The Anatomy of Violence Read online

  “Rich didn’t do it.”

  His eyes crinkled. “I thought you didn’t know who it was.” He held up his hand. “Now, sit down. I didn’t say he did. But I want you to tell me what went on between you two this evening—in detail.

  It was easy to remember; but this time I had Koch’s full attention. His questions were sharp little hooks that raked my story and pulled out facts I hadn’t felt were important. Between questions he scrawled in his notebook. Little pinpoints of excitement appeared in his dark eyes.

  A new fear grew inside me. Rich had told me how he’d interviewed a prisoner, then wrote a story about the stone steps at the city jail—the ones all prisoners seemed to fall down after interrogations. Koch had said nothing, but the police blotter had been strangely mislaid the next few times Rich came to read it. He’d filed a whimsical story, pointing out that it was a public record and should be restored to the public. Someone, he suggested, was sitting on it; someone who carried a lot of weight on the force. The story was killed and Rich transferred to general assignments.

  “But it isn’t over,” Rich had said. “Koch wouldn’t let duty interfere with a personal grudge. If I park crooked, he’ll haul me in for reckless driving. If I stumble on the sidewalk, I’ll be charged with being drunk in the public view.”

  Koch wrote for a minute after I finished, then dropped the pencil in his pocket and smiled. “So he picked a fight with Curtright? That sounds like him.”

  “He felt he was being pushed,” I said. “He hates to be pushed.”

  “Too bad.” Koch smiled again. “Would you testify against Richard if we proved he did it?”

  I’d been expecting the question. “You can’t prove it.”

  “We will.” He held out the notebook.

  I started reading his cramped scrawl. He’d filled three pages—not with names and dates of old boy friends—but with his case against Richard.

  Attacker was strong. Violent. Mimicked small boy.

  Knew victim’s name. Knew car and route home.

  (Out of towners not likely.)

  Small mechanical problem to lift rotor cap. Any boy who owns car could handle.

  FIRST RULE OF RAPE: FIND FRUSTRATED BOY FRIEND.

  R. is strong. (L. says he broke free of officers on club duty)

  R. violent. (Tracer may turn up record of voilence. Would explain cop-hating, too.)

  R. mimicked country boy at club. (Check on dramatic training. Doubtful. Probably a natural talent.)

  OPPORTUNITY: Only R. knew L. wouldn’t find him in club parking lot. Knew she’d rather walk than beg ride. Took short cut. (Or stole car? Double search for blondie’s car. R. may be in it.)

  Where got tape? (Type used in every first-aid kit. Check purchases.)

  MOTIVE: Dated L. over year without sex relations. Proof: L. was virgin. Proposed as last resort. Turned down. L. leaving for N.Y., thus his last chance. Asked L. to trailer. She refused. R. got drunk, decided on force. Succeeded, then panicked and tried to kill. (Temporary insanity plea? Not with rotor cap and tape.)

  CONVICTION? R. was drunk. Alibi if any easy to break. Confession possible. Testimony of victim not necessary, since L. admits failure to recognize, Public opinion strong. Max. penalty probable.

  On the way home I said, “He’s trying to frame Rich, Daddy. He hates him.”

  “I don’t know.” Daddy cleared his throat. “I wish you hadn’t torn up his notebook. Koch is not the jolly fat man you get when athletes go to flesh. He’s probably been fat all his life—with all the teasing and derision that obesity involves. His hatred for people goes deep. Now I’m afraid he hates you, too.”

  “That makes it even,” I said, thinking of the notebook. “Do you think it was Richard?”

  “I’m … not thinking, Laurie.” He raised his hand, then let it fall on the steering wheel. “I’m trying to regard this crime as calmly as humanly possible. If I don’t—Well, you saw me with the gun. Civilized people don’t go down the list of crimes and say, ‘This one I’ll give to the law, and this one I’ll avenge myself.’”

  “What about Koch?”

  A smile tugged at his lips for an instant. “You have your mother’s blindness to abstract values, Laurie.” He stopped beside our house, leaned across me and opened my door. “I’m going now to find Captain Riemann—sober, I hope. He’s technically head of the police department, even though the council gave Koch control when they brought him in.”

