LeBeau was suddenly struck in the shoulder by the outer door, which opened as far as it could, the smooth face of the man with the carnation peeping in through the aperture. “Will you be much longer?” he asked. “They’re ready to start for the crematory.”
“Go away,” Moody told him. It was easier for him to reach around Dennis to slam the door than for the latter, at his angle, to bring up a hand.
“Crematory?” asked the lad with the gun. “You’re cremating them?” He uttered a howl of anguish. He dropped the weapon on the tile floor, hung his head, and sobbed. While this sequence was in progress LeBeau reached around and seized him, flung him against the closed door, brought his wrists into the small of his back, and cuffed him. The boy offered no resistance whatever.
Moody picked up the heavy pistol. It was a blued-steel .357 magnum. All the cylinders were empty. He asked LeBeau to look for ammo in searching the young man’s pockets.
He addressed Larry Howland, who had remained against the wall for the reason that there was noplace else to go at the moment. “Did he take anything from you?”
“He’s my half brother,” Larry said.
“Let’s get out where we can breathe.” Moody helped LeBeau open the door and move the prisoner into the hallway. The carnation man was lurking nearby. “Tell ‘em to turn off the motor,” Moody said. “Nobody’s going anywhere at the moment. This is a criminal investigation. You don’t want to obstruct it.”
“I certainly do not, Officer. You’re absolutely right.”
“Is that the men’s or ladies’ room?”
“It’s for anybody. It’s the only public one.” The man hustled away.
“What did you do with the bullets?” LeBeau asked the prisoner, completing the body search.
The young man spoke for the second time. His face was wet. “I threw them away.”
“What’s your name?”
“Lloyd Howland.”
“Where’s your ID?” asked Moody.
“There’s nothing on him,” LeBeau said.
“We’ve been wanting to talk to you for a couple days, Lloyd,” said Moody. “Where’ve you been?”
Lloyd’s head fell. “I would have been here if I only knew. I would never have gone away.”
“Let me tell you something, Lloyd. When we ask questions, you have to answer them,” Moody told him. “It’s a serious crime to menace somebody with a gun even if it’s empty, and I’d be surprised if you had a license for it in the first place. So we got plenty to book you on.”
Lloyd raised his pale eyes, from which tears were suddenly flowing again. “He did it.”
“Who’s he?”
“I should have killed him. I should have kept the bullets and killed him. But he’s my brother.”
Moody asked LeBeau to read Lloyd his rights. Larry was staying in the bathroom. Moody returned there now and found him throwing cold water on his face and, inevitably, wetting his tie and shirt front.
“Do you want to tell us anything before we take him down to be booked?”
Howland turned his streaming face to Moody. “Do you have to arrest him?”
“He was menacing you with a deadly weapon.”
“It was unloaded. You said so yourself.”
“What were you doing, listening at the door? Then you must have heard him also say he wishes he had killed you.”
Larry winced. “He overreacts a lot. He’s overemotional. He was real close to Donna.”
“What do you mean?”
The tall, soft man shook his head. “No, not that. He…well, he might be gay for all I know. I don’t really think so, but at least he doesn’t seem interested in sex. Anyhow, Donna wasn’t either. I can testify to that.” Larry tore several paper towels from the dispenser, made a pad of them, and patted his now mottled cheeks. “I’m not saying he didn’t throw a scare into me with that gun in my gut, but it’s different if it wasn’t loaded.”
“What about his regret he didn’t kill you?”
“I don’t believe it,” Larry said into the mirror. “Lloyd’s a little screwed up, but he’s no criminal. He was crazy about Donna and Mandy.”
“He thinks you murdered them.”
Larry turned to face him. “You shouldn’t be talking like that!” “What did he say to you?”
Howland resumed patting his forehead with the pad of paper towels, though moisture could no longer be seen there. “He was babbling. I didn’t understand what he was saying. He grabbed me. I was on my way out to follow the hearse. I didn’t know what he wanted! He didn’t say a coherent word. I was in shock, I guess. I mean, not only was he waving that gun, but I never had a slight difference of opinion with him, ever. This isn’t like him.”
“I thought you said he overreacts a lot.”
“Oh.” Larry dropped the padded towels into a tall white waste can with a squeaky swinging top. “He’s had run-ins with people everywhere he’s ever worked, at least according to what he told Donna, and he changes jobs all the time. If you ask why, he mentions the boss or his coworkers having it in for him.”
“Think he ever got violent?”
