Investigation

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  I don’t know if I was pissed off because she saw through us so easily, or if I really did feel offended; after all, I hadn’t given her a hard time.

  The interrogation resumed, without Vito. When Quibro asked her what time she had called her husband the night of the murders, she replied, “It was ten-fifteen.”

  Quibro looked up. “Are you sure?”

  Kitty took that as a challenge. “Yeah, I’m sure. It was ten-fifteen.”

  “Could it have been later? Maybe closer to eleven o’clock? Maybe even later than that, say eleven-fifteen or eleven-twenty?”

  She leaned forward and spoke directly to the stenotypist, who didn’t know what to do, so he just kept taking down words. “Hey, you. You at the machine. Read him back my answer. He doesn’t seem to have heard me. I told him I called my husband at ten-fifteen. Isn’t that what you took down?” Then, to Neary, “Is that guy hard of hearing or does he need permission to speak?” Then, to the stenotypist, “Speak! C’mon, good boy, speak!”

  The stenotypist hunched himself closer to his machine and just kept hitting the soft-clicking keys; he never looked up at Kitty.

  She was prepared to be questioned about the telephone calls to Vincent Martucci. They had discussed business: the opening of the new spa; nothing else.

  When Patti MacDougal’s statement was read to her, the portion describing her visit at 2:30 A.M. to the Keeler apartment, Kitty held up her hand. “You have to know Patti,” she said. “She didn’t come near my apartment that night. She probably thought about it by the time she got home. Patti means well, but she hardly ever follows through on a good impulse. She did call me at three A.M. and gave me the story about having tried to return the car earlier, but I knew she hadn’t.”

  She told this calmly, shrugging Patti MacDougal off without much trouble. What I had seen of Patti didn’t really contradict Kitty’s view of her: a girl who means well, but.

  Finally, Quibro rested his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “Just a few more questions, Mrs. Keeler, but I must urge you to consider them most carefully. You have previously stated that you last tended your two sons between one and one-thirty A.M. Thursday, April seventeenth, 1975. Is that right?”

  Her voice seemed tired, stretched thin. “Yes. Yes.”

  “At that time, Mrs. Keeler, how did your son George appear to you?”

  “Appear to me?” She pulled herself straight in the chair and became sharper, more alert. “What do you mean? George had fever. He threw up a little and cried. It always upsets him. And I cleaned him up, changed him and all, and he went back to sleep. That’s all.”

  “And your son Terry. Did your son Terry appear to be in a normal condition?”

  “Normal condition?” She regarded Quibro carefully, weighing the questions, trying to find the direction they were taking. “I don’t know what you mean, normal condition?”

  In his monotone, flat and irritating, Quibro said, “According to your earlier statement, you saw Terry in the bathroom and then back in his bedroom. In any way, did he appear to be different than he normally was?” When she didn’t answer, just stared at him, Quibro said, with a touch of impatience, “Did he appear to be hurt, or injured? Did he seem to be ... drugged?”

  “Drugged?” Kitty frowned; she glanced from Quibro to Neary to Walker to me, then back to Quibro. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. He was ... sleepy. He went back to bed and went back to sleep. What do you mean?”

  “Mrs. Keeler, did you at any time during the night of Wednesday, April sixteenth, and Thursday, April seventeenth, 1975, leave your children alone in the apartment?”

  I might have imagined it, but she seemed to falter, to hesitate for about a split second, as though coming to a decision; no one else noticed; Tim’s face was still set and unmoving.

  Kitty Keeler shook her head and her voice sounded weary, exhausted, tired of it all at last. “No, I didn’t leave them alone at any time.”

  “Mrs. Keeler, do you have any idea, at all, as to who may have been involved in this matter?”

  “In ‘this matter’?” She mimicked Quibro coldly; he didn’t react, just stared at her blankly. “Is that what you people consider the murder of my two children? Is that how you refer to it: this matter?”