  I got out and leaned on the window. “What if he can’t do anything?”

  “Laurie, just go in and go to bed. I’ll wait until you get in and lock the doors.” When I didn’t move he sighed. “If Riemann can’t help, we’ll work with Koch, somehow. Calling in the police is like jumping off a bridge. You can’t change your mind halfway down.”

  Walking to the house I thought, This is where I came in. But I’d held the case in my own hands then; now it was turning into a community problem. It’s still between the two of us.

  I slept—but only for minutes, it seemed. Then I was wide awake, and the silence of the house pressed against me. I pulled a robe over my shorty pajamas and went to the window. A strip of gray threw a faint light on the slope of our back yard and showed the wasteland of sand and willows that reached from there to the river.

  False dawn. I stared hard into the murk to be sure. Something had moved, near the fence. A broad shadow moved slowly toward the house. One step. Pause. Another step. Too thickset for daddy.

  Blood pounded against my temples. So soon?

  In the hall, I heard snoring from Gwen’s room, soft as a whisper. Daddy’s room was empty, but his gun was where he’d left it. It’s lightness surprised me, after Rich’s army .45. Now … press this, pull out the magazine. There they are little gray devils. I replaced the magazine. I pulled the carriage and released it; heard the soft, oily click. Now the safety, forward or back? The red dot showed; it was ready.

  My senses had sharpened. I could feel the grain of the weed on the stairs against my bare feet, then the separate fibers of carpeting in the living room and the cracks in the kitchen linoleum. I jumped as the refrigerator whirred, then hummed.

  Through a kitchen window, I saw him. He’d reached the big tree just below my bedroom window. As I watched he took a step then paused. I rested the barrel on the window ledge.

  I aimed just below the widest part of the shadow and touched the trigger. “Who’s there?”

  “Laurie?” The voice was low and hoarse. My heart pounded as he took a step toward me, but my hands were steady and I kept the gun pointed at him. “Who is it?”

  He cleared his throat and spat. “Captain Riemann, Laurie. Just lookin’ around. You got too much good cover around here.”

  He stepped from beneath the tree and I saw his shaggy white hair and the gleam of a badge. My knees were weak as I put the gun in a kitchen drawer. I felt relief, and a vague sense of letdown.

  “Laurie, come out if you’re dressed. Wanta ask you something.”

  “Where’s daddy?”

  “Around front.”

  I pushed open the door and sat on the cement steps, pulling the robe together over my knees.

  Captain Reimann grunted and lowered himself beside me. “See what you get with amateurs runnin’ the force? Koch never even thought of your protection.” In the poor light, Captain Riemann’s face had a blunt handsomeness. You couldn’t see the pouches and ruptured blood vessels that overlaid his clean features.

  “Laurie, tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have known about this case until your dad told me, and if a couple out-of-town reporters hadn’t woke me out of a sound sleep.”

  Reporters? Already the ripples had spread beyond the community.

  “Had to get the story from the desk sergeant. Koch wouldn’t tell me a da—a darn thing.” He mumbled, slurring his consonants, and I wondered what sort of sleep he’d been in. “Koch treated me like I was already on pension. But it’ll be ten years before—”

  “Captain Riemann, yo
u said you wanted to ask me something.”

  “Oh, yeah, I did.” He cleared his throat, spat, and moved his feet. “Uh … you seen a doctor yet?”

  “I don’t need a doctor, do I?”

  “Well, if they catch it a half hour afterward they can help you. You know, make sure you don’t have a baby? You should’ve been taken straight to the hospital.”

  I felt nauseous, thinking of the unwanted seed inside me, robbing my flesh and bone for its own. “Why didn’t Koch do it?”

  “Ah …” He cleared his throat and spat again. “Koch shoulda stayed in New York as a private keyhole peeper. He can’t run a case without me. He should at least had a doctor certify you’d been raped; now he’ll have trouble in court. Uh, you mind?” He pulled a bottle from his hip pocket and unscrewed the cap.

  “No,” I said after hearing the gurgle. “Captain, is it too late for a doctor?”

