The truth is that the windows were installed in the late Fifties, in order to make life more difficult for Officer ‘Bull’ Bateman, a Department legend with a forty-eight inch chest and the IQ of a diced carrot.
It seems that once behind closed doors, Bateman’s suspects had this habit of falling on the table edge, or else going completely ape-shit crazy and banging their heads repeatedly against the wall. Bateman was the nephew of one of the Elders, and there was no getting rid of him, so the then-Chief – who must have had about fifty times more basic humanity than Ringman – came up with the idea of the windows.
“Lookee here, Bull,” he said to his master interrogator, “it seems to me like the problem is that it’s too dark in there. Maybe they’d be less clumsy if it was lighter. Maybe that’ll calm down the ones that go off their heads.”
Bateman had just grunted. He didn’t need more light (“If’n he’ll just keep them big, white, scared eyes open, I can beat the shit out of a nigger in a woodshed at midnight”, he’d told his friends later), but he’d figured that as long as they didn’t interfere with his work, he didn’t mind the windows.
It hadn’t taken much time for even someone as stupid as Bateman to realize that the windows did interfere with his work. Every time he lifted his fist to a suspect, he was observed by at least thirty pairs of eyes, some of which belonged to people who were not as sympathetic as his fellow officers. He grew inhibited, then morose and listless. All the fun had been taken out of his work. He stuck it out for only three months before moving to the Deep South, where they had a more enlightened attitude to police procedure.
Bateman left, but the windows remained.
“Isn’t there another room available?” Tait asks.
“Nope,” I say, lying again.
I go back to the Squad Room, and lean my butt against a convenient desk. Through the window, I can see Tait making himself as comfortable as is possible in such sleazy, non-executive conditions.
Bobbie appears at the top of the basement stairs. The two officers – one on either side – are holding an arm each, but like Malloy yesterday, they are guiding, not restraining. Bobbie has never needed restraining. He’ll run – but he won’t fight.
He looks around the Squad Room at the officers pounding away at old-fashioned typewriters, at witnesses being questioned, and petty criminals charged. All the noise and activity seem to confuse and frighten him.
Prisoner and escort draw level with the desk I am sitting on, and Bobbie notices me for the first time. He smiles broadly, glad to see a friendly face in the middle of a hostile room.
“Hi, Mr Mike,” he says.
“Hi Bobbie.”
The sound of my voice seems to trigger some half-forgotten memory in Bobbie’s slow brain.
The smile vanishes, and in its place is a look which may be fear, or shame, or disappointment.
Or maybe all three!
Bobbie lowers his head and gazes at the floor. Then he is past me and all I can see is his back.
The exchange has not done much for my self-esteem, because the smile told me that he once believed in me – and the expression which followed it says he doesn’t any longer. There is a wall between us – but it wasn’t always there. I should have been able to get him to talk before the smooth Boston lawyer breezed in and built that wall. I’m convinced that if I had, Bobbie wouldn’t be in the deep shit he is now.
The door to Interrogation A opens, and Bobbie enters. His head is still bowed as the escort closes the door, sealing him in with his attorney.
Tait rises to his feet. Bobbie looks up, sees him for the first time, and rushes around to the other side of the table.
Tait holds out his mitt for a man-to-man handshake, but this isn’t what Bobbie wants. He throws his arms around the lawyer and hugs him. But it is more than just a hug. Though he is taller than Tait, Bobbie somehow manages to bury his head in the other man’s chest.
I feel a twitch of emotion.
Jealousy?
It can’t be.
But it is!
I want to be the guy Bobbie trusts – his friend and protector. I would surely make a better job of it than Tait.
They stand there locked together for a few seconds, then Tait gently untangles himself and points to the second seat. Bobbie meekly sits down. Tait looks up, and sees me watching. He gestures me to go away. I stay where I am.
Hell, there’s no law against looking.
