Victims

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Victims Page 14

by Collin Wilcox


  Still, she made no response. Her face was frozen in a mask of hopeless misery. Her eyes were empty, her mouth was slack, twitching slightly at one corner. Her head hung slightly forward, as if she could no longer support its weight. She was breathing unevenly, in short, shallow gasps.

  “I’m going to leave now, Mrs. Kramer,” I said softly. “I’m going to interrogate Durkin, downstairs. Then I’m going to talk to the D.A., and to my superiors. Meanwhile, if there’s anything you want to tell me—” I showed her my card, then put it on the window sill. I hesitated, then said, “Say good-bye to John for me. Tell him I’m sorry I didn’t have time to show him my handcuffs. Tell him I haven’t forgotten. He’s a good kid.”

  As I turned away, I heard her mumble, “Too good to have a drunk for a mother. Is that what you—” Suddenly I heard her sob. It was a harsh, ugly sound, torn from the tortured depths of her soul. I didn’t turn, didn’t acknowledge her torment.

  SIXTEEN

  AS I KNOCKED ON Durkin’s door, I spoke softly to Canelli. “What’d you think? Before we got here—before I told her Kramer’s gun was the murder weapon—did she know the gun wasn’t in the closet?”

  Promptly, Canelli nodded. “That’s what I think, Lieutenant. Definitely, she knew it wasn’t in the closet. Because if she’d thought it was in the closet, that’s the first thing she’d’ve said. Sure as God made little green apples, she knew that—”

  The door opened to reveal Bruce Durkin. He was barefooted, wearing a blue terry cloth robe with “Bruce” stitched in white on the left breast. The robe came to mid thigh, revealing thick, muscular calves.

  “I was just going to take a shower,” he said.

  “We won’t be long.” I stepped forward. “We just want to check on a couple of things.”

  He backed away grudgingly, into a short, narrow hallway. The cramped quarters emphasized Durkin’s wide, weight lifter’s shoulders, his short, stocky neck, and his powerful torso that tapered to a trim waist. For a moment the three of us stood crowded shoulder to shoulder. Finally, still grudgingly, Durkin turned and led the way to a small living room that looked out to the east, across the city. The room was furnished with cheap plastic furniture that made the apartment look like a third-rate motel room.

  “I was going to go out.” He sat on a sofa, crossed his heavy, hairy legs and pulled the short bathrobe across his thighs. It was an incongruous moment: this big, brawny man plucking at his robe like a painfully modest girl struggling with a short skirt.

  Canelli and I took two matching metal straight-back chairs, facing Durkin. “We just found out that you did time for aggravated assault down in L.A.” As I said it, I experienced a sense of relief, a feeling that I was on familiar ground. Unlike Marie Kramer and Alexander Guest, Bruce Durkin was a known quantity to me.

  Sullenly, he shrugged. “It was a barroom fight. I told you about it, Saturday. The other guy picked up a bottle. I picked up a chair.”

  “How much time did you serve?”

  “Six months in Chino.”

  “What was your sentence?”

  “Twenty-four months. It was a first offense.”

  “Are you still on probation?”

  He shook his head. “No. Probation expired almost a year ago.”

  “Where’d you do your probation?”

  “Los Angeles. I came up here as soon as I’d served my time.”

  “Do you have friends here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d you get this job?”

  “A friend of mine—Eddie Johnson—is a process server. He does a lot of work for Mr. Guest. I went to work for Eddie, serving summonses. So—” He shrugged. “So when Mr. Guest needed a bodyguard, he asked Eddie if he knew of anyone.”

  “You didn’t tell Mr. Guest that you served time.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It never came up. He didn’t ask, so I didn’t say anything. It’s like—you know—in the army. Don’t volunteer.”

  “So Alexander Guest moved an ex con into his daughter’s house, to guard his only grandchild.” As I said it, Canelli guffawed.

  “Nobody’s perfect, I guess,” Canelli observed.

  Durkin glanced at Canelli with flat, hostile eyes, then looked away indifferently.

