The Interrogation Read Free Page B

wind that hummed through its steel cables, playing them like massive harp strings. They’d sneaked into movie houses, stolen apples from peddlers’ carts, both of them orphaned by fathers dead from drink and raised by mothers increasingly bitter, looking every day more ragged and used up, like the clothes they washed. Then the Dealer ofthe Cards had unexpectedly switched the deck and sent them Officer Horace Miles, the beat cop who’d taken two street urchins under his wing, offered a way they might escape the iron grip of Harbortown. You two don’t have to end up like the rest of this scum, you know.
    “I’ve never learned to like them, Tom.” The Commissioner shook his head. “These fancy balls and dinners. Me? I’d rather go home, put my feet up, maybe listen to a Patti Paige record, smoke a cigar. That’s my idea of a good way to spend the evening.”
    It was a lie, but Burke let it go, for it was harmless enough, a boy from the slums claiming against all evidence that some part of him remained loyal to the people who still toiled there. In fact, as Burke knew, the Commissioner felt nothing for the old neighborhood. Once lifted from the pit, he’d never looked back into its teeming depths. Even so, Burke could say nothing against the life his old friend had forged. Francis O’Hearn had worked hard to get where he was, a detective shield at twenty-six, Commissioner Dolan’s hand-picked successor by thirty-six, Commissioner himself a short eleven years later. But more than that, Francis had put three daughters through college, a doctor, a lawyer, and an aide to the mayor. He’d reared strong, determined children, kids with grit and fortitude, and in Burke’s view, once it could be said of a man that his children bore his steel, little could then be said against him.
    It was a badge of honor he would never wear, Burke knew. He thought again of Scottie, this son of his who was a sneak-thief, beggar, dope addict, mercifully dying now, soon to be cremated. A fitting end, he thought, to a life reduced to ashes.
    “It’s the shindigs they throw at the art museum I have the most trouble with,” the Commissioner addedwith a hearty laugh. “It’s something the nuns never taught us, isn’t it, Tom, that you need the rich if you want to get anything done.” He drew in a deep breath. “I’m afraid I don’t have the best of news for you tonight. This fellow we have. He’s got to be released by six tomorrow morning. The D.A. says that’s all the time we’ve got. You can’t hold this guy forever, Tom, without some evidence. So I’m having him brought here for a final interrogation. He should arrive within the hour.”
    “Another interrogation won’t do any good,” Burke said. “We’ve been over everything with him time and again. All we get is evasions, denials. How he didn’t do it, has no idea who did.”
    The Commissioner draped his uniform coat over one of the chairs in front of Burke’s desk and lowered himself into the other. “True enough. But sometimes even the toughest of them will crack under the right questioning. You’ve seen that, Tom. You know what a good interrogation can do.”
    Burke well knew what a good interrogation could do, hammer home the incriminating evidence, wind the suspect in coils of lies and contradictions, force him to see under the ruthless light of inquisition that there was no escape from what he’d done. But he also knew that no interrogation could ever find the toxic spring that had finally boiled out into the world, poisoning everything it touched.
    “Are you telling me that you see no purpose in any further questioning of this fellow?” the Commissioner asked.
    “No, I just think that there are limits to what we can get out of him,” Burke answered.
    “That’s the sin of despair, wouldn’t you say, Tom?”
    “You sound like a seminarian, Francis.”
    “Do I? But it was you who once considered the priesthood, wasn’t it, Tom?”
    “Not for long,”