Tait glares at me for maybe half a minute – Bobbie’s lawyer trying to outface Bobbie’s champion – and finally decides that the battle is not worth winning. He turns to Bobbie and starts to speak slowly and carefully. Bobbie nods his head after almost every sentence, yet only occasionally does he seem to be saying anything.
It is like watching TV with the volume turned off. I wonder what Tait is telling him, and wish I could lip-read.
What would I do in this situation? What did I do when I was in this situation? I tried to get Bobbie to talk. But Tait is monopolizing this interview.
If Bobbie was a normal client, it would be easy to reconstruct the conversation:
What are my chances, Mr Tait?
Good. If they try to pin it on you with the DNA results, we’ll bring in our own experts to contest them. And apart from that, it’s all circumstantial. The only problem is the panties the police found in your room. If we can explain them away, we should be home and free.
Couldn’t we say they were a plant? Couldn’t we tell them I wouldn’t be stupid enough to take evidence home?
That might work. Suggestions of police corruption. But don’t you tell them anything. Leave all the talking to me.
I know that, Mr Tait. I told you, I’m not stupid.
But that kind of exchange wouldn’t mean a thing to Bobbie. He’d never get his mind round the idea of circumstantial evidence, even if he lived to be 100.
So just what the fuck is it that Tait’s telling him?
I suddenly notice Bobbie’s right hand. At the start of the interview, it was resting on the table in front of him, but now it has reached across and is holding Tait’s left hand.
Tightly.
I shift my eyes to Tait. He looks at me, then at the interlocked hands, then back at me again.
He smiles, as if to say, “Yes, it is revolting to be holding hands with a half-wit – but it is necessary.”
I wonder if there is anything Tait wouldn’t do if he considered it necessary.
17
I pick up the phone, find the number recorded on the witness report in front of me, and dial that number. This is maybe the twentieth call I have made in the last two hours, and Williams, who has the other half of the list, will have done about the same.
Forty calls, then.
And so far we have nothing! Zilch! Nada!
What we are doing is contacting anyone who is on record as having been in the vicinity of one of the attacks. Put it another way – we are ignoring the Chief’s instructions and trying to find something – anything – to support our ‘half-assed’ theory that the rapist had to have had wheels.
“Did you see any cars acting strangely that day?” I hear Williams say into her mouthpiece. “No ma’am. Course not. I meant the driver … I know cars don’t act on their own … You saw some out-of-state plates … Yeah … What state? Florida, you say … What make of automobile was it? … You don’t know …”
My own call is connected. “Mr Harding? This is Lieutenant Kaleta, HPD. I was wondering if you noticed any cars – I mean the drivers of any cars – acting unusually the day Jerry Schmitt was attacked.”
Even as I ask, I know we don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting anywhere with this line of questioning. Who notices cars in urban America? Trees, you might notice. Animals, you’d remember. But cars are as natural as the sky and the sidewalk. So we’re probably just wasting our time – but we’re in desperation overdrive, and we can’t just sit here doing nothing.
“Could you repeat the question?�
� the old guy on the other end of the line asks. “I didn’t quite catch it the first time around.”
So he’s deaf.
Great!
And the way our luck is running, he’s probably near-blind and going senile as well.
But I repeat the question anyway.
“Yeah, I did notice something unusual,” Harding says. “There was this van cruising round near the school for about half an hour.”
I look down at the witness report.
Nothing about seeing any van recorded there.
“Why didn’t you mention this earlier?” I ask.
“I forgot,” says Harding, half-defensive, half-annoyed. “Listen, sonny, when you get to my age, things kinda slip your mind.”
“So how come you remember it now?”
“I seen it again. Same time, same area.”
“Can you describe it for me?”
“It was metallic blue. One of them little Ford jobs. You want the number?”
When he made his statement, the man didn’t even remember the van. Now, suddenly, he can tell us the registration.
