Meeting Evil: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  “Don’t worry about it,” Brocket said. “Now we got you, there won’t be any more trouble in this part of the state.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody! Or try to. Why would I? I’m not a criminal.”

  “Come on,” Brocket said, as the trooper behind the wheel started the car. “We got you now, and you’re not getting away. Might as well come clean. It’ll make you feel good, believe me. You cut the throat of that girl who pumped gas this morning. She didn’t make it. But the woman at the taxi company is still living. You botched that one, slashing from behind that way. She was able to give a good description. She’s in Intensive. She’ll live to nail you, buddy. Then there’s that business with the tractor-trailer driver. We got witnesses who put you at the scene.”

  The car was traveling at high speed, and now the trooper in front hit the siren, the sound of which was like a screw penetrating John’s cranium.

  “None of that is true! All of it was Richie’s doing. I didn’t even—”

  “I’m not talking about this Richie. He was just along for the ride, wasn’t he?”

  “Sharon!” John shouted. “That’s her name. Haven’t you found her yet? She can vouch for my story. She was there the whole time.”

  “Spare me this crap,” said Brocket.

  “My family’s in danger. He’s heading for my house.”

  “Let’s make a little deal,” Brocket said in a seductive undertone. “You just own up to what you did, and on our side we’ll call the local force to look in at this home of yours.”

  “I didn’t do anything to own up to. You’ll learn that if you catch this guy. He’s a maniac. But he told Swanson up at the farm, the officer, that I had nothing to do—”

  “The town cop whose head you smashed?” Brocket asked. “Yeah, I’m sure he will want to give you a clean bill of health.”

  The radio was quacking, but John could not understand a syllable. He returned to asking again about Sharon and the boy. “Didn’t you find them?”

  “How could I?” Brocket said. “We weren’t at the farm. We were looking for you.”

  “You know that Swanson was hurt. By Richie, not me! Why don’t you know about Sharon and Tim?”

  “John,” said Trooper Brocket, “we been trying to put the pieces of the story together. But we don’t exactly yet understand just how it was you went on this rampage in the first place. Maybe you got some kind of reasons. It might help if you try to explain, get a head start now, before we take you back to formal interrogation, which I assure you will be an awful long session. Maybe we can cut down some on that, right here and now, just between you and me and, of course, my partner Franklin up there. But he won’t bother us, will you, Franklin?”

  At the steering wheel, Franklin shook his close-cropped skull and raised a finger but said nothing. He had removed his wide-brimmed hat, as had Brocket, who had dropped his into the front passenger’s seat.

  John was so relieved to hear that Brocket wanted the whole story that he almost wept. He began, “We were having breakfast—”

  “You and Richie?”

  Already it was going bad! “No! My wife and myself. Joan, my wife, and the children—actually the kids and I had already had ours. Joan was—”

  Brocket interrupted again. “Okay, John, granted. But how do you get from there to killing the female gas-station attendant? Do you even know the poor thing’s name? She was nineteen. Kelly Holt.”

  John lowered and shook his head. “God Almighty. But you see what he can do.” He looked up. “I’m not going to say anything more unless you send somebody right now to my house.”

  Franklin was looking at him in the rearview mirror. “They been trying to call the number, but the line is busy.”

  “It’s off the hook,” John shouted. “My little daughter does that. Please send a car there.“

  “Settle down, John,” said Brocket. “Let’s get back to your story.”

  “I refuse to say anything more until I know my family is protected from this madman.”

  “If he’s so crazy, John,” the trooper asked, “then what did you see in him?”

  “He knocked on my door and asked me to give his car a push.”

  Brocket nodded. “And you just left home and went off with him? He must have had something you wanted. Good-looking guy, is he?”

  John decided not to react to these innuendos. “The car started going downhill. My shirt was caught in the door. I had to run and jump—no, wait a minute…” That did not make sense, but for an instant he could not remember the precise sequence of events.

