by D. W. Buffa
The police had found the suspect exactly where an anonymous caller had told them they would find the killer, and they had the murder weapon. They did not have a confession, but they quickly convinced themselves that they did not need one and that, in any event, their suspect was too far out of his mind to give one that could stand up in court. What had not been quite so obvious in the case of the killer of Calvin Jeffries was impossible to ignore in the case of the killer of Quincy Griswald: He was homeless and he was crazy. He did not confess, because he could not remember. He could not remember anything, not even his own name. That he remembered the name, and apparently nothing else, about the person who had supposedly given him the knife was the kind of inconsistency that only served to underscore the irrational workings of whatever mind he had left. The only one who had any serious doubt about his guilt was Detective Stewart, and he kept his own counsel. He told only Flynn, and he asked Flynn to tell me.
The next night I waited in my car across the street from a single-story brick building next to a warehouse on the east side of the river. A few minutes past ten the door opened, and through a yellow haze Flynn and Stewart made their way out of the crowded smoke-filled room. Puffing on cigarettes, they climbed into Flynn’s car and, signaling me to follow, drove off.
We stopped a couple of blocks away and went into a tavern.
A couple of old men and one old woman were hunched over the bar. At the pool table in front, a woman with dishwater blond hair and vapid blue eyes chalked a cue stick while a man with a smug mouth and oily black hair racked the billiard balls for another game. The place reeked with the dead smell of stale beer and nicotine. We took one of the two booths in back and ordered coffee.
“This place is awful,” I said to Flynn.
He exchanged a glance with Stewart, sitting next to him. “We always come here after a meeting.” His head moved from side to side on his thick neck, the way someone who used to fight follows the action in the ring. “In case we forget what a glamorous life we gave up.”
“I wouldn’t have come here drunk,” I replied.
“Depends how long you’d been drunk,” he said with the assurance of someone who knew what he was talking about. “Once I found myself wearing a three-piece suit, sitting in the dirt talking to some guys at a construction site. It was Monday morning and the last thing I remembered was Friday night. You would have come in here if you were drunk. You would have been camped out on the doorstep waiting for them to open, grateful to get out of the daylight and back into the dark.”
Just as I lifted the cup to my mouth a loud, cracking noise struck my ear with such force that I ducked my head and put the cup down on the table. “What!”
“Bitch!” shouted a surly voice from the front.
Flynn shook his head and rolled his eyes. He looked at Stewart. “Didn’t I do it last time?”
Stewart shrugged. “You’re closer.”
“Christ,” Flynn muttered as he got up from his place at the end of the booth.
I leaned around and followed him with my eyes as he walked pigeon-toed toward the pool table. With his hand on her throat, the pool player had his partner up against the wall, screaming obscenities in her face, while he brandished his pool stick with his free hand.
“Let her go. Put the stick down,” Flynn ordered in an irritated voice.
His hand still on her throat, the man turned and, with his lips pulled back in a murderous grin, snarled incredulously, “You gonna do something about it, old man?”
“I’m going to bust your ass, is what I’m going to do about it.”
In a single motion, he threw the woman to the side and with both hands swung the stick as hard as he could. Flynn had already taken a half step forward, and with one hand caught the stick in midair. With a quick downward turn of his wrist he twisted it behind the back of the other man until it dropped on the floor, and then grabbed him by the shoulder and the seat of his pants.
With two quick steps he threw him as hard as he could head first into the door. For an instant, he lay there, motionless, and I thought Flynn had killed him. Then he began to stir, and a moment later got to his knees.
“What are you trying to do—kill him?” the woman yelled as she shoved Flynn out of the way and dropped down on one knee, putting her arm around the shoulder of her boyfriend, who a moment earlier had been ready to crush her windpipe.
Straightening his jacket, Flynn came back to the table. “Didn’t that door used to swing open?” he asked as he slid in next to Stewart.
“You’re a credit to the nobility of the Irish race,” I said. “Still rescuing damsels in distress.”
He dropped his chin and raised his eyes. “She didn’t look like any damsel to me. I should have stayed out of it.”
Stewart laughed. “No, you did the right thing. If you hadn’t stopped it, she would have killed him.”
“What were they arguing about, anyway?” I asked.
Holding the cup with both hands, Flynn sipped his coffee. “I don’t know. Maybe she finished off his beer while he was making a shot.” His face had a wry expression. “That can be a really serious thing, leaving a drunk without anything to drink.”
My leg began to hurt again. I reached down and rubbed it with the heel of my hand. The sharp, stabbing pain subsided, replaced by a dull throbbing ache. Soon there was nothing left of it, and I could only wonder how much of it was real, and how much of it was in my mind, a figment of an imagination over which I was beginning to think I had little, if any, control.
“Tell me about this John Smith,” I said, looking at Stewart.
“You’re not convinced he’s the one who killed Griswald?”
“I’m convinced he did not.” He paused before he added, “It’s just a feeling. I don’t have any proof.”
“Like the feeling you had about Whittaker?”
