Just Cause (40 page)

The two men's eyes met and the reporter shook his head. I should have known you would show up. Everything else seems to be going wrong today.'

Brown gestured with his hand. 'Do I have to stand out here or may I come in?'

The reporter seemed to think this was funny, smiling and shaking his head. 'All right. Why not? I was going to come see you, anyway.'

He held open the door. The room behind him was Mack.

How about lights?'

Cowart went to a wall and flicked a switch. The detective stared around in surprise at the mess illuminated by the overhead light.

Christ, Cowart. What happened here? You have a break-in?'

The reporter smiled again. 'No, just a temper tantrum. And I didn't feel much like cleaning it up yet. It fits my mood.'

He walked into the center of the living room and found an overturned armchair. He lifted it up and set it on its legs, then stepped back and waved the detective toward it. He swept some papers from the seat of a couch onto the floor and slumped down in the space he'd made.

Tired,' Cowart said. 'Not much sleep.' He rubbed his hands across his face.

'I haven't been sleeping much, either,' Brown replied. 'Too many questions. Not enough answers.' That will keep one awake.'

The two weary men stared at each other. Cowart smiled and shook his head in response to the silence between them.

'So. Ask me a question,' he said to the detective, 'What's going on?'

Cowart shrugged. 'Too broad. I can't answer that.' Wilcox told me that whatever Blair Sullivan told you before he went to the chair, it fucked you up pretty good. Why don't you tell me?'

Cowart grinned. 'Is that what he said? Sounds like him. He's a pretty cold-blooded fellow. Didn't bat an eyelash when they turned on the juice.'

'Why would he? You can't tell me you shed a tear over Sullivan's exit.'

'No, can't say I did. Still…'

Brown interrupted. 'Bruce Wilcox just sees things differently from you.'

'Ah, well, perhaps,' the reporter replied, nodding. 'What would I know? So, you want to know what fucked me up, huh? Wouldn't listening to a man confess to multiple homicides shake your complacency a bit?'

'It would. It has.'

'That's right. Death is your line of business. Just as much as it was Sully's.'

'I guess you could say that, though I don't like to think of it that way.' Brown tried to obscure the sensation that the reporter had pinned him with his first move. He sat watching the disheveled man in his disrupted apartment. He wondered how long he could keep from grabbing the reporter and shaking answers from him.

Cowart leaned back, as if picking up an interrupted story.

'… Well, there was old Sully, talking my ear off. Old men, old women, young folks, middle-aged people, girls, boys. Gas-station attendants and tourists. Convenience-store clerks and the occasional passersby. Zip, zap. Just chewed up and tossed aside by a single wrong man. Knives, guns, strangled 'em with his hands, beat 'em with bats, chopped and shot and drowned. A variety of bad deaths. Inventive stuff, huh? Not nice, not nice at all. Makes one wonder what the world's coming to, why anyone should go on in the face of all that evil. Isn't that enough to listen to for a few hours? Wouldn't that account for my – what? Indecisiveness? Is that a good word? – at the prison.'

'It might.'

'But you don't think so?'

'No.'

'You think something else is bothering me, and you came all the way down here to ask me what. I'm touched by your concern.'

'It wasn't concern for you.'

'No, I suspect not.' Cowart laughed ruefully. 'I like this,' he said. 'You want a drink of something, Lieutenant? While we fence around?'

Brown considered. He shrugged, a single, why-the-hell-not motion and leaned back in his chair. He watched as Cowart rose, walked into the kitchen and returned after a moment, carrying a bottle and a pair of glasses and cradling a six-pack of beer under an arm. He held it up.

Cheap whiskey. And beer, if you want it. This is what the pressmen used to drink at my old man's paper. Pour a beer, drink a couple of inches off the top, and in goes a shot. Boilermaker. Does a good job of cutting the day's tension real fast. Makes you forget you're working a tough job for long hours and little pay and not much future.'

Cowart fixed each of them a drink. 'Perfect drink for the two of us. Cheers,' he said. He swallowed half in a series of fast gulps.

