Suspects (9 page)

McCall was nodding with reference to Merryweather's gridiron days. He had himself attended the rival school and had football ambitions but was too small even by the sophomore year to go out for the team. With the irony that so often obtains in human affairs, he began to grow to his current size only after forgetting about his own participation in the game. He reminisced about this to Marevitch, who had heard it many times but listened politely now. McCall finally cut it short to say, “I wonder if we should have gotten that kid's real name and run it. What do you think?”

“You know my policy of keeping down clutter,” Marevitch replied. “With the computers it hasn't gotten better, but worse. Have you noticed any less paperwork?” He chewed his lip. “A kid steals a rubber duck ain't going on to rob a bank any day soon.… Listen, Artie, you better wait awhile before taking even any discounts anyplace. I told you, Internal Affairs is going on the warpath right now. I know that for a fact.” As a veteran of the force, Marevitch had a few friends in the department, people in jobs where they could do some modest spying for him. There had been a time, way back, when he never paid for a restaurant or takeout meal, in or out of uniform, and when he got all his wife's home appliances, as well as the clothes for her and all three kids, at prices no higher than the respective store owner's costs. But in those days it was also true that he was pulling down less than fifteen a year, not to mention that he kept himself clean when offered big money by the same drug dealers who were more successful with other cops, leading to the big scandal of twenty years back when a dozen officers were thrown off the force and two went to prison.

It did not occur to Lloyd to feel he had been lucky to avoid arrest. Instead he believed he had added another misfortune to the series of such that had begun the morning before. It would have been morally preferable to be caught while stealing an object of value. He had been humiliated in a way that permitted no restitution of pride. Should he have taken on the gigantic guard over a rubber toy?

He absolutely could not visit Laurel Avenue without bringing a present for Amanda, who always came running to him with that in mind as soon as he set foot in the door. It had probably been a mistake to start the practice in the first place, which was all his doing and could not be blamed on a niece who, in the early days of her awareness of other persons than her parents, had shrunk from him and, when he persisted, screamed in aversion, embarrassing Donna, though, as was to be expected, brother Larry thought it hilarious. “You got quite a way with women, kid.” On subsequent visits Lloyd eventually proceeded to bribe Amanda to tolerate him, bringing toys that squeaked or rattled and distracted the child from whatever it had been about him that scared her.

Then he lost his local hardware-store job, which had only been temporary from the first, but for a change he got along with his employers and colleagues and had hoped to be kept on when the regular guy came back after recuperation from major surgery. However, the budget could not take it in a poor season for retailing. Nor could he find work anywhere else in town at that time. Extending his search, he ended up out in the western part of the state, picking fruit, and when the harvest was over, he stuck around in the region. They were big on high-school sports out there, with a college-style stadium and a fast-food franchise to service it. Lloyd roamed the stands with a hot-dog carrier slung from his neck. This had been a student job when he was himself in school, but it was part of a bigger business here, not confined to Friday-night games. The stand was also kept open every afternoon at practice sessions, for the considerable crowd who gathered to watch those phases they were permitted to see, and then for the players themselves, for whom, as active young athletes, few calories were excessive. Once practice had concluded for the day, they were allowed to grab snacks before going home to gorge on massive suppers. Husky young giants who frequented the gymnasium weight room whenever they were not on the football field, they were the kind who might have bullied Lloyd, he was sure, had he been their contemporary, or, worse, might have been polite to him in a condescending way, but he at least had learned how to pull rank by means of age: he had a few more years than they in which to see more of life than truck farms and orchards and high-school locker rooms.

When he next came back to Donna's house, Amanda was no longer a baby but rather a self-propelled little person who could even talk, and she liked him immediately, so much so that she climbed into his lap without invitation. He had saved his money, and he brought Mandy a big doll that could speak a dozen sentences. Donna's gift was a thick-walled perfume bottle of green glass within which sparkled little stars of gold. Larry received a bottle of scotch.

