Suspects

by Thomas Berger

  “You hate each other?”

  “I don’t hate him. He’s my brother.”

  “Half brother.” LeBeau squirmed in his chair. “You just mentioned his low opinion of you.”

  “You can think little of somebody,” Lloyd pointed out, “without hating him. You can also hate somebody while having a high opinion of them, in the sense of them being good at what they do.”

  LeBeau smirked. He was a younger, better-looking, and much fitter man than his partner. “But all this philosophizing is missing the point, though, isn’t it, Lloyd? You don’t want to think about Donna, laying there in all that blood, or little Amanda with her throat cut from ear to ear. It’s easier to bullcrap about who thinks what of somebody.”

  “But it was you just asked me,” Lloyd said. “I was only answering what you—”

  “You know, Lloyd,” the detective said, “we’re doing you a big favor. You got this special private cell all by yourself only because we arranged it. This jail is full up. On the top level they’re three to a cell. If we didn’t ask, they’d put you in with two big black guys, and they’d be putting it to you night and day, at both ends. You complain and they put a shank in your belly.” He showed his dirty grin again. “Of course, maybe you’d enjoy it, for all I know. You like sex with guys, Lloyd? Is that it?”

  This was now getting more ridiculous than offensive. But even though Lloyd was aware that no tape recorder was running now, he knew he would do well to avoid making ironic or sarcastic remarks. “No, certainly not.”

  “Larry’s got quite a taste for tail, hasn’t he? He’s quite the cockmeister, I hear.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Why’s he got this low opinion of you, according to you?”

  “I don’t stick at jobs, for one thing,” said Lloyd. “I guess that’s a good part of it.”

  “Why?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  The detective massaged an earlobe. “It wouldn’t be because you threaten your bosses with knives, would it?”

  “That’s a lie. I’ve already gone over that incident, and the other one, with Moody.”

  “What became of the weapon you showed to the produce manager at the Valmarket?”

  “It wasn’t a weapon!”

  “Where is it now, Lloyd?”

  “I lost it.”

  “Exactly how?”

  “How do you know how you lost something?”

  LeBeau stood up and walked to the dingy, barred window and remained there for a while, his broad tweed back to the table, the kind of thing he certainly would not have done if closeted with a dangerous criminal.… But then Lloyd realized that, dirty and obscured as it was, the glass nevertheless provided a usable mirror image of the room: the detective was being neither negligent nor contemptuous of him.

  Addressing the window, LeBeau asked, “The regular box cutters used at the Valmarket, they don’t cut very deep, do they? Be real hard to kill somebody with one. But you take a utility knife now, with the blade run all the way out and locked, you could sure go deep across a throat, severing the jugular and windpipe and all.” He turned. “Would you confirm that, Lloyd? You’re the expert.”

  “I used it to open boxes,” Lloyd said flatly. “Because it worked better than the regular ones, which were all dull. I didn’t threaten Duncan. He was always looking for an excuse to blame me for something.”

  “Like your brother?”

  Lloyd tried to explain, though it was probably a waste of breath. “Larry never blames me for anything. When you don’t think somebody can do something, you’re not blaming them. You like to see them, because it makes you feel superior by contrast. Larry was always asking me to come around for dinner, also to stay overnight. I could have lived there rent-free, eating off them: that’s the impression I got.”

  “Now there’s brotherly love for you,” said LeBeau. “Why would Larry encourage you to be even more of a leech than you already were?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But the thought must have occurred to you? Or didn’t it? Maybe you’re so pleased with yourself you didn’t even notice.”

  “Hardly.”

  LeBeau returned to his chair. “You and Larry didn’t grow up together.”

  “We didn’t even know each other till a couple years ago.… It was a big surprise to me. I grew up never even knowing I had a half brother. My mother finally mentioned it; I was eighteen or nineteen by then. I guess she hadn’t before because he was not her son. But then she rarely mentioned my father, whom she hated.”

  “Why?”

