by Unknown
Two more pickups for "loitering" in Coconut Grove. No charges filed. Released at station.
Picked up in a Coral Gables parking lot. A glasscutter confiscated. Jerry claimed he found the glasscutter in the street, and that he didn't know what the tool was used for. No charges filed.
Picked up in the parking lot, Sears, Coral Gables store, for shoplifting. Subject's father paid for the item--a brass standing lamp, complete with parchment shade, with a blue eagle painted on it. Released to father's custody. No charges filed.
There was also a brief report from an interview with a psychiatric social worker:
Hickey, Gerald. Age: 16--4 mos. 68 inches tall. Wt.
147 lbs. Adopted. I.Q. (Stanford/B) 123. Intelligent,
but rambles when asked direct questions. Sociopathic
personality. Schizoid tendencies; unrealistic goals,
i.e., wants to be "Russian interpreter at U.N." or a
"marine biologist." Suppressed sexual anxieties. Ad-
mits to hustling gays for money, but not always
"successful." Smokes pot daily. Mixes codeine with
pot, but doesn't use PCP. Cooperative. Despite socio-
pathic attitude and quick temper, Jerry would
probably thrive in a disciplined environment, e.g.,
live-in military school. Father can afford it. Therapy
recommended.
s/t M. Sneider, MSW
Not much. Hoke wished now he had read the file before he talked to Harold Hickey. He could have asked him why he hadn't sent Jerry to a military school. Of course, at a military academy, a weak kid like Jerry would have been cornholed by the upper classmen, but they would have kept him off the spike. On the other hand, this was about the time of Hickey's marriage to Loretta, so Harold might have thought that she would be a stabilizing factor for Jerry. But that was speculation. Not a single overnight stay in Youth Hall or jail. In a legal sense, Jerry wasn't a juvenile delinquent officially. To become a bona fide juvenile delinquent, a kid had to be charged, found guilty, and the case adjudicated. If Jerry had been pushing dope, he had managed to avoid ever being apprehended for it.
Hoke phoned the lab and asked if they had completed the report on the contents of the Baggie that Sanchez had sent for analysis. He was promised a report for Monday, Tuesday at the latest.
"Make it Monday," Hoke said and hung up.
It was only three o'clock, and he should take the money to Loretta Hickey. But there were all those files to be read. Henderson and Sanchez would have made a dent in them by now, and he would have to catch up. Hoke looked up the number of the Bouquetique in Coral Gables, then wrote it in his notebook before dialing.
A childish, incredibly high voice answered. "Bouquetique. How may I help you?"
"Mrs. Hickey, please."
"She's designing in the back. May I help you?"
"Just take a message. Tell her that Sergeant Moseley will be in to see her tomorrow."
"Sergeant Moseley?" the tiny voice chirped.
"That's right. You are open on Saturday, aren't you?"
"Oh, yes! Saturday's our busiest day."
"Okay. I don't know what time, but it'll be some time tomorrow."
Hoke hung up the phone. The voice sounded like a little girl around six or seven years old, he thought. Why would Loretta Hickey employ a child to answer the telephone? Hoke went to join Bill and Ellita in the interrogation room.
Bill and Ellita were sitting close together at Bill's end of the table. Both were studying material from the same accordion file. Hoke lighted a Kool, but before he could sit down, Bill held up an eight-by-ten black-and-white glossy photograph.
"Remember this guy, Hoke?"
Hoke looked at the photo and grinned. It was a 'picture of an unsmiling middle-aged man--a head-and-shoulders shot--wearing an open-collared polo shirt.
"Captain Midnight."
"That's right," Bill said. "Captain Morrow. I was telling Ellita about him. He was the pilot we called Captain Midnight. We must've talked to him a half-dozen times three years ago."
"He was clean."
"He wasn't clean. He was eliminated as a suspect because we couldn't prove anything. Anyway, I'd been looking at his file just before Ellita and I went over to have lunch at the Omni. Otherwise, I don't think I'd have recognized him. The fucker was sitting on the bus bench at the southwest corner of Biscayne when we went in, and he was still sitting in the same place when we came back to get the car. But if I hadn't just been looking at his photo here, I wouldn't've recognized him. He's a bum now, Hoke. On a hunch, I sent Ellita over to talk to him because I figured he might recognize me. She asked him if he'd missed his bus, and he told her he was waiting for his wife."