  “What’re you to Marie Kramer, Durkin?” I asked. “I know you’re John’s bodyguard, and a driver, and I guess you do some household chores. But what else do you do?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You know what I mean, Durkin. She’s an unhappy woman. She drinks too much, and she spends her weekends at the singles’ bars, looking for men. What’s she doing during the week? What’d you do for her, during the week?”

  “What’s she say I do for her?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  He shrugged his bully-boy shoulders as he looked at me with shrewd, street-wise eyes. Finally he said, “I’m not going to answer that. It’s private, what you’re asking. Private business.”

  I nodded, then decided to match his carefully calculated indifference. I’d let him wonder what I knew about his relations with Marie.

  “Mrs. Kramer has a gun in her bedroom,” I said, “a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver. You know that.”

  “I—” His eyes fell away. I had him guessing. How much did I know? How much had she told me?

  “Come on, Durkin—” I tried to make it sound casual, as if it was a routine question: groundwork, nothing more, confirming information I already possessed. “Just answer the question. Did you know about the gun?”

  “A ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ will do,” Canelli said. “Just a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’”

  I kept myself from reacting. I’d wanted to slip the question in casually. It was one reason I’d asked him whether he was sleeping with Marie Kramer. I wanted to mask the more important question with a less important one. By picking up the question, emphasizing it, Canelli wasn’t helping.

  Showing an indifference he obviously didn’t feel, Durkin shrugged again. “Yeah, I knew about the gun.”

  Still trying for a seemingly casual indifference, I asked, “Did you ever handle the gun?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Once. She was afraid of it. She wanted me to check the gun, see if it was loaded.”

  As I nodded in return, I exchanged a covert look with Canelli. Half an hour ago, Marie Kramer had said that only her father and her child and Gordon knew she had the gun.

  To protect Durkin, Marie Kramer had lied. She’d known the stakes. She’d known—or suspected—that her gun was the murder weapon. But then she’d lied.

  “Did she ask you to unload it, or what?” Canelli asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And did you unload it?” I asked

  He nodded. “Yeah. I put the shells in one of the drawers, inside the closet. I put them in a sock.”

  “So your prints would be on the gun,” Canelli said.

  Remembering that the gun had been wiped clean of fingerprints, I said, “They’d be on the cartridges, too.” I let a beat pass, then added, “A lot of people forget about cartridges.”

  “Listen—” Frowning uneasily, he leaned forward on the plastic sofa. The robe fell open across his thighs, unheeded. With relief, I saw that he was wearing undershorts. “Listen, what’s this all about, anyhow? What’s this about her gun, anyhow?”

  “What it’s about,” I said softly, “is that her gun was used to kill Charlie Quade.”

  As if he suspected a trick, Durkin looked from me to Canelli, then back to me. I saw his Adam’s apple bob in his throat. His big hands, one on either knee, were clenched knuckle-white.

  I decided to gamble, and tell him the rest of it: “There’s no question. That’s the gun, the murder weapon. It was ditched not far from the crime scene. It’d been wiped clean of fingerprints.” I let a long, deliberate beat pass as I saw his heavy, stolid face begin to come apart, spasmodically breaking up into tics and twitches. Durkin was softening up—fast. “But there
’re fingerprints on the cartridges,” I said. “Latents. There’ll be your prints, since you already unloaded the gun. Then there’ll be other prints, too—the murderer’s prints, on top of yours.”

  “Ah—ah—” His mouth was working impotently, trying to form words that wouldn’t come.

  “Or maybe there’s just your prints,” Canelli said softly. “Just yours, nobody else’s. From when you maybe took the cartridges out of the sock and reloaded the gun. Friday.”

  Suddenly Durkin got to his feet. Caught by surprise, I rose with him, instinctively falling into a crouch, fists clenched. Canelli was on his feet, too, instantly on guard, reaching under his jacket for his service revolver.

  But Durkin wasn’t going to fight. He was going to yell.

  “Get outta here, you bastards. Get out. If you—you don’t get out, I’ll call Mr. Guest. He told me to call him, if—if—” Mouth twisting, head turning from one of us to the other like a confused bull ready to charge, Durkin took a furious step forward, threatening us with clenched fists.

