Victims (14 page)

“An interrogation concerning Quade’s murder?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because John’s an eyewitness at the scene of the crime.”

He slowly shook his head—just once. It was a practiced mannerism, calculated to intimidate. And it succeeded. In that moment, Alexander Guest seemed to grow larger than life. More than merely a man, he became a presence, an irresistible force.

“I don’t want you to interrogate John,” he said. “You’ll do him harm. I’ve got a psychiatrist’s opinion—two opinions, in fact—to that effect. It’s obvious that he’s had a shock, witnessing a murder. It’s also obvious that his father has brainwashed him, told him what to say. So, when you interrogate him, you’re bound to produce conflicts, since the truth differs from what his father told him to say. And that kind of conflict can obviously be traumatic. Especially when, literally, his testimony could mean life or death for his own father.” He paused, a long, ponderous silence. Then: “What you’re proposing, Lieutenant, could irreparably damage John’s mental health. And I oppose it.”

“You’re assuming that Kramer’s lying. It could be that he’s telling the truth. And if that’s the case, then John would be helping his father, not harming him.”

Measuring his words with icy precision, he said, “Either Kramer is lying, or I’m lying, Lieutenant. What’s your preference?”

“That’s not necessarily the choice, Mr. Guest. You’re telling me what you saw, and what you heard. And the facts certainly seem to back you up. But it’s possible that Kramer’s telling the truth, too. It’s possible that both of you could be telling the truth.” I let a beat pass, then said, “What I’m saying is, it’s possible that something else happened Friday night—something neither you nor Kramer saw, or heard. And that’s what I’ve got to find out—whether something like that could have happened.”

“If Kramer is telling the truth when he says that he was outside the house on the driveway when the shots were fired,” he said, “and if we deal with the facts as we know them to be, then there’s only two possibilities. Either Quade killed himself, or else I killed him.”

“Those facts could change, though. There could be something we don’t know, another piece to the puzzle.”

He rose to his feet, and I did the same. I hesitated, then said, “You should know, Mr. Guest, that I intend to interrogate John. Of course, his mother will be with him. But I have the right to interrogate him. Legally, I have the right. And you know it, sir.”

Standing with his head lifted, shoulders sharply squared, arms rigid at his sides, he looked at me for a last long, larger-than-life moment. If he were in uniform, he could have been a general of the army, posing for a portrait.

“The law is a living thing, Lieutenant. It has its slaves, and it has its masters.” He let another moment of regal silence pass. “And the slaves never win. They protest, sometimes. They can cause problems, sometimes, for their masters. But in the long run, they never win.”

He thanked me for my company at lunch, turned on his heel and left the restaurant. A blue Cadillac waited for him at the curb.

W
HEN I JOINED THE
homicide squad, captain Krieger was the boss. Friedman was the second in command, with two sergeants and fifteen inspectors working under him. When Krieger had a heart attack and died, at age fifty-two, I was the senior sergeant. Everyone assumed that Friedman would be promoted to captain, and I’d make lieutenant. Everyone was only partly right. I made lieutenant, but Friedman declined to take the captaincy when it was offered. His reasoning was typical. He didn’t like departmental politics, and he didn’t like departmental politicians. Besides, he said, his home was paid for, his only son was halfway through college, and his wife had come into a sizeable inheritance. Result: For the last several years, Friedman and I had run the homicide squad as co-lieutenants.

When Friedman declined the captaincy, he also declined Krieger’s large corner office. After a short interdepartmental tug of war, the office fell to me, along with Krieger’s outsize desk and his large, leather-upholstered chair, both handed down from Krieger’s predecessor. I knew Friedman coveted the chair, and I offered it to him. He thought about the offer, then declined it. The chair, he said, would provide for his comfort whenever he decided to walk down the hallway and instruct me in the art of solving homicides.

Now, leaning back in my visitor’s chair and lacing his fingers over the bulge of his vest, Friedman listened to the last of my report on my lunch with Alexander Guest.

