Prime Witness (47 page)

Denny taps on the door to our cubicle as he passes by, the signal that Coltrane is here, to keep our voices down.

I am holding the evening paper, the afternoon edition from Capital City. I pulled it from a rack on the way over here. It is already ablaze with unflattering headlines, the debacle with Tolar on the stand. On the front page is a three-column picture, Iganovich a beaming smile, flanked by his two lawyers. This was taken by one enterprising photographer who slipped into the courtroom in the seconds following adjournment, after Ingel left the bench and before the deputies hauled the Russian back to his cell.

Just then the door to the interrogation room opens. A man enters followed by Denny.

“Sit down there,” says Henderson. He points to a chair behind the steel table bolted to the floor, then leaves the room.

Noise, the shuffling of shoes on linoleum over concrete is piped in through the tinny little speaker screwed to the wall above our heads.

Cleo Coltrane has one of those faces that defies estimations of age. He is medium height, a complexion like chewed rawhide and body to match, wiry and a little bowlegged in worn jeans and cowboy boots. Shots of disheveled dirty blond hair rise from a wild cowlick on the back of his head like the crown on Lady Liberty.

His shirt is a size too big, with imitation pearl snap buttons and a lot of stitching. It hangs on his upper frame looking like a flag in dead air. For all of the wary voice over the phone, his appearance here in this bleak room under harsh light has a certain frontier innocence about it, the artless countenance of the common man.

Seated at the end of a small table he looks around at nothing in particular, though he glances hard-eyed at the mirror where we stand several times, like he suspects that maybe someone is back here.

A second later Henderson joins us in the cubicle. Off a hot plane, no shower since yesterday. I am glad that I will not be staying in here with Denny.

“Wish us luck,” I say. Henderson will watch from here, keeping notes of anything we might miss. It would not do to have too many people crowding around Coltrane if we want him to talk.

Dusalt and I head out. Seconds later we enter the interrogation room.

Coltrane is out of his chair, up on his feet as we enter. He is gangly, some nervous gestures with his hands, like he doesn’t know what to do with these. I get a kind of shy smile one might see from a stranger on the Montana prairie.

“Mr. Coltrane,” I say. “I’m Paul Madriani. We spoke on the phone.”

“Oh yeah,” he says. A guileless grin. He shakes my hand, a grip like a warmed and raspy vise. But there is no venom or animus apparent in the man. If he suffers from anxiety, it dances to the tune of a different drummer, not the rhythm I was beating to him over the phone.

I introduce Claude. Dusalt gives him his best cop’s look, a death mask of menace, a nod and no handshake.

“Sit down,” I tell him. “Go ahead. Relax. We just want to talk for awhile. Cup a coffee?” I say.

“Sure.”

“Cream and sugar?”

“Just sugar,” he says.

Claude does the duty, tells the guard outside to relay the message to bring some coffee.

“You wanna smoke, go ahead,” I say.

He shakes his head.

Claude and I remain standing, Dusalt with his back leaning against the wall behind me as I do the talking.

“Mr. Coltrane, we’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

He points with his finger to his chest, like surely you don’t mean me.

“Yes,” I say. “You. We didn’t know your name. But we’ve been looking for you. As I’m sure by now you’re aware, we have a series of murders in this county, brutal crimes that have taken the lives of four college students, a distinguished member of the university faculty and his former wife. We are currently in trial on some of those charges. And we believe we have the killer.”

He looks at me from sheepish eyes.

“We also believe that you witnessed two of these murders, or at least saw the bodies being staked out on the ground, from a blind in the trees along the Putah Creek?”

He’s shaking his head. “No,” he says. “Not me. Musta been somebody else.”

I look at him a benign smile, the kind I reserve for Sarah when she tells me the dirty little handprints by the light switch in the kitchen are not hers.

“It’s what I told you over the phone,” I say. “Whoever did this. Whoever committed these murders, particularly the last one, pretty soon, that person is going to know there was a witness. He’s going to be looking for you the same way we were. It would be best, a whole lot better for you, if we catch up with him, before he catches up with you.”

