The Interrogation (3 page)

A knock at the door.

He turned to face it. “Come in.”

It was Commissioner O’Hearn, tall and erect in the doorway, all but gleaming in his dress uniform, the police-brass equivalent of a tuxedo. His luxurious black coat was folded neatly over his crooked arm, his cap held delicately in recently manicured fingers, and in that pose the Commissioner looked decidedly aristocratic, like an old European military man, trusted adviser to the Kaiser or the czar. Only the lilt of his voice betrayed his shanty-Irish roots.

“Did you ever figure, Tom, that I’d end up wearing a monkey suit like this?” the Commissioner asked.

“No, never,” Burke replied.

What he remembered were two kids from the slums, throwing rocks in the river, leaping off the pylons, racing across the bridge fast as the wind that hummed through its steel cables, playing them like massive harp strings. They’d sneaked into movie houses, stolen apples from peddlers’ carts, both of them orphaned by fathers dead from drink and raised by mothers increasingly bitter, looking every day more ragged and used up, like the clothes they washed. Then the Dealer of
the Cards had unexpectedly switched the deck and sent them Officer Horace Miles, the beat cop who’d taken two street urchins under his wing, offered a way they might escape the iron grip of Harbortown.
You two don’t have to end up like the rest of this scum, you know.

“I’ve never learned to like them, Tom.” The Commissioner shook his head. “These fancy balls and dinners. Me? I’d rather go home, put my feet up, maybe listen to a Patti Paige record, smoke a cigar. That’s my idea of a good way to spend the evening.”

It was a lie, but Burke let it go, for it was harmless enough, a boy from the slums claiming against all evidence that some part of him remained loyal to the people who still toiled there. In fact, as Burke knew, the Commissioner felt nothing for the old neighborhood. Once lifted from the pit, he’d never looked back into its teeming depths. Even so, Burke could say nothing against the life his old friend had forged. Francis O’Hearn had worked hard to get where he was, a detective shield at twenty-six, Commissioner Dolan’s hand-picked successor by thirty-six, Commissioner himself a short eleven years later. But more than that, Francis had put three daughters through college, a doctor, a lawyer, and an aide to the mayor. He’d reared strong, determined children, kids with grit and fortitude, and in Burke’s view, once it could be said of a man that his children bore his steel, little could then be said against him.

It was a badge of honor he would never wear, Burke knew. He thought again of Scottie, this son of his who was a sneak-thief, beggar, dope addict, mercifully dying now, soon to be cremated. A fitting end, he thought, to a life reduced to ashes.

“It’s the shindigs they throw at the art museum I have the most trouble with,” the Commissioner added
with a hearty laugh. “It’s something the nuns never taught us, isn’t it, Tom, that you need the rich if you want to get anything done.” He drew in a deep breath. “I’m afraid I don’t have the best of news for you tonight. This fellow we have. He’s got to be released by six tomorrow morning. The D.A. says that’s all the time we’ve got. You can’t hold this guy forever, Tom, without some evidence. So I’m having him brought here for a final interrogation. He should arrive within the hour.”

“Another interrogation won’t do any good,” Burke said. “We’ve been over everything with him time and again. All we get is evasions, denials. How he didn’t do it, has no idea who did.”

The Commissioner draped his uniform coat over one of the chairs in front of Burke’s desk and lowered himself into the other. “True enough. But sometimes even the toughest of them will crack under the right questioning. You’ve seen that, Tom. You know what a good interrogation can do.”

Burke well knew what a good interrogation could do, hammer home the incriminating evidence, wind the suspect in coils of lies and contradictions, force him to see under the ruthless light of inquisition that there was no escape from what he’d done. But he also knew that no interrogation could ever find the toxic spring that had finally boiled out into the world, poisoning everything it touched.

“Are you telling me that you see no purpose in any further questioning of this fellow?” the Commissioner asked.

“No, I just think that there are limits to what we can get out of him,” Burke answered.

“That’s the sin of despair, wouldn’t you say, Tom?”

“You sound like a seminarian, Francis.”

“Do I? But it was you who once considered the priesthood, wasn’t it, Tom?”

