Suspects

by Thomas Berger

  “I’ve never done much carpentry,” Lloyd told him, “though I have sold small power tools when I worked at a hardware store. But I can haul things and clean up and so on. I don’t mind work. I’m not a charity case.”

  “All right,” said Joe. “That’s fine with me. Let me think after I finish turning this table leg. You can go in meanwhile and see where you’re gonna stay. It’s the front bedroom. It’s not much, but there it is. Your sack is already in there.” He elucidated. “Molly brought it this morning.”

  Lloyd had forgotten leaving his backpack behind at the motel. In jail he had been provided with the necessary toilet articles except for a razor. On arrival he had been quickly, coarsely shaved, with an electric razor, by a prisoner-barber, the guard impatiently waiting in attendance.

  “Okay,” he now told Joe. “Then I’ll come back and make myself useful.”

  Joe had pulled the safety goggles down over his eyes. “You might want to take a look at that bird I was talking about.”

  Lloyd found the interior of the house, beginning with the kitchen, reasonably clean and in order, at least by his lights, whatever Molly’s feeling. Perhaps the main reason for this was that the furnishings were almost as sparse as they had been in the one-room apartment he had lately vacated. A crudely made table, the top of which was but a sheet of unpainted plywood, sat in the center of a sizable kitchen and was accompanied by two folding chairs. Then up a bare hallway, past a room stacked with cardboard boxes, to the bedroom assigned to him, where nothing movable was to be found but an air mattress on the floor beneath the side window, and the blue cotton blanket heaped upon it. He opened the door to the closet and saw his backpack on its floor.

  Another window looked onto the slanted front porch. He glanced out but could not see the sparrow. Either the bird was at the other end or had finally removed itself to the thickly foliaged grove of trees between Joe’s hideaway and the busy commercial street that was only a hundred and fifty yards away but from which only muted sounds penetrated the greenery.

  In his own company for the first time since leaving the cell, Lloyd was convinced he carried about his person the stench of the disinfectant of which the jail reeked, an odor so strong he wondered why Molly had failed to mention it. But then he considered the possibility that the smell might be the work of his imagination, which was perhaps rebelling against the constraints he had placed upon it since learning of the murders. He crossed the hall to the living room, another place barren of furniture. One wall was painted in pale blue, and newly so, with a drop cloth stretched along beneath it and cans of paint and turpentine nearby, alongside a tray filled with a cloudy liquid in which a roller was soaking. This was the source of the odor, which closer up was so different from that of disinfectant that he must have misidentified it for reasons other than a simple matter of smell.

  He stepped out the door onto the porch. He still did not see the bird but immediately heard a faint whirr of wings and felt as if a fallen ball of cotton had lodged in the thick hair on his crown. When he gingerly reached up not to seize the creature but to verify its presence, the sparrow flew to the second-highest eminence on the porch, the tip of the handle of a push broom leaning against the flaked white paint of the siding. Its eyes were as bright as those of the squirrel in the park across from the jail, but, being smaller, seemed quicker and more sensitive. Aware that the slightest movement on his part, the crooking of a little finger, could send the bird elsewhere, he stood frozen and exchanged stares with it. Even so, in another moment the sparrow winged from the broom shaft to the collapsed end of the porch and landed on the angled floor, where it plodded about on large but frail-looking claws, beak down, poking between the desiccated boards.

  Lloyd was accepted by being disregarded, if not trusted, by a creature so small it had reason to fear all who were larger. Next time he visited the porch he would bring along something the bird could eat: there was no other service he could provide it. For Joe, he could begin by painting the rest of the living room. He yearned to be useful, not simply to submerge himself in a task but to be able to look at an accomplishment when he was done and know it would endure for a while at least no matter what happened to him. He had never yet decided what to think about the dead, whether they could know of the subsequent histories of those they left stranded in life, but if it was possible for Donna to be aware of him, he would like finally to gain the respect she could not possibly have felt for him when alive.

