Chapter IV
The cell was small and airless. There was a cot, a chair, a basin of water. There was a uniformed policeman standing in the corridor with his back to Larry.
Larry sat on the edge of the cot, hands twisted together.
For six hours he had been telling and re-telling his story. And answering questions. Polite questions, tough questions, insulting questions. Questions that were simple, involved, ridiculous and shrewd.
He had dictated a statement and signed it.
His tongue was parched and his brain was numb. He didn’t care what happened. He wanted Fran. He wanted to talk to her. He had begged them for that much and they had looked at him as if he were speaking Hindustani. And had gone on asking questions.
He looked up as a key sounded in the door. The uniformed policeman was admitting the big copper, the big guy in the gray clothes, whose name was Meyers. Larry had learned to hate him in the last six hours.
He stood looking at Larry a moment, his hard face impassive. Then he sat down and brought out a crumpled pack of cigarettes, lit one, blew smoke at the ceiling.
“Still playing the same tune?” he asked.
“Go to hell,” Larry said weakly. “I’m not answering any more of your questions. I’ve told the truth. I haven’t lied about a damn thing. Now I’m through.”
He put his hands to his face and tried to keep from making a weeping fool of himself. “Have you called my wife?” he asked. He tried to keep his voice steady and it sounded like a croak.
“We called her,” Meyers said. “She’s on her way down.”
Larry looked up at him, waiting for a laugh, but it didn’t come. Meyers was dead-pan.
“Is that right?”
Meyers nodded. “I talked to her myself. As a matter of fact we called her this morning.”
“You bastard,” Larry said.
“Shut up,” Meyers said mildly. “That kind of talk ain’t going to help. This isn’t a kindergarten we run here. This is a police station. We aren’t interested in being nice to people. Your wife to us is just another witness. I called her trying to find out if you’d lied to me. She backed you up. She said you had a fight and you walked out. That much of your story we know is true. But the rest of it stinks.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Larry said wearily. “Why should I lie? I’ve told you the truth.”
“No, you ain’t. But we been asking ourselves one question all day. Why should you lie? We know you’re lying. We know damn well you’re lying. But we want to know why. Either you’re buggy as hell, or you’re covering up something else.”
He blew more smoke at the ceiling and frowned. His face was gray and hard and his eyes were puzzled. He was a big man, a solid, careful, cautious man, with gray clothes, graying hair and a gray soul. He liked to know the answers. He liked the feeling of all the details of a case dove-tailing together and giving one result. That was his passion. He didn’t like to be puzzled. And he was puzzled now.
“Why should a guy lie like you have?” he said. He wasn’t talking to any one in particular. He was thinking out loud.
“You keep saying I’m lying,” Larry said. “How the hell do you know? Do you look in a crystal ball? Do you have a private ouija board up in the Captain’s office?”
Meyers looked amused. It made him look grimmer.
“We don’t have anything like that,” he said. “All a copper has is a pair of legs. And the benefit of a little experience. That’s one copper. Now do you know how many cops we got in Chicago? About fifteen thousand. That’s thirty thousand legs, walking here and there, looking for things. All of those coppers have some experience and when you lump it all together that makes a big lump of experience. When you got thirty thousand legs you don’t need a crystal ball.
“Now the funny thing about this case of yours is this; we haven’t found the body of this girl you keep talking about. No corpse with a knife in it. No girl lying on a bed with blood on her chest. That’s the funny thing.”
“You didn’t tell me that before,” Larry said. He tried to say it calmly, but hammers were beating inside his skull.
“You didn’t ask,” Meyers said ironically. “Now let me explain just how funny that is. Supposing you’re telling the truth. We started out this morning believing you. We started looking for a body. That’s where those thirty thousand legs go to work. All of them, looking for this dead girl. We know where you said she was. Nelson Boulevard. Good. We send a few hundred legs out there to start looking. They found out that you was out there. We got people who saw you. But nobody saw a body. We found out the block you stayed in last night. Not the house, but the block. That’s close enough, because we got plenty of legs. The legs went through every house in that block. Every room. And they didn’t find a body.”
He looked through the smoke at Larry. “See what I mean? We know you’re lying. Now we’d like to find out why you lied. If you just had the shakes and a bad dream we want to know that. If you’re covering up something else we want to know that and we intend to find out.”
“There was a dead girl lying beside me when I woke up,” Larry said. “I didn’t dream it. I was sick and half-drunk but I didn’t imagine it. I tell you I saw her. You saw the blood on my shirt, didn’t you? And there’s not a cut on me, is there? How do you explain that away?”
“We don’t do Sherlock Holmes stuff here,” Meyers said. But he frowned. “The blood we can’t figure. We took a test of your blood and it ain’t the same type as on your shirt sleeve. And anyway you weren’t cut anywhere. So the blood came from somebody else. We’d like to know about that.”
Larry felt a shiver of terror. He might have been dreaming. Maybe there wasn’t a girl. Maybe there wasn’t a knife stuck into the cup of her breasts. Maybe the blood had come from someone else. What had really happened last night?
If it was just a horrible dream he was in the clear. But until he knew what had happened he’d never sleep. Not with something dark and horrible and unknown hanging over his head.
Meyers was still looking at him thoughtfully.
“I believe you,” he said finally. “That makes me a fool. But I can’t help it. Maybe I do use a crystal ball. Maybe thirty thousand legs ain’t enough. But there’s got to be a body.” Larry said, “Give me a cigarette.” He took one from the pack Meyers extended and inhaled gratefully. He wasn’t feeling better. But he was intelligent enough to know that there was a reasonable explanation for this mystery. And whether it incriminated him or not, he had to know.
“Look, Meyers, nobody has found the body yet. Let’s suppose I’m not lying. And that I wasn’t dreaming. What could have happened to it?”
Meyers looked gloomy. “Bodies are hard to get rid of. When people find an ordinary body they generally call a doctor. Or maybe the fire department. Some people call a priest first. But they call somebody. Just so they can talk about it. And when they find a body with a knife stuck in it, they call everybody. They call the police first though. We know that from experience. Nobody wants to get mixed up with a murder case. This is normal, innocent people I’m talking about. Now a murderer has a different problem. He’s either got to make it look like somebody else did it, which is the way most of them figure, or else he’s got to get rid of the body. No body, no murder, that’s the law. He can burn the body in a furnace, he can throw it in the river, he can stuff it down a sewer, he can bury it, he can hide it in a trunk, or he can toss it into a barrel of acid.
“All them things have been done. But none of them was done in this case. Because we had our legs out there fast. And they been all over the place. They looked in furnaces, they looked in trunks, the neighborhood is miles from the river, and nobody saw any vats of acid around. So they did something else. That’s not what’s bothering me though. I want to know why they did it. If you’re not lying or crazy you fell into a nice frame. Why you were framed I don’t know. You ain’t important enough to frame. You got no enemies. You don’t know anybody. So you beat the frame. You wake up and walk out. Maybe that’s what they wanted you to do. I don’t know. If I had a nickel for everything I don’t know about this case, I’d retire.”