“Gosh, Lloyd,” Donna said. “I know what those things cost. You're too extravagant.” So he knew she was impressed. Donna addressed her daughter. “Did you thank Uncle Lloyd?” The child's version of thanks really was special: she said she loved him.

The trouble (which, as he had painfully learned throughout the years beginning with adolescence, proved to be the trouble with so much in life) was that the consequences could not be foreseen at the outset. He naively failed to anticipate that there would be times when he could not afford to buy any gift, let alone one that would startle Donna with his generosity. His brother did not really figure in any of this. Sometimes Larry was not there when Lloyd visited, even when by special invitation to a dining-table meal. Or Larry would arrive halfway through Sunday dinner, or come for the roast but leave before dessert. Once he did both, came late and left early, and there were occasions when he did not appear at all.

Lloyd took the unhappy experience at Just Nickels as final and sufficient warning that it was time for him to leave town promptly, lest the next reverse prove to be one of permanent damage. He returned to the discount drugstore, down at the west end of the strip, where he had left his backpack, having for once used a regulation for his own advantage: a poster mounted at the entrance warned against bringing into the interior of the store any parcels, packages, or articles of luggage, and offered a free parcel-checking service.

He reclaimed the pack from a pudgy young clerk who was officially sullen, probably because he made no concomitant purchase. She should have understood, as
he
always did when working at a job in which the real profits were made by others, that it was no skin off her personal butt.

* * *

Moody and LeBeau took Lawrence Howland to the less well equipped of the two interrogation rooms. The better one had the two-way mirror and an efficient system for making a fairly understandable audio recording, as well as video when the camera was in operating condition, but it was in use at the moment. Their colleagues Detectives Arnold Lutz and Warren Payton, Arnie & Warnie, were interrogating a white teenaged male who probably knew more than he had yet said about the body of the fourteen-year-old female found in the park near where certain elements from Central High gathered to drink and dope up on weekend evenings. Arnie & Warnie didn't think he'd done it, but they were sure he knew who had.

“What's this?” Howland asked as LeBeau ushered him into the little room filled with a large table and four chairs. He stared at the blank walls, gesturing. “You said you'd take me to my wife and child!”

“Please.” Howland had stopped just inside the doorway, blocking the detectives' entrance. Moody spoke to his back. “We said we'd do that soon as we could, and we will. Now just please go in, Mr. Howland.”

Howland turned and stridently said, “Okay, I want my lawyer.”

LeBeau began. “Can't we just—?”

“You know my rights,” Howland said. “You're trying to trick me. I want my lawyer!” He looked more petulant than sincerely angry, but of course they had to let him make the phone call. There went such edge as they might have had. His attorney would successfully stifle or obstruct any effort they made to discover the truth, even if Howland himself wanted to cooperate.

When the lawyer showed up, he turned out to be a sallow-skinned man even taller than his client but thinner. His name was Harold Loftus. He was not recognized by either of the detectives, and thus was likely to be not a criminal defense lawyer but rather an attorney used by Howland for civil matters, real estate and the like. For a moment Moody and LeBeau, seeing Loftus' unfamiliarity with felony procedures, thought better of the situation and still hoped Howland might be permitted to help them, but as soon as the counselor was brought into the presence of his client, he reverted to type and said, “Larry, my advice is that you say nothing further unless you are formally charged.”

Howland clutched at Loftus' hand. “I just want to see my wife and child! I didn't
do
it, for God sake.”

“Just one question, please, Mr. Howland,” asked LeBeau, less hostile to the suspect now. “Is Lloyd Howland any relation of yours?”

Loftus turned, scowling. “I might just stop by and ask your captain if your hearing has been checked lately, Detective.”

“This is a proper question in a criminal investigation, Counselor,” LeBeau said, but when Loftus continued to stare at him, he sighed, and he and Moody moved away to allow the two men to leave.

“Dammit,” LeBeau said across to Moody, when they were back at their facing desks. “We should have asked Larry about Lloyd before we left the house.”

