Stewart raised his eyebrows. “It was like he was watching, too; watching himself, observing everything, making sure he did not miss any part of it. He talked about the way the knife went into Jeffries’s stomach, straight to the hilt, as if he had been standing in front, watching it happen, instead of holding on to Jeffries from behind. He told us details only the killer could have known.
It was not just what he said, either: He had the knife. He did not even try to hide it. Hide it! He had not even tried to wipe it clean! He was found living under the Morrison Street Bridge, one of the homeless. He was surrounded. There was no way for him to get away. But he acted like he was expecting us. There were a dozen cops, weapons drawn, every one of them trained on him, or rather trained on a group of four or five homeless men sitting around a small fire they had built to keep warm. Any one of them could have matched the description we had been given by an anonymous informant. You know what he did-as soon as his name was called out? He stood up, raised his arms, and…
smiled. Smiled! Can you believe it? It was as if he had been waiting for someone to find him-not like a fugitive, but like somebody who got lost in the woods waiting for a rescue party. As soon as they had the handcuffs on him, he told them where to find the knife. They had not asked him anything. He just nodded his head toward a greasy bedroll a few feet away. ‘The knife is in there.’ Just like that. It’s the only piece of evidence that can link him to the crime and he gives it up without being asked.”
Flynn, who since we sat down had listened in silence, had a question. “If he was that eager to be helpful, why didn’t he just turn himself in?”
“I don’t know, Howard. Nothing about him made much sense.
Maybe it was part of the game.”
“The game?” I asked.
He acknowledged the question with a nod as a way of post-poning an answer. Once he started following a train of thought he did not want to lose it. Flynn had the same habit, born, I suppose, out of the fear that unless they concentrated on one thing at a time they might forget something important, the way they had forgotten things when all they thought about was the next drink and the one after that.
“Everything fit. He had the knife-his fingerprints were the only ones on it. The blood-and we know it for certain now-
belonged to Jeffries. And he described things about the crime no one else could have known.”
“And then he killed himself,” I interjected.
Stewart gave me a strange look. “If you believe what the junkie in the cell across from him said.”
“What are you suggesting? That he didn’t kill himself? That someone else…?”
He was careful. “I’m not suggesting anything. But all we know for sure is that he was found in his cell with the top of his skull caved in, and the only eyewitness is a barely literate drug addict who couldn’t remember the last time he told the truth about anything.”
“Are you saying you think the police, or someone-?”
He held up both hands and turned his face to the side. “I’m not saying anything, but it’s a real strange way to kill yourself.”
He drew his jaw back and made a clicking noise as he tapped his teeth together. “Why I should find anything about this case stranger than anything else is a kind of mystery in itself,” he said, thinking out loud. He leaned forward, resting his folded arms on the table. “I’ve interviewed thousands of suspects, listened to hundreds of confessions, but this was different. There was no remorse.
I don’t mean just about what he had done, killed another human being. There was no remorse, no regret, about anything: not about getting caught, not about being locked up, not about what he had to know was going to happen to him. I’ve sometimes wondered whether-if he really did kill himself-he had already decided to do that while he was talking to me. He was-or at least he seemed-completely indifferent to everything. No, that’s not right. He was not indifferent, not the way we normally mean it.
He was pleased. Yes, that’s right: pleased, satisfied-more than content, almost serene.
“I asked him why he had done it, and he said: ‘I really can’t say.’ He said it each time I asked, always that same phrase: ‘I really can’t say.’ But the meaning seemed to change. It was not clear whether he did not know why he had done it, or-and I know this must sound incredible, but it is what I started to think at the time-he knew exactly why he had done it, but for some reason thought that he was not supposed to tell.
“As soon as I understood that his words could be taken in two different senses, I realized that he was aware that the phrase had a double meaning and that he had chosen it deliberately. I began to watch him more closely. At first I thought he was playing a game with us, laughing at us. There were two other investigators in the room, and we took turns asking him questions. His basic expression never changed, that same look of self-contentment, the look of someone who knows something you do not-something so incredibly important that he actually feels sorry that he can’t tell you what it is, something he knows you’ll never figure out on your own.”
Biting his lip, Stewart narrowed his eyes and shook his head, struggling to catch hold of a thought so elusive that it slipped farther away each time he was sure he had it. With one last shake of his head, he gave up. “I’d seen that look before.” Turning his shoulders, he waved his arm toward the oak trees scattered over the open space around us. “My wife loved it out here. Twenty years ago, this was the country. There wasn’t anything else, just trees and green grass, and the river. You could ride your horse for miles and not see a house or a car. It was a wonderful place to live, a great place to raise kids.” He exchanged a glance with Flynn. “Then I started drinking. The more I drank, the more involved she became with her church. I became a drunk; she became a born-again Christian. That’s when I first saw that look, on my wife’s face, a kind of light in her eyes. Whether it’s peace or joy, I don’t know; but whatever it is, it’s there, it’s real, and it used to make me crazy.”
He clenched his teeth, mortified by the thought of what he had once been like. “I did some pretty bad things,” he said presently. “But I think I could have killed her and with her last breath she would have forgiven me. That’s what made me crazy, this absolute certainty she had that she knew the truth and felt sorry for me because I did not. That was kind of the look he had.”
He stopped, and in the same way he had before, bit his lip, shook his head, and narrowed his eyes. “You know how most of these people are, the ones who wind up in the system: dull, sullen, lethargic, only roused to rage. He was not like that at all. He moved around a lot, animated, lively. His eyes never stayed stilclass="underline" They jumped all around. His face was full of expressions, all of them colored by that same look of-what shall I call it?-cheerfulness? It seems a strange thing to call the look on the face of a murderer, but that’s what it was. He had no regret about what he had done and no fear at all about what was going to happen to him. In that sense at least he was like someone born again, all his sins washed away, and heaven waiting with open arms.”
Stewart searched my eyes. “The difference is that I’m convinced he did not think what he had done to Jeffries was a sin. I believe he thought he had done something commendable, something he was supposed to do. And I’ll tell you something else,”
he said, raising his chin. “If he had not died in jail, he never would have been convicted of murder in a court of law.”