The Interrogation (5 page)

Yes, I know.

And not much evidence.

All I’m asking is that you take it to Chief Dolan. If the Chief says it’s not enough to bring Webster in for an interrogation, then I won’t press the matter.

I’ve just gotten into the division. I could look like a right fool asking for something like this, Tom.

You were never afraid of that before, Francis.

Nor was he then, Burke remembered now, watching as if he were once again in the room as a twenty-eight-year-old Detective Francis O’Hearn gathered up the loose sheets of Burke’s report.
All right, Tommy, but you owe me one, that’s for sure, pal.

Chief Dolan had ended Webster’s interrogation after only twenty-three minutes. Webster had come alone, without a lawyer, dressed in an English suit, his shoes still smelling slightly of the freshly mowed lawns of Winchester Heights. Dolan had even shaken hands with Webster as the two men exited the room, leaving
Burke to wonder if there would be any further investigation of Donald Webster, a question Webster himself had answered the next morning when, at around five
A.M.
, he’d climbed out of his sleek black touring car.

A witness claimed that Webster had stood absolutely erect as he’d stepped off the bridge, his arms still bolted to his sides when he pierced the icy water sixty feet below.

Error by error, Burke thought now, Webster had brought himself to that instant on the bridge. Were we all doomed to do the same? Accumulate errors and mis-judgments and finally sink in a river of regret? Were there no questions you could ask at the beginning of the journey that would save you from this drowning at the end?

“I guess you teach all the detectives your method,” Officer Day said, returning Burke’s mind to the present.

“There’s no method,” Burke answered crisply as he tucked the Cathy Lake file beneath his arm. “Except to start from the beginning and go over everything again.”

Did you hear her scream?

7:17
P.M.
, Interrogation Room 3

Pierce turned on the tape recorder that rested on the table. “September 12, 7:17
P.M.
,” he said. “Police Headquarters. Interrogation Room 3. Present are Detective Jack Pierce and Detective Norman Cohen, and Municipal Jail Inmate 1407, identified as Albert Jay Smalls. Okay, let’s start from the beginning.”

The prisoner nodded, and a strand of hair slid over his forehead. He raked it back through pale fingers that seemed to tremble even when they didn’t.

Pierce stared at him evenly. “Okay, for the record, state your name.”

“Albert Jay Smalls.”

Smalls’ voice was weak, a child’s voice, and from the first interrogation Cohen had noticed that, like a child,
Smalls seemed uncomfortable in the presence of adults, desirous of pleasing them, afraid of what might happen to him if he didn’t. There was a child’s tendency to shift in his chair too, glance about restlessly, toy with whatever lay close at hand, avoid your eyes. Everything about him played at hide-and-seek. He claimed to be twenty-six but looked considerably younger. Like a child, he recalled pleasant things (seeing
The Wizard of Oz)
and unpleasant ones (the time a cat had scratched him), but everything else occupied a vague territory he “didn’t keep track of.” Like a child, he sometimes blurted out a truth … and like a child, he lied.

“And you have no permanent address, is that right?” Pierce asked.

Smalls’ eyes sought the room’s one dusty window. “No.”

Cohen walked to the opposite corner and leaned into it, watching Smalls intently, trying to get a sense of what went on in his brain, noting the unmistakable self-loathing that surrounded him like an odor.

“How about any previous address?”

Smalls said nothing.

“Still not willing to give us any previous address, Smalls?”

“No.”

Strange, Cohen thought. Why would Smalls refuse to give the police any of his previous places of residence? Pierce had always assumed it was to cover up his criminal record. But if it was not that, what could it be? Why would a young man conceal the place he came from, the people he had known, everything about himself until the moment he’d taken up residence in a filthy drainage pipe near Dubarry Playground in City Park?

“Okay, let’s talk about the park,” Pierce said. “You do remember living there, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Smalls’ pale right hand fled beneath the other, like a crab scuttling under a stone.

“Tell me about that pipe the officers found you in that night.”

“I live in that pipe.” Smalls settled his gaze on Cohen briefly, then drew it away. It was a movement generally associated with guilt. But Cohen wondered if Smalls might not simply be a man who couldn’t face other men. But why?

