Suspects (33 page)

“Mrs. Donna Howland was nude?” Moody asked for the benefit of his partner, who had not heard any of Keller's foregoing remarks.

“Naked without a stitch. She was laying across the bed, legs spread far as they would go.”

Moody made some jottings with a ball pen that was only intermittently inking the words. “You're sure she was looking at you?”

“Hell yes.”

The pen had warmed up by now and was writing legibly. He waved it. “Go on.”

“I got fed up,” said Keller. “I'm no prude, but there's a limit.”

“Her blinds were open?” LeBeau asked.

Keller stubbornly shook his head. “I ain't gonna go through it all again. I explained it already to”—he hesitated for a moment, then found the name—“Mr. Moody here.”

Moody blinked. “He claims the slats were turned so you could see down through them if looking from above.” He directed Keller to proceed.

Keller began, “I'm a broad-minded individual, but—”

“What did you do next?”

“What I went over there to do was just talk to her, I swear. I didn't want to make too much of it. I was willing to keep it between me and she. Imagine if that old Jones woman had something like this on her? It'd be all over town next day. These people'd be run out of the neighborhood. I didn't want that. I'm a fine person, you ask anybody.”

“Let me get this straight,” asked LeBeau. “You say she was heating you up on purpose, knowing you were watching? You didn't go over there with the idea of getting some, did you?”

Keller appealed to Moody. “I thought you wanted to hear my side of it. How come he's interrupting with his dirty mouth?”

“The detective is trying to get to the truth,” Moody said. “Like me, Gordon.
Did
you make sexual advances to her?”

Keller seemed to be grinding his teeth behind clenched lips. “You're all alike in thinking the worst, ain't you? A man like me, do I look like a sex maniac?”

“You walk over to eleven forty-three. What's your wife doing at this time?”

“Watching TV in the living room.”

“You come right down the stairs over here?” LeBeau asked. “Tell her where you were going?”

“She gets into her soaps, she won't pay attention to nothing else.” Keller said this with a smile, which faded when Moody put him at the Howland threshold.

“Back door or front?”

“Back.”

“You went through to the kitchen in this house and out your own back door. Across the yard to eleven forty-three?”

“Correct.”

“Just walked in over there?”

LeBeau's question exasperated Keller. “I don't barge into other people's homes without knocking. You can't seem to understand you're not dealing with some lowlife. I might of made mistakes, but I'm not trash.”

“So you knocked. Then what?”

Keller began to agitate his head. “She come to the door after a while.”

“With clothes on?”

Keller smirked. “No.”

“Stark naked?” LeBeau asked with obvious and menacing skepticism. “I don't believe it.”

“All right!” Keller wailed, shrinking against the cushions. “She had some kinda bathrobe on, but it was real skimpy, thin material, and I could see everything she had.”

“Must have looked pretty familiar to you, just at closer range,” said Moody. He now had the man's number and did not worry about offending him into silence. Keller's self-professed need was to be heard: needling him would only make him more desperate to talk. “She look hotter close up, or worse?”

“She turned my stomach! If she don't get enough from that queer she's married to, it ain't my problem!” Keller lowered his voice. “I didn't say that. I was polite, but I just told her straight I couldn't put up with it any more. She pretends she don't know what I'm talking about. She acts like I'm going to put my hands on her.”

“Where are you now? Porch or in the house?”

Keller stared at the floor. “Wait a minute,” he said as if to himself. “I'm inside by now. I remember there was a screen door between us, but then it wasn't there any more.”

“You opened it and came in.”

“I never would of done that without being asked, I guarantee.”

LeBeau sneered at him. “Why would she have invited you in?”

“Because I'm a neighbor,” Keller loftily replied.

Moody stared at him a while in silence. “So?”

“Oh,” Keller said. “Okay.…” His heavy eyebrows were twitching. “I'm trying to remember.….” “How'd you get in the bedroom?”

Keller nodded once. “Oh, sure. Well, way it happened was…”

“She run in there to get away from you?” asked LeBeau.