  “Well, what difference does it make?” asked Brocket, moving his heavy dark jaw as if chewing. “What matters is a witness puts you at the gas station at approximately nine twenty-five.”

  “Sure,” said John. “Richie was out of gas, so I stayed with him in case he needed another push, but he made it to the station all right. I was going to leave and walk back home then, but I hurt my leg jumping into the car, and he insisted on giving me a lift back.”

  “You couldn’t tear yourself away from him?”

  “I told you, my leg hurt. Now listen, I’m not going to—”

  “All right,” Brocket said, “you already mentioned that. They’re sending a car.”

  “Why couldn’t you have told me that before?” John asked angrily, though he was relieved as well. “Why do you keep treating me like a criminal, after what I’ve been through today? I don’t have anything against the police. I’ve always admired the job you people do. Christ Almighty, all day long I’m stuck with this guy, and I didn’t even know, I swear to God, that he was committing these crimes you speak of. I mean, I knew he ran down the truckdriver, but he had some kind of excuse for that. I admit I made a mistake in going along with him on that even partially—I mean, I had nothing to do with driving into the guy, who by the way was coming after me with a tire iron for something I didn’t do, and—”

  “Calm down, John,” Brocket said. “We’ll get everything in eventually, and we’ll be doing it all on video so there can’t be any mistake, but right now just stick to the time frame if you can.…” He had brought a black notebook from the pocket of his tunic and was scratching in it with a pushbutton pen.

  “Okay, but how could I know what he was doing to that girl at the gas station? They went inside the office. I didn’t see them. I didn’t try to watch them. Why should I? He mentioned later there was some problem with his credit card. I don’t know. I wasn’t anywhere near the office. I stayed out by the car.”

  “So when did you make the assault on the woman in the taxi office?”

  “Oh, no!” John said. “I didn’t touch her in any way. She refused to accept me as a passenger, probably because she didn’t like my looks and she absolutely would not take my word that I lived in a perfectly nice part of town.… Oh, yeah, that’s right: I didn’t have any money with me. She wanted the fare in advance.”

  “So you knifed her in the course of this altercation?”

  John tried to breathe deliberately. “I don’t carry a knife. I didn’t even say anything threatening to her. I was just sad that she wouldn’t take my word.”

  Brocket himself assumed a sad expression. “Thing is, John, there are eyewitnesses to all of this, and the perpetrator’s description—the guy at the gas station and later coming out of the taxi office—matches yours real close. And just about the same thing is true with all the other felonies. I should warn you about that, in case you’re going to stick to this same story for everything that happened all day long.”

  “That’s nuts! Richie does all these crimes and nobody sees him? Just find Sharon, I tell you. She was at the farm. Why hasn’t anybody found her? And the young boy, Tim. He can—”

  Brocket interrupted. “John, there wasn’t any girl there.”

  “The cops have got to the farm? You’ve talked to them?”

  “We been in touch.”

  “Sharon was behind the barn when Richie tried to set fire to it. Maybe she go
t up the hill and into the woods. Are they at least looking for her?”

  The trooper shrugged. “I don’t know, John. I’m not there. If she really exists, then she ought to turn up on her own when she hears you been apprehended.”

  “She exists!” John said. “She’ll confirm everything I said. She was another prisoner of Richie’s.”

  “And also a prisoner of yours, isn’t that what you mean?” Brocket put up a finger from the hand that held the pen. “Because if she wasn’t, then why didn’t you get him to let her go?”

  “It’s complicated,” said John. “If you haven’t believed anything else I’ve said, then you probably won’t listen to this. Some of the time he was armed and we weren’t. During the earlier phases we didn’t take him seriously—or anyway I didn’t. I can see now that she was leery of him from the first. I came to her defense a couple of times, but—”

  “But what?” asked Brocket, interrupting again. “Maybe you two ganged up on her?”

  “Then at least you believe there is such a person?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Brocket sniffed disdainfully. “That’s real dumb, John, to play word games at a time like this.”

