The Interrogation

by Thomas H. Cook

  No answer to these questions came, of course. Nor did Cohen expect any. His father, the great rabbi and respected leader, had told him that in no uncertain terms. God is not one of your criminals, son. He will not subject Himself to interrogation.

  He parted the blinds and scanned the street below, now thinking he might get a glimpse of Ruth Green as she made her way home from the public school where she taught second grade. Mid-twenties, he thought, wondering how she’d managed to stay single. But what did that matter? he asked himself. For why would she ever want to marry him? He was a loner now, solitary, divided from Ruth Green less by age than by what he’d seen in the war, the haunting, irresolvable questions it had left him with. A strange darkness had descended upon him during those long years, dense and heavy, a black ink poured into his life. Find something good when you get back home, he’d told himself over and over during that time, find something good and cling to it. But for all his effort he had discovered nothing that could remove the dark stain that marked him. Randomness was all he saw, life and death decided by a throw of the dice in the stone-cold dark.

  The phone rang.

  “Norm,” Pierce said. “Jack. I got a call from the Chief. I think they’ve decided to let Smalls go, and he wants us to take one more crack at him before they do it.”

  “Are we alone in this?”

  “Yeah, I think we are.”

  “How long do we have to question him?”

  “Till dawn, I think.”

  “Okay, I’m on my way,” Cohen said, all other questions, large or small, now silenced for the night.

  Why is this happening to me?

  6:39 P.M., Saint Jude’s Roman Catholic Church, Western Avenue

  “Hello, Tom.”

  Chief Burke looked up from where he sat near the back of the church. The priest stood above him, Sean Paddock, another escapee from the old neighborhood, motionless in his black cassock, one hand holding the other, like someone upright in a coffin.

  “‘Evening, Father,” Burke said.

  “How’s Scottie?”

  “It won’t be much longer.” Burke rose from the pew, started to leave.

  Father Paddock placed his hand on Burke’s shoulder. “Sometimes a child just goes astray, Tom. I’ve seen it a thousand times. A child starts out fine, then goes astray.”

  Burke saw his son as he’d appeared in the emergency room five days before, clothes foul and filthy, stinking of sweat and the sourness of stale urine, deranged, clawing at his own belly as if it were a mound of earth.

  “He wanted to die,” Burke told the priest. “When they found him, that’s all he wanted. Just for the doctors to let him die. And do you know something, Sean? I couldn’t find a single reason why they shouldn’t.”

  The priest nodded silently. “Come,” he said. “I’ll walk you out.”

  The two men drifted down the central aisle until they passed through the door and out onto the wide marble steps of the church. In the distance, through the last light of day, Burke could make out the southern border of the park. He thought of the duck pond, the small, twisted body found lying in the mud nearly two weeks before, a girl named Cathy Lake, blood oozing from her swollen lips, a heartbreaking question in her open eyes. Why is this happening to me?

  “I’ve been thinking of leaving the force, Sean.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know that I’m doing any good anymore.” He thought of Cathy Lake, alone in the park, her killer watching her. Where did it come from, he wondered, the evil it took to destroy a child? “That little girl, the one who was killed in the park. The man who killed her will be released in the morning.”

  “Is that what’s troubling you, Tom?” the priest asked. “Raising doubts about staying on the job?”

  “Part of it, I suppose.”

  “Well, don’t let it. Because it’s a noble calling. What you do.” Again he placed his hand on Burke’s shoulder. “You’re the questioner of Cain, Tom.”

  Burke nodded, but it didn’t seem true. What had he ever really questioned? Not his faith. Not his work. Not his life. Not that he’d known best for his son, guided him away from useless studies, useless thoughts, those poems he scribbled incessantly, when he should have been thinking about his future, the place Burke had prepared for him on the force, his duty to take up the banner of the blue.

  “You should read The Silver Chalice, Tom. A book of faith. Everybody’s reading it.”

  “I’m not much of a reader, Father.”

