I remembered those times: all the faces of the guilty and the damned came back in one shivery moment, and now I felt my skin crawl at the thought of someone like me, the cop I had once been, tearing at Ralston’s open wounds. I remembered another case: Harold Waters, who had signed a confession for me and had been on the brink of a life behind bars until the real killer made a mistake. Harold Waters had signed everything we put in front of him. Why? He simply didn’t care what happened to him after his wife was murdered.
Hennessey knew how that case had always haunted me. “Do me a favor, Cliff,” he said. “Don’t give me that Harold Waters shit. How many times has that ever happened?”
“It happens, though, doesn’t it?”
“It happened once.”
“All right, I’m interested in Ralston now. And I don’t want him browbeaten.”
I heard him cough softly, turning his head away from the phone.
“I mean it. There’s no way he could’ve done this.”
Hennessey said nothing. Exactly what I’d have done under the circumstances.
“Help me out here,” I said.
This was an offensive thing to say to a cop and Hennessey was properly offended. “You know better than to ask me something like that. I told you it’s not my case, I’ve got nothing to say about how it’s run. I’m making a courtesy call to an old comrade-in-arms and that’s all I’m doing. I should’ve just stayed out of it and let them drag you out of bed at midnight.”
“All right,” I said in a softer voice. “Are you interested in my opinion?” “I’m sure Detective Whiteside will be, at the proper time.” There was a gulf between us now and Hennessey was as bothered by it as I was. I heard him sniff, then he said, “One thing about your opinion, Cliff, you always had one. They were pretty good too, as opinions go. But the man has said nothing to us, just that he walked in and found her sprawled across the bed. The only other word anybody recognized out of him was your name.”
“He was talking to me on the telephone not thirty minutes before he went home. He was way the hell out in Golden at the time. I don’t know when she…” I took a deep breath. “I don’t know when she died but he couldn’t have gotten home in less than half an hour.”
“Assuming that’s really where he was when he called you.”
Again the moment stretched. Hennessey was saying what I would have said in his place.
“I’m sorry this wasn’t better news,” he said. “It was bound not to be, wasn’t it? But thanks for the call.” “Sure. We should grab a beer sometime.” But I was thinking of Denise and I barely heard him.
I knew he wouldn’t tell me but I tried anyway. “Any idea of the time of death?”
“That’ll take some time. The boys are still out there and will be for a while.”
“Do they know yet what the cause of death was?”
“Nothing you can take to the bank.”
Then he gave me this for old times’ sake. “It looks like she was smothered.”
CHAPTER 12
Ralston’s block was full of cars, the usual scene when something bad happens. There were two patrol cars and some unmarked vehicles, a green Chevy belonging, I knew, to an assistant coroner named Willie Paxton, and Ralston’s old Ford Fairlane. No obvious sign of news coverage. The TV idiots had taken a pass on this one: no wires or cams or blow-dried hairdos cluttering up the block. A Cherry Hills murder would have brought them out at midnight but this just wasn’t that important. There were two seedy types in jeans, guys I knew from the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, and plenty of plain people milling around. Even at that hour word had spread across the neighborhood: two dozen neighbors watched from the distance and a row of kids sat gawking on the roof of a house across the street.
A young uniform stopped me at the sidewalk. “You can’t go in there, sir.”
“Is Whiteside here?”
“He’s busy right now. You got something to tell him?”
“I might, yeah. My name’s Janeway.”
The cop summoned another cop, a guy I knew. “Go inside and tell Detective Whiteside that Mr. Janeway is here to see him, when he gets a break.”
I waited.
Minutes later the cop came out and motioned to me from the porch. The first cop nodded and held open the gate. On the porch the second cop said, “I know you know the routine, but I’m supposed to tell you anyway—don’t touch anything.” A moment later, to my own amazement, I was in the living room, sitting on a chair well out of the way.
It looked different now—not at all like the place where I had met Mike and Denise Ralston in the beginnings of friendship just a few days ago. Tonight it was cold in the harsh white strobe lights and loud with impersonal voices of the men who probed through its cracks and corners. I saw Whiteside pass the open doorway and he met my eyes before he disappeared in the crowd of people gathered around the bed. I tried to push away my prejudices and hope for the best. Whiteside had always seemed like a good enough cop; hell, his record of clearing cases was at least as good as my own and maybe that was at the root of it, why we had never liked each other much. He had come in five years ago, trading on a big reputation from some department back East, but to me he was a hot dog from day one. In a way he was like Archer. His badge was his Pulitzer and somehow that set him above the sorry race of men. I could still hear my voice and the words I had said to Hennessey years ago: “I’ll bet he sleeps with that shield pinned to his nightshirt.”
After a while he came out of the back room. “Well, goddamn, Janeway, imagine meeting you here.” He loomed over my chair but I knew that technique and I didn’t let it bother me. I looked up at him from the darkest part of his shadow, his face in silhouette, framed by lights behind him and above. “So what’ve you got to tell me?” he said, and I told him what I knew about Ralston’s day hunting books. I told it to him short and direct, wasting none of his time. “He called me at nine o’clock,” I concluded. “He was still out in Golden and he’d just found a book.” I knew what he’d ask next and he did. “What book did he find?” I told him and he said what I knew he’d say: “Then that book might still be in his car.” He called the uniform over and told him to go out to the car and see if there was a book by somebody named Irwin Shaw in it.
I was playing a wild card, a little too sure that the book would be there and would easily be traceable to that store in Golden. If we were lucky there’d be a receipt with a date and maybe even a time printed on it, and there’d be a price sticker on the spine, color-coded to tell approximately when the book had been put out for sale. Each week in stores like that, books were marked down according to the sticker colors. It wouldn’t be conclusive: just another small piece of evidence that the man was telling the truth.
So far I had been playing Whiteside’s game his way. Now I said, “Where is Mr. Ralston?” and Whiteside backed out of the light and looked at my face, keeping his own in shadow. “He’s where I want him to be.” “Okay,” I said pleasantly.
“What’s your connection with Ralston? Other than this hunt for books you sent him on, what’s he to you?” “I’m his friend.”
“I guess that’s good. He’s gonna need a friend.” I felt my anger boiling up but I kept it in check. I heard a movement and the uniform came in carrying the book, suspended from a pencil under its spine like a pair of pants draped over a clothesline. I saw the blue thrift-store sticker on the jacket and the receipt peeking out of the top pages, and I thanked the book gods that it hadn’t dropped out when the cop picked it up that way.
I said nothing for a moment: it would be far better to let White-side discover these things for himself. But when the cop continued holding the book that way, I said, “I imagine that’s the receipt sticking out of it.” Whiteside said, “Bag it,” and the cop dropped the book, receipt and all, into a plastic bag.