Then what did you do to little Amanda? I mean, other than using the knife. What did you make her do first?”

  “You can talk that way all you want, but I won’t have any answer except the same one I’ve been giving. I know what you’re trying to do.”

  “Your brother says you always wanted to get in Donna’s pants.”

  Lloyd could not help inwardly cringing at this coarseness, but he said firmly, “No, he didn’t.”

  “How do you know what he says behind your back?”

  “Because Larry hasn’t ever hidden his low opinion of me face-to-face,” Lloyd said. “I’ve got to hand him that.”