Suspects (36 page)

He wanted to give Ravenswood enough time to do whatever she had in mind, but he was also bored. He could have walked down to the water, but it was a hundred yards distant and he did not wish to leave her there alone and unarmed. Thinking she would be able to talk some sense into a kid like that was another example of her naïveté, but then she seemed to be a lace-curtain type, from a bedroom neighborhood on the border of the suburbs, who had little sense of the urban lower depths.

He kicked a rusty rail. Either scrap metal was no longer worth much or the locals were too lazy to pry it up and sell it, for tons were still in place over the ties, which in themselves could be put to various uses, but not firewood, owing to the creosote. It took a special effort for him to stop thinking like a cop, and he saw no reason to exert such energy, for he liked what he was and did. In fact, he loved it.

From time to time he eyeballed whichever rear window of the unit he was nearest in the circuit he was pacing, and he usually saw Ravenswood doing all the talking. She could continue that till she was, as the saying went, blue in the face, for all the good it would do. A boy like that would have no father, a mother who drank or drugged up all her welfare money, brothers who were thugs, and sisters who were whores. You were going to tell him to clean up his act? Come on. Or, as his daughter told him to say now, thinking he actually wanted to speak a teenager's lingo: get real. There were lots of such gets. Get a life. Get it on. Get down.…

It was time to get rolling. He was walking toward the front pas senger's door when Felicia backed carefully out of the rear compartment.

She closed the door with her hip technique and said solemnly, “Let's step over here.” Meaning, as she proceeded to demonstrate, about twenty feet behind the unit.

Marevitch plodded with her. “So,” he said when they stopped, “did you save his soul?”

Ravenswood ignored the derisive question. She stood in her usual somewhat round-shouldered posture when speaking with him if he too was standing, probably to diminish their difference in height, and as always he was more offended than gratified. “I got this idea,” she began. “I just thought I would try it on for size, since you were going to let him go anyway. I mean, it couldn't hurt.”

“Oh, yeah?”

With a finger to the bill, she poked her cap up about an inch and, thrusting out her lower lip, blew air up her face. “Hot in there, and I didn't want to open the windows. … Anyway, I thought I'd see if maybe I could get him interested in being an informant on what was going down around the neighborhood.”

Marevitch winced. “Jesus, I wish you'd asked me. Kids'll just get you in trouble. Leave ‘em to Juvenile. They know the ropes.” He sneered. “Of course, what that means is they just let ‘em get away with everything. They got ten social workers to every cop there. But hell, you can't do anything about that situation except walk away from it. I could tell you…”

Though impatiently scraping her teeth across her lips, she waited for him to finish, but when it looked as though he wouldn't do so soon, she broke in. “I wasn't prepared for the reaction. Right away he asks what it would be worth to us if he fingered the gang that's been robbing the liquor stores and doing all the killing.”

Marevitch stared at her. “Oh, no,” he said angrily. “That's crap, can't you see that? This little punk would know who hit Artie? Forget about it, Felicia. We wasted enough time already.” He wanted to turn and go back to the unit, but she grabbed the elbow of his blue shirt.

“Just hear this, Jack. It's his cousin and some other boys. They're a few years older, though still in their teens. He wanted to join them, but they wouldn't let him. Said he was too little. They gave him a real bad time when he pestered them too much.”

“So he's gonna do this to get back at them? Get real.” Felicia shrugged and looked away. But Marevitch did not want to hurt her feelings. “You learn these things after a while on the street,” he said, taking the harsh edge off his voice. “Little mutts like this will say anything to a cop. Then you turn your back on ‘em and they zap you, if they got a weapon. Sometimes they'll do it to your face. Think this one wouldn't have used a gun or knife on you if he had one? Last year an officer in the Nineteenth took a shot in the stomach when he asked a kid this age to turn down a boom box.”

Ravenswood nodded vigorously, a light in her eyes. “But would you mind if I told the captain about this thing?”

Marevitch sighed. “You want to waste his time, go ahead. I won't stand in your way. Only grant me this, please. Just be sure Novak knows it's all
your
idea. Just leave me out of it.” He stretched, elbows back, and smiled. “I hope it won't break your heart if you never see that kid again once we let him loose.”

“At least we got some names we could check.” She patted the back pants pocket where she carried her notebook.