  Before the detectives could get far with a search for the garbage bag discarded by Denarius Glotty—LeBeau was still trying by phone to find a Sanitation Department official who could say for certain exactly which dump was used by the trucks that collected along the seven hundred block of Claussen—Larry Howland called Moody.

  His voice was plaintive. “Can I get over to my house sometime today?”

  “We’re up to our necks—”

  “Can I ask you something? Who bailed Lloyd out of jail, and where is he? He doesn’t have any family but me, and I never knew he had any friends.”

  Being a professional, Moody concealed his surprise and asked, “How’d you find out about it?”

  “I went to see him,” said Larry. “Or tried to. I’m over here now, at a phone in the park across from the jail. Can’t I find out where he is, at least? They won’t tell me a thing.”

  Moody thumbed through his notebook and found Larry’s new address. “Got your phone in yet?” Larry gave him the number. “Does he know you moved?”

  “I don’t know how he could. I haven’t told anybody but you.”

  “And the hotel and phone company and the PO, I bet, and how about your place of business?”

  “He’s not going to hurt me,” Larry said. “I’m not worried. If you really are, then you would have notified me he was out, right?”

  Ignoring the jibe, Moody said, “Sit tight. We’ll get back to you.”

  LeBeau had just hung up his own phone. He was glowering. “How about this? They haven’t—”

  “Lloyd’s been bailed out.”

  “By who?”

  “Not Larry. That was him on the line. He doesn’t know, either.”

  “Does he want protection?”

  “He didn’t seem worried,” said Moody. “Lloyd probably doesn’t know his new address. But we better find where the little bastard is. If he’s in the wind again—!”

  LeBeau called the jail. After a short conversation he lowered the phone and told Moody, “Martha Sparks, two-oh-six West Ether-edge, Clareville.” This was an incorporated village north of the city.

  “She met the bail? Where’s Lloyd?”

  “Care of a Joseph Littlejohn.” LeBeau was reading from his note. The street was one neither detective had heard of, but the ZIP code indicated the middle of town.

  Moody ran the names: neither Sparks nor Littlejohn had a sheet. Down in the car, he took the local street guide from the glove compartment. “Welling… K-fifteen … Welling, Welling…” LeBeau meanwhile had started the engine. Moody shook the folds from the map attached to the guide and was tracking a finger across it. “Here it is, Welling.… Looks like Lloyd suddenly picked up some friends someplace.”

  “He’s still a creep,” LeBeau said.

  * * *

  Marevitch’s worst fears were not realized: the female psychologist was neither in her twenties nor was she especially pretty, at least according to his taste. He preferred fair hair, and furthermore Dr. Andrea Gilbertson looked undernourished to him, the kind who ran in the park in the early morning and ran the risk of being waylaid there and raped.

  Dr. Gilbertson leaned across the desktop and shook Marevitch’s hand in a firm but womanly grasp, not the macho kind, relieving him of another of his fears. She asked him to be seated. He was wearing civilian clothes, a brown serge suit and a shirt and tie chosen for him by his wife.

  Dr. Gilbertson asked him to tell her about Artie’s death.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  When he had finished t
he account, the doctor said, “Thanks. I know that wasn’t easy.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You don’t have to address me so formally, and you don’t have to sit at attention. This isn’t a disciplinary hearing, and I don’t have any authority over you. Authority’s something police officers worry about a lot, I know. And they should. That’s their profession.”

  “Doctor, if I can just say this before we go further: I’m not in any danger of committing suicide or anything like that. I just regret not doing more to stop Officer McCall from endangering his life.”

  “What more could you have done?” Dr. Gilbertson asked. “You warned him to wait for the backup.”

  Marevitch winced. “It wasn’t exactly a warning: I don’t wanna take credit for that. It was more like a suggestion.”

  “But he heard you, didn’t he?”

  “I guess so.”

