There is a clicking of high-heeled pumps behind us, and then a voice says: “Let him go, Lieutenant.”
It is Williams speaking.
Williams, my faithful partner, the Tonto to my Lone Ranger, the Watson to my Holmes – I wish.
I look down at my hands, still grasping Malloy. They are sweating and patches of dampness are spreading over his khaki shirt. I don’t want to let him go. I am tired of dealing with people like him – shit-kicking hicks with black-and-white vision. He needs a little compassion shaking into his cracker frame – and I am the man to do it, right here and now.
“Let him go, Kaleta,” Williams persists. “This isn’t the way.”
She’s right, of course – and I hate her for it.
I unclasp my hands, and Malloy is free. His heels touch the floor again, and he does a couple of little bounces, like he’s checking that it’s still solid.
“Get on the phone to Bobbie’s mother,” I order him. “Tell her that her son needs a lawyer. Give her the number of the public defender’s office.”
Malloy’s mouth flaps open, but no words come out. If I had a fish, I would throw it to him. Since I don’t, I just point to the door. He turns away, already rewriting the scene in his mind so that he can come out with some sort of credit. Yeah, well, don’t we all do that?
“That wasn’t smart, Lieutenant,” Williams says.
No, it wasn’t smart, because before he calls Bobbie’s mother, Malloy will be on the phone to Chief Ringman, who, we already know, is not my Number One fan.
“So what do we do now?” Williams asks.
“I’m going to have a talk with Bobbie,” I say.
“Before his lawyer gets here?” Williams says, raising one eyebrow.
But what she really means is: ‘You’re gonna give him grief, aren’t you, Kaleta? So what was all that pantomime with Malloy? If you’re planning to play the hard cop, then at least have the guts to admit it.’
It’s not like that. Part of me, at least, is already on Bobbie’s side, and I want to talk with him one-on-one, before everything starts getting filtered through a mouthpiece with a heavy caseload and a cheap leather briefcase.
“You’ll just be giving his lawyer ammunition,” Williams points out to me.
“He’s been Mirandised,” I say, hating myself for using official procedure as a shield, but not wanting – really not wanting – to go into issues like sensitivity right now.
“Yeah, he’s been Mirandised,” Williams agrees, “but do you think he really understands his rights? Do you think the courts will believe he does?”
“I’ll take the chance,” I say, and when Williams’ rule-book face slips into place, I add: “And I’ll take the responsibility. All of it!”
We stand looking at each other for perhaps ten seconds, then Williams shrugs.
“I’ll go see if one of the interrogation rooms is free,” she says.
“I’ll talk to him here.”
Another break with regulations.
‘Suspects must always be interrogated in the rooms provided for that purpose’ – thus saith the Harrisburg Police Manual, Paragraph 84, Sub-section 13.
But though the interrogation rooms are more comfortable than this bare holding cell, I can tell by the way that Bobbie is hugging the wall that he will be happier and more co-operative here – because at least this is the nightmare he knows.
“You stay where you are,” I tell Williams.
I unlock the door and step inside the cell. The door swings slowly behind me and clicks shut. The noise – loud, metallic, somehow very final – reverberates round the walls, and seems to both exclude me from the world of Sergeant Williams on the other side of the bars, and seal me into the stuffy, mentally gray existence of Bobbie Hopgood.
I straddle the chair opposite the prisoner. He looks up at me, eyes full of fear, imploring me to help him.
“Tell me about Jeannie Quail, Bobbie,” I coax.
Bobbie says nothing, just sits there, his chin resting on his hands, looking anxiously at me. He is not trying to be difficult. He wants to help me – I can sense it. Yet there is something holding him back.
“We’re wasting our time, Lieutenant,” Williams says, from the other side of the bars.
I shoot her an angry look. “Go get yourself a cup of coffee, Sergeant.”
“I’m not thirsty.”
“Go get some coffee anyway.”
