Joe Dartelli, the pride and joy of his police career, was another thing entirely. Dartelli, with his college degree and his barnyard sense of where the rat was hiding, was proving nothing but trouble.
I’ll put him in the hospital if I have to, Zeller thought, just like they’re trying to do to me.
He glanced down the street nervously, alert for the familiar Toyota, for the cracked and bent face behind the wheel-the hired knee-breaker he had been outrunning all this time. Outsmarting. Out-thinking.
Looking down once again, he felt relieved to see that his hands had stopped shaking. He was under control again, and for Zeller, control was everything.
CHAPTER 19
Dart was part theatre critic, part acting coach. It was his job to make this woman tell him what she didn’t want to. Any interrogation amounted to the same thing: a con game of give-and-take, of tricks, the challenge of making someone say something that he or she had no intention of saying. Any investigator worth his salt knew that everyone held secrets. The skill was finding a way to pry it out.
The CAPers interrogation rooms were a pair of small unattractive cubicles, each containing a cheap table and two metal chairs. Dart dragged a third chair inside and shut the door, well aware of the effects of such an austere environment. Interrogation offered only a single door. That door lead either to jail or to freedom, depending on how the critics rated a performance.
Danielle Payne, the wife of the Halloween suicide, had an artificial look of surprise around her eyes that could be attributed only to a face lift. Her skin was flawlessly smooth, her lips a sensual red, and the rest of her could have been the model for Tommy Templeton’s Venus, a pinup of epic proportions with a pair of breasts that would have made her surgeon proud, displayed in a tight turtleneck top that accentuated the lack of any visible means of support, defying all rules of gravity and age. That she had been married to a known pornographer could be easily determined by her lousy taste in clothing, her platinum hair, the gum that she chewed between her front teeth, and a heightened sense of sexual readiness, communicated by repetitively placing her hand into her crotch and withdrawing it slowly, and a tendency to shift her upper body around restlessly, jiggling her breasts and twisting her narrow waist as if she needed an itch scratched. Scratched hard, by the look of her.
The attorney to her right, Dart’s left, was a silver-tongued, six-hundred-grand-a-year asshole by the name of Gambelli. His mere presence warned Dart not to expect much.
After formal introductions for the sake of a tape recorder, he asked the woman to recount her activities on the night of her husband’s suicide-a suicide that Dart considered a murder but lacked the evidence to investigate as such. Throughout her narration, Dart sensed in her an underlying nervousness that he associated with lying. There were two different kinds of anxiety that surfaced in an interrogation-the person uncomfortable and unfamiliar with being in the company of a cop; and the person who had something to hide. Danielle Payne fell firmly into the second category.
“How would you describe your relationship with your husband, Ms. Payne?”
“My relationship?” she asked, checking with the attorney, who offered a barely visible nod.
“Warm and fuzzy?” Dart offered. “Turbulent … Nurturing?”
“We got on okay, I guess.”
“Okay?” Dart asked. “Affectionate? Romantic? Distant? Cold?”
“We liked each other fine. Harry, you know, had his work, his stuff, and I had my stuff too. Okay, I guess.”
“He was never rough with you,” Dart stated, clearly making her uncomfortable.
“Rough?” she gasped, blushing.
“Physically abusive,” Dart clarified.
Gambelli tugged at his French cuff and said, “Where are you going with this, Dartelli?”
Danielle Payne squirmed in her chair, all sexuality lost. Her face puckered up into a knot of worry.
“Abusive situations are difficult on the victim of that abuse.” I ought to know, he thought, thinking of his alcoholic mother and hiding inside the dryer.
“Meaning?” Gambelli questioned.
“Ms. Payne,” Dart said, doing his best to ignore the attorney, “was your husband ever physically abusive toward you?”
“Did he rough me up some? Sure he did,” she admitted. “He’s gone now. What’s it matter if I tell you. He was not an angel. So what? Show me a man who is.”
“And you put up with this behavior of his,” Dart said. “You tolerated it. You endured it.”
She shrugged. “We’ve got a nice place to live. I drive a Mercedes. Have you ever driven a Mercedes?” she asked, her eyes searching Dart, as if to say that this mattered a great deal. Dart shook his head no. She said, “It’s a nice car. A real nice car, a Mercedes. So what do you know?”
“Isn’t it true,” Dart asked her, “that on at least six different occasions you admitted yourself to the emergency room for injuries sustained from conflicts with your late husband, that on two occasions you telephoned Nine-one-one and asked for help from the police?”
She said defensively, “It was all a mistake.”
“He’s dead,” Dart reminded. “You don’t need to fear him. You don’t need to lie to me.”
She looked away. Her attorney advised her that she need not answer any question that she chose not to. Her eyes pooled with tears, she waved him off.
Dart waited until she appeared more at ease. He needed to judge her reaction carefully to this, his most important question. He studied her and asked, “Were you ever approached by a man offering to help you with your husband?”
Her expression disappointed him, for she didn’t appear to understand the implication that Dart was attempting, whereas her attorney certainly did.
“I don’t want you to answer that,” the attorney snapped to his client.
But Danielle Payne had already formed an answer in her head, and she spoke it. “They approached him, not me. It was his problem, not mine. Nothing I could do about it.”
For the first time in this meeting, Dart and Gambelli met eyes, neither able to contain their astonishment at her answer. Dart’s eyes said sternly, Let me pursue this. Gambelli’s were a cauldron of concern.
The attorney admonished. “Danielle, please!”
But she had to protest, “He didn’t tell me any more than that-only that they could help him and he was going to try it.” To Dart she said, “Harry loved me loads. He didn’t want to be mean. Really. He didn’t want to hurt me.”
“They?” Dart asked, knowing full well that the attorney would interrupt, which he did. But Danielle Payne seemed to be venting.
“What’s he care what I say? He’s dead and gone. What’s it matter to him?”
Seizing quickly on this, Dart asked, “Who offered to help your husband, Ms. Payne? What do you mean by that?” Dart had imagined just the opposite-that Walter Zeller had made himself available for hire to women who wanted their abusive spouses eliminated, that he had created a profession out of reversing his years of investigating homicides. An abused wife or lover, or the mother of an abused child, would have plenty of motivation to see the sex offender killed. A carefully manufactured suicide would be quickly cleared. Zeller could carry out his own passion and earn a living while convincing himself he was doing the world a favor. This fit Zeller’s controlling personality and his disenchantment with the legal system that he had abandoned. But Danielle Payne was throwing him off completely: The mention of a third party, and this third party approaching Payne himself, did not fit with any of Dart’s preconceived notions.
“I don’t know,” she answered, and he trusted the confusion in her eyes. “Harry said he couldn’t tell me, but that things were going to get better, that he was going to be better, and that I just had to trust him and the doctors.”