The Interrogation

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Nobody likes a twelve-hour shift,” Eddie said. Again he thought of Laurie. Her sickness. Her fever. The way she’d vomited through the night. Then his mind shifted to her mother, snatched from the secretarial pool, screwed, and tossed aside. He’d scooped something out of her, the guy who did that, so that she’d collapsed from the inside, abandoned her husband and daughter, leaving nothing behind but the lingering smell of her afternoon gin.

  The terrible loss that had been inflicted upon his life abruptly swept down upon Eddie Lambrusco, a grown man who couldn’t hold on to a wife or stay home with a sick daughter or say “Go fuck yourself” to anyone at all, not even the little punk who sat whining at his side.

  “So, you getting out?” he asked.

  “Okay, okay,” Siddell answered sourly. He grasped the door handle, jerked it up, and pulled himself out of the truck, leaving the door open behind him.

  “Fucking wimp,” Eddie growled under his breath. He leaned over and violently jerked the door closed, imagining Siddell’s right hand smashed by the impact, screaming for him to open the door, release him, gazing in horror at his mangled fingers when he did. The only problem was that such vengeful fantasies were brief, and in their wake Eddie felt only smaller and more powerless.

  In the wide rearview mirror, he watched as Siddell lumbered toward the bulging cans. Christ, he thought, what a lousy break. A twelve-hour run ahead of him, every second of it with a rich kid who’d be his boss in five years, another jerk he’d have to answer to. He imagined Terry Siddell behind a big desk, dressed in a suit and tie, pinkie ring on his finger, puffing a big cigar as he handed him the pink slip. Sorry, Eddie, but we just can’t keep you on.

  In the old days he’d been partnered with Charlie Sweeney, and the two of them had laughed the night away. If Eddie hadn’t lost his job with the city, they’d have still been partners, gotten the work done, cleaned up the whole area around police headquarters, the park, Briarwood, where the big Dumpsters bulged with the dreadful garbage of Saint Vincent’s Hospital, and finally the crumbling tenements of Cordelia. They’d have laughed their way through the whole damn thing because Charlie was a jokester, a guy who made faces and could imitate the people he saw on the street. Charlie moved the clock forward one gag at a time, lightened the load for everybody else. Every shift run, Eddie decided, needs a comedian, and he knew that without Charlie, tonight would be long, the work arduous, and there’d hardly be a moment when he wasn’t brooding about Laurie, chewing at the fact that he wasn’t with her, despising himself for leaving her alone.

  A clatter sounded behind the truck, the intentionally vicious noise Siddell always made, rolling the cans back and forth and banging them against the metal sides of the truck as if trying to get even with Old Man Siddell for making him work for his supper. Amazing, Eddie thought, what some guys feel entitled to. He reached in his pocket and drew out the battered pocket watch he’d inherited from his father, a laborer’s timepiece with its chinks and scratches and slightly skewed hands that circled turgidly around the yellowing dial. After a lifetime, he thought, this.

  Siddell groaned as he crawled back into the truck. “Okay, let’s get out of here.”

  Eddie glanced in the mirror. A trail of garbage lay strewn across the wet street. “Next time try to get some of it in the truck, Terry,” he said, relishing what he knew would be only a fleeting moment of authority over Terry Siddell.

  Siddell’s lips jerked into a scowl. “Fuck you, asshole.”

  Eddie gave no indication that he’d heard Siddell’s insulting reply. After all, what could he do about it? Punch the little shit’s lights out and get fired for it? No. He couldn’t do that. He’d gone that route before, been fired by the Parks Department and the Sanitation Department and even the private carting service where he’d worked before being hired by Old Man Siddell. No, he had to control himself now. For Laurie’s sake. Because she needed things.

  And so he swallowed his rage, grasped the black knob of the gearshift, stomped the clutch, and stirred the truck back onto the deserted avenue, his eyes locked on the street ahead, where, at the end of it, the great stone facade of police headquarters loomed.

  As the truck lurched forward, Eddie let his gaze drift up the side of the building. On the top floor, he could see a solitary figure in a lighted window, staring down at the darkening street, head bowed, shoulders slumped, as if beneath a weight he could not carry anymore.

