“Well, Mr. Janeway, it was swell of you to come in. If we have any more questions, we’ll be in touch.”
I knew I was being dismissed with malice but I nodded, still the soul of reason, and said, “I’d like to see Mr. Ralston, if that’s okay.” Whiteside gave a dismissive little laugh and that’s when I knew it was going to turn ugly.
“Are you charging him with something?”
“That remains to be seen, doesn’t it?”
“Well, until you decide, you have no right to detain him.”
“I don’t have to charge him with anything in order to question him.”
“You’ve got to inform him of his rights if you intend to detain him. And he doesn’t have to answer anything if you come at him with a hard-on. Come on, Randy, we both know the rules.”
I had never called him Randy in my life. I held up my hands in a peace gesture. “Look, I’m sure he’ll talk to you, I know he will. But the man just lost his wife, for Christ’s sake. Give him some time to get the wind back in his sails. Can I see him?”
“Not till I’ve talked to him first.”
“Then how’s this for a deal? You talk to him in my presence. You be civil and I promise to be quiet.”
“No way. I can’t believe you’d even ask me something like that. How long were you a cop, Janeway?”
Long enough to know a prick with a badge when I see one, I thought. But I said, “Look, I promise you this man didn’t do this. His heart’s just been ripped out and I can’t sit still while you rip it out again.”
“You’ve got jackshit to say about what I do.”
“Maybe not, but I can have a lawyer downtown by the time you get there. Then you can go piss up a rope and talk to nobody.”
“Shit,” he said. But he thought about it a moment.
“You just sit there and keep your fuckin‘ mouth shut. That the deal?”
“Absolutely,” I said with my great stone face.
I moved out to the kitchen table and watched as they wound up their work. The house seemed incredibly small for the number of people bustling about. I looked into the bedroom and felt an almost crushing wave of sadness. I could see Willie Paxton in the other room talking to a woman I knew, Joanne Martinson, also from the coroner’s office. I could see Denise’s arm, flopped over the edge of the bed, and the sight of it filled me with heartbreak. Son of a bitch,
I thought. Some miserable son of a bitch did this, probably a cheap neighborhood spider looking for pocket change. How many times does it happen? Someone returns home, walks in on a thief, and bingo. Suddenly in my mind I was a cop again.
Paxton came out of the bedroom and Martinson was right behind him.
“Hey, Cliff, how ya doin‘?” they said almost in the same voice.
“Ah, you win some, lose some.” I had lost this one big-time, but I left that unsaid. I kept up the bullshit until Whiteside went into the bedroom. Then, in a low voice, I said, “So what’s the story, guys?”
“Smothered with the pillow,” Paxton said. “We’ll know more later, but that’s how it looks.”
“How long?”
“I dunno. My guess is somewhere between five and seven o’clock.”
“No later than seven, though, huh?”
“Not much chance of that. Rigor was already setting in when we got here.”
Joanne looked at Paxton and said, “Look, I know you boys go back a ways and I love you too, Cliff, but Jesus Christ, Willie, this is inappropriate as hell.”
“It’s all gonna be in the report,” Paxton said.
“Then let him read it like everybody else.”
I nodded at them. “Yeah, don’t get your tit in a wringer on my account, Willie. But thanks.”
It had still been light on the street at seven o’clock. People had been coming home from work. That meant there was a chance the perp had been seen, and maybe Whiteside already had a witness under wraps.
Now there was nothing to do but wait. Cops can take hours at a murder scene and these guys were in no hurry. I thought of Ralston, alone on the hot side of Mercury, sealed off in his own private hell. This was the first of many hellish hours, and all I could do for him was try to make it less awful than it had to be.
After a while two men brought a stretcher into the bedroom and they lifted the body off the bed. I didn’t want to watch this part— you never do with a friend—but I stood up and without moving from the spot looked into the room. I didn’t think of her as Denise now: Denise was gone and this shell was what she had left behind. Paxton directed the loading of the body, taking care to leave the dangling arm in the same position as it was when they’d found her. Joanne said something and he looked at the bed, took a long for-cepslike instrument and peeled back the covers. Then he said, “Hey, Whiteside, look what she was lying on,” and still using his forceps, he plucked what looked like a dollar bill from the folds of the rumpled sheet. But my eyes were good and I could see the picture of Franklin clearly from where I stood. It was a C-note.
Whiteside appeared at once with a plastic bag. Paxton reached over to drop it in. Joanne said, “Here’s another one,” and Paxton pulled it gingerly from the covers.
“Here’s some more,” Joanne said.
“I thought these people were supposed to be poor,” Whiteside said. “Looks like she had something going on the side.”
I held myself onto the chair. I hated Whiteside in that moment but I watched quietly while they bagged the other bills. With the body gone there was a general combing of the room. The bed was vacuumed for fibers and hairs, the floor around the bed was examined, and the small throw rug vacuumed as well. At some point Whiteside looked at his watch and said, “I’m going on in, see what the man’s got to say.”
I followed him out into the yard.
“I’ll see you down there,” Whiteside said without enthusiasm. “You know the way?”
“If I get lost I’ll ask somebody.”
“Remember, you’re only there by my permission. You keep your mouth shut, just like you said.”
I had never seen Whiteside work but I didn’t think much of him so far. There was no way I’d have let him sit in if I had been in his shoes and he’d been in mine. I wouldn’t have let him into the crime scene in the first place. I wouldn’t have crumbled under any threat of bringing a lawyer in. They’d have talked to me on my terms or I’d have found out why. It was obvious that Whiteside had something up his sleeve: he was confident he could handle me or maybe even show me up, and the chance to get a quick confession and clear this case in hours was too much to resist. Some cops are like that. I met a reporter once who said it was like that in his business too. The two biggest hot dogs were battling it out in the front-page derby, just like some cops who always wanted to be number one in clearing their cases. I wondered who the other hot dog was now that I was gone.
At the station Whiteside showed us into an office that suggested the atmosphere of an interview rather than an interrogation. I sat off to one side while he and Ralston faced each other across a desk. Whiteside offered coffee but Ralston made no response at all. I thought of the Harold Waters case and the similarities were chilling. Waters, a big black man; his wife by all accounts articulate, the joy of his life. I looked at Whiteside and in that half second he seemed almost predatory.
A stenographer came in and sat just behind Ralston in a corner of the room. “We’re making a tape of this conversation as well as a transcript,” Whiteside said, glancing at me. “The young man who just came in is Jay Holt, and he will take down everything we say. This is routine.”
Ralston’s wet eyes moved around the room and found mine. I nodded what I hoped was encouragement. Ralston said my name, first just “Janeway,” then “Jesus, Janeway,” and his tears began again. Whiteside said, “Speak to me, please, not to Mr. Janeway,” and the interrogation that was supposedly only an interview got under way.