I can see Coltrane’s Adam’s apple take a deep bob with this thought. He has been in trouble before, but the expression in his eyes makes me think that this is the deepest it has ever gotten.

“Can I chew?” he says.

I look at him.

He scoots forward in the chair and tugs a little round canister from his hind pants pocket. He looks like he’s going to offer me some.

I wave him off with one hand and glance at Claude. He’s rolling his eyes as if to say “we got a real winner here.”

“We know what you were involved in,” I tell him. “We know about the falcons, we have physical evidence. You might say we’ve almost become experts on birds of prey in the last few months.”

“That so?” he says. “What was I involved in?”

“We know,” I say, “that in the past you’ve possessed and trained great horned owls. They tell us, the people who know about such things, that this bird is a natural enemy of the peregrine falcon. A lot of these falcons were killed near the site of the last murder.”

He looks at me but says nothing.

“We’ve found feathers belonging to a great horned owl in the bird blind. The one up in the trees,” I say.

The first art of interrogation, to make him think we know a lot more than we do.

“We know you have a record,” Claude chimes in. “Federal violations on which you did time. We are not interested in those,” he says. “We are interested in murder.”

“I didn’t murder nobody,” says Coltrane, calm, collected. He’s packing what looks like black tar between his cheek and gum, a wad the size of a walnut.

Claude makes a face, like maybe he doesn’t believe him.

“Listen, am I under arrest?” he says.

“No. No. I told you you’re not under arrest.” My biggest fear now is that he will get smart, and either ask to leave or demand to see an attorney if we say no.

“But you think I did some crime?”

I make a face. “Maybe. We don’t enforce the federal law here,” I say. “That’s for the federal government to do. Now we could help them out, give them some of our evidence, and see what they want to do with it.”

For the first time he chooses to look the other way, not at me.

“There’s a lotta horned owls,” he says.

“I wouldn’t know,” I tell him. “All I know is that the folks down in San Diego, the Wild Animal Park. They say you own one. What’s his name again?”

He looks at me, but doesn’t volunteer.

I look at Claude.

“Harvey,” says Dusalt.

“Harvey.” I pause for a second. “Like the rabbit.” The people where he worked told us this is how he came up with the name. “You picked the name?” I say.

He nods.

Harvey is now in the hands of animal control down in San Diego. He was found on property outside of town rented by Coltrane, where he kept two horses, near a trailer in which he lived. The authorities took the animals to protect them while their owner was otherwise detained. In reality they are waiting for nature to take its course, for the bird to drop a few of its feathers in the cage where they have it confined. They cannot pluck these without a search warrant. But evidence dropped into their hands by the forces of nature. That is something else.

The coffee arrives. Coltrane stirs a little sugar into the cup while we watch him. We pass the time, idle chitchat to put him back on an even keel. I drop the rolled newspaper which I am still carrying onto the table in front of him.

“Had time to see the paper today?” I ask him.

He shakes his head. “Go ahead and read,” I say. “Lieutenant Dusalt and I have something we have to discuss, outside,” I say. “We’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

Claude and I step outside and close the door.

“He listens well,” says Claude. “Problem is he doesn’t talk much.”

“A good listener is usually thinking about something else,” I say. “In this case I think Mr. Coltrane is thinking about the jam he’s in.”

Claude and I are doing a quick two-step around the corner to the little observation cubicle where Denny is waiting. We step inside and close the door.

Coltrane’s still sitting at the table, reading.

“What’s he doing?” says Claude.

“Like he’s starved for news,” says Henderson. “The story at the top of page one.”

“Has he looked at the picture?” I ask.

“He keeps going back to it,” he says. “A little reading, then back to the picture.”

I see him do this as Denny’s talking.

We give him a few minutes. He’s searching for the jump on the story, the inside pages. The man should take remedial reading lessons. Sarah could teach him speed. Three times he closes the paper, turns away from the inside pages, to look at the picture on page one, and then goes back to the inside. Finally we give him enough time. He’s out of his chair walking around, stretching his legs.

“Let’s not let him get too relaxed,” says Claude. We head back in.

