The Interrogation

  Zarella dug energetically, pressing the blade cautiously into the earth, then bringing up one small clump of ground at a time and depositing it on the path, where Sanford probed it with a gloved hand.

  “Widen the hole,” Burke commanded once Zarella had reached a depth of nearly a foot. “See if you can find anything around it.”

  Zarella did as he was told, a mound of earth growing on the pathway.

  But nothing was found, and so they moved on down the path until they reached the pond.

  At the water’s edge Burke looked back down the path. He tried to imagine what Smalls claimed to have seen, a man digging in the earth, trying to bury something he hoped might be Cathy Lake’s missing locket. It had been a long shot, of course, and now the muddy spades and empty hole suggested just how desperate their effort to hold Smalls had become, the blind leads they were forced to pursue because they had no others. During the previous twelve days, they’d dredged the pond, searched through the undergrowth, rousted the park’s bedraggled population, and found nothing. But for Burke this last failure suggested that any further search for physical evidence would prove no less fruitless.

  “You want us to go farther up the path, Chief?” Zarella asked quietly.

  Burke handed him the spade. “No, go on with your usual duties,” he replied.

  The two patrolmen walked away, talking softly, leaving Burke alone in the park.

  For a time, the Chief stood in place, considering this latest failure, wondering if Smalls was capable of devising such false diversions, running out the clock one hollow lead after another.

  Then, obeying a nameless impulse, he strode back along the path, through the tunnel, and up to the gate where a little girl had waited for her mother twelve days before. Across the empty street he could see the alley that ran alongside Clairmont Towers, and out of which Smalls had staggered on that fateful day, a ragged figure who’d frightened a solitary child, pressed her into the tangled folds of the park, where she’d rushed through the rain, beneath the dripping trees until, at last, she’d reached the pond’s edge and there, faced with a fork in the path, allowed herself a moment’s hesitation, glanced left and right, unable to decide which way to run, a fraction of a second, but long enough for Smalls to fall upon her.

  A bank of clouds drew apart, and in the reverse chasm they defined, Burke could see the faint glow of the moon. He’d read somewhere that light travels infinitely through the depths of space, and wondered if, far beyond the moon, the murder of Cathy Lake flickered eternally in the nightbound sky, her killer’s face eerily revealed in distant flashes of exploding stars.

  Still lost, then?

  12:27 A.M., Seaview, Fairgrounds

  They reached the fairgrounds gate, and behind the high storm fence Pierce observed what remained of the midway, a few tumbledown wooden booths, and beyond them, up a slight incline, the skeletal Ferris wheel.

  Only a few years before, the midway had bustled with crowds from the city. Pierce recalled the prattle of the calliope, the crackling fire of the shooting galleries, the line of people that snaked up toward the black maw of the House of Horrors, and on the wave of that memory, he smelled cotton candy and fried onions, and yet for all the sensory vividness of these recollections, his boyhood remained like an episode from someone else’s life.

  It was Debra’s death that had done this to him, he knew, and now he remembered the sticky summer day when he’d first brought her here. She’d been only three years old that summer, but full of bravado as she’d clambered into the bumper car, wrestling her metal brace into position as she nestled into his lap and gripped the wheel. She’d gasped at the first collision, but after that she’d shown not the slightest fear. As the minutes passed, she’d grown ever more aggressive, happily ramming other cars, yelling “Got him, Dad!” each time she plowed into one. He’d felt a surging delight in her courage, a feeling wholly different and more intense than any he’d ever known. So this is what it feels like, he’d said to himself, to be proud of your child. Did he really have to put away such memories to reach out to life again? he wondered. Or was it possible to find a resting place for grief that did not utterly obliterate the one you’d lost?

  The gate released an aching cry as Yearwood nudged it open, then glanced back to where Pierce stood staring out over the deserted grounds.

  “You coming?” Yearwood asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” Pierce replied.

  The two of them made their way across a muddy track to where a gray trailer sagged alone at the edge of the midway.

