Suspects (20 page)

Moody chewed on his stubbly upper lip. “You can see how that might have looked if you were arguing with the man. But there's these other jobs where you didn't get along with people. Like this restaurant in a place called”—more flipping—“Oakwood. You want to explain that?”

“Are they accusing me of something?”

“Should they be?”

“I ought to be the one to do that! There were lockers for your street clothes. They gave me one where the lock was broken, and somebody kept stealing stuff I left in my pockets. Nothing really valuable. I didn't have anything worth much. But you know, a comb and so on. Small change.”

“Other employees would steal these items?”

“I tried to figure out why,” Lloyd said. “They all made more than me. I was at the bottom. I was supposed to share in the busboys' cut of the tips, which is some small percentage of the waiters', or so I heard only after I got fired. I actually never collected a cent of it. I didn't even know I had it coming. The others never said a word about it, so it wasn't
that
that caused the trouble. I just got fed up having my locker pilfered. So this big bastard is the one who takes me on.”

“How?”

“I complained, and this guy says, ‘You got a big mouth. That's the way to get a sore ass.'”

“How far did it go?”

Lloyd shrugged. “If you let them do that to you, you'll never hear the end of it, but I don't like to get the hell beaten out of me, believe it or not. But I just can't let certain things go. This guy was a head taller and had forty-fifty pounds on me. What am I supposed to do?”

Moody was shaking his head. “All that matters is what you
did.”

“What Duncan says is a complete lie, but this time I really was standing next to a big chef's knife on the butcher block where they had been cutting chickens up. I told him, ‘You better worry about your guts and not my ass.' I just glanced at the knife. I never even touched it. But he goes and gets me fired. The manager says, ‘You're just lucky we don't press charges.'”

“Knives again,” Moody said, as if wearily. “Now you've switched to guns, is that it?” He rose slowly from the chair and strolled about the limited space available to him on that side of the table. “You see how it looks, Lloyd? I'm trying to understand, but it always seems to come down to you threatening somebody—or anyway
they
think so, whatever your intentions were according to yourself.” He stopped and stared. “It never goes beyond that? You don't ever use any of these weapons? It's always just you saying something and somebody else getting the wrong impression? It's always just talk?”

Patrolmen Jack Marevitch and Art McCall were talking to a florid-faced man wearing an undershirt that was stained with what looked like blood, sweat, and other substances not so easily identified but which may have included ketchup, car oil, cooking grease, and excrement. The man had let them into the second-story apartment through its back entrance, up a flight of outside stairs from an asphalt driveway and through a screen door with a cracked frame and torn mesh, into a kitchen. He held a beer can in one fist and a lighted cigarette in the other. He was unshaven and stank of beer and a mixture of foul personal odors.

“Sir,” Marevitch said, “I'm going to ask you again to put down the can.”

“Yeah,” McCall added, squinting as the smoke came his way, “and drop the butt in it.”

The man crumpled the can in his right hand and hurled it into a porcelain sink mounted on the farthest wall, but he retained the cigarette.

McCall was tall and fit but nowhere near the size of the smoker. Holding his horizontaled baton at either end, belt-high, he stuck his face up at the man's big nose and asked threateningly, “You got a hearing problem?” It was of course legal to smoke and drink inside your own home, but the officers found it useful to start off by bullying a mutt of his type, and all the more so given his size.

The cigarette was launched to join the accordioned beer can. “I want you to throw the book at her,” the man said through lips that had difficulty in forming the words.

“How much did you have to drink?” Marevitch asked.

“She was the one assaulted
me
. I wanna swear out a complaint.”

“What's your name?”

“McCracken. Mac McCracken.”

“Is Mac your real first name or your nickname?”

“It's Avery.” The kitchen was typical of those on domestic-disturbance calls: all flat surfaces were crowded with empty take-out food containers, sticky ex-liquid receptacles, slimy plastic plates, and forks with solid matter clogging their tines. The general odor was sweetish-rotten. “You going to arrest her?” McCracken glared down at the officers.