“You live alone, right?”

“Alone, yes.”

“Do you have any relatives in the city?”

“No.”

“Or anybody, for that matter?”

“Anybody?”

“Friends?”

“No,” Smalls answered softly.

“Just not sociable, is that it?”

Smalls shrugged. “Never liked, that’s all.”

“You’ve cooked up a real sob story there, Smalls,” Pierce said. “That nobody ever liked you.”

“I stay away from people. I don’t bother them.”

“You ever bother a little girl?” Pierce snapped.

Smalls’ body stiffened, but he gave no answer.

“Okay, tell me this,” Pierce said. “What were you doing on the trail near the duck pond on the evening of September first? You remember that evening, don’t you, Smalls? The time the woman saw you. You know the woman I mean, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you remember where you were when she saw you, right?”

“Near the pond.”

“What were you doing at the duck pond?”

“I was going home.”

“Home? You mean that drainage pipe?”

“Yes.”

Cohen stepped forward. “Okay, let me ask you this, Jay. About the little girl who was murdered. Cathy Lake. We’ve talked to you about Cathy quite a few times. You remember all the things we’ve asked you, right?”

“Sure he does,” Pierce said. “He has a good memory, don’t you, Smalls?”

“Good as anybody else, I guess.”

“And you’re a reader too,” Pierce added. “We found a lot of books in your … home. By the way, where’d you get all those books?”

“I found them.”

“Where?”

“People throw them out.”

“So you pick them out of the garbage?”

Smalls sniffed softly and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“Do you ever go into a bookstore?” Pierce asked. “Maybe slip a book under your jacket?”

“No.”

Pierce eased himself around the left corner of the table where Smalls sat, hands clasped together, washed clean, the grit that had once lay caked beneath his fingernails cleared and bagged days before.

“Let me ask you something else, Jay,” Cohen said. “Did you ever have any visitors at your home? Somebody who could tell us a few things about you? Things you might have done in the past.”

“No.”

“Okay,” Pierce said. “Let’s go back to the little girl. The one who was murdered in the park. Cathy Lake had something with her. Something she was wearing. A silver locket. Heart-shaped.”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“You told me about it before,” Smalls answered.

“You snatched that locket from Cathy Lake’s neck,” Pierce said. “You did do that, didn’t you, Smalls?”

Smalls shook his head.

“Answer with your voice,” Pierce said, irritated.

Smalls flinched at the sharpness in Pierce’s tone. “Yes. I mean … no. I never saw that locket.”

Cohen stepped over to the table and placed his hand on his partner’s shoulder. “Jay, maybe we’re moving too fast for you. So let’s go back to what you were doing when those two cops found you that night. The night of Cathy’s murder. When they found you in the drainage pipe. You told us you were sleeping.” He offered a friendly smile. “But are you sure you were sleeping when the officers found you?”

“I was sleeping.”

“But you heard them when they came up to the tunnel, right?”

“I heard them.”

“What did you hear?”

“Voices.”

“Okay, fine, Jay, good, tell me about those voices you heard,” Cohen said gently. “What did the voices say?”

8:37
P.M.
, September 1, City Park, Drainage Pipe 4

“Jesus, will you look at this, Mike?”

Patrolman Pete Sanford’s flashlight raked over the debris in the dark pipe, briefly illuminating empty cans and soda bottles, magazines and books, the tattered refuse of food wrappers and coffee cups, until it reached the side of a bare mattress.

“Is that a pile of …” Mike Zarella peered down at the mound of rags that lay on the stained mattress. “Whoa, somebody’s there.” He drew his pistol. “Police.” His voice sharpened. “Don’t move.”

A groan.

“Don’t move,” Zarella repeated. Then to Sanford, “I’ll take the other side of the pipe.”

Sanford listened to the pad of Zarella’s feet as he rushed to the right and over the embankment. He kept the light trained on the rustling mound. “Police,” he said. “Stay where you are.”

Zarella’s light bobbed at the far end of the pipe, a brilliant scythe that expanded inside the tunnel until it swept up its curved concrete sides and finally curled over like a cresting wave.

