Kincaid and Graul gave the man’s clothes a close inspection but found no stains or tears. His hands were clean and uncut, his face unscratched. Even so, he would have had time to clean up before the body was found. A radio car was called; the suitor and both cafeteria employees were sent downtown.
After more than two hours at the crime scene, the two detectives drove back to the office. Landsman had deposited the three arrivals in separate rooms, where in Landsman’s considered opinion they had all displayed rodent-like behavior.
Squirrel No. 1, the cafeteria employee who had given Graul the tip about the woman’s suitor, remained solicitous of the investigators and continued to suggest all kinds of motives that could have inspired the man to murder. The second cafeteria worker, Squirrel No. 2, seemed to know damn little about the murder of his boss other than that it happened. And Squirrel No. 3, the plant employee who had lusted for Ernestine, was now strangely indifferent to her violent death, as if it were just something else that happened at work that day.
Having spent an hour or so traveling between the offices and interrogation rooms, balancing one story against another, Landsman has already formed some opinions. Squirrel No. 2 in the large interrogation room? Brain-dead, thinks Landsman. Maybe brain-dead and guilty. Squirrel No. 1 in the small interrogation room? Too fucking helpful. Color him helpful and guilty. And Squirrel No. 3, waiting in the fishbowl, is an asshole, probably a guilty asshole at that.
Now, three hours into the investigation, Landsman watches Kincaid return to the room where Graul is still listening patiently to lies. It’s into early morning now, and Landsman has so far been the very picture of earnest patience. No shouting. No wild rant. No twisted homicide humor amid the chaos of criminal investigation.
Landsman’s restraint comes in small part because this is Graul’s second case and Landsman is trying hard not to crowd a new detective, and in larger part because Ernestine Haskins-like Latonya Wallace-appears to be a real victim. And whatever else two decades in the department have done to Landsman, they have at least taught him that difference between a killing and a murder. It’s one thing, after all, for a detective to cut up with the uniforms when they’re gathered around some dead yo; it’s another entirely to behave that way when the case involves a young wife with her blouse pulled up, her throat slit open and her husband waiting in the company lot. Even for Landsman, certain things remain decidedly unfunny. Likewise, despite his reputation, he does understand that there are moments when a rant does more harm than good. For hours, he lets Graul and Kincaid lead the charge, waiting until they’ve run out of fresh questions before beginning his own pursuit. Only in the earliest hours of the morning, when the cafeteria company officials call the homicide unit to reveal that the day’s receipts are missing from the kitchen strongbox-only then does Landsman revert to form.
“What the fuck is this bullshit I’ve been listening to?” he mutters, storming back down the hall.
Squirrel No. 1 looks up in dismay as Landsman bursts into the small interrogation room.
“Hey, what the hell are you telling us?”
“What?”
“This is a robbery.”
“What is?”
“This fucking murder. The cashbox is missing.”
The employee shakes his head. Not me, he assures Landsman, though you might want to talk to that other boy who works in the kitchen. He was always talking about stealing that money. He tried to talk me into it.
Landsman takes that in, pivots, then charges past the large interrogation room, where the dead girl’s suitor-now suddenly forgotten-is banging on the door, asking to go to the bathroom.
“Hey officer…”
“One minute,” yells Landsman, turning the corner into the fishbowl, where the second cafeteria employee has been sitting between interviews.
“You,” he tells Squirrel No. 2. “Get up.”
The man follows Landsman back down the corridor and into the small interrogation room, now vacant because Graul has returned the first employee to the fishbowl through the main office. Musical witnesses.
“What happened to the money?” says Landsman, full of menace.
“What money?”
Wrong question. Landsman jumps in the face of Squirrel No. 2, railing on about how much they know about the robbery, about how serious a crime this is, about how they’ve already heard about how he wanted to steal that strongbox, about how Ernestine Haskins discovered the theft and confronted the thief in the men’s room and was killed for the trouble.
“I didn’t take the money.”
“That’s not what your friend says.”
The man looks around the room for comfort. Kincaid and Graul stare back, impassive.
“What are you, stupid?” asks Landsman. “He put you in.”
“What?”
“He’s telling us you killed her.”
“I… what?”
What the fuck, thinks Landsman. Do we need some kind of visual aid in here? Slowly, painfully, Squirrel No. 2 catches on.
“He’s telling you that?”
“Sure is,” says Kincaid.
“He’s the one did it,” says the man angrily. “He’s the one.”
Fine, thinks Landsman, storming back down the hall. I can live with this. After all, a stone whodunit has just been reduced to a simple either-or proposition. Now there’s nothing better for a detective to do than put Squirrels No. 1 and 2 into the same cage.
But turning the corner into the aquarium, Landsman comes up too quickly on the Number One Squirrel, arriving just as the man is stuffing wad after wad of greenbacks inside the lining of his fellow employee’s winter jacket.
“WHAT… WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?”
The young man freezes, his hand caught very deep inside one very big cookie jar.
“WHAT THE FUCK… GIMME THAT!” sputters Landsman, grabbing the guy by the arm and tossing him out into the corridor.
The jacket lining is fat with fives and tens and twenties; the rest of the money is still in the man’s own jacket pockets. He looks at Landsman sheepishly as Graul and Kincaid come running, having heard the commotion.
Landsman shakes his head, amazed. “While we’re in there talking to one guy, this goofy motherfucker is sitting here on the couch stuffing the money into the other guy’s coat. I just walked in, and he’s shoving the fucking money into the lining like this…”
“Just now?” says Kincaid.
“Yeah, I walk up and he’s shoving bills into the lining.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Yeah,” says Landsman, laughing for the first time all night. “Can you believe it?”
Hours later, after the guilty man has confessed to murder in his fashion (“I had the knife to her throat, but I didn’t cut her. She must have moved or something”), Landsman sits in the main office and dissects the case as Graul types his warrant.
“All that bullshit he was telling us about this guy and that guy,” Landsman tells Kincaid. “I should have jumped on that earlier.”
Maybe so, and maybe there’s a lesson in that. When you’re working murders, preparation and patience and subtlety take you only so far; sometimes anything more than the usual amount of conscientious precision becomes its own crippling burden. Witness Tom Pellegrini, who spends the night of Ernestine Haskins’s murder as he has spent so many others in the last two months-searching for a rational approach to that which is unapproachable, for scientific exactitude in places where nothing is ever exact. The method to Landsman’s madness is a hard, tight logic formed in a crucible of impulse and sudden anger. Pellegrini’s madness, on the other hand, takes the form of an obsessively rational pursuit of the Answer.
In the annex office, Pellegrini’s desk is adorned with a dozen or so milestones from this lonely, quixotic campaign. Reading material on new interrogation techniques, résumés of professional interviewers and private companies that specialize in criminal interrogative planning, paperback books on subliminal messages and body language, even a few reports from a meeting with a psychic that Pellegrini arranged in the hope that extrasensory investigative techniques would yield more than the usual strategies-all of that has now joined the paper storm of the Latonya Wallace case file.