  The priest nodded. “Other things on your mind, I know. Scottie. That little girl. Murdered. Terrible.”

  “Yes,” Burke said. He saw the moon-splashed waters of the pond, the people at that very moment strolling obliviously around its shadowy path. They had never seemed more vulnerable. All of them, in the end, were as helpless as Cathy Lake had been on her last day on earth, no more aware than she of what menace lay in wait. No more able than she had been to defend herself against it.

  “They have no idea what’s out there, Father,” Burke said. “The harm that can be done to them.”

  “And that’s God’s gift to them, Tom, the things they don’t question,” Father Paddock replied. “And the questioning of these same things, that’s the gift He’s given you.”

  6:57 P.M., Office of the Chief of Detectives

  Pierce sat alone in Chief Burke’s office. While he waited, he recalled other interrogations he’d conducted, trying to find something within them that he might use during the one he was about to begin. Sometimes suspects would simply grow tired or too confused to keep up their denials. Sometimes they would be overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the evidence against them. The only thing that never broke them was an unbearable guilt for what they’d done. If you looked into their eyes, all you saw was the regret of the caught for getting caught, nothing more.

  “Don’t get up, Detective Pierce,” Chief Burke said as he strode through the door. “Where’s Detective Cohen?”

  “He’s on his way, sir.”

  Burke sat down behind his desk. “The order has come down straight from the Commissioner himself. We have until six A.M. to get something solid. Or we have to let Smalls walk.”

  Before Pierce could protest, Norman Cohen knocked and came into the office.

  “I was just telling Detective Pierce that you have until six to get something on Albert Smalls,” Burke told Cohen. “He’s being brought here. The Commissioner thought a change of scenery might shake him up a little.” He nodded toward the open door. “As you can see, he’s just arriving.”

  Pierce and Cohen looked down the corridor to where Albert Jay Smalls, Municipal Jail Inmate 1407, shuffled toward Interrogation Room 3, hands cuffed, ankles shackled, a uniformed officer at his side. He seemed lost inside the striped prison uniform, but there was a sense that no clothes would have fit him any better. His body looked as if it had been made from separate parts of other bodies, his head a bit too weighty for the narrow shoulders, a bit too large for the stringy neck. His hands were small, delicate, and oddly feminine. Despite his slenderness, he seemed curiously fleshy, some residue of baby fat still clinging to his bones.

  “What a creep,” Pierce said.

  Cohen nodded. But it was not just his creepiness that set Smalls apart, he thought. There was also the deep melancholy he had observed over the last ten days, a lacerating inner suffering that separated Smalls from every other criminal he’d ever known, marked him as utterly alien, a creature dropped to earth from someplace that glimmered dimly in the far reaches of the firmament—dark, cold, profoundly inhospitable to life. The suspect never laughed and he never wept, allowed himself neither comfort nor release.

  “But being creepy isn’t a crime,” Burke told the two detectives authoritatively. “And if we can’t prove by six tomorrow morning that he murdered that girl, he must be released.”

  “But he knew Cathy, we know that much,” Pierce argued. “He admits it.”

  “He admits seeing her,”
Burke corrected Pierce. “Recognizing her. But what does that prove? The fact is, we don’t have any evidence that he ever touched the murder weapon. We have a witness who saw him within a few yards of where Cathy’s body was found, but that was quite some time after she’d already been murdered, and even if Smalls had been seen in the area at the time of the murder, his presence could be purely circumstantial, particularly since he was living in a drainage pipe not far away.”

  Pierce leaned forward, still intent on making his argument. “But what about the drawings? Where we found them, doesn’t that prove—”

  Burke shook his head. “We need more. We need physical proof. Evidence. A confession. You have until six. That’s just eleven hours. Any questions?”

  There were none.

  “All right, you may go.”

  With that, Pierce and Cohen left the Chief’s office and headed down the corridor, walking shoulder to shoulder until Pierce stopped and turned toward Interrogation Room 3.

  “Maybe we should let him stew for a few minutes. Maybe the Commissioner’s right. Maybe a change of scenery could shake him up.”

