The Interrogation

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Anyway, I look for opportunities to run into her.” Cohen had resumed talking about Ruth Green after returning to the interrogation room following his talk with the Commissioner. “But she’s young. That’s the problem. Too young for me.” He shook his head at his own foolish hopes, then glanced at Smalls. “Embarrassing, right? Her twenty-six and me over forty.” He laughed. “I’m a cradle-robber, that’s what you’re thinking. I can see it in your face, like I’m some guy after a kid, right?”

  Something crawled into Smalls’ eyes. Not light, but darkness, not the glimmer of innocence Cohen thought he’d recognized an hour before, but its hideous opposite, the cold, hard, unmistakable glint of guilt. He looked at Smalls’ hands, the elongated fingers, delicate as reeds, the narrow wrists with their soft net of blue veins, and it rose before him in a macabre vision, full and dark and searingly real, the world of Smalls’ perverse desire, the parks and playgrounds where he lurked, watching children as they laughed and frolicked, waiting for one of them to break off from the rest, to wander into his dank tunnel and be forever lost.

  He felt a shudder deep inside, then a wave of self-lacerating fury at the murderous consequences of his failure, time slipping away, Smalls about to go free, how he’d fallen into Smalls’ trap, been deceived by his frailty and his pose of helpless, wounded innocence, and thus been lured into a precious hour of idle talk, not interrogation at all, but idle fucking talk about himself!

  His eyes bore into Smalls, who smiled at him softly.

  You fucking bastard, Cohen smoldered, his eyes now leaping toward the window, the thick black thread of the river, the overarching bridge. You bastard. He saw the sprawl of small towns that spread out beyond the bridge, Titus, Englishtown, Seaview, and felt time like a burning fuse. Find something, Jack, he pleaded desperately. Please.

  PART IV

  Will you be with him till the end?

  3:43 A.M., September 13, Route 6

  Pierce gripped the wheel, looking for the turn off Route 6 that led to Titus. Time was pressure now, a swirl of ever-deepening water that would ultimately drown his promise to Anna Lake. Four years before, he’d made the same promise to Jenny but had failed to keep it. He must not fail Anna Lake, though even now he found no way to avoid the growing certainty that Smalls would go free, and thus trap Anna in the same poisonous chamber in which he had been imprisoned, and from which only Smalls’ apprehension could provide escape.

  Escape.

  In the long weeks after Debra’s murder he’d wanted escape more than vengeance. Just to escape the tormenting truth that he was condemned to breathe the same air as the man who’d killed his daughter. He saw Costa stagger out of the bar and into the fog of Harbor-town, gazing blearily as he tottered forward, his red-rimmed eyes working to peel away night’s black curtain, cursing the fog and the darkness and the deserted street where he could find no one to direct him home.

  “You asked what happened to me,” Pierce blurted out suddenly.

  Yearwood looked at him but said nothing.

  “A guy killed my daughter,” Pierce said. “Four years ago.” He expected a question from Yearwood, but none came. “I dropped her off at a park near our house. She walked over to where some of her friends were standing around. I never saw her again.” He recalled his return to the park two hours later, the way his eyes had searched for her among the other children, the stab of unease he’d felt when he hadn’t seen her, then the steadily building panic. “They found her three hours later. In a ditch about a hundred yards from the park.”

  “Did they catch the man who did it?” Yearwood asked.

  “The next day,” Pierce answered. “Some people had seen a guy hanging around the girls’ bathroom. A couple of people recognized him from the neighborhood. But there was no physical evidence, so he got away with it. Even moved to the city. Free as a bird.”

  Pierce saw Costa stumble out into the fog-shrouded street, weaving drunkenly as he sought his way home.

  “He fell in the river a year later though,” he said. “Drowned.”

  “An accidental death,” Yearwood said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So in the end he didn’t get away with it.”

  Pierce remembered Costa’s body faceup on the deck of the tug, lips purple and bloated, eyes popped, a look of utter terror in his features. At that instant, he realized what he could not have known before, that vengeance was a stale bread. It did not fill the emptiness within him, nor grant him the slightest peace.

