I said: “Have you got the boy’s side of it yet? He isn’t stupid. He must have known the bolo could be traced to him. Would he use it to do a murder and leave it lying there?”
“He didn’t leave it lying. He started back for it. You saw him coming back. He even jumped you.”
“That’s not important. He thought I was messing with Lucy, and he got mad. The boy was under a strain.”
“Sure he was. That’s part of my case. He’s the emotional type. I’m not claiming premeditation, see. I say it’s a crime of passion, second degree. He got hot pants and busted in on her. Or maybe he lifted the key from her purse when they were out riding. Anyway she wasn’t having any. He ran wild and cut her and took off. Then he remembered the knife and came back for it.”
“Your story fits the external facts. It doesn’t fit your suspect.” But I was thinking that if and when Brake discovered the jealousy motive, he would have a steamroller case.
“You don’t know these people the way I do. I deal with them every day.” He unbuttoned his left shirt-cuff and bared a heavy freckled forearm. A white scar ran jaggedly from the wristbone to the elbow. “The buck that gave me this was trying for my throat.”
“So that makes Norris a slasher.”
“There’s more to it than that.” Brake was on the defensive in spite of his honorable scar. The violent world he fought for and against didn’t suit him or anybody else, and he knew it.
“I think there is more to it. Too many people were interested in Lucy. I wouldn’t settle for the first suspect we stumble across. It isn’t that easy.”
“You took me up wrong,” he said. “What I mean, the boy acts guilty. I been looking at their faces for thirty years, listening to them talk.” He didn’t have to tell me. The thirty years were marked clearly on him, like fir-traces on an old tree. “All right, I’m still in the minor leagues. All right. This is my league. Champion is a minor league killing.”
“Consciousness of guilt is pretty tricky stuff. It’s psychological, for one thing.”
“Psychological hell. It’s a plain fact. We try to hold him for questioning, he runs out. We catch him and bring him back and he won’t talk. I tried to talk to him. He’s sullen. Tell him the world was flat, he wouldn’t answer yes or no or maybe.”
“How have you been treating him?”
“Never laid a finger on him, neither did anybody else.” Brake pulled down his shirt-sleeve and rebuttoned the cuff. “We got our own brand of psychology.”
“Where is he?”
“Out at the morgue.”
“Isn’t that a little unusual?”
“Not by me. I get a killing a month in this town, sometimes two. And I solve them, see? Most of them. The atmosphere at the morgue will loosen a killer up faster than anything I know.”
“Psychology.”
“That’s what I said. Now, you playing on my team or you want a crying towel to cry into? If you’re on my team, we’ll go on out there and see if he’s ready to talk.”
Chapter 20
The door was numbered 01. The room behind the door was windowless, low-ceilinged, concrete-walled. When the door sucked shut behind us, we might have been in a sepulcher far down under the earth. Brake’s heel struck dully on the composition floor. His shadow spread across me as he approached the only light in the room.
It was a cone-shaded bulb that hung low on an adjustable pulley over a rubber-wheeled stretcher. Lucy’s sheeted body lay on the stretcher under its white glare. Her head was uncovered and turned towards Alex Norris. He was sitting in a chair on the far side of the stretcher, looking steadfastly into the dead woman’s face. His right wrist was linked to hers by twin rings of blue steel. The pumps of a cooling system hummed and throbbed like time running down in the concrete walls. Behind the paired glass doors of the refrigerator, the other sheeted bodies might have been waiting for judgment, dreaming a preview of hell. It was as cold as hell.
The uniformed policeman who had been sitting opposite Alex got to his feet, raising his hand in a slovenly salute. “Morning, lieutenant.”
“What’s good about it? You running a wake in here, Schwartz?”
“You told me not to mark him. Like you said, I been letting nature take its course.”
“Well? Did nature take its course?” Brake stood over Alex, wide and impermeable against the light. “You want to make a statement now?”
Moving to one side, I saw Alex look up slowly. His face had thinned. The passage of the night had pared flesh from his temples and cheekbones. His wide carved lips drew back from his teeth and closed again without making any sound.
“Or you want to sit all day and hold hands?”
“You heard what the man said,” Schwartz growled. “He ain’t fooling. You sit here until you talk. In an hour or so the deputy coroner’s gonna cut her up, finish the job you done. Maybe you want a ringside seat?”
Alex paid no attention to Brake or his subordinate. His gaze, incredulous and devoted, returned to the dead woman’s head. Under the pitiless glare her hair shone like coiled steel shavings.
“What’s the matter with you, Norris? You got no human feelings?” Brake sounded almost querulous in the subterranean stillness, almost feeble, as if the boy by accepting everything had turned the tables on him.
I said “Brake.” The word had more force behind it than I intended.
“What’s eating you?” He turned with a bewildered frown. The dead cigar in the corner of his mouth was like a black finger pulling one side of his face crooked. I retreated to the door, and he followed his own diminishing shadow towards me: “You want that crying towel?”
I said in a low voice, but not too low for Alex to overhear: “You’re handling him wrong. He’s a sensitive kid. You can’t treat him like a punchy thug.”
“Him sensitive?” Brake removed his cigar and spat on the floor. “He’s got a hide like a rhinoceros.”
“I don’t think so. Give me a chance at him anyway. Uncouple him and let me talk to him alone.”
“My wife and me were going up in the mountains today,” Brake said irrelevantly. “We promised the kids a picnic.”
He sneered at the dead cigar in his hand, dropped it suddenly, and ground it under his heel. “Schwartz! Turn him loose. Bring him over here.”
The click of the handcuffs opening was tiny but very important, like the sound of a moral weight shifting on its fulcrum.
Schwartz pulled Alex to his feet. They crossed the room together, Alex round-shouldered and hanging back, Schwartz roughly urging him. “Taking him back to the cell, lieutenant?”
“Not yet.” Brake addressed the boy: “Mr. Archer here is a friend of yours, Norris. He wants a little chinfest with you. Personally I think he’s wasting all our time, but it’s up to you. Will you talk to Mr. Archer?”
Alex looked from Brake to me. His smooth young face had the same expression I had seen on the ancient Indian face of the woman in the alley, beyond the reach of anything white men could do or say. He nodded wordlessly, and looked back at Lucy.
Brake and Schwartz went out. The door pulled shut. Alex started back across the room. He walked uncertainly with his legs spraddled like an old man’s. The concrete floor sloped gently to a covered drain in the center of the room. He staggered down the barely perceptible slope and labored up the other side to the stretcher.
Standing over Lucy with his head bowed, he asked her: “Why did they do it?” in a dry hard voice.
I reached past him and pulled the sheet up over her head. I took him by the shoulders, turned him to face me. Part of his weight hung on me for a moment, until his muscles tightened. “Straighten up,” I said.