  He belched softly as he screwed on the cap. “Stuff keeps me awake, Laurie, or I’d never touch it.” He set it between his feet. “Yeah, it’s too late for the baby angle. But you’d be smart to go anyway, in case of … contagious diseases. ‘Course, if it was the boy they brought in while I was at the station—”

  “They brought in someone?” I pushed disease and babies into the back of my mind. “Was it Richard?”

  “Richard? A big, short-haired blond with more guts than good sense?” He loosed a short, barking laugh. “They pulled him in fightin’ like a bull caught in a barbwire fence. He broke loose in the office and was on Koch like a wet shirt. Closed one eye and smashed his cigaret into his teeth before Sergeant Johnson got to him with his stick.”

  “Oh, lord. Did Rich say anything?”

  “What I heard him say I wouldn’t repeat. And I wasn’t there when he woke up. After Johnson put him out, Koch grabbed the stick and tried to get in a lick. I stepped in then and said it’s a poor cop who clubs a man when he’s out cold. Koch went for me then and I eased out the door, not wanting to mess in any more after what the council told me last year.”

  “And you don’t think Rich did it?”

  Captain Riemann had been talking like a boy describing a close ball game; now his voice grew wary. “What makes you think that?”

  “You’re here. Richard’s in jail.”

  “Hold on, Laurie.” His voice took on a false heartiness. “I’m only here because your dad was worried. We worked together on a lot of station robberies and I know he ain’t a guy that sees things under the bed. But now … who did what—that’s been out of my jurisdiction since they took me off the Eileen case last year.”

  I looked down and curled my toes on the step. “Koch said he wouldn’t need a statement from me. Now he’ll beat a confession out of Richard.”

  “Now, Laurie …” He patted my knee then jerked back his hand as my robe fell away. I drew it over my knees again.

  “You mind?” He was unscrewing the cap again. “I wouldn’t touch it except it calms my nerves.”

  When I didn’t answer, he drank and sighed. “Laurie, I ran this force long enough to learn a rape is like no other kind of case. First you get a girl who’s a hysterical witness and she’s a liability in court. You don’t seem like the type, Laurie, but maybe Koch don’t know you like I do. Most of them don’t know black from white.

  “And not only the girls get hysterical. I remember one case …”

  As he talked of his old cases, an idea grew in my mind. Captain Riemann knew the routine of crime detection. His pride had been hurt when Koch replaced him. And I needed help.

  “Haven’t you noticed that my case is a lot like Eileen’s?” I asked.

  “Eileen? But that was murder. Wait! She was raped, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she was Miss Stella exactly a year ago.”

  I waited.

  “Let’s see, the M.O. She was strangled. Ah, he tried to strangle you, too.”

  “Yes.”

  He chuckled. “You wonder how I could tell that? Your voice is hoarse, like it hurt you to talk.” He fell silent, looking out over the back yard. “You know, if they’d given me a couple more weeks—”

  “They said Koch was brought in because you couldn’t solve it.”

  “They said that?” He was indignant, then moody again. “Koch’ll never solve it. His theory is it was somebody just passing through and we’ll just have to wait until he does it again in some other town. Far as Koch is concerned, the Eileen case is dead as Eileen.”

  This time his silence lasted several minutes, and I found it hard to wait. He stood up and began pacing in front of me. Then he stopped, put his foot on the step, and leaned forward. “Did he tie you up?”

  “Tape.”

  “That’s it!” He straightened and smashed his fist into his palm. “That’s why the hair on her wrists was pulled out by the roots. By God! The same man!”

  The soft, beery wheeze was gone from his voice when he leaned forward again. “How long did you know Eileen?”

  “All my life. We moved onto her block when I was five. She was six. Ann, Eileen and I were friends just about all of our lives.”

  He nodded. “Sometime, then you and Eileen might of got mixed up with the same man.”

  A lot of them, Captain. I’ve been trying to think …”

  He sat down. “Can you think of anything that happened in the months before she was murdered that might be important?”

  I told Riemann everything that I could remember.