Williams shrugs again. “You want to talk to the suspect without witnesses, that’s up to you.”
She turns and is gone. I lean forward so that my face is closer to Bobbie’s. He cowers, like I’m about to hit him. And I know that if I did strike him, he wouldn’t fight back – though he is at least as strong as I am.
“Talk to me, Bobbie,” I say. “You’ll feel better when you’ve talked to me.”
His lip quivers with doubt.
“Why did you run away from us, Bobbie?”
“You’re a policeman,” Bobbie replies.
“Why did you want to run away from policemen, Bobbie?”
“You musta found out that I did a bad thing. Somebody musta told you.”
“What bad thing are we talking about here, Bobbie?”
“I got fired from the supermarket.”
“What have you been doing for the last four days, Bobbie? Where were you when you should have been working at the supermarket?”
“Walking. Sitting in the park, and watching the ducks.”
“Why?”
He looks at me like I’m retarded.
“So my mom wouldn’t find out I’d got fired,” he says.
“But she’d have to have found out at the end of the week, Bobbie – when you didn’t bring your pay check home.”
“I … uh … didn’t think of that.”
And I believe him. I really do.
“You got fired because you were taking time off work, didn’t you, Bobbie?” I ask.
He bows his head. “Yeah.”
“What did you do when you left work early, Bobbie?”
He mumbles something which I think is ‘friend’.
“Did you say you were with your friend?’ I ask.
He nods.
“Which friend is that? What’s his name?’
“He’s my special friend.”
“Tell me about him.”
He shakes his head. “I can’t. It’s a secret.”
“You’ll be in big trouble if you don’t tell.”
“I promised I wouldn’t,” he says.
He squares his jaw with a child’s determination – like the secret is very important to him. If I keep pushing this line of questioning, I tell myself, I’m going to drive him back into his shell.
Okay, so let’s try going at it a different way.
“What do you do with this special friend?” I ask.
Bobbie smiles. “We play games. We …”
Then he realizes that he is saying too much – suspects I am trying to trick him. And the exact thing I wanted not to happen is happening – he has started to clam up on me.
I shift to shock tactics.
“Did you do bad things to those little boys and girls, Bobbie?” I ask.
No good. Though his eyes are still open, he’s pulled down the blinds over his mind.
“I don’t wanna talk no more,” he says.
“Why?” I insist.
He buries his head in his hands, so that even though he is shouting, his next words are muffled. “I don’t wanna talk no more. I don’t wanna talk no more.”
I’ve lost him, but only for the moment. I can open him up again. I know I can, because I feel we’ve already started to bond, and all it will take is a little time – a little patience.
I become aware there is a third person present. Malloy has returned and is standing at the other side of the bars, looking in on us. Bobbie, peeping through a gap in his fingers, sees the khaki too, and huddles closer to the wall.
Great!
“What th
e fuck are you doing here, Malloy?” I ask.
I am furious at the interruption, but I keep my voice at its normal level – because I don’t want Bobbie even more frightened than he is already.
“Chief wants to see you, Lieutenant,” Malloy says.
“Tell him I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“He said I was to bring you right away. He said I wasn’t to take no arguments.”
I look at Bobbie, then back at Malloy. There is no way the khaki officer is going to leave without me, and no way that Bobbie is going to open up to me with Malloy hovering there.
“We’ll talk later, Bobbie,” I promise. I stand up. “Okay, Malloy, let’s go.”
*
When I enter Ringman’s outer office, Ruth is on the phone again. She gives me her ‘You’re in such deep shit that I can’t even see your hat’ look, then points towards the Chief’s office to indicate that I should go straight in.
I knock on the door and Ringman shouts: “Yeah?”
The Chief has his back to me, and is looking out of the window across Jackson Square.
“The Mayor’s called an emergency meeting of the Elders,” he says, still gazing outwards. “He wants you there.”
“What’s it about?” I ask.