“You remember the whole number plate?” I ask, because if he says yes, he is almost certainly giving me the run-around.
“Not the figures. Just the letters – WNH.”
“You quite sure of that?”
“Sure I’m sure. It’s like my name. Walter Mervin Harding. See, it’s almost my initials, ’cept it’s N ’stead of an M.”
So there is a God, after all – a God who gave my witness the right initials and caused him to be in the right place at the right time!
I thank Harding for his information, and hang up.
Williams is still busy on the other line.
“I appreciate you giving us your time, sir,” she says, trying to sound as grateful at the end of call twenty-one as she did after her first. “Yeah, we’ll certainly get back to you if we need anything else.”
She puts the phone down on its cradle, then immediately lifts it again and starts to dial a new number.
“Forget it,” I say.
For a second, she thinks I am just giving up – and then she sees the expression in my eyes.
“A lead?” she asks. “We’ve got a lead?”
“Yeah. A real hot one.”
*
I call the Vehicle Licensing Department in City Hall, and am connected with a clerk who says his name is Browne – with an ‘e’. I give him the license plate letters and ask him if he will run them down for me.
“I’d like to, but I can’t,” he tells me. “All that stuff’s on the computer, you see.”
“Shouldn’t that make it easier to find?”
“Sure – as long as it’s all systems go. But right now the computer line’s down.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Who knows? I just press buttons. I got no idea what goes on inside the thing.”
“When will it be fixed?”
“Today – maybe. Tomorrow – perhaps. In time for the Christmas rush – possibly. You in some kinda hurry?”
Yeah, I’m in a hurry. I want to find who owns the van with the WNH registration before Ringman – or Pine – can do anything to foul up my investigation.
But maybe they already have. Maybe the computer isn’t really out of action at all.
I look around the Squad Room, wondering which of the city’s finest is the Mayor’s personal Judas.
Paranoid!
I’m getting paranoid!
But then, as the old joke goes, it’s hard not to get paranoid when everybody’s against you.
“I’ll get back to you later,” I tell Browne with an ‘e’.
“I’ll be right here,” he promised. “Leastways, I’ll be right here as long as you call me between nine and five.”
I hang up the phone and turn to Williams.
“Let’s hit the streets and play at being detectives,” I say.
*
We drive from grade school to grade school. A couple of days ago, the entrances of the schools were blocked with anxious parents waiting to pick up their kids. But now there’s no need for that, because now the rapist is safely behind bars.
Right?
Wrong!
He’s out there somewhere – just waiting for his chance to strike again. And before he does, I’m going to catch the son-of-a-bitch.
We spot the van on Lee, just past the Central Grade School – and only two minutes from the park. It isn’t blue, but it is a dark green that Harding could easily have mistaken for blue. And the other things about it are right. The license plate is WNH – and the van is moving slowly along the inside lane, like the driver is looking for something.
“It’s got to be him,” Williams says.
I clamp the siren on the roof, switch it on for one short burst, and then flash the driver to pull over. But he doesn’t! The Ford suddenly cuts across into the middle lane and is accelerating off down Lee.
I hit the gas and follow him. The van’s lights are flashing and, as he zigzags in and out of the afternoon traffic, the driver keeps his hand on the horn.
We are both in the outside lane now. The van driver is five or six car-lengths ahead of me. If the gap gets any wider, he will probably ditch the van and make his escape – and I can’t let that happen.
A pick-up truck is just in front of me. Maybe the driver hears my siren and wants to pull in to let me by, but the middle lane is occupied and he has nowhere to go. I steer around the side of him, crossing the central line and finding myself looking into the face of a guy in a Toyota who is coming in the opposite direction and is crapping himself. I hear the screeches as the Toyota and pick-up truck slam on their brakes. The Toyota slews to the side, the truck is slowing. I wrench on the steering wheel and cut in just ahead of the truck.
“Jesus, that was close!” Williams gasps.