“Let me tell you something, sir,” Marevitch responded aggressively. He was a head shorter than this man.
“You're
the one going to find yourself in jail if you say any more with that tone in your voice.”

The man produced a combination of whine and howl. “Me? Arrest
me?
I'm the one
called
you, for Christ Almighty.”

“Then calm down, sir. Here we are. Now, who's ‘her'? Wife? Girlfriend? Sister, mom, or who?”

McCracken lifted his chins and closed and opened his bleary eyes. “Fiancée.”

“Is she here at this time?”

The big man seemed to take offense. “All right, don't believe me, goddammit. I'll just go get her.”

“You stay right here,” McCall told him, pointing. “Take the crap off that chair and sit down in it. I'll go find your fiancée. What's her name?”

McCracken closed his eyes again and for an instant swayed as though he might fall. The officers stepped aside, having no intention of catching him and getting befouled. But he remained on his feet and finally said, “Della.”

“Delia what?”

“I forgot.”

“You forgot your fiancée's last name?” asked McCall.

The big man patted the protuberant belly of the stained T-shirt and suppressed a belch. “You know how it is,” he said.

Calling out “Miz Delia?” McCall went through the inner doorway. He could be heard repeating the name for a while. Then, after a moment of murmuring, he came running back. “She's okay,” he told Marevitch and kept going toward the door.

Marevitch too had got the call on his own epaulet radio. It was a 10-31, crime in progress, at a liquor store on Central Avenue. “We got to go, Mr. McCracken,” he shouted at the big man, who now seemed to have gone into a trance. “You try to dry out for a while, and I bet it'll all work out with your lady.”

The officers trotted down the desiccated wooden steps of the outside staircase and, skirting the rusty pickup truck parked off the asphalt in the muddy yard, reached their unit.

Marevitch took the wheel. “Did you find her?”

“Yeah. She's okay. She's a little bitty woman. She admitted beating up on
him.”

They got a laugh out of that. Marevitch turned on the flashing light and the alarm that he still called a siren though it actually made a whooping sound, but only a few of the private automobiles and commercial vehicles made voluntary way for the police car.

“Look at that guy.” He bared his teeth. “And they get away with it. The only time you could catch them is when you don't have time to do it.” He cut the wheel sharply and darted through a suddenly opened space to pass the offending four-wheeler, at the driver of which McCall shot a finger. “If I could get away with it, I'd put the flasher on sometime when it wasn't a hurry-up call, and bust everybody who wouldn't clear the way.”

The liquor store was for once not in a mall but on a street of middle- to small-sized shops, heavily traveled, the metered parking places always filled. It was probably because of the difficulty of access by motorist customers that the store advertised sizable markdowns in its placard-covered windows. In a quick eyeballing of the facade, Marevitch managed to register that his prosperous brother's brand of sour-mash bourbon was discounted here by almost 15 percent.

He double-parked the unit, the first to arrive, and he and McCall approached the liquor store, Marevitch with the old-fashioned, familiar .38 revolver, an empty shell in the chamber under the hammer, making it only a five-shot, and his partner with the twelve-gauge pump gun.

“Goddamn those signs,” McCall complained. “You can't see inside.” One that advertised jug wine covered even the glass of the front door. He took his billed cap off, put it under his left arm, and, bending, went along the glass looking for a hole in the paper or an open joint between two panels.

A poodle-haired white-blond woman stepped out of the beauty salon next door, and Marevitch waved her back inside with his free hand, though all she could look at was the gun in the other.

He told her not to let anyone else come out until they were told. He spoke into the radio at his epaulet, asking the ETA for backup units. But it was still a long moment before he heard the sirens. Meanwhile, McCall had come back to the obscured front door in his reconnoitering tour.

“Here they are,” Marevitch said, with reference to their distantly audible support. “Wait up, willya?” He could never understand, looking back, why his partner did not do so. McCall had never been a hotdog or showboat, eager for commendations or promotion. Not to mention that his wife was seven months pregnant.