Keller extended his hands, long wrists emerging from the sleeves. “She had the wrong idea from the first.”

“What does that mean?” asked Moody.

Some blood colored Keller's cheeks. “Like it was
me
who done the wrong thing. I mean, here I am, the injured party.”

“She was scared of you?”

Keller turned his head away, snorting, and came back to say, “Yeah, me, at my age. What am I gonna do to her?”

“What
did
you do?”

“Nothing!”

“You killed her with a blow to the head,” LeBeau said, “then sliced her from groin to breastbone.”

Keller was heavily reproachful. “I mean sex. You know that: it was in the paper she wasn't touched, for heaven's sake.”

Moody asked, “How'd you come to hit her in the head, and with what?”

“Wish you could of seen it for yourselves.” Keller looked from one to the other. “Even then you would of found it hard to believe.” He silently requested affirmation from each detective, but getting none, he hardened his nose. “Woman can claim anything, all you got's your word, and who will take that these days?” His jaw was shivering above his turkey neck. “She was gonna call the police! Can you top that? I says I was the one who should call ‘em. She runs in the bedroom. She heads for the phone on the little table there. Nobody's gonna listen to me. I knew that. I hit her with a thing from the dresser.”

“What thing?”

“A bottle. Real thick glass.”

“Like a perfume decanter?” asked LeBeau.

“You tell me,” Keller said, appropriately this time. “I can show it to you.”

“You kept it?”

“Under the sink.” He pointed kitchenward, over his shoulder, then waggled the finger in front of him. “I just wanted to slow her down, for heaven's sake. She was out of control. I didn't know what else to do. She wouldn't listen to anything I said.”

LeBeau had been pacing, but he halted now. “The cutting—why did you do that?”

“Yeah.” Keller's eyes showed a pain that was probably real enough to him, because its object was wholly himself. “I should probably not of done that, though it didn't matter to her by then. When I saw she was dead—I couldn't see any breathing, anyway—I knew I'd get blamed if anybody found out I was over there. Like the nosy old Jones lady. But if nobody saw me, then who would ever suspect a man of my reputation? I turned Presbyterian for
her
when we got married”—he pointed up—“and was an elder down at the church on Greenwood for many years.” He grunted. “I wanted you to think it was a sex maniac. I didn't realize how that might make me look if you ever traced it to me, but I didn't think you ever would, see? Now you might think I'm weird. The other was an accident, but—”

“The other?” Moody asked.

“The thing with the bottle.”

“Murdering her, you mean,” said LeBeau. “That's what killed her: getting hit with the so-called decanter.”

“Yeah, that's what I'm saying.”

“No, you're not. Can't you say it?”

“Say what?”

“You killed her with the decanter.”

Keller shrugged. His eyes were cold again. “It was an accident, I tell you. I'm admitting the other business, the cutting, might of been a mistake. I know it doesn't look right.”

“What kind of weapon did you use?” It was Moody.

Keller leaned to the left so that he could reach into his right-hand pants pocket. He brought out an object. “It's not a weapon. It's just this. I always carry it. Comes in handy. The blade slides out.” He was about to demonstrate when LeBeau quickly moved in and relieved him of the knife, handing it to Moody, and then ordered the man to his feet and frisked him.

Moody examined the tool that had been used as a weapon: it was a utility knife, but unlike the one taken by the patrolmen from Lloyd Howland, it was made of plastic and its blade could be extended by a thrust of the thumb, not being locked in place by the setscrew of Lloyd's model. He found an evidence bag in the third pocket he explored, and put the knife into it.

LeBeau meanwhile had reseated Keller on the couch and moved a few steps away. “Tell us about killing the child.”

Keller nodded briskly and patted his long thighs in the gray suit pants he wore above the big striped sport shoes. “She was sleeping. The blanket was pulled up to her nose. I just reached under and did it. She couldn't of felt a thing.”

“Why?”

Keller elevated his chin. “Because her mama was gone, and what kind of father was that guy? I couldn't of lived with that on my conscience. She would of been an orphan.
We
couldn't take her in. We're too old, and she”—again he pointed at the ceiling—“well, need I say more?”

