The Witness Page 7

  INDITE MURDERER LINELLI

  After a commercial, a series of interviews followed. On tape a Negro minister, long active in the civil rights movement, his voice sorrowful, his words sad, warned the city that the Negro community would no longer tolerate the murder of its sons. A Negro youth leader, his face twitching with rage, demanded that the Mayor and the Police Commissioner arrest Linelli for murder, or turn him over to the people on the streets. “We know how to take care of his kind,” he said.

  A familiar state senator, up for reelection, spoke with much feeling; he pleaded for calm and law and order. He assured his fellow citizens that justice would be done.

  The Police Commissioner appeared on the screen for a brief moment as he pushed his way past newsmen who lined his path from his limousine to Police Headquarters. He was surrounded by several tense, alert plainclothesmen who kept their backs to him and their faces to the crowd. As the microphones were pushed up to his face, the Commissioner shook his head. “We are currently investigating this matter. I have no further statement at this time.”

  “When will you have a statement, Commissioner?”

  “Where is Patrolman Linelli now, Commissioner?”

  “Is he going to be charged?”

  The Commissioner left a trail of unanswered questions as his men shouldered him into Headquarters.

  Reardon snapped off the television and said, more to himself than to Christie, “That poor bastard.”

  “Who? The Commissioner?”

  “Not the Commissioner,” Reardon snapped. “Linelli. He was set up. It was all planned and he doesn’t know what hit him.”

  Christie watched Reardon pick up the empty glass, then put it down again. “Mr. Reardon, did you have prior information?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you—did you know that something like this was going to happen?”

  “Anything might have happened, right? Look, Christie, you’re involved in this and God knows I didn’t expect you to be, but you are. Let’s kind of ride it out for a while and see where it goes, okay?”

  She considered for a moment, then took the glass from his hand. “Do you want another drink, Mr. Reardon?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I want. Another drink. And for God’s sake, Opara, pour the Scotch over the ice, will you?”

  TEN:

  AT FIRST BARBARA REARDON thought the voices were part of her dream. She felt an unnamable panic, which dried her throat, tightened her chest and churned deep inside her stomach. The chanting sounds stopped and she pulled herself up in the bed, trying to fight off the heavy sleep. She recognized the familiar voice of the television commentator, and while she realized she was awake, she could not quite grasp where she was.

  It was her father’s voice that cut through the heavy confusion. Though the dimensions of the room, outlined by the glow from the small lamp beside the bed, were unfamiliar to her, she remembered that she had been brought to the home of Christie Opara. There was a dull ache in her upper right arm. Her fingers lightly felt a small swelling. A doctor had come, injected her with something, and she had fallen into a sick, whirling sleep composed of sounds and pain and confused streaks of color and then total darkness.

  Billy Everett is dead.

  The words moved on her lips with startling clarity and shocked her into a cold and total consciousness. Billy Everett was dead and she had to tell her father about it. She moved across the room and into the hallway, puzzled by the difficulty of her movements. Her body did not seem to respond, as though it had been drugged separately from her brain, which was starkly alert and aware of the devastating fact:

  Billy Everett is dead.

  She was not aware of the thumping sound of her footsteps on the stairs, only that her father stood waiting below.

  Christie moved instinctively to assist the girl, but Reardon raised his arm, barring her way. He stood motionless watching his daughter. He seemed as frozen and as immovable as a statue, and Christie felt a terrible urge to shove him, to make him move, to make him reach out for the girl.

  As she reached the last step, Barbara’s face was nearly gray. There was a wide circle of white completely surrounding her mouth where the blood seemed to have deserted the skin. She stood unsteadily, one hand touching the post; then she blinked quickly, as though trying to focus her large, abnormally shiny eyes. She let her hands fall heavily to her sides and stood uncertainly.

  Reardon made no gesture, no move. He didn’t even seem to be breathing; yet, somehow, something communicated itself between the father and daughter, for at the exact moment that Barbara silently mouthed the word “Dad,” Reardon’s arms raised and the girl hurled herself against him.