  I raised both hands, to placate him. In close quarters, if he came for us, I doubted whether Canelli and I could subdue him without getting badly hurt.

  “Okay,” I said. “Cool down. We’re going. But remember—” I backed one cautious step away, then another step. “Just remember, all we want is the truth. If we get it, and if you’re clean, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  I gestured for Canelli to open the door, then gratefully walked out into the central hallway that served both Marie Kramer’s part of the house and Durkin’s tiny apartment. At the top of the stairs, I saw John Kramer. Eyes round, the boy said, “Did he hit you? Did you hit him? Did you?”

  Safe now, I could smile. “Cops don’t hit people if they can help it, John. It’s not smart.”

  “That’s because they hit back,” Canelli said, opening the front door and stepping outside.

  SEVENTEEN

  “SOMEONE INSIDE, THERE—” CANELLI jerked his head back toward Marie Kramer’s townhouse—“sure knows more than they’re telling.”

  “I’m glad I took you along. I wouldn’t want to deal with Durkin alone.”

  “Jeez, yeah,” Canelli said fervently. “I know what you mean. That guy’s got muscles on his muscles.”

  Our cruiser was parked down the hill from the Kramer house, and out of sight around the street’s first downhill curve. We walked to the car and got inside. I told Canelli to turn on the ignition, but not to start the engine. Then I switched on the radio and contacted Communications. I identified myself and ordered a round-the-clock, two-man stakeout on the Kramer house, located at 845 Telegraph Place.

  “I want us to keep them under surveillance until the stakeout comes.” I pointed to the curve ahead. “I’ll walk up there, where I can see the house and you can see me. If our relief hasn’t come in a half hour, you relieve me.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Keep your eye on me.”

  “Yessir. Right.”

  I got out of the car and walked up Telegraph Place. The narrow, winding street clung to the side of the hill, spiraling up to Coit Tower, at the top. As always, a steady two-way stream of tourist cars was clogging Telegraph Place. Bound for the sightseer’s circle at the crest of the hill, the uphill stream inched forward, moving in a constant, closed-circuit, bumper-to-bumper parade. Finished with sightseeing, the downhill stream moved faster. The September evening was warm and soft; the sky was a clear, darkening blue overhead. Across the bay, the lights of Oakland and Berkeley were beginning to sparkle in the hills that rimmed the East Bay.

  Because the evening was clear and warm, the procession of cars climbing the hill was more congested than normal, moving more slowly. Most of the sightseers would park at the observation area that circled Coit Tower. They would get out of their cars, look dutifully at the view, snap a few pictures, get back in their cars and join the descending procession. Later, after dark, teenagers would begin arriving on the scene, hoping to find a parking place and cop a quick feel before the police on the beat hassled them.

  I found a spot on the sidewalk beside a cypress tree where I could see both the Kramer house and our cruiser. Because it was built against the side of the hill, the unique design of the house made surveillance simple. Whether he went on foot or by automobile, whoever left the house had to leave by the front door. Except for two front windows, also in plain view, there was no other way out of the house.

  I leaned against a low stone wall and tried to look inconspicuous, concealed behind the cypress. Always, it seemed, detective work came down to this: standing, or sitting, or even lying in some unlikely place, watching and waiting—for hours, days, even weeks. Sometimes we knew what we were looking for, most of the time we didn’t. An anxious over-the-shoulder glance, an uneasy gait, a few furtive words exchanged in a shadowed doorway—often these were the detective’s most meaningful data, his only guide to possible guilt or innocence. So, inevitably, it came down to a gambler’s choice. Or, rather, a series of gambler’s choices, at least half of them wrong. A single detective on stakeout could—

  The front door of the Kramer house was slowly opening. Bruce Durkin came out. He stood motionless for a moment, looking up and down the street. Then, carefully—cautiously—he closed the black lacquered door. He was dressed in jeans, jogging shoes, a beige colored waist length jacket. He carried a small duffel bag in his left hand.

