Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (29 page)

“Here,” she said in a soft, husky voice, that seemed always on the verge of laughter.

“Where?” I asked dimly, startled out of a daydream of my own.

I gawked at the buildings around us, wondering if she meant one of them or something else.

“Here,” she repeated, laughing at the confusion in my eyes.

“My car. It’s in here.”

We were standing at the front entrance of a parking garage.

A horn blared and we stepped out of the way as a frizzy blonde steered a brown Lexus into the street.

“I’ll drop you at the office if you like.”

I could have walked there in less time than it was going to take to get the car out of the garage. “That would be great,” I replied.

We found the Porsche and I watched, fascinated, as she drove down the narrow spiral chute that led out to the street. Her eyes, glazed with the thrill of it, stayed fixed on a spot immediately ahead of the car, while her mouth moved with the soundless rhythm of someone talking to herself.

“Is it still your intention to die like Isadora Duncan, your scarf caught in the spokes of your Bugatti?” I asked dryly when she passed through the last curve and was slowing to a stop at the ticket taker’s window.

“No,” she said as she paid the bill. “That was a schoolgirl fan-tasy. Now I’m all grown up.” She darted a glance to her left and then turned right out of the garage. “I want to die in bed,” she said as she sped through an intersection to beat the light. “Of overexertion.”

She parked across the street from my building. Leaning against the window, she smiled. “I’m glad I came today. I liked watching you in court.”

I opened the door and started to get out. “Would you like to have dinner tonight?” I asked, turning back to her.

She smiled, and I knew the answer, and more than that I knew that the answer would now always be the same.

I watched her drive off, the tires squealing as she raced down the street, her hand trailing out the window, waving one last goodbye. As I jogged across the street, I remembered what it was like, years ago, when I was a teenage kid and I could run forever and never get tired and could not imagine that I ever would.

Helen was waiting for me when I walked into the office. She marched right behind me, clutching a wad of phone messages in her hand. “Before we do anything else,” I said as I dropped into my chair, “could you do me a favor?” I opened the briefcase, removed everything in it, and handed it to her. “Could you take this somewhere and have it repaired. All it needs is some new stitching where the handle fell off.”

She looked at the briefcase, then looked at me. “You sure you don’t want to get a new one?”

“Anything important?” I asked.

“There’s one from Howard Flynn,” she said, handing me the stack.

Flynn answered on the first ring. “Stewart called about an hour ago. He said you might be interested. They made an arrest in the Griswald murder.”

“It was good of him to call,” I said, wondering why he had gone to the trouble. If it were not already public information, it would be by the end of the day.

“That isn’t the reason,” Flynn went on. “He thought you’d be interested because the guy they arrested was another mental patient.”

Seventeen

_______

John Smith, for that is the name by which I first came to know him, suffered from a serious mental defect, but there was no record that he had ever been a patient in a mental hospital. It would have been surprising if there had. John Smith did not exist.

There was no record of him anywhere; there was no record he had even been born. He had been found under a bridge, the same one where the killer of Calvin Jeffries had been found, living in the cardboard squalor of a homeless camp. When the police arrived, he was sitting on his haunches, digging in the dirt with the steel point of the knife that turned out to be the weapon used to murder Quincy Griswald. When the police, guns drawn, demanded he surrender it, he stood up, clutched it to his chest, and repeated over and over again the single word “Mine.” He did not resist when they took it away from him, but as soon as it was out of his grasp he began to cry.

They brought him to the police station and he said the same thing all over again when they asked him if the knife was his.

When they asked him if he had used it to murder Quincy Griswald, he still mumbled that same word. They told him he would feel better if he admitted what he had done, and there was not a sign that he understood what they meant. It was only when they asked him where he had gotten the knife that there was a spark of recognition in his eyes and that he made something like a clear response. “Billy,” he said. That was all. Just that single one-word name. No last name, no description of what this unknown person looked like, nothing about where he gave it to him or why.