Marevitch snorted. “Take my word for it, the names will be phony. Think he really believes you could do something for him?”

“I think he'd like to get the reward.”

“There's a reward?”

“The liquor dealers' association,” said Felicia. “After your partner was hit, they got together and offered it.”

Marevitch was embarrassed. This had happened while he was distracted by self-pity. “Then you better run with it, Felicia. You might get yourself a commendation, first time out.” He decided it made more sense for him to be affirmative, to be proud of her, than to admit envy into a partnership that lived on loyalty.

Moody was at Walsh's, and tonight nobody tried to cut down on his drinking. The proprietors in fact were setting them up. Sal Borelli, working the bar as usual, even joined him in the first one, hefting a little shot glass of beer for himself while Moody put away two ounces of what Sal poured him, gratis: not the usual bar stock but mellow stuff from a special bottle.

“To the man of the hour.”

“I had some luck,” Moody said. “You remember how that can happen.”

“Yeah, but I always took full credit.” Borelli had the kind of laugh that sounded almost like a cough. “The department's on a roll, huh? The liquor-store gang's been collared too, huh?” He poured Moody a refill.

“Information received,” Moody said before swallowing. After savoring the aftereffect—he enjoyed the taste of good whiskey while he was still sober—he explained, “Couple of patrolmen brought it in. Precinct commander does it by the book, gives it to Robbery, who've been liaising with Homicide, where”—he took another sip—“since the officer was hit, the Wonder Boys got into the act.”

“Payton and Lutz.”

“Arnie and Warnie. So you probably saw who took credit for the collars.”

“Yeah, Nicky, you got upstaged. But some of that's your own fault, you and Dennis, and you know it. The TV news treated the Howland case like some kinda, uh, afterthought. And that
Five Star Report
, that pencil-neck geek Bill Arbogast, he says you fellas bungled it from start to finish. Why's he got a hard-on for you?” Sal stuck his five-o'clock shadow up close. “You don't stand up for yourself enough, pal.” He pulled away and grinned. “So how's Dennis these days?”

“Wife's pregnant again,” Moody said more gloomily than he would have liked, because he did not want to get into the subject with Borelli, who might know more than he was letting on. It would not be Moody who told him that Dennis had asked Crystal for a divorce, but Sal's grapevine had never needed help from him in the past. At Walsh's they had known of his own domestic troubles almost as soon as he did, and he could never figure out quite how, unless the women provided the information, but in fact both his wives loathed the place.

Throughout the succeeding hours, other officers, current and ex-, stopped by Moody's stool to offer similar sentiments and stand him a round, and after a few hours of this, his first hollow leg was filled to capacity and he was working on the second. He had a lot to drink about.

On the advice of the lawyer whom he had finally asked for and been assigned, a counselor from Legal Aid but as aggressive as those who charged high fees, Gordon John Keller had repudiated all of the several phases of his confession including that on videotape, on the ground that the police had abused him in various ways, among them the conducting of an illegal search of his premises and denying him food and drink when he was taken into custody, and in fact detaining him improperly. But dealing with this was now primarily the responsibility of the district attorney's office.

Dennis LeBeau had gone home after the interrogation of Keller and chosen that moment to tell his wife that though he loved her and the children he was in love with Daisy O'Connor, someone whose name Crystal had never before heard, so that for a while she assumed it was a wacky joke of his, chuckled over it, and then changed the subject to say the doctor had confirmed what she had more or less known but thus far had not mentioned: namely, that once again she was “with child,” using that term to maintain the tone of levity he had introduced.

“You can imagine how I felt then,” LeBeau told Moody the next morning.

“No, I can't,” Moody replied.

“Take my word for it.”

“I don't want to take anything from you.”

Dennis leaned across the desk as far as he could without leaving his chair. It was obvious he did not want the other detectives, coming and going, to hear this. Not that there was much danger of that, given the volume of noise, most of it coming from the area where Payton and Lutz held sway.

“Daisy wants me to tell you she apologizes for what she said the other night. She was under a lot of stress. It was embarrassing. You're like an uncle to her.”

