THE NEXT TIME MAUREEN WOKE UP, THE POLICE WERE in the apartment. She could hear McCarthy and Kent.
“Was he in AA?” Maureen heard one of them say.
“Well, not according to anyone who knows him,” said the detective sergeant.
“But it is just a twenty-four-hour chip,” McCarthy said. “He coulda just joined.”
“Well, let’s talk to the girlfriend. See if she knows anything.”
Maureen made only the tiniest of sounds as she tried to make herself as small as possible, but McCarthy was standing in the doorway of the bedroom like a shot. His mind might be dull, Maureen thought, but he’s got ears on him like a fucking hoot owl.
“Who’s here? It’s the police. Come out with your hands up!”
“It’s me,” Maureen said.
“Me? Who me?”
“Me: Maureen Brennan.” She felt stupid walking into her own living room with her hands up over her head. The constab didn’t even have guns—what were they going to do to her if she didn’t have her hands up? Hit her with their nightsticks, she guessed.
“Miss Brennan,” said Kent, “this is serious business. This apartment is a crime scene. The site of a possible murder.”
“What? He was murdered here? There’s no blood or anything. Why do you think he was murdered here?”
“Miss Brennan, we are asking the questions,” he said, losing his temper. “Now, what are you doing here?”
“It’s still my apartment, isn’t it? ’Cause I’m paid up till the end of the month, so I was just gonna sleep here for a night or so, just till, you know, I figure stuff out.”
“You can’t just sleep here. Didn’t you see the notice on the door, maid?” McCarthy said.
“No. I never seen a sign or nothing, and nobody told me I couldn’t sleep here.”
The detective sergeant sighed.
“McCarthy, open those curtains.”
When McCarthy opened the curtains, the grey morning light poured in and there was snow swirling around outside. Maureen realized she’d slept through the night.
“While we’ve got you here, Miss Brennan, was Mr. Browne a member of Alcoholics Anonymous?”
“No! Jumpins! Bo always said he’d rather be dead than not drink. Oh, Jesus, and now he is.” Maureen tried to look suitably sad about that fact. “He always hated people who wouldn’t take a drink. He didn’t trust ’em, he said.”
“Are you?” asked the detective sergeant.
“Am I what?”
“A member of Alcoholics Anonymous?”
“No, no, gosh no. I maybe should be, ’cause, you know, it’s not like every time I drink I get in trouble, but every time I’m in trouble I was always drinking, you know?” Maureen laughed half-heartedly. “What do you think? Do you think I should join?” While Maureen waited for Kent’s answer, McCarthy shoved a little brown coin the size of a silver dollar in Maureen’s