“In which case, I’d like to suggest that we call off the questioning and go about our more productive endeavors. Detective Carella, Detective Meyer, it’s been a distinct…”
“He’s down the hall,” Carella said. “In the lieutenant’s office. Shall I ask him to come in?”
“Who is down the hall?”
“The super. Mr Zabriski. He remembers it was nine-thirty because that’s when he puts out the garbage cans each morning. The truck comes by at nine-forty-five.”
The room was silent for a moment.
“Assuming you do have this super…” Alexander said.
“Oh, I have him, all right.”
“And assuming he did see Mrs Keating entering the building at ninethirty…”
“That’s what he told me.”
“What exactly do you think happened in that apartment between then and ten-oh-seven, when she called the emergency number?”
“Well,” Carella said, “assuming she herself didn’t hang her father from that bathroom hook-”
“Goodbye, Mr Carella,” Alexander said, and rose abruptly. “Cynthia,” he said, “leave us hie yonder. Bob,” he said to her husband, “it’s a good thing you called me. Mr Carella here is fishing for a murder charge.”
“Try Obstruction,” Carella said.
“What?”
“Or Tampering with Evidence.”
“What?”
“Or both. You want to know what I think happened, Mr Alexander? I think Mrs Keating found her father hanging from that hook…”
“Let’s go, Cynthia.”
“… and took him down and carried him to the bed. I think she removed…”
“Time’s up,” Alexander said cheerfully. “Goodbye, Detec…”
“… the belt from his neck, took off his shoes and socks, and pulled a blanket up over him. Then she called the police.”
“For what purpose?” Alexander asked.
“Ask her, why don’t you? All I know is that Obstructing Governmental Administration is a violation of Section 195.05 of the Penal Law. And Tampering with Evidence is a violation of Section 215.40.
Obstructing is a mere A-Mis, but…”
“You have no evidence of either crime!” Alexander said.
“I know that body was moved!” Carella said. “And that’s Tampering!
And for that one, she can get four years in jail!”
Cynthia Keating suddenly burst into tears.
The way she tells it…
“Cynthia, I think I should advise you,” her attorney keeps interrupting over and over again, but tell it she will, the way all of them-sooner or later -will tell it if they will.
“The way it happened,” she says, and now there are three detectives listening to her, Carella and Meyer who caught the squeal, joined by Lieutenant Byrnes, because all of a sudden this is interesting enough to drag him out of his corner office and into the interrogation room. Byrnes is wearing a brown suit, a wheat colored button-down shirt, a darker brown tie with a neat Windsor knot. Even dressed as he is, he gives the impression of a flinty Irishman who’s just come in off the bogs where he’s been gathering peat. Maybe it’s the haircut. His gray hair looks windblown, even though there isn’t a breeze stirring in this windowless room. His eyes are a dangerous blue; he doesn’t like anyone messing with the law, male or female.
“I stopped by to see him,” Cynthia says, “because he really hadn’t been feeling too good these days, and I was worried about him. I’d spoken to him the night before…”
“What time was that?” Carella asks.
“Around nine o’clock.”
All three detectives are thinking he was still alive at nine last night.
Whatever happened to him, it happened sometime after nine P. M.
Her father’s apartment is a forty-minute subway ride from where she lives across the river in Calm’s Point. Her husband usually leaves for work at seven-thirty. Their habit is to have breakfast together in their apartment overlooking the river. After he’s gone, she gets ready for her own day. They have no children, but neither does she work, perhaps because she never really trained for anything, and at thirty-seven there’s nothing productive she can really do. BesidesShe has never mentioned this to a soul before but she tells it now in the cramped confines of the interrogation room, three detectives sitting attentively stone-faced on one side of the table, her husband and her attorney sitting equally detached on the other. She doesn’t know why she admits this to these men now, here in this confessional chamber, at this moment in time, but she tells them without hesitation that she never thought of herself as being particularly bright, just an average girl (she uses the word “girl”) in every way, not too pretty, not too smart, just, well… Cynthia. And shrugs.
Cynthia is not one of the Ladies Who Lunch, but she nonetheless busies herself mindlessly throughout the day, shopping, going to galleries or museums, sometimes catching an afternoon movie, generally killing the time between seven-thirty A. M. when her husband leaves for work and seventhirty at night, when he gets home. “He’s in corporate law,” she says, as if this completely explains his twelve-hour day. She is grateful, in fact, for the opportunity to visit her father. It gives her something to do.