  “Mrs. Keeler, I believe your husband is waiting for you in the outer office. Detective Walker will drive you to your brother’s house. That is where you’re staying, isn’t it?”

  She stood up without answering Tim and started for the door, then stopped as though she’d just remembered something. “Captain Neary, when will we be able to get into our apartment and get some clothes? I have hardly anything with me. Can we go in and take out some clothes?”

  “In another day or two, Mrs. Keeler; we’ll let you know.”

  I opened the door and stood back for her to pass. She stopped again, bit her lip, inhaled and seemed to hold it. She turned again to Tim.

  “Captain Neary, when will they release the boys’ bodies? We have to make funeral plans and no one’s told us yet.”

  “We’ll let you know as soon as we know, Mrs. Keeler.”

  Vito had been standing just outside the door, in the squad room. He stepped back elaborately to let her pass and she never blinked at him. He went into Tim’s office and said, “Holy Christ, Tim. First she asks when she can get some of her clothes. And then she remembers to ask about her kids’ bodies.”

  It hadn’t seemed exactly that way to me; it seemed to me that it was too hard a question for her to ask. That she worked up to asking about the boys by asking about her clothes first. Vito hadn’t seen the dull center of her eyes at that moment; he hadn’t seen the slight twitching of a nerve ending in the corner of her mouth.

  Ed Quibro packed and buckled his briefcase, then fondled his head to make sure every hair was in its assigned place.

  “Well, boys,” he said, “what do you think about that? According to Kitty Keeler, there was nothing wrong with either of her sons between one and one-thirty A.M. According to the Medical Examiner, one kid was dead and the other was drugged unconscious by that time. And she never noticed anything unusual about them.” He pulled his thin lips back into what he thought was a smile. His teeth were little and dingy. “I think that little lady is going to hang herself.”

  Tim said, cautiously, since the burden of finding proof was squarely on his shoulders, “We have a helluva lot of work to do before that happens, Ed. We’re just at the beginning of the investigation.”

  “Well, I hope you’ll move right along, Captain Neary. Time is of the essence in this particular case.”

  Quibro never noticed the way Tim’s eyes glazed over, the way he was breathing through his teeth in a soft, dangerous whistle.

  “Hey, Quibro,” I asked him, “you got a cousin in the Bronx? Name of Teddy Riley?”

  Teddy Riley was the Ed Quibro of our neighborhood when Tim and I were kids. He was the kid we used to punch when there wasn’t anything else to do.

  Tim laughed and turned away from Quibro. Quibro’s beige eyes blinked, but he couldn’t find the joke. “No, my family is from Westchester originally.”

  He started out of the office, but couldn’t resist stopping and saying, more for his own benefit than ours, “Yes, sir, I’ll tell you how this whole thing is going to end. I’m going to get that little lady indicted on two counts of murder one. Just you wait. You’ll see.”

  It was at that exact point, if Ed Quibro had been Teddy Riley, he’d have gotten one right in the mouth.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE MINUTE THE PHONE rang, I remembered that I hadn’t called Jen. Before she could say a word, I said, “Hi, babe. Sorry I didn’t have a chance to call you last night. Tim’s got us working long hours.”

  There was a short silence, then, “You’ve really got me pegged, haven’t you, Joe?” She sounded sharp and tense, like this was the opening line of an argument, but she dropped it and said, her voice trying for lightness, “Hey, I saw you on the late news last
night. You really looked good, Joe. How come you’re on that case?”

  We talked for a little while about how come I was on the case. Then about our kids: she’d heard from our daughter; she was planning to call our son tonight. We made polite conversation, like two strangers being very careful not to say the wrong thing and not really certain what the wrong thing might be.

  Jen quit City College to marry me; she’d been an art major and always planned to go back someday for her degree. We were married nearly three years before I got on the job and we felt we could manage on my salary alone. Instead of going back to college, Jen got pregnant with our daughter. Then we put a down payment on the house in Queens; then we had our son. Jen kept up with her work on her own. She sold some watercolors and a few oil paintings from time to time at different summer art shows. But it always seemed that the more she worked, the less satisfied she was with what she was accomplishing. When the kids reached school age, Jen worked, on and off, in an art gallery; as a freelancer for an advertising agency; as an instructor in an adult-education community center. But she said she always felt “on the fringe of things”; not really into the center of what she felt she could do.

