Suspects

by Thomas Berger

  “Wrong!” Keller made it a little triumph. “Her side was pointed this way.”

  “You were at right angles?” Moody sighed. “She did this just once? Showed the top, then the bottom?”

  “That was the worst of it,” Keller said, leaning forward to cup his kneecaps again. “She did it over and over.”

  “She was touching her toes, Mr. Keller. Doing exercises. Haven’t you seen that on TV?”

  “No,” said the older man. “They always wear those special suits for that. She was naked, I tell ya. And you ain’t heard what she does next. She lays down, across the bed, pointing my way, and she spreads her legs. I swear! She spreads them wide as they could go.” Eyes gleaming, he demonstrated with his outflung arms. “I shouldn’t have to look at things like that.”

  “That’s another exercise.” Moody raised his voice. “Tightens the thigh muscles. Women worry about their thighs, especially as they get older, but this poor girl never even got to thirty. Donna Howland was exercising in the privacy of her bedroom, while her little girl was taking a nap in the next room.”

  Keller scowled. “I know what I saw! And not for the first time by any means. But those people were trash. I never thought well of them.”

  “You did this peeping every day?”

  “I wouldn’t call it peeping. I wouldn’t put it like—”

  “What would you do, play with yourself while you were watching?” Keller showed what he wanted to be taken as incredulous outrage, but Moody needled him further. “Man your age, how’d you get it up?”

  “Listen, you,” Keller began, but he stopped abruptly and changed his tone. “You got it all wrong. Nobody ever wants to hear what I.…” His eyes wandered as if looking for a point on which to focus.

  Moody decided to strike without further preparation. “I’ll be glad to listen to you. Just tell me how you killed her.”

  Keller’s gaze fixed on an arbitrary point on the carpeted floor between them. He was sadly reproachful. “I don’t know where you get off talking to me like that. I thought we were friends. I been cooperating all along. You come into my house and talk to me like I’m dirt. It ain’t fair.”

  “How much did you have to drink before you went over there?”

  Keller’s indignation now seemed real enough. “I haven’t taken a drink in fifteen years.” He swept a forearm at the surrounding room. “Go ahead, look for a bottle. You won’t find none.”

  “I know you did it, Gordon. I just need the details.”

  Keller was slowly shaking his grizzled head and smiling vaguely into the distance. “You got quite an imagination.”

  “Then how about giving me some facts?”

  “She was the one exposing herself. I was the innocent bystander.”

  “You tell your wife about this?”

  The man snorted. “Hardly.”

  “Jealous woman?”

  Keller glanced furtively toward the stairway. “There was this girl, years ago, did some baby-sitting. I come home early. I thought my wife wasn’t due back yet, and I, well, why go into it? Anyway, she come in, and she ran her out with a butcher knife.”

  “What were you doing with the girl?” Moody asked.

  “Oh, a little touching’s all.” He widened his eyes at Moody. “I swear.”

  “She blamed the girl, not you?”

  Keller silently shrugged.

  “Are you saying she spotted you peeping at Donna Howland and went over there and cut her throat?”

  Keller stared dully at him. “I’m not saying anything.”

  Moody stood up. “Let’s go up and ask your wife about it. I want to look at that bathroom window, too.”

  “No, wait a minute,” Keller said. “I don’t wanna give you the wrong impression.” He added, in a weaker voice, “My wife’s a little off, but she’s not like that.”

  “Well, you’ve succeeded in putting the idea in my mind,” said Moody.

  “Wait a minute. She’s on medication.” Keller rubbed his jaw, from the neck forward. “I made that up. She never went after any girl with a knife.”

  “Was there really a girl?”

  Keller was silent awhile. “Maybe not exactly like that.”

  “Maybe like some other girl who forgot to close her blinds all the way?”

  “Just give me a minute,” Keller mumbled, then in a wailing tone said again, “Nobody will ever listen.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Who will take care of her?”

