I directed him to a drug store half a block from Riemann’s address. Inside, I suggested he have a cup of coffee while I have my prescription filled.
He tilted his head and studied me. “Just remember I lose my stripes if you run out on me. And I got a wife and four kids.”
“Sergeant—” I pointed to the front door. “I promise I won’t go through there without you.”
I saw him seated safely at the counter then hurried to the rear, hoping they hadn’t altered the building since I’d jerked sodas there four years before. I slipped behind the high prescription counter, pulled open the door of the storeroom, then paused while my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. Then I stepped into the alley, leaving the back door unlatched.
Riemann opened the door of his second-floor apartment. He wore slacks and a flowered sports shirt. He looked old and gray and somehow smaller without his uniform.
“Don’t look so disappointed, Laurie,” he said, smoothing the shirt self-consciously over his stomach. “I’m still workin’ even if I ain’t in harness.”
I handed him the picture of Eileen in her cheer-leader’s uniform. “Could you tell me why you want it?”
He shook his head slowly as he inserted the picture into his wallet. “It’s better if you’re not involved, Laurie. That’s why I wanted you to get here without being seen.”
“Captain …” I sat on the edge of the unmade bed. I didn’t intend to leave as ignorant as I’d arrived. “Koch says he doesn’t have Richard.”
Riemann put his wallet in his hip pocket. “He’s got him, all right. I don’t know where he’s got him but he’s got him.” He looked at me narrowly. “You been lookin’ for the rapist.”
“Naturally.”
“Laurie, you got to remember this guy’s a killer. Don’t go around drawing fire!”
“That seems to be out of our control now, Captain. He visited me again last night.”
Riemann was thoughtful as I told the story. When I finished he rubbed his chin. “Athletic character, climbs trees. Made his getaway on sand, so footprints are no good. Smart character.” He pulled a metal locker from beneath the bed. “I reckon you rate a peek at what I’ve got, after that.” He drew a key from his pocket and tried to insert it, but his hand began to tremble and jerk. I took the key from his fingers and he grinned apologetically. “Second day is the roughest, Laurie. By tomorrow I’ll be dried out and bright as a dollar.”
I opened the lid and he lifted out two plaster casts, each containing the print of a shoe. Both prints were the same size and shape.
“This one,” he pointed, “came from the soft ground under the bleachers. See how it deepens toward the toe? I figure he squatted there, maybe waitin’ to see if you was dead.” He squinted up at me.
I felt an urge to spit in the footprint and grind the plaster into dust, but I only nodded.
He held up the other cast. “A footprint tells a story, Laurie, but it don’t yell it out loud. This deep one came from the curb of the pool. Take into account the condition of the ground, and a hundred and twenty pounds of dead girl, and you got a man weighing around two hundred pounds. It ain’t fat, either; he’s strong as a bull. Didn’t even slip while he carried the girl. Nor an ordinary sex criminal type. They’re usually short and fat.”
I suddenly felt a confidence in Riemann I hadn’t had before. “So you’re looking for a strong, athletic man weighing around two hundred pounds. What else?” I hoped there’d be more; so far it sounded too much like Richard.
“Well …” He studied the casts, resting his chin on his hand. “See them pointy toes and slick soles on both prints? We look for a guy who gets dressed up on Stella Night.”
It still could be Richard. “Will you know more soon?”
“Maybe.” He put the casts tenderly into the locker and snapped it shut. Then he rose and patted the hip pocket containing his wallet and Eileen’s picture. “I’m takin’ this little girl on a trip today. When I get back tonight … Well, we’ll see. But by then Koch’ll have your phone tapped, so how’ll I get in touch with you?”
I rubbed my forehead. “If we had a signal, I could get past Sergeant Johnson, my watchdog!”
“That’s it! Listen.” He cupped his hands to his mouth and gave a low, mournful howl, followed by three short barks. Then he repeated it. “When you hear that you come down to the fence at the end of your garden.” He put his heavy hand on my shoulder and opened the door. “I meant what I said about this guy being a killer, so”—he squeezed my shoulder—“don’t take any chances today. Tomorrow it may be all over.”