  “But the boy? Tim? Surely the police found him. He was locked in the barn.”

  “Yeah.” Brocket sighed. “They talked to Tim, all right.” He sighed again, but in more exasperation than sympathy. “John, I wish I could figure out why you think he’d say anything good about you. It shows disrespect for my intelligence. Here’s what Tim says: you appeared at the door armed with a shotgun. You tried first to get him to let you inside with some phony story, and then, when he refused, you tried to make forcible entry, then cut the outside phone line. Then you and the other members of your gang broke in through the back door and attempted to set the house on fire. You held him prisoner, but he escaped and took refuge in the barn, which you were trying to burn down when the town cop showed up.”

  John wondered how in the world he could ever explain which parts of this account represented the facts, and in what degree. Was he in a position to admit anything at all at this time? He was aware that he had not been obliged to say anything whatever in the absence of a lawyer, but at the outset he had not wished even to consider that the situation would get so far out of hand that he would need an attorney. Having one would imply that his position needed defending. All along he had been telling himself he had done nothing criminal and would therefore have nothing to fear from the police once the truth was known, but speaking with this officer now, he saw he had committed certain acts which, though his motives had been of the highest, were technically breaches of the law that might cause him grief unless he could establish a clear distinction between them and Richie’s terrible deeds. Perhaps he did need a lawyer.

  He glanced out the window for the first time since entering the car. They were still traveling through country, on the motorway. “How long till we get there?”

  “You got no reason to hurry,” Brocket said. “If I were you, I’d use this time to get the whole business off my conscience, John.”

  “There’s nothing on my conscience,” John said. He became more aggressive than hitherto. “Doesn’t it occur to you that a respectable person like myself just doesn’t without warning turn into a vicious killer? Don’t you people work largely on precedents?”

  Brocket smiled, but coldly. “John, let’s leave the theorizing to the professors of criminal law. They can afford it.

  Franklin and me are on-the-job guys. My last partner stopped a nicely dressed, respectable-looking man for speeding; instead of handing over his license and registration, he pulled a three-fifty-seven magnum and shot Jim Conti through the heart, leaving a fine girl without a husband and two babies without a father. The felon served all of three years for that crime.”

  “That’s awful,” John said with sincere emotion. “I have never criticized cops, I assure you. I’m grateful for the job you do. What I meant was, you are wasting time with me, when Richie is still out there. If you’ll just check with my firm, Tesmir Realty, you’ll find out who I am.” He gave the address and both phone numbers. “My neighbors, too, can tell you about me. My wife and I are fairly active in community affairs. My wife’s uncle, Philip Dixon, ran quite a successful floor-tile business in Eddington until his retirement. He can certainly vouch for me, as for that matter can my other in-laws. Most of them are local, at least in the county. I don’t have any nearby folks of my own. My father passed away, and my mother remarried and moved out West.”

  “Everybody’s got a life story, John,” said Brocket. “Let me just ask you why in your opinion several eyewitnesses would describe a guy who looked exactly like you as the probable and principal perpetrator of these felonies?”

  “That really bothers me,” said John. He bit his lip until it felt as though ready to bleed. “All I can come up with is this Richie is so inconspicuous. He’s skinny and has a light complexion and wears nondescript clothes. I’m somewhat shorter but a lot heavier—easier to remember, I guess. If you see the two of us together, I suppose you’d remember me because there’s more of me—especially if you’re too far away to notice many individual characteristics. But the taxi-office woman would know! I talked to her, standing right there in front of her.”

  Brocket picked at his ear. “She can’t speak yet, due to her cut throat. But she can write on a tablet, and what she writes is you jumped her from behind. She was talking to a driver on the radio: you came in, reached around, and slashed her throat.”

  “There you are! She’s not an eyewitness, then. She didn’t see her attacker.”

  “But another woman saw you come out of the office,” said Brocket. “She voluntarily got in touch with the local force when she heard about the attack, says she saw a guy looking like you come out of that office carrying a knife—or rather, in the act of putting one away.”

