Q: Miss Purchase, you know we have a signed confession from your brother, don’t you?
A: Yes, but he was lying. He didn’t kill them.
Q: How do we know you’re not lying to protect him?
A: I’m not.
Q: How do we know this isn’t a false confession, Miss Purchase?
A: Because I know where the knife is.
I had not been back to Jacaranda since the night of the murders.
Now, at a little past noon, it looked drowsy and peaceful. Many homeowners up and down the street, tired of the constant struggle against browning grass, had seeded their lawns with pebbles, giving them the serene appearance of Japanese gardens strewn with oases of cactus and palm. The sunlight was dazzling on the dappled stones. We drove up the street slowly, almost like a cortege, the car from the State’s Attorney’s office in the lead, the unmarked Police Department car following.
I was in the car with Bensell and Karin; she had insisted that I hear every word. She told us again how she had backed out of the driveway and turned in the wrong direction, driving away from where she really wanted to go. We were moving west toward the pine forest bordering the beach. She pointed out a pair of sewers ahead, one on either side of the road. She said that on Sunday night she had stopped her car, and thrown the knife in the sewer there on the right. We pulled to the curb. Car doors slammed; the street echoed with sound and then was still again. Ehrenberg and Di Luca came walking over from the second car.
“This is where she says she threw the knife,” Bensell said. “Down the sewer here.”
The sewer opening was little more than a narrow metal rectangle set into the cement curb. There were no sidewalks on the street; lawns of grass or pebbles stretched immediately to the roadway, where they sloped into asphalt. But the sewer had been built into a concrete mini-sidewalk some four feet square, and a cast-iron manhole cover afforded easy access to the drain below. Di Luca went back to the car for a crowbar, and then pried off the cover. In the house across the street, a woman watched from inside her screened lanai. Ehrenberg rolled the cover onto a patch of parched grass. The sewer was relatively shallow, some three or four feet deep. An inch or so of water lay stagnant on the bottom; it had not rained in Calusa all month long. Resting in the water on a bed of sand and silt was a knife with a ten-inch blade.
“Is that the knife you used to kill them?” Bensell asked.
“That’s the knife,” she said.
It was a little past one when we got back to the police station.
Michael was still in his cell on the second floor; I could only assume he had not yet been moved across the street because of the new developments in the case. I followed the jailer down the long corridor, watched him insert the color-coded key into the keyway. He swung the steel door back, and did not lock it behind him. We walked past the row of cells to the bend in the corridor, and then to Michael’s cell. The jailer opened the barred door for me, and then locked me in. Michael was sitting on the grimy foam-rubber mattress. I heard the metal door clanging shut around the bend in the corridor, heard the key being twisted again.
I told Michael that his sister had confessed to the murders. I told him that she had led them to where she’d thrown the murder weapon down a sewer, and that Ehrenberg was fairly certain they would be able to recover latent prints and blood samples from the knife. There were cracks and crevices in the handle, and blood would have caked in it someplace. The water in the sewer was still, there was no possibility it could have completely washed away the blood; nor would water have had any effect on fingerprints.
I told him that the State’s Attorney was dubious about fingerprints and blood proving Michael’s sister had committed the murders. The way he saw it, this only proved she had transported the murder weapon to the sewer and disposed of it. I told Michael that Ehrenberg was hoping the latent prints they’d gathered all around the house would match up with his sister’s — prints on the phone, the doorknob, the faucet handles in the bathroom, where she said she’d washed the blood from her hands. But Bensell had debated the value of the prints as evidence, saying they would only prove she’d been in the house and not that she’d murdered Maureen and the children.
I told Michael that the police had confirmed his sister’s telephone call to the marina, that the dockmaster there had told them he’d taken the call at eleven-thirty and had gone to the boat to get Michael. But Bensell said this only meant she’d called Michael, and not that she’d called him from the house during the time the coroner’s report had stated the murders occurred — between ten and midnight. Bensell maintained that Karin could have called her brother from anywhere in Calusa, asking him to meet her at the house, where together they could have committed the murders. I explained that they were at this moment booking his sister for Murder One, but that they would not release him till they were convinced he’d had nothing to do with the commission of the crime.
“Michael,” I said, “I’d like you to take a polygraph test.”
“What for?”
“Because there’s no way you can help your sister now. The only person you can help is yourself.”
“You just told me the fingerprints wouldn’t prove—”
“Michael, they’ll let you go the minute they’re sure you had nothing to do with this.”
“I had everything to do with it. I killed them.”
“Jesus, you’re a pain in the ass!”
“Why couldn’t she have stayed out of this?” he said.
“I guess for the same reason you couldn’t,” I said.
He looked at me. He nodded. He sighed heavily.
It was Ehrenberg’s opinion, and mine as well, that Michael had blended what he knew had happened with what he imagined had happened, using his intimate knowledge of the house — and what he had found there on his arrival — to construct a scenario within a plausible setting. There had always been a problem about his motive, but if we were to accept the existence of the knife rack, for example, then why not accept his statement that he’d seized a knife from that rack? If we were to believe that he’d kissed his dead stepmother on the mouth — and we both did believe it — then why not also believe he had stabbed her first? There had been no way of sorting the lies from the truth; in Michael’s various tellings, all had sounded equally genuine; even the hesitations, the groping for words seemed not really a lapse in inventiveness but only the customary disorientation of a person confessing to a brutal crime.
The polygraph would accept no lies.
A trained examiner would ask Michael questions, and the machine would accurately record any changes in his blood pressure, respiration, pulse, and electrodermal response. Ehrenberg was hopeful that the boy would be released before sundown, provided the test results showed what he thought they would. Bensell seemed a bit more dubious, and insisted he would not let Michael out on the street till he was absolutely certain of his innocence. They both advised me to go home. The test would take some time, and there was no sense in my hanging around. Ehrenberg promised he would call me as soon as he had the results.
I left the Public Safety Building at two-thirty that afternoon.
I didn’t know where to go.
I got into the Ghia, and started driving toward the office, and then turned in the opposite direction and headed for the bay. I wanted to go home, I guess, but I didn’t know where home was.