The Interrogation

by Thomas H. Cook

  They walked on through narrow streets until they reached the harbor where, in the distance, Pierce could see the wharf from which Nicolas Costa had tumbled drunkenly into the water.

  “He’s not going to get away with it,” Pierce had assured her, renewing with added determination his earlier pledge. “The man who killed Cathy. I promise you he won’t.”

  But now, eight days later, as Pierce closed in upon Seaview, he was no longer sure that he could keep his promise. For days he’d tried to find some fragment of physical evidence that would nail Smalls, or, barring that, some way to break him. But neither effort had brought fruit, and now one effort seemed no less doomed to failure than the other. So what will I tell her? Pierce asked himself as he pulled into the parking lot of Seaview Police Headquarters a few minutes later. What do I tell her if Albert Smalls goes free?

  10:42 P.M., September 12, Police Headquarters, Sixth Floor Lounge

  Ralph Blunt’s great bulk appeared wreathed in smoke as Cohen entered the lounge.

  “Christ, Ralph,” Cohen said, batting a billowing cloud away.

  Blunt shifted the cigar over to the left corner of his mouth and dropped another card on the solitaire tableau he’d spread across the scarred table. “You break that bastard yet?”

  Cohen poured himself a mug of coffee and slumped down opposite Blunt. “No. Sometimes I think he’s about to crack, then he clams up.”

  “Fucking pervert,” Blunt sneered. His small eyes squeezed together. “Give me five minutes with the fucking bastard and he’ll tell you the whole goddamn story.”

  Cohen had no doubt that this was true. He’d seen Blunt in action, the brutal gleam in his eye when he threw a punch.

  “Five minutes,” Blunt boasted. “That’s all I’d need.”

  It was the tough-cop swagger Cohen had always detested. But it was also the style that seemed most natural to men like Blunt, and so the only way to talk to them at all was to change the subject.

  “It’s sort of late for you to be hanging around headquarters, isn’t it?” Cohen asked.

  “Commish asked me to stick around.”

  “The Commissioner. Why?”

  Blunt shrugged. “Didn’t say.” He slapped another card onto the table. “So how come you stopped drilling the bastard?”

  Cohen sipped the coffee. “I’m letting him take a breather. Or maybe I’m just taking one for myself.”

  “Fucking freak, that guy. Is he a faggot?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Looks like a faggot.”

  “Tough as nails in some ways though,” Cohen said. “You ever grill a guy like that, Ralph? A guy you just couldn’t get to?”

  “Had a retard once. Couldn’t get shit out of him.”

  “This is different.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Sometimes I think he wants to confess but just doesn’t know how. Like it’s buried so deep he can’t dig it up himself.”

  “Bullshit.” Blunt smacked another card down. “He’s a freak, that’s what he is. When the kid wasn’t fucked, I knew it’d get weird. It’s worse when the kid ain’t fucked.” He stared at the card a moment, then peeled another from the deck. “A guy who fucks a kid, that’s just your average scum. But a guy who kills a kid he ain’t fucked, that’s a guy you can’t never figure out.”

  Cohen knew that for Blunt, this amounted to a philosophical insight, though he had no intention of pursuing it. “The Chief still around?” he asked.

  “Yeah, he’s around.” Blunt released a burst of foul smoke. “You hear about his kid? Found him in the gutter over on Cordelia five, six days ago. You knew he was a dope fiend, right?”

  “I knew he had problems.”

  “Chief’s all shook up about it.”

  And how, Cohen wondered, could a primitive like Ralph Blunt possibly know anything about the complicated inner life of such a man as Thomas Burke?

  “He goes over to Saint Jude’s,” Blunt went on. He squinted down at his cards. “Every night since they picked up his kid.”

  “How do you know that, Ralph?”

  “My cousin lives over on Cordelia. Told me he’s seen the Cap coming out of Saint Jude’s every night for the last few days. Always looks shook up, so my cousin says.”

  “Sounds like this cousin of yours is really in the know.”

  Blunt’s eyes chilled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just that he provides information to the police,” Cohen replied, amazed at how sensitive the inferior were to imagined slights, how swiftly they rankled at the slightest suggestion of their vast inadequacy.

  Blunt laughed. “Anyway, you ask me, talking to that bastard you got in there won’t never do you no good.”

  “You may be right, Ralph.” He glanced at the clock, and the room grew smaller, its walls pressed in by the vise of time. He gulped the last of the coffee and stood. “Take it easy, Ralph.”

  “Yeah,” Blunt muttered. He flipped a card and stared glumly at the lengthening tableau. “Good luck.”

  Cohen glanced back as he left the room. If they ever round us up again, he realized, it’ll be men like Blunt who show up at our door.

  You’re desperate, then?

  10:58 P.M., Seaview, Police Headquarters

  Pierce had never been in this particular building, but the look of it did not surprise him. There was the battered desk at the entrance, the overweight sergeant behind it, thumbing through a magazine. To the right, double doors opened to what Pierce assumed to be administrative offices, while just on the other side of the room, a single door was marked Records. A worn staircase led to the second floor, and there Pierce knew he’d find the shower and locker rooms, equipment offices, interrogation rooms, and, at the center of it all, a detective bull pen with a scattering of what at this hour were no doubt unmanned desks.

