CHAPTER THREE

Decker went back to headquarters. The first thing he wanted to do was listen to Alison Maitland’s 911 call. Down in the basement, Jimmy Freedman, their sound technician, played it back for him, his chair tilted back, chewing gum and sniffing and tappety-tapping his pencil against the recording console.

“There’s definitely a fault on the line, Sergeant, but it’s not like any regular fault. The regular faults are usually opens, which give you white noise, or shorts, which gives you, like, static, or else you get intermittents, which are usually caused by earth shifting or water ingress. But you listen to this.”

He switched on the tape, and Decker heard the 911 operator responding to Alison’s call. “Emergency, which service?” This was followed by a crackling sound, and a very faraway voice, screaming. “Yes, ambulance”—more screaming, more crackling—“urgent—bleeding so bad!”

“What the hell?” Decker said. “Sounds like she’s got the TV on.”

“Uh-huh,” Jimmy said. “It’s not background noise. It’s actually breaking into her call from another location.”

“Crossed line, then?”

Jimmy shook his head. “It could be some kind of resistive fault, like an earth or a contact. But it’s very strange, the way it just switches off and on. Listen.”

“It’s my husband—blood everywhere!”

Decker blew out his cheeks. “That’s when he must have been stabbing her. Jesus.”

But then there was shouting. It sounded like a crowd, panicking, but it was impossible to make out what they were saying.

“For God’s sake—Alison—4140 Davis Street—my husband!”

“Ma’am, can you repeat that address please? I can hardly hear you.”

Screaming, and then a crunching noise.

“Forty-one forty Davis Street! You have to help me—so much blood—you hear me?”

Decker listened to the tape to the end. Then he said, “Any ideas? That sounds like a goddamned battle.”

“Who knows? Somebody else could have had their phone off the hook, and, like you say, there could have been a war movie playing on television. But it would have had to be a recording, because I checked the TV listings and there were no war movies playing on any channel when this call was being made.

“Like I say, though, it wasn’t like a normal fault. I’ll have to talk to Bill Duggan at the telephone company, see what he has to say about it. Meanwhile I’ll do what I can to clean it up. Maybe we can hear what those guys are yowling about.”

At 9:00 P.M. that evening, Decker received a call from the Medical College Hospital that Gerald Maitland had recovered sufficiently to be questioned. Decker called Hicks to see if he could join him, but Hicks was still taking 4140 Davis Street to pieces in his efforts to find the murder weapon.

He sounded exhausted.

“I was wondering whether we ought to cut open the couch. I mean it’s real genuine leather, and it must have been pretty damned expensive.”

“This is a homicide investigation, Hicks, not a furniture sale. Did you check up the chimneys?”

“I called in Vacu-Stack. They vacuum-cleaned all five of them, but all they found was dead birds.”

“Tried the bedding? I found a shotgun sewn up in a mattress once.”

“We tore up the mattresses, the comforters, the pillows. We pulled down the drapes—you know, in case the murder weapon was hidden in the hem. We even tore their clothes to pieces.”

“Looked in the kitchen? Cereal boxes, packets of spaghetti, rolls of foil?”

“You name it, Lieutenant, we’ve looked in it.”

“Okay … keep at it. I’ll call you when I’m done at the hospital.”

He was walking out through the shiny new lobby when a girl’s voice called out, “Decker!”

He skidded to a reluctant stop and turned around. It was Officer Mayzie Shifflett, from traffic. She had a dimpled, kittenish face that made her look five years younger than she really was, with a little tipped-up nose and freckles and big brown eyes. Her khaki shirt was stretched tight over her small, rounded breasts, and her skirt was stretched tight over her firm, rounded bottom. Her blond hair was fastened in a tight French pleat.

“Are you avoiding me, Decker?”

“Of course not. Caseload, that’s all.”

“You weren’t working Tuesday night, were you?”

“Tuesday? Ah—when was Tuesday?”

“Tuesday was the day before yesterday, and Tuesday was the day when you were supposed to be taking me to Awful Arthur’s.”

He kicked the heel of his hand against the side of his head. “Jesus—you’re right, I was. Oh, Mayzie, I’m so sorry. Tuesday, my God. Do you know what happened?”