  “People who might do a better job than you,” said Moody. “Doctors.”

  Keller shook his big face. “She won’t go for that. She don’t think she’s that bad.”

  “Maybe she’s right. We won’t know till she’s examined, will we?”

  Keller’s exploratory finger now found the long furrow that ran from the right lobe of his nose to the corner of his mouth. “I just got fed up, see? I know I made a mistake, I realize that.”

  “Tell me about it.” Moody was trying to hold the line between overeagerness and a show of indifference. He had been taken entirely by surprise. He might have been embarrassed, a detective with his experience, had it not been that the same experience made him professionally immune to such an emotion.

  “I’m no pervert,” Keller said. “You got to understand that.”

  “If you mean you don’t have a record,” said Moody, “I know.”

  “You already checked?” The thought seemed to startle the man.

  “That’s routine in a homicide case where the perpetrator isn’t immediately identified. We run all the near neighbors, relatives, coworkers, et cetera, through the computer.”

  “I’ve had a few parking tickets.”

  “They don’t show up.” He added, “Peeping Toms don’t get a sheet either unless somebody brings charges, and that’s rare.”

  Keller became agitated and slapped his thighs. “I wasn’t worried about that! It would of been my word against hers. I got a good reputation in this town long before those people showed up. I always been fair with everybody, paid my bills on time, give to every charity that asks….” He hid his face in his hands for a moment, and when he next revealed his features they were blurred, his cheeks ashen, his mouth an open, seemingly toothless oval. He moaned, “Oh my God, I can’t, I can’t.…”

  “Sure you can,” said Moody, as if only stating a fact. “Go minute by minute, take your time. Just tell what happened. You don’t have to analyze anything: that would only complicate matters at this point. You can go back and do that later.”

  Suddenly Keller was transformed, for no apparent reason. He said blandly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you do, Gordon, and you really want to tell me and get a burden off your shoulders. I’ve seen you watching us next door, afraid what we’d find out. That’s over now.”

  All at once Keller let the air out of himself with a long exhalation.

  Moody brought out the leather folder that held his shield and, in the pocket under it, the Miranda card.

  Keller seemed to receive a certain confidence from the reading of his rights and in a strong voice answered where asked. Yes, he understood; no, he didn’t need a lawyer to “tell my side of it” at this time.

  Moody did not like the restrictive phrase. “Just tell what happened,” he said, knowing full well that nobody ever was capable of that.

  19

  Moody answered the knock at the front door.

  It was LeBeau, looking somewhat miffed. “Old Mary Jane came out and told me you went in here. I was about ready to go back downtown.”

  Moody stepped out onto the porch. In an undertone he said, “Keller is confessing.”

  “Keller?”

  “I ran into him by accident. One thing led to another, and it suddenly hit me that he did it. So I just asked him.”

  “Christ.” But professional that he was, Dennis had already lost his look of surprise by the time he was inside the house.

  “Hi, th
ere,” Keller said affably, rising from the couch, preparing to shake hands. But LeBeau stayed back and acknowledged the greeting only with a shift of the shoulders.

  “Mrs. Keller is upstairs, getting ready for another TV show,” Moody told his partner.

  “Five Star Report,” Keller specified. “Bill Arbogast and Natalie Featherstone.”

  “Okay,” said Moody, taking his chair again as Keller sat down. LeBeau remained standing. “What we’re going to do, Mr. Keller, is take down your story.” He displayed his notebook again. “Just tell me everything the way you remember it. You’ll get a chance to look at all this later on, make sure it’s accurate as possible. But first we just want to get an idea of what happened.” Moody liked a suspect to believe that what would finally go on record was only an edited and polished version of a confession, whereas of course the Miranda warning was literal: every utterance of a person under arrest belonged to the state and would be used, if possible, always to his detriment, even though he might be confessing voluntarily. Fine moral tolerances were of no value in law enforcement.