  Cohen offered no objection, and so they entered the observation room that adjoined Interrogation Room 3, where, through its rectangular one-way mirror, they could see Inmate 1407 sitting stiffly at the room’s scarred wooden table.

  “How do you want to do it this time?” Cohen asked his partner.

  “Hit and run,” Pierce answered. “Throw out the time line. Keep him off-balance. Hope he’ll trip up somewhere and give us an idea of what he did with the locket, or some other little detail.”

  “Or maybe just an idea of where he came from.” Cohen kept his eyes on Smalls. “He has to have come from somewhere, Jack. That’s the one thing we can be sure of about this guy. Everybody has a past.”

  7:05 P.M., Criminal Files Room

  “Good evening, sir.”

  Chief Burke nodded to the young officer who stood behind the counter. “Bring me the Catherine Lake file.”

  The officer vanished into a labyrinth of metal shelves so packed with bulging manila envelopes, they drooped beneath their weight.

  A metal table stood a few feet from the counter, four chairs placed neatly around it. Yellow pencils lay scattered across the table’s surface, along with notepads and a few ashtrays. How many hours had he sat at that table, Burke wondered, first as an eager young officer, then as a no less eager rookie detective, and finally as Chief of Detectives? To gain the gold badge had been his sole ambition. He recalled the long struggle he’d made to win the shield, at work when Scottie had been born, at work at all but two of his son’s birthdays, at work as Scottie’s mood darkened with adolescence and the raging quarrels began, at work on the day Scottie told his weeping mother he’d had enough of “this tyranny” and left home for good.

  “Here it is, Chief.”

  Burke faced the counter and saw himself in the guise of Officer Jimmy Day, the blue uniform impeccably pressed, every speck of lint scrupulously picked off, the polished silver badge winking in the naked bulb that hung above him. The abyss that separated his own experience and the young officer’s struck him as impossibly wide.

  “In my spare time I read the cold-case files,” Officer Day remarked as he handed Burke a manila envelope. “When I got this assignment, Sergeant Philips said I should read them, because when you had this job, you solved one of them, Chief. The Lorna Dolphin murder.”

  Burke had first seen her in crime-scene photographs he’d randomly pulled from the cold-case file his third day at the front desk. Lorna Dolphin, aka Sheila Kanowski, sprawled in one of Harbortown’s filthy alleys, her fleshy legs dangling over a ragged pile of fish nets and scrap metal, blood snaking down them to drip from her thick ankles and gather in a sticky pool beneath her feet. She’d been shot once in the chest, after which she’d lived long enough to scratch something in the oil-slick muck in which she’d died. One word: BLADE. An odd word for her to have chosen, Burke had thought, for she’d been shot, not stabbed. This more than anything else had given Burke the sense that there were stones still unturned in this cold case.

  And so he began to look through the file more closely, and after that to explore beyond the file, using off-duty hours to make inquiries in Harbortown, where Sheila Kanowski had lived her last days, and finally moving backward into the life that had preceded it.

  He discovered that in her youth Sheila Kanowski, known then as Lorna Dolphin, had partied with the uptown crowd, an extraordinarily pretty young hooker who’d been passed from one white-gloved hand to another until age and familiarity had stolen her allure. After that she’d worked as a fish packer in one of the local markets by day and haunted the dockside bars by night, a loud-mouthed sot often picked up by foot patrolmen, tossed in the nearest drunk tank, and left to dry out overnight.

  And so she might have lived out her days, then been found dead beneath the bridge or in some harbor shanty, one of hundreds like her.

  But at thirty-seven Sheila Kanowski took up prostitution once again, turning tricks in Harbortown, usually dockworkers or old sailors so bleary with drink, they hardly saw the body they pawed.

  On the night of her death, the cold-case file concluded, Sheila Kanowski had likely taken one of her customers to a garbage-strewn back alley, where the tryst had suddenly turned lethal, probably because Sheila had at some point during the proceedings opened her famously abusive mouth.