“No,” Larry answered quickly. “I mean, I never talked to any of the people worked with him, but I wouldn’t say from the way I’ve known him he was a violent person. I think he might do a lot of mouthing off.” He stared defiantly at Moody. “I refuse to press charges against him.”
“It’s not your say-so. Two police officers were eyeball witnesses.”
“The gun was unloaded!”
“That might mean less than you think.”
Larry pushed past Moody without touching him, a feat in the constricted space. He turned at the door to say, “You let Lloyd go. He’s harmless! And when can I get back to my house, for a change of clothes and some other personal items?”
“I think a supervised visit can be arranged,” Moody told him. “It might help if you’re a little more cooperative in giving us simple information.”
“You’ve got my word on it.”
The detectives booked Lloyd Howland on as many charges as they could associate with the incident in the washroom of the mortuary, among them menacing, illegal possession of a deadly weapon, resisting police officers, battery, threatening bodily harm, and others, the purpose of the excess being so that some of it could be thrown out in the inevitable deal made between the state, the defense, and the judge. As cops they were only too aware that any lawyer could render most of these counts ineffectual, with an unloaded gun and a supposed victim who refused to testify against the alleged assailant, but their principal interest in Lloyd concerned the murders of his sister-in-law and niece and the arrest provided an excuse to keep him for a while at their disposal. Even so, a lawyer could have sprung him on low bail within a few hours.
But as it happened, Lloyd refused to seek legal counsel, which refusal, if immediately convenient, might well be troublesome in the longer run, for though it would be easier to interrogate him without the obstruction of an attorney, if he decided to get one at any time in the future the first thing the counselor would arrange was a repudiation of everything his new client had said without legal representation. The fact was, the entire system was run so as to keep cops at a disadvantage, or so it was seen by all law-enforcement personnel.
Moody assumed his paternal manner in the interrogation room. “Like something to eat or drink, son? Did you have lunch? How about a burger?”
The wan young man silently shook his hanging head.
“How’d you get that scratch on your face?” LeBeau asked. “Look at me. That cut or scratch, where’d you get it?”
Lloyd stared dully at him. “Shaving.”
Leaning back, as if relaxed and confident, Moody asked, “Where’d the three-fifty-seven come from?”
“What?”
“The gun.”
“I stole it.”
“Who from?”
“From a gun store.”
“It’s not new,” said LeBeau.
“Don’t they ever sell used guns?” The lad was not an experienced criminal, whatever else he might be. This sounded like a genuine question.
Moody asked, “Have you used this weapon to commit other crimes?”
“No, of course not.”
“Why did you want to kill your brother?”
Lloyd closed his eyes. “It’s personal.”
“There you’re wrong,” said Moody. “It’s illegal to threaten to kill somebody. You want to fight with your brother, it’s nobody’s business only if you don’t break the law.”
Lloyd’s face suddenly looked as if threatened with disintegration, and he clutched at it. His shoulders were heaving. For an instant, until the tears came through the fingers and coursed down the backs of the young man’s hands, Moody thought it might be a seizure of the epileptic kind.
LeBeau wore a faint sneer. He was always distrustful of suspects who interrupted the rhythm of an interrogation. He now coldly repeated Moody’s earlier question. “Why’d you want to kill your brother?” But Lloyd, lost in his weeping, made no answer. Dennis became more contemptuous. “What are you really crying about? Because you got arrested?”
Moody carried a little packet of Kleenexes, which often came in handy throughout the day and cut down on his laundry, and he now produced it and peeled off a couple of sheets and gave them to Lloyd, who politely thanked him.
“It would make a better impression if you answered the questions,” LeBeau said ominously. “It really would.” He angrily rose from his chair and stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind him, in a display of fake emotion.
Moody settled back again and spoke paternally. “We wanted to talk to you for a couple days but had a hard time finding you. Mind telling me why you gave your brother’s phone number to the Valmarket personnel people?”
“I didn’t have a phone of my own.”
“And I hear from”—Moody flipped his notebook back to the appropriate page—“Jack Duncan, produce manager, that you didn’t do much of a job. In fact he fired you—and you drew a knife on him?”
“That’s a dirty lie!” Indignation superseded grief, to be replaced by bitterness. “But I doubt you want to hear the truth.”
“You seem intelligent,” Moody said. “Use your head. Why wouldn’t I want to know the truth? Because this Duncan is paying me off in fresh cabbages? I’m trying to get your side of it. Give me some help.”
“I had a utility knife to cut cartons with. It was the store’s property. When he fired me I was just trying to return it.”
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?”
11
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,” M
cCall 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.”