Find a Victim

Chapter 29

Treloar wheeled the bodies out of their glass-doored compartments, one by one, and uncovered their faces. Aquista’s was pale and gaunt, Kerrigan’s flashy and imperturbable. Anne Meyer was already old in death.

“Handsome cadavers,” the doctor said. “Their organs were in beautiful shape, every one of them. It’s a pity they had to die.” He gave Bozey a mildly chiding look.

“What you bring me in here for?”

Westmore answered him. “To assist your memory. What’s your name and age?”

Leonard Bozey. Age twenty-one. No address. No occupation. No hope.

“When did you last see this man, Donald Kerrigan?”

“Thursday night. About midnight, I guess it was.”

“You guess?”

“I know. It wasn’t any later.”

“Where did you see him? At his motor court?”

“No. At a drive-in near there. I don’t remember the name.”

“The Steakburger,” I said. “I witnessed the meeting.”

“We’ll hear from you later.” Westmore turned back to Bozey: “What occurred at that meeting?”

“I don’t have to answer. It’s self-incineration.”

Westmore smiled grimly. “Did a package of money change hands?”

“I guess so.”

“What did you do then?”

“I went away.”

“What were you running away from?”

“Nothing. I just went for a drive. I like night driving.”

“Before you went for your joy-ride, did you take a .38-caliber revolver and shoot Kerrigan through the head with it?”

“I did not.”

“Where is your gun?”

“I got no gun. It’s against the law to carry one.”

“And you never do anything against the law?”

“Not if I can help it. Sometimes I can’t help it.”

Westmore breathed deeply. “What about the truck you stole? What about the bank you robbed in Portland? Couldn’t you help doing those things?”

“I never been to Portland. You mean Portland, Maine?”

“I mean Portland, Oregon.”

“Is there a Portland in Oregon?”

Westmore leaned forward. In the flat bright light his profile was sharpedged and thin, like something cut from sheet metal. “You’re talking pretty flip for an ex-con with the blood of three citizens on his hands.”

“I didn’t kill any of them.”

“Didn’t you? Take a good look at them, Leonard, refresh your recollection.” Westmore said to the guard: “Move him up closer.”

The guard pushed Bozey forward to the head of Aquista’s stretcher. The closed Latin face seemed to be haunted by its lifelong yearnings, persisting into death.

“I never saw him before.”

“How could you shoot a man and steal his truck without seeing him?”

“I didn’t shoot him. He wasn’t in the truck, and I didn’t exactly steal it. It was sitting here on the open highway, see. People oughtn’t to leave their trucks sitting around in the open with the engine running.”

“I see. This was one of those things you couldn’t help. Was shooting Aquista another? Was that another one of the things you couldn’t help?”

“I didn’t shoot him.”

“You didn’t take your revolver and point it at this man’s heart and pull the trigger and inflict a fatal wound on him?”

“I don’t even own a revolver.”

The interrogation went on for an hour. It reminded me of a fight between a young club fighter and an educated southpaw. Gradually Bozey was being worn down under the padded blows of words. After a while he had nothing left but a stubborn mulish terror. His voice was a croak, and the bandages that masked his face were stained with a reddish sweat.

I sweated with him, trying to guess the life behind his record. I had lifted cars myself when I was a kid, shared joy-rides and brawls with the lost gangs in the endless stucco maze of Los Angeles. My life had been like Bozey’s up to a point. Then a whisky-smelling plain-clothes man caught me stealing a battery from the back room of a Sears Roebuck store in Long Beach. He stood me up against the wall and told me what it meant and where it led. He didn’t turn me in.

I hated him for years, and never stole again.

But I remembered how it felt to be a thief. It felt like living in a room without any windows. Then it felt like living in a room without any walls. It felt as cold as death around the heart, and after a while the heart would die and there would be no more hope, just the fury in the head and the fear in the bowels. Bozey. But for the grace of an alcoholic detective sergeant, me.

There was another reason for my sense of identification with Bozey. Westmore was using him as my whipping boy, trying to force his answers to prove me wrong, and not succeeding. Not quite.