“Of course I know what happened. I put on my killer blouse and I pinned up my hair and I sprayed myself with Giorgio and then I waited for two and a half hours watching Star Trek until I finally decided that you weren’t going to show.”

“My mom had a fall. Her hip, you know? I had to go see her. I’m truly sorry. I was so worried about her that I totally forgot we had a date.”

“Your mom had a fall. Decker—can’t you even lie to me without bring your mother into it?”

“I’m telling you the truth, Mayzie. Do you think I would pass up on a date with you unless something really, really serious came up? Listen—I promise that I’ll make it up to you.”

“Like when?”

“I’m not sure. You’ve heard about this homicide on Davis Street—young woman had her head cut off. It’s a shocker—I’m right in the middle of that.”

“Decker, I have to talk to you.”

He clasped her shoulders and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “Let’s make it next Tuesday, then. Same place, same time.”

“Decker, I have to talk to you sooner than that. I missed my period.”

He snorted. “Can’t you even lie to me without bringing my children into it?”

“I’m serious, Decker. I think I’m pregnant.”

“Ah. Pregnant.” He paused, and then he narrowed his eyes. “You’re kidding me, right?”

She stared at him without blinking for a long, long time and gradually it dawned on him that maybe she wasn’t kidding. He leaned closer and hissed, “How can you be pregnant? You’re on the pill, aren’t you?”

“I had to stop taking it because of my antibiotics. It was only for two weeks. I didn’t think that—”

“You didn’t think that if you made love without being on the pill that there might be some remote risk of motherhood? Or, even worse, fatherhood? I’m a detective, Mayzie, I’m not a daddy.”

Mayzie’s eyelashes sparkled with tears. “I’m sorry, Decker. I didn’t mean it to happen. But we have to talk.”

“What good is talking going to do?”

“I might be having your baby, Decker. It’s not going to go away.”

Decker took a deep breath. Detective George Rudisill was standing on the opposite side of the lobby, talking to a dithery old woman with her arm in a sling, and he gave Decker a slow, sly smile. Decker thought, Shit, this is all I need.

“All right, Mayzie,” he said. “I have to go talk to my chief suspect right now. But I’ll meet you at the Tobacco Company bar at, say—what time is it now? Eight o’clock, okay?”

“You’ll be there, right? You won’t let me down?”

“I swear on my mother’s hip.”

God, thought Decker. To look at, Mayzie was a peach. But whenever they had sex she let out a peculiar piping noise, like a wild goose flying south for the winter, and when they weren’t having sex and she wasn’t piping she never wanted to talk about anything but soap operas and nail polish and how she had once appeared in the audience in Oprah! (she had the videotape, if you wanted to see her, fifth row from the back, in the purple spotted dress).

Decker had invited her to Awful Arthur’s for a last dinner to say, “Sorry, Mayzie, but I don’t think this is really working out.” It wasn’t working out so much that he had totally forgotten to go.

“Eight o’clock,” she insisted, and walked off back toward the traffic department.

Decker stood alone for a moment, slowly massaging the muscles at the back of his neck. Rudisill came up to him and grinned. “Hi, Lieutenant. Everything okay?”

“Sure, why shouldn’t it be?”

“Shifflett didn’t look too happy.”

“Women are always happy, George. Especially when they’re miserable.”

Jerry Maitland was propped up in bed with the left side of his face and both of his arms thickly bandaged, so that he looked like a snowman. His pupils were dilated and he still smelled of the operating theater. The redheaded nurse said, “Ten minutes and no more, please, Lieutenant.”

“You like Mexican food?” Decker asked her.

“I’m married.”

“Being married affects your taste buds?”

“Nine minutes,” the nurse said and closed the door behind her.

Decker approached the bed. Jerry stiffly turned his head to stare at him. Decker said nothing at first, but went over to the window and parted the slatted blinds with two fingers. Down below he could see the brightly lit sidewalks of Marshall Street, and the intersection with Fourteenth Street. After a while, he turned back and said, “How’s tricks, Gerald?”

Jerry shook his head, but didn’t say anything.

Decker drew up a chair and straddled it backward, shifting Jerry’s plasma drip so that he could sit a little closer. “Is it Gerald or can I call you Jerry?”

“Jerry’s okay,” Jerry mumbled.