“Might be about Bobbie Hopgood,” Ringman says. “Yeah. Could be about just that.”
“Specifically?”
Even though his back is to me, I know he is grimacing, because Chief Ringman has no fondness for fancy language.
“Specifically,” he says, holding the word carefully in his mouth, as if he is afraid it will fall and smash, “specifically, Kaleta, I have no fucking idea.”
He is lying, of course. Ringman is a politician first and a police chief second. There is nothing going down in City Hall which he doesn’t know about.
“Does Williams go with me?” I ask.
The Captain finally turns round, and there is a wide grin on his face.
“Does Superman take a piss without Lois Lane there to shake his dick for him?” he asks.
7
We are cutting across Jackson Square – en route to City Hall – which entails passing close by the large neo-classical marble fountain which was commissioned, in happier times, in an attempt to give Harrisburg a more cosmopolitan air. When it was working – when water continually cascaded from the pots held by semi-clad maidens, and dolphins perpetually squirted out jets of spray from the top of their heads – the fountain had a certain charm, but it is not working now (and hasn’t been for some time), and its bowls and channels have become nothing more than a repository for discarded cigarette packets and chewed-out gum.
It has not been switched off due to any lack of water – once Mustang had closed down, the town had more than enough of that stored in the Nathaniel Harris Dam – but because of a mechanical malfunction. Of course, the malfunction could be fixed, but there is no money to pay for it, because we are experiencing what the mayor calls in public ‘an eroding tax base scenario’ and in private refers to as ‘having our balls caught in the mangle’.
As we reach the fountain, Williams comes to a sudden halt.
“Is something the matter?” I ask.
“I don’t think Bobbie did it,’ my sergeant says in a rush.
That’s rich, I think, coming from a woman who, just over an hour ago, seemed more than willing to pump him full of lead.
But aloud, I say: “Would you like to tell me how you’ve reached that conclusion?”
Williams shrugs. “It just … just doesn’t feel right.”
I almost laugh at seeing the look of doubt on her face. Her ice maiden mask has quite melted. Or, to put it another way, my hard-boiled sergeant has abandoned the departmental manual and guides to procedure in favor of instinct – and she really doesn’t feel comfortable with it.
“Besides, he doesn’t seem organized enough,’ she adds in an attempt to shore up her gut feeling with a little policewoman logic.
The same thought has occurred to me. I picture Bobbie’s bedroom in my mind – the clumsy decorating job, the awkwardly folded clothes – and the floorboard laid back in place so expertly that only a couple of splinters show it has even been lifted.
*
We reach City Hall – its grimy whiteness exposed by the July sunshine, its Doric columns groaning under the weight of Mayor Pine’s administration. We mount the steps, cross the lobby, and take the elevator to the second floor, where the Chamber of Elders is located.
Elders?
Yeah, you heard right. Other towns in the area have town councilmen, but Harrisburg remains loyal to the traditions established by Nathaniel Harris.
Harris, you see, was the son of a nonconformist Scots immigrant who owned most of the land on which the town now stands, and he rather liked the sound of ‘elders’. He also liked driving a hard deal, and the one he tried to drive with the railroad companies was so hard that they eventually decided – at great cost and inconvenience to themselves – to bypass the town. And thus it was, through blind greed and stupidity, that Nat set out a pattern of governance which Harrisburg’s elected officials have stuck to ever since.
We reach the heavy oak doors behind which the Board of Elders reaches its weighty decisions. I knock, the doors swing open, and we are admitted. We are facing a long wooden table. Along each side of the table sit the Elders. At the head, under a stern portrait of Nat Harris himself, sits my esteemed father-in-law, Mayor Pine. His nickname – Porky – has got something to do with his weight, but mainly relates to the fact that even his most loyal supporters think he’s a real prick.
Porky Pine!
Not much of a joke, but then standards of humor in Harrisburg were never very high.
“Sit down, Lieutenant Kaleta,” Porky says.
