“You want anything from upstairs?” I asked.
She was crying now. “No, no. I just want to go. Come on, come on.”
I placed my fingertips on her mouth. “Quiet, Alice. Keep it together. We’re almost out of here.”
We returned to the first floor, exited to the street, and crossed quickly to the warehouse opposite, surrounding Alice like bodyguards, blocking her from view.
Willy met us inside the door. “What’d you get?”
“Don’t know yet,” I told him. “Let’s get to some light. Sheila, can you take care of Alice?”
She nodded and took the skinny girl off to where we’d parked one of our cars in a back bay, out of sight.
The rest of us crossed the dark, echoing room we’d entered and stepped inside a small interior office. Willy closed the door and turned on the lights.
I placed the bag on a dust-covered desk, pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and opened the zipper. On top of a bundle of clothes and a pair of spattered sneakers were some blue jeans, one knee of which was crusty with old blood.
“Bingo,” Willy said softly. “Who they belong to?”
“As far as we know,” I answered, “they’re Walter’s.”
24
We didn't arrest Walter Freund, although there was pressure to do so among members of the squad. Instead, we sent a car to his house shortly after he’d returned home and had a patrolman question him about his girlfriend’s whereabouts, implying she might have been involved in a crime and left town. The officer reported later Freund hadn’t seemed too concerned.
The contents of the bag-the bloodstained clothes, the sneakers, and a vicious-looking but very clean hunting knife-were labeled, packed up, and sent to the crime lab for analysis.
Gail, Jack Derby, Tony Brandt, and I met on the afternoon of the next day in Derby’s office to discuss what to do next.
Derby, seemingly recovered from his anger of our last meeting-I thought in large part because we’d brought him something useful-made a show of letting Gail represent their office in the conversation.
“You’re comfortable not arresting him?” she asked us after I’d outlined how we’d come by the bag-barring a few details.
“We don’t think he’s going anywhere. He has to report daily to his parole officer, he doesn’t know what we’ve found, and he thinks his girlfriend just got into a jam and split town. On our side, we don’t want to repeat the mistake we made with Owen Tharp and move prematurely. Until the lab tells us otherwise, we can’t prove if the contents of that gym bag have anything to do with him or Brenda Croteau.”
“Would you have any objections to getting a nontestimonial evidence order for a blood sample from Freund?”
I thought about that for a moment. It was perfectly feasible. Freund had waded deeply enough into the “reasonable suspicion” category to allow a judge to grant such a request. And with Alice Duprée now out of harm’s way, stirring up Walter’s paranoia might not be a bad idea. It could push him to do something that might land him in hotter water.
“This to compare with the tissue sample collected from under Brenda’s fingernail?”
“Seems like a good idea-it didn’t match Owen,” Gail admitted with a smile.
“Sure, I’ll serve him with it,” I answered. “What happens with Owen and Reggie McNeil while we’re waiting for forensics?”
Gail deferred to Derby.
“We’re meeting with Reggie in Judge Harrowsmith’s chambers this afternoon. I’m hoping Reggie will see the value of holding his breath till we sort this out.”
I asked another question that had been nagging me. “What did your shrink think of Owen?”
“Perfect fit,” Gail said. “I just got her report this morning. She confirmed our guess he was a prime candidate for manipulation. She couldn’t ask him anything about the crime, of course-not with Reggie there-but in general terms, she found him both extraordinarily malleable and prone to devoting himself to whoever’s treating him well at the moment. Supposedly, Owen’s sense of gratitude is so psychologically rooted that it virtually stands in stead of a conscience. He’s not wired too tightly, of course, which doesn’t help matters, so he’s also easily overwhelmed by people’s use of language.”
“What about the fits of violence?”
“They’re there, but ‘fits’ is the operative word. She agrees with me that the carnage at the Croteau scene exceeds Owen’s capabilities, even if he was artificially disinhibited with booze and dope.”
That caught Derby off guard. “Hold it-I thought we were working on the theory that if the blood on Freund’s belongings was Brenda’s, then that merely placed him at the scene. Is the shrink suggesting he actually played a role in the killing?”
“That’s what we’re starting to think,” I admitted, “but my question is, why did Walter get Owen involved in the first place? Why run the risk of having some simpleminded kid spill the beans later?”
“He hasn’t spilled the beans, though, has he?” Gail answered.
She had a point.
“Still, the risk…”
“So Walter set Owen in motion,” Derby hypothesized, “and then watched from the shadows to make sure he did the job right?”
“And possibly finished her off when he didn’t,” I suggested. “Now that we have two knives, I can ask the ME to try to match each wound to the blade that caused it.”
“Why would Walter make it so complicated?” Derby wanted to know.
Gail shrugged. “Because he had the perfect fall guy. Because it fits his sociopathic needs. Because he almost got away with it.”
That last crack obviously hurt. Derby scowled. “What a mess.”
Tony broke his silence to disagree. “Maybe not-in a few days, we could have a nice, tidy little package that McNeil will be happy to help gift-wrap.”
Derby looked doubtful. “Maybe. What bothers me about all this is that everything made sense when Owen was the sole killer. With the death of his girlfriend, he had the perfect rationale for killing Croteau.” He looked at Gail balefully. “You’re the one who’s so hot on motive. What did Freund have against Croteau?”
If he’d had a sense of humor, the obvious response should have been that motive wasn’t a prosecutor’s concern. Gail, however, wasn’t about to go there again, jokingly or not. She simply said, “Let’s hope we find out.”
I found Walter Freund in what seemed to be his home away from home, the Dirty Dollar-a true dump of a bar near where South Main meets up with Canal. Once the basement of a tenement building, the Dirty Dollar reminded me of the lower-class speakeasies I’d read about as a boy, where the bar had consisted of a plank and two sawhorses, and a seat was wherever you chose to fall down.
It wasn’t quite that bad, of course. Building codes and licensing requirements had seen to that. And a long time ago some pretense had even been made to decorate the place. But the effort was so faded or in disrepair, and the lighting so poor in any case, that none of it really mattered.
Walter was sitting in a corner booth, his back against the wall, his feet extended along the bench, as if he were propped up in bed. On the battered table next to him were a pack of cigarettes, an overflowing ashtray, a small, closed notebook, and a glass of what looked like water, although the glass itself was too dirty to tell. He was a small man, cadaverously thin, with a long greasy ponytail and a yellowish complexion that reminded me of mushrooms.
I slid onto the bench facing him. “Walter Freund?”
“Lieutenant,” he said, as if we’d known one another for years. In fact, despite his reputation, we’d never actually met. Neither of us extended a hand in greeting, and Freund kept his eyes sleepily focused elsewhere.
“Your name’s been coming up quite a bit lately.”
“So’s yours,” he answered.
I kept my tone conversational. “Oh, yeah? How’s that?”
Walter gave a shrug so small it was barely a quiver. “Busting Owen, shooting Billy, libeling politicians. I was thinking you maybe had Katz on the payroll-keeping you in the news. Must compensate for the lousy salary and all those hours. What do you make?”