The Scarlet Ruse Part 10

He opened the car door and sat sideways on the seat and looked up at me. "Pride is so G.o.dd.a.m.ned wickedly expensive. I have been waiting here, thinking about pride."

"Sir?"

"Three sons. Jerry was the only one who went into the service and the only one who died. The other two are doing fine. I retired early. Heart murmur. The second star was a going-away present. Bought a little grove in California. Take care of the trees. Gardening. Golf. Bridge. Am I boring you?"

"No, sir."

"I'm boring myself. Somebody has to get stuck with listening. They paved a road near my place. I went and watched them every day. Isn't that fascinating? Old fart watching the big yellow machines. Made myself agreeable. Asked questions. Never saw such a crowd of f.u.c.kups, pouring money down the sewer. Found a couple of my retired NCOs and officers, as bored as I was. All put some money in the pot. Rented equipment after we bid low on a culvert. Made out. Ploughed it back in. Every one of those other six old farts have taken at least two million out of it. And I kept fifty percent of everything. Seven corporations. Factory structures in Taiwan. Flood control in Brazil. Bridges in Tanzania. Pipe lines in Louisiana. Shrewd old b.a.s.t.a.r.d, right? Wrong. Just bored doing nothing. Horse sense and energy and being fair. Nothing more. There's a Christ-awful shortage of horse sense in the world. Always has been. Ask me where the pride comes in. Go ahead. Ask me."

"Where does the pride come in, General?"

"Me beginning to make money hand over fist, and Jerry's widow with two little girls. I had to travel a lot, leaving Bess alone. Lots of room in that house, and if there wasn't, I could build more onto it. No, she was too proud. She wanted to make her own way. Raise Jerry's kids without help from anybody. Bess wanted to come down here and visit her and talk her into it and bring her back. She was sure she could. So my pride got in the way. If the d.a.m.ned girl wants to act like that, let her. Jane's pride and my pride. Send too big a check along with the Christmas stuff, and she'd send it right back. Oh s.h.i.+t, isn't pride wonderful? She stayed right here in this half-a.s.s place leading a half-a.s.s life, when if she'd wanted to spend a thousand dollars a day of my money, it would have tickled but not pinched. So she's gone down the drain after a lot of scruffy little years, and the youngest girl has gone sour. For what? There's no meaning to it at all. None." He put his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands.

I gave him ten seconds and then said, "Are you waiting for them in there?"

He looked at me as if he had forgotten who I was. "Oh, they're supposed to be finis.h.i.+ng up. I can go in when they're through, they told me." He patted his s.h.i.+rt pocket. "Linda is over at the hotel with Bess. I've got a list of things. I don't want that little girl to have to come back here even one more time. She had one look. This was her home. She shouldn't remember it like the way it is now."

I excused myself and went up the steps and pushed the buzzer. I told my story to a fat young man with a guardsman moustache. He took me back through litter and ruin to a bedroom where two technicians were working in a perfume stink, patiently dusting the larger fragments of gla.s.s. A large man sat on the bed, murmuring into the bedside extension. He had a big head and golden locks and a great big face and jaw, with fleshy, regular features. He hung up and stared at me with a look of total, vapid stupidity. It did not change as I went through my little account for the third time.

He said, "My name is Goodbread, and so far I'm making the file on this one. What I hope, McGee, is that you are one of the kinks we get now and then, they kill somebody and come back and say they just happened to know that somebody and how are you boys making out catching the killer, heh?"

"Sorry I can't help you that way."

He favored me with a long, stupid stare. "I might anyway have Arn run you down and check you through everybody's computer file."

"There's somebody you could ask."

"The mayor?"

"Captain Matty Lamarr."

"Your first name again? Travis? Stand easy." He phoned again. He had a very soft telephone voice. He held the phone in such a way that half his big hand formed a cup around the mouthpiece. I guess he was getting the home number. The captain was a few years past pulling Sunday duty. He held the bar down, then dialed again. Big swift nimble fingers. He spoke, waited a time, then spoke again. Listened a long time. And another question. More listening. Expression of grat.i.tude. Hung up.

"The captain didn't say you are his favorite people."

"He's not one of mine, but we got along all right one time."

"He says there's no use asking you what kind of an angle you are working."

"If any."

"He says he thinks you stay inside the law, just inside, most of the time."

"I try, Lieutenant."

