The Railroad (31 page)

“This crime was in my jurisdiction.”

“So we’re going back
there
?”

“Uh huh.”

“You have no right to hustle me around like that. I’ve just called a lawyer. It’s my right to have a lawyer present at questioning.”

He shrugged. “You can leave him a message and he can come up to Targersville. We’ll question you there.”

I felt helpless and I didn’t care who I pissed off. “I’m going to sue the shit out of you, your department and the whole county!”

He shrugged again. “I’m doing what I’m told.”

“This is disgusting.”

“We’re going whether you like it or not.”

They let me stop to call Dennis one more time. I knew he’d get to the precinct in Manhattan and find me gone. All I got was his voicemail; I only hoped he’d call his office for messages.

As they hustled me out, I saw the NYPD cops who’d helped arrest me; they were looking the other way and looking decidedly uncomfortable. A car was waiting for us out on the street. Wills nodded at the driver and then repeated the whole holding the head ritual. I sat, steaming, in the back, for an hour and a half, planning the types of trouble I’d be causing.

I felt like I was in a bad dream, the type where you get to go on summer vacation and for some unspoken reason, they make you come back to school. I had escaped and now I was being dragged back into their muck, their sickness.

They left me alone in a room for about forty minutes. I figured it was stock police tactics to make me sweat. Alone with my thoughts, I was able to focus on something beyond my anger. I had to admit that a dead Bob Benoit made me very happy. A horrible thought, but that was how I felt. Yet his death opened up a whole new collection of unpleasant possibilities. If he was dead, who had killed him? Was that person interested in me? None of this seemed simple enough for me to take at face value; there was always some dark corner where I hadn’t looked.

Wills finally came back with another man. It took me a second to recognize him. “You know Lieutenant Chasen."

To my eyes, Chasen seemed downright nervous. “Why was I brought all the way up here?” I asked, blustering.

Chasen eyed me as if he was sizing up a possible opponent. “The crime was committed in this jurisdiction. This is where you’ll be processed.”

We sat in uncomfortable silence for a while. I had expected them to go into the movie version of interrogation; firing questions at me. “I hope my lawyer knows where I am,” I prodded.

“You left a message,” Wills said and then the two sat down on the opposite side of the table from me. “Can you tell us where you were two nights ago, about 10:00?"

“In the Shamrock bar on 23
rd
Street.”

“Can anyone prove that you were there?”

“No. I didn’t talk to anyone. Though the bartender will probably remember me.”

“And when did you get back to your friend’s apartment?”

“Around 11.”

“Where were you before the bar?”

“The City View Diner. In that case, I can give you witnesses to say I was there till around 9:30.

“So you got back to your friend’s apartment around 11?”

“I told you that. Dennis can tell you I was there at 11. I remember we watched the news.”

The two looked at each other. “I guess we’ll have everyone’s statements.”

“You guess? You should have gotten them when we were in New York.”

“That’s not the way we do things,” Chasen chimed in.

I gaped at them. “I think I’ll wait for my lawyer.”

Wills looked at the table. Chasen seemed to wind up suddenly. “You can do that. But I know for a fact that you could have driven up here in 45 minutes at that time of night and driven back by 11.”

“Very good! Maybe I could have sent him poison through the mail.”

Wills looked pained. “He was shot,” he told me.

“Oh so I shot him?”

“It’s easy to get a throw away gun in New York.”

“Why do you think I killed him anyway?”

Chasen puffed up, ready to kill. “Now we have that covered. You hated him and you were harassing him. You accused him of horrible things and you have reason to believe that he broke into your house.”

“Oh, you admit that he might have done that? Why didn’t you investigate
him
?”

He glared at me. “It was
your
claim that he broke into your house.”

“Whatever. You don’t have any reason to believe I would have killed Benoit. I consider this harassment.”
 

“Well, irregardless-” He looked at me strangely. “Why did you just wince?”

“I don’t think you want to know.”

“Well I do.”

“Is this part of the interrogation?”

“I’m trained to take note of every reaction from a suspect. Why did you wince?”

“Because the word
irregardless
isn’t really a word.”

“What?”

“Let’s get on with this. In fact, where is my lawyer?”

He went on like he hadn’t heard me. “He also tried to attack you on your front porch.”

“Which you did nothing about.”

“You have a clear motive.”

“I’ll admit that. Can you arrest me on that?”

“Don’t get smart with me! I can arrest anyone I want if I think they killed someone.”

“I’m waiting for my lawyer.”

“It’ll be a lot easier if you simply tell us what you did. I have all day, and all night if necessary.”

We spent the next four and a half hours going over the same ground. Where was I two nights ago? Where did I get a gun? Why did I kill Benoit? Did I know where Eileen and Megan were?

I’ll admit that I was starting to get a little antsy and I started wondering how long I’d be able to put up with it. I had expressed my desire to go to the bathroom three times and had been ignored. Both men had upped the ante by bringing in drinks and making a show of slowly sipping them. I was thirsty, agitated, and I had to pee. A couple of times I felt myself starting to slip. At one point I lashed out, telling them that I would have loved to have seen Benoit dead, but I didn’t kill him. Silently I admonished myself and told myself I couldn’t let them win for both my sake and Eileen’s.

I was mindlessly mouthing the details of my activities that evening for perhaps the twentieth time when there was a knock on the door. Both cops went to the door; Wills opened it and they both looked out into the hall. For a moment I suspected that they were bringing in some real goons to scare me, but the confused look on the two policemen’s faces convinced me otherwise.

Chasen opened the a little bit wider and I heard someone say, “His lawyer’s here.” This brought another round of confused looks. I began to wonder if anyone had really told Dennis where I was.