  “I promised Cathy Lake’s mother that Smalls wouldn’t get away with it either,” Pierce said. Anna appeared in his mind, and he felt something unravel within him, the hard knot of his loneliness. “Anna is her name.”

  Yearwood’s smile came from the ages. “And you’re in love with her,” he said.

  3:47 A.M., Saint Vincent’s Hospital, Room 704

  Dr. Wynn stood at Scottie’s bed when Burke entered. He drew the curtains of the oxygen tent closed.

  “Thank you for letting me know,” Burke told him. “I don’t want him to die alone.”

  The doctor toyed with the end of his stethoscope. “Will you be with him till the end?”

  “Yes,” Burke said.

  The doctor nodded. “Well, if there’s anything I can do.”

  “Thank you.”

  Once the doctor left the room, Burke was not at all sure he wanted to spend the final minutes of his son’s life alone in this sterile room, Scottie little more than a blur behind the translucent plastic of the oxygen tent, a silent room save for the ragged edge of his son’s breathing. But was that not how he’d always reacted to his son? Had he not always chosen flight? After that last battle, when Scottie had screamed in his face, declared that he would never, never be the son Burke wanted, had he not simply turned and walked to his car and gone to headquarters and sunk himself in whatever case first greeted his arrival? And after that, each time his wife had begged him to find Scottie, accept him, welcome him into his arms, had he not muttered that yes, yes, he would do that, and then fled downtown?

  But now he felt that he had no choice but face this solitary vigil with the same fortitude with which he’d sat alone with his dying wife six years before, Scottie’s whereabouts unknown, so the possibility existed that even now, in his last hours, his son did not know that his mother had died before him, drowning in a sea of worry for her wayward son, whispering his name over and over, Scottie, Scottie, her last plea. If she were here now, what would she say to him? Burke wondered. Only that she loved him, he supposed, always had and would, the fabled words of motherhood, older than the Virgin. But Ellen was not here, and so it was up to Burke to carry on alone.

  Alone.

  Burke thought of the many nights he’d left Ellen and Scottie to sit alone at the dinner table, then in front of the radio, and later still to go to their beds without his touch, then rise alone, dress and eat alone, while all that time he’d remained at headquarters or in some blood-spattered room. Had he been so deeply engrossed in the lonely death of someone far away that he had not for a moment grasped the lonely lives of those who’d been infinitely near? Had Scottie known him only for his willful absences, a father who found distasteful the very presence of his son, and so avoided contact, and by that means erased him deliberately from his life?

  He walked to the end of the bed, then returned to the chair beside the bed and sat again. He was still seated at his son’s bedside when Father Paddock arrived.

  “Hello, Tom.”

  “Father.”

  The priest took a chair a few feet away, his hands in his lap, clasping a Bible. “Scottie will soon be home, Tom,” he said.

  Burke had never convinced himself of such a possibility, so he said nothing.

  The priest’s fingers tightened around his Bible. “It’s all a wilderness, Tom, so we’re bound to get lost here and there.”

  “I wanted a different son,” Burke admitted. “That’s my confession. I wanted a different son, and he knew that. And i
t destroyed him.”

  “You didn’t destroy Scottie, Tom.”

  “Sean, as a priest, if you believed that God wished you’d never been born, wouldn’t that destroy you?”

  Father Paddock leaned back as if pushed by an invisible hand. “You can’t eat yourself alive, that’s what I’m telling you.” He waited for Burke to respond, and when he didn’t, got to his feet. “I’ll give him the Last Rites now.”

  Burke listened as the priest administered the Last Rites, but the words rang hollow, and he felt a hollowness at the very center of himself. He had been given a child, a life, and had irreparably damaged that life, twisted and distorted it. That was his legacy, this brutal destruction.

  “Would you like me to come back after morning Mass?” Father Paddock asked.

  “No,” Burke answered. “No need.” He walked the priest to the door, shook his hand, thanked him, then returned to the chair beside his son’s bed.

  After that Burke did nothing but wait, casting his eyes toward Scottie only long enough to make out the ghastly pallor of his skin, the blue lips, eyelids that had begun to flutter in what Burke took to be a final spasm of life and which he expected to diminish quickly, then vanish behind a rigid mask of death.

