The white cop was a detective sergeant, a tall, sour man of about thirty-three or -four with bleached blue eyes that somehow went with the whine in his West Virginia accent. He introduced himself as Sergeant Lester Vernon and I decided that he probably was a sixth- or seventh-generation American WASP who thought that poking around dead bodies was better than mining coal. Maybe it was.
The black cop was Lieutenant Frank Schoolcraft. He was a few years older than Vernon and he had a big wide nose and a big wide mouth and looked as if he would speak with a mushy accent and use man every other word, but he didn’t. Instead, he talked out of the left side of his mouth because something had happened to the muscles on the right side and he seemed a little self-conscious about it. If he had any accent at all, it was East Coast Bitter.
“So when you found him you called us and then you called your partner here?” Schoolcraft said, nodding his long head at Padillo.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Why’d you call him?” Vernon said. “Whyn’t you call a lawyer?”
“Because I’m not going to need a lawyer,” I said.
“Huh,” Vernon said and went over to look at the dead body some more.
The two of them had been questioning Padillo and me for twenty minutes and during that time a half dozen uniformed cops had flowed in and out of the apartment, doing nothing useful that I could see. The technical crew was still at work, but I didn’t pay much attention to them. After thirty minutes or so they wheeled the body of Walter Gothar out of my apartment and I was glad to see him go.
Sergeant Vernon joined us again. “Never seen that before,” he said.
“What?” Schoolcraft said.
“Those plastic handlebar grips. They had lead pipe inside of them and the pipe had little holes bored in it and the wire went in and out of those holes so it wouldn’t slip.” There was nothing but admiration in Vernon’s voice.
“Seems funny to me,” Schoolcraft said.
“What seems funny?” Vernon said.
“That a man would go to all that trouble to fix up something like that and then leave it behind. Anybody who’d go to all that trouble was planning on using that thing more than once. What do you think, Mr. Padillo?”
“I don’t,” Padillo said.
“And you don’t know where his sister might be either?”
“Gothar told me the Hay-Adams.”
“We tried that again and she’s still not there.”
Padillo looked at his watch. “It’s only one fifteen,” he said. “Maybe she’s out on the town.”
Padillo’s observation was about as pertinent and useful as the rest of the information that he had given the police about Walter and Wanda Gothar. Yes, he had known Walter Gothar and his sister for some time, nearly fifteen years, but no, he didn’t know exactly why they were in Washington, although they had mentioned they were here on business, but he wasn’t sure of its exact nature because they hadn’t told him, and no, he didn’t think he knew who might have wanted Walter dead.
“And they just dropped by to see you socially, is that it?” Schoolcraft said.
“I didn’t say that,” Padillo said.
“What was the reason?”
“They wanted to know if I would be interested in one of their ventures.”
“Business ventures?”
“It could be called that, I suppose.”
“What kind of business?”
“The confidential kind.”
“So you don’t know what it was?”
“No.”
“What kind of business were the Gothars in as a rule?”
“I’m not sure that there were any rules in their business.”
“Is that supposed to be a smartassed answer?”
“Just informative.”
Schoolcraft shook his head. “You’re about as informative as a fireplug. What kind of business?”
“Security,” Padillo said.
“That doesn’t tell me anything either.”
“Think about it,” Padillo said, turned, and headed for the bar.
“Your partner’s not much help, is he?” Vernon said, giving me a nice, friendly smile.
“He’s just withdrawn,” I said.
“What about you?”
“I’m more outward going. You know, friendly.”
“Is that why Gothar was in your apartment, because he liked the friendly types?”
“He was kind of cute, wasn’t he?” I said and watched to see what effect the remark would have on Vernon. He didn’t blush, but he couldn’t prevent the look of uncomfortable disapproval from sliding across his face.
“Jesus, you don’t look like a—”
“He’s needling you, Sergeant,” Schoolcraft said. “He’s a smartass just like his partner.”
Padillo came back from the bar, carrying two drinks. He handed one of them to me. That was thoughtful. I smiled at Vernon and took a swallow.
“Why was Gothar in your apartment, McCorkle?” Schoolcraft said, his voice a tired rasp.
I sighed and shook my head, keeping the impatience out of most of what I said. “I don’t know why he was in my apartment. I don’t know how he got in. He was here when I arrived and he was as dead then as he was when they wheeled him out of here ten minutes ago. And that makes him your responsibility, not mine, so why don’t you go look for who killed him someplace else now that you’ve peeked under my bed and into all the closets.”
I raised the glass for another swallow, but Lieutenant Schoolcraft knocked it out of my hand. The glass bounced on the carpet and the drink made a small puddle for a moment before the woolen fibers soaked it up.
“You should take something for that temper, Lieutenant,” I said, bending down for the glass. When I straightened up, Schoolcraft was massaging his right hand. He couldn’t possibly have hurt it. “Eighteen hours straight today,” he said. “Twenty yesterday, nineteen and a half the day before.” He looked up from his hand. “I had no call to do that. Sorry.”
“Forget it,” I said and noticed that Sergeant Vernon seemed irritated by my magnanimity.
“Let’s take them both down,” Vernon said.
“Sure,” Schoolcraft said, nodding wearily as he moved toward the door. “That would do everybody a lot of good, wouldn’t it?”
“It might learn them not to be so goddamned lippy.”
Schoolcraft turned at the door and leaned against it. He seemed to be a man who rested whenever he could. Only his eyes moved, racing across my face and then Padillo’s, circling the room quickly and finally lighting for a brief moment on Sergeant Vernon’s face before again taking up their restless journey.
“A trip downtown wouldn’t teach these two anything, Sergeant,” he said. “You want to know why?”
“Why?” Lester said.
“Because you can’t teach anything to guys who know it all—and you know it all, don’t you, Padillo?”
“Not all of it,” Padillo said. “For instance, I don’t know what goes on inside a cop’s head.”
Schoolcraft stopped his eyes on Padillo’s face. It was a hard, almost brutal stare. “You think it’s different from what goes on inside your head?”
“It has to be.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Padillo said, “I could never be a cop.”
5
WHEN THE two homicide detectives had gone after making sure that we’d be down at police headquarters to make a full statement by 2 P.M., which was as soon as Lieutenant Schoolcraft would be out of court, I went into the kitchen and put on some water for coffee. It helps me to sleep for some inexplicable reason. Just as the water was beginning to boil there was a knock at the door. After I opened it I wished that I hadn’t.