The last person I’d expected to see walked in.

Moskowitz smiled his patented 200 watt smile at me and then turned to do his magic on Targersville’s finest. “Hello Gentlemen. I heard that my client is here. So I came for the party.”

Wills gritted his teeth. “You’re not his lawyer. His lawyer is in Manhattan."

“Technically,yes. Actually, Mike has consulted me a number of times on legal matters. Isn’t that true, Mike?”

I eyed him suspiciously. “True,” was all I said.

“Okay,” Moskowitz said, rubbing his hands. “You have no murder weapon to start with. You have nothing placing my client at the scene of the crime. From what I hear he was in Manhattan for the past four days. Now how do we have a case here?”

Chasen bounced up. “We’re going to get a warrant to search his place to see about his gun. In fact I think it’s about to be delivered here.”

Moskowitz shook his head. “I’ve looked at the police report. Now you can do what you want, but I can save you the trouble. Benoit was killed with a 9 millimeter. Mike doesn’t own a gun.”

“So he could have bought one.”

“As I said, go ahead if you want to, but you won’t find any gun there. Now what makes you think he committed this crime?”

“He’s been harassing Benoit. He thinks that Benoit is one of the
Chapter and Verse
Killers
. He has lots of motive.”

“I’ve said that I wanted to kill a lot of people when I’ve been drunk. Not conclusive enough.”

“He had more than enough time to drive up here and shoot Benoit and then get back to the City in time to meet his friend.”

“Uh…what car did he use?”

“He has a car. We found out he drove it to Manhattan.”

“And where is he keeping it?”

I smiled. “In a garage around the corner from Dennis’s place.”

Moskowitz nodded. “And we can pull the records from the garage to see if he used it that night.”

Chasen’s face turned red. Wills stared out the window. “He could have gotten another car,” Chasen said finally.

“Okay. Where did he get it? Did he rent it? Then they’ll be a record. He’d have had to use a credit card so there’d be a record of that. Or did he borrow another person’s car? Maybe. Then we have to find that person. Aren’t there security cameras at each toll booth? He would have had to pay a toll to get up here from New York. Bridges and all. What about E-ZPass?”

“He could have gone through Jersey and then come back another way.”

“Maybe. That would have made his trip longer. Here’s the kicker, gentlemen. He pulled out a copy of what must have been the police report. “Benoit was killed by a 9 millimeter from at least twenty feet away in bad light and hit, square in the back of the head. I can assure you that Mike is not a skilled enough shot to do that. You can test him if you like”

He turned to me. “Don’t say anything else. By the way were they interrogating you?”

“I’d have to say yes.”

“Did you ask for a lawyer?”

“Several times. They kept going.”

Neither cop moved. “I’m going out to talk to the ADA,” Moskowitz told them. He left.

We sat in a silence charged with lightning. No one looked at anyone else. I went back and forth between feeling satisfaction that I was being vindicated and fear that Moskowitz was not saving my ass for altruistic reasons. I began thinking how I’d get back to Manhattan without a car.

Moskowitz walked into the room followed by a woman in her late thirties. She seemed annoyed to say the least. “I think that we need to let Mr. Dobbs go home now,” she told cop 1 and cop 2.

“I’m sorry for the treatment, Mr. Dobbs. I’m Assistant District Attorney French. We might be contacting you for informational purposes, but you can consider your status as a suspect at an end.”

I stood up, trying my best not to gloat. “I was a bit confused by the methods used to determine that I was a suspect. It seemed that it was all based on motive.”

“I can see how you’d think that,” she said, making a point of not looking at Wills and Chasen. “I hope you’ll be available if we need to ask you some questions.”

“Certainly, I think the detectives here have my number in Bardstown and Manhattan?”

Chasen jerked at the word detective, but kept his cool otherwise.

French smiled frostily. “Thank you. I assume Mr. Moskowitz can take you home?”

Moskowitz nodded. “Certainly.”

In a few minutes I was in the car with Moskowitz. I spent five minutes saying nothing which prompted him to display an odd bout of sensitivity. “Did I do something wrong?” he asked. “I thought you’d be grateful.”

Normally I wouldn’t tip my hand to someone I didn’t quite trust, but at that moment, I didn’t give a crap. I figured if I turned up dead, they’d be looking hard for the killer and Moskowitz didn’t need that kind of shit; I’d left the precinct with him. “I’m not sure what your motives were for helping me, but by now about five people know I’m suspicious of you, and they’re not the kind to give up.”

“What?”

“Let’s say that I’ve considered the possibility of a connection between you and Benoit. I have my reasons.”

His glance was pure shock. “You’re fucking crazy, you know? I just got your ass out of jail. I could have just as easily left you there to rot if I wanted you out of my way. And you notice that Benoit is dead.”

“I’m sure he had other enemies besides me. It doesn’t mean you weren’t on his side.”

He looked straight ahead and, if I didn’t know him better, I would have been sure that he was hurt. “Okay. Have it your own way.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“On the house, Mike. I heard about it and came as soon as I could.”

I chewed on this for a couple of minutes. Moskowitz didn’t seem interested in conversation. “Can I ask you a question?” I asked finally.

“If you think you can trust me.”

“I can if it doesn’t conflict with your interests. Why did Wills and Chasen do such a lousy job of railroading me? Why would they take a risk like that when they had no case?”

“It was Chasen. Wills is a good guy, really. Let’s just say that Chasen didn’t want a murder on his watch. And Benoit had some very powerful friends, the kind who can apply pressure to a broken-down civil servant like Chasen. Benoit’s friends don’t like you for reasons I’m sure you can figure out. So Chasen had a lot of motivation to find someone to hang this on and you were the best bet.”