The Interrogation Read Free Page A

truck, Terry,” he said, relishing what he knew would be only a fleeting moment of authority over Terry Siddell.
    Siddell’s lips jerked into a scowl. “Fuck you, asshole.”
    Eddie gave no indication that he’d heard Siddell’s insulting reply. After all, what could he do about it? Punch the little shit’s lights out and get fired for it? No. He couldn’t do that. He’d gone that route before, been fired by the Parks Department and the Sanitation Department and even the private carting service where he’d worked before being hired by Old Man Siddell. No, he had to control himself now. For Laurie’s sake. Because she needed things.
    And so he swallowed his rage, grasped the black knob of the gearshift, stomped the clutch, and stirred the truck back onto the deserted avenue, his eyes locked on the street ahead, where, at the end of it, the great stone facade of police headquarters loomed.
    As the truck lurched forward, Eddie let his gaze drift up the side of the building. On the top floor, he could see a solitary figure in a lighted window, staring down at the darkening street, head bowed, shoulders slumped, as if beneath a weight he could not carry anymore.
    6:12 P.M. , Office of the Chief of Detectives, 227 Madison Street
    Chief of Detectives Thomas Burke peered through the arched window of his sixth-floor office, hands clasped behind his back, staring down at the city’s tangled streets. At the corner of Madison a garbage truck made a clumsy rocking turn, a spume of trash blowing behind it. Is that what dooms us in the end, he wondered, a million small neglects?
    He had no answer to this question, and he looked out across the city, where lights had begun to flicker in the distant apartment houses as the day workers returned to their rooms like birds to their nests. The image, he knew, was from one of his son’s poems. What had Scottie called the city? A rookery of scars.
    He closed his eyes briefly, tried once again to fathom his son’s fall. Where had it come from, Scottie’s utter lack of nerve, the way he’d curled into a ball of defeat and let life squash him like a can in the street? A little spine would have saved him, Burke thought, but there’d been no sign of that. No sign of muscle, sinew, the strength required to take a punch. He thought of Rocky Marciano, the championship bout that was coming up. That’s what Scottie had needed, a touch of the fighter in his soul. But Scottie had hit the mat in the first round, and never gotten up.
    When Burke opened his eyes again, the great bridgerose mutely before him, its stone ramparts towering above the unreflecting waters of the harbor. The bridge was often lost in spooky fogs, but this evening, as night fell, it glowed in a pale blue light. Burke thought of ghost ships in the mist, of the coffin boat that had disgorged some half-starved ancestor at the harbor door a century before, a scullery maid or landless tinker. Scottie had failed to grow the thick hide and sharp fangs of these wolfish forebears. If subjected to some final interrogation, Burke wondered what answer his son would give to the one question he should have asked him. Why didn’t you fight back?
    A knock at the door.
    He turned to face it. “Come in.”
    It was Commissioner O’Hearn, tall and erect in the doorway, all but gleaming in his dress uniform, the police-brass equivalent of a tuxedo. His luxurious black coat was folded neatly over his crooked arm, his cap held delicately in recently manicured fingers, and in that pose the Commissioner looked decidedly aristocratic, like an old European military man, trusted adviser to the Kaiser or the czar. Only the lilt of his voice betrayed his shanty-Irish roots.
    “Did you ever figure, Tom, that I’d end up wearing a monkey suit like this?” the Commissioner asked.
    “No, never,” Burke replied.
    What he remembered were two kids from the slums, throwing rocks in the river, leaping off the pylons, racing across the bridge fast as the