“Mercy, mercy,” Wallace said, looking at his watch as he walked into the squad room and saw Peterson motioning him over to where we stood. “I didn’t realize you were holding a sunrise service today or I would have been on board hours ago.”

“Get in here. We need you to go to work on Pops right away. We’re going to have to get him downtown to be arraigned by the end of the day or some knee-jerk’s likely to void the arrest,” Peterson said. “I want you to see who you’re dealing with.”

The courts in New York have a very strict rule about the length of time during which a defendant may be held without the opportunity to appear before a judge for a bail hearing. The latest trend was the complete dismissal of the charges when police and prosecutors dragged their feet getting the suspect into the courtroom.

Peterson briefed Wallace on Bailey’s sheet and background. “Sounds like he ain’t goin‘ anywhere except back to his padded cell. Lemme see what he’ll give me this morning.”

Wallace picked up two cups of coffee, a bagel, and a doughnut. He walked to the still open door of the holding pen and greeted Austin Bailey, who was stretched out the length of the wooden bench. The prisoner-we’d all assumed his status as a “guest” had been downgraded to a custodial relationship during the night-sat up and appeared to smile as he talked to Mercer.

After the detective handed Pops his breakfast, he led him back down the hallway to the interrogation room.

Wallace emerged briefly to come back to Peterson’s office, pick up a pad, and suggest to us that we watch some of the conversation through the two-way mirror. “Don’t want to lose this good thing, baby,” Mercer said aloud, to no one in particular. Then he nodded at me. “Think Eddie Floyd, Coop,” he urged, smiling and whistling the chorus of the R amp;B singer’s only big hit, “Knock on Wood,” as he turned around to head back to talk with Bailey.

“Anybody Mirandize him since last night?” I asked, referring to the Supreme Court ruling that had crept into the criminal justice lexicon as a verb, a noun, and a landmark decision.

“Don’t worry, that’s what I’ll start with. I’ll read him his rights but I don’t think it’ll much matter. I’m not sure we’re talking on the same wavelength.”

Mercer returned to start his session with Pops. I walked over to the adjacent room and peered through the glass. Both men sat at the Formica-topped table in the bare room. Mercer was clean-shaven and well dressed, sitting erect and talking with Bailey, who was taking bites of his food and sips of his coffee. The older man was slumped over the table, his few front teeth nipping at the doughnut while he slurped from the cup without lifting it to his mouth.

Detective Wallace was warming up his subject, chatting about himself and his father, trying to find some level on which to connect with the broken figure he was hoping to engage in a coherent conversation.

I walked into the hallway, chastising myself for mingling the pity I felt when I looked at Pops with the outrage I had internalized because of Gemma Dogen’s murder.

Chapman came toward me and we reentered the room with the viewing window. Mercer had thrown away the paper cups and was eyeballing Austin Bailey across the table. He was explaining the right to remain silent to his target, using language and paraphrases that a second-grade child would have been able to understand.

I wondered if Mike was thinking, as I was, about the futility of this questioning. A killer with this kind of psychiatric history would necessitate a competency hearing and I was already cross-examining the shrinks who would testify for the defense that Arthur Bailey was unable to stand trial.

As we watched Wallace try to hold his subject’s attention, Bailey reached for the old black rotary phone on the end of the table. He was ignoring Mercer and picked up the receiver to dial a series of numbers.

“Hello, Ma? Yeah. Charlie’s back-”

Mercer’s long arm gently wrested the phone from Pops’s grip and replaced it on the hook.

“I wish he’d just let the guy talk,” I said under my breath to Chapman. “Now he’s going to claim he wasn’t allowed to make his phone call.”

“Coop, you know where that phone goes? It’s a friggin‘ intercom. You can’t dial out-it only goes to extensions in the station house. He’s not talking to his mother, he’s talking to Harvey the rabbit, for Chrissakes. I don’t even know why we’re wasting our time with this nonsense. Let’s just take him down to Criminal Court and get on with it,” Mike said, walking out of the airless room.

I followed him back to Peterson’s office. We were trying to figure out what to do next when Wallace joined us.

“He says he’ll talk to you, Cooper. Might as well come in and see what you think. I wouldn’t bother with your video unit. This is either an act worthy of the Ringling Brothers or he’s really deranged. I think this is one scene you wouldn’t want to show a jury on videotape.”

I shrugged my shoulders and retraced my steps, this time going into the interrogation room with Mercer.

Pops looked up at me when I closed the door behind us and offered a grin in my direction. “Ruthless and toothless, ma’am,” Bailey said by way of introduction. “That’s what the doctors always say about me.” Dead on.

Wallace told him who I was and why I was there as I pulled one of the chairs alongside Mercer’s position.

“I want to talk with you about some things that happened at the hospital, Mr. Bailey. D’you understand me?”

“I’m sorry about the hospital, ma’am. I’m sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

How much more frightening, it seemed to me, Gemma Dogen’s struggle must have been against a madman with whom she had been unable to reason when she was pleading for her life.

“That’s what I want to talk about. I want you to tell me what you’re so sorry about so I can tell the judge.”

It would be imperative for me to prove to a judge, and then to a jury, that Bailey had been given his rights in a manner he comprehended if there were any statements he was about to make that I wanted to introduce into evidence.

“Did Detective Wallace tell you that you don’t have to talk to me, Mr. Bailey?”

“Ido want to talk to you, lady. I haven’t talked to a nice girl since my wife passed on.”

“You see, you don’t have to answer any-”

“She talked to the knife, didn’t she? That doctor talked to the knife.”

A chill passed through me like a bolt of lightning. Was he talking about Gemma?

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t talk to me. Didn’t talk to nobody. She talked to the knife all right.”

Now I had to bring him back to a logical conversation. I had to finish some kind of Miranda warning but not lose his willingness to talk about the killing.

Suddenly Pops’s facial expression changed, his mouth drew tightly closed and his hands clasped against both ears as though responding to a loud noise. I leaned forward toward him as Mercer reached for one of his arms and pulled it away from the side of his head. Pops rocked back and forth in his chair, wailing for us to get him some Kleenex. Mercer nodded at me and I got to my feet, running down the hallway to grab some tissues from my purse. I returned with a handful of them and placed them in front of the prisoner, who smiled and began to shred them into tiny bits, ball them up, and press them in each ear.

He kept rocking as he stuffed the Kleenex, which hung in little strips past his lobes. “Charlie’s talking to me. See?” he said, looking at Mercer. “I told you that’s who tells me what to do. Nothin‘ you can blame on me ’cause everythin‘ I ever done is what Charlie makes me do.”

“Tell her who Charlie is, Pops.”

“He’s my brother, lady. Born the same day I was only he never left the hospital. Kept him there all these years, but he always talks to Mama and me. Every day. Tells me what to do.”