  Christie turned away. She had never imagined that Reardon’s hard face could reveal his feelings so nakedly. He held his daughter tight against him for a minute; then, when her sobs grew stronger and less controlled, he thrust her back abruptly. “Okay,” he said, “take a couple of good deep breaths.” His daughter stared at him blankly and he grasped her shoulders and shook her roughly. “Barbara, snap out of it.”

  Barbara inhaled through her mouth and let the breath out in a series of gasping sounds, then let her father lead her to the couch, where she sat stiffly.

  “Well, you sure screwed things up today, didn’t you?”

  The girl’s mouth moved, but no words came.

  “You had to be part of it, didn’t you? Well, you were part of it, all right. Was it fun?”

  Christie, shocked by his tone, said, “Mr. Reardon, she’s still a little sedated and I think she’s still in shock. Don’t you think you should—”

  “I think you should cut out of this, Opara, right now!”

  Barbara turned toward Christie in confusion, but her father’s voice forced her to face him again.

  “Well, come on, tell me about it. Lots of excitement, right? You were right in the middle of a bit of history today, weren’t you?”

  Barbara’s voice was thin and hollow. “It was terrible. It was awful.” She tried to say more, but seemed unable to get any words out. Reardon kept jabbing words at her, not stopping for her to speak. Finally she stood up—found herself standing up, her face close to his, her voice finally her own. “Will you listen to me!” she demanded, stunned by the sudden silence, for her father had stopped speaking.

  “Okay,” he said calmly, “I’m listening, Barbara.”

  Her words came as her memories came, clear and terrible. “I saw a police officer shoot Billy Everett.” She turned her face to Christie. “I saw that, no matter what my father told you to tell me. I saw it.”

  Reardon’s face relaxed and his voice was almost gentle. “Barbara, why would the police officer shoot Billy?”

  The girl shook her head. “No, Dad, no. Don’t try that. I saw the policeman shoot Billy. Don’t try question-and-answer games with me. It won’t work.”

  Christie was surprised that he let it go. “Okay, we won’t talk about that part of it now. What else did you see today? What else did you learn today?” He reached out and turned his daughter’s face to his. “Come on, I want to hear you. I want to know if it was a worthwhile experience after all.”

  Though his voice was soft it was insistent, and Barbara knew that he was demanding that she tear into herself and that she would have to make certain admissions to him. More importantly, she knew he would force her to make certain admissions to herself. “It was terrible. The whole thing.”

  “Go on,” he insisted.

  She pulled his hand from her face, and Reardon saw a flash of anger. “All right. The people were like animals. Everyone seemed to go crazy. Everyone. There was a terrible violence all around us. We were part of it, too. Is that what you want to hear? All right, then, we were part of it too.”

  Reardon ran his hand over his eyes, dug at them roughly but said nothing.

  “We hurled bottles back at them and chains and stones back at them. It all seemed to fall apart, the whole thing. We became a mob, too.”
>
  “What the hell did you think would happen?” Reardon snapped. “A large group of people, unlawfully demonstrating with the sole purpose of interfering with a lawful enterprise, refusing to obey direct police orders, with weak leadership—”

  “Don’t you say anything about Billy Everett,” she warned him.

  “Was he in control of his people?”

  “Don’t say anything about Billy,” she repeated.

  “He didn’t know a goddam thing about the group of people he was supposed to be leading. He didn’t know that his own group had been infiltrated by a handful of dangerous people who were intent on turning this into the situation it has become. He didn’t know that his people could be turned so easily to violence, and that was his responsibility—to know.” He turned to Christie and realized she had followed what he had said fully. “Yes, we had information. But not good enough to have prevented what happened. Just enough to have anticipated some kind of trouble.” He turned back to Barbara. “Don’t shake your head at me. You don’t know anything about it. God damn it, you gave me your word you’d stay away from there today!”

  The girl’s voice was cold and slightly taunting. Her eyes flicked toward Christie, then back to her father. “Why did you bother to ask for it? You didn’t trust me anyway.”

  “Apparently I was justified, wasn’t I?”