  But the movement only grew more violent, so that Burke finally parted the curtain and pressed his hand against his son’s forehead. “You can go now, Scottie,” he whispered.

  Scottie’s fingers clawed at Burke’s hand, digging frantically as he tossed his head from side to side and began to mutter incoherently.

  “You can go,” Burke repeated brokenly.

  But Scottie did not go. He twisted to the right, shuddered, then wheeled about, his mouth jerking wildly, the movement beneath his eyes growing ever more violent as his hands dug fiercely at the covering sheet.

  “Please, Scottie,” Burke pleaded. “Please go.”

  But still Scottie wheeled and turned, tormented, burning, twisting back and forth in an agony of stifled speech until his anguished whisper broke the air in a final plea.

  Bury me.

  3:55 A.M., Route 6

  “Jesus,” Blunt muttered.

  He glared blearily at the black sea that churned a few yards from the car, the yellow beams illuminating tumbling lines of foam. Covenant? Brighton? Sumpter? Shit! Which one was he supposed to follow to which one?

  One thing was sure; he wasn’t supposed to be here, staring at the goddamn fucking ocean, with no light to be seen, not even some goddamn fisherman’s hut. He was lost, goddammit, and there was no one around to help him get found again.

  A steaming wave of rage washed over him, hateful and malignant, the kind that had so often swept over him in school, especially when some bitch teacher had called on him. Called on him, goddammit, as if she hadn’t fucking seen that his hand wasn’t up. As if she hadn’t noticed that his hand was never up, the bitch. Not like that fucking Weinberg kid, the puny little kike, always with the answers.

  He grinned, remembering the afternoon he’d trailed Weinberg down the deserted corridor, come up behind him and nailed him with a swift ferocious blow to the back of the skull. Now how do you feel, you little fuck? You feel smart now? Huh? The kick had come before he’d been able to stop it, hard and vicious, then another and another until …

  Well, he got over it, the little weasel, Blunt said to himself now. A few days in the hospital, but he got over it. Probably a good lesson for him. Probably taught him not to be such a smart-ass. And the good news was that that first whack had knocked him cold, the little pussy, and so he’d never been able to piss and moan and say it was Blunt who did it.

  This final thought filled Blunt with a satisfaction so intense, it came close to ecstasy. But it was short-lived, as all joy seemed to him, and at its departure he peered out into the mute, unhelpful darkness and cursed himself for getting lost. How had he gotten to this fucking nowhere place? he wondered, now laboring to retrace the route. Had he turned left on Brighton, then right on Covenant? Or had he done the opposite of that? Maybe it was Dunlap who’d gotten it wrong. After all, the jumpy little bastard was talking so fast, whipping that pudgy finger all over the map. Sure, it could be Dunlap that fucked it up, Blunt reasoned. And if he had, he decided, then his moron of a cousin was going to get a quick kick in the ass.

  He felt his mind careen around a blind corner and he laughed suddenly, remembering how he’d sometimes gotten the addresses wrong on patrol, showed up at the wrong place. O’Hearn had tried to fire him for that, but Dolan always kept him on. Later Burke had tried to fire him, but by then O’Hearn had found out that he could be depended upon for certain jobs. Just like Dolan had found that out. With pleasure he recalled the words Dolan told him that he’d said to O’Hearn. He could almost hear him saying it, Dolan’s voice all cheery and lilting, that twinkling smile: There’s one thing the nuns never taught us, Francis, that a hard fist can be as useful as a sharp brain.

  Blunt drew his hands from the wheel, curled his fingers into fists, and stared at them admiringly as he remembered Dolan’s words. No shit, he thought, now imagining what those two massive fists could do to Dunlap for getting him into this fucking mess. Take that, you little prick.

  Is this the man?

  4:10 A.M., City Park

  Burke knelt beside the path and ran his finger over the rough ground. Much as he hated it, he could not get the image out of his mind. Neither the image nor the words. Scottie’s fingers digging into his hand, clawing at them relentlessly, repeating the same prayer over and over again.

  Bury me.

