The Judgment (11 page)

Another silence. “All right,” he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Be here in an hour and a half, then.”

He said he would and hung up.

I was left holding the receiver, trying to figure the ups-and-downs, the ins-and-outs of this cop’s cop. Anybody who could inspire the turnout he did at his arrest and arraignment had lots of support on the force. But for the first time I considered the possibility that he was getting
help from some other source. There were too many unanswered questions, too many questions unasked. I was sure now that he was holding out on me in some way.

As I was going through Conroy’s file once more, a man and woman came in without an appointment. They looked familiar. If I hadn’t had my mind so firmly fixed on other matters, I would have recognized them right away.

It was that elderly couple who had come in a few days before to make out a will that excluded their son completely. Now they wanted to change everything. Had the will been prepared? I said it had. They said things were different now. Could I perhaps do another one so that their son would get everything? I said that could be arranged. Then I said something to the effect of I-told-you-so. That was when the wife explained that their son had decided not to marry “that woman” after all. The husband looked embarrassed. The wife looked smug.

Once again I took down the facts and got rid of the couple as quickly as possible. I decided to keep their original will on file for their next visit. When would parents stop using money as a weapon against their children? Maybe never.

Once they’d left, I dialed Sue at her office.

“Gillis.”

“It’s me, Sue. How did it go last night?”

“Oh, Charley.” It came out in a sigh. She sounded exhausted. “By the time I finished up at the medical examiner’s, it was nearly two. When I got home and went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. Kept seeing that little girl on the slab.”

“The parents identify her?”

“Yes. Her name was Catherine Quigley. She was an only child.”

“Jesus, those poor people.”

“I sent them home in a patrol car and stuck around to get some details from the medical examiner.”

“What does it look like for cause of death?” I asked.

“Well, it’s all preliminary, of course—the autopsy
won’t be until this afternoon—but it looks like asphyxiation, the same as the boy. No marks on the body. Again, probably a pillow was used.”

“Any sexual evidence?”

“No, nothing detected. But I don’t care what the physical evidence says, Charley, this was a sex crime. By whatever sick, screwed-up logic, that’s what it was.”

She sounded overwrought, strung out, on the verge of tears.

“I understand, Sue.” And I did, too. It was this sense of desecration that had her going, the same reaction that had sent me out into the night, screaming to Bob Williams for help.

“She was so clean!” Sue went on. “Bathed! Her underpants had even been washed. Oh, this guy is sick, really sick.”

She had that right. What kind of geek was doing this?

“We’re going out around noon to take another look at the area where the body was found now that the snow’s melting,” Sue said. “Maybe we’ll find something we didn’t see last night.”

“I hope so.”

“Later then, Charley. Thanks for the call.”

I swung around in my chair and took a look out the window. The sun shone down brilliantly on the river and what was left of last night’s snow. Already the streets were clear and so were the sidewalks. There were dark patches all around where the snow had melted to reveal the bare ground. And slush, a lot of slush.

I felt vaguely guilty because I’d slept so well last night. Did that mean I was callous and indifferent where Sue was sensitive and responsive? No, I remembered just how frantic I’d been. I decided the difference between us was that I’d gone to confession and she had not.

Mark Conroy arrived a little earlier than he’d promised, and he seemed willing to talk. One thing he asked was
that we conduct our interview away from my office.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “You afraid Mrs. Fenton will listen in? You think I’ll tape-record you on the sly?”

He gave me one of those ironic smiles that seemed a specialty with him. “No,” he said. “I’m starving. I was hoping we could go someplace where I could get something to eat. If it’s not too crowded, we can talk.”

So we wound up together back at Benny’s Diner. It was between the breakfast rush and the noon rush, and the place was just about as empty as it had been the night before. We sat in that same back booth that Bob and I had been in. There was no question of being overheard, not even by the waitress. After rudely slamming down Conroy’s order of ham and eggs and my coffee, she seemed to make it her business to ignore us. I think she disapproved of his two-thousand-dóllar suit. I wasn’t too keen on it myself.