He does not always call me by my rank. Sometimes – in increasingly rare moments of family feeling – he calls me Mike. At others, he refers to me as “that shithead fucking intellectual my idiot of a daughter married.”
“You can sit down too, Sergeant,” the mayor continues.
Two chairs have been placed for us, side-by-side, at the opposite end of the table to the mayor. We fill them as instructed, and immediately feel ourselves under the scrutiny of a dozen pairs of hostile eyes.
“So you caught the pervert at last,” Porky says.
“We’ve certainly pulled a man in for questioning,” I reply cautiously.
“But you haven’t charged him yet?”
“No, sir, I haven’t.”
Porky rubs his shiny red head, as if he thinks this will speed up his mental processes.
“We gotta think about how this has been looking in the newspapers,” he says. “We need to be able to tell investors that everything’s fine now.”
I say nothing. Porky is obsessed with urban regeneration – and with good reason. He is in his third term of office. The last time he was elected, the factory closures hadn’t really begun to bite, but they’re clamped hard around everybody’s ankles now. And Porky knows that if he doesn’t pull something off soon, he’s a political dead man. But losing office isn’t the worst thing – the worse thing is that once he’s no longer mayor, he’ll have no way of keeping the lid on the municipal corruption that he’s both encouraged and profited from.
“The thing is,” Porky continues, “we want the problem settled as quickly as possible.’
“I understand that,” I tell him. “And as soon as we’ve got a solid case together, Bobbie Hopgood will be charged.”
If we’ve got a solid case together – and if Bobbie really is guilty – I add mentally.
“How long is it gonna take to come up with this solid case?” the mayor asks.
I shrug. “We’ll have to wait at least until we get the DNA evidence back from the lab in Richmond.”
The look on Porky’s face says that he has no idea what DNA is, but he sure as shit isn’t going to ask me to explain.
“And when will the results be back?” he asks.
/> “Two to three days.”
“Wouldn’t it be a hell of a lot quicker if we did those tests right here in Harrisburg?”
“Yes, it would,” I agree, “but unfortunately we don’t have the proper facilities here.”
“I hear this Hopgood kid ain’t asked for a lawyer,” Porky says, changing direction. “I also hear that you’re trying to talk him into getting one.”
“It is the right of every alleged felon to be legally represented,” I say.
Porky doesn’t seem impressed by felons’ rights. “A lawyer’s gonna slow up the whole process,’ he points out.
“I still think—”
Porky’s eyes narrow. “I don’t want you thinking, Kaleta. I want you doing your job, which is to see that this sicko is charged, sentenced and locked away, so that decent people can feel safe on the streets again.”
He pauses, but I know he hasn’t finished, because I can see a vein throbbing on his shiny skull as it pumps more venom round to his mouth.
“There’s a lot of folk in this town who think that the way you’ve handled this case has been strictly amateur night,’ he continues, “an’ I’m starting to agree with them. You might – I say might – still have a future in the Harrisburg Police Force, but first you gotta show willing.”
Porky has always been better with the stick than the carrot, and this comes out more of a threat than an offer of salvation. But even if he really means I might have a future, I am not interested.
Fuck him, and fuck this town! I don’t have to be here.
I am just composing a suitably offensive resignation speech when a new voice says: “I think Lieutenant Kaleta is right.”
I look along the table at the man who has dared to defy Porky. He has a long thin face with an aquiline nose. His smooth skin puts him in early middle age, though his thick mane of swept-back hair is completely white. But it’s the expression on his face that makes the real impact. There’s no aggression there, no suggestion that he’s going to fight like hell for his corner – it just says with absolute certainty that he knows he’s right, and that everyone had better realize it soon. It is the expression of a man who would correct God – or any other social inferior.
I have never met him before, but I know immediately who he is, because there is only one man it could be – Thurston Craddock, Chairman, President and sole stockholder of Craddock Industries.
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