"Sergeant. And he said you answer questions right, or you clam up, and you can be a help if you want to be."

"I liked the woman. I didn't know her well, but I liked her."

"The captain says that the only handle he could find to use on you was that you don't want your name in the paper."

"There's a point where that handle breaks right off, Sergeant."

His long stare was lethargic, his eyes sleepy. "So let me know if you feel anything starting to give, McGee."

"Can I suggest something to you?"

"You go ahead, and then I'll tell you if you should have."

"The woman's father-in-law is waiting out at the curb in a rented car. He wants to pick up some things for the older daughter."

"And?"

"If you know who you are keeping waiting, okay. But I read an article about him in a magazine a couple of months ago. That is Major General Samuel Horace Lawson, and Lawson International is listed on the big board, and in his line of work I would guess that he gives a bundle to both political parties, and if he gets annoyed enough, he is going to-"

"Arn!" Sergeant Goodbread roared. The fat young one with the guardsman moustache came in almost at a run, his eyes round.

"Arn, fill me on that guy you talked to out front."

"Uh... he's related. Lawson. Old folks. He just wants to get some stuff out of here when we're through. For the daughter. Why? He'll keep."

"Did he call himself General Lawson?"

"Sure. But you know how many old generals we've got around this state..."

Sergeant Goodbread went out and brought the general into the house, apologizing for the delay. He helped Lawson with the list of items and had Arn carry them out to the Olds. Goodbread talked for about ten minutes to Lawson in the living room. I could hear the voices but not the words. The air conditioner was too loud. I sat on the bed. The technicians kept going listlessly through the broken gla.s.s looking for clean fresh prints. Or even fresh smudges. Many many police officers have worked in criminal investigation until retirement without ever working on a case where a fingerprint made one d.a.m.ned bit of difference one way or the other. A skilled man knows a fresh print or smudge the instant he brings it out by the way the natural oil from the skin responds.

Lawson left. Goodbread came to the doorway and beckoned me into the living room. A chair and the end of the couch had been cleared off. A plastic tape box crunched under his heel and some brown stereo tape caught around his ankle. He motioned me toward the couch, and he bent and plucked the tape off his ankle before he sat in the chair. He took a stenopad out and opened it and put it on his heavy thigh and said, "Description of Judith Lawson, please."

I shut my eyes for a moment and rebuilt her, head to toe. I started to give it to him slowly, but I saw he was using some form of speedwriting or shorthand, so I delivered it more quickly. I gave him the conversation as I remembered it, not word for word, but reasonably close.

He closed the pad and said, "Thanks for your cooperation."

"Can I ask some questions?"

"What for?"

"I want to waste your time with my idle curiosity, Sergeant. Like I wasted your time telling you about General Lawson."

"He mentioned... Captain Lamarr mentioned you get kind of smarta.s.s."

"Is the reconstruction that she came home and found persons unknown busting up this place?"

"No way to check it, but she was wearing street clothes, and her purse was found beside the body. Without a dime in it."

"And where was the body?"

He hesitated. "In that doorway there to that hall, legs in this room, head in the hall."

"Was the air conditioner on when the body was found?"

He looked at the ceiling, and for a moment that ma.s.sive face firmed up, losing the practiced and deceptive look of the dullard. "On when I got here. Which seems several days ago and was yesterday. Linda Lawson said the only things she touched were the front door, which wasn't locked, and her mother and that telephone. Why?"

"When we got here Friday, the heat would knock you down. She apologized. The house rule was last one out turns it off, first one in turns it on. It made a h.e.l.l of a noise on high, but cooled off the place fast."

He went over to the door and walked back into the room. He came back and sat down. "So the kids were busting up the back of the place when she came in, and this room was okay, and so she went over..."

He paused. I said, "If you hear a noise, you don't turn on something that makes it harder to hear."

He nodded. "And if you are going to sneak in and bust a place up, you don't turn on a lot of noise that would keep you from hearing if anybody is coming. And the daughter would have had to walk further to turn it on than to get to her mother."

We sat in silent contemplation. He tapped the stenopad and said, "Unless this little chickie was part of the group."

"For what reason?"

"Do they need reasons?"

"How did they get in?"

"Awning window in Judy's room was open wide, screen pushed into the room. A small person could wiggle through and go open the back door or the front."

