“You’re sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure.”
That went on a few more minutes, but she hadn’t expected to hear anything else. Her target wasn’t Gary Kingman. It was Edward Herkiser.
“All right,” she finally sighed. “You can go back to the waiting area while I talk with your friend.”
He grinned. “Okay, Katherine. Want me to send him in?”
“I’ll come for him in a few minutes.” She needed those minutes. She stepped out to Moby’s desk. “I’ll take Totoo now, Mobe.” With the cairn on his leash, Kat beckoned to Herkiser. He followed her into the interrogation room.
“You going to interview the dog, too?” he asked as he sat where she told him. “What’s he doing here?”
“Visiting. Relax,” she advised Herkiser as she took her chair, the leash still in her hand.
“Is this going to take long?”
“Up to you, Herk. Is that what they call you?”
“That’s what Gary calls me.”
“I’ll call you Edward. Time to tell me the truth, Edward. What really happened out there on Baylook Drive?”
“How many times do you want to hear this? Around eleven-thirty, we took the boat out. Came back an hour later. We didn’t see anybody when we left or when we came back in. That’s it.”
Almost word-for-word identical to Gary’s statement. Rehearsed? Or was she at a dead end here? Maybe they truly hadn’t seen Beverly Bridger and her dog. Even if they had, were they to stick to their story, there was no hint of another lead. It all came down to this moment with this close-mouthed boy.
She let the leash drop.
Then she leaned forward, her eyes hard on his. “Did you perhaps hear anything unusual that night, Edward?”
He seemed not to hear her. Totoo had wandered from under the table and stopped beside Herkiser’s chair. Edward’s attention had swung to the dog. Motionless on his haunches, the cairn stared upward, unblinking.
“I’ll ask you again, Edward. Did you hear or see anything unusual out there that night?”
“Uh, anything what?”
“Unusual.”
“Huh-uh.” He was trying to ignore the dog’s unremitting gaze. Totoo’s attention riveted on Herkiser. Who twitched uncomfortably. On his forehead sweat glistened.
“She was a twenty-year-old girl, Edward. About your age. Just out for a walk with her dog. With that dog, Edward.”
He swallowed. Blinked. Wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Dammit,” he whispered. To the dog. “It was an accident.”
“It was what, Edward?”
“An accident,” he wailed. And like a pent-up flood behind a ruptured levee, the story poured forth.
“In a way, it was an accident,” she told Moby after the arrests, the senator’s predictable explosion, the hastily summoned lawyers. “They ran into Beverly out there and talked her into a moonlight boat ride. Just a chance encounter. God knows why lonely women fall for invitations from strangers, but she and Totoo went aboard. Kingman and Herkiser had two six-packs with them. When they left the bay and cruised into the gulf, the six-packs were in them. That, plus his cocky arrogance, prompted Kingman to make a pass at Beverly in the cabin. It escalated into serious grappling. According to both of them, her head smacked the cabin wall hard enough to kill her.”
“Manslaughter and attempted rape.”
“That’s what they realized, too, Mobe. It got uglier, if that’s possible. They tied her body to one of the boat’s two anchors and into the gulf she went. About five miles offshore, Herkiser estimates.”
“But the dog—”
“Herkiser says Gary made him throw Totoo overboard, expecting him to drown. But that’s one tough little canine. He obviously swam toward lights on shore — five miles of doggy-paddling with those stumpy little legs. Some dog, that one.”
“Damn near human, too. You say he’s the one who cracked the case — with his hard, beady stare?”
“It was more than Herkiser could take, an accusing stare from a little dog he’d tried to kill. Totoo’s a great interrogator. Come on, Totoo, let’s go home.”
“He’s yours now?”
“Beverly had no family, Mobe. Her friend doesn’t want him. So it looks like I’ve got a partner.”
Moby chuckled. “In your case report you gonna give your partner a mention for an assist?”
“Not a bad idea.” What she wouldn’t mention, though, was the dog biscuit she had taped under the arm of Herkiser’s chair just before his interrogation.
Copyright © 2002 by William Hallstead.
A Piece of the City
by Andrew Vachss
In October of 2002, Knopf published Only Child, the latest in the series of Burke novels by Andrew Vachss. The author, who has been called “a contemporary master” by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has also recently penned a nonseries thriller that will be released as a Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original in February, 2003. Entitled The Getaway Man, the novel pays tribute to the origins of the hardboiled genre.
1.
Just because you live someplace, that doesn’t mean you understand how it works. The city where I came up is a perfect example. Everybody who lives there talks like they know all about it, but they never will. If you want to figure out how the city really works, you have to get far away from it. When you’re down too deep in it, all you can see is your own little piece.
I know what I’m saying. I’ve been away for a long time now. There isn’t much to do here, once you figure out how to stay alive. So I’ve been studying the city, getting ready for when I come back.
What I finally figured out was that there isn’t just the one city, like people think. I mean, everybody knows there’s different parts of the city, like Queens and Brooklyn. And there’s parts inside the parts, like Harlem and Greenwich Village. But the city is cut up a lot smaller than even that.
2.
When I was a kid, the city was split up into little tiny pieces, all the way right down to the blocks. Our territory was three streets, plus a vacant lot, where they had torn down some buildings. Anytime you left your territory, no matter where you went, you were an outsider.
Mostly, we got around by subway. You might think, nobody owns the subway, but you would be wrong. The subway, it’s just like the city itself. It’s a great big huge thing; but the minute you put people into it, it starts getting cut up into pieces.
Like, if you got on a subway car, and it was full of boys from another club, it was their car. And if you had enough boys get on with you, you could maybe make it your car.
Other people riding the subway, they would watch this happen right in front of them, and not pay it any mind. When I was a kid, I thought that was because they didn’t understand what they were seeing. Now I know different. They knew. But to them, the subway was like a bad neighborhood they had to go through every day to get to work. They would never want to live in a neighborhood like that, so they never wanted a piece of it for themselves, that’s all.
But the block, that wasn’t like the subway. The block was permanent. You were there every day. When outsiders came into your block, you had to make them pay tolls. Because if people could go through your territory without paying, it was like it wasn’t yours at all.
The City — that’s the government, not the territory — it owns the subway, so everyone who rides has to pay. But if you were riding with some of your boys, and a kid got on alone, you could collect, too. Charge a toll, because that was your piece he was standing on, then.