  A yellow light shone from one of its small square windows, and as he grew nearer, Pierce noted a rusty car, a washing machine with a hand wringer, and a drooping clothesline from which a single unexpectedly white towel hung, its ragged edges trembling in the wind from the sea.

  At the door, Yearwood paused. “Let me start things off,” he warned Pierce. “Cindy might not want to talk if a stranger just starts asking her questions out of the blue.”

  Pierce nodded.

  Yearwood rapped at the metal door. “It’s Sam, Cindy. Sam Yearwood.”

  Something stirred inside the trailer, then the door opened and a woman stood backlit in the doorway, her body in black silhouette save for an explosion of wiry red hair that formed a glowing aura around her skull. She looked quizzically at Yearwood. “Ain’t it mighty late for you to be out, Sam?”

  Yearwood touched his hat. “Sorry to disturb you at this hour, Cindy.”

  “Been a long time since you come out this way.” Her voice was raspy, a barker’s voice gone to seed.

  “Yes, it has,” Yearwood answered. “Cindy, I have a fellow here with me. His name’s Pierce. A detective from the city. He may have some news about Jimmy.”

  Cindy’s head dropped to the right but remained in shadow so that Pierce could draw nothing from her expression. He saw only that she wore a shapeless dress that fell over her like a collapsed tent, white with overblown flowers whose colors had faded with countless trips through the wringer.

  “Is he dead?” she asked Pierce.

  “No,” Pierce told her. “He’s in trouble though.”

  Cindy eased back into the trailer, and its watery light washed over her, revealing a skeletally thin face, with meager eyes, a red, jagged mouth, and leathery skin that hung slackly from the bone.

  “Come in,” she said.

  “We won’t stay long, Cindy,” Yearwood assured her. “Jack just has a few questions for you.”

  “You can stay as long as you want, Sam,” she replied with a small, twisted smile. “I don’t get much company.”

  Yearwood motioned Pierce into the trailer, then followed him inside.

  It was cramped, as Pierce observed, with enough room for only a short sofa and two spindly wooden chairs. A radio perched on the narrow island that separated the living room from a second space, where a square table stood in one corner, stocked with bread, three cans of tuna, a jar of peanut butter, and an ancient hot plate. His future, he thought, and perhaps Anna’s, if they did not find a way to reach beyond their respective losses. He decided that he would call her at six o’clock sharp, tell her whatever news he had, either that Smalls was still in custody or on the streets again, maybe ask if they might have breakfast together. Then, if she said yes, they’d meet at a nearby diner and he would tell her that he knew, really knew, exactly how she felt, the unbearable pain of a murderer on the loose again, the very one who’d killed your child, and that he would never stop trying to find him, and that only when he did would he himself know peace.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” Cindy asked.

  Pierce shook his head. “No, thanks.”

  Cindy dropped onto the sofa, then watched as Pierce and Yearwood sat down. “So Jimmy’s in trouble,” she said to Pierce. “Is it something real bad?”

  “Yes, it is,” Pierce answered. “Murder.”

  A short burst of air broke from Cindy’s red lips. “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

  Her accent
was southern, and Pierce imagined her as a young girl on some dirt farm, staring out over the field, yearning for the nomadic life she’d later found but which had not turned out the way she’d hoped, and so left her here, in Seaview, beached on northern shores, talking to a cop from the city about a son she could not save.

  “He won’t tell us anything about himself,” Pierce added. “Family. Where he’s lived. But my partner got the idea that he might have come from Seaview, so I drove out here to check it out.”

  “Poor Jimmy,” Cindy muttered brokenly.

  Pierce took out his notebook. “When was the last time you saw your son?”

  “I ain’t seen him but one time since he left. That was a little over five years ago. Didn’t figure I’d ever see him again.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause he didn’t want me to see him no more. He didn’t want nobody to see him. Took to staying here in the trailer. Didn’t want to go out. Didn’t want to do nothing. Wouldn’t go to school. It was like everything was took out of him. Didn’t have no friends. Pushed everybody away that wanted to help him out. Like he couldn’t find no way to be happy.”