  Covertly, I gestured to Canelli, signaling for him to join me. I held my hand to my mouth and ear, reminding him to bring our walkie-talkie. I saw his answering nod, then turned back to face the townhouse. Durkin was descending the three steps to the flagstone walk. Now he turned right, toward the garage door. Because of the steepness of the hillside terrain, the house had only a single car garage. So Durkin was taking Marie’s car.

  Why?

  Was he running?

  His furtive manner, the duffel bag, the fact that he obviously intended to take Marie Kramer’s car—everything suggested that, yes, Durkin was running.

  If I was right—if he was running—then I was within moments of making a gambler’s choice.

  He could back the car out of the small garage, wait for a break in the sightseeing traffic, then join the downhill stream of cars. Minutes later, he would be in downtown traffic, close to his choice of freeway ramps. And the freeways weren’t closely patrolled. Once on the freeways, his chances were odds-on of escaping into the gathering twilight.

  I had two choices: Either block his car with mine, or get his car and its license number on the air. The second choice was the simplest, the one favored by regulations. If nothing went wrong, with plenty of manpower, units responding to my pickup order could easily take him into custody without unacceptable risk.

  If nothing went wrong.

  If the units in the area weren’t already responding to emergency calls.

  If the units responding could catch him before he got to the freeways.

  I glanced back at Canelli. He was already out of our cruiser, walking toward me, trotting now. Had I time to run back to the car, start the engine, drive into position to block Durkin before he got clear of the garage? Looking toward the house, I saw the garage door lifting, automatically. Durkin was already inside the garage, out of sight.

  Events were getting ahead of me. There might not be enough time to get into my car and work my way through the uphill stream of sightseeing cars before Durkin backed Marie Kramer’s car out of her garage and got underway, escaping downhill.

  Time was working against me now. Time had tilted in Durkin’s favor.

  My only hope of blocking the suspect was the stream of tourist cars itself.

  The house was about five hundred feet ahead, up the hill. I began running, dodging between slow-moving cars, crossing the street to the opposite sidewalk, on the same side of the street as the Kramer house. From inside the garage, a silvery shape emerged: the trunk of a Mercedes convertible. The car was across the sidewalk now; Durkin was waiting for
a break in the traffic. Certainly he would back into the street, then turn downhill, toward me. If he drove uphill, into the closed circuit of sightseeing cars, he would trap himself.

  With two hundred feet still separating me from the Mercedes, I slowed to a walk, unwilling to risk attracting Durkin’s attention. Ahead, three pedestrians were on the sidewalk, hopefully screening me. Now the automatic garage door was lowering, barely clearing the Mercedes’ hood. Slowly, the big car was backing into the street, forcing its way into traffic. One horn blared, and another. Now the downhill flow of cars had stopped, waiting for the Mercedes. But Durkin must also back into the uphill flow, before he had room enough to turn the Mercedes downhill.

  Three cars separated me from the Mercedes. In the seconds it took me to make a decision, one car passed me; only two remained. The first was a black pickup truck, the second was a red Porsche. I took my shield case from my pocket, flipped it open to show my gold lieutenant’s badge, and stepped out into the street, both arms raised. Inside the black pickup, I saw a man driving, with a woman beside him. I heard the man’s angry shout, saw the woman’s mouth come open. The car’s horn blared; its front end dipped sharply as the brakes caught. I stood motionless until the truck had completely stopped, only a foot from my legs. Close behind me, I heard Canelli’s voice.

  “Is it Durkin?”

  “Yes. Stand here, in front of the truck.” I stepped to the driver’s open window. The driver was young and swarthy, a Chicano.

  “Hey, man, whadda you doing, man? I couldda—”

  “Switch off your engine.” I put my hand through the window. “Give me the keys. Now.” As I spoke, I looked up the hill, beyond the red Porsche. The driver’s door of the Mercedes was swinging open.

  “Hey, man, whadda you talking, give you the keys? I’ve no done nothing. You got no right to—”

  “Either give me the keys, or you’re going to jail. Take your choice.”

  “Christ, Remo, give him the goddam keys,” the woman wailed. “He’s a cop. Can’t you see?”

  A brown hand took the keys from the ignition, handed them to me.

 

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