"His wife's dead," Hoke said. "Her head was smashed in by a four-pound sledgehammer. He was our only suspect, Ellita, but we finally suspended the case."
"He did it, Hoke, I know he did," Bill said.
"We think he did it. We couldn't ever prove it, Bill. He passed the polygraph without a tremor. I know the machine can be beat, but in his case, if he did kill her, the indications were that he didn't know he'd killed her. After he passed the test, we had to drop it altogether."
"According to your notes," Ellita said, "he didn't have any reason to kill his wife. They'd only been married a year, and the neighbors claimed they were a happy couple. He didn't need money--not as a pilot earning fifty thousand a year."
Hoke sat down and flipped through the papers in the file. "We should be reading the other cases. We can vote on this one later if you want, if you want to put it on your list. But right now we should follow my plan."
"Tell him, Ellita," Henderson said.
"He was very confused, Sergeant Moseley," Ellita said. "I tried to talk to him, ask him a few more questions like 'Are you sure your wife's bus stops here?' and he just repeated what he said the first time. Finally, he got angry. He said, 'You aren't my wife,' and walked away."
"I signaled Ellita to go get the car," Bill said, "and I tailed him. He lives over on Second Avenue, down from the old Sears store, in Grogan's Halfway House, or what used to be the halfway house. It's just a rooming house now. Grogan lost his license and his city funds when the bag lady starved to death on the front porch. Do you remember that, Hoke?"
"Yeah. It was a legal problem. There was no law to cover it, although the paper wrote an editorial on the case. What happened, Ellita, was weird. There were about ten guys staying at the halfway house at the time. All of them were on parole, but some had jobs and others were on a methadone program and just lived there. Do you remember the bag lady case at all?"
"No. How long ago was it?"
"Seven or eight years. I don't remember exactly. Anyway, this old lady climbed onto the porch when it was raining. She was run down, physically, like most bag ladies, and she just laid there for four days. The guys in the halfway house, including Grogan, had to step over her for the first day or so, and then she managed to crawl over to the wall. The point is, no one helped her or gave her any food or water. She was too weak to move, so she just died there. Finally, after she died, someone told Grogan the woman was dead, and he called the rescue squad to pick up her body. When he was asked why he didn't call them the first day she showed up on the porch, he said he didn't mind her lying there. She didn't bother anybody, he said, but he would've called the police if she'd tried to come inside the house. When they were questioned, the parolees in the halfway house all claimed that they didn't see anything wrong with a woman lying out there, moaning, on the porch."
"And so Grogan lost his license for the halfway house?"
"Yeah, but not for that. If someone comes up on your front porch to get out of the rain, you can let him do it out of the goodness of your heart. That person isn't your personal responsibility. But a lot of people in town were pissed off because the old lady died. Four days is a long time. So housing inspectors were sent out, and they yanked Grogan's license for faulty wiring and drainage problems."
"But Grogan's house is still there, Hoke," Henderson said. "Only now his place is a rooming house, and that's where Captain Morrow lives. Ellita picked me up in the car, and we came back here. I went over his file and I think we should talk to Captain Midnight again. The man owned a hundred-thousand-dollar home, he had money in the bank, and he was an airline pilot. Where did all of that go in only three years? He looks like he's been on the street for months. And he looks at least twenty years older than he did the last time we talked to him. If he's sitting around on a bus bench waiting for his dead wife, he's confused and disoriented. Maybe he'll admit now that he killed her if we lean on him a little. The time to kick a man, Hoke, is when he's down. You know that."
"Maybe he was waiting for a new wife. He could have gotten married again, you know."
"Tell him, Ellita," Henderson said. "Did he look like a married man to you?"
"No one would marry a bum like that. He's a sick man, not a drunk, not talking to himself or anything like that, more like a man lost somewhere in his own thoughts."
"Let's go talk to him, Hoke," Henderson said. "You know he's guilty and so do I. If we can crack a case on our first day, Willie Brownley'll shit his pants."
