Even with the arrival of a living witness, however, Vincent Booker remained an open door, an escape hatch for Robert Frazier. As much as he was now convinced of Frazier’s guilt, Garvey had to admit that any good defense lawyer could take Vincent’s connections to the case and run wild in front of a city jury. Vincent was somehow involved-the.38 wadcutters in the soap dish made that clear-but as the killer, he simply didn’t add up.
For one thing, there were the nested clothes and the blade marks on the headboard above the bed in Lena’s room; the woman would not have undressed casually and stretched out on the bed for anyone but a lover. That played not to Vincent, but to Frazier. On the other hand, the same gun used to shoot Lena also killed Purnell Booker. What possible connection was there between Frazier and the father of a boy who sold Frazier’s cocaine? Why would anyone want to kill old man Booker? The man who killed Lena took cocaine from that bag of rice hidden in the bureau, but for what did he ransack Purnell Booker’s apartment?
Vincent is the key, and Garvey, looking at the boy beneath the barren white light of the large interrogation room, doesn’t see someone capable of the act. No way did this kid do what was done to his father. Murder, maybe. But not the dozen or more superficial blade wounds to the old man’s face. Even if Vincent could manage something like that with Lena, Garvey is certain that the kid doesn’t have ice enough in his veins to conduct a prolonged torture of his father. Few people do.
Vincent has been stewing in the cubicle for more than an hour when Garvey and Kincaid finally walk into the room and begin the monologue. Wadcutters in the soap dish, drug paraphernalia, jackknives, and your man Frazier’s putting you in for both these murders. Deep shit, Vincent, deep shit. Five minutes of this talk produce the desired level of fear, ten minutes produce a completed rights form, signed and witnessed.
The detectives carry the form out of the room and confer briefly in the hall.
“Hey, Rich.”
“Hmm?”
“That boy don’t stand a chance,” says Kincaid in a stage whisper. “You’re wearing your power suit.”
“That’s right. I am.”
Kincaid laughs.
“The dark blue pinstripe,” says Garvey, lifting one lapel. “He won’t know what the fuck hit him.”
Kincaid shakes his head and gives Garvey’s attire a last look. A Kentucky native, Donald Kincaid addresses the world in a loud, backwoods drawl and sports a tattoo of his initials above his left wrist. Garvey plays golf at Hilton Head and speaks of power suits; Kincaid trains hunting dogs and dreams of deer season in West Virginia. Same squad, different world.
“You want to have a go at him alone?” asks Kincaid as the two move back toward the interrogation room.
“Nah,” says Garvey, “we’ll gang-bang him.”
Vincent Booker waits for the second round with his back against the near wall, his hands cupped in the folds of his sweatshirt. Kincaid takes the far seat, facing the kid. Garvey sits between the two, closer to Vincent’s end of the table.
“Son, lemme tell you something,” says Garvey in a tone that suggests the interrogation is already over. “You have one shot here. You can tell us what you know about these murders and we’ll see what we can do. I know you’re involved in some way, but I don’t know how much, and the thing for you to think about is whether you want to become a witness or a defendant.”
Vincent says nothing.
“Are you listening to me, Vincent? You better start thinking about every fucking thing I’m saying here because a lot of shit is going to be coming down.”
Silence.
“Are you worried about Frazier? Listen to me, son, you better start worrying about yourself. Frazier’s been in here already. He’s trying to fuck you. He’s telling us about you.”
That gets it. Vincent looks up. “What’s Frazier sayin’?”
“What do you think?” says Kincaid. “He’s trying to put you in for these murders.”
“I didn’t…”
“Vincent, I don’t believe this motherfucker Frazier,” says Garvey. “Even if you’re involved in one or the other, I don’t believe you killed your father.”
Garvey pushes his chair closer to Vincent’s corner of the room and drops his voice to little more than a whisper. “Look, son, I’m just trying to give you a chance on this. But you’ve got to tell us the truth now and we’ll see what we can do with that. You can be at the defense table, or you can be on the prosecution side. That’s what we can do. We do a few favors now and then and we’re doing you one right now. Are you smart enough to see that?”
Probably not, thinks Garvey. And so the two detectives begin to lay it out to young Vincent Booker. They remind him that his father and Lena were both shot with the same kind of ammunition, that both murder scenes are identical. They explain that right now, he’s the only suspect who was known to both victims. After all, they ask him, what was your father to Robert Frazier?
At this, the boy looks up, puzzled, and Garvey stops talking long enough to reduce this abstraction to paper. On the back of a lined statement sheet, he draws one circle on the left-hand side of the page, then writes “Lena” inside the circle. On the right-hand side he draws a second circle with “Purnell Booker” written inside. Garvey then draws a third circle that intersects the circles of the two victims. Inside that third circle he writes “Vincent.” It’s a crude little creation, something any algebra teacher would know as a Venn Diagram, but it gets Garvey’s point across.
“This is our case. Look at it,” he says, pushing the sheet in front of the boy. “Lena and your father are killed by the same gun, and right now the only person who has any connection to both of the victims is Vincent Booker. You’re right in the fuckin’ middle of this thing. You think about that.”
Vincent says nothing and the two detectives leave the room long enough to allow the geometry to sink in. Garvey lights a cigarette and watches through the one-way window in the door as Vincent holds the crudely drawn diagram to his face and traces the three circles with his finger. Garvey shakes his head, watching Vincent turn the diagram upside down, then right side up, then upside down again.
“Look at this fuckin’ Einstein in here, will you?” he says to Kincaid. “He’s about the dumbest motherfucker I ever seen.”
“You ready?” says Kincaid.
“Yeah. Let’s do it.”
Vincent doesn’t look up from the diagram when the door opens, but his body gives an involuntary shake when Garvey enters and immediately begins another rant, his voice louder this time. Vincent can no longer manage eye contact; he grows smaller, more vulnerable with each accusation, a bleeder in the corner of the shark tank. Garvey sees his opening.
“You’ve got a knot in your fuckin’ stomach, don’t you?” Garvey asks abruptly. “You’re feeling like you’re going to be sick. I’ve seen a hundred or so just like that in here.”
“I seen ’em throw up,” says Kincaid. “You ain’t gonna throw up in here, are you?”
“No,” says Vincent, shaking his head. He is sweating now, one hand clutching the end of the table, the other wrapped tight in the hem of his sweatshirt. Part of the sickness is the fear of being pegged for two murders; part is the fear of Robert Frazier. But the greater share of what’s holding Vincent Booker on the precipice is a fear of his own family. Right here and now, Garvey can look at Vincent Booker and know, with even greater certainty than before, that there is no way this boy killed his father. He doesn’t have that in him. Yet the bullets connect him to the crime, and his rapid reduction to a speechless wreck in less than an hour of interrogation testifies to guilty knowledge. Vincent Booker is no killer, but he played a role in the death of his father, or at the very least, he knew the murderer and said nothing. Either way, there is something that cannot be faced.