  “That’s only fair,” Keller said. He crossed his long legs in the other direction and conspicuously moistened his lips. He raised his chin, tightening the loose skin there, and closed his eyes. Then he uncrossed his legs, placing both big shoes flat on the floor. He stared into the middle distance through slitted eyes.

  “Start anywhere you want,” said Moody. “You were at the upstairs bathroom window?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “What time would that have been?”

  Keller shrugged. “Whenever, you know.” He frowned at Moody. “You said the details could be left till later.”

  “We need an approximate time.”

  “You tell me,” Keller said, with the rising inflection of indifference, but then he appealed to LeBeau with a half-smile.

  Dennis rejected him. “This isn’t a joke, Mr. Keller.” He moved closer to the man by one step. This was intended to be threatening, now that Keller did not expect him to be potentially a friend. A suspect’s home was not usually the optimum venue for an interrogation, but Moody had to take the matter of Mrs. Keller into consideration. He believed her husband might at this stage refuse to cooperate if taken downtown. Of course, he might do the same if the TV people arrived before the detectives had heard even a preliminary account of his role in the homicides.

  Moody leaned forward. “You get your act together, Gordon, or we’re gonna go right down and book you this minute, and I tell you this: you won’t get out on bail if we do that. Give me a time.”

  “We don’t eat till whatever show she watches is off at twelve-thirty. Then she opens a can of soup and so on. I always help her with the dishes, and after that’s done I generally—”

  “How long’s it take you to eat your soup? Fifteen minutes, quarter hour?”

  “Oh,” Keller said, “hour, hour ‘n’ a half.”

  “For soup?”

  “Well, there’s more than that! I got a partial dental plate, and I eat slow. I also drink a lot of coffee, and by time I’ve helped her with the dishes, I need to go upstairs and pee.”

  “Use the upstairs bathroom, do you?”

  “Well, yes,” Keller said. “I could use the downstairs toilet, but that’s next to the kitchen and it seems nicer to go upstairs. So while I’m up there, while I was drying my hands I happened to see out the window and I look down and there she is, over there, doing what I said she was in the habit of doing. You say exercises, because you never saw her the way I did. Oh, she was the bold one inside her bedroom. She wasn’t the kind who would take sunbaths in the yard, wearing skimpy little bikini bathing suits, not her! That was all to make the public think she wasn’t that sort. Her husband was away a lot. If you ask me, he don’t even like women. Seen that walk on him? If my boy still lived here, I wouldn’t let him talk to him, I don’t mind saying that. I wouldn’t want him talking to her, for that matter.”

  “Mrs. Donna Howland was nude?” Moody asked for the benefit of his partner, who had not heard any of Keller’s foregoing remarks.

  “Naked without a stitch. She was laying across the bed, legs spread far as they would go.”

  Moody made some jottings with a ball pen that was only intermittently inking the words. “You’re sure she was looking at you?”

  “Hell yes.”

  The pen had warmed up by now and was writing legibly. He waved it. “Go on.”

  “I got fed up,” said Keller. “I’m no prude, but there’s a limit.”

  “Her blinds were open?” LeBeau asked.

  Keller stubbornly shook his head. “I ain’t gonna go through it all again. I explained it already to”—he hesitated for a moment, then found the name—“Mr. Moody here.”

  Moody blinked. “He claims the slats were turned so you could see down through them if looking from above.” He directed Keller to proceed.

  Keller began, “I’m a broad-minded individual, but—”

  “What did you do next?”

  “What I went over there to do was just talk to her, I swear. I didn’t want to make too much of it. I was willing to keep it between me and she. Imagine if that old Jones woman had something like this on her? It’d be all over town next day. These people’d be run out of the neighborhood. I didn’t want that. I’m a fine person, you ask anybody.”

  “Let me get this straight,” asked LeBeau. “You say she was heating you up on purpose, knowing you were watching? You didn’t go over there with the idea of getting some, did you?”

  Keller appealed to Moody. “I thought you wanted to hear my side of it. How come he’s interrupting with his dirty mouth?”