  “He ran away with some other woman.”

  “You were how old?”

  “Three. I don’t remember him at all.”

  “How’d you finally connect up with Larry?”

  “I just looked him up in the phone book. I just took a chance. I didn’t even know his first name. There were only two Howlands with male names in the city book. I got the right one first time. I asked if he was the son of Willard Howland, and he was.”

  “Would you say with Larry, it’s like father like son?” LeBeau asked archly, wrinkling his brow. When Lloyd failed to respond, the detective said, “But not you, huh? You’re the mama’s boy. Though your mom must not have been too straitlaced. Didn’t she take your old man away from Larry’s mother?”

  “I wasn’t alive at the time,” Lloyd said icily. “I can’t say.”

  “See,” LeBeau said, “what’s interesting is everybody else you’re related to has had a kind of spicy love life. But not you.”

  “I talked to Moody about that,” Lloyd told him. “It should be on the tape. I’m not going to keep repeating it. It doesn’t have anything to do with why I’m here.”

  “That’s not a decision you can make.” LeBeau pointed a finger at him. “Don’t kid yourself, Lloyd. I think you do that a lot, and you get in trouble as a result. I didn’t bring a machine along, and this room isn’t bugged. That’s so you can talk to me straight. You don’t have to perform for the grandstand. It’s just man to man. And I’ll tell you this, I’m tough but I’m fair. You give me the truth and I’ll respect you. But you lie, I’ll be all over you.” The detective cleared his throat and suddenly turned, if not positively friendly, as Moody had seemed at times, then at least receptive. “I’m trying to look at this situation from your point of view. Moody and me, in an investigation we see eye to eye. I’m a little younger, for whatever that means. Sometimes you’ll find a guy who likes to talk to somebody closer to his own age, is all.…” He put his earnest face forward. “Tell me about Donna. And speaking of age, I believe she was a lot closer to your own than Larry. Did the two of you have a lot in common?”

  Lloyd frowned. The change had only been a simulation. “If you’re getting back to sex, no.”

  “That’s a funny answer. I didn’t say a word about sex, yet you had to bring it in.” LeBeau drew back. “I meant the way you two looked at the world.”

  “Current affairs?”

  LeBeau shook his head in annoyance. “Come on, Lloyd. You’re not helping. What does a guy talk about with a woman his own age, or pretty close?”

  “I don’t know about anybody else,” Lloyd answered. “But me, what I talked about to Donna was always myself. Looking back now, I can see how selfish I was.”

  The detective seemed amused, his square jaw moving. “That’s what women usually accuse men of. You’re saying it about yourself?”

  Lloyd wanted to deal with this matter whether his questioner believed him or even listened to him. “It bothers me now. But I still don’t know what I could have done about it even if she had told me her troubles.”

  “What troubles did she have?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I’m telling you. I didn’t want to go into the matter, because I didn’t have the power to change anything. But maybe I should have tried anyway instead of just dodging the issue. Maybe she’d be alive today.”

  LeBeau snorted. “She’s dead becau
se somebody used an edged weapon on her,” he said flatly. “That’s why she’s not alive today: no other reason. How could talking have changed that?” He paused for a moment. “Unless it was you with the weapon. Is that what you’re working up the nerve to tell me? Because otherwise you’re not making much sense.”

  Was this serious or a part of the technique? “All right,” said Lloyd, “suppose she was in some kind of, uh, situation—”

  “That is a very interesting choice of words, but I don’t have any idea of what you mean by it. What kind of situation? Financial? Domestic? Bad health?”

  “I don’t know, is what I’m saying,” Lloyd insisted. “I really didn’t want to know, because if I did, I would feel I should do something about it, and what could I do about anything but probably make it worse?”

  “Why should you feel the need to do something?” asked LeBeau. “She was just your sister-in-law.”

  “Because I was in love with her,” Lloyd said. The admission was for himself. He could never have made it as long as she was alive.

