Suspects (6 page)

He noticed a telephone cubicle on the other side of the rank of clustered shopping carts under the covered walkway in front of the supermarket. He went there and, retaining the large bottle on the little phone-side ledge with his elbow, dialed 911. He told the operator all he knew about the apparent holdup of the liquor store, but naturally withheld his own name. Maybe he was thereby saving the clerk's life, if any was left to save. He was not quite the total bastard people thought he was.

Immediately on hanging up the telephone he saw a crumpled brown grocery bag in the bottom of an empty shopping cart that stood free of the long, clustered files of its fellows. He went to it and seized the bag, which turned out to be torn but would serve to mask his stolen bottle with superficial legitimacy.

He had trekked only halfway through the parking lot when he heard the
whoop
of the oncoming police car, followed soon by the siren's wail of an ambulance. Both vehicles hurtled in through another entrance to the parking area than the one to which he was heading. He glanced back at the crowds coming out of the PriceRite and the satellite shops, because it would have been suspicious-looking not to.

Then he hiked back to the room he called home in lieu of anything better, leaned against the tiny sink in the kitchen niche, and opened the half gallon. He had not noticed the label before pouring himself a coffee mug full of liquid and taking a hefty gulp. He choked briefly and almost spewed it out: it was scotch, which he put in the category of cleaning fluids, fit to swab out toilets, open drains, but not for human use.… But the same properties that made it so filthy at first encounter served quickly enough to stun the very sense of taste by which it was obnoxious, and in no time at all, his palate anesthetized, he had not only drained the mug but refilled it. He was anxious to get to that level of consciousness at which he could contemplate his next move. Liquor worked best for this purpose. He had never tried a drug that did not dull his faculties whatever its reputation as stimulant.

As soon as they had obtained it, the detectives ran “Howland, Lloyd” through the computer but found no criminal record listed for a man of that name. They stayed up all night, part of which they spent revisiting the scene of the crime at 1143 Laurel.

Next morning Moody was an observer at Dr. Pollack's autopsy of Donna and Amanda Howland. Little in police work was more unpleasant. Though having attended many such events in his years in Homicide, Moody never became habituated to the sight of a human body laid open with a scalpel and was more squeamish than LeBeau, on whom he might have tried to foist the job had his partner not been the father of a daughter near the age of the smaller victim.

You could close your eyes, of course, but that was no defense against the odors that permeated the mask over your nose and mouth, and if you pinched your nose shut, you still tasted it or thought you could. The process took hours. He did not get back to his desk until early afternoon. He had eaten no lunch but would not have an appetite before dinnertime, if then.

He filled LeBeau in. “Donna was killed by a blow to the back of the head. Pollack wants to study the wound more before coming to any final conclusions about the weapon, but it must have been heavy to do what it did. The knife wounds were made with an edge as thin and sharp as one of his surgical scalpels.”

“And the little girl?”

“The cut across her throat,” Moody said curtly. “She wasn't otherwise hurt.” He consulted his notebook, though he needed to read nothing there. “Neither one had been touched sexually.”

At least LeBeau had meanwhile notified the woman whose number had been listed next to “Mom,” who turned out in fact to be the mother of Donna Howland, a Mrs. Elizabeth O'Neill, in Elkhart, Indiana. But she was not at home. The next-door neighbor who watered her plants directed him to call the hospital, where Mrs. O'Neill was currently a patient with a serious heart condition. According to the neighbor, Donna was an only child, and she knew of no other relatives. Mrs. O'Neill was a widow. So Dennis saw no way out of the unhappy duty of informing a very sick woman that her only child had been violently murdered.

Moody visited the water cooler, where he swallowed two mint-flavored digestion pills.

When he got back to his desk, LeBeau was just hanging up the phone.

“Larry Howland came home.”

The partners went down to their car, and Moody drove to 1143 Laurel. Across the street from the crime scene was a crowd of onlookers and also a scattering of media people. LeBeau and Moody ignored the shouted questions of the latter, ducked under the yellow tape, and walked to the house.

