Эд Макбейн - Beauty and the Beast

He had just made his third mistake. I’d been in Miami Wednesday, at Davis’s house, talking to his wife Leona, and there hadn’t been hide nor hair of him anywhere. I decided to pinpoint it.

“Were you there at five-thirty, six o’clock?”

“All day,” he said again. “Well, wait, I went out for a sandwich at lunchtime.”

“But other than that...”

“I was there all day.”

“I must have missed you,” I said.

“What?”

“I was there on Wednesday, talking to your wife at about five-thirty, just as the sun was going down. I didn’t see you there, Mr. Davis.”

He looked at me.

“Then you’re right,” he said, “you must’ve missed me.”

“Did your wife tell you I’d been there?”

“No.”

“That’s strange, isn’t it? If you were in Miami on Wednesday, and I missed you when I was at the house, wouldn’t your wife have told you I was there?”

“Sometimes she tells me, sometimes she doesn’t.”

“But she told you Harper was there on Sunday the fifteenth, right? When you got back to the house after leaving Vero Beach.”

“Yes, that’s what she told me.”

“And you’ve been in Miami all this time?”

“Until last night, when I got the call from Detective Bloom here.”

“You didn’t come to Calusa, did you, at any time during...?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

“Then how did you know Michelle Harper was brutally beaten on the night of Sunday the fifteenth?”

He hesitated, suddenly wary of me, and undecided as to whether he should brazen it out or simply shut up. He decided to risk a head-on collision. That was his final mistake.

“Sally told me,” he said.

“Sally?”

“Owen. She called to talk to my wife, but Leona was out someplace, so she talked to me instead.”

“When was that, Mr. Davis?”

“Monday sometime, I guess.”

“The day Michelle was murdered?”

“I guess.”

“Well, was it or wasn’t it?”

“Who remembers ? Listen, what is this, would you mind telling me? I come up here to lend a hand, and next thing I know—”

“He’s right, Matthew,” Bloom said. “I don’t like this tack you’re on. If I realized for a minute you were going to put the man through a third—”

“Thanks, Detective Bloom,” Davis said, turning to him at once, and nodding righteously. He still didn’t know there were two of us tracking his spoor, still didn’t know that Bloom was also waiting in the bushes to pounce.

“Would you like to call this off?” Bloom asked him.

“He can certainly stop answering questions if he wishes to,” I said.

“That’s right, Mr. Davis,” Bloom said, picking up on it immediately. “Nobody’s going to start thinking of you as a suspect here, instead of a friendly witness, if you decide to call off the questioning. That’s your right, Mr. Davis. You can stop answering questions here anytime you like.”

Bloom had just performed a triple somersault in midair and had caught the trapeze bar just before heading for a fall. According to the rules of Miranda-Escobedo, a police officer interrogating anyone isn’t supposed to offer any advice (and certainly not threats) as to whether a person should seek counsel, or answer questions, or stop answering questions, or even blow his nose, for that matter. Bloom hadn’t given Davis any advice at all, telling him only that he could stop answering questions whenever he wanted to, which was merely a repetition of the rights he’d earlier read to him. Nor had I openly suggested that a refusal to answer any further questions would constitute a presumption of guilt. All was innuendo in the sly little game of Mutt-and-Jeff we were playing. And try to prove innuendo on a played-back tape. But the seed had been planted.

“Shit,” Davis said. “I came up here to answer questions about Georgie , and now—”

“Of course, you did,” Bloom said.

“So what should I do?”

“About what?”

“Should I answer his questions?”

“I’m not permitted to give you advice on that,” Bloom said, covering himself again, everything neat and clean, everything in accordance with the Supreme Court decision.

Davis looked me straight in the eye.

“Sally Owen called on the Monday Michelle was murdered, yes,” he said.

“What time, would you remember?”

“Sometime in the morning.”

“How early?”

“Not too early. Eight o’clock or thereabouts.”

“And told you Michelle had been beaten up the night before?”

“Yes. Actually, she wanted to tell this to Leona , you understand, but Leona was out—”

“At eight in the morning?”

“Well... yes. We needed... orange juice. For breakfast. She ran out for some orange juice.”

“Which is when Sally Owen called.”

“Yes.”

“And told you all about Michelle’s beating.”

“Yes.”

“Did she tell you George Harper had been the one who’d beaten his wife?”

“Yes.”

“How’d she know this?”

“Michelle told her.”

“At eight in the morning?”

“I guess so. If Sally called at eight...”

“Then Michelle must have told her this before eight, isn’t that right?”

“I suppose so.”

He was lying like a used-car salesman. In my office that Monday morning, Michelle had told me she’d gone to see Sally Owen at nine o’clock. Sally couldn’t have known about the beating by eight, and neither could Davis. Unless—

“How well did you know Sally Owen?”

“Not particularly well.”

“But she chose to reveal this to you?”

“Well, she wanted to talk to Leona , actually.”

“But she settled for you.”

“Well, yes. Any port in a storm, right?” he said, and smiled.

“Did you know Sally well enough to have posed for her?”

“Posed for her?”

“For a painting she made?”

“A what?”

“In black-and-white?”

“I don’t know what you—”

“A painting of Michelle Harper going down on you,” Bloom said suddenly and flatly, and Davis realized in that moment that it had been a trap all along, even his friend and ally was in on the hunt, and the hounds were barking at his heels.

“What... what... makes you think Michelle would ever have... have...?”

“A woman named Kitty Reynolds was there the night Sally made her sketch,” Bloom said, no longer the friendly Jeff, hard as nails now, fire in his eyes and molten steel running through his veins. Davis looked into those eyes and must have known the party was over. But he hung in there, anyway.

“I don’t even know anybody named Kitty Reynolds,” he said.

“Why’d you leave Vero Beach?” Bloom snapped.

“I was sick, I told you.”

“Who phoned you there Sunday morning?”

“Phoned me? Nobody. Who says—”

“Your first sergeant says you got a call there at nine o’clock on Sunday morning. Who was that, Mr. Davis? Was it Michelle Harper?”

“Michelle? I hardly even knew Mi—”

“Calling to say she’d spilled the beans the night before?”

“No, no. Why would—”

“Calling to say her husband was on his way to Miami—”

“No, hey listen—”

“...looking for you?”

“No, that’s wrong. Really, that’s—”

“Looking to kill you, Mr. Davis?”

Davis said nothing.

“Were you afraid he’d found out about The Oreo, Mr. Davis?”

Davis still said nothing.

“Afraid he’d kill you because he knew about The Oreo?”

He was silent a moment longer. Then he said, “Oh, Jesus.”