Suspects Page 18

  “Anyway,” he concluded, “I told them I stole it from a store. I kept you out of it.”

  “It’s unregistered,” Molly said. “They’ll never give it back. I just hope my dad doesn’t ask to see it one of these days.”

  “I’ll add its cost to everything else I owe you,” Lloyd promised. “I’ll start looking for work right away. I don’t exactly have good references, even without this thing hanging over me, so I’ll have to find somebody who hires for day work, off the books.” He felt some concern for her. “How long you think you can keep your father in the dark, if you insist on involving yourself in my affairs this way?”

  “I’ll get around to telling him eventually. I just have to make the effort, is all. It won’t be like the usual fights.”

  “You fight with him?”

  “All the time.”

  “I thought you two were really close.”

  Molly laughed with lips that were pinker than usual. He realized that she was wearing makeup. “That’s why we fight! Because we’re so close.” She frowned. “Don’t you understand that, Lloyd?”

  “I don’t doubt your word.”

  Molly elucidated. “I don’t mean throwing punches. I mean arguing, and we both get real mad. Didn’t you ever do that with somebody you loved?”

  “No,” said Lloyd. He was not at all reluctant to make the confession.

  “Didn’t you ever love anybody?” Immediately she lowered her head. When she came back up, she said, “I’m sorry. I was out of line.”

  Nothing she could do would hurt him, but he sensed that she would not like to hear that. What she wanted was an intimacy that he could not furnish. “I don’t mind,” he said. “I think I have loved certain.… But if it has to be according to someone else’s definition.… Look, I tangle with plenty of people. If I love somebody I want it to be different from the situation with everybody else. I don’t want to fight.”

  Molly made a disarming, girlish grimace. “We probably are talking about different aspects. The kind of thing I mean is you wonder how some person you think so much of can be so stupid in a particular instance. Yet if some outsider attacked this person for just the same thing, you’d defend your loved one, and you’d use his very argument! Funny how that works.” She peered at Lloyd with bright eyes.

  “I understand.” He did not, but it was the least he could do under the circumstances. He changed the subject. “You’re wearing a dress. It’s very nice.”

  That was certainly the right thing to say to please her. “You really think so? I figured when you come to bail somebody out, you oughta be dressed respectable.” The dress was of a blue-green figure, and her shoes were heeled. He actually preferred her in the trucker outfit, baseball cap and thick soles, which had not asked so much of him. It was as if she were attired for a date. He slapped his thighs and stood up. “I’d better make the most of my freedom and get going and find a job.”

  “Till your first payday, what are you going to do about eating, and where you going to spend the nights?”

  “There are places where you can get food and lodging.”

  “Soup kitchens? Homeless shelters? God Almighty, Lloyd.”

  “How about jail?” he asked. “I wouldn’t have the problem if I was still there.”

  Molly hopped up from the bench and pointed. “I just had a brilliant idea. My cousin Joe’s a skilled carpenter, and he’s also got a handyman business. He can’t keep up with all the calls he gets. He’s been looking for a helper but can’t find the right guy. If they have any skills they want too much money. If they aren’t good with their hands he can’t use them.” She peered into Lloyd’s face. “How do I know you don’t belong in the second category? I don’t. But I think you could try, and it won’t cost him to experiment, because I’m gonna tell him you’ll take fifty cents under the minimum wage. That’ll appeal to him. He’s a big cheapskate.”

  “Oh, listen—”

  “No, Lloyd, just shut up and play along for once. I know it’ll work out.”

  Flat on his back, Marevitch was fighting for his life. He grasped at his holster but could not find it.

  “Jack, Jack!”

  Illumination appeared. When his eyes were half opened he saw it came from the pink lamp on the table at the far side of the bed. To see it he looked past his wife, between her plump nightgowned back and the crumpled pillow; she was sitting up.

  “Jack,” she cried again. “You’re having a nightmare.”

  He made a sound that was incoherent to himself.

  “Come on, Jack, will you wake up, for heaven’s sake?”