The officer on duty had detained Howland in the living room. The detectives took over.

Howland was a tall man going a little soft around the middle. He had curly dark hair cut neat and short. He was closely shaven but had the kind of beard that always casts a shadow. He wore a suit of medium gray, a shirt with a thin blue stripe, and a blue tie with a small red figure. His only visible jewelry was a gold wristwatch and a wedding band. He looked a few years older than the thirty-two they had established from Motor Vehicles records. The blue Escort parked up the street, just beyond where the yellow tape turned the corner at the driveway of 1143, was his, according to the number on the plate.

Howland's face was colored with indignation. He shouted at the detectives. He claimed not to know what had happened here.

Moody asked him, “You are Lawrence Howland, and this is your home? Your wife is Donna Howland, and your daughter's named Amanda?”

The answer was given at high volume. “How much longer do I have to put up with this? Where are they? What's happened to them?” He seemed more angry than worried. But the visible evidence of emotion could be highly deceptive.

“This won't take a minute,” Moody said. “Would you mind just telling us where it was you really went yesterday? Because you weren't on any of the airlines that fly in and out of Los Angeles—at least not under the name Lawrence or Larry Howland. Also your employer, Glenn-Air, states they never sent you to any kind of conference or convention or whatever, in L.A. or anyplace else.”

Howland was suddenly no longer angry. “God Almighty,” he pleaded, “show me a little decency. What's happened to my family?”

LeBeau spoke, with a harder voice than Moody's. “We've got some serious business here, and therefore I'm going to give you your rights at this point. You have the right to remain silent…” He went through the litany, pretending to read from the card he took from the leather folder that also contained his ID and shield.

But before he had finished, Howland cried, “Do I have to get my lawyer to force you to answer a simple question?”

Moody decided it was time to hit him with it. “Mr. Howland, your wife and your daughter are deceased.”

Howland nodded his head for a moment, looking at nothing. At length he lowered his fleshy chin and closed his eyes. The two detectives stood flanking him, in front of the couch he refused to take a seat on when they asked him to. There were all sorts of possible reactions to such news as he had now received—if in fact it
was
news to him—and in Moody's experience none was likely to be indicative of either guilt or innocence, though you might pretend otherwise. The most ruthless of murderers was quite capable of a display of shock and grief that was at face value much more credible than the sometimes mild reaction of the clean-souled.

“Now maybe you want to sit down,” Moody told him, gesturing. “Mr. Howland?” The man seemed in a stupor.

“Excuse me,” Howland said finally, turning as if in appeal to LeBeau, who previously had been the less friendly; but it was not LeBeau who had brought the worst news. “I want to get this straight.” His eyes seemed to have shrunk in diameter as his chin receded and his nose grew more pointed, but his color stayed the same.

Moody repeated the curt statement, this time replacing “deceased” with “dead.” When the substance of what you said was of this character, there was no means of not being brutal, at least so he believed. But he still might try when addressing someone who could not possibly be a perpetrator, such as Donna's mother. Which is why he was relieved that Dennis had taken that job off his hands.

Howland nodded as he had earlier.

“Sit down,” LeBeau said sternly. He touched Howland's shoulder.

Howland flinched. He cried defiantly, “This is my house. Don't tell me what to do! You're on my premises here.”

“Mr. Howland, you listen to me,” said Moody. “Something happened here that changes a lot of things. You don't want to work against us. You want to help us find out what happened to your wife and little girl. At least I'm hoping you do.”

Howland all at once screamed, taking the officers by surprise, and thus was able to dash as far as the hallway before LeBeau, with his quicker reflexes, could pursue him and halt his progress, being careful, however, to avoid strong-arming the man. Luckily nothing of the sort was needed, despite his apparent burst of hysteria. Howland came to a rigid stop at the touch of his elbow.

“Mr. Howland,” Moody said. “Listen to me. I'm sorry there's been a misunderstanding. We're going to tell you everything we know. The reason why we want you to sit down is you're going to hear some nasty stuff.”