“I don’t think,” Friedman said, “that we should get all bogged down in who’s going to suffer, if we interview this kid. If we start playing the lawyer’s game and the psychiatrist’s game, it’ll never end. There’s been a murder, and the kid was probably a witness. We’re cops. We investigate homicides. Which means we interrogate witnesses. What happens afterwards, in court, that’s not our problem. Whether this kid makes it to the witness stand, that’s between the D.A. and the judge. Whether the kid’s little psyche is bruised—” He spread his hands. “That’s his problem, and his family’s problem. So let’s let the lawyers hassle, and the psychiatrists argue. That’s their job, that’s what they’re paid for. Our job is to investigate—to find out who murdered Charlie Quade. And the deeper we get into the investigation, the more it appears that John could have the answers. So—” He waved an airy hand. “So we go to the mother and explain that, doing our lawful duty, we’ve got to interrogate her son—in her presence. Either she agrees, or we charge her with obstructing.”

I snorted. “Will you be the one who turns the key on Alexander Guest’s daughter?”

He grinned like a sly, overweight pixie. Meaning that, yes, Friedman would turn the key. More and more, lately, Friedman enjoyed taking on the establishment, win or lose. His targets were usually “the goddam politicians,” inside and outside the police department, inside and outside politics. When I asked him why he did it, his response, typically, was a quip. His wife, he said, had just gotten the second half of her inheritance.

Without having to ask I knew that, to Friedman, Alexander Guest was the perfect target, the ultimate goddam politician.

“We’ve got to give them time to think about it,” I said. “We can’t just go over to Marie Kramer’s house and tell …”

“Stringfellow wants to have the kid’s testimony before he goes to the grand jury,” Friedman interrupted. “He’s told us that. Right?”

“Right.”

“And Stringfellow is the one who runs the D.A.’s office while the D.A. is drinking martinis and making after-dinner speeches. Right?”

I nodded.

“Now let’s suppose,” Friedman said, “that Guest decides to take John to the Menninger Clinic, or maybe Switzerland, or wherever, to have his anxieties checked out. What happens to Stringfellow’s case then?”

“I don’t know what’ll happen to the case. But if Guest takes the kid out of town after we make a demand for interrogation, and if the mother lets the kid go, then she’s guilty of obstructing.”

As if he were an all-knowing teacher complimenting a backward pupil, Friedman raised a congratulatory forefinger. “That’s it exactly. So the thing for you to do, right now, is strike the first blow. You’ve got to make the mother realize that, legally, she has to let us question the kid. You’ve also got to make her realize that, if she lets Guest take the kid out of town once the demand for interrogation is made, she’s in big trouble. So you should drive over to Marie Kramer’s house, right now, and make your demand. You should take Canelli, as your witness. While you’re doing that, I’ll call a couple of friends in New York, and see what they say about Kramer. I’ll also do a background check on Marie Kramer’s live-in bodyguard. What’s his name again?”

“Durkin. Bruce Durkin.”

“Right.” He made a note of the name. “Then I’ll take Kramer through his story again, with his lawyer present. Okay?”

I nodded. “Okay.” I got to my feet. “By the way, what’s the word on the ownership of the murder weapon?”

“By the time you get back, I should know. If I don’t hear from Washington in an hour, I’ll call them again. I just called an hour ago, but a computer was down, or something.”

I called for Canelli to get my car, clipped my service revolver to my belt and began shuffling through the papers on my desk, looking for Marie Kramer’s address.

“J
EEZ,” CANELLI SAID, GESTURING
to Marie Kramer’s house, then expanding the gesture to include the rest of it: Telegraph Hill, the downtown skyscrapers set so dramatically against the vivid blue of San Francisco Bay, the long, low curve of the Bay Bridge, the hills of Berkeley in the background.

“Jeez,” Canelli repeated, “that’s a million-dollar view, Lieutenant.” He gestured again toward the house, rising tier upon tier up the sharp slope of the hill. “That’s what that house cost, I bet. A million dollars. At least.”

“At least.”

“I read somewhere that the rich are different,” Canelli said, his swarthy brow earnestly furrowed as he stared at the house. “And, you know, when you see a place like this, or a place like Alexander Guest’s place, you realize that it’s true. The rich
are
different. Aren’t they?”

As I nodded, I was thinking of my ex-wife, and her industrialist father and his factory in Detroit, and his mansion in Grosse Pointe.