“Not quite. I knew Whittaker killed Jeffries; I just couldn’t figure out why. I still don’t know. Whittaker was crazy and, remember, he had killed before. There was no question that he was capable of murder. I don’t think John Smith—or whatever his name really is—could hurt anyone.” He thought about what he had just said. “Maybe if he was backed into a corner, or maybe if he was scared—maybe then. But I just don’t think it’s possible that he would lie in wait for someone and then use a knife on him,” he said, shaking his head.
Though he seemed certain of himself, it was clear from his expression that there was something else, something about which he was not nearly so confident.
“It’s not my case,” he explained. “But ever since Jeffries’s killer killed himself—if that’s what he did,” he said, suggesting once again the possibility that it might not have been suicide at all,
“I keep wondering what made him do it. When I heard an arrest had been made in the second murder, and that everything seemed to be the same: an anonymous call; the suspect another homeless man living under the same bridge; the murder weapon a knife and the knife still in his possession, I wanted to find out if there might be some other connection between the two murders or the two killers. That’s why, when they brought him in, I sat in on the interview.”
Stewart slowly rubbed one thumb over the other. Long deep lines creased his forehead. His eyebrows were knit close together.
Something had left a bad taste in his mouth.
“They brought him into the interrogation room and sat him down in a chair. It had been raining. He was soaking wet, and his shoes and the bottoms of his pants were caked in mud. He was filthy. Forget about when he had last had a bath; God knows the last time he had changed his clothes. He had on an old olive-colored overcoat, torn, tattered, ripped; underneath that, a sweater with more moth holes than wool. His hair was down to his shoulders and he had a scraggly beard.”
He shuddered as a look of disgust passed over his face. “I could not tell exactly how old he was, but he was young, probably still in his twenties, and he had what I can only describe as innocent eyes. When you looked at
him and he looked back, it seemed as if he wanted you to tell him what to do, that it would not occur to him that there was any reason not to trust you. He seemed helpless.
“That’s when I noticed—when he looked at me with those childlike eyes. At first I thought it was because he had gotten all wet. His hair was plastered to his head and his beard was stuck to his face when they first brought him in. He was starting to dry out, and his hair and his beard extended farther out from his head, from his face. Then I realized—we all realized: His head, his beard, were crawling with lice, with disgusting vermin. I could only imagine—I did not want to imagine!—what was living on the other side of his clothing. It was like watching an eruption: They were coming from everywhere, and still he looked at us the same way he had before, without emotion, without any sign that he was even aware that he was being eaten alive by this unspeakable infestation. The awful thing is, I don’t think he was aware of it; I think he was used to it, the way you or I might be used to a little dirt under our nails if we were out in the garden.”
“What did you do?” I asked, amazed at what he had seen.
“We had all seen it at once; and we all reacted the same way.
We jumped up from the table, afraid that some of those things had already had time to get on us. No one wanted to touch him, and we gestured like a bunch of panicked fools, pointing toward the door. They managed to get him out of there and down the hall to the shower. When they got him undressed, they burned all his clothes. They got him deloused and they shaved his beard and cut his hair. But before that, when they saw him naked, they got the doctor. He had scars all over his legs and his buttocks.
They were cigarette burns, the doctor said, and they had probably been there since he was a child.
“The next day he was interviewed again.”
“Without a lawyer?” I asked.
Stewart raised his head. “That’s right. He was told he had a right to one,” he added, anticipating my next question. “Well, not told, exactly.” His eyes seemed to open wider, while his gaze turned inward. “They read it to him from the card we all carry, read it to him in a flat monotonous voice. Then, at the end, the detective put down the card, bent toward him, and put his hand on the suspect’s arm. ‘Or do you want to just talk to me?’ He asked that question like he was talking to a friend. It’s an old technique.”
“And he didn’t want a lawyer?”
A scathing look came into his eyes. “He didn’t know what a lawyer was! We should have known it from the beginning—the way he talked, the look in his eyes. Without the beard, without those filthy clothes, you had to know what he was. It was not just his eyes anymore. You could see it in the way his mouth sagged to one side, the clumsy, awkward way it moved when he gave his one-or two-word answers to a question, the way the words seemed to drag out: rough, slurred, without any definable end. Our suspect—the one arraigned this morning for the murder of Judge Griswald—is retarded. God knows just how retarded!
There aren’t any records. He doesn’t have an identity. If he was ever tested we don’t know about it.”
With narrowed eyes, Stewart studied me for a moment, and then looked down at his hands and again began to rub one thumb over the other. “This is a travesty,” he said without looking up.
“And there’s nothing I can do about it. Everything was done by the book. He had the weapon; his prints are all over it; and he was living under the bridge.” With his head bent over his hands, he raised his eyes. “It’s the similarity. A homeless man with mental problems murdered Jeffries with a knife. Griswald is murdered with a knife, and a homeless man with mental problems of his own has it. He doesn’t confess, but that doesn’t matter because you can tell yourself that he’s so far out of it he might not even remember what he did. Besides, that’s someone else’s problem.