The thought of learning who the man was tightened my throat with a mixture of dread and eagerness. I couldn’t speak, so I nodded and left Captain Riemann.
Back in the drug store, I found the sergeant flanked by chattering office girls on coffee break. He twisted on the stool and held out a glass. “I bought you a lemonade, but it’s probably warm. Look at this.” He held up a newspaper. “You made the big papers, Laurie!”
His last sentence rolled out into a sudden silence like a shout in a tomb. Faces turned toward me, and I felt as though I’d blundered into the men’s locker room. I took the lemonade and paper and walked stiffly to a booth hidden from the counter by a magazine rack.
The big city papers had no more information than the Clarion, but they’d run photos of Eileen and me under a caption: BEAUTY QUEEN SECOND VICTIM OF SEX ATTACK. Seeing my picture gave me a strange feeling of detachment, as though I were looking at a stranger. As I stood there staring at the paper I thought of Rich. I had to see him. One way or the other, I had to get to him at police headquarters!
Sergeant Johnson scratched his jaw when I told him what I wanted to do. He said he’d call first to save us a trip for nothing. He returned from the phone scratching his jaw even harder. “Let’s go. This’ll be something for the papers-victim visits attacker in jail.”
“He hasn’t been found guilty, Sergeant.” I said as I pushed out the door into the blistering sun. I could hear him chuckling behind me.
Johnson left me seated alone in the interrogation room. Fifteen minutes dragged by while I drummed nervously on the massive table. I was grinding out my second cigaret when Richard came in and closed the door behind him. He had the alert, defensive look of a deer approaching a strange water hole. His eyes were puffy, and a purple ridge began just above his right eye and disappeared into the matted hair on his scalp.
“Richard!” I jumped up and touched a fingertip to the welt. “What did they hit you with?”
“Later, Laurie.” He caught my wrist gently and stepped back. “Koch told me what I’m supposed to have done. Do you think I did?”
“No.” My eyes swept down his body and I saw the rounded toes of his shoes sticking out below his wrinkled trousers. He was dressed as he’d been Saturday night, except that his tie, belt and shoelaces were missing, and the white shirt was gray and webbed with tiny wrinkles. I put my arms around his chest and rested my forehead against his stubbled cheek. “I knew it wasn’t you.”
His arms went around me and I felt the strong beat of his heart. “Now maybe I can stand the place.” Then his lips brushed my ear and I barely heard his soft whisper. “Don’t look now, but Koch can see and hear us.” I stiffened and started to pull away. “Wait. He’ll let you stay as long as he thinks he’ll learn something. Now let’s sit down and act like fourth cousins.”
We sat down with the wooden table between us, and the thought of Koch’s eyes kept me stiff and tense. I kept my hands on the table, though I ached to smooth Richard’s matted hair or press something cold to his forehead while he talked.
First, said Richard, he hadn’t stolen a car—but he’d have to explain that later. And he hadn’t taken a rotor cap. It had just been there when he’d emptied his pockets into a paper sack at the station. He remembered going for Koch—here he grinned—then the lights went out and didn’t come on again until midnight last night, when he woke up in a car on the way to the station
. An hour ago he’d been charged with rape and bond set at twenty thousand dollars. And a lawyer had come to see him.
Here he rubbed a knuckle across his eyebrow. “He said your dad hired him for me, and that sounds screwy. Koch said your dad signed the complaint against me.”
It was like daddy, I thought, to hire a lawyer—but he’d never find twenty thousand. “It’s his own idea, Rich, and—” I thought of Koch listening. “I can’t explain now.”
Rich nodded and caught his lower lip between his teeth. “Can you keep Goldie until I get out of here? I don’t know how long that’ll be.”
“Yes. I’ll bring you some clean clothes too. And … what else?” I was suddenly eager to do something for him. “You have enough to eat?”
He grinned. “Stop looking so sad, Laurie. The place is clean; not even a cockroach for company. Food is edible. I would like some books, though.”
“I’ll bring some from your trailer, Rich.”
