The Anatomy of Violence (5 page)

The hand lashed out again and the boy staggered. Blood fell from his chin in big, bright drops. “Louder,” said Koch. “And slowly. Say: Yes, Lieutenant, I have watched them pound meat in a butcher shop.”

“Yes … Lieutenant. I … have watched them pound meat in a … butcher shop.” A red mist sprayed from his lips with each word.

Koch turned to me. “There, Miss Crewes. He recited for you. Could this be the man?”

I felt sick. “I … can’t be sure.”

“Never mind being sure. Would you be willing to point this boy out to a jury and say, ‘This is the man who raped me’?”

“Hey!” The boy’s eyes flew wide. “I didn’t rape anyone. Lieutenant, you know damn well—”

“Shut up.” To the policeman, Koch said, “Put him back in his cage.”

As they went out the door, the boy protested to his escort in a whining, frightened voice. “Jesus, I wouldn’t rape anyone. What the hell good is that?”

When the door closed, Koch spoke to me. “I asked, Miss Crewes, if you would identify the boy in court as your attacker?”

“Not unless I were sure. I’m not sure.”

“Suppose he confessed?”

I glanced down at the bright trail leading to the door and met Koch’s eyes. “I don’t think that would mean anything.”

Koch studied his fingernails with exaggerated care. “Some girls, when they meet the man face to face, aren’t so sure they hate him.”

“Lieutenant,” daddy said, speaking in the precise, even tones he used when he was holding himself under control, “May I ask if there’s any point in this? Have you any evidence on this boy?”

“Ummmm, no.” Koch looked thoughtful as he lit a new cigaret from the butt of an old one. “Actually the boy told the truth. He wouldn’t rape anyone. His type—they pick out the easiest girls in town. They regard themselves as great lovers. I don’t know what kind of girl Ann is, but …” his voice trailed off and he shrugged. “There’s another reason the boy couldn’t have done it. He was in the station at the time yelling that his car had been stolen.”

Daddy’s voice was taut. “You knew this, and went through that interrogation charade?”

“For a reason, Mister Crewes. You said your daughter tried to hide her assault. That could have meant she knew who it was and wanted to protect him. Naturally she’d jump at the chance to pick a substitute.”

So the poor guy was beaten because of me. But it could have been worse. “Lieutenant, what if I’d picked him?”

“I like closed cases, Miss Crewes. That’s why the council brought me in last year. We’d have booked him, and your word would probably have been good in court.” He fumbled a pad from his pocket and gripped a pencil in a dimpled fist. “You’ll have other chances. Let’s dig into your past—old boy friends, boys you dated, boys you refused to date and why.”

I’d dated perhaps a dozen fellows besides Richard, and refused at least twice that many. It was hard to remember names and faces that hadn’t even mattered at the time. It was still harder to tie boys to dates.

I told all I could remember. Sometimes I wondered if Koch were listening. He kept his eyes on the pad and looked up only when I mentioned Jules Curtright.

“You turned down Jules Curtright?”

“I told him to call tomorrow. He asked as I was leaving the club.”

Koch scribbled something. “That gets him off the suspect list, if he was in the club when you left.” Then he started laughing. It was silent laughter, all inside him, swelling his cheeks and shaking his belly. “I just thought what a good spot you’re in to shake-down Jules Curtright.”

“What?”

“It’s been tried before. Girls figure he’ll pay just to keep his name clear.” He gave me a long, hooded look. “I’m glad you’re not that kind.”

Then the sergeant came in and gave him a note. Koch glanced at it, nodded, then looked at me as the sergeant left. “This Richard you were out with tonight, where is he now?”

I felt my stomach tighten. “Home, I guess.”

“Guess again. We’ve had his trailer staked out since your dad called. He isn’t in yet. I’ve ordered him picked up.”

“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.

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, you 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?”