I told him about my visit to the Mouse. The main thing was that the Mouse had claimed that Conroy was setting him up to take the fall for the missing funds. That was his justification for his sudden fit of righteousness.

I put it to Conroy directly. “Was there anything to that?” I asked. “Did he have reason to think you’d tag him with the blame?”

“Look,” said Conroy, “the safe was in my office. Only he and I had the combination. There was over a million in it, give or take. The money went missing all at once. Maybe the Mouse saw it was gone before I did, and if he did, he’d think I took it. And if he thought that, then who else was there for me to blame but him? Since we were at least theoretically the only two who had the combination.”

This was confusing. It was a little like one of those puzzles, or whatever they were, that consist of boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes. “Now, wait a minute,” I said. “In spite of all this, you don’t think the Mouse took the money? I remember you said that earlier. It bothered me then.”

“No, I don’t think he took the money.”

“Why not?”

“We’ve been together too long. You get to know somebody. Frankly, I’m disappointed that he felt he had to cover his ass and didn’t come to me to talk about it.”

“So what do you think is the answer? If he didn’t take the money, and if you didn’t take it, who did?”

“Somebody else must have had the combination to the safe, somebody we don’t know about.” As he said that, I looked at him, studied him. For the first time since we’d started talking, I had the feeling that he wasn’t telling me the truth, or the whole truth. I knew he was reading me, too. He was perceptive. But Conroy added nothing, said nothing more.

Finally, I said, “What about those account books that the Mouse kept, the ones in code?”

“What about them?”

“Where are they? I understand that if he’s fingering you, the Mouse isn’t going to say, ‘Oh, by the way, I was book-keeping the entire operation.’ He’s going to say what he did at the preliminary hearing. That you were entirely in charge of disbursements, that he was only your gofer.”

“So?”

“The books exist, don’t they?”

“What’re you saying?”

“That he might have destroyed them, or …”

“Or what?”

“Or passed them on to interested parties.”

Conroy was getting elusive. Obviously, at this point, I felt that I wasn’t getting everything from him he had to give. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he should be holding out when it was in his interest to tell me what he knew, or suspected.

Rather than lecture him, I decided to take a new tack. “All right,” I said, “let’s talk about one of those interested parties.”

And then I told Conroy about my troubling lunch with Jack Rivers. I omitted Rivers’s name, just called him “a prominent Detroit attorney.” But the rest I summarized
just about as it had happened, the bait and then the threat.

Conroy listened, expressionless, until the very end. Then he gave me another one of those smiles that seemed more like a sneer. “You should have taken the two hundred thou,” he said.

“You think so? Well, maybe I should have. But that session at the Rattlesnake Club told me a couple of things. Number one, it told me why you’d come all the way out to Pickeral Point to hire me as your lawyer. There are bigger lawyers with better records in Detroit. So why me? Because I’m so far out of the loop that I wouldn’t know you’re too hot to handle. Nobody in town would take you on. Am I right?”

I waited for a response, returning the stare from those laser-beam eyes of his.

At last he shrugged and said, “Something like that.”

“Okay,” I said. “Another thing I found out at the Rattlesnake Club—and this really surprised me—it was that you might, just might, be telling the truth, at least about being framed for the theft of the W-91 Fund.”

That smile again. “Well, it’s nice to know my own lawyer might possibly believe me.”

“I’ll tell you, frankly,” I said, “I was prepared to conduct your whole defense by tennis rules. Lawyers do that all the time. It’s called making the prosecution prove its case. You cops hate us for that. The guilty sometimes go free.”

He cast a look around the diner, like he really wasn’t very interested in what I was saying. “Just doing your job, I suppose.”

“That’s right, doing my job. And that’s the kind of job you would have gotten from me, still might get from me, unless you give me some answers.” I stopped then, smiled unhappily, and shook my head. “Answers? I don’t even know the questions to ask.”

“All right, listen, Sloan. Even if you knew the right questions, I might not be able to answer them. All I can say is, I haven’t lied to you yet.”