Back inside we have a little more idle chitchat. I tell him about a woman in my office, a good looker, a lawyer named Lenore.

“Must be nice for you,” he says.

“Ms. Goya used to work for the United States Attorney’s Office in Southern California.”

He stops smiling, like maybe he’s not interested in meeting any of her old friends from the office. It is how progress is made, little threats, some more subtle than others.

He’s back in his chair now.

Claude takes the lead this time, a no-frills approach to questioning, like an inquisition on the cheap.

“You can stash the cowboy homilies act,” says Dusalt. “I lost interest when Will Rogers died.”

Their eyes lock on each other. Coltrane doesn’t appear particularly concerned.

“We got your spotting scope.” Claude is leaning across the table now into Cleo’s face. “The one you left behind up in the blind, remember? We’ve been running traces on it,” he says. “Not very many made like that. Pretty expensive,” he says, “for a cheap fuck like you.”

If this is getting to him, it doesn’t show.

Claude raises his voice a notch, a few more expletives. Then he comes back down to a more normal tone.

“Tight jeans you got there,” he says. “A good tush.”

Coltrane looks at him, not certain whether he should be offended.

“Ever see what people in prison for a few years can do to loosen up a pair of tight buns like that?” says Claude. “They’re real adept at it. And they seem to enjoy their work.”

Coltrane chews on the lump in his cheek, unmoved, like they’d have to catch him first.

“Six people are dead and you’re busy covering for their killer. You can jack these good people around,” says Claude, looking at me, “but I’ll see to it that your ass is put in the federal slammer so fast you won’t believe it,” he says. “Now I wanna know what you saw, and I wanna know it now.”

Coltrane looks down at the newspaper, something to divert his eyes from Claude, a silent variation on the word “no.”

Dusalt sweeps the paper off the table with the back of his hand, sending it sailing halfway across the room.

Coltrane stiffens, pushes back in his chair, away from Claude as far as he can get, rigid like a head case subjected to shock therapy. He can’t be sure how far Claude will go. His eyes come to me again, a sign that we have bonded. He would much rather talk to me than Claude. With me he gets coffee with sugar.

“The scope,” says Claude, “we got a fingerprint off the scope.” This is a lie of misdirection. We did get a print, smudged and unusable.

“We’re waiting for yours to be sent up by wire now,” he says. In fact this can be done instantaneously by computer link now, a fact that Coltrane probably doesn’t know, and intended to sweat him.

Claude tells him if he cuts a deal now before we match the prints it will go easier, we will help him with the federal violations, put in a good word, that he cooperated.

This does not seem to move the man much. He shows the kind of confidence that grows when you know you wore gloves. I have suspected from the beginning that with only a single smudged thumb print on the scope that maybe this belongs to the evidence tech, the one sent up to flop around on the perch the day I first met Claude.

Dusalt tries a few more pitches, variations on the common theme. Each of them fails to move Coltrane. Dusalt’s powers of persuasion exhausted, Coltrane has taken Claude’s worst punch and is still psychically on his feet.

Claude gives me a little glance, like maybe he should get a rubber hose. We take a break. Coltrane wants to hit the head. We send him with a guard.

Outside in the hall we cluster near an open window at the fire escape for some fresh air, Denny, Dusalt and I.

I’ve tried to reach Nikki up in Coloma three times in the last two hours. She has still not returned. I am beginning to get worried.

“Any ideas?” I ask Claude.

He is wrung out.

The sun is down much earlier these days. I can see dusk closing on the horizon, through the wire mesh. One would wonder what good the fire escape would be, sealed off like this.

I look at my watch, a quarter to seven. Lenore should be deep into it with Ingel and Chambers by now, trench warfare over terms of the jury charge in Ingel’s chambers at the courthouse. With the details to cover, this could go till well after nine.

“What do you want to do?” says Claude. He wants to know how late I want to go.

“A while longer,” I say. “Then we’ll give it a rest. Put him up in a hotel and go at it tomorrow, after court,” I say.

“Sooner or later,” says Claude, “he’s gonna want it to stop. Ask to go free or to see a lawyer.”