  “That’s crazy! I didn’t have a knife. I didn’t touch her. Wait a minute. Maybe the guy wasn’t even Richie! Richie couldn’t have been carrying a knife that was big enough. He was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of real tight jeans. Where could he have carried a knife?”

  “I don’t know about Richie,” said Brocket. “But in both the attacks a very thin blade was used, like a razor blade or, more likely, on account of the depth of the wounds, one of those utility knives you can buy at a hardware store. Something like that would fit in a shoe or a sock, and in fact this woman says you bent down and did something with your leg—”

  “I hurt my knee!” John cried. “I was probably feeling it, looking at it, you know. For Christ sake.”

  The car stopped at this point. John had been peripherally aware it had left the motorway, but he was startled now to arrive at a destination.

  Brocket slowly put his notebook and pen away, and reached over into the front seat and retrieved his felt hat. Franklin left the car and opened the door next to Brocket, and the latter slid out. Then he leaned back in and stared into John’s face.

  “God,” John said plaintively. “Are you really taking me to jail?”

  “John, John, John…,” said the trooper, extending a helpful hand.

  II

  RICHIE’S threat to visit John’s home was, like a lot of the other stuff he told him, mostly a joke. John was the kind of guy it was fun to kid: he took everything so seriously and wanted so much to do the right thing. A man like that was also very vulnerable, the type that bad people tended to abuse. Richie felt protective toward him and had avenged him on that woman in the taxi office and saved his life from the truckdriver. He was sure that eventually John would come to understand those incidents for what they were, morally admirable, and appreciate that he had a code which was unaffected by the condemnation of others for whom he had only contempt. He did not easily make a friend, but when he did, it was all the way. John, balanced and decent as he was, would not take forever to understand that. Meanwhile, it was probably all to the good that John be given some time alone and suffer a limited amount of
privation, be all by himself in a hostile world and recognize that he could not cope with it in the absence of his friend.

  Therefore Richie drove only a mile or so farther along the road on which John had left the car and, on reaching the area of motels and gas stations, took the underpass beneath the motorway to the next cross street and there attempted a sweeping U-turn at a sufficiently high speed to ruin the right front tire when it made forceful contact with the far curb. He banged his face on the steering wheel, but what hurt worse was his embarrassment at so poorly estimating the turning circle of the police car. Luckily for them, nobody seemed to be around to witness his accident, for he could not endure being shamed and would have had to deal with those in whose eyes he had been less than proficient, even though he could grant they bore no personal responsibility, but neither did those who perished in hurricanes or epidemics.

  He simply abandoned the police car where it was, leaving the officer’s cap behind as well as, with reluctance, the shotgun, which could hardly have been concealed on his person. The .38, for that matter, seemed also to pose a problem, but finally he took the folded cap from the right rear pocket of his jeans and, having replaced it with the pistol, snug against his buttock, he jammed the cap behind it so that the flopping bill came over and hid the butt of the weapon. This would do until he made better personal arrangements in general, which could not wait for long, for when he started walking he remembered what he had been distracted from for hours: he had not urinated all day, nor had he eaten anything since the doughnuts.

  Among the motels and gas stations along the road near the motorway ramps were fast-food places offering the usual burgers, pizza, and deep-fried chicken, but Richie was not in the mood for any of that garbage. What he really would have liked was meatloaf, say, or thick beef stew, preferably a day old, vegetable soup with big golden-yellow dumplings. The woman at one of his foster homes had fed him well. For that reason, though he stole from her purse, he never struck or cut her. One criticism he would make of current conditions was that it was almost impossible to find edible food in any public place, and a cellmate had once told him the same thing was largely true of Canada and, it went without saying, Mexico, but anybody who would go to the latter deserved anything he got. Richie himself had never been out of the Northeast. In fact, what with the juvenile-detention center, then one prison term soon succeeding the last, and then the eternity he had been at Barnes Psychiatric, he had not been at liberty long enough to travel far.