“Yeah, do that.” Rich was hunched over the table, wetting his finger and making marks idly on the table top as he talked. I noticed that a twitch had developed under his right eye. “You know, you hear stories about jail, about how hard it is not to get up and go out for a beer when you want, or raid the icebox for a midnight snack. But I’ve got freedom here. Nobody tells me whether to lie on my back or my stomach. I can close my eyes, or I can leave them open. I can wriggle my right big toe or my left big toe.” He looked at me, and I saw his eye still twitching. “So, I’m happy as a calf on green grass, and I don’t want you poking around trying to find some missing alibi for me.”
His eye was getting worse. Nerves … no, he was winking at me! The swollen eyes had made it hard to tell. Now I realized he’d been talking to distract the watcher from his marking on the table. Now the last mark was drying; I could only make out two bars of a capital “N.”
“I don’t understand, Rich. You have an alibi?”
“Never mind, just go home,” he said, making the marks again. “I’m not planning to spring my alibi until I get in court.” An “A” took shape as Richard wrote upside down. “I don’t want anyone to know what it is, particularly anyone connected with that fat-assed lieutenant.” An “N” appeared, then another. “And that’s all I have to say, Laurie.”
ANN. She was his alibi. Ann knew where he’d been from the time I’d left the club until the police picked him up in his trailer. I felt a twist of jealousy, then pushed it away and stood up. “All right, Rich.” I put bitterness into my voice. “I’ll leave right now if that’s the way you feel.”
He laughed as he rubbed his sleeve across the table. “That’s right. And don’t worry about me. It’s not as though I’d committed a really heinous crime like hiding Jules Curtright’s toothbrush or slipping a diet chart into Koch’s mail.”
Richard was still talking as I went out the door. He asked if I’d noticed what a marked improvement had been made in the fat man’s face.
I was halfway down the hall when footsteps thudded behind me. I turned to see Koch jerk open the door of the interrogation room and step in, his face an angry purple. I felt a thrill of fear for Rich; but he’d baited Koch so I’d be free to find Ann without being seen. I swept past three policemen at the outer door and stepped into the street. Half a block away I cut into an alley.
Ann’s mother blew a tired, defeated sigh over the phone line. “Ann hasn’t been home since Saturday morning.”
“Where does she stay in town?”
“I don’t know.” She sighed again. “I never know anything, and her daddy’s no help. If I send him after her he goes to the tavern and gets drunk and I don’t see him for days. I can’t go. I’m a sick woman and the medicine they give me doesn’t help. I keep telling her she’ll wind up like Eileen or—”
I hung up on her plaintive voice. I’d have to pick up Ann’s trail in town. I’d start with the bars.
Outside, the sun pounded down on my head and the sidewalk sent waves of heat up my legs.
I hurried across the courthouse lawn, past the greening statue of Jules’ great-grandfather. I entered a block of abandoned buildings whose blank windows mirrored the sun. A police car turned the corner, and I ran up a short flight of grass-grown steps and pushed through a peeling door. My nostrils filled with the odor of rotting wood and I heard rats’ feet scurry above me. Then Sergeant Johnson drove by, his head swiveling like a searchlight.
The first bar I came to was cool, musty and dim inside. I waited while the bartender served three cardplayers at the end of the bar, then I asked about Ann. He knew her, he said, but he hadn’t seen her for three-four days. That’s the way it was with Ann, he said—on tap every night for a couple weeks, then gone for days like she’d got religion.
I thanked him and left.
The next bar was cleaner and emptier, and the bartender had red hair which formed a fuzzy halo around a gleaming scalp. Ann was a regular, he said, polishing a glass; but her patronage was as unpredictable as summer rain. He held up a glass and squinted through it. “You’re Laurie Crewes, right?”
I stiffened and turned away. “Thanks for the information.”
“Now wait. You look like you’re about to crack up, if you don’t mind a stranger’s opinion. Sit down over there and I’ll bring you a drink.”
“I haven’t time,” I said. But I didn’t leave. He came out carrying a bottle of beer and a glass of amber liquid. I followed him to a booth in the corner. He waited with his hands folded across his apron while I sat and sipped the bourbon. I felt my twitching nerves relax and smiled at him.