  “The detective is trying to get to the truth,” Moody said. “Like me, Gordon. Did you make sexual advances to her?”

  Keller seemed to be grinding his teeth behind clenched lips. “You’re all alike in thinking the worst, ain’t you? A man like me, do I look like a sex maniac?”

  “You walk over to eleven forty-three. What’s your wife doing at this time?”

  “Watching TV in the living room.”

  “You come right down the stairs over here?” LeBeau asked. “Tell her where you were going?”

  “She gets into her soaps, she won’t pay attention to nothing else.” Keller said this with a smile, which faded when Moody put him at the Howland threshold.

  “Back door or front?”

  “Back.”

  “You went through to the kitchen in this house and out your own back door. Across the yard to eleven forty-three?”

  “Correct.”

  “Just walked in over there?”

  LeBeau’s question exasperated Keller. “I don’t barge into other people’s homes without knocking. You can’t seem to understand you’re not dealing with some lowlife. I might of made mistakes, but I’m not trash.”

  “So you knocked. Then what?”

  Keller began to agitate his head. “She come to the door after a while.”

  “With clothes on?”

  Keller smirked. “No.”

  “Stark naked?” LeBeau asked with obvious and menacing skepticism. “I don’t believe it.”

  “All right!” Keller wailed, shrinking against the cushions. “She had some kinda bathrobe on, but it was real skimpy, thin material, and I could see everything she had.”

  “Must have looked pretty familiar to you, just at closer range,” said Moody. He now had the man’s number and did not worry about offending him into silence. Keller’s self-professed need was to be heard: needling him would only make him more desperate to talk. “She look hotter close up, or worse?”

  “She turned my stomach! If she don’t get enough from that queer she’s married to, it ain’t my problem!” Keller lowered his voice. “I didn’t say that. I was polite, but I just told her straight I couldn’t put up with it any more. She pretends she don’t know what I’m talking about. She acts like I’m going to put my hands on her.”

  “Where are you now? Por
ch or in the house?”

  Keller stared at the floor. “Wait a minute,” he said as if to himself. “I’m inside by now. I remember there was a screen door between us, but then it wasn’t there any more.”

  “You opened it and came in.”

  “I never would of done that without being asked, I guarantee.”

  LeBeau sneered at him. “Why would she have invited you in?”

  “Because I’m a neighbor,” Keller loftily replied.

  Moody stared at him a while in silence. “So?”

  “Oh,” Keller said. “Okay.…” His heavy eyebrows were twitching. “I’m trying to remember.….” “How’d you get in the bedroom?”

  Keller nodded once. “Oh, sure. Well, way it happened was…”

  “She run in there to get away from you?” asked LeBeau.

  Keller extended his hands, long wrists emerging from the sleeves. “She had the wrong idea from the first.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Moody.

  Some blood colored Keller’s cheeks. “Like it was me who done the wrong thing. I mean, here I am, the injured party.”

  “She was scared of you?”

  Keller turned his head away, snorting, and came back to say, “Yeah, me, at my age. What am I gonna do to her?”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing!”

  “You killed her with a blow to the head,” LeBeau said, “then sliced her from groin to breastbone.”

  Keller was heavily reproachful. “I mean sex. You know that: it was in the paper she wasn’t touched, for heaven’s sake.”

  Moody asked, “How’d you come to hit her in the head, and with what?”

  “Wish you could of seen it for yourselves.” Keller looked from one to the other. “Even then you would of found it hard to believe.” He silently requested affirmation from each detective, but getting none, he hardened his nose. “Woman can claim anything, all you got’s your word, and who will take that these days?” His jaw was shivering above his turkey neck. “She was gonna call the police! Can you top that? I says I was the one who should call ‘em. She runs in the bedroom. She heads for the phone on the little table there. Nobody’s gonna listen to me. I knew that. I hit her with a thing from the dresser.”