  Last year, our daughter got married in June; our son went off on a two-month jaunt across the country before establishing himself at the University of Michigan in September. In August, we did just what we’d promised each other, years and years ago when it was far enough in the future to look like some terrific goal: we sold our house in Queens and bought a brand-new four-room condominium in Florida. Jen went down there and enrolled in the University of Miami as an art-education major. And I’m supposed to retire from my life next November and start “living” down in Florida.

  I spent a week with Jen at Christmas. She seemed settled in and happy and busy with classes. I went down for a four-day weekend last month and something happened that I don’t think either of us anticipated. At least, I didn’t.

  It was the last night before I was to return to New York. We started to make love. I started to make love and Jen seemed to stiffen up, to draw back.

  “Why, Joe? Because it’s the last night we’ll see each other for a long time? The way it was always on the last night before you changed tour, for the same reason?”

  That was how it started. By the time we parted, it was like I’d never really known Jen at all. Maybe living on her own for the first time in her life, maybe because there’d been so many changes all at once in our lives, maybe because she was spending her days around kids half her age with a whole different life style, Jen seemed all caught up in the fact that she was forty-four years old and that there were more years behind her than ahead of her.

  Two years ago, Jen went with our daughter to a women’s consciousness-raising group at Hunter College. Jen dropped out after about three sessions. What she told me was, “Those women scared the hell out of me, Joe. They’re all so crazy and angry and frustrated.” My daughter accused her of being afraid of what she might discover about herself, but Jen shrugged that off.

  I think maybe our daughter was right; and maybe Jen knew that all along and finally has had a chance to take a good look at herself and her life. I think she feels a little confused and scared. I know she feels cheated. She’s made that pretty damn clear, one minute blaming her own background (“I guess the nuns in Montreal really did a number on me in all those years they had to shape my life”); the next minute blaming me (“How could you not know it was never the same for me as it was for you? How could you honestly say you didn’t know?”).

  Of course I defended myself by going on the offensive: “You mean in all these years you’ve never been able to be totally honest with me about this? To let me know? Christ, I’m not a goddamn mind reader.”

  And then went further: “You were always so damn inhibited about sex, about your body, about my body, how could I have ever tried anything different with you? And I did try, Jen, you know damn well, and you know goddamn well what your reactions have always been anytime I ever—”

  “Right, right. Poor Joe. Stuck with a cold frigid wife, which of course would drive any hot-blooded normal male into the arms of other women ...”

  “I never said ...”

  “You never had to ...”

  We both went too far and neither of us knew how to undo whatever harm we’d done the other. I tried.

  “Look, Jen, this is the first time in our whole lives that you and I have even approached discussing our sex problems. Maybe this is the first step—”

  “Or maybe it’s the last step, Joe.”

  In all this time, we’ve spoken on the phone regularly, on schedule, and never once has either of us acknowledged in any way what happened that night. But it isn’t as though it never happened; it’s there, for both of us. If we were living together, seeing each other every day, it would have been resolved, one way or the other, by now. But we’re a thousand miles apart, so we talk like careful strangers.

  Jen questioned my diet: Was I eating enough bland foods? Had I cut down on my smoking? Was I getting enough sleep? Then, softly, almost like she was thinking aloud, “She’s a pretty girl, isn’t she, Joe?”

  “Who?”

  “That girl, the mother. Kitty Keeler. She looked beautiful on the news last night.”

  I felt the tightness working down my throat, a steady pressure against my windpipe. “Yeah, she’s a pretty girl.”

  “What an awful thing, Joe. Those poor babies. How could she have done it?”

  “What?”

  “That girl, Kitty Keeler. How could she have killed her own children?”