  “I’m awake.”

  “No, you’re not! What day is it?”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re still asleep!”

  He wanted to argue but could not.

  His wife said, “It’s three-thirty in the morning.”

  “I was dreaming, I guess.”

  “Sure you were.”

  “I was down, and I couldn’t find my gun.” He realized with shame that he was literally sniveling. He asked Stephanie for a Kleenex, and she turned and pulled a clump of several from the box on her bedside table. After he had wiped his face he said, “Artie wasn’t there at all, and I couldn’t find my weapon.”

  “You’re okay,” Stephanie said. “You’re right here with me.”

  “I didn’t know who they were. All I knew was they had me down and I was helpless.”

  “Well, it was a dream, Jack, and now it’s over.”

  His pulse had not yet begun to decelerate. The ultimate shame would be to die of a heart attack in his bed, like a civilian.

  “Novak is going to put Artie in for a decoration.”

  “Yeah,” Stephanie said. “That’s great.”

  “I told you that already?”

  They had been married for eighteen years. She was a good twenty pounds heavier than in the old days, when she had never been exactly slender. But he had always gone for full-figured gals, as what’s-her-name called them in those commercials. “Yeah, Jack, and more than once, and I was glad to hear it every time. They don’t come any better than Artie.”

  “If Artie was there, I wouldn’t be helpless, see?”

  “It was just a dream, Jack. Nobody had you down, and you didn’t need to find your gun.”

  He had continued to lie supine, but now he rolled onto his side to face his wife, who lowered her head to the pillow. He said, “I got to go see this doctor. She’s a woman, for God’s sake. What’s she know about police work?”

  “I guess she’s qualified or they wouldn’t of hired her.”

  “Are you kidding?” Marevitch asked. “Politics. Like everything the department does.”

  “I doubt it will do you permanent harm,” said Stephanie. “You could just go see what she has to say.”

  “I’ve got no choice.”

  “There you are,” said his wife. “That’s the way to look at it. It’s not your idea. You can’t be blamed for it.”

  Marevitch felt his features contort, as if on their own. “If I had only—”

  “No, Jack,” his wife interrupted, so forcefully he could feel her breath from a foot away. “You go tell that to the lady doctor, but don’t mention it to me again. I don’t want to hear how you should of laid down your life for Artie, because what would become of us if you did? And you know I thought the world of Artie. You just go tell the lady.”

  Suddenly it made sense to Marevitch: he was not allowed to spill his guts to his intimates or colleagues, but a psychologist had to listen to anything you said. “You’re right,” he told Stephanie.

  She raised her pale eyebrows. “You mean it?”

  But he did not want to tell her of his new understanding. “Civilians think cops are the ones who give orders. That’s wrong. Most of the times cops take orders.”

  “All right, Jack, I’ll give you another one: go back to sleep. I’m right here. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  Moody and LeBeau were at the
barren so-called studio apartment where Lloyd Howland had lived for the preceding weeks.

  “Zee,” said the super, a bulbous-bellied, thick-eyebrowed man named Denarius Glotty, who spoke with an accent neither detective could identify, “iss cleaned op for new guy.”

  Further questioning established that the place had already found a new tenant, a man who had paid an extra week’s rent to Glotty to give the room a thorough cleaning of the kind it had obviously not enjoyed in recent memory if ever. The super also informed them that the new guy was bringing his own people in to install a reinforced door and unspecified security devices, from which the detectives suspected the newcomer was a drug dealer, and they would give the address to Narcotics.

  Moody asked whether the previous occupant had left anything behind, anything at all, however insignificant. Glotty failed to recognize the name Lloyd Howland until LeBeau hand-printed it on the page of a notebook, peering at which the super scowled and pronounced a word that sounded like Hoomar.

  “Racks,” he said disdainfully. “Old racks.”

  “What did you do with those rags?” asked LeBeau.

  Glotty had put them and other sweepings into a plastic garbage bag and the bag into one of the garbage cans the contents of which had been collected by a sanitation truck the morning two days earlier.

