Just as I lifted the cup to my mouth a loud, cracking noise struck my ear with such force that I ducked my head and put the cup down on the table. “What!”
“Bitch!” shouted a surly voice from the front.
Flynn shook his head and rolled his eyes. He looked at Stewart. “Didn’t I do it last time?”
Stewart shrugged. “You’re closer.”
“Christ,” Flynn muttered as he got up from his place at the end of the booth.
I leaned around and followed him with my eyes as he walked pigeon-toed toward the pool table. With his hand on her throat, the pool player had his partner up against the wall, screaming obscenities in her face, while he brandished his pool stick with his free hand.
“Let her go. Put the stick down,” Flynn ordered in an irritated voice.
His hand still on her throat, the man turned and, with his lips pulled back in a murderous grin, snarled incredulously, “You gonna do something about it, old man?”
“I’m going to bust your ass, is what I’m going to do about it.”
In a single motion, he threw the woman to the side and with both hands swung the stick as hard as he could. Flynn had already taken a half step forward, and with one hand caught the stick in midair. With a quick downward turn of his wrist he twisted it behind the back of the other man until it dropped on the floor, and then grabbed him by the shoulder and the seat of his pants.
With two quick steps he threw him as hard as he could head first into the door. For an instant, he lay there, motionless, and I thought Flynn had killed him. Then he began to stir, and a moment later got to his knees.
“What are you trying to do-kill him?” the woman yelled as she shoved Flynn out of the way and dropped down on one knee, putting her arm around the shoulder of her boyfriend, who a moment earlier had been ready to crush her windpipe.
Straightening his jacket, Flynn came back to the table. “Didn’t that door used to swing open?” he asked as he slid in next to Stewart.
“You’re a credit to the nobility of the Irish race,” I said. “Still rescuing damsels in distress.”
He dropped his chin and raised his eyes. “She didn’t look like any damsel to me. I should have stayed out of it.”
Stewart laughed. “No, you did the right thing. If you hadn’t stopped it, she would have killed him.”
“What were they arguing about, anyway?” I asked.
Holding the cup with both hands, Flynn sipped his coffee. “I don’t know. Maybe she finished off his beer while he was making a shot.” His face had a wry expression. “That can be a really serious thing, leaving a drunk without anything to drink.”
My leg began to hurt again. I reached down and rubbed it with the heel of my hand. The sharp, stabbing pain subsided, replaced by a dull throbbing ache. Soon there was nothing left of it, and I could only wonder how much of it was real, and how much of it was in my mind, a figment of an imagination over which I was beginning to think I had little, if any, control.
“Tell me about this John Smith,” I said, looking at Stewart.
“You’re not convinced he’s the one who killed Griswald?”
“I’m convinced he did not.” He paused before he added, “It’s just a feeling. I don’t have any proof.”
“Like the feeling you had about Whittaker?”
“Not quite. I knew Whittaker killed Jeffries; I just couldn’t figure out why. I still don’t know. Whittaker was crazy and, remember, he had killed before. There was no question that he was capable of murder. I don’t think John Smith-or whatever his name really is-could hurt anyone.” He thought about what he had just said. “Maybe if he was backed into a corner, or maybe if he was scared-maybe then. But I just don’t think it’s possible that he would lie in wait for someone and then use a knife on him,” he said, shaking his head.
Though he seemed certain of himself, it was clear from his expression that there was something else, something about which he was not nearly so confident.
“It’s not my case,” he explained. “But ever since Jeffries’s killer killed himself-if that’s what he did,” he said, suggesting once again the possibility that it might not have been suicide at all,
“I keep wondering what made him do it. When I heard an arrest had been made in the second murder, and that everything seemed to be the same: an anonymous call; the suspect another homeless man living under the same bridge; the murder weapon a knife and the knife still in his possession, I wanted to find out if there might be some other connection between the two murders or the two killers. That’s why, when they brought him in, I sat in on the interview.”
Stewart slowly rubbed one thumb over the other. Long deep lines creased his forehead. His eyebrows were knit close together.
Something had left a bad taste in his mouth.
“They brought him into the interrogation room and sat him down in a chair. It had been raining. He was soaking wet, and his shoes and the bottoms of his pants were caked in mud. He was filthy. Forget about when he had last had a bath; God knows the last time he had changed his clothes. He had on an old olive-colored overcoat, torn, tattered, ripped; underneath that, a sweater with more moth holes than wool. His hair was down to his shoulders and he had a scraggly beard.”
He shuddered as a look of disgust passed over his face. “I could not tell exactly how old he was, but he was young, probably still in his twenties, and he had what I can only describe as innocent eyes. When you looked at him and he looked back, it seemed as if he wanted you to tell him what to do, that it would not occur to him that there was any reason not to trust you. He seemed helpless.
“That’s when I noticed-when he looked at me with those childlike eyes. At first I thought it was because he had gotten all wet. His hair was plastered to his head and his beard was stuck to his face when they first brought him in. He was starting to dry out, and his hair and his beard extended farther out from his head, from his face. Then I realized-we all realized: His head, his beard, were crawling with lice, with disgusting vermin. I could only imagine-I did not want to imagine!-what was living on the other side of his clothing. It was like watching an eruption: They were coming from everywhere, and still he looked at us the same way he had before, without emotion, without any sign that he was even aware that he was being eaten alive by this unspeakable infestation. The awful thing is, I don’t think he was aware of it; I think he was used to it, the way you or I might be used to a little dirt under our nails if we were out in the garden.”
“What did you do?” I asked, amazed at what he had seen.
“We had all seen it at once; and we all reacted the same way.
We jumped up from the table, afraid that some of those things had already had time to get on us. No one wanted to touch him, and we gestured like a bunch of panicked fools, pointing toward the door. They managed to get him out of there and down the hall to the shower. When they got him undressed, they burned all his clothes. They got him deloused and they shaved his beard and cut his hair. But before that, when they saw him naked, they got the doctor. He had scars all over his legs and his buttocks.
They were cigarette burns, the doctor said, and they had probably been there since he was a child.
“The next day he was interviewed again.”
“Without a lawyer?” I asked.
Stewart raised his head. “That’s right. He was told he had a right to one,” he added, anticipating my next question. “Well, not told, exactly.” His eyes seemed to open wider, while his gaze turned inward. “They read it to him from the card we all carry, read it to him in a flat monotonous voice. Then, at the end, the detective put down the card, bent toward him, and put his hand on the suspect’s arm. ‘Or do you want to just talk to me?’ He asked that question like he was talking to a friend. It’s an old technique.”
“And he didn’t want a lawyer?”
A scathing look came into his eyes. “He didn’t know what a lawyer was! We should have known it from the beginning-the way he talked, the look in his eyes. Without the beard, without those filthy clothes, you had to know what he was. It was not just his eyes anymore. You could see it in the way his mouth sagged to one side, the clumsy, awkward way it moved when he gave his one-or two-word answers to a question, the way the words seemed to drag out: rough, slurred, without any definable end. Our suspect-the one arraigned this morning for the murder of Judge Griswald-is retarded. God knows just how retarded!