Ask the Right Question (27 page)

I guess cops don't get asked “please” very often. Gartland said, “You get one of my men to put in a check of fingerprints with dead bodies and he comes up with a match. A dead body sitting around unidentified for sixteen years and you walk in one day and turn the key. Do you expect me to believe that you don't know what's going on?” So spill, shamus. You can to it here or downtown.”

In adversity he was getting trite. We were already downtown, for openers—just not at his house. And “shamus” went out with the bustle. But I forgave him. “Where's Miller?” I said.

“I'm handling this now.”

That didn't seem reasonable. “I don't talk to anybody but Miller.”

“For crying out loud.” I guess I hurt his feelings, but I could tell what he was thinking. He was balancing the importance of giving Miller a sixteen-year-old murder case against the convenience of not having to break me.

I offered a sop. “I'll tell Miller everything I know.” I was glad I'd played tough when I came in. I knew he could break me with a feather, but he didn't. I break easy because I'm afraid of guns. Not that they go around shooting witnesses in murder cases in Indianapolis. Not usually anyway. Not white witnesses. Not before they get the information out of them.

“You take me to Miller,” I said, “and I'll spill everything I know.” Shamus indeed.

Gartland sighed. He waved to his uniformed associates. “Take him in,” he said, in a tone which sounded like, he was carrying out a threat when he really was giving in to me. Subtle guys, these captains.

The ride from my office to cop center was less than two blocks, but they didn't speak to me at all. I appreciated the silence. It gave me a little chance to reorient myself. Especially with respect to Leander Crystal. Either he had conned me a second time or even he hadn't known everything that went on. I got a rudimentary notion of how I wanted to play it, and I was glad that Miller owed me for getting him back on the case.

At headquarters Miller was not hard to locate. There is nobody more present than a man who has been taken off a big case but who thinks there might be the slightest hope of getting back on it. I was his hope. Very touching, and I could always get additional leverage by reporting him for stealing cars as a kid.

Gartland was not gracious about turning me over to him. And he was even less gracious when he found out I wanted to talk to Miller alone. But finally we shooed the surplus uniforms away and had a friendly chat.

“Where was it?” I asked him.

“Your alien's prints matched a body in New York.”

I nodded as if I already knew. He picked up some paper.

“A previously unidentified female body discovered in Central Park, New York, November 23, 1954. Caucasian. Aged twenty to thirty. 5 feet 3. Brown hair. Hazel eyes. Dead a few days. Skull fracture and mutilations. She was probably knocked out, strangled and then cut to ribbons in the area between her waist and her knees.

It chilled and shocked me. I rocked back and forth in my seat.

“New York covered the match with a note. They say they never checked the corpse's prints with the FBI—that's where they file aliens' prints—because they didn't have any reason to believe she was foreign. In the park, in the condition she was in, they figured her for a whore cut up by some kind of maniac. When nobody came looking for her they closed it unsolved.”

I nodded grimly. People get killed every minute somewhere in the world. It doesn't bother you because you don't know about it. This killing sixteen years ago bothered me terribly. I did know things about it, things other people didn't know. Like why she was killed, who she had been, and why she had been killed in that particular way at that particular time.

“Al, New York wants to know how we matched it with Annie Lombard. So does the Justice Department.”

“So does everybody, if I judge the look in your eyes correctly.”

“I can't help it, Al. You know what this could mean to me. You know probably better than anyone.”

I wished I could shut him up at that moment. I knew what it meant to him all right. But I wished that I could have been there in 1954 to stop it, because it can't have been nice. I wished I could keep the billions of people who get pushed around every day from having to take it anymore. I wished I wasn't unimportant to everybody except me, and I wished I wasn't going to die someday.

I said, “Yeah, I know. I've just been figuring out how to go about it. There are people I don't want to have to hurt.”

“That girl, Annie Lombard, she got hurt in the worst way, Al.”