The rich …

When I’d married Carolyn, I was still playing professional football. But one illegal block thrown by a Green Bay Packer changed my life, and when I got out of the hospital I went to work for my father-in-law. I had a corner office with a leather couch. My secretary had graduated from Boston University and gone to Katherine Gibbs. Supposedly, I was doing “public relations.” Actually, I met important visitors at the airport, got them settled in their hotels and generally catered to their preference in food, drink—and women. After the first year, I realized that I had a drinking problem. Sometime during the second year, standing blearily at the bar of the Book Cadillac while I watched an important visitor paw a girl I’d hired for the evening, I realized that I’d become a pimp. I left the important visitor and drove home. I woke Carolyn up, and told her that I was through. I told her we were going to give our house back to her father, and pack up our things and take the children to San Francisco.

She sat up in bed, looked at me with sleepy contempt and yawned in my face. Then she told me that she was in love with another man. She was going to divorce me, she said. She’d already seen a lawyer.

A week later, at breakfast, hung over, I was served with divorce papers. It had been a beautiful Sunday morning in June, and Carolyn and I were eating on our flagstone patio. The process server had come through the garden gate, left open for him.

The next morning my father-in-law called me into his office and fired me. As I left his office, his secretary gave me a blank envelope. Inside I found an airline ticket and a five figure check.

“You’re right, Canelli,” I said, swinging the car door open. “The rich are different. No question.”

At 3:30 on a Monday afternoon, nothing had changed at the Kramer house except the outfit Marie was wearing. Bruce Durkin was his same surly, burly self, admitting us. The high-styled living room looked the same. The coffee cup was the same, too, placed so innocuously beside Marie Kramer. And, yes, the same sounds of a TV cartoon were coming from John’s room. We’d arrived in time, then, before Guest could take the boy away.

Friedman and I had decided on my strategy. I’d simply walk into the house, introduce Canelli, then say, casually, that I wanted to have a short talk with John, “for the record.” I’d also remind Marie that I’d promised to show her son how my handcuffs worked.

As soon as I made the request, Marie Kramer frowned with apparent perplexity, as if she hadn’t understood exactly what I’d said. Still frowning, she looked first at me, then at Canelli, then finally back to me. Today, obviously, she’d had more to drink than she’d had two days ago.

“Do you remember—remember—?” She shook her head in a wide, bemused arc. She couldn’t recall what she’d wanted to say. Then, suddenly: “Carmody. Michael Carmody. Do you remember him? He’s one of my father’s assistants—one of several, of course. Several assistants.” She privately nodded, pleased with what she’d said, pleased that she’d remembered the name.

“I remember him, yes. I saw him Saturday. Here.”

“Right. That’s right.” She nodded loosely, as if the muscles in her neck had gone slack.

“Is Carmody here?” I asked, glancing up the stairs that led to John’s room. “With John?”

“No. But he’s coming. My father called, and said that Carmody was coming.” She sat silently for a moment, slumped loose-limbed in her elegant white leather chair. Then, speaking with exaggerated precision, she said, “I was just thinking that, now, I always say ‘my father.’ I can’t even remember when I said ‘dad.’” Sadly, she shook her head. “I can remember when I used to say ‘daddy’ But never when I said ‘dad.’”

“I know. I remember those same things, Mrs. Kramer. We all do, I think.”

With obvious difficulty she focused her confused eyes on my face. “You know, then,” she said. “I remember, from the other day. I can see that you know. I saw it then, too. On Saturday. You—”

John’s voice came sharply down the stairs, but the words were indistinguishable, cut off by the sound of a slamming door. Apparently he’d only left his TV cartoon long enough to shout a quick command to his mother.

Signaling Canelli to do the same, I rose to my feet, as if to respond to whatever the boy had said. With Carmody on the way, I had to act fast. Speaking to the woman, I said, “We’ll just be a few minutes, Mrs. Kramer. Would you like to come upstairs with us? To John’s room?”

As I expected, she didn’t answer immediately. Instead, predictably, she reached for the coffee cup. Jerking my head for Canelli to follow, I walked to the stairs, and began climbing. As we reached the upstairs hallway I spoke softly to Canelli. “We’ll go inside his room. Both of us. I’ll do the talking. You stay near the door. If she comes up, let her in. If anyone else comes—Durkin or Michael Carmody—keep them out. I don’t care how you do it, as long as you’re quiet about it. Clear?”