  6:12 P.M., Office of the Chief of Detectives, 227 Madison Street

  Chief of Detectives Thomas Burke peered through the arched window of his sixth-floor office, hands clasped behind his back, staring down at the city’s tangled streets. At the corner of Madison a garbage truck made a clumsy rocking turn, a spume of trash blowing behind it. Is that what dooms us in the end, he wondered, a million small neglects?

  He had no answer to this question, and he looked out across the city, where lights had begun to flicker in the distant apartment houses as the day workers returned to their rooms like birds to their nests. The image, he knew, was from one of his son’s poems. What had Scottie called the city? A rookery of scars.

  He closed his eyes briefly, tried once again to fathom his son’s fall. Where had it come from, Scottie’s utter lack of nerve, the way he’d curled into a ball of defeat and let life squash him like a can in the street? A little spine would have saved him, Burke thought, but there’d been no sign of that. No sign of muscle, sinew, the strength required to take a punch. He thought of Rocky Marciano, the championship bout that was coming up. That’s what Scottie had needed, a touch of the fighter in his soul. But Scottie had hit the mat in the first round, and never gotten up.

  When Burke opened his eyes again, the great bridge rose mutely before him, its stone ramparts towering above the unreflecting waters of the harbor. The bridge was often lost in spooky fogs, but this evening, as night fell, it glowed in a pale blue light. Burke thought of ghost ships in the mist, of the coffin boat that had disgorged some half-starved ancestor at the harbor door a century before, a scullery maid or landless tinker. Scottie had failed to grow the thick hide and sharp fangs of these wolfish forebears. If subjected to some final interrogation, Burke wondered what answer his son would give to the one question he should have asked him. Why didn’t you fight back?

  A knock at the door.

  He turned to face it. “Come in.”

  It was Commissioner O’Hearn, tall and erect in the doorway, all but gleaming in his dress uniform, the police-brass equivalent of a tuxedo. His luxurious black coat was folded neatly over his crooked arm, his cap held delicately in recently manicured fingers, and in that pose the Commissioner looked decidedly aristocratic, like an old European military man, trusted adviser to the Kaiser or the czar. Only the lilt of his voice betrayed his shanty-Irish roots.

  “Did you ever figure, Tom, that I’d end up wearing a monkey suit like this?” the Commissioner asked.

  “No, never,” Burke replied.

  What he remembered were two kids from the slums, throwing rocks in the river, leaping off the pylons, racing across the bridge fast as the wind that hummed through its steel cables, playing them like massive harp strings. They’d sneaked into movie houses, stolen apples from peddlers’ carts, both of them orphaned by fathers dead from drink and raised by mothers increasingly bitter, looking every day more ragged and used up, like the clothes they washed. Then the Dealer of the Cards had unexpectedly switched the deck and sent them Officer Horace Miles, the beat cop who’d taken two street urchins under his wing, offered a way they might escape the iron grip of Harbortown. You two don’t have to end up like the rest of this scum, you know.

  “I’ve never learned to like them, Tom.” The Commissioner shook his head. “These fancy balls and dinners. Me? I’d rather go home, put my feet up, maybe listen to a Patti Paige record, smoke a cigar. That’s my idea of a good way to spend the evening.”

  It was a lie, but Burke let it go, for it was harmless enough, a boy from the slums claiming a
gainst all evidence that some part of him remained loyal to the people who still toiled there. In fact, as Burke knew, the Commissioner felt nothing for the old neighborhood. Once lifted from the pit, he’d never looked back into its teeming depths. Even so, Burke could say nothing against the life his old friend had forged. Francis O’Hearn had worked hard to get where he was, a detective shield at twenty-six, Commissioner Dolan’s hand-picked successor by thirty-six, Commissioner himself a short eleven years later. But more than that, Francis had put three daughters through college, a doctor, a lawyer, and an aide to the mayor. He’d reared strong, determined children, kids with grit and fortitude, and in Burke’s view, once it could be said of a man that his children bore his steel, little could then be said against him.