The police had found the suspect exactly where an anonymous caller had told them they would find the killer, and they had the murder weapon. They did not have a confession, but they quickly convinced themselves that they did not need one and that, in any event, their suspect was too far out of his mind to give one that could stand up in court. What had not been quite so obvious in the case of the killer of Calvin Jeffries was impossible to ignore in the case of the killer of Quincy Griswald: He was homeless and he was crazy. He did not confess, because he could not remember. He could not remember anything, not even his own name. That he remembered the name, and apparently nothing else, about the person who had supposedly given him the knife was the kind of inconsistency that only served to underscore the irrational workings of whatever mind he had left. The only one who had any serious doubt about his guilt was Detective Stewart, and he kept his own counsel. He told only Flynn, and he asked Flynn to tell me.

The next night I waited in my car across the street from a single-story brick building next to a warehouse on the east side of the river. A few minutes past ten the door opened, and through a yellow haze Flynn and Stewart made their way out of the crowded smoke-filled room. Puffing on cigarettes, they climbed into Flynn’s car and, signaling me to follow, drove off.

We stopped a couple of blocks away and went into a tavern.

A couple of old men and one old woman were hunched over the bar. At the pool table in front, a woman with dishwater blond hair and vapid blue eyes chalked a cue stick while a man with a smug mouth and oily black hair racked the billiard balls for another game. The place reeked with the dead smell of stale beer and nicotine. We took one of the two booths in back and ordered coffee.

“This place is awful,” I said to Flynn.

He exchanged a glance with Stewart, sitting next to him. “We always come here after a meeting.” His head moved from side to side on his thick neck, the way someone who used to fight follows the action in the ring. “In case we forget what a glamorous life we gave up.”

“I wouldn’t have come here drunk,” I replied.

“Depends how long you’d been drunk,” he said with the assurance of someone who knew what he was talking about. “Once I found myself wearing a three-piece suit, sitting in the dirt talking to some guys at a construction site. It was Monday morning and the last thing I remembered was Friday night. You would have come in here if you were drunk. You would have been camped out on the doorstep waiting for them to open, grateful to get out of the daylight and back into the dark.”

Just as I lifted the cup to my mouth a loud, cracking noise struck my ear with such force that I ducked my head and put the cup down on the table. “What!”

“Bitch!” shouted a surly voice from the front.

Flynn shook his head and rolled his eyes. He looked at Stewart. “Didn’t I do it last time?”

Stewart shrugged. “You’re closer.”

“Christ,” Flynn muttered as he got up from his place at the end of the booth.

I leaned around and followed him with my eyes as he walked pigeon-toed toward the pool table. With his hand on her throat, the pool player had his partner up against the wall, screaming obscenities in her face, while he brandished his pool stick with his free hand.

“Let her go. Put the stick down,” Flynn ordered in an irritated voice.

His hand still on her throat, the man turned and, with his lips pulled back in a murderous grin, snarled incredulously, “You gonna do something about it, old man?”

“I’m going to bust your ass, is what I’m going to do about it.”

In a single motion, he threw the woman to the side and with both hands swung the stick as hard as he could. Flynn had already taken a half step forward, and with one hand caught the stick in midair. With a quick downward turn of his wrist he twisted it behind the back of the other man until it dropped on the floor, and then grabbed him by the shoulder and the seat of his pants.

With two quick steps he threw him as hard as he could head first into the door. For an instant, he lay there, motionless, and I thought Flynn had killed him. Then he began to stir, and a moment later got to his knees.

“What are you trying to do—kill him?” the woman yelled as she shoved Flynn out of the way and dropped down on one knee, putting her arm around the shoulder of her boyfriend, who a moment earlier had been ready to crush her windpipe.

Straightening his jacket, Flynn came back to the table. “Didn’t that door used to swing open?” he asked as he slid in next to Stewart.

“You’re a credit to the nobility of the Irish race,” I said. “Still rescuing damsels in distress.”

He dropped his chin and raised his eyes. “She didn’t look like any damsel to me. I should have stayed out of it.”

Stewart laughed. “No, you did the right thing. If you hadn’t stopped it, she would have killed him.”

