“How is Steven?” she asked, assembling. Without turning around, she could see Father shaking his head. “That poor boy.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’s been through a lot, but he’s all right. I’d say it’ll be a couple of months before he’s really over it.” Now sipping his beer. It really was amazing, she thought, that she knew his rhythms so well. She didn’t even have to be looking at him to know what he was doing. “Youth is really something, isn’t it, Rose?”
“That it is, Father, though I’m not the expert on it I once was.”
Father chuckled at her jokes, that was another thing. “None of us is, Rose, none of us is.”
Lettuce? No, not with the pickles. One green was enough. “Frankly,” Father said, “I’m almost more concerned about Erin and Big Ed.”
Well, of course you are, she thought. But she kept it to herself. How he felt about Erin was a secret. At least he thought it was. But anyone who knew him like she did could tell without any effort.
She brought the sandwich over, along with another beer. It was a good big one, and she knew he’d finish the first beer right in the middle of it.
“Are they all right?” she asked.
He dug into the sandwich, chewed carefully, swallowed, then drank some beer. “Oh, Ed’s a rock, you know. It’s mostly Erin.”
She nodded.
“She feels like she’s neglected Steven, drove him to running away, so everything that happened because of that is her fault.”
“How has she neglected Steven?”
“That’s what I tried to tell her. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe she had other things she was doing, but I really don’t think it was at Steven’s expense. Look at the other kids.” He took another bite of the sandwich. “Besides, Erin’s always been very active.”
“Could it be Steven just needed more attention?”
“But how do you tell that, Rose? And how do you blame yourself for it?”
She nodded again. Nothing in the universe would convince Father that Erin Cochran had done something wrong. “Great sandwich, by the way.”
She beamed.
“But you know what I think it is, really? I think-no, I’m sure -it’s still Eddie. How do people bear with all that in one week?” He closed his fist on the table and pounded it. “Dear God, if I could just change one thing…”
She reached over and covered his hand. “Now, don’t you go blaming yourself, Father. You’ve said it yourself-sometimes God takes the cream of the crop early, back to Himself. He took Eddie, and nothing you or anybody else does is going to change that. You’ve just to pick up and go on from there. Erin’s strong, and Ed will help her.”
“Go on from there?”
“That’s all you can do, isn’t it?”
His eyes softened. The pain visibly left his face. “Thank you, Rose. You’re a gem.”
She blushed again, looking down. “Finish your sandwich,” she said. Now, she thought, would be a good time. “You know, Father, while we’re talking about Eddie… What I mean is, the reason I couldn’t sleep is I was wondering if you’d made a mistake.”
Father swallowed and smiled. “No one’s infallible but the Pope, Rose. What did I do this time?”
“Well, I don’t know you did, but…” She outlined it all for him, everything she remembered or thought she did. It took only a couple of minutes, but sure enough, that must have been what had been keeping her up, because suddenly she was exhausted.
Father had left the second half of the sandwich (had she made it too big?), and didn’t open the other beer. Maybe what she was telling him was important.
“You might be right, Rose,” he said when she’d finished. His lips were tight, the wide forehead creased in concentration. “I’d better call the sergeant in the morning.”
“I’m sorry, I just thought.”
He patted her hand. “Nothing to be sorry about. You did the right thing. Exactly. I’m sorry I cost you some sleep.”
She sat back in her chair, relieved, but only for a moment, then reached for the dish. Father held her hand again.
“I’ll get the dishes, Rose. You get some sleep.”
Chapter Twenty-six
INSPECTOR SERGEANT Glitsky answered the telephone on the first ring, his adrenaline pumping. Calls in the middle of the night meant one thing-one of his cases had come in.
He kissed Flo, who didn’t even stir anymore when the phone rang after midnight, and looked in on the three kids, two in bunkbeds and one in a crib all in the same twelve-by-fourteen room (and they did have to get moving on a new house, even if they couldn’t afford it, if he didn’t make lieutenant). In the kitchen, sucking a quick microwaved cup of mud, he called Dismas Hardy as a courtesy. The phone rang four times and then the machine clicked on and Abe said, “Hardy, Glitsky. They got Alphonse.” Then he hung up.
Now he was looking through the small hole in the door of the interrogation room at the Hall of Justice. It was, by his watch, exactly 3:11 A.M.
A familiar and therefore not ominous silence prevailed all around him. The silence was familiar, in this place normally strafed by obscenities and bedlam, because Glitsky had done this many times since becoming a homicide inspector-come down in the middle of the night to interrogate a suspect still without his lawyer and therefore perhaps likely to talk if, as was also likely, his IQ didn’t hover much above room temperature.
If he waited until the morning, even a rookie court-appointed defense attorney would tell Alphonse to say nothing, and that would be that until the trial. This was the prosecution’s one big chance to break something in any case, and if an inspector wasn’t willing to forego a night’s sleep for it, he was in the wrong job.
Alphonse slumped, maybe sleeping, at the small table. His hands were not visible-it was likely they were cuffed to the chair behind him. A deputy, hands folded, also perhaps dozing, sat at one end of the table. Glitsky knocked.
“Alphonse, my man, how you doin’?”
Abe’s voice boomed in the small room. Everybody was awake now. Alphonse even managed a more or less welcome look, possibly relieved that he was getting questioned by one of his brothers, a notion Glitsky was not above using but that, all in all, he found pretty funny.
“Hey, we got you, huh?”
Alphonse shrugged. He had abrasions on his forehead and cheek, a swollen mouth, a little clotted blood under his nose. “You get caught in a door or something?” Abe asked.
“Airport cops hurt me,” he muttered. Glitsky glanced at the deputy, making a clucking sound. “We’ve got to do something about those airport cops. He been Mirandized?”
The deputy nodded. “ ’Bout five times.”
“Does he want to talk?”
“Ask him.”
“Alphonse, you want to talk to me?”
“Yeah. You wanna do something about them beating me up?”
He flipped on the tape recorder, an old, squeaking reel-to-reel. Glitsky turned back to Alphonse. “Says in the report you resisted arrest and necessary force was used to restrain you.”
Alphonse rolled his eyes. He had a way of saying “shit” that took about two seconds and didn’t end in “t.”
“Shi…”
“So why’d you run?”
“I knew you was after me.”
“Saw your picture in the paper, huh? Hey, you got your hair cut. Looks bad, man.”
Alphonse bobbed his head at the compliment.
“So why’d you have to kill her?”
“I didn’t kill nobody.”
Glitsky smiled, warm and inviting. “Oh, that’s right. Somebody planted your knife there, smeared her blood on the pants we got out of the hamper in your mother’s house.” Glitsky raised his eyebrows.
Alphonse’s brain squeaking made almost as much noise as the reel-to-reel. Finally he said, “What if I don’t wanna talk to nobody? What if I wanna see my lawyer first?”
“Then absolutely it’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna stop right now and get you a lawyer in here.”