  But it was not that simple, as Burke uncovered, for Sheila Kanowski had done more than return to a life of prostitution. True, during her last days she’d plied her trade in Harbortown. But in the weeks immediately preceding those days, she’d seemed seized by a deluded determination to recapture the beautiful young woman she’d once been. Sheila had returned to an old identity, as if by will alone she could revive the party girl who’d once been the toast of Broad Street, a compact pleasure palace much admired by the well-heeled middle-aged club men of fashionable Winchester Heights, men who’d used her for a time, then unceremoniously dropped her from their circle.

  And for fifteen years she had, in fact, disappeared from their lives. Then, abruptly, Sheila Kanowski had dyed her hair flaming red and bobbed it in the style of the days of her youth. She’d pulled her old clothes out too, let out the seams to their full measure, and slipped into them again. She’d become a grotesque, overweight flapper, complete with the long black cigarette holder that had once been the emblem of Lorna Dolphin.

  All of this could be dismissed as the theatrics of an old whore who’d lost her wits. But Burke discovered that during the two weeks before her death, Sheila Kanowski had been rather rudely escorted from places quite remote from the dockside bars and brothels where she’d lived for the past twenty years, places that had been all too well known to Lorna Dolphin.

  The conclusion was inescapable. Sheila Kanowski had invaded Lorna Dolphin’s world. Further inquiry revealed that on at least three occasions Sheila/Lorna had brazenly sidled up to a certain silver-haired man who’d clearly been astonished and appalled by the vulgar harridan who’d materialized before him.

  The man’s name was Donald Webster, a wealthy businessman who, at the time of Kanowski’s murder, had been contemplating a run for Lieutenant Governor, a run which, after the murder, he’d decided not to make. He’d cited health reasons as the cause of his withdrawal from the race, but as far as Burke had been able to determine, Donald Webster had been in perfect health, played tennis every weekend at his club, took skiing trips to Switzerland, and often rode in polo matches held at his country estate.

  Burke probed further, and found that a good portion of the Webster family fortune was based on the manufacture of cutlery, and that in his youth, Donald Webster’s friends had called him Blade.

  Burke could still recall the look on the face of the young homicide detective to whom he’d laid out his discoveries.

  You’re talking about a very powerful man, Tom.

  Yes, I know.

  And not much evidence.r />
  All I’m asking is that you take it to Chief Dolan. If the Chief says it’s not enough to bring Webster in for an interrogation, then I won’t press the matter.

  I’ve just gotten into the division. I could look like a right fool asking for something like this, Tom.

  You were never afraid of that before, Francis.

  Nor was he then, Burke remembered now, watching as if he were once again in the room as a twenty-eight-year-old Detective Francis O’Hearn gathered up the loose sheets of Burke’s report. All right, Tommy, but you owe me one, that’s for sure, pal.

  Chief Dolan had ended Webster’s interrogation after only twenty-three minutes. Webster had come alone, without a lawyer, dressed in an English suit, his shoes still smelling slightly of the freshly mowed lawns of Winchester Heights. Dolan had even shaken hands with Webster as the two men exited the room, leaving Burke to wonder if there would be any further investigation of Donald Webster, a question Webster himself had answered the next morning when, at around five A.M., he’d climbed out of his sleek black touring car.

  A witness claimed that Webster had stood absolutely erect as he’d stepped off the bridge, his arms still bolted to his sides when he pierced the icy water sixty feet below.

  Error by error, Burke thought now, Webster had brought himself to that instant on the bridge. Were we all doomed to do the same? Accumulate errors and mis-judgments and finally sink in a river of regret? Were there no questions you could ask at the beginning of the journey that would save you from this drowning at the end?

  “I guess you teach all the detectives your method,” Officer Day said, returning Burke’s mind to the present.

  “There’s no method,” Burke answered crisply as he tucked the Cathy Lake file beneath his arm. “Except to start from the beginning and go over everything again.”

  Did you hear her scream?