"Okay. But let me look at the file for a minute."
Everything in the file led to Captain Robert Morrow as a prime suspect. After dinner he had left his house, he said, to get a package of cigarettes. While he was at the 7/Eleven, he drank a cup of coffee, a large one, and talked to the Cuban manager. His house was only two blocks away, and he was gone for only twenty minutes--twentytwo minutes at most. When he returned home, he found his wife in the kitchen. Someone had taken his four-pound sledgehammer from the garage and hit his wife over the head with it while she was washing pots and pans at the sink. Death was instantaneous, with a hole in her skull big enough to hold an orange. From the way it looked, she hadn't known what hit her. The sledgehammer, without prints, was on the floor beside her body. When he discovered her body, Captain Morrow had telephoned 911 and waited outside on the front lawn until the police arrived, smoking two of the cigarettes from the package of Pall Malls he had bought at the 7/Eleven.
He had shown little or no emotion about his wife's death, but he had explained that to Hoke and Henderson. "After two years in 'Nam, I don't find the sight of a dead body particularly upsetting," he had said.
He had understood his Miranda rights, but he talked freely anyway, without a lawyer present. "I didn't do it," he claimed. "If you charge me, I'll get a lawyer, but I can't see paying a lawyer who'll just tell me to remain silent. I haven't done anything to remain silent about."
Hoke and Bill had talked to the neighbors, to the Morrows' friends---they didn't have many acquaintances--and Mrs. Morrow did not, apparently, have any enemies. Nothing had been stolen from the house, not even the threethousand-dollar diamond ring that Mrs. Morrow had taken off her finger before washing the pots and pans. The ring was still on the counter right next to the sink.
What had bothered Hoke and Bill most, however, was why Captain Morrow had gone to the 7/Eleven to buy cigarettes. He had a carton of Pall Malls, with only two packs missing, in his dresser drawer. Also, there was a pot of coffee in the Mr. Coffee machine in the kitchen. The pot was half full, and the red light on the base of the coffee maker showed that it was still warm enough to drink. He had, for some reason, lingered in the convenience store, establishing an alibi with the manager before returning home. Two witnesses had seen him on his walk to the store and back, but that merely confirmed that he had been in the store.
The case had been frustrating. Hoke and Bill had talked to Morrow several times. At one point, Hoke had advised him to confess and to plead "post-Vietnam stress syndrome," which would mean, in all probability, a lighter sentence or a commitment of a year or two to a psychiatric hospital.
"I didn't do it," Captain Morrow said. "And I don't have any stress problems. If I did, they wouldn't have me flying a 707 back and forth to Rio."
After the pilot passed the lie detector test, they had put the case away, pulling it out occasionally only to take another look at it. But there were no more leads, and it looked as though Captain Morrow had managed to get away with murder.
"Why not?" Hoke said. "It won't hurt to talk to him again. Bill and I will do the talking, Ellita. But you check out a micro-cassette recorder from Supply and keep it in your purse. Just record everything that's said, and don't get too close to him. You got handcuffs, Bill?"
Bill nodded.
"I didn't bring mine today. I didn't think I'd need 'em."
9
From the looks of Grogan's rooming house, an ocher concrete-block-and-stucco two-story structure on Second Avenue, very few repairs, if any, had been made since Grogan had lost his city contract to run a halfway house. The unpainted concrete porch, almost flush with the cracked sidewalk, held two rusty metal chairs. They were occupied by two aging winos. There was no rail, and as soon as Hoke, Henderson, and Ellita stepped onto the porch, the winos stepped off the other end of the porch and started briskly down the street. Hoke wore high-topped, lace-up, doublesoled black shoes, which gave him away as a cop if his face did not. Henderson usually reminded people of a high-school football coach. Ellita, of course, although she wore sensible low-heeled black pumps, was not so obviously a police officer. Today she wore a red-and-white verticalstriped ballerina-length skirt with her cream-colored silk blouse.
A black-and-white TV crackled in the living room, but although the set was on, no one was in the room to watch it. There were some battered chairs of wicker, and a low coffee table piled high with old -Sports Illustrated- and -Gourmet- magazines. There was a sign on the wall saying "Thank you for not smoking," and there were no ashtrays in the room; nevertheless, there were more than a dozen cigarette butts ground into the scuffed linoleum floor.