  He thought of the man Smalls claimed to have seen shortly after Cathy Lake’s murder. The one he’d told Cohen about. A man on his knees, at this very spot where Burke now knelt, staring at the ground, muttering the same words Scottie had muttered. The question dug incessantly at Burke’s mind. Could it have been Scottie? And if it had been Scottie, had his son committed the crime of which Smalls was accused? Could Scottie have been in the park, crouched in the rain, watching a little girl move down the sodden path, seen the silver necklace that dangled from her throat … and struck? In his vast neglect, in his failure to accept his son, had Burke forged the killer of a child? Was this evil his own Evil had finally made?

  He looked down the path. At the end of it he could see the tunnel in which Smalls had been apprehended. It was completely cleaned out now, no longer the hovel it had once been, strewn with debris. Smalls had sat hunched in that tunnel, shivering in the chill, peering out into the park, and seen a man digging at the earth, repeating over and over the words Scottie had released on his dying breath. Again the question assailed him: Could it have been Scottie?

  He rose and strode rapidly down the path, then through the tunnel and back out of it, toward the entrance to the park, the ornate Victorian gate where Cathy Lake had spent the last dwindling moments of her life. The unlighted facade of Clairmont Towers faced him from the opposite curb, and he recalled the interviews Cohen and Pierce had conducted first with the building’s superintendent, then with a second man who’d told them about an argument he’d had with yet another man, a dope addict, desperate for money, one who’d attacked him in the lobby of the building.

  He felt a jolt of urgency, walked briskly to Clairmont Towers.

  The superintendent groggily opened the door of his apartment.

  Burke displayed his gold shield. “Two officers questioned a man in this building regarding a murder case,” he said. “He’d had some kind of argument with another man here in the lobby. Do you remember who they spoke with?”

  The superintendent blinked drowsily. “Stitt,” he said. “Burt Stitt, 14-F.”

  One minute later the door of 14-F opened. Burke saw two small brown eyes peering at him through the slit. He took out his badge.

  Stitt groaned. “Jesus H. Christ, it’s four in the morning.” He drew the chain from its cradle and opened the door. “What’s this all about?”

  “You told two detectives that you were in the lobby downstairs at
around seven in the evening on September first,” Burke said.

  “So what?” Stitt snorted. “I’m in the lobby every day at around that time. I live here.”

  “You told the detectives that on this particular day you had an argument with somebody.”

  “So that’s it,” Stitt said with a grim smile. “That fucking hophead again. You catch the bastard yet?”

  “Tell me what happened in the lobby.”

  “He asked me for a handout. This was out front. I said no, and the bastard followed me inside, screaming and grabbing at me, begging for money. I said hell no, and he threw a chair at me. Desperate. Grabbing for my wallet, my briefcase, anything he could get his hands on.”

  “Had you ever seen this man before?”

  “How would I know? He’s just a hophead. You know, skin and bones. Do anything for a fix. They all look alike, dope fiends.”

  “Where did he go when he left the building?”

  Stitt shrugged. “Last I saw, he headed up Clairmont.”

  Burke studied Stitt’s narrow features, the feral nose and sunken cheeks. “I have one more question.” He drew out his wallet and showed him a picture. “Is this the man who attacked you?”

  “Well, he didn’t look all cleaned up the way he does there. But, yeah, that’s him.”

  Burke drew the picture from Stitt’s hand.

  “What’d he do anyway?” Stitt asked. “I mean, you’re not here over some lousy panhandler.” Recognition broke like a light over his face. “It’s that kid, right? The one that was killed. You think the hophead did it.” He glanced at the photograph that now trembled slightly in Burke’s grip. “Who is he anyway?”

  “My son,” Burke answered quietly.

  Outside, standing in the dark air, Burke could see the iron gate that stood at the park entrance, and where he suddenly imagined Cathy Lake as she dashed through it, fleeing a man who staggered after her in the rain, frightening in his disarray, wild-eyed and desperate for money, perhaps glimpsing a way to get it in the glint of the silver locket that hung from her slender throat. The terrible question sounded a third time. Could it have been Scottie? And for the third time Burke forced himself to deny the terrible suspicion that was growing in his mind. Not a little girl, he thought, please, not a child.