  “But he decided he knew better, didn’t he?” Dr. Gilbertson said, her eyes bright. “He was a younger man, with less experience, but he knew better.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way,” said Marevitch, staring into his lap.

  “But it’s true, isn’t it?” the doctor asked implacably. “The fact that your partner was killed doesn’t change the truth, does it? Officer McCall was taking a risk that shouldn’t have been taken.”

  “Too much is being made of that, too goddam much.” Marevitch suddenly seethed with emotion. “How could we have known what was going on inside there without looking? The windows, even the door, were all covered with signs advertising cut-rate prices. Somebody might have been dying inside: we wouldn’t know. We don’t have X-ray vision, for God’s sake.”

  Dr. Gilbertson nodded briskly. “I think you’re right. McCall was doing the only thing he could have done in view of the existing circumstances. He wasn’t taking an unreasonable, unprofessional risk. In a situation like that, time counts, doesn’t it? Waiting even a minute or two for the backups to arrive could be too long. The perps might be going out the back door or they might be hurting people, even killing them. Every second matters. He was doing his job. He was doing the right thing. Being a cop is always a risky business.”

  Marevitch’s head had been lowered during her remarks. His face came up slowly now. “That’s what the perps did anyway: they exited the alley door after they killed Artie. There were just two of us; we couldn’t cover the back. The SWATs were only half a block away by then, with a vanload of men with automatic weapons, stun grenades, what-have-you. We didn’t hear a sound from inside. They weren’t shooting anybody at that point. They had already killed everybody in the store and were probably looting the place. Probably if we had just sat tight they would have been there when the SWATs arrived. They might not even have known we were there: we killed the siren before we hit the neighborhood.”

  “Well,” Dr. Gilbertson said solemnly, respectfully, “then it was not the right thing to do.”

  “No.” He was relieved by the admission.

  “What you really feel, underneath it all, is resentment. Artie shouldn’t have done it. He shouldn’t have got himself killed, depriving you of the best partner you ever had.”

  So as to avoid the ultimate capitulation a while longer, Marevitch squinted at her and asked, “How did you know that?”

  “Because a cop’s current partner is always the best he’s ever had. Am I right?”

  “Because you’ve got to rely on him,” Marevitch said in assent, but he was almost annoyed that she knew so much.

  Dr. Gilbertson answered his unspoken question. “My dad was a police officer all his adult life, and so was my late husband, though for a shorter time.”

  Marevitch felt as though a burden had been lifted from him. He looked again at the nameplate on her desk: “Gilbertson.” He could not remember anybody with that name. “Our force?”

  “My dad was Anthony Accordino.”

  “Chief of detectives, what, twenty years back? He passed away some time ago, didn’t he?”

  “He did,” said Dr. Gilbertson. “My late husband, Trooper James Gilbertson, was a rookie in the state police. He was shot through the head by a driver he had stopped for a broken taillight. He didn’t have a partner.”

  “Yeah,” Marevitch said. “I recall: wasn’t that on a state road west of Summitsburg somewhere? About fifteen years ago?”

  “Nineteen,” said the doctor. “Anyhow, that’s why I know more about police work than I learned at college.”

  “I think you do,” Marevitch said with gratitude.

  “But what really matters is if you yourself understand how you feel about what happened the other day at the liquor store. I’ll tell you how I felt when Jim was killed: for a while I hated him for letting them do it to him, for leaving me stranded. And I felt so guilty about feeling that way that for a while I thought I might shoot myself with the gun that, goddamn him, he never drew to save his own life!”

  The sight of her distress after all these years evoked Marevitch’s paternal sympathies. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I’m real sorry—a young man like that. Artie was young, too. His wife is just a kid, with her first baby on the way.” He shook his head vigorously. “But you’re right: I guess I feel deep down pretty much like you say. But that’s while I’m awake. Sometimes when I’m sleeping it’s a different thing.” He told her about his bad dream.