  They glared at each other, father and daughter, and it occurred to Christie that they were evenly matched. The girl, fragile and pale, her black hair dark against the whiteness of her skin, her blue eyes luminous and angry. And Casey Reardon, radiating a kind of street toughness, his eyes deepening to a honey color, his head held to one side: neither of them giving an inch, both of them certain and sure.

  Christie reached out and touched his arm. “Mr. Reardon, I think we could all use some coffee.”

  “I think my daughter could use some more brain cells, not coffee,” he said shortly.

  Barbara sank back on the couch, weariness buckling her knees. Her small hands clenched into fists, trying to hold onto a rapidly fading sense of control. “I don’t know why things went wrong,” she said. “I don’t know why some of us responded to the violence. But I know that most of us didn’t. Billy didn’t. I know that the policeman shot Billy without any provocation and—” Barbara suddenly clamped her knuckles over her mouth, and for a moment her body was rigid and her breath came in an anguished cry. Casey pried her hand from her mouth, sat beside her, his hand on her face, but she pulled back from him. “My God,” she said, “Billy is dead. It’s not possible. Billy is dead.”

  “Get the coffee, will you, Christie?”

  She hesitated for a moment, but something about Reardon—not his voice, which was still harsh, nor his face, which was set and expressionless, but possibly his hands, which reached out and kneaded his daughter’s clenched fists—reassured her.

  He brushed Barbara’s dark, disheveled hair from her face and touched her cheek. “Daddy,” she said, her voice young and frightened, “Billy Everett is dead and I loved him. We all loved Billy. Billy was my brother and he’s dead.”

  Reardon cupped his daughter’s face in his hands and said softly, “Sure, baby. We’re all brothers and we all love each other and we all die sometime, right?”

  ELEVEN:

  AT FIRST, CHRISTIE THOUGHT she had gotten off at the wrong floor. The narrow corridor was filled with desks, some regulation, some improvised with boards set up on wooden horses. The men behind the desks were obviously detectives, their eyes narrowed and intent and wary upon the young people sitting across from them, their voices so soft and intimate that they did not interfere with interrogations taking place not more than twenty-four inches from them.

  Detective Sam Farrell, a large man with narrow hips and wide shoulders, plunged into the corridor from the door marked DISTRICT ATTORNEY—SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS. He collided with a desk placed immediately outside the office, rubbed his side absently without noticing that he had knocked a stack of papers to the floor.

  “Hey, Christie, how about all this, huh?” Farrell’s whisper carried the length of the corridor and his round, clear blue eyes circled the area. “Boy, are we jumping here today.”

  “Where’d we get all the extra people?” Christie asked, for she did not recognize the detectives.

  “Oh. Yeah, them. They’re Headquarters people. Mr. Reardon wanted some detailed statements from anybody we could lay our hands on. There’s more of them inside. We got everybody in the squad on this. Boy, the guys who were on vacation are fit to bust. Mr. Reardon recalled everybody.” Farrell was cheerful. His vacation had been in July, and instead of the usual deadening lull of August he had returned to a burst of activity that suited his need for constant motion. “Oh, yeah. Mr. Reardon’s been asking for you. Twice so far.” Christie glanced at her wristwatch; apparently Mr. Reardon had the squad in early, but he hadn’t told her anything about it. Farrell thumped her on the shoulder. “That was about an hour ago. He’s got some people in his office now, so it’s okay.”

  There was a soft humming sound of voices from every section of the squad office and Christie wandered from desk to desk, exchanging nods with the squad men, listening for a moment to the questions, gauging the climate of the interrogations so precisely that she could hear Reardon’s instructions as clearly as if she had sat in on the briefing: Keep it calm, keep it low-pitched, work around the main question, lead up to it.