“Not for long,” Burke said. He shook his head. “Look, what we really need is evidence. Something that physically links Smalls to the murder. Without it, we can’t—”

“The man’s a child killer, pure and simple,” the Commissioner interrupted. “We found the murder weapon in that hole he lived in, remember?”

Burke remembered. It was a two-foot coil of wire with a strand of long dark hair clinging to it, but otherwise washed clean by rain and mud, with no prints of any kind to link it to Albert Smalls. Nor had it actually been found “in that hole he lived in,” but a full fifty feet away, near a worksite littered with pipes, bricks, other strands of the same rusted wire, any one of which could have been snatched from the ground, used to strangle a child, then tossed back into the debris.

“I don’t want this fellow back in the park, Tom,” the Commissioner said resolutely.

Burke was in the park now, the trees that bordered it in a thick green wreath, the gravel paths that wound through it, a playground filled with laughing children, and finally the child they’d found in the grass near the duck pond, her dark hair wet with the rain that had washed over the city, a trickle of blood at the corner of her mouth.

“What I’m telling you is, we’ve got to get results,” the Commissioner added.

“We’ll do our best,” Burke said. “Pierce and Cohen know the case inside out.”

The Commissioner adjusted the cuffs of his dress uniform. “Cohen has never seemed all that serious to me.”

“He’s gotten more serious since he got back from the war,” Burke told him.

“I’ll take your word for it,” the Commissioner said, although he did not seem convinced. He glanced at his watch, rose, and gathered his coat and cap. “You’ll be here at headquarters too? During the interrogation?”

Burke knew this was not a question, but an order. He nodded. “I have to go over to Saint Jude’s, but I’ll be back by the time Pierce and Cohen get here.”

“Saint Jude’s?” the Commissioner said with a chuckle. “Is it hopeless cases you’re praying for tonight, Tommy?”

Burke felt the rookery stir beyond the window, heard a million hapless crimes. “Every night,” he said.

6:23
P.M.
, 212 Morgan Street, Apartment 7

A plain white roll, boiled ham, a slice of cheese, a dab of mustard. His daily bread.

Detective Jack Pierce ate hunched over a square table balanced on aluminum legs, one of the few pieces of furniture he’d bought for the place during the three years since his wife had left him. In the background, the radio played scratchily, tuned to the low-watt station Jenny had preferred and Pierce had never bothered to change, so that it simply droned on, a memory both of her and of the daughter they had lost.

He snatched the evening edition from the chair beside the table and glanced through it. Charlie Chaplin was heading back to America and Nixon was trying to explain some cash he hadn’t told Ike about. There were ads for Coca-Cola and Kaiser cars and a new kind of toaster that popped the bread out when it was done. So what? he thought, folded the paper, and tossed it on the chair.

He’d turned thirty-three a month before, but there’d
been no party. He’d been unable to celebrate anything since Debra’s death, but at the same time he was aware that he could not drift forever in his grief, live the way Jenny did, with Debra’s murder always in his mind. And yet, after four years he couldn’t pull himself out of it. Even Costa’s drowning death a year after the murder had done nothing to relieve his burning sense of loss. At times he’d tried to imagine Costa’s stubby fingers clawing desperately at the wooden pylons as he labored to pull himself from the oily water, but he could find no solace in the final terror of the man who’d slaughtered his daughter. Instead, Costa’s death had faded, and in its place he’d seen Debra in the summer grass, then the dank basement where Costa had maintained his museum of child murder, files bulging with newspaper clippings, photographs taped to poster board, even a “toy” scaffold just high enough to hang a child, a hideous contraption Costa had dismissed with a snicker as a “little joke.”

“When I think of children,” Costa had freely told police during his first interrogation, “I like to think of them as dead.” Then, with a mocking smile, “There’s no law against having a sick mind, is there?”

No, no law at all. And so, with no evidence against him, Nick Costa had been set free, and in that instant Pierce had felt a fiery bitterness consume him, charring everything that had ever promised peace.