  Shortly before she was murdered, Eileen had stopped by my house in a new convertible. It was a bright blue with a shine to match her eyes. “Like it?” she said. “It’s mine.”

  “Nice. How’d you get it?” I had asked her.

  “From a man.” She pushed a button. “See? Power shift.” She pressed another button and a window went up. “Power windows.” She bounced on the seat and her laughter bubbled. “Power seats, everything!”

  “Yes. How’d he happen to give it to you?”

  She smiled a slow smile that made her eyes go narrow. “Call it gratitude.”

  “You could call it something else.”

  “Do I look like a whore?” Here eyes were wide and innocent, and her oval face, faintly freckled across the bridge of her nose, was that of a sixteen-year-old. “Laurie, it happens that men own the world. I just want my share, that’s all.”

  We split up over the car. She wanted me to keep it for her; I told her I couldn’t conceal the source any better than she could. She took it to another town and sold it, and I heard no more from her until a while later when she called and we got together.

  A few weeks after we’d resumed our friendship, Eileen asked me to stay out of the Miss Stella contest for that year. If I did, she’d have a chance to win, then she’d wait and help me win the next year. I promised in the warm glow of reestablished friendship.

  Later I was sorry I’d promised, but Eileen didn’t let me forget it. She called the morning of the contest and asked me to help her get ready.

  She was wearing the dress when I got there: feather-soft lace, icy blue against the warm, golden tan of her shoulders. “Eileen, you’re beautiful,” I had said.

  “It’s imported,” she said, looking in the mirror. “Two hundred and fifty bucks.”

  “Who gave it to you?”

  Her lips pouted a moment, then she brightened. “Laurie, after today, when I go to New York, I can do it your way.”

  “Will you?” I didn’t believe her. “We should put some net over the front.”

  “No, look.” She bent at the waist, put her palms on the floor, and rocked her shoulders. “See? They don’t fall out. Two hundred and fifty bucks, Laurie.”

  “It isn’t that. Here.” With a finger I touched the skin where the sun had drawn out speckles of pigment, like dark confetti sprinkled between her breasts. “A little net will hide them.”

  We put the net on and tucked it in her cummerbund.

  “You should have something of mine—for luck.” I s
aid.

  “I have.” She raised her dress and showed me the panties; sheer light blue with the word Saturday stitched in bright blue. “That’s part of the set you gave me last year.”

  “Well …” I took a gold chain off my ankle and fastened it around hers. “This’ll make certain.”

  At the club that night, Eileen joined Rich and me. She was alone. She seemed hysterically gay, and danced several times with Richard. Then, while they were dancing, she left him on the floor, came back to the table and picked up her purse. She didn’t speak to me, just walked out with her fingers tight on her purse.

  I asked Rich what she’d said when she left him. He shrugged and looked puzzled. “Said, ‘Right now is a good time to stop it.’ I thought she meant me, but she walked away.”

  Eileen didn’t come back. Once I looked out and saw rain pounding on the sidewalk. Later, Rich and I went to look at the pool Jules Curtright had given the city. They hadn’t filled it yet. Walking around it in the poor light, I saw something on the bottom. Rich ran to find the floodlights while I waited.

  The lights came on, and the picture burned into my mind like an overexposed photograph. Eileen’s face was dark now, her blue shoes awash in two inches of rain water. The gold chain I’d given her still gleamed around her right ankle. The blue dress was ripped down to her waist. Below the sharp line of tan, her breasts looked like snow in the harsh light. And the net—I screamed when I saw it rolled into a narrow band, still tight around her throat.

  Telling it had made it real, and I could almost smell again the rainwashed concrete and hear my own distant scream.

  “Her hair wasn’t wet,” said Captain Riemann. “I figure he killed her somewhere then dumped her in the pool after the rain.”

  “Footprints?”

  “A couple. A guy makes a pretty deep print with a body on his back.” His face was set hard in the cloudy, colorless dawn. “She never told you where she got the car and dress?”

  “She was good at changing the subject.”

  “Yeah, but what ties you two together? Did you take any guys for—” He stopped and shook his head. “No. Eileen either tried to cut him off, or he got tired of paying off.”