The landlord was in the kitchen. He was sitting at a table by the window, overlooking a backyard that contained a wheelless 1967 Buick on concrete blocks, a discarded and cracked toilet, and a pile of tin cans. The backyard was enclosed by a wooden fence, but only the top third of the fence was visible because of the jungly growth of tall grass and clumps of wild bamboo. The proprietor, a gray-haired man in his mid-sixties, was eating a bacon-and-fried-egg sandwich.
Hoke showed the man his badge. "Are you Mr. Grogan?"
"You're looking at him. Reginald B. Grogan. What can I do for you, Officer?"
"We'd like to talk to Captain Morrow."
"No Captain Morrow here. People come and go, but I haven't had a boat captain here since I lost the methadone people."
"He's an airplane captain. A pilot."
"No pilots either. Never had one of them. People here now are mostly day laborers, although a couple are on Social Security. But no Morrow."
Henderson showed Grogan the photograph of Captain Morrow but pulled it back when Grogan reached for it. "Your fingers are greasy. Just look at it."
"You can't eat a bacon-and-egg sandwich without getting a little grease on your fingers." Grogan peered at the photo, squinting. "That looks something like Mr. Smith, but Mr. Smith's a lot older than that."
"Smith?" Hoke said.
"John Smith. Lives upstairs, last door on your right down the hail. Right across from the john." Grogan bit into the sandwich, and a trickle of undercooked yolk ran onto his chin.
"Mind if we talk to him?" Hoke said. "We don't have a warrant. We just want to talk to him."
"Sure. Go ahead. I'm eating my second breakfast now, or I'd show you up. Besides, my fingers are greasy. But you can't miss his room. It's right across from the john. He's paid up through Sunday, but I don't know if he's in or not."
Upstairs, the house had been modified by plywood partitions to make ten small bedrooms out of four larger ones, but the bathroom at the end of the corridor had not been altered. Two dangling unshaded light bulbs, one of them lighted, illuminated the narrow corridor. The door to the room across from the bathroom was closed. Hoke tapped o
n the door. No answer. He tried the knob, then opened the unlocked door.
John Smith, -né- Robert Morrow, was sitting on the edge of a narrow cot. He was using a metal TV table as a desk, and was writing with a ballpoint in a Blue Horse notebook. He looked up when the three detectives entered the room, but there was no curiosity in his face or eyes. His disheveled gray hair needed cutting, and he hadn't shaved in several days, but he wasn't dirty. His khaki work pants and his blue work shirt were both patched, but they were clean. He tapped his right foot, and as he did so the upper part of the shoe moved but the sole did not, because it was detached from the upper. The room was about eight feet by four, and a four-drawer metal dresser, painted to look like wood, completed the furnishings. Because the room was at the end of the building it had a window, and the jalousies were open. The tiny room was filled with light from the afternoon sun. With four people in the room, it was very crowded. Bill stood in the open doorway. Ellita moved to the dresser and leaned against it. Hoke smiled as he bent over and put out his right hand to shake Morrow's. Morrow shook hands reluctantly.
"It's good to see you again, Captain," Hoke said. "Do you remember my partner, Sergeant Henderson? That's Ms. Sanchez over there. She was talking to you earlier--"
"She was harassing me, and I had to leave my bench. But I've got no complaints against her. A man can't just sit in his room all the time. But it's quiet here in the daytime, so I usually work here anyway. If you don't mind, I'd rather you'd all go away."
"What kind of work are you doing?" Hoke said.
"You can remain silent if you want to," Bill added. "What you say could even be held against you."
"That's right," Hoke said. "You don't have to tell me anything."
"That's a fact," Bill said, loud enough for Ellita to get it on tape.
Hoke rubbed his chin. "If you've got enough money, you could have a lawyer present."
"He doesn't need any money, Hoke," Bill said. "If he can't pay, we can get him a lawyer free."
"This is a benevolent state." Hoke smiled. "The government will pay for a lawyer if you're broke. Do you understand?"