The liquor burned Tanny Brown's throat and warmed his stomach. He grimaced. 'It tastes terrible. Ruins both the whiskey and the beer,' he said.

'Yeah,' Cowart grinned again. 'That's the beauty of it. You take two perfectly reasonable substances that work fine independently, throw them together, and get something horrible. Which you then drink. Just like you and me.'

The detective gulped again. 'But if you keep drinking, it improves.'

Hah. That's where it's different than life.' He refilled their glasses, then sat back in his chair, swirling a finger around the lip of his glass, listening to the speaking sound it made.

'Why should I tell you anything?' he said slowly.

'When I first came to you with my questions about

Ferguson, you sicked your dog on me. Wilcox. You didn't make it real easy on me, did you? When we found that knife, were you interested in the truth? Or maybe in keeping your case together? You tell me. Why should I help you?'

'Only one reason. Because I can help you.'

Cowart shook his head. 'I don't think so. And I don't think that's a good reason.'

Brown stirred in his seat, eyeing the reporter. 'How about this for a reason,' he said after a momentary hesitation. 'We're in something together. Have been from the start. It's not finished, is it?'

'No,' Cowart conceded.

'The problem, from my point of view, is that I'm in something, but I don't know what it is. Why don't you enlighten me?'

Cowart leaned back in his seat and stared at the ceiling, trying to determine what he could say to the detective, and what he should not.

'It's always pretty much like this, isn't it?' he said.

'What?'

'Cops and reporters.'

Brown nodded his head. 'Uneasy accomplices. At best.'

'I had a friend once,' Cowart said. 'He was a homicide detective like you. He used to tell me that we were both interested in the same thing, only for different purposes. For a long time neither of us could ever really understand the other's motives. He thought I just wanted to write stories, and I thought he just wanted to clear cases and make his way up the bureaucratic ladder. What he would tell me helped me write the stories. The publicity his cases got helped him in the department. We sort of fed each other. So there we were, wanting to know the same things needing the same information, using a few of the same techniques, more alike than we'd ever acknowledge, and distrusting the hell out of each other. Working the same territory from different sides of the street and never crossing over. It was a long time before we began to see our sameness instead of our differences.'

Brown refilled his drink, feeling the liquor work on his frayed feelings. He swallowed long and stared over at Cowart. 'It's in the nature of detectives to distrust anything they can't control. Especially information.'

Cowart grinned again. 'That's what makes this so interesting, Lieutenant. I know something you want to learn. It's a unique position for me. Usually I'm trying to get people like you to tell me things.' Brown also smiled, but not because he thought it amusing. It was a smile that made Cowart grasp his glass a bit tighter and shift about in his seat.

'We've only had one thing to talk about, from the very start. I haven't had enough to drink to forget that one thing, have I, Mr. Cowart? I don't think there's enough liquor in your apartment to make me forget. Maybe not in the whole world.'

The reporter grew silent, then he leaned forward. 'Tell you what, Detective. You want to know. I want to know. Let's make a trade.'

The detective set his glass down slowly. 'Trade what?'

The confession. It starts there, right?' That's right.'

'Then you tell me the truth about that confession, and

I'll tell you the truth about Ferguson.'

Brown held his back straight, as if memory thrust rigidity into his body and his words.

Mr. Cowart,' he replied slowly. 'Do you know what happens when you grow up and live your life in one little place? You get so's you can sense what's right and wrong in the breeze, maybe in the smell of the day, the way the heat builds up around noon and starts to slip away at dusk. It's like knowing the notes of a piece of music so that when the band plays them in your head, you've already heard them. I'm not saying everything's always small-town perfect and there ain't terrible things happening. Pachoula isn't big like Miami, but it doesn't mean we don't have husbands who beat their wives, kids that do drugs, whores, loan sharks, extortion, killings. All the same. Just not quite so obvious.'

'And Bobby Earl?'