“It’s on me,” he said. “Take your time. Nobody will bother you here.”
After he left I lit a cigaret. It was cool and dim in the booth.
A flat, nasal voice broke into the quiet. “Heard you was looking for Ann.”
I looked up to see the blond boy Koch had beaten in the station. My fingers tightened on the glass. “You know where she is?”
“Nah. I just got outa jail.” His tone held boredom and disgust. His eyes, the color of faded blue jeans, had the same defensive alertness I’d seen in Richard. Except for a skinned nose, he seemed undamaged, and his heavy shoes were rounded and scuffed at the toes.
“I just thought …” He shoved his hands into the pockets of khaki pants and looked down, conscious of my scrutiny. “If you find her will you tell her I said good-bye? I been advised to leave this town, but I gotta get gas money for the old hoopee first.”
“Sit down if you want to,” I said, waving across the booth.
He slid quickly into the booth and grinned at me. “I been looking for some of my old drinking buddies to borrow some gas money from. That lousy judge musta looked in my billfold because the fine took all I had.”
I saw him glance at the untouched beer and slid it across to him. “Take it all. I don’t drink beer.”
“Yeah?” His eyes narrowed. “I saw you before some place.” He shrugged, tipped the bottle and drank in huge swallows then he set the bottle down and belched, his face slack. “Ooops, sorry. You forget manners in the coop.”
“How long have you been going with Ann?”
“Year, when I’m in town.” He tipped the beer glass with the rim of his bottle and watched the pale liquid run down the side, filling the glass without foam. He grinned up at me. “I like Ann. She’s a real kick in the pants on a party. But I gotta say this—if you’re gonna buy beer for all her friends, you better carry a lot of money.”
“I know.” I was no longer surprised at Ann’s far-reaching reputation for “friendliness.” “But she had one particular boy friend didn’t she?”
“Now, that”—he pointed his finger at me—“is something I’d like to know myself. We’d be having a helluva time for a few days—you know Ann never held nothing back. Then one day she’d just not show up for a date. Four-five days later she’d look me up and say she’d been out of town, and if I’d ask no questions I’d hear no lies. Now I figure”—he pointed again—“Ann’s got s
ome married john on the hook. When he can break loose from his old lady, he calls Ann up and she takes off like a speckled bird. Saturday night she did it right in the middle of a date.”
“What time?”
“Ten-thirty.”
That would have been right after I saw her at the Barn. “Did you see her talk to anyone?”
The boy shook his head and looked down at his glass. “I don’t guess I’ll see her again. I ain’t coming back here while that fat lieutenant is alive. He got mad when I wouldn’t sign a complaint against that guy for taking my car.”
Richard. I felt a surge of warmth for the boy. “You don’t think he took it?”
“Yeah, he probably did. But I been in too many jails myself to go around puttin’ other guys in. Hell, I got the car back undamaged, except it only had about a teacupful of gas left.”
“Did you see him in jail?”
“No. They got him in a segregated cell. I been in ‘em. You don’t see nobody, don’t talk to nobody.”
As he talked I kept seeing Richard as he’d looked when he came into the interrogation room, wary and uncertain. And I saw Koch’s face, purple with anger.
The blond boy had a theory about guys like Koch, he said. They marked drifters like him down in their books as guys to arrest when the public yells for blood. If it wasn’t for guys like him, three-fourths of the crimes in the country would be on the books unsolved.
Actually, he said, he’d been damn glad to get off with a twenty-eight dollar fine after he heard about the rape. He said he felt sorry as hell for the guy they’d charged this morning because he had him figured for a patsy.
“I know he is,” I said.
“You know?” He squinted at me, then slapped his forehead. “Jesus! I musta been drunk Saturday night. You were in there when that fat bastard was pounding on me. You’re the gal, right?”
I nodded.
“And you know the guy didn’t do it?” He shook his head in wonder. “Then why is he in jail?”
“I—” There was no point in telling the whole, complicated story. “They dont’ believe me.”
The Anatomy of Violence Page 8