  “How about a knife, a blade of any kind?” Glotty continued to look baffled, so Moody made a sawing motion with an index finger across the knuckles of his other hand. “Something that cuts?” They had already searched the kitchen alcove. “No cooking or eating knives?”

  “Used to have farks and knives and alls,” Glotty said, popping his thin lips in disgust, “but dey break ebryting or steal.”

  “So while Howland lived here you didn’t provide any kitchen utensils?”

  “Hail no.”

  “What can you tell us about Howland?” LeBeau asked. “What kind of tenant was he?”

  “Shart,” Glotty answered, holding his hand at a level that would have made Lloyd about three feet tall, though by Moody’s assessment, Howland was probably a little taller than the super.

  “Did you ever fight with him?” The question had to be repeated and rephrased several times. What Moody meant by it was not confined to physical violence, and that was difficult to communicate to Glotty. Eventually the detectives came to believe that the super had, in the time-honored fashion of such functionaries, avoided the tenants so assiduously that his description of any would not get beyond the generic.

  “Place is supposed to be furnished, isn’t it?” LeBeau asked. “So what did you do with the furniture?”

  Glotty thrust his double chin at the doorway. “New guy donwan-nit, so took table and chair and frame of duh bett down cellar. But dat faking mattress full of piss!” He roared what were probably curses in whichever language. He wasn’t going to carry it anyplace, said he, so he took the sash out of the window and dropped the mattress into the rear areaway.

  The detectives immediately went to the window, which had been put back together but remained open and screenless, and they stuck heads out and looked down at a blackened mess.

  Moody came back. “You burned it?”

  “Naw. Dem kids, dat night.”

  “Neighborhood youths?”

  “No loss,” said Glotty. “But maybe landlord will nail my ass. I was gonna just let it dry, then bring back.”

  Moody and LeBeau went right down to examine what was left of the mattress, which had fallen atop a collection of other rubbish, surely also airmailed from above. Its top cover had burned away entirely, along with all but wisps of the filling and a few knots of the twine that had held the springs, but the sooty springs remained in place. LeBeau squatted and peered into them.

  “Bottom cover’s still there.” He wrinkled his nose. “You can still smell piss even after all the burning.”

  “Somebody peed on it since the fire,” Moody said, sniffing. “Maybe to put it out.”

  After poking through the other refuse with lengths of rusty metal found on the site and discovering nothing useful for their purpose, Moody stood guard while LeBeau went out to the car and put in a call for a team to come collect the remains of the mattress and test the table, chair, and bedframe from the cellar for the presence of dried blood or whatever else might be pertinent to the case.

  Their next job was to get as much help as they could talk the captain into providing them, find the dump for this sanitation district, and look for the plastic garbage bag into which Glotty had placed the rubbish left behind by Lloyd Howland. That there might be nothing therein that could be identified as Lloyd’s, let alone anything incriminating, was likely. That among the thousands of similar bags in the dump the one with the Howland-Glotty association could not be recognized even when opened could even be called probable.

  14

  To reach Molly’s cousin Joe’s place you went through an alley in the middle of a string of shops that had seen better days, crossed a service road, and were suddenly in an almost rural setting of trees and weeds, amid which sat a one-story structure that had apparently formerly been a cottage but had undergone sufficient degeneration by now, with flaking paint and curled roof shingles, to be called a shack. The underpinnings of the screened-in porch had collapsed at the far front end, slanting its floor in two planes, and the screening was torn in every panel but the one above the crushed support.

  Molly stopped her father’s car behind a gleaming black pickup truck equipped with an immaculately white cap that covered its bed.

  “Look at the difference between his machinery and his house,” said she. “That’s Joe for you.” When they were out of the car, she told Lloyd that the porch had been fallen in for years. “We have to use the back.”