'Wrong from the start. I knew he was waiting to kill somebody. Maybe from the way he walked or talked or that little laugh he would make when I would pull his car over. He came from mean stock, Mr. Cowart, no different from a dog that's been bred for fighting. And it got all tarnished and banged-up worse living in the city. He was filled with hate. Hated me. Hated you. Hated everything. Walking around, waiting for that hate to take over completely. All that time, he knew I was watching him. Knew I was waiting. Knew I knew he was waiting, too.'

Cowart looked over at the narrow eyes of the detective and thought, Ferguson wasn't the only one filled with hate. 'Give me details.'

'None to give. A girl complains he followed her home. Another tells us he tried to talk her into his car. Offered her a ride, he said. Just trying to be friendly. But then a neighborhood crime watch patrol spots him cruising their streets at midnight with his headlights off. Somebody's committing rapes and assaults in the next couple of counties, but forensics can't match him up. A patrol car rousts him from outside the junior high one week before the abduction and murder, right before the end of school, and he's got no explanation for why he's there. Hell, I even ran his name through the national computer and I called the Jersey state police, see if they had anything up there in Newark. No instant winners, though.'

'Except Joanie Shriver turns up dead one day.'

Brown sighed. The liquor slopped over some of his anger. 'That's correct. One day Joanie Shriver turns up dead.'

Cowart stared at the police lieutenant. 'You're not telling me something.'

Brown nodded. 'She was my daughter's best friend. My friend, too.'

The reporter nodded. 'And?'

Brown spoke quietly. 'Her father. Owned those hardware stores. Got 'em from his father. Gave me a job after hours in high school sweeping out the place.

He was just one of those people who put color way down on his list, especially at a time when everybody else had it at the top of theirs. You remember what it was like in Florida in the early sixties? There were marches and sit-ins and cross burnings. And in the midst of all that, he gave me a job. Helped me when I went away to college. And when I came back from

Vietnam, he pointed me to the police force. Made some calls. Pulled some strings. Called in a favor or two. You think those little things don't amount to much? And his son was my friend. He worked in the store next to me. We shared jokes, troubles, futures. That sort of thing didn't happen a lot back then, though you probably didn't know that. That means something, too, Mr. Co wart, in this equation. And our children played together. And if you had any idea what that meant, well, you'd understand why I don't sleep much now at night. So I had a couple of debts. Still do.'

'Go on.'

Do you have any idea how much you can hate yourself for letting something happen that you could no more have prevented than you can prevent the sun from rising, or the tide from flowing in?' Cowart looked hard, straight ahead. 'Perhaps.' Do you know what it's like to know, to know absolutely, positively, with complete certainty, that something wrong is going to happen and yet be powerless to stop it? And then, when it does happen, it steals someone you love right from beneath your arms? Crushes the heart of a real friend? And I couldn't do a thing. Not a damn thing!'

The force of Brown's words had driven him to his feet. He clenched a fist in the air between them, as if grasping all the fury that echoed within him. 'So, get it now, Mr. Cowart? You beginning to see?' 'I think so.'

So there the bastard was. Smirking away in a chair.

Taunting me. He knew, you see. He thought he couldn't be touched. Bruce looked at me, and I nodded. I left the room, and he let the bastard have it. You think we beat that confession out of Robert Earl Ferguson? Well, you're absolutely right. We did.'

Brown slapped one hand sharply against the other, making a sound like a shot. 'Wham! Used the phone book, just like the bastard said.'

The detective's eyes pierced Cowart. 'Choked him, hit him, you name it. But the bastard hung in there. Just spat at us and kept laughing. He's tough, did you know that? And he's a lot stronger than he appears.' Brown took a deep breath. 'I only wished we'd killed him, right there and then, instead.'

The detective clenched his fist and thrust it at the reporter. 'So, if physical violence won't work, what's next? A little bit of psychological twisting will do the trick. You see, I realized he wasn't afraid of us. No matter how hard we hit him. But what was he afraid of?'

Brown rose. He pulled up his pants leg. 'There's the damn gun. Just like he said. Ankle holster.'

'And that's what finally made him confess?'

'No,' Brown said with cool ferocity. 'Fear made him confess.'