  “Can I help you?” the sergeant asked.

  “I hope so.” Pierce drew out his badge. “Jack Pierce.”

  The sergeant closed the magazine.

  “We had a murder in the city a few days ago,” Pierce told him. “An eight-year-old girl. We think the guy we have in custody may have come from here. He doesn’t have a record as far as we’ve been able to dig up, so I need to talk to somebody who knows the town. Not necessarily a cop, just somebody who’s been around.”

  “That would be Sam Yearwood,” the officer said promptly. “He worked for the local paper all his life. Knows as much as anybody about Seaview.”

  “Where would I find him?”

  “He spends a lot of time at the Driftwood Bar.” The sergeant pointed out the window to where coils of blue neon shone dully from the ocean fog. “Usually sits in the back. You can’t miss him. A real old guy. Always reading some book.”

  Across the street, the Driftwood Bar crumbled in a murky gloom. A few old cars formed a line along the curb in front, but the streets themselves were silent and deserted, with nothing but the steady beat of the nearby surf to orchestrate the night. Everything looked as if it had been discarded years before and was now merely waiting to be hauled out to sea.

  Pierce crossed the street with a determined stride, Anna Lake foremost in his mind, the promise he’d made to her, the growing fear that he would not be able to keep it, the ticking clock loud in his brain.

  He stepped into the bar, and the air turned red. To his right, a swirl of neon tumbled downward in a hellish boiling wave. The air was so thick with smoke, Pierce could barely make out the hunched figures who sat at the long wooden bar or the scattered tables that rested in the sawdust on the floor.

  None of the bar’s patrons glanced up at him as he entered, and the murmur of their conversation continued without interruption as he angled around chairs and tables until he finally glimpsed Sam Yearwood in the back booth.

  Through the smoke, Yearwood appeared bleached pale, his skin a dead white, more ghost than man. A crumpled black hat perched on his head, the brim lifted and swept back like raven’s wings. His cane dangled pre
cariously from the edge of the table, ticking rhythmically, like a clock’s ruthless pendulum, at the urging of the pale, bony fingers.

  “Sam Yearwood?”

  The old man’s eyes rose from the open book, ancient and forlorn, mirroring what they’d seen, storm and shipwreck, fire and flood and children swept from sunny beaches by rogue waves and angry currents.

  “My name’s Jack Pierce.” He showed his badge. “I’m looking for a killer.”

  The old man nodded toward the bar’s other patrons. “Take your pick.” His voice had the quality of gnarled wood. He brought a glass of bourbon to his lips, drank, set it down. “Talk.”

  Pierce slid into the booth across from Yearwood. “We have a man in custody for killing an eight-year-old girl. He says his name is Smalls. Albert Jay Smalls. He looks like he might be in his late twenties, but he could be younger. He’s been living on the streets, so it’s hard to tell how old he really is. Anyway, he may have come from Seaview.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Something he said,” Pierce answered. “That when he was a kid he rode a Ferris wheel every day. Seaview’s the only place around here that ever had a Ferris wheel all year round.”

  “Is that all you have to go on?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re desperate, then?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  Yearwood’s jagged smile was mirthless. “I like that in a man.”

  Pierce reached into his jacket and came up with a mug shot. “This is Smalls.”

  Yearwood gazed at the photograph with what struck Pierce as an unearthly concentration. When he looked up again, something glimmered in his eye. “The lost boy,” he said.

  11:14 P.M., Interrogation Room 3

  “This is what we call the Murder Book,” Cohen told Smalls. He placed it on the table. “It has everything we’ve found during our investigation of Cathy’s murder. I’m going to be showing you things while we talk. Pictures. Crime-scene photographs, for example, which aren’t very pleasant to look at. But I want you to look at them anyway, Jay. One by one. I’m not going to rush you through this. I want you to look long and hard at the pictures.”

  Cohen slid the book to the center of the table, turned it so that it faced Smalls, and opened the cover to a photograph of Cathy Lake standing outside her house on Obermeyer Street. “This picture was taken five weeks ago. It’s the picture Cathy’s mother gave to the police when she first reported her daughter missing. Cathy’s wearing the same dress she wore the day she was murdered. The same red dress. Do you recognize it?”

  “Yes.”

  Cohen tapped the photo gently, his nail just at the nape of Cathy’s slender neck. “You can’t see it very well, but she’s wearing a little silver locket. Heart-shaped. Cathy was wearing that locket the day she died, but we haven’t been able to find it.” Nothing glimmered in Smalls’ eyes. Again, Cohen tapped the photograph in the Murder Book. “Concentrate on Cathy, Jay. She was only eight years old. She was in the third grade.” He looked for a reaction of some kind, saw none. “She liked to dance and sing. She had a beautiful voice. Cathy was a real person, Jay. She liked chocolate ice cream best. She had an old gray cat she named Samson because its hair was long. A real person, Jay. Not some …” He thought of the glass eye Zarella and Sanford had found. “Not some doll you could just throw around.”