Moody spoke quickly, so that Dennis would not dwell on the little girl's killing at this time. “You cut somebody like you did Mrs. Donna Howland, there's gonna be blood all over the place.”

“Well, now, that's true.” Keller spoke affably. “But I looked around and found one of them real big towels in the cupboard, the kind they sit on on the beach? I was going to use it to cover
me
, but then I saw it could go over her and I could work underneath. If my sleeves was rolled up, I wouldn't get the blood on me except the hands. I saw that on a TV show. When I was done, I rolled up the towel along with her robe and the bottle and brought ‘em over here. I put the stuff in the washer, but I washed the bottle off and kept it, because it's real nice, might be worth something. That was dumb, I guess, but I was raised a poor kid and can't destroy something of value.”

“Where's the towel and the robe?” Moody asked.

“Threw ‘em out in the garbage that night.”

“Can was picked up by Sanitation?”

“Next morning.”

It occurred to Moody that this confession would send him and LeBeau back to the dump after all. He stood up. “Let's get that bottle.”

“Sure,” said Keller, rising from the couch with the aid of only one hand. Moody could not have done that.

“Stay there,” he told Keller and drew LeBeau aside, asking him in an undertone to phone for some help with Mrs. K.: there was a protocol for such matters; social-service liaison personnel would come to look after the old lady. He turned back to the suspect. “Where's a phone?”

“Kitchen,” Keller said. “Bottle's there too. C'mon.” He led the way at a fast lope.

They went past the stairs and through a dining room that was made smaller by a large table covered with a lace cloth in the center of which was a big cut-glass bowl empty except for a single paper clip. Moody glanced across at the house next door and saw the closed Venetian blinds on all the windows. When they reached the kitchen, he asked LeBeau also to call the Howland number and tell the patrolman on duty there to come over.

Keller pointed to a wall phone identical to that in the kitchen of 1143. “Help yourself.”

LeBeau too noticed the similarity. “You saw Miz Donna Howland went into the bedroom to use the telephone. What about the one in the kitchen?”

Keller smiled. “That's simple,” he said brightly. “I wouldn't let her.” He opened the cabinet door underneath the sink and, squatting, fished around in a cardboard box filled with empty cans and bottles until he found and brought forth what proved to be, when it was surrendered to Moody, a globe of thick green glass in the walls of which were embedded golden stars fashioned apparently of another substance, glittering, perhaps metallic. It was empty and had no stopper. “How about that?” Keller said. “How do they get them in there?” Meaning, presumably, the stars. He stood up and gestured down at the box. “I'm religious about recycling.”

“Oh, here you are.” It was Mrs. Keller, entering the kitchen with her distinctive walk. Her gray hair was arranged otherwise than when Moody had last seen her, more formally, as it were, swept up no doubt in the interests of the large disklike earrings. The dress was black, with fancy puffed sleeves and a long skirt. Evening attire? She was dressed for the TV interview, which he had not forgotten but was thinking of in another way: namely, that he wanted to get Keller away before the television people showed up, and time was running out. “Gordie,” she chided, “you haven't changed yet? Better get going. I'll take over with these gendemen.”

Moody, summoning up all the courtliness at his command, took her arm in his. “You look beautiful, ma'am,” said he. “But there's been a change of plans. Let's go in the living room and talk things over.”

She pulled around to stare at the perfume bottle in the flat of his far hand, her eyes sparkling like its embedded iridescent stars. “Is that a litde present for me?”

“Not really.” LeBeau had already finished with the phone, and Moody asked him to escort Keller. He would wait for the reinforcements before he arrested and cuffed the man, though that event was overdue.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” said Mrs. Keller. “It's for your own lady.”

“No, ma'am.” He dropped her arm and found another plastic evidence bag in the same pocket that the other one had come from. “I need it for my work.” The bottle was the size of a small grapefruit or large orange, and hung heavily first in the bag and then in his jacket pocket.