Howland violently shook his head, without, however, disarranging his hair. He did not focus his eyes anywhere. He came slowly back into the living room, touching the woodwork and the pieces of furniture he passed, as though seeking orientation. He still would not sit down.

Moody told him about the murders. Howland covered his face, and his shoulders heaved, though he made no sound and no tears emerged from beneath his fingers. After a while LeBeau returned to the questioning, for one of the best times to get straight answers was when a subject was genuinely overwrought and grief drained the supply of energy needed for misrepresentation. But it was also true that one of the worst times was when the emotion was being faked. It would take a while before they could decide about Howland.

Howland took his hands off his dry face. Between shattering sobs, he proceeded to admit he had invented the story of going to L.A. for business or in fact for any other purpose. He had not been out of his home county since leaving 1143 the morning before. But the lie had been fabricated to delude his now dead wife, certainly not the police. The truth was that he and a lady friend had been at the Starry Night, one of those motels specializing in facilities for romantic trysts, the rooms of which featured hot tubs, water beds, erotic videos on closed-circuit TV, and bottles of pink champagne. Moody and LeBeau remembered the place as where, some years earlier, a transvestite was beaten to death by a man who picked him up at a bar. When the victim's body was found next day, a faint growth of beard had pushed through the heavy makeup on his cheeks: whiskers take a while to learn the game is finished forever. The killer, a manual-arts teacher at the public high school, turned himself in by late afternoon. He said what enraged him was being taken by surprise, that he had nothing in general against the type.

“I believe that,” Moody said. “Otherwise you wouldn't have sodomized the body after killing the individual, would you?”

“What I figured,” the husky teacher said, “was I was out an awful lot of money, adding up the drinks, the expensive room, and what I gave this, uh, person, and I still hadn't gotten what I went there for, so I had something coming.”

Howland finally began actually to weep tears. He sat down or rather fell onto the sofa, where he continued to sob. “The cop wouldn't tell me what happened. I kept asking to talk to Donna, but he wouldn't put her on. I thought, well, maybe it's a burglary or something.”

“You weren't that worried,” LeBeau said coldly.

“I'll tell you what worried me,” cried Howland. “You don't know Donna. If she knew I was with somebody else—look, maybe she'd rather be dead.” His eyes became wild. “You think I'm kidding?”

“Is that why you killed her?”

Howland's expression immediately turned bland. It was a remarkably rapid transition, but Moody had seen its like on people who proved guiltless. Howland proceeded to loosen the knot of his necktie. Then he ripped his shirt at the top button—the cloth tore, the button remained. The shirt was probably ruined, as Moody did not fail to notice and, considering his own meager wardrobe, to deplore.

“I know how it might sound at a time like this,” Howland said.

“What's that supposed to mean?” It was LeBeau.

“See, if this hadn't happened, it would have been just sex. It looks so bad now because while I was—well, you know, in bed and so on with someone else.… But look”—his eyes flared wildly again—“I wouldn't have been home in any case. I would have been calling on customers or doing paperwork in the office. I'm never home before past six.”

“Who could have done a thing like this?” asked Moody.

“Nobody!” Howland shouted. “Everybody loved Donna.” He sank to the couch.
“And my little girl.”

Moody leaned toward Howland and said, “Take your best guess, Larry.”

Howland was moaning softly into the hands over his face. After a moment his thick fingers parted to make a fence through the interstices of which he peeped at the carpet. “I could never get her to keep the door locked. Maybe the front door, okay, but never the back. It was just too much trouble when you were running in and out, she said. I should have insisted more, but I could never argue with Donna.” He lowered his hands and frowned. “She was real straidaced, you know. But I won't go into that.”

“What does that mean?” asked LeBeau.

“Well, nudity and so on.” Howland wet his lips. “You know…”

“No, I don't,” Moody said. “Tell me.” He drew up an upholstered chair and sat down facing Howland. “I could use some help here, Larry.” He moved his chair closer, so that their knees were almost touching.