“Loftus doesn't know anything about criminal law, that's for sure,” said Moody, leaning back in his chair, which meant he had to raise his voice to be heard by his partner, for the place was noisy today with phones ringing and people coming and going. “I better call the DA's office.” An assistant district attorney was usually assigned to a murder case at the outset, so that the state would be fully prepared when it had a defendant to try. The cops hastily passed all legal problems on to this guy or, sometimes, woman.

Warren Payton, of the white-and-black Arnie-Warnie pair, walked jauntily to his nearby desk and scooped up a file folder.

“Are you looking good?” Moody asked him.

“He didn't kill her,” Payton said, “but he was one of them, four or five, who got in on the rape.”

“The little South Park girl?” asked LeBeau.

Payton's mahogany forehead glistened in the reflected light from the ceiling fixture high above him. “He said he knew it was wrong but could never get any sex on his own, and she was unconscious, so it would hardly matter to her. Besides, all the others were doing it.”

Arnie and Warnie were good detectives, but they were also notorious publicity hounds and darlings of the TV newspeople. They regularly violated departmental policy but were allowed if not encouraged to get away with it by the brass, on the theory that the police could use favorable attention in an era when law enforcement often got bum-rapped in the media.

Before Moody called the DA's office, an assistant district attorney named Sydney Logan phoned him and asked what was happening with Howland, by which he meant the case, not any of the individuals of the name.

Moody filled him in. “We are short on a motive,” he continued. “This morning Dennis checked with all the major insurance companies and couldn't find any policies on the wife or child. Howland's got one on himself through his company's benefits package, but there's nothing on the wife except the little one with the automobile club, which applies only to car accidents.”

“What about the bedroom?”

“He's putting it to his boss's wife, so he says. He claims he was in a motel with her at the time of the murders, but he claims it's just sex, not love. We're going over to interview her soon as I get off the phone. Dennis called the motel clerk, who confirms someone matching Howland's description checked in yesterday about noon, but doesn't know when he left. Also didn't see a woman with him, but that's normal, and Howland did pay for a double. We're going to see the clerk soon as we can. We haven't got any sleep since night before last.”

“You fellas do a good job,” Logan said diplomatically. “That a local motel?”

“The Starry Night out on Three-oh-one. If the man provisionally identified by the clerk is Howland, he's been there a time or two before. He signs as ‘Phil Owens,' and he pays cash, in advance—but they all do that. The clerk didn't see him after he checked in: most of the rooms are entered from around back, and you can leave the rear parking lot by the side road.… We better get going and find this woman of his, and see if she's just tail, as he claims, or somebody he'd kill his wife and child for. Oh, somebody else we're looking for is another man, apparently a younger guy, named Howland, first name Lloyd. He was in the wife's book. Maybe a brother. Got a bad reputation, at least with coworkers at some of his many jobs: threatening and so on, at least once with a knife. Seems like a drifter. Having a hard time getting a firm location on him.”

“Sounds like you fellas have a good handle on it,” Logan said. “We got too much on our plate over here, as usual. If you would just give me a holler when you've—”

“Sure thing, Syd,” said Moody, who was always pleased not to have someone riding herd on him, and by now he was long inured to the district attorney's practice of grabbing as much credit as he could when the city detectives had brought in the perpetrator of a major crime.

LeBeau was on the phone too. “We're looking for him, Miz Jones. Where could we find him, do you think? … Yeah. If you could. Think real hard. Try and remember everythi—Yeah. No, we came up empty there. Sure.…”

Having hung up with Logan, Moody waved at his partner and punched the lighted button on his own telephone, putting him on LeBeau's line. “Miz Jones, this is Detective Nick Moody. Miz Jones, I know we asked you this before, but could you please try real hard to remember again if you saw or even heard any sound at all from next door at eleven forty-three during early afternoon? You think somebody could have pulled into the driveway but not far enough back for you to see their car? You could only see it from your place if it was all the way back in front of the garage, am I right? Otherwise the Howland house would block your view?”