“What were they arguing about, anyway?” I asked.

Holding the cup with both hands, Flynn sipped his coffee. “I don’t know. Maybe she finished off his beer while he was making a shot.” His face had a wry expression. “That can be a really serious thing, leaving a drunk without anything to drink.”

My leg began to hurt again. I reached down and rubbed it with the heel of my hand. The sharp, stabbing pain subsided, replaced by a dull throbbing ache. Soon there was nothing left of it, and I could only wonder how much of it was real, and how much of it was in my mind, a figment of an imagination over which I was beginning to think I had little, if any, control.

“Tell me about this John Smith,” I said, looking at Stewart.

“You’re not convinced he’s the one who killed Griswald?”

“I’m convinced he did not.” He paused before he added, “It’s just a feeling. I don’t have any proof.”

“Like the feeling you had about Whittaker?”

“Not quite. I knew Whittaker killed Jeffries; I just couldn’t figure out why. I still don’t know. Whittaker was crazy and, remember, he had killed before. There was no question that he was capable of murder. I don’t think John Smith—or whatever his name really is—could hurt anyone.” He thought about what he had just said. “Maybe if he was backed into a corner, or maybe if he was scared—maybe then. But I just don’t think it’s possible that he would lie in wait for someone and then use a knife on him,” he said, shaking his head.

Though he seemed certain of himself, it was clear from his expression that there was something else, something about which he was not nearly so confident.

“It’s not my case,” he explained. “But ever since Jeffries’s killer killed himself—if that’s what he did,” he said, suggesting once again the possibility that it might not have been suicide at all,

“I keep wondering what made him do it. When I heard an arrest had been made in the second murder, and that everything seemed to be the same: an anonymous call; the suspect another homeless man living under the same bridge; the murder weapon a knife and the knife still in his possession, I wanted to find out if there might be some other connection between the two murders or the two killers. That’s why, when they brought him in, I sat in on the interview.”

Stewart slowly rubbed one thumb over the other. Long deep lines creased his forehead. His eyebrows were knit close together.

Something had left a bad taste in his mouth.

“They brought him into the interrogation room and sat him down in a chair. It had been raining. He was soaking wet, and his shoes and the bottoms of his pants were caked in mud. He was filthy. Forget about when he had last had a bath; God knows the last time he had changed his clothes. He had on an old olive-colored overcoat, torn, tattered, ripped; underneath that, a sweater with more moth holes than wool. His hair was down to his shoulders and he had a scraggly beard.”

He shuddered as a look of disgust passed over his face. “I could not tell exactly how old he was, but he was young, probably still in his twenties, and he had what I can only describe as innocent eyes. When you looked at him and he looked back, it seemed as if he wanted you to tell him what to do, that it would not occur to him that there was any reason not to trust you. He seemed helpless.

“That’s when I noticed—when he looked at me with those childlike eyes. At first I thought it was because he had gotten all wet. His hair was plastered to his head and his beard was stuck to his face when they first brought him in. He was starting to dry out, and his hair and his beard extended farther out from his head, from his face. Then I realized—we all realized: His head, his beard, were crawling with lice, with disgusting vermin. I could only imagine—I did not want to imagine!—what was living on the other side of his clothing. It was like watching an eruption: They were coming from everywhere, and still he looked at us the same way he had before, without emotion, without any sign that he was even aware that he was being eaten alive by this unspeakable infestation. The awful thing is, I don’t think he was aware of it; I think he was used to it, the way you or I might be used to a little dirt under our nails if we were out in the garden.”

“What did you do?” I asked, amazed at what he had seen.

“We had all seen it at once; and we all reacted the same way.

We jumped up from the table, afraid that some of those things had already had time to get on us. No one wanted to touch him, and we gestured like a bunch of panicked fools, pointing toward the door. They managed to get him out of there and down the hall to the shower. When they got him undressed, they burned all his clothes. They got him deloused and they shaved his beard and cut his hair. But before that, when they saw him naked, they got the doctor. He had scars all over his legs and his buttocks.