“See anything?” Sanford called, afraid now, his hand wrapped around a pistol, eyes trained on some bum who slept in all this filth, maybe armed, maybe violent. “Be careful, Mike.”

The mound rustled again, but no voice came from it.

“Put your hands up,” Zarella ordered.

Sanford felt his breath catch, certain now that something was going to happen—a flash of light, a deafening explosion, his partner staggering backward, the light falling from his hand. He stepped forward, both hands gripped to the pistol. “I’m right behind you!” he warned the moving bundle. “Get on your feet! Slowly!”

Over the barrel of his service revolver, Sanford watched as the mound rose languidly, like it had been stirred by the fetid air inside the pipe. “Put your hands behind your head,” he yelled.

The figure thrust his hands up and placed them behind his head, assuming the technical position without further instructions, Sanford noticed, clearly a guy who
knew the routine, like most vagrants, used to being rousted.

Zarella kept the light aimed at the upper torso as the figure slouched toward him. He noted the ragged shirt, torn collar, the debris that clung from a long, dark beard. “That’s it. Real slow now. Keep moving forward.” His eyes bore in upon the shadowy figure who moved haltingly toward him. “What the hell,” he whispered as the man stepped into the light.

“Keep your hands behind your head!” Sanford shouted.

“Okay, it’s all right,” Zarella said, calming now, convinced that it was over, that there’d be no further excitement.

Then a woman’s scream pierced the stone-dark air, hard and jagged, slicing like a knife through the black vein of the tunnel.

Zarella thought of the frightened woman he and Sanford had left on the path near the pond only moments before. Terrified by what she’d seen, she’d begged one of them to stay with her, but Zarella had decided to accompany Sanford instead, make sure he got in on the action. Now he imagined the woman under attack, the ragged stranger she’d seen and reported suddenly bursting through the undergrowth, grabbing for her throat.
Why
, he wondered as he rushed back through the dark woods and up the embankment to where he’d ordered her to wait.
Why didn’t I stay with her?

7:26
P.M.
, September 12, Interrogation Room 3

“The woman, Smalls,” Pierce said. “Did you hear her scream?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know why the woman was screaming?”

“No.”

“How about Cathy Lake?” Pierce asked. “Do you remember her screams?”

“No.”

“Oh, come on, Smalls. You heard them. You know what it sounds like when a little girl screams.”

Smalls’ lips parted wordlessly. He seemed deeply shaken, as if suddenly overwhelmed by the knowledge of what he’d done.

“You do know what that sounds like, don’t you, Smalls?” Pierce insisted.

Smalls glanced at Cohen as if pleading with him to pull Pierce off.

It was the usual reaction to the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine that Pierce and Cohen had established from the first interrogation, but this time Cohen thought he caught something else in Smalls’ eyes, a hint of panic, and in that panic a desperate search for a way out.

“What’s the matter, Jay?” Cohen asked. He pulled up a chair and leaned his elbow on the table. “What are you afraid of?”

“Everything,” Smalls murmured. He looked like a bewildered animal with his leg in a trap, thrashing about desperately even as the cruel reality of its capture settled in.

“Tell me what happened in the park, Jay,” Cohen said.

Smalls glanced toward the window, the dark city beyond it. “You want me to confess. You want me to tell you that I did it.”

Cohen felt the anguish in Smalls’ eyes. “Jay, wouldn’t it be better to tell us?”

“It doesn’t matter what I say. You’re not going to believe me. So it doesn’t matter what I tell you.”

Cohen glimpsed a drowning man’s acceptance of a watery death. “Yes, Jay, of course it—”

Pierce broke in. “Okay, let’s go back to when the cops found you in the pipe. The woman screamed, then one of the cops left. The other one stayed with you. And later, the one who stayed with you brought you up to the trail. After a while there were lots of cops around. Flashing lights. You remember all that, Smalls?”

Smalls faced Pierce. “Yes.”

“By then we’d found Cathy Lake by the pond and so there were lots of cops around. We brought you up to the pond. You saw her body. You remember all this, right?”

“Yes.”

“What else do you remember?”