  Smalls said nothing, but Cohen noted that the left corner of his lips gave a tiny twitch. He drew a chair up to the table and sat down. “Tell me what you’re thinking, Jay.”

  “I’m thinking of her. Of the last time I saw her.”

  “When she was crossing the street toward the park.”

  “Yes. I think someone was behind her.”

  “Who?”

  “A man. Coming across the street.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because she kept looking over her shoulder. Like I said before. Maybe she was doing that because someone was following her.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “It would be a reason, wouldn’t it? For her to be looking back over her shoulder. If someone was following her, someone who’d scared her, she’d be looking back to see where he was.”

  “But you didn’t see anybody following Cathy, did you, Jay?”

  “No.”

  “You only think he may have been following Cathy because she was looking over her shoulder?”

  “They do that. Kids. When someone’s following them.”

  “Sure they do, but maybe it was just that Cathy heard a car blow its horn and looked over her shoulder.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or some guy yelling for a cab, or at his kid, or his dog. Something like that.”

  Smalls shrugged. “I guess.”

  “The fact is, anything could have made Cathy glance over her shoulder, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why did you think it was a guy following her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There has to be a reason you thought that, Jay.”

  Smalls considered this, then said, “Because there was this other guy. Maybe he gave me the idea that someone was following her.”

  “What other guy?”

  “A man I saw in the park.”

  “When did you see this guy?”

  “The same day.”

  “The day of the murder?”

  “Yes.”

  “What time?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Before dark.”

  “Where was this guy when you saw him?”

  “On the path. To the playground. He was digging. Like he was burying something. And praying.”

  “Praying?”

  “It sounded like prayer. He was saying, ’Bury me. Bury me.’”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Like me. Sort of … dirty.”

  “Did you ever see this guy again?”

  “No.”

  Cohen gazed at Smalls pointedly. “Jay, this is the second guy you’ve come up with. First you told me about a man in the playground. A guy nobody but you ever noticed. And now, ten days later, you’ve come up with another guy. And you say this guy was maybe following Cathy. Or some guy was following her and maybe it was the same man you saw in the park that same afternoon.”

  “I know how it sounds,” Smalls said. “But I did see a man. He was digging, like I said, and he—”

  “Yeah, okay, let’s say you did see this guy. Here’s my question. Why didn’t you ever mention him before?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not good enough.” Cohen leaned forward and fiercely stared at Smalls. “Which is why I don’t really want to talk about this second guy. What I really want to talk about is you, Jay. About what you were doing the day Cathy died. Not some guy you say scared Cathy in the playground. Not some guy you saw digging a hole. You, Jay. You.”

  Smalls’ lips pinched together.

  “You know what I think, Jay? I think you followed Cathy into the park.”

  Smalls shook his head. “No.”

  “You saw Cathy come across Clairmont and go into the park, and you followed her.”

  “No.”

  “You saw that she was alone. With no one to protect her.”

  Smalls’ head was shaking violently now. “No,” he repeated. “No. No.”

  “You followed her and you grabbed her.”

  Smalls slumped forward, knocked his head against the table. “No!”

  “You took a wire and you wound it around her neck and you—”

  Smalls lifted his head and slammed it down against the table. “No!” He arched backward violently and brought his head down against the edge of the table in a jolting blow.

  Cohen leaped to his feet, grabbed Smalls’ head, and held it tight against his chest. “Stop it!” he shouted. “Stop it, Jay!” Smalls’ head trembled in Cohen’s tight embrace. “Stop it, Jay,” Cohen repeated, softly now. He glanced at the clock, and the walls of the
room closed in upon him, the air thickened and grew hotter, and he knew this was what it felt like to close slowly in on Hell.

  Is it not love?

  11:29 P.M., Seaview, Main Street

  Pierce and Yearwood walked together toward the Registry Office through the misty air. Toward the sea, Pierce could hazily make out a few rotted fishing piers.

  “I came here when I was a boy,” he told Yearwood. “My father liked to fish off the pier. He took me to the amusement park too.”

  “That closed five years ago. But we may be headed out there tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if this boy turns out to be the man you have in custody, then his mother still lives in an old trailer just off the midway. The same one she came here in.”

  “His mother was a carnival worker?”

  “She worked the county fair circuit. Had her own shooting gallery.”

  “The carnival circuit. Always moving from place to place. Smalls said he’d done that. Maybe that’s how he’s got away with it.”

  “You think he’s done it before? Killed?” Yearwood asked.

  “Probably.” Pierce thought of Costa, how certain he was that Costa would have killed another child, wouldn’t have stopped with Debra’s murder. “One thing’s for sure. They never stop once they start it. It gets easier every time.”

  They walked on down the street, the beat of Yearwood’s cane on the cement walkway ticking like a metronome. When it stopped, they stood at the Registry door.