“See,” Moody said, throwing back his head. “That's what—Hell, what's the use?”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“She can't tell me to my face? I've known her since she was four years old.… I can assure you of one thing, Dennis. This will kill her mother if you go through with it. Marie's from the old school. She never missed a mass in her life. Only reason she talked to me after my first divorce was neither Ruthann nor me was Catholic, so she didn't take the marriage seriously anyway. If she knew what you are doing with her baby daughter…”

“That's where Daisy thought you might come in. Maybe you could talk to her mom. A word from you in my behalf might do a lot. You were her husband's partner. Now you and me have been partners for what?, six years in August. If you can't vouch for me, nobody can.”

“But I
don't
know you, Dennis. That should be obvious.”

“You're turning us down? I can't believe it, Nick.”

“Believe it. After you gave her the news last night, and she finally believed it and threw you out of the house, Crystal called me and talked past midnight. She blames
me
, for Christ sake.”

LeBeau shook his head, probably in self-pity. “I stayed out in the van.” He must have gotten back in the house in the morning, for he was clean-shaven and wearing the usual sparkling shirt.

Moody had enough of the subject. He pointed, with the by him seldom-used gesture of a detective first grade ordering around his junior partner. “Set up a visit to the dump, and make sure there's help this time. Should be somebody free, now the caseload's down by two.”

At Walsh's he was reluctant to leave his glass and the camaraderie even for a short visit to the men's room, but eventually he had to. In his opinion he walked without a stagger, if more slowly than usual, and he was careful not to show an expression associated with drunkenness, the fixed smirk, the judicious scowl, etc. But on approaching the urinals he acquired a doubt that he could function while standing without bepissing himself, so made his careful way to the farthest of toilet stalls, almost sat down before lowering his clothes, but remembered in time, and began to urinate in the female position.

The room had been empty when he entered. Now he heard the sound of the opening door and, soon after, two voices, neither of them familiar to him, but it appeared their owners knew who he was and referred to him as they peed.

“Old Moody's feeling no pain tonight.”

“Glad he had one more good collar before he drinks himself to death,” said the other voice. “He's a nice old guy—good for him.”

“He's settled down a lot with age. Time was, you didn't dare introduce him to a woman unless she was a working girl, or he'd be all over her.” They flushed simultaneously. Then the same man added, “It'll happen to you too, my boy. One day you won't be able to get it up any more.”

“Speak for yourself,” said the other. They ran the water at the washstands and subsequently used the paper-towel dispenser. They departed.

There was a side fire exit at Walsh's, and Moody used it after he left the men's room. He assumed that all the drinks he had had were gifts from someone else. If not, Sal and Howie would not hold an unpaid tab against him. He was not sober by any means, but hearing what he heard had raised him to a level of inebriation at which he could move efficiently enough while thinking with greater clarity than had ever been available to him.

When he got home, after driving as carefully as in a dream, he recognized, seriously as opposed to theoretically, what a mess the place was in. Bad enough before, it had degenerated further since the episode of Daisy and Dennis. He had not remade his bed, nor in fact had he used the bedroom. He had slept on the living-room couch, sans bed linen, just rolling up in a blanket and using as pillow one of those that had accompanied the sofa for decades and gave off a sour smell when the face was pressed against it.

In the kitchenette the sink had not been emptied of its soiled glasses and dishes, and the adjacent countertop was a cockroach racetrack. The refuse in the pedal can was piled high enough to prop the lid in the open position. His entrance would have momentarily scattered the mice into hiding, but unmenaced experience there had made them bold, and they would return at any moment, or “forthwith” as would be said in the police jargon that had been his unique written idiom through adult life. Had he commanded any other language, he might have tried to write a letter to his son at this point, providing a counterargument to the one Frank had heard from his mother, or on the other hand, agreeing with her—who knew what he might say if he had been able to express himself? As it was, he must confine himself to certifying, on a page torn from his new notebook (the old one, containing his notes on the Howland case, had been turned over to the DA), that it was he and he alone who had discharged his service weapon, of his own volition and not under duress, with no involvement of a person or persons unknown, through the roof of the mouth at a forty-five-degree angle, the slug exiting through the cranium and entering the back of the couch, in the upholstery filler of which it would probably have come to rest in a deformed state. After completing the statement he signed it as Nicholas T. Moody, Detective First Grade, and was about to place it on the coffee table, weighted in place with a frosted can of beer that he had taken from the fridge but decided not to drink, when he remembered something else, and added a postscript to the effect that his personal papers, copy of his will, etc., could be found in a shoebox on the shelf of the bedroom closet.