  It was a badge of honor he would never wear, Burke knew. He thought again of Scottie, this son of his who was a sneak-thief, beggar, dope addict, mercifully dying now, soon to be cremated. A fitting end, he thought, to a life reduced to ashes.

  “It’s the shindigs they throw at the art museum I have the most trouble with,” the Commissioner added with a hearty laugh. “It’s something the nuns never taught us, isn’t it, Tom, that you need the rich if you want to get anything done.” He drew in a deep breath. “I’m afraid I don’t have the best of news for you tonight. This fellow we have. He’s got to be released by six tomorrow morning. The D.A. says that’s all the time we’ve got. You can’t hold this guy forever, Tom, without some evidence. So I’m having him brought here for a final interrogation. He should arrive within the hour.”

  “Another interrogation won’t do any good,” Burke said. “We’ve been over everything with him time and again. All we get is evasions, denials. How he didn’t do it, has no idea who did.”

  The Commissioner draped his uniform coat over one of the chairs in front of Burke’s desk and lowered himself into the other. “True enough. But sometimes even the toughest of them will crack under the right questioning. You’ve seen that, Tom. You know what a good interrogation can do.”

  Burke well knew what a good interrogation could do, hammer home the incriminating evidence, wind the suspect in coils of lies and contradictions, force him to see under the ruthless light of inquisition that there was no escape from what he’d done. But he also knew that no interrogation could ever find the toxic spring that had finally boiled out into the world, poisoning everything it touched.

  “Are you telling me that you see no purpose in any further questioning of this fellow?” the Commissioner asked.

  “No, I just think that there are limits to what we can get out of him,” Burke answered.

  “That’s the sin of despair, wouldn’t you say, Tom?”

  “You sound like a seminarian, Francis.”

  “Do I? But it was you who once considered the priesthood, wasn’t it, Tom?”

  “Not for long,” Burke said. He shook his head. “Look, what we really need is evidence. Something that physically links Smalls to the murder. Without it, we can’t—”

  “The man’s a child killer, pure and simple,” the Commissioner interrupted. “We found the murder weapon in that hole he lived in, remember?”

  Burke remembered. It was a two-foot coil of wire with a strand of long dark hair clinging to it, but otherwise washed clean by rain and mud, with no prints of any kind to link it to Albert Smalls. Nor had it actually been found “in that hole he lived in,” but a full fifty feet away, near a worksite littered with pipes, bricks, other strands of the same rusted wire, any one of which could have been snatched from the ground, used to strangle a child, then tossed back into the debris.

  “I don’t want this fellow back in the park, Tom,” the Commissioner said resolutely.

  Burke was in the park now, the trees that bordered it in a thick green wreath, the gravel paths that wound through it, a playground filled with laughing children, and finally the child they’d found in the grass near the duck pond, her dark hair wet with the rain that had washed over the city, a trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth.

  “What I’m telling you is, we’ve got to get results,” the Commissioner added.

  “We’ll do our best,” Burke said. “Pierce and Cohen know the case inside out.”

  The Commissioner adjusted the cuffs of his dress uniform. “Cohen has never seemed all that serious to me.”

  “He’s gotten more serious since he got back from the war,” Burke told him.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” the Commissioner said, although he did not seem convinced. He glanced at his watch, rose, and gathered his coat and cap. “You’ll be here at headquarters too? During the interrogation?”

  Burke knew this was not a question, but an order. He nodded. “I have to go over to Saint Jude’s, but I’ll be back by the time Pierce and Cohen get here.”

  “Saint Jude’s?” the Commissioner said with a chuckle. “Is it hopeless cases you’re praying for tonight, Tommy?”

  Burke felt the rookery stir beyond the window, heard a million hapless crimes. “Every night,” he said.

  6:23 P.M., 212 Morgan Street, Apartment 7

  A plain white roll, boiled ham, a slice of cheese, a dab of mustard. His daily bread.

  Detective Jack Pierce ate hunched over a square table balanced on aluminum legs, one of the few pieces of furniture he’d bought for the place during the three years since his wife had left him. In the background, the radio played scratchily, tuned to the low-watt station Jenny had preferred and Pierce had never bothered to change, so that it simply droned on, a memory both of her and of the daughter they had lost.

