“Well, there was one guy I liked for it from the start. Big brawny son of a bitch, he was the super in the building she lived in. Ex-Navy man, got out on a bad-conduct discharge. We had a sheet on him. Two arrests for assault, both dropped when the complainants refused to press charges. Complainants in both cases were women.
“All that is enough reason to check him out down to the ground. Which we did. And the more I talked to him the more I knew the son of a bitch did it. Sometimes you just plain know.
“But he had himself covered. We had the time of death pinpointed to within an hour, and his wife was prepared to swear on a stack of bibles that he’d spent the entire day never out of her sight. And we had nothing on the other side of it, not one scrap of anything to place him in the girl’s apartment at the time of the murder. Nothing at all. Not even a lousy fingerprint, and even if we did, it meant nothing because he was the super and he could have put his prints there fixing the plumbing or something. We had nothing, not a smell of anything, and the only reason we knew he did it was we simply knew, and no district attorney would dream of trying to run that by a grand jury.
“So we checked out everybody else who was vaguely possible. And of course we didn’t get anywhere because there was nowhere to get, and the case wound up in the open file, which meant we knew it was never going to be closed out, which meant to all intents and purposes it was closed already because nobody would bother to look at it anymore.”
I got to my feet, walked across the room. I said, “But we knew he did it, see, and it was driving us crazy. I don’t know how many people get away with murder every year. A lot more than anyone realizes. This Ruddle, though, we knew he was our boy, and we still couldn’t do anything about it. That was his name, Jacob Ruddle.
“So after the case was marked open, my partner and I, we couldn’t get it out of our heads. Just couldn’t get it out of our heads, there wasn’t a day one of us didn’t bring it up. So eventually we went to this Ruddle and asked him if he’d take a polygraph test. You know what that is?”
“A lie detector?”
“A lie detector. We were completely straight with him, we told him he could refuse to take the test, and we also told him it couldn’t be entered in evidence against him, which it can’t. I’m not sure that’s a good idea, incidentally, but that’s the law.
“He agreed to take the test. Don’t ask me why. Maybe he thought it would look suspicious of him to refuse, although he must have known we damn well knew he killed her and nothing was going to make him stop looking suspicious to us. Or maybe he honestly thought he could beat the machine. Well, he took the test, and I made sure we had the best operator available to administer the test, and the results were just what we expected.”
“He was guilty?”
“No question about it. It nailed him to the wall, but there was nothing we could do with it. I told him the machine said he was lying. ‘Well, those machines must make a few mistakes now and then,’ he said, ‘because it made one right now.’ And he looked me right in the eye, and he knew I didn’t believe him, and he knew there was nothing on earth I could do about it.”
“God.”
I went over and sat down next to her again. I sipped some of my drink and closed my eyes for a moment, remembering the look in that bastard’s eyes.
“What did you do?”
“My partner and I tossed it back and forth. My partner wanted to put him in the river.”
“You mean kill him?”
“Kill him and set him in cement and drop him somewhere in the Hudson.”
“You wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
“I don’t know. I might have gone along with it. See, he did it, he killed that girl, and he was an odds-on candidate to do it again sooner or later. Oh, hell, that wasn’t all of it. Knowing he did it, knowing he knew we knew he did it, and sending the bastard home. Putting him in the river started sounding like a hell of a good idea, and I might have done it if I hadn’t thought of something better.”
“What?”
“I had this friend on the narcotics squad. I told him I needed some heroin, a lot of it, and I told him he would be getting every bit of it back. Then one afternoon when Ruddle and his wife were both out of the apartment I let myself in, and I flaked that place as well as it’s ever been done. I stuffed smack inside the towel bar, I stuck a can of it in the ball float of his toilet, I put the shit in every really obvious hiding place I could find.
“Then I got back to my friend in narcotics, and I told him I knew where he could make himself a hell of a haul. And he did it right, with a warrant and everything, and Ruddle was upstate in Dannemora before he knew what hit him.” I smiled suddenly. “I went to see him between the trial and the sentencing date. His whole defense was that he had no idea how that heroin got there, and not too surprisingly the jury didn’t sit up all night worrying about that one. I went to see him and I said, ‘You know, Ruddle, it’s a shame you couldn’t take a lie-detector test. It might make people believe you didn’t know where that smack came from.’ And he just looked at me because he knew just how it had been done to him and for a change there was nothing he could do about it.”
“God.”
“He drew ten-to-twenty for possession with intent to sell. About three years into his sentence he got in a grudge fight with another inmate and got stabbed to death.”
“God.”
“The thing is, you wonder just how far you have a right to turn things around like that. Did we have a right to set him up? I couldn’t see letting him walk around free, and what other way was there to nail him? But if we couldn’t do that, did we have a right to put him in the river? That’s a harder one for me to answer. I have a lot of trouble with that one. There must be a line there somewhere, and it’s hard to know just where to draw it.”
A little while later she said it was getting to be her bedtime.
“I’ll go,” I said.
“Unless you’d rather stay.”
We turned out to be good for each other. For a stitch of time all the hard questions went away and hid in dark places.
Afterward she said that I should stay. “I’ll make us breakfast in the morning.”
“Okay.”
And, sleepily, “Matt? That story you were telling before. About Ruddle?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What made you think of it?”
I sort of wanted to tell her, probably for the same reason I’d told her the story in the first place. But part of what I had to do was not tell her, just as I had avoided telling Cale Hanniford.
“Just the similarities in the cases,” I said. “Just that it was another case of a girl raped and murdered in the Village, and the one case put me in mind of the other.”
She murmured something I couldn’t catch. When I was sure she was sleeping soundly, I slipped out of bed and got into my clothes. I walked the couple of blocks to my hotel and went to my room.
I thought I would have trouble sleeping, but it came easier than I expected.
Chapter 15
The service had just gotten under way when I arrived. I slipped into a rear pew, took a small black book from the rack, and found the place. I’d missed the invocation and the first hymn, but I was in time for the reading of the Law.