April Smith - Good Morning, Killer

I first glimpsed Devon County through the heavy mesh of the booking cell. He was a hefty guy, overweight, with a shaved head and goatee, looking more like a con than a cop. It was barely dawn; he wore a sweatshirt and baggy warm-up pants; you might have thought he was out for a run, except for the crutch. He had become a lawyer because he had been forced to retire from the department on disability after a horrific crash during a high-speed chase. He made legendary use of the crutch in the courtroom.

There was to be no more “special handling.” Devon would remain outside the cell, I would be inside, and we would speak through yellowed mesh. When I protested there would be no privacy, Devon said that’s the way the lawyers liked it.

“You know why they have this double screen?” he asked. “So you can’t spit on your attorney.”

“I’d laugh if I knew how.”

“We’ll try to improve the jokes.”

“Devon,” I said right off, “you have women on your staff. Shouldn’t I have a woman represent me?”

He shook his head confidently. “You would suffer the backlash of the prosecution’s theory.”

“You already know the prosecution’s theory?”

“They will claim the obvious, which is you went after him in a fit of jealous rage. ‘Fatal attraction.’”

“Not true—”

He held up a hand. “ Not now. You need a strong, macho guy as a counterpoint to all the cops they’re going to parade out, and I’m as close to macho as we’re going to come up with in the middle of the night on a Thursday.” Nor was he unhappy they had made me wait “while suffering unduly” for medical care. Another bullet in the macho ammo belt. I was feeling better after a couple of painkillers and a shot of penicillin from a spiffy young Asian doctor with beautiful shoes. They even gave me a cup of raspberry Jell-O. The bare outdated first-aid room in the jail had seemed like a Club Med vacation.

“You understand that you are being charged with attempted murder. You are looking at potential penalties of twenty-five years to life.”

Incomprehensible.

“Apparently the condition of the victim, Detective Andrew Berringer, has been upgraded to stable.”

“I wasn’t trying to kill him.”

“Stop!”

I cringed.

“You don’t know me, and I don’t know you.” He was speaking intently, close to the mesh. “We need to have a truthful, but very delicate discussion. The best way I can help you is if we talk about what happened very carefully .” “I understand.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, you need to preserve your ability to use me as witness on my own behalf. You can’t put me on the stand if you know I would perjure myself.”

“Good. So let me ask the questions in my own peculiar way. This is not a tell-me-what-happened. It’s not like interrogating a suspect, all right? We have to do this surgically.”

“You’re talking to a pro,” I assured him. “Although it might not appear that way, under the circumstances.”

“I never forget who I’m talking to,” Devon said.

He produced a leather binder and a Cartier pen with a blue stone in the cap. In the following weeks, I would watch that stone as it whipped legal arabesques around my words.

“If the police were claiming that you were in apartment ten in Tahiti Gardens at nine-thirty p.m. Monday night, would they be wrong?”

“No, they would not be wrong.”

“If they claimed you fired a weapon at Detective Andrew Berringer, would they be wrong?”

“They would not be wrong, but — could I ask one thing?”

He waited.

“Is there some legal way I can stay involved with my kidnap investigation?” I told him about the Brennan case and how close we had come to capturing him.

“Not when you’re suspended from the Bureau, darlin’.”

“The Bureau’s going to drop the ball.”

“Nothing you can do about it.”

“Any way I can stay in touch with the victim?”

“Why would you want to stay in touch with the victim?”

“She’s a fifteen-year-old girl. Her world just ended. I don’t want to personally let her down.”

“Have you been very close to this little girl? Helped her through …” He gestured with the pen, indicating spirals of unnamed suffering.

“Yes.”

He wanted to know more. After I described our morning talks and how Juliana had opened up to me, his belly jumped and he belched like a bald, satiated Roman emperor, and went back to the shooting.

“If the police were to claim you were a frustrated, jealous woman who was trying to avenge a betrayal by her lover, would you have some other explanation? Yes or no?”

The blue-stoned pen tapped against the pad.

“Yes or no?” he prompted.

“Can we stop playing games and can I just tell you—”

“Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“What would be your explanation?”

“I wanted to stop him.”

Devon nodded encouragingly.

“You wanted to stop him from what?”

“From hurting me any more. Physically hurting me.”

“Would that involve some kind of self-defense on your part?”

“Yes, it would.”

“Would it be true to say you shot him in self-defense?”

I had seemed to lose direction, lost in some elastic loop of time.

“Yes.”

“Did you feel in physical danger?”

“I just wanted him to leave.”

“Did he leave?”

“No.”

“What did he do?”

“He attacked me. He wouldn’t stop. I kicked him in the groin and he backed off, and I warned him, but he came back at me. I dropped to the gun. I warned him again. I started shooting. We fought over the gun, and he got it away from me. He never stopped once he started coming at me, and I kept pulling the trigger.” “So he kept coming.”

“He did.”

“Even when you warned him, showed him the gun?”

“That’s right.”

“Even when you shot him, he didn’t run, or take evasive action?”

“No.”

“Nothing was going to stop him.”

I was unaware of everything except Devon’s rapid breath on the other side of the mesh, intimate as a priest’s.

“Why,” I said, faltering, “didn’t he stop?”

“I think it’s very possible,” Devon answered, “Detective Berringer went to your apartment with the intention of killing you.”

“Killing me ?”

“You thought it was the other way around?”

“I was the one with the gun.”

“Yes,” said Devon, “that was the surprise.”

After a moment I shook my head, as if waking from a dream.

“You’re kidding, right? This is one of those outrageous legal arguments—”

“You can’t be objective,” Devon said. “I can. All I hear is you blaming yourself. It is absolutely not out of the question that this cop, who is used to violence, possibly depressed, despondent, getting older, close to retirement, financial problems, high on drugs, who knows what, finally resents the demands made on him by all the women in his life, and goes over there and takes it out on someone.” “Very creative,” I said tiredly. “You should be a writer,” totally forgetting that Devon County was also a celebrity author with two thrillers on the best-seller list.

I climbed out of the pool, dizzy with all that flip turning. It was just a few steps from the scorching patio to the cool kitchen, with its light cabinets and vinyl daisy tile and microwave as big as a boxcar. The refrigerator had cold water in the door. Inside the walk-through pantry there were marshmallows and chocolate bits you could chug out of the bag, and a shelf of neon-colored breakfast cereals.

The boys drank Gatorade and powdered fruit punch; there were flats of sodas and wholesale sacks of chips in the garage. All this was new to me, and I was as curious about the stand-alone freezer stocked with chicken nuggets, hot dogs, twelve-pack Klondike bars, whole chickens and racks of ribs as I would have been visiting a family in Japan. I never realized you could buy such huge tubs of peanut butter or cans of soup big enough for the entire fourth grade.