  Dr. Gilbertson wore a faint, sad smile. “Notice who the victim was in your nightmare.”

  “Yeah.” He snorted sheepishly. “Me.”

  “That’s healthy.”

  “It is?”

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  “I see what you mean. I mean, I think I do.”

  “My job is a lot simpler than police work,” Dr. Gilbertson told him, smiling widely for the first time. “It’s just calling attention to the obvious.… You’ll be okay. I can recommend something to help you sleep, if you want.”

  “No, thanks. I might get too fond of it.” Marevitch moved his tongue across his lower teeth. “Uh, you’re going to give me a clean report for the captain?”

  “Count on it.” She rose and put out her hand. “I’m real sorry about your partner. He sounds like a fine officer and a fine man. He won’t be forgotten by those who served with him.”

  “Thanks, Doctor.” He wanted to tell her she was doing her dad proud, but not knowing whether it was his place to make such a comment, he refrained. He could not wait to tell Steph how well it had turned out, but he had no intention of doing the same with Novak, lest the captain think he had had a real problem.

  15

  “All of a sudden,” said the younger detective, the one named LeBeau, “you’ve got all kinds of friends to bail you out and give you a roof over your head and all.”

  “Yeah, well.” Lloyd did not know what he should say: it was not really a question. He stood alongside the detectives’ car. What with the din from Joe’s machines out back, it was only by chance he had seen them getting out of the vehicle after a quiet arrival. He had gone to cut them off before they came in. He did not want Joe’s generosity to him repaid by the intrusion of policemen.

  “Who’s Joseph Littlejohn?”

  “A guy I know.”

  “Is that him making that noise back there? Running machinery?”

  “He’s got a carpentry shop.”

  Moody had not spoken except politely to say, “Hi, Lloyd.” He had not offered to shake hands as he had always done at the jail. Now he suggested that they conduct the conversation in the car. Lloyd was directed to take the front passenger’s seat, with LeBeau behind the wheel.

  LeBeau asked, “Littlejohn an old friend of yours?”

  “He’s not exactly a friend. He’s a guy I work for.”

  “What kind of job is it?”

  “He needed somebody to be his helper. Clean up, carry tools, and so on.”

  “So you get out of jail only a few hours ago,” LeBeau said dubiously, “over on the other side of town, and right away you
’ve got a so-called job over here.”

  Moody leaned close to the back of the front seat. “Lloyd, who is Martha Sparks?”

  Lloyd was half turned in the seat, but it was difficult to see much of Moody at the angle. The name honestly meant nothing to him, and he said so.

  “You don’t know the woman who went bail for you?” It was LeBeau’s harsh question.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Lloyd said. “I guess I forgot her last name. I only heard it once. I never knew her formal first name. She calls herself Molly.”

  “Well, who is she?”

  If they already knew her name, presumably by reason of the bail thing, he could not see how he could keep Molly entirely out of it, but maybe he could restrict their interest in her to the minimum. “She’s a girl I met hitchhiking. She’s not involved in anything you’re accusing me of.”

  “That’s not quite accurate,” Moody said. “It’s not against the law to put up somebody’s bail, but naturally we’re interested in the person who did it in your case, when we never heard of her before and you didn’t seem to have any friends.”

  “And now,” LeBeau chimed in, “you got two real good ones, it looks like, ready to bail you out on a felony charge, even hire you and give you a place to live.”

  Lloyd found nothing to reply to here.

  Moody asked, “That gun of yours, the one that got you in trouble: you wouldn’t have borrowed that from your friend Joe, would you?”

  “I told you, I stole it from a store.”

  “Thing is, all handguns sold by legitimate gun shops have serial numbers which the shop owner keeps a record of,” said Moody. “Yours wasn’t reported stolen or purchased by any shop in the state.”

  “I didn’t say it was this state.”

  “What state was it?” asked LeBeau.

  “Hey, Lloyd!” The distant shout could only have come from inside the workshop.