Yet Art chose this moment to be foolish for the first time in his career. He returned the cap to his head, extended the barrel of the shotgun before him, and with its muzzle pried a narrow gap between the edge of the glass door and the metal frame of the doorway.

At his own angle Marevitch could not see into the gap. He was reluctant to shout another warning, lest someone inside be alerted to his partner's presence. Therefore he was watching silently when McCall's cap was blown off by a burst of heavy-caliber automatic fire that also pulverized the glass of the door. McCall's body was twisted and hurled aside by the impact.

Seeing the spray of blood and brain matter, Marevitch for an instant believed Art had lost the entire back of his head, but finally recognized he was looking at where his partner's face had been.

Artie still had a faint heartbeat when they put him into the ambulance, Marevitch accompanying, but it was gone by the time they reached the hospital.

Lloyd slept well in jail, despite the noise and the lights, which were not extinguished or even dimmed as day became night and vice versa, as he had to assume continued to happen, though there was no window by which to confirm it. If he had had a watch it would surely have been taken from him, as was everything else removable except his underwear and socks, in return for which he received a shirt and a pair of pants dyed navy blue and slip-on shoes with pale canvas uppers and black rubber soles. CITY JAIL was stenciled in white across the back and on the breast of the shirt and, in smaller letters, down the seam of both trouser legs. His cell was furnished with a combination washstand and toilet, with the basin where the water tank of a normal toilet would be, an ingenious fixture new to him, efficient and space-saving. The cot, with a continuous metal frame, was fixed to floor and wall and covered with a gray blanket over a firm pad that was no less comfortable than some of the surfaces he had slept on when free.

Here in jail he slept better than he had for quite some time on the outside, except when watched over by Molly (guilty memories of whom he tried to suppress now), and he ate breakfast from the compartmented plastic tray with better appetite than he had known for days.

He was aware that the detectives used certain techniques of manipulation that really had nothing to do with him as an individual except in the role as specimen. He returned the favor, having no personal interest in them or in fact anyone else alive. They were doing what they had to do. He had refused a lawyer despite the judge's stern advice at the arraignment. He said he had listened to and understood the charges against him, which was not true, and pleaded guilty, which did represent something closer to the truth, if not to the letter thereof, but then what was? The truth was that he had first unloaded the pistol and then gone to shoot Larry with it, and that was an impossibility, but no more of one than that Donna and Amanda had been violently murdered, of course not literally by Larry, who could have had no motive. What Larry
was
guilty of was consorting with other women while his wife and daughter were alive: for this he deserved to be shot, but Lloyd could not have done that, for they were brothers, hence the unloaded gun. He could never have explained this to the police without compromising Donna's memory.

Not long after he had cleaned up the breakfast tray Lloyd was manacled at the wrists and shackled at the ankles and taken by elevator to a room on the floor below.

The older detective was waiting for him there. “Hi, Lloyd.”

“Your name is Moody.”

“Thanks for remembering.” Moody asked the guard to remove the prisoner's restraints. “How they treating you here?”

“Okay,” said Lloyd. “All right.” The guard pushed him down onto the chair so the leg irons could be removed.

“Getting fed?”

“The food is good.”

The guard smirked as he unlocked the handcuffs. “You must like the taste of spit.”

“Knock that off,” Moody said, scowling. The guard left with the clinking hardware.

There was a window in this room, but behind thick bars the glass was covered on the interior with dense mesh and was barely translucent, masked on both sides with a veneer of filth. The only effective light came from the embedded ceiling fixture inside its protective cage.

Moody sat some distance back of the table between them, maybe so he could cross his legs. But he uncrossed them now and brought up an attaché case from the floor. “Do I have your permission to tape-record our conversation? I'll ask you the same question when the tape gets rolling. This is what we have to do nowadays…. And I'm going to level with you, Lloyd. It will probably have to be done all over again if you get a lawyer.”