I looked at the floor, at thin shards of picture gla.s.s and at a triangular piece of the face of the long-dead Jerry Lawson, a piece containing one eye looking up at me. Next to it was a tape cartridge, mult.i.track, plastic cracked, tape dangling from it. The color picture on the plastic housing was of a young girl, smiling mouth agape, eyes half-closed in song. The press-apply label on the tape box read $7.79. The broken box and label looked fresh and neat.

I picked it up. I handed it to Goodbread. He threw it on the floor and said, "I know, I know. d.a.m.nit. What kids wouldn't rip off new tapes? Take the money in the purse. Leave perfume. Smash everything in the kitchen, including bourbon, one bottle, seal intact. What kind of kids, everybody puts on gloves in the summertime before they touch anything? Something else too."

He got up and went into the next room and came back with a nine-by-twelve manila envelope. He undid the clasp and looked through glossies and selected one and handed it to me, saying, "You never saw this."

I studied it. At first it made no sense, and then I saw what he meant. It was a picture taken with a wide lens and flash, looking down at the doorway where the body had been. There was a ghost outline of a woman lying on her side, head tilted back.

He bent over me, pointed with a thick finger. "Along here some kind of bag or box of some kind of cake mix or cookie mix hit the wall and exploded and came sifting through the air. Then along here, where the side of this leg was, are pieces of a blue and white vase, very small pieces. When the examiner started to roll her over, I saw the clean floor underneath her, so I had them lift her off it very careful."

I looked up at him. "So what kind of glove-wearing kids, who wouldn't rip off tapes, perfume, or booze, broke her neck and went right on tras.h.i.+ng the house?"

He sat down. "If you take total freaks, if they did not give one d.a.m.n about anything, where do the gloves fit the pattern?"

"Where are the dirty words?"

"The what?"

"With paint, catsup, lipstick, anything. On the walls. Where's the big pile? Don't they always think of putting all the clothes in the middle of the kitchen floor or in the bathtub and pouring everything liquid on top of the mess?"

"I never thought of that," he said. "It's kind of orderly. Wrong word, I guess. Break everything breakable. Tip all the furniture over. Dump all the drawers. Slash the clothes and bedding." He tapped his notebook again. "Mama came home and had another fight with this kid. It got physical, and mama got killed. So the kid trashed the house to make it look as if she didn't do it. She trashed her own stuff."

"Or someone was in here looking for something to steal when she came home, Sergeant. Lost his nerve. Tried to grab her when she ran. Broke her neck. Then tried to make it look like kids."

"Except where is the girl? Why doesn't she show?"

"But if it was your your way, she would have to show up to make it work, wouldn't she? Running would spoil her idea." way, she would have to show up to make it work, wouldn't she? Running would spoil her idea."

He wiped the lower half of his face with a big slow hand. He looked tired. "I've got more to think about than I need. I want to decide whether or not I want to stay on this. I can get off in thirty seconds, risking nothing."

"I don't understand."

"The general doesn't want publicity. The press hasn't made him yet. I told him I want to keep it that way as long as I can because without him, this one is low priority. Three column inches on page thirty-one. An indoor mugging of a middle-aged widow. If whoever killed her keeps on thinking it's handled on a routine basis-which means only so many man hours, lab hours, leg work, and then into the open file-maybe that person won't do such a good job of covering as they would if they knew all the pressure there is behind it. I can get departmental priority, quietly, on the basis of who he is, and it improves my chances of a wrapup on it. But if I tip the press, if I made a private call, say, to Gene Miller on the Herald Herald, then it moves from page thirty-one to maybe a big story on the first page of the second section. It hits a lot of sensitive areas. It gets political. The person or persons we're looking for are alerted, and so they go back and put a lot more braces and rivets on the alibi. And as I told the general, they will cover Judy Lawson's trouble with the law, because when something gets big, on the days when there's nothing new, they go back and dig up the old and print it, because if it isn't known, it's new. And official sources get into the act."

"What do you mean?"

"Official sources revealed today that the persons who murdered Jane Lawson may have in fact been looking for her younger daughter Judy, arrested seven months ago by vice-squad undercover agents-"

"Vice squad!"