“Jerry it is, then. My name’s Decker. Don’t know what my parents were doing, giving me a goddamn outré name like that. It was something to do with my great-great-grandfather. Fought in the army of northern Virginia, in the Civil War.”

Jerry tried to cough, but it obviously strained the stitches in his face, and he had to stifle it.

Decker said, “Hurts, huh?”

Jerry nodded. Decker nodded too, as if in sympathy. “You can have your lawyer present, you know that, don’t you?”

“I don’t need a lawyer. I haven’t done anything.”

“You’re sure about that? It might be in your own best interest.”

Jerry shook his head.

“Okay,” Decker said. Then, quite casually, “What did you do with the knife?”

“I was putting up wallpaper and I cut myself. I don’t know how. I dropped the knife on the floor.”

“No, no. That’s not the knife I mean, Jerry. That was a teensy weensy little craft knife. I’m talking about the other knife.”

“The other knife?”

“That’s right. I’m talking about the great big two-foot-long mother that you used to cut off Alison’s head.”

“You don’t seriously believe that I killed her? How can you think—I love her. She’s my wife. Why would I want to kill her?”

“Well, that’s what I’m trying to find out, Jerry, and it would make it a whole lot less complicated if you told me what you did with the knife.”

“There was no knife. Don’t you understand? There was no knife.”

“So what did you cut her head off with? A pair of nail scissors? Come on, Jerry, there was nobody else in the house but you and Alison, and Alison wasn’t just decapitated—she suffered more than seventeen deeply penetrative stab wounds and serious lacerations. I’ve been listening to her 911 call. The operator asks her what’s wrong and she keeps saying, ‘My husband.’”

Jerry’s eyes filled up with tears. “She was calling because of me. I got cut first.”

“Oh yes, by whom exactly?”

“By whatever it was that killed Alison. I didn’t touch her. I love her. We were going to have a baby girl.”

Decker was silent for a while. Then he reassuringly patted Jerry’s arm. “All right, Jerry. You didn’t touch her. But if you can tell me where the knife is, I can have the handle checked for fingerprints, and if it really wasn’t you who did it, then we’ll know for sure, won’t we?”

“There was no knife. My arms got cut and then my face got cut, but I never saw a knife.”

“You were alone, though? There was nobody else there except you and Alison? Is that what you’re telling me?”

Jerry nodded, miserably.

Decker sat in thought for a minute or two, his hand covering his mouth. Then he said, “Okay, supposing that’s what happened. How do you explain it?”

“I don’t know. There was blood all over the kitchen. I was sure that I was going to die. Then Alison went to answer the door to the paramedics and she suddenly …”

“Go on. Take your time.”

“I wasn’t anywhere near her. She just collapsed. She kind of spun around, and—fell onto the floor and—her head—”

He turned his face away, rhythmically beating his bandaged arm against the blankets. All that he was capable of uttering were high, strangulated sobs.

“Okay,” Decker said, after a while. “Let’s leave it at that for now.”

He stood up and placed the chair back against the wall. He had no doubt at all that Jerry had murdered his wife, simply because there was no other rational explanation. But there was little point in trying to question him until he came out of shock. Decker had seen it so many times before: mothers who couldn’t admit that they had smothered their babies, husbands who genuinely believed that somebody else had shot their wives, even when they were standing over the body with a discharged revolver in their hand. Disassociation, they called it.

He left the room. A uniformed officer was sitting outside reading the sports pages. He put his paper down and started to stand up but Decker said, “That’s okay, Greeley. Got any hot tips for Colonial Downs?”

“Mr. Invisible in the 3:45, twenty-five to one.”

“Mr. Invisible, huh?” He glanced back at Jerry Maitland lying bandaged up in bed. There was no knife. There was nobody there.

He walked down to the nurses’ station.

“That was quick,” she remarked.

“I’m known for it. You’re sure about that dinner invitation? I know a place where they do the world’s most aphrodisiac tamales.”

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I went to a palmist recently, and she made it quite clear that my future doesn’t include Mexican meals with law enforcement officers.”

“That’s because she was predicting the wrong line. She was predicting your head line instead of your heart line.”

“No, she wasn’t. She was predicting your cheesy pickup line.”