Pierce washed the last of the sandwich down with a gulp of stale coffee, then lit a cigarette and thought of Anna Lake. During the last few days, the terrible thing they had in common, a murdered daughter, had created a bond between them. More than anything, Pierce wanted to keep the promise he’d made to her during the first days of the investigation, a pledge that her daughter’s killer would not go free.

The phone jangled.

“Hullo.”

It was Chief Burke, his voice hard and authoritative. “Pierce, you’re needed downtown. Be here by seven. Do you know where Cohen is?”

“At home, probably.”

“Get in touch with him. Tell him to be downtown by seven.” A pause. “Prepare to stay the night.”

“Yes, sir,” Pierce said. “Is this about …?”

But Chief Burke had already hung up.

6:31
P.M.
, 1272 Hilton Street, Apartment 5-B

Norman Cohen trudged up the stairs more slowly than he liked or wanted to admit, hoping the young woman who lived in Apartment 4-A had not peeked out the peephole in her door to see him standing, wheezing, on the fourth-floor landing. He put Ruth Green’s age at somewhere in the mid-twenties, and he thought that had she known his true age, forty-one, she might have stifled any further interest in him, never again stopped on the landing or paused to chat when she met him on the street.

Ruth Green had no idea of her power, Cohen thought as he glanced down the stairs, hoping to see her materialize there, beautiful as she peered up at him, hesitantly speaking the words he now imagined.
I’ve been thinking about you.
He shook his head, embarrassed by his adolescent yearning.
Fantasy
, he told himself as he turned from the empty stairs and slid the key in the lock.
You’re living in a dreamworld, Norm.

He walked into the kitchen and placed on the table the bag of groceries he’d just lugged up the stairs. Then he opened the small, rumbling refrigerator. Someone
had left a beer from the card game two nights before. The first swig went down cold and easy, the second had no taste. How some of the guys on the job could down a dozen beers in a single sitting at Luke’s Bar amazed him. A
goy
thing, he decided, remembering how Ralph Blunt had stared at him glumly from the other end of the bar.
You people don’t like beer, huh, Norm?

You people.

Cohen remembered the things he’d seen at the Camp’s liberation, skeletal faces behind barbed wire, mounds of bodies bulldozed into a pit. Had they not liked beer? he wondered. Is that why they’d been killed in such vast numbers, because in a few insignificant ways they had been different from their neighbors? And if this were their only crime, was there nothing to prevent their wanton slaughter?

No answer to these questions came, of course. Nor did Cohen expect any. His father, the great rabbi and respected leader, had told him that in no uncertain terms.
God is not one of your criminals, son. He will not subject Himself to interrogation.

He parted the blinds and scanned the street below, now thinking he might get a glimpse of Ruth Green as she made her way home from the public school where she taught second grade. Mid-twenties, he thought, wondering how she’d managed to stay single. But what did that matter? he asked himself. For why would she ever want to marry him? He was a loner now, solitary, divided from Ruth Green less by age than by what he’d seen in the war, the haunting, irresolvable questions it had left him with. A strange darkness had descended upon him during those long years, dense and heavy, a black ink poured into his life. Find something good when you get back home, he’d told himself over and over during that time, find something good and cling to
it. But for all his effort he had discovered nothing that could remove the dark stain that marked him. Randomness was all he saw, life and death decided by a throw of the dice in the stone-cold dark.

The phone rang.

“Norm,” Pierce said. “Jack. I got a call from the Chief. I think they’ve decided to let Smalls go, and he wants us to take one more crack at him before they do it.”

“Are we alone in this?”

“Yeah, I think we are.”

“How long do we have to question him?”

“Till dawn, I think.”

“Okay, I’m on my way,” Cohen said, all other questions, large or small, now silenced for the night.

Why is this happening to me?

6:39
P.M.
, Saint Jude’s Roman Catholic Church, Western Avenue

“Hello, Tom.”

Chief Burke looked up from where he sat near the back of the church. The priest stood above him, Sean Paddock, another escapee from the old neighborhood, motionless in his black cassock, one hand holding the other, like someone upright in a coffin.

“‘Evening, Father,” Burke said.