  “When did this start, this pushing away?”

  “First year of high school.”

  “Do you know why he began to behave this way?”

  “He’s just got strange, that’s all.” She grabbed a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her dress, thumbed one out, lit it. “He never had nobody get close to him. Never had no job. Always jumpy. Something screwy up there.” She tapped the side of her head with a nicotine-stained finger. “Made him real … moody. That’s how I’d say it. Jimmy got real moody.” She took a quick draw on the cigarette. “Still lost, then?”

  “Yes,” Pierce said.

  “Is he out of his head? Raving? Is it like that?”

  “No. It’s just that he won’t tell us anything about himself.”

  She pointed to a picture on the wall. “That’s Jimmy. When he was eight.”

  The photograph revealed a slender boy with large eyes and dark hair parted in the middle. He wore a cowboy suit, complete with ornate holsters and two toy six-guns. There was joy in his face, and peering at it, comparing it to the timid features of Albert Jay Smalls, Pierce wondered where this joy had gone and why, as it fled, it had turned this boy into a murderer.

  “Georgia,” Cindy said. “We was in Georgia when that was took.” A vague nostalgia touched her eyes. “Jimmy loved to draw. That’s what he done the most when he was off by hisself. He’d take a drawing book down to the beach or over to the park, and he’d set and draw things all day. Kids, mostly.”

  “Kids?” Pierce asked.

  “He loved kids,” Cindy said. “Drawing ’em.” She shook her head. “He was normal till he come up on thirteen, fourteen. That’s when he started acting strange. Not talking. Staying in his room. Then he took to wandering off. He’d go out on the pier and just set there, staring around, like he was listening to the clouds. He didn’t want to be with other kids. Just off by hisself.”

  “Is he wanted for anything?” Pierce asked.

  “Wanted?”

  “Any outstanding warrants, for example,” Pierce explained. “We’re trying to find something we can hold him on. It could be anything. Shoplifting. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s enough for us to keep him in custody.”

  “Because you figure he’s so dangerous?”

  “Yes.”

  “Poor thing.” Her face swam in and out behind weaving curls of smoke. “He was just a kid when it come over him. I guess it got worse and worse, whatever was going on in Jimmy’s mind, but he never once told me what it was.”

  “Did he ever do anything violent?”

  “No.” She started to say more, then stopped, as if considering a question she feared to ask. “Who did Jimmy kill?”

  “An eight-year-old girl,” Pierce told her.

  “Poor little thing,” Cindy whispered. “Eight years old.” Her gaze settled upon the photograph of Jimmy Eagar in his cowboy suit. “Poor little thing,” she repeated. “My son.”

  Then the story unfolded, Cindy talking quietly in the dim light while Pierce listened intently, taking notes as she sketched the grim decline of her lost boy.

  12:45 A.M., Interrogation Room 3

  Critical as time was, Cohen decided that he would give Smalls another ten minutes to wallow in his own self-lacerating anguish in the distant hope that if it weren’t an act, then it might actually urge Smalls toward confession.

  And so, with no word of explanation, Cohen rose and left the interrogation room, locking the door behind him. Once in the corridor, he considered heading to the lounge but feared Blunt might still be there, playing solitaire in a cloud of rancid smoke. And so he turned to the left instead and walked down the hallway to the detective bull pen.

  The desks were empty now, the phones silent, with nothing moving but the sweep of the second hand on the large clock that hung between the room’s two arched windows.

  Cohen walked to the water cooler, took a long drink, crushed the cup, and tossed it into the nearest can. He looked at the clock. Eight more minutes. How is it, he wondered, thinking of his forty-one years on earth, how is it that each minute can be so long and life so short?

  He sat at his desk, toyed with a pencil, a paper clip, the pencil again. His eyes lit on the phone, and he thought of Ruth Green. How would she react if the phone suddenly rang in the middle of the night and it was his voice on the other end? Would she think him crazy, or would she say Why don’t you come here when you get off? I’ll make a pot of coffee. But what would happen after that? he wondered. What did he really have to offer a young woman who’d not seen the things he’d seen, and so had no way of knowing how he felt, his sense that the wheel never turned in favor of the good.