  Marty Ginsburg sat hunched over his battered relic of a desk in the far corner of the office, his heavy face damp with perspiration. He seemed to be strangling beneath his tightly knotted tie, and his eyes kept flickering between his notebook and the large bosom of the young girl sitting beside him. The girl was dressed in a jersey shift that barely covered her thighs, but Marty wasn’t looking at the lower portion of the girl. His eyes were drawn irresistibly from the wide pale mouth down to her breasts which were outlined by the clinging jersey. They were pushing up out of the low wide neckline and Marty was finding it difficult to concentrate on his questions. He looked up at Christie, raised his eyebrows and shrugged. Christie glanced at the girl, then smiled to herself.

  “Boss was looking for you,” Marty told her, “but he’s tied up with some VIPs right now.”

  “So I’ve been told,” Christie answered.

  Marty wiped his forehead with the back of a heavy hand, and his eyes, as though they had a life separate and apart from his will, moved again, examining that incredible fullness before him.

  Detective Arthur Treadwell sat stiff and erect at Stoner Martin’s desk. It wasn’t often that he had occasion to be in possession of his partner’s desk, but Stoner wasn’t around and Detective Treadwell treated his opportunity with respect. His hands never touched the Royal, which was tuned and timed to Stoner Martin’s special rhythm and would rebel against the pecking and halting of any two-fingered typist. He jotted notes on a legal-size pad, neatly in small cramped legible swirls of green ball-point. His large round face, speckled with soft brown freckles, betrayed nothing, did not react in any way to the pretty young Negro girl who had just slapped the flat of her hand to the surface of the desk.

  “I was there, Detective Treadwell. You weren’t!”

  “Which is why I’m asking you questions, miss,” Treadwell said in his reasonable, noncommittal manner. “Hey, Christie, how you doing?”

  Christie noted that Art looked weary: the weariness of a forty-five-year-old man, with two teenage children, who had half warily and half delightedly become the father of an infant daughter two months ago.

  “How’s it going, Art? The baby, I mean.”

  Arthur exhaled between clenched teeth and shook his head. “Out of practice with all that, I guess. All night again.”

  “When the heat lets up, it’ll be better.”

  The witness tapped her fingers impatiently against the surface of the desk and Art turned back to her. Her angry dark eyes saw him only as a policeman, an enemy, incapable of spending a sleepless night because o
f an unhappy baby. “Sorry, miss, let’s get back to it. Oh, Christie, Mr. Reardon was asking for you.”

  “Yes. I know. You got something you want typed up? I understand he’s busy right now.”

  Gratefully, Detective Treadwell vacated the desk, leaving the Royal to Christie’s quick and experienced touch. She worked steadily for nearly an hour, watching the parade of students and witnesses who came to sit beside each detective, answering the questions in varying degrees of anger or eagerness. As she typed up a succession of statements, preparing them for signatures, Christie felt the heaviness of words pressing down on her. One after the other, they all claimed to have been witnesses to the shooting of Billy Everett and they all claimed to have seen the policeman shoot the boy.

  There was a sudden flurry of applause and then a low, affectionate cheer as three men walked from Mr. Reardon’s office and stopped momentarily in the squad room. The men, all familiar civil rights leaders, raised their hands, motioning the students back. The largest of the three men, an immense man, heavy but not fat, with pale tan skin and coal-colored eyes and a deep, eloquently resonant voice, faced into the room, waited for a timed moment, then held his hand out for silence.

  “My young friends,” he said in his familiar platform voice, “just answer all the questions put to you. It is up to you and to all of us to see justice done, and it will be done!”

  There was a growing cheer rumbling from the corridor, for his voice had carried, and his many admirers pushed into the office. Reardon’s door opened and he strode quickly to the side of the three civil rights leaders. Reardon looked tense and pale. He placed his hand lightly on the shoulder of the speaker, the Reverend Dr. Alfred Morse, and when the man turned expectantly, Reardon shook his right hand firmly and his lips smiled, but Christie saw that Reardon’s eyes were like frozen amber. Casually, still holding the minister’s right hand, Reardon turned him about toward the door and moved with him and the other two men. Photographers were waiting in the corridor and Reardon released the hand and turned his back as the flashing of photographers’ bulbs began and students rushed to be included. Reardon reentered the squad room and with a jutting of his chin signaled Christie into his office.