The platitude made me mad. Who the hell knew that better than I did? Who knew better about the pictures of the girl in the progessing stages of pregnancy, and who knew better about her daughter?

“Don't play the cop ploys with me, Jerry. Don't do it. You are going to get credit for this, but it goes my way or not at all. It's hung around for sixteen years, and, by God, if you don't watch out it's going to hang around for another sixteen.”

When I said it I meant it, but it didn't take long for me to remember all the records and files I had around, not to mention my notebook. Laid out like that even Gartland could figure out enough of it.

Miller felt my passion, but he was evaluating his own situation. “It's hard. You know that.”

“Bull. I had to con you into getting the things for me in the first place and now you're acting like it was all your idea. Just because I stumbled on it doesn't mean that you're any dumber than anybody else or any less fit to be a lieutenant.”

We had communicated at last. It's one of the facts of life that friends are not perfect. But you learn to patch up the breaches. A little booze. A few reminiscences.

There was a knock on the door. Gartland stuck his face in. It seemed only seconds since we'd seen it last. If Miller had been in doubt about our understanding, Gartland's frowning mug resolved it.

“Get out,” Miller addressed his captain. “We'll let you know.”

The face withdrew and we got down to business. I gave it all to him, in essence as Leander had told it to me. In chronological order, not the way I'd found it.

Then I told him that I wanted us to go and visit Leander Crystal.

“But he lied to you till it was coming out of your ears,” he said.

I shrugged. It's not that I had any bigger master plan which would identify all the guilty and clear all the innocent. But I wanted to talk to Crystal again before we pulled the rug out. I had to have a chance to find out whether my gut reaction—to trust the man—had really been as far off base as it seemed it was. One of the things which distinguishes children from adults is the confidence to make and trust one's own value judgments. When I decide to trust someone it's disorienting to find out he's not trustworthy.

Miller thought we should just go pick them all up and then straighten everything out later.

But he acceded to my wishes. That was the deal.

We went out and told Gartland. If Miller didn't like, it, Gartland hated it. But since he still didn't know the details all he could do was rant about what would happen to Miller if something went wrong.

Miller played cool. What else could he do but go along with me, he told Gartland. Little as they both liked it I was calling the shots. And in his opinion if they didn't act fast they might lose the killer.

It was all a subtle reminder that Gartland had opted to bring Miller back in, and that the consequences were ultimately still his.

We requested and got four patrolmen and two cars.

We left, Gartland hated it.

40

Miller and I rode together in the back of one unmarked car. The other followed us. We pulled up in tandem in front of the Crystal house. If Chivian was there, his car was not out front. It probably didn't matter. Whatever Crystal had told him about our afternoon session, they couldn't be expecting this.

As we got out I waved the second car back along Jefferson Boulevard, to get it more out of sight. They were there in case someone left the house by car. The other two cops were to post outside, front and back. Only Miller would come in with me. I wanted to give Leander Crystal as much benefit of doubt as possible. But also to protect Miller in case Crystal didn't deserve such benefits.

“If anybody does come out,” I warned the two cops to be posted at front and back, “warn them, identify yourself, fire a warning shot, but do not, repeat, do not shoot them.”

They looked at Miller. He nodded. “Unless they are threatening your life.” He checked the load in his gun. The patrolmen did the same. Then they walked to their positions.

After giving them a little time Miller and I walked silently across the lawn to the front door.

It was about eight thirty, dark. Lights shone upstairs and downstairs to our right. Muted lights showed elsewhere.

I felt the kind of majesty that a big house can have, especially when you are walking across the lawn as if you owned it. The Crystal Palace.

Leander Crystal answered the door. He stood for a moment taking in the fact that there were two of us. Then he functioned. “Come in.” He led us toward the living room. Just as well. It was the only place in the house with which I felt any familiarity, felt comfortable.

The comfort did not last. Seated in the living room was Henry Chivian, MD. He got up as we came in. He grinned. He couldn't have been there long or he wouldn't have been grinning from what Leander told him I knew. Or would he?