“That’s something, at least. But what are you holding back? What, for instance, have you got on the mayor?”

“Me?” he said, all innocence. “I don’t have anything on the mayor.”

“Then why is he trying to get you put away?”

“Ask him.”

This guy was blocking me at every turn. It seemed almost useless to go on. But I’d gone into this meeting with a three-point agenda. I’d covered two, more or less. I might as well get on to the third.

“Mary Margaret Tucker,” I said.

“What about her?”

“Did you mention her to your friends?”

“No. Not yet. I will.”

“She wasn’t called at the preliminary hearing,” I said. “Got any idea why not?”

“Well,” Conroy said coolly, “maybe they couldn’t find her, either. Or just maybe they decided she didn’t have any connection to all this. Which is what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“The first is a possibility, I suppose. But as for thé second, just introducing her and establishing your relationship the way the Mouse did discredited you further. And that’s really what this is all about, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It looks like it.”

“I need some details on her. You said she was a senior in college. Which college?”

“Wayne State. She’s in the prelaw program.”

“Wants to be a lawyer, huh? What did you think of that?”

“I never tried to talk her out of it. I never tried to talk her into or out of anything.”

This was a guy who would lie on the witness stand. But here and now, in Benny’s Diner at eleven-thirty in the morning, with those dark eyes fixed on me, it seemed impossible to doubt what he said.

“You said she was living in a building you owned until
she disappeared. I’d like the address of that building she was in and the key to her apartment.”

He looked at me. This was a challenge, an intrusion. He thought it over for a moment, then he took a ballpoint pen and wrote an address on a paper napkin. He took out his keys, selected one, and pulled it off the ring. Then he laid it on top of the napkin.

“This is a residence that you have maintained with Mary Margaret Tucker. Is that correct?”

“What is this? More tennis rules? Yes, that’s correct.”

“And I have your permission to enter it?”

He sighed. “Yes.”

“Just one more thing,” I said. “Do you have a picture of her?”

His mask of self-control slipped for just an instant. I had a glimpse of the sense of loss he felt. “No,” he said, his voice close to a whisper, “I never needed one.”

The address Conroy had given me was on Parker in Indian Village, a part of Detroit that dated back to just after the turn of the century. It was a neighborhood filled with oversized mansions and stately old apartment buildings. Maybe this was where the moguls of the auto industry first decided to build. But whoever they were, these first residents were sure out to prove something. The houses were relics of conspicuous consumption in the grand old manner.

The name given to the area had to do only with the streets that ran through it. They all carried the names of Indian tribes—Iroquois, and so on. All except Parker.

I turned off Jefferson right ât UAW headquarters and started up the street, driving slowly, checking the addresses as I went along.

The building I was looking for was right on the corner. A three-story apartment house that must have gone up about the time America entered World War I, it had two big Greek columns supporting a fancy roof over the entrance,
which was now laden with melting snow.

I checked the mailboxes and buzzers in the hall, found the name Tucker, and went up to the second floor. The key fit. I let the door swing wide and hesitated a moment before stepping over the threshold. Well, it wasn’t breaking and entering, anyway. I went inside and shut the door behind me.

There’s something weird about being alone, uninvited in a place that’s not your own. No matter how certain you may be otherwise, there’s always a lurking fear that you’ll be discovered. I’ve heard burglars get a thrill from this. Not me. As I started to walk through the apartment, room by room, my stomach began jumping, and I noticed I had started to sweat. Even so, I kept my gloves on.

It was a big apartment. A couple of the rooms in it stood empty. The rest were furnished in basic Salvation Army style—typical student stuff but not quite what you’d expect for a deputy chief.

The exception was what might be called the master bedroom. It was large by any measure, maybe fifteen by fifteen, living-room size. In addition to an obviously new bedroom set—matching dressers, full-length mirror, king-sized bed—there was what the catalogs call a home entertainment center—television/radio/CD player—on shelves that took up most of one whole wall. Conroy had put his money where it counted. The master bedroom was clearly where they had spent most of their time. This was the place to look.