The sound of my siren has cleared a path for us, and now we are only four cars behind the green van. Ahead of us is the park, where Lee comes to an end. From there, the van driver is going to have to swing left and take Riverside Drive. And once he does that, there is no way he can lose me.
Two minutes, I guess. Two minutes, and it will all be over. After months of banging my head against the wall and drinking myself stupid at night, the end is finally in sight.
My hands grip the wheel, ready to spin my car on a nickel like they do in those cop movies on TV. But the van doesn’t turn. It keeps on going, right through the ornamental gates and along the Carriageway which bisects the park.
There are no horse-drawn vehicles on the Carriageway any longer, but now people use the broad asphalt strip for other purposes, and just beyond the gates, we have a perfect example of this – a gray-haired couple on bicycles. The van driver honks his horn, and they steer onto the grass. The woman manages to keep her balance, but the man’s front wheel wobbles, and he is off.
We pass the duck pond, and are almost at the slight incline the skateboarders use. There are six skateboarders there today. They see the van and scatter. One falls off, and is forced to roll out of the way as the van’s wheels crush his brightly-colored board. I hear the crunch as my LeBaron goes over the shattered remains a second later.
I slow down. There’s no hurry any more. Two hundred yards ahead of us, the Carriageway ends, right at the base of General Beauregard’s statue. Beyond that there are high railings and then the river. To each side lie trees, so close together that he can never squeeze the van through. Although the guy we’re chasing does not know it, he is heading for a dead end.
We’re getting near to the General’s statue – close enough to see his hat. The van swerves to the left, then to the right – looking for an escape, some way out through the greenery. And all the time he is getting nearer and nearer to the five-ton slab of granite. Now – finally – he begins to be more worried about what is ahead of him than what is behind, and jams his foot down on the brake.
The Ford lurches to the side. Its front fender catches the base of the
statue, and the van is on two wheels, like it is performing some kind of stunt. And then it goes over, landing with a crash on its side.
A rookie might think that’s the end of it – but not me. I’ve chased cars that have had head-on collisions with brick walls, and seen the guys inside come out shooting seconds later. So I take no chances, not when I’m dealing with a rapist who is desperate and probably packing heat.
I bring the LeBaron to a stop about five yards from the van. Williams flings her door open and jumps out. She is on the offside of the car, shielded from the Ford. She draws her gun to cover me, and I scramble across the passenger seat to join her. We stand there, legs spread, pistols in two-handed grips, waiting to see what’s going to happen next.
“Police!” I shout. “Come out with your hands up!”
It’s ironic that it should end here, where the first victim – little Jeannie Quail – was discovered.
Jeannie Quail!
Shit!
I should have known from the second the van turned on to the Carriageway – should have realized that the guy who attacked Jeannie would know the geography of the park and would never have allowed himself to get boxed in like this.
The door in the side of the van which is facing the sky swings open, and a hand appears.
“Nice and slow!” Williams shouts.
A head emerges next, then a blue-jacketed trunk.
“I’m gonna need help getting out of here,” says the woman we’ve chased all the way from the Central Grade School.
18
Two of the walls of the Mayor’s office are lined with bookshelves weighed down by the rows of leather-bound volumes which Porky has purchased by the yard. On the third wall are artists’ impressions of a future Prosperity Park, complete with gleaming efficient buildings and broad, tree-lined avenues. There are no filing cabinets or personal computers. Porky doesn’t like paperwork – and most of his deals are better not written down.
“A car chase down Lee,” the Mayor complains. “In the middle of the fucking afternoon! How the hell is that gonna look in the papers?”
He is behind his rosewood desk, his fat body cocooned by his padded leather armchair. To his left sits Clews, thin-featured, cold eyed – the hatchet man. To his right is Standish, round faced and rosy cheeked – Pine’s court jester. This is the Police Review Committee and I am standing before it like a naughty schoolboy who has been caught jacking off in the john.
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