  “You’ve got that all figured out, have you?”

  “Well, she did it, didn’t she?”

  “That’s terrific, Jen.” I felt anger pulling my voice tight and thin. “I mean, you’re what? about a thousand miles away from Fresh Meadows and you caught the late news and I guess you read the morning paper and you’ve got the case cracked. I’m up here, working twelve hours on and twelve hours off, and this is the start of the third day of investigation and you know more about it than I do. That’s really terrific.”

  I don’t know why I said any of that. If I could have taken it back, I would have taken it back. In the silence, I could feel Jen’s hurt; her faraway hurt and anger. I was sorry. But I was tired of being sorry and I was tired of these strained, forced conversations on the telephone.

  After a long silence, Jen said, “I guess I shouldn’t believe everything I read in the papers, Joe.”

  “Well, they’ve got it all figured out, too. In fact, everybody has it all figured out.”

  “Well, don’t you think she ...”

  “I don’t know, Jen. Damn it, I don’t know. No one really knows anything at this point.”

  But they were all certain. Who the hell else would have killed those two kids? All you had to do was take a look at Kitty Keeler. Everyone said that; everyone felt that. Tim knew she did it; Vito knew; even the girl’s own mother knew. So why the hell was I so mad because Jen knew, too?

  Because Jen had said she was a pretty girl and I know what Jen means by that. Because I’ve gone through years and years of coming home after fifteen-, sixteen-hour investigations, tired, aching, needing a hot shower and sleep, and there was Jen, trying not to but always asking me: “Does she mean anything to you, Joe? You spend more time with these people than you do with us; with the kids, with me. Sometimes you must feel something for one of these women you get involved with on a case.”

  Jen wasn’t asking me if Kitty killed her kids; she was asking me how I felt about Kitty. And at this point, although I hadn’t even acknowledged it to myself, I was beginning to feel something about Kitty.

  “Listen, Jen. You caught me on my way out. I have an interview right in Forest Hills Gardens.”

  “You mean policemen have to work on Saturdays?”

  “Well, the bad guys work on Saturdays, don’t they?” It was an old joke between us, going back to when we were young and laughed a lot togethe
r.

  We said a few more safe things to each other, then Jen said, “Talk to you Tuesday night, then. Love you, Joe.”

  “Right. I love you, Jen.”

  Whatever the hell that means.

  I had another cup of coffee, another cigarette, a couple more antacid tablets. I doodled circles and arrows on the notepad next to the telephone and then I began to trace large and small question marks with little circles underneath.

  If Kitty Keeler didn’t kill her kids, then who did? She was the only logical one, but there wasn’t anything logical about any of her actions, assuming she did kill them.

  Keeler wasn’t a stupid girl; why the hell would she have dumped the bodies so close to home?

  Why the hell didn’t she come up with a better story than just “I went to bed; I went to sleep; I woke up; the kids were gone”?

  Why had she called Martucci, person to person, twice that night? She must have known that would be easy to check out.

  Why was she coming on so hard, antagonizing everyone who might possibly help her? The media could go either way: make you want to hang the bitch or make you want to jump on a white charger and save her.

  Why the hell did I come up with that particular image? There was nothing helpless about Kitty Keeler. Maybe something a little vulnerable beneath the surface toughness; maybe something a little injured in the dead center of her beautiful cold eyes. There was another Kitty, another facet we hadn’t seen: a girl who was loving and concerned about that lady, Mrs. Silverberg. I’d seen a flash of it when she’d reacted to George’s near-collapse after he’d found the boys. There had been something pure and selfless and uncontrived about her concern for George.

  All of our assignments had been to prove that Kitty Keeler killed her kids, instead of a wide-open investigation, which would ultimately prove she did it if in fact she was guilty. What bothered me was that we seemed prepared to prove her guilty even if she wasn’t.

  If I was feeling somewhat protective of Kitty Keeler, it was more because someone had to play devil’s advocate rather than because the girl seemed to want or need a protector.