Mission Flats

34

‘Ben, we need to talk again.’

‘Am I under arrest?’

Gittens hesitated when he heard the question, and I felt compelled to make an explanatory little wave toward the two uniform cops and the strobe flashes from the cruisers’ light bars.

‘No.’

‘Then why the backup?’

‘People tend to get emotional,’ Gittens replied, ‘when things start to look bad.’

‘Is it starting to look bad?’

He gave a pained shrug. ‘I’m sure you can explain.’

The Area A-3 station was just a few blocks away. We returned to the same painted-cinder-block interrogation room where Lowery and Gittens had confronted me twenty-four long hours earlier. This time, Lowery was not there. Kurth had taken his place.

‘I want Kelly in the room.’

‘No,’ Gittens said. ‘Sorry.’

‘Then I have nothing to say’

‘However you want to play it, Chief Truman. You can just listen, if you want. Or talk. Your call.’

‘And if I just leave? Invoke my right to remain silent?’

‘Then we’ll have to wonder. Which is our right, Chief Truman.’

‘And what about-’ I was thinking of the fact that I was a cop and was owed a measure of professional courtesy. But something in Gittens’s demeanor warned me it was too late for that. Something behind all that elaborate courtesy, all those respectful Chief Trumans.

‘What if Kelly watches from the glass?’ I nodded toward the one-way mirror.

Gittens considered a moment before deciding to allow it.

Kelly urged me not to participate in the questioning at all. There was nothing to be gained by it. But I felt — foolishly — there was nothing to gain by lawyerly dithering. I wanted to show my innocence; I wanted to walk the walk. More important, I had a fatal curiosity about Gittens’s continuing suspicion of me. Why me? What did he have? The whole thing was inexplicable. I had to see the evidence against me, even took morbid pleasure in it. Freud once described pleasure as the release of tension; at least now the tension caused by being kept in the dark might be released.

But when Kelly had left the room, it was Kurth, not Gittens, who took over the interrogation. The switch was disconcerting. It moved the case from a local A-3 detective to a Homicide detective. It signaled that the ball had been passed. Kurth exhibited none of Gittens’s false friendliness. ‘We just got this back.’ Kurth put a heat-sealed plastic bag on the table. It contained a drinking glass, which had been fumed and powdered for prints. The gold-leaf shield of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel was smudged with black powder.

I tried consciously to slow down my body, to master the subsystems — respiration, metabolism, heartbeat. Do not blink, do not blush, do not hyperventilate, do not react in any way.

‘It’s from the room where your mother’s body was found. Those are your prints. The fluid inside tested positive for barbiturate residue.’

More staring.

‘Do you want to explain how your prints got there?’

‘Not at the moment.’

‘It’s a murder weapon.’

‘No, it’s not, and you know it.’

‘Did she drink it? I thought they were pills.’

No answer.

‘Danziger had this glass. Come on, you must have known that. Did he ask you about it?’ Kurth waited a beat. Then, ‘There’s more too. Video of you in the hotel with your mother, checking in and out. Video, Chief Truman. We haven’t done a handwriting analysis on the hotel’s paperwork yet, but it doesn’t really seem necessary at this point. You were there with her.’

I wore a cast-iron poker face, the one valuable thing I inherited as Annie Truman’s son.

‘You helped her do it, didn’t you?’ A beat. ‘You murdered her.’

‘It’s not murder,’ I said.

‘It is in this state. Did Danziger tell you that? He was going to indict you, wasn’t he? Of course he was. Why else would he go all the way up to Maine except to talk to you about it? He was going to take it to the grand jury. A cop involved in a murder — excuse me, a suicide. How could Danziger look the other way? Not on this one, not this time.’

‘I didn’t murder anyone,’ I said.

‘Why wasn’t Danziger’s file on the case with the rest of his things?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘His case file on your mother’s death, the folder, it’s missing. He must have brought the file with him when he went to Maine, since he intended to work on the case there. We had to reconstruct it from duplicates and from files he kept on his computer. So where’s the original file?’

‘I have no idea.’

He laid a piece of paper on the table.

‘Is that your signature?’

I glanced at the document with stagy blitheness, the way you might look over a day-old newspaper or a dessert menu.

‘Versailles Police Department,’ Kurth read,’ missing firearm. Nine-millimeter Glock 17 pistol. Firearm reported missing from evidence locker by Officer Dick Ginoux. Dick to follow up. Signed Chief Benjamin W. Truman. September 29, 1997. Let me guess, Chief Truman: The Glock was never found.’

‘No.’

‘Any idea where it might have gone?’

‘No.’

‘Would you be surprised to hear that a nine-millimeter Glock 17 is consistent with the weapon that murdered Bob Danziger?’

‘Oh, come on, Kurth, I saw the body. There must be a hundred guns that would be consistent with that scene.’

‘Strange coincidence, though, wouldn’t you say? Big gun like that just disappearing from the evidence locker in a little Podunk police station like yours?’

‘Shit happens.’

‘Shit happens,’ he repeated. ‘So what did you do to follow up? Or weren’t you concerned about a nine-millimeter semiautomatic lying by the side of the road?’

‘Of course I was concerned. We searched, we investigated. We couldn’t track it down.’

‘You had access to that locker, didn’t you? You could have taken that gun.’

I didn’t answer.

‘Chief Truman, can you tell me why you went out to the cabin that morning? When you found the body, I mean. What were you doing there?’

‘It’s routine. We check all the cabins as part of our rounds.’

‘Even in winter?’

‘Especially in winter.’

Gittens broke in at this point. He sat down opposite me, rested his hands on the table and interlaced his fingers. It was a thoughtful pose. ‘Ben, why don’t you help yourself out here. Get ahead of this a little, before it goes too far down the track. All these things, you see what it adds up to, don’t you? Motive, means, opportunity. Danziger told you he was going to indict the assisted-suicide case, so you shot him, then you ditched the gun somewhere, probably in the lake. Then you took Danziger’s file.’

‘That’s your theory?’ I said.

‘That’s our theory, yeah.’

‘It’s not true. Martin, I’m not a murderer. What else can I tell you?’

Gittens shook his head mournfully. He’d wanted to hear more.

‘Gittens, are you going forward with this?’

‘That’s up to the DA.’

‘Then I’m free to go?’

‘You’re free to go. Unless there’s something else you want to say’

‘I didn’t do it,’ I told them. And again, ‘I did not do it.’

And again to myself — to remind myself of the truth: I did not do it. Braxton’s message played in my head, too, with renewed urgency: Find Raul.