  “Detective Cohen?”

  Officer Day stood at the entrance of the bull pen.

  “The Chief asked me to tell you that he didn’t find anything in the park,” Day said. “He and some other officers went along the path all the way from the gate to the pond. They found some ground that looked as if it might have been disturbed, so they dug all around it, but they didn’t find anything.”

  Cohen nodded. “Okay, thanks.”

  Officer Day remained in place. “Chief Burke wants to know if anything new has come from the interrogation since he spoke to you?”

  “No,” Cohen answered. “Except that Smalls seems to hate himself. Really hate himself. Calls himself slime. It may be an act, of course. Or it may be a sting of actual remorse. I can’t tell.”

  “I’ll let the Chief know,” Day said, then turned and exited the room.

  So there was no praying beggar clawing at the ground, Cohen concluded as he sat back in his chair. No buried silver locket that might ultimately have guided them to the truth. Instead, it had all been a lie, a way for Smalls to buy time, knowing, as he probably did, that time was all he needed now, that this was the last interrogation, that at the end of it he would be set free.

  He shook his head. What he needed now was a miracle. A voice from the burning bush proclaiming with incontrovertible proof, This is the man who strangled Cathy Lake. He looked toward the window, the empty blackness beyond it, saw no flame, heard no voice, felt only the unfeeling void.

  And so it was up to him and Pierce, he told himself, himself and Pierce and others like them to go on, unaided in their quests. He glanced at the clock, felt the whirl of its hands like spinning blades. Five minutes, he thought, still resolved to let Smalls stew a little longer, five minutes that will feel like forever.

  12:52 A.M., Criminal Files Room

  Seated at the room’s wooden table, Burke studied a photograph of Albert Jay Smalls, hoping to get a fix on what lay in the mind behind the man’s mournful eyes. Cohen’s latest remarks concerning Smalls came into Burke’s mind, the ones Officer Day had reported minutes before, the fact that the suspect had referred to himself as slime.

  He opened the file a
nd once again began to read the previous interrogations, beginning with the September first interview.

  And it was an interview, not an interrogation. Smalls was merely one of four men taken from the park the night of the murder, brought to headquarters, questioned briefly, then released. Little had been known about either Smalls or Cathy Lake’s murder at that point. Smalls’ two drawings had not been found, nor anything else that had connected him to the girl’s killing, save the purely circumstantial fact that he’d frightened a woman near the duck pond. Thus, at the time of the interview, Smalls had not been considered a suspect. The detectives’ questions had been little more than an effort to ascertain who he was and where he’d been at the time of the murder.

  And yet one exchange stood out.

  COHEN: Why do you live in the park?

  SMALLS: I have to.

  COHEN: Why?

  SMALLS: It’s where I live, that’s all.

  COHEN: What do you do in the park?

  SMALLS: Nothing.

  COHEN: Just sit around? All alone in that tunnel?

  SMALLS: I have to be on guard.

  COHEN: Against what?

  SMALLS: Other men.

  COHEN: What other men?

  SMALLS: The ones in the park.

  COHEN: You mean other guys like you? Jay? Did you hear my question?

  SMALLS: Yes. Other guys like me.

  Burke considered the section of the transcript he’d just read. In the initial interview, Smalls had given almost no sense of himself, his life, how or why he’d ended up in the park. He’d said only that he had to be on guard against other men who came to the park. But why? Had he been robbed? Assaulted?

  COHEN: So you’re afraid of these other men?

  SMALLS: Yes.

  COHEN: Have any of these guys ever bothered you?

  SMALLS: No.

  No.

  Then what was Smalls afraid of? Burke wondered. If these other men had never harmed him, why was he on guard against them? And if he felt he had to be on guard against these men, why would he choose to live in their midst?