  Marevitch was cleaning out Art McCall’s locker when a burly patrolman named Carl Pingatelli stopped by to tell him to see Captain Novak before leaving.

  “I’m in charge of the collection for Rosie,” Pingatelli said. “I went to school with Artie, starting the sophomore year, when I transferred over from Macon.”

  “You guys were on the same team, year you were all-city champs.” This was common knowledge of the kind that would have been unbearably boring to hear repeated again had McCall not been killed. Had his partner still been alive, Marevitch would have done anything to avoid Pingatelli, but now he was warmed by the encounter.

  The commander’s door was open when Marevitch got there, but he lingered on the threshold until the baldheaded captain looked up from some papers and noticed him.

  “Jack. Come in.… Take a chair.” Novak walked briskly to close the door. Despite his desk job he had never developed a potgut, unlike Marevitch, who had always been on the street. Back behind his desk, the captain scowled across it. “I don’t want to hear you saying Artie’s death was your fault in any way. You just let the investigators draw their own conclusions, see.” He gestured with a fist. “Art made a mistake and he paid for it with his life. He went in there without waiting for backup. He never had SWAT training, goddammit.” Novak pounded the desk, the papers bouncing.

  “He was a brave man.”

  “He was an idiot,” the captain shouted. “What did he accomplish? He got himself killed for nothing. They’ll use him at the Academy as an example of an officer’s judgment at its worst.” Novak struck the desk again. “Is that what we’re here for, to bury our own?”

  “Captain, I’m turning in my shield.”

  “Like hell you are. You’re gonna see the psychologist. You’re gonna take a couple days off. And then you’re gonna come back and get in the car. You got police work to do, and I can’t spare you.”

  Marevitch tried to be angry. “Don’t tell me what I’m going to do.”

  Captain Novak said quietly, “Look, Jack, you’re not all alone in this. I know what it is to lose a partner. Maybe you don’t remember: it happened to me when we were rookies? Joe Malone.”

  Marevitch looked at the floor. “Sure, I remember.”

  “You’re one of the few old guys left,” Novak said. “I can’t run this precinct without you. Besides, you’re the only other Polack.”

  Marevitch was in no mood for levity. “What I should of done was order him back,” he said desperately. “I’m the ranking officer, if it comes down to that. But give your partner an order? Whoever heard of that?”

  Novak stood up. He was a good six-three. “You tell that to the doctor, Jack. That’s where you take it, not to me, because I know it’s crap. She won’t.”

  “She? I got to go see some woman doctor?” He began to unfasten the silver shield on his left breast pocket.

  “Jack, if you give that to me I’m going to stick it up your ass,” Novak said. He smiled expansively. “Hell, wouldn’t you rather have a woman than some little know-it-all pansy with a beard and long hair?”

  “You mean what you said about making an example of Artie? That’s not right, Captain.”

  “I’m putting him in for a citation, Jack.”

  Marevitch lowered his head again. “Thanks, Captain.… All right, I’ll go to this woman doctor.”

  “She might have some good ideas, Jack,” Novak said. “Anyway, it’s out of my hands. It’s department policy, like everything now, like putting in a bigger locker room for the three female officers than we ever had for all the men. Jack, you remember way back when we joined the force, when all a cop had to do was collar the villains?”

  13

  Lloyd Howland and Molly Sparks were sitting on a bench in the spring-green park across from the big gray cube of the municipal jail with its barred windows. He said resentfully, “Did I ask you to bail me out?”

  “All right.” Molly spoke wearily but without apparent offense. “But I notice you didn’t refuse to leave when you had the chance.”

  “I didn’t know what was happening,” said Lloyd. “They don’t tell you anything in there.”

  “Look at him” she said with delight, pointing at the squirrel that sat within a foot of Lloyd’s right shoe, staring up at him with huge eyes seemingly all pupil.

  “I’m sorry,” Lloyd told the animal, which rapidly flicked the bushy tail erected behind its head, “but I don’t have anything to give you.” He scanned the nearby reaches of the park. “See that old lady over there? She’s got stuff.”