  The garage at the end of the dirt driveway was also in better condition than the residence. Through its big open doorway could be seen the furnishings of a carpentry shop: floor-mounted power tools, walls hung with shelves or pegboarded hardware, wood in many forms—horizontally stacked lumber, barrels blooming with clustered dowels, giant plywood sheets on end—and unfinished pieces: a doorless cabinet, an inverted table with three legs in the air, the bottomless frame for a drawer.

  As they approached the building a loud whine issued from deep within. Sporadically this became a groan or a scream or a howl, all noises made by the same lathe according to which tool was applied to the cylinder of wood revolving on its longitudinal axis or whichever section of the grain was under the blade. The tall skinny goggled man supplying human direction did not hear the arrival of Molly and Lloyd, nor did they exert any effort to gain his attention until he at last switched the machine off, killing the sound instantly. The last of the spray of sawdust ceased to descend a moment thereafter.

  “Hey, Joey,” Molly shouted at high volume as though over a power tool that had not been silenced.

  The man turned, pushing his goggles up. Seen at closer range, he was more sinewy than skinny. He had a long jaw shaded with a faint growth of whiskers, and black hair brushed straight back from a high pale forehead. He seemed to be in his late twenties. He squinted in their direction. He wore jeans and a sawdusted shop apron.

  “Hey, Moll!”

  “I told you about Lloyd,” Molly shouted. In a lower tone she informed the latter, “He can give you something to do and also a flop. I didn’t spell it out earlier because I didn’t want an argument. You got one now, we can call it off.”

  “You’re really something,” Lloyd observed. It would have been embarrassing for him to back out at this point, not to mention that he had no better offers.

  Joe shook hands with a limp, diffident grasp. He addressed his remarks to his cousin. “I didn’t reckonize you there for a minute. You’re all dressed up.” A fact that did not seem to please him greatly.

  “I’m back behind the wheel again tomorrow A.M.,” said Molly, as if in apology. “I got to be going now, to buy food for my dad and then get it all cooked. If I don’t leave him enough to heat up,
he’ll feed himself, and you know what that will be—eggs fried in bacon grease.”

  Without warning, Joe spoke to Lloyd. “She’s a good cook, too.”

  “I might take the hint and cook you guys something too if you ever clean up that kitchen.” She began to step backward. “I really have to get going. You need me for anything, Lloyd, you get Joey to call, huh? Not for the next couple days, though: then I’ll be on the road.” She was heeling the threshold. “Thanks again, Joey, you’re the greatest. Take care, you guys.” She was gone before Lloyd remembered he should have said something to acknowledge what she had done for him.

  The two men stood there awhile, continuing to watch Molly’s departure after it was over. They could not see her car owing to the presence of the van in between. Lloyd believed it was probably his place to say something, since he had been, in effect, imposed upon the other, but nothing whatever came to mind, and finally it was Joe who spoke.

  “I guess you’re her boyfriend?”

  “No,” Lloyd hastened to say. “Just a friend.” They both continued to look out the doorway of the garage and not at each other. “She’s been helping me with some problems.”

  “That’s old Moll,” Joe said. “That’s her all right. She’s got a good heart. You’re the first person she ever brought over, though; the rest have been animals: dogs, cats, all hurt or sick, and the baby squirrel was an orphan. ‘Hey, Moll,’ I used to say, ‘what am I, a vet?’ But the idea was, see, I got this place where there’s extra space, and then it bothers her I’m by myself. I had a dog once, but he got out to the main street and was hit by a car. I can’t go through that again.” At last he turned to look toward if not precisely at Lloyd. “She brings birds that fly into the picture window over at her and Uncle Bob’s place. They don’t get killed usually, just knocked out. She brings ‘em over here.” He jerked his elbow. “Right now I got a sparrow she brought last week. It’s on the front porch. It got well after a couple hours, but stayed around. All those holes in the screening? You’d think it would find one and fly away. I tried to catch it, to take it out, but if you know birds you know that didn’t work. So there it stayed, and I give it bread crumbs to eat. Damn if I didn’t go there yesterday and the bird flew and landed on my shoulder. How about that?”