  He snatched the evening edition from the chair beside the table and glanced through it. Charlie Chaplin was heading back to America and Nixon was trying to explain some cash he hadn’t told Ike about. There were ads for Coca-Cola and Kaiser cars and a new kind of toaster that popped the bread out when it was done. So what? he thought, folded the paper, and tossed it on the chair.

  He’d turned thirty-three a month before, but there’d been no party. He’d been unable to celebrate anything since Debra’s death, but at the same time he was aware that he could not drift forever in his grief, live the way Jenny did, with Debra’s murder always in his mind. And yet, after four years he couldn’t pull himself out of it. Even Costa’s drowning death a year after the murder had done nothing to relieve his burning sense of loss. At times he’d tried to imagine Costa’s stubby fingers clawing desperately at the wooden pylons as he labored to pull himself from the oily water, but he could find no solace in the final terror of the man who’d slaughtered his daughter. Instead, Costa’s death had faded, and in its place he’d seen Debra in the summer grass, then the dank basement where Costa had maintained his museum of child murder, files bulging with newspaper clippings, photographs taped to poster board, even a “toy” scaffold just high enough to hang a child, a hideous contraption Costa had dismissed with a snicker as a “little joke.”

  “When I think of children,” Costa had freely told police during his first interrogation, “I like to think of them as dead.” Then, with a mocking smile, “There’s no law against having a sick mind, is there?”

  No, no law at all. And so, with no evidence against him, Nick Costa had been set free, and in that instant Pierce had felt a fiery bitterness consume him, charring everything that had ever promised peace.

  Pierce washed the last of the sandwich down with a gulp of stale coffee, then lit a cigarette and thought of Anna Lake. During the last few days, the terrible thing they had in common, a murdered daughter, had created a bond between them. More than anything, Pierce wanted to keep the promise he’d made to her during the first days of the investigation, a pledge that her daughter’s killer would not go free.

  The phone jangled.

  “Hullo.”

  It was Chief Burke, his voice hard and authoritative. “Pierce, you’re needed downtown. Be here by seven. Do you know where Cohen is?”

  “At home, probably.”

  “Get in touch with him. Tell him
to be downtown by seven.” A pause. “Prepare to stay the night.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pierce said. “Is this about …?”

  But Chief Burke had already hung up.

  6:31 P.M., 1272 Hilton Street, Apartment 5-B

  Norman Cohen trudged up the stairs more slowly than he liked or wanted to admit, hoping the young woman who lived in Apartment 4-A had not peeked out the peephole in her door to see him standing, wheezing, on the fourth-floor landing. He put Ruth Green’s age at somewhere in the mid-twenties, and he thought that had she known his true age, forty-one, she might have stifled any further interest in him, never again stopped on the landing or paused to chat when she met him on the street.

  Ruth Green had no idea of her power, Cohen thought as he glanced down the stairs, hoping to see her materialize there, beautiful as she peered up at him, hesitantly speaking the words he now imagined. I’ve been thinking about you. He shook his head, embarrassed by his adolescent yearning. Fantasy, he told himself as he turned from the empty stairs and slid the key in the lock. You’re living in a dreamworld, Norm.

  He walked into the kitchen and placed on the table the bag of groceries he’d just lugged up the stairs. Then he opened the small, rumbling refrigerator. Someone had left a beer from the card game two nights before. The first swig went down cold and easy, the second had no taste. How some of the guys on the job could down a dozen beers in a single sitting at Luke’s Bar amazed him. A goy thing, he decided, remembering how Ralph Blunt had stared at him glumly from the other end of the bar. You people don’t like beer, huh, Norm?

  You people.

  Cohen remembered the things he’d seen at the Camp’s liberation, skeletal faces behind barbed wire, mounds of bodies bulldozed into a pit. Had they not liked beer? he wondered. Is that why they’d been killed in such vast numbers, because in a few insignificant ways they had been different from their neighbors? And if this were their only crime, was there nothing to prevent their wanton slaughter?