  “She just ran him off with her cane,” said Molly. “She’s feeding the birds. We could go over to that deli and buy peanuts for him, unless you just want to sit here all day and gripe.”

  “Not we. We wouldn’t be buying them. You would be.” He turned his head away in chagrin. The movement scared the squirrel into a quick retreat up a tree with bark that was as thickly textured as tread on a tire. “You’re always doing me favors I don’t want. How do you think I feel about you taking your savings for the bail?”

  “I just had to put down the ten percent for the bondsman,” Molly explained. “He pays the rest. I won’t owe any more unless you take off.”

  “I ought to,” Lloyd said, turning back. “Teach you a lesson. I bet that percentage amounted to your whole savings. Admit it!” He spoke so loudly that he briefly caught the attention of the bird-feeding woman across the way.

  “Not quite.” She avoided his eyes.

  “I don’t know how you even found me.”

  “The arrest was on the news when I got back.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  She shook her head at him. “You didn’t expect it to be? The murders of your sister-in-law and niece, and you show up at the funeral with a gun? Why wouldn’t that make the news? Incidentally, the gun was mine.”

  “You don’t think I committed the murders, do you?”

  “Would I be here if I did? But it was you waving my gun around.”

  “That’s all I was charged with.”

  “That’s the only reason I could make the bail,” Molly said.

  He spoke more gently. “You’re too nice a person to hang around with me. Not to mention the kind of trouble it will get you into with your father when he hears about it.”

  “He won’t. It’s none of his business. I did the run and brought the rig back, and I got to go out on another job tomorrow. You can’t come even if you want to, because it’s out of state and you got to stay here or your bail will be revoked and you’ll be considered a fugitive.”

  “You’ve really got me tied down, haven’t you?”

  “Come on, you know that ain’t, isn’t, my idea!” She squirmed on the bench. “You’re free to do what you want.”

  “Just take off, jump bail, and disappear.”

  Her brown eyes were fixed candidly on him. “Sure. If that’s what you have to do, then do it.”

  He gazed acr
oss the park, past the bird woman, over a sweep of unpeopled greensward, to the thronged baseball field at the far side, occupied by scurrying players and bracketed with onlookers in multicolored clothing. The day was warm and sunny but did nothing for his sore heart. He saw no improvement over being in a windowless cell. “I’m not going to do that. I wouldn’t know where to go.”

  Molly twisted again. “I’m never going to ask you about your problems,” she said. “But I want you to know that if you ever do want to talk about them, I’ll listen, and I won’t offer any advice. But I have thought a lot about you, and I think I can tell a good guy from a bad.”

  “Please,” Lloyd said uncomfortably. “There’s not always a distinction.… Here’s something you should know about me. It’s only fair. I don’t—“ He looked away. “This is hard to say so it won’t be misunderstood. It’s nothing against you, but I’m not interested in a romantic attachment.… But ‘interested’ still isn’t the right word.” Neither was “impotent.” Yet without using it he nevertheless, rejecting the claims of pride, employed a term that would probably be taken as synonymous. “‘Incapable’ would be better.”

  “All right,” she said without a change of expression. “We’re not making a deal. I’m just trying to be a friend. You can look at it in any way you want, except as pity.”

  He was grimly amused. “What if pity’s just what I want?”

  “Oh.” Molly frowned as if serious, then quickly proved she was not. “Then get yourself another sucker, buster. You’ve got all you can squeeze out of this monkey.”

  Lloyd assumed she was simulating the dialogue heard in an old movie from the days when there were ladies and gentlemen and both wore hats. “That’s what you should have said a long time before now.”

  “I might have, except I wanted my gun back.” She still seemed to be joking.

  “I guess they’ll have to give it back when this is all over,” said Lloyd. “No real crime was committed with it. I unloaded it and threw the bullets away—”

  She groaned. “You know what bullets cost?”