The police did their job. They found the evidence and they made an arrest. They read him his rights and they brought him to court.
That’s the way the system is supposed to work, right? The lawyers will sort it all out.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Flynn remarked as he rubbed the back of his thick neck. With a droll look, he added: “He’ll have the finest defense lawyer the public defender’s office can spare.
They’ll probably plead him to two murders instead of one just to get rid of it.”
I leaned my head against the back of the booth, slowly shifting my gaze from Flynn to Stewart and back again. It was a setup and they knew I had finally caught on.
“All we’re asking,” Flynn said as his co-conspirator concentrated on the spoon with which he began to stir his coffee, “is that you think about it.”
“Think about it?” I asked, with a laugh. “You don’t want me to think about it. You want me to do it.”
Flynn never backed down. “What do you have to lose? Why do you practice law, if it isn’t to take a case like this? The kid’s retarded, for Christ sake; and when he was growing up some son of a bitch tortured him just for kicks. You imagine? … A child, retarded, somebody tortures him!” Hunching forward, Flynn hit the table hard three straight times with his stubby fingers. “He lives under a bridge; he’s got things crawling all over him. If you’re not going to help someone like that, who the hell are you going to help?”
Stewart was glued to the coffee cup, mesmerized by the movement of the spoon. “I’ll help,” he said. Reversing direction, he began to stir counterclockwise. “I’ll get you everything we’ve got.”
His hand stopped moving, and for an instant he seemed to tense.
“On both investigations,” he said, looking straight at me.
“Aren’t you taking something of a chance?”
He shook his head. “So what? Let me tell you something: I was one of the people in charge of the Jeffries investigation. There was too much pressure, too many people with too much to lose.
As soon as Whittaker confessed, as soon as he was dead: That was all anyone needed to end it. No one wanted to go farther; no one wanted to hear about it anymore. We know who did it.
What difference did it really make why he did it? Well, I still want to know. Maybe there’s a connection between the two murders. Maybe Griswald wasn’t a copycat killing. The only way we’ll ever know is to catch the killer. This kid didn’t do it. See for yourself. You tell me if you think he could have killed someone.”
I did not agree to take the case; I did not even agree to see for myself, as Stewart had put it, whether John Smith was capable of murder. I did agree to talk with whoever in the public defender’s office had been assigned the case; and two days later, when I finally had a break in my calendar, I dropped by a few minutes before noon.
With the telephone cradled between her chin and shoulder, the receptionist glanced up at me while she continued filing her nails. “Hang on a second,” she said into the receiver. “Which case was that?” she asked, reaching for a thin gray three-ring binder.
She was young, not more than nineteen or twenty, with long brown hair and eyes that never stayed still. On the counter in front of her, a straw smudged with red lipstick stuck out of an ice-filled container of Pepsi-Cola. When I told her the name of the defendant, she hesitated just long enough to decide that I was serious. Her eye followed her finger down a handwritten list of cases and the lawyers assigned to them.
“You’d think they’d put all this in the computer,” she remarked, making a face. Her finger came to a stop. “William Taylor,” she said, looking up. She flapped her hand in the air and picked up the phone with the other. “Third door on the left.”
I went down a corridor, passing between same-size cubicles identically furnished. Sitting in his shirtsleeves, his tie pulled down from his throat, William Taylor wadded up a piece of paper, leaned back and took careful aim at a wastebasket next to a file cabinet on the other side of the small room. It hit the edge and bounced onto the floor. With a sigh, he got up from behind his metal desk and picked it up. I was standing in the doorway, just a few feet away,
but I might as well have been invisible. He went back to his chair, leaned back the same way he had before and tried again, with the same result.
“Mr. Taylor?” I said when he bent down to pick it up.
He did not look at me. “Yeah?” he said as he resumed his position and got ready to throw.
“Do you have a minute?” I asked patiently.
The paper wad ricocheted off the side of the file cabinet into the basket. It did nothing to improve his mood. He looked at me with sullen, insolent eyes. “Depends,” he replied as he opened his desk drawer and began to rummage through it.
In his early thirties, he was tall and lean, with fine brown hair and a pale complexion. He had the dour look of a moralist, someone who could never bring himself to admit there was a second side to anything about which he had a firm conviction. He was the kind of lawyer who became apoplectic about the death penalty, but seldom cared that much about any particular case.
I decided to start over. “My name is Joseph Antonelli. I’m interested in a case you’re handling. The defendant’s name is John Smith.”
He kept searching through the drawer. “I know who you are.
Why are you interested?” Whatever he was looking for—if he was looking for anything—he gave up. “You don’t represent the indigent.”
I had been standing in his doorway the whole time, deliberately ignored. He stretched out his arm and waved his hand toward the chair in front of his desk, a reluctant invitation to sit down. I did not move. “No, thanks. I don’t want to take any more of your time than I have to. What can you tell me about John Smith?”
The harsh tone of my voice got his attention, but that was all it got. “I can’t discuss a client,” he said, as if I should have known better than to ask.