“Where is everybody?” I asked as we sat down. Us two facing them two. Leander said, “Fleur and Eloise are upstairs. What can I do for you? And who is this gentleman?”

“This is Jerry Miller. He is a friend of mine and he is also a sergeant of police.”

“Police!” He stood up. I forgave him that. Anyone would be nervous on a day his deceptions of sixteen years had been coming down around his ears. What I had to establish was just how nervous he was.

“Sit down, Mr. Crystal.” I used my fatherly voice. He sat down. Thankfully, Chivian had ceased to smile. I wanted to jump over the table between us and pull off his wig.

Leander did the talking for their side.

“I don't understand, Samson. This afternoon—” He stopped himself. “What does he know?”

I talked for our side. I spoke quietly, concentrating on his face. “He knows everything that you told me this afternoon.”

He just sat and shook his head. “I don't understand. I thought we had an arrangement.” Chivian clearly didn't know anything. He was relaxed, grinning again.

“Things aren't quite what they were this afternoon.” Still quietly. “I've found out about Annie.”

He looked at me. “What about Annie?” Chivian's grin fell like a bomb. He lurched forward to the edge of the couch.

“I've found her body.”

“Her
body
!” said Crystal. “Where? When? When was she …?”

I'm not infallible, but it was good enough for me.

“In New York,” I said. “Central Park.”

“But when? I don't understand what this has to do with …?” And then I believe a wave of understanding broke inside his head. It showed in his eyes. I helped it.

I said, “Sixteen years ago. They found her November twenty-third.”

“Oh, my God,” he said. His head was down. In his hands.

It must have been then that I began to hear a high-pitched laugh begin. It was low in volume to begin with. I didn't quite notice it at the time. It's just on recollection that I have figured out when it began.

“Oh, my God,” he repeated. “No!” I was concentrating on Crystal. I remember wondering if he was crying, or what. I sensed tension coming into his body. And it was then that I consciously realized the sound was a laugh.

It was hideous and growing and high-pitched. I call it a laugh because my vocabulary isn't all that good. But it wasn't a scream. It was getting louder. For a few instants I couldn't find the direction. I looked at Chivian but he was looking around, too. I guess I was convinced that it was coming from Crystal. But a second after I became conscious of the sound and of Crystal's tensing, it all began to happen.

His head came up and I had a moment to realize that his mouth was closed and his eyes were somehow not involved in a noise like that.

It was rising and loud and there was a bursting sort of sound. Like through a door.

Like behind me.

I have a visual memory of Leander Crystal diving toward my right. Somehow stronger than diving. Hurling himself.

Then all I remember is her being on me. Turning me or my turning in reaction to her. But somehow turning so I saw three or four flashes.

They say that she got me six times and that must have been what the flashes were.

They call knives cold and metallic but all I felt was a hot poker ripping into my right side. And ripping again. And again.

I have a faint notion of a red moment, of red passing before my eyes, but I wouldn't swear to it. It might have been my blood. They say there was a lot of it. Or her hair.

I don't know. All I know is that at that moment I decided to lie down and go to sleep.

41

How they got her off me I don't know. They don't know. Miller says that he thinks Crystal may have deflected her when he dived for her legs. Crystal doesn't agree. He feels like he just rolled right off her, that's how hard she was coming. They agree that somehow they did get her off, knock her off, or she decided to leave. She got up from my body and ran for the door from the living room to the front, out the house. There is disagreement about whether she was still making that sound, but there is no disagreement that it was just as she was going through the living room door that Miller shot her.

He had had a lot of trouble, he says, now. Trouble getting the gun out of his holster. When he did shoot she was virtually through the door. He thought he had missed her. But the coroner says he didn't. The bullet went through the door and into her back. Apparently there were wood splinters near the entry hole. It didn't kill her immediately, but it was a mortal wound, they say, being near the backbone. I just wonder what kind of world it can be when “mortal” wounds are fatal.