"She was fifteen then, working with two older boys. There was a rash of it at the time, kids working the parks and working over the tourists. The girl smiles and wags her little behind and tells the mark she'll give a ten-dollar treat over in the bushes or over in that camper or van. He goes for it, and the boys jump him and pick him clean. Maybe one mark in ten files a complaint. A lot of them are users. Maybe the others are behind in their car payments. They ran Judy through medical, and she wasn't using, and she wasn't dosed, and it was first time, so she got two years in the custody of her mother. The boys were already in the files and legally adults, so they didn't make out that well. Anyway, if it should break, they would take me off and give it to somebody with a lot more rank. The general has given me a deadline to come up with something promising, and if I don't, he's going to break it himself by coming up with such a reward for information it will clog the switchboards for a week."

"How much time?"

"Not enough."

"Where is he staying?"

"In a hotel."

"Thanks. Thanks very much."

"I've stopped being an information service. Where can I find you if I want you?" I told him, and he wrote it down.

"And if you think of anything, McGee, get in touch right away. Don't try to decide what is and what isn't worth telling me. Get in touch."

He stood up. I was dismissed. When I looked back, before closing the door, he was staring into s.p.a.ce, big face slack, mouth sagging open, eyes sleepy and lifeless. It was a shtick shtick I'd never seen before: Here is a cop so stupid you don't have to keep your guard quite so high. Here is a cop who needs help finding his way out of a phone booth. Somebody's dumb brother-in-law. Sure. I could see how that style would fit a lengthy interrogation. Long pauses. Simple questions. A lack of comprehension requiring endless repet.i.tion. "And what was it you said you did after that?" Then the eventual, inevitable, fatal contradiction, because the one thing successful lying requires is total recall of all the details of the structure of lies, and that is rare anywhere, even among men who face prison if they fumble just one critical question. I'd never seen before: Here is a cop so stupid you don't have to keep your guard quite so high. Here is a cop who needs help finding his way out of a phone booth. Somebody's dumb brother-in-law. Sure. I could see how that style would fit a lengthy interrogation. Long pauses. Simple questions. A lack of comprehension requiring endless repet.i.tion. "And what was it you said you did after that?" Then the eventual, inevitable, fatal contradiction, because the one thing successful lying requires is total recall of all the details of the structure of lies, and that is rare anywhere, even among men who face prison if they fumble just one critical question.

Chapter Eleven.

I drove over to the beach and put old Ag into a private, fenced lot which bragged of its security measures. On the way I had stopped at a mainland shopping center and was now the owner of a red and white flight bag containing shorts, socks, s.h.i.+rt, and precuffed slacks which were going to be too short. I carried the cheap sport coat over my arm. The rest of the overnight essentials were in the new flight bag. Thai International. drove over to the beach and put old Ag into a private, fenced lot which bragged of its security measures. On the way I had stopped at a mainland shopping center and was now the owner of a red and white flight bag containing shorts, socks, s.h.i.+rt, and precuffed slacks which were going to be too short. I carried the cheap sport coat over my arm. The rest of the overnight essentials were in the new flight bag. Thai International.

The same cold-eyed man was on the desk. I told him to tell Mr. Nucci that Mr. McGee wanted to check in. He once again muttered on the phone, hung up, spun the visitab index, turned, and picked a key out of the mail rack. He put a card in front of me and said, "Please." I hesitated and could think of no reason why I shouldn't be exactly who I was and so signed in. A bellhop took me on a long easterly walk to far elevators. We rode up to eighteen and walked further east, to the end of the corridor. He turned on all the lights. It took some time. He had to work his way around a big room. He finally left, with tip, and I was alone with my big beds on a circular platform, with my electric drapes, my stack of six big bath towels, my balcony overlooking the sea, my icemaker, my sunken tub, my coral carpeting six inches deep.

I phoned Meyer aboard the Keynes. I told him that I was in 1802 at the Contessa, and it seemed a convenient, temporary refuge. I asked him what he did when he knew he had heard something that meant something, and he should be able to remember what it was, and he couldn't. He said he usually walked back and forth and then went to sleep. I asked him if that did any good, and he said practically never.

I tried Mary Alice and hung up after the tenth unanswered ring. There was a tapping at my door. A waiter brought in a tray with a sealed bottle of Plymouth gin, a double old-fas.h.i.+on gla.s.s, a large golden lemon, and a tricky knife with which to cut slices of rind. w.i.l.l.y Nucci followed the waiter in and waved him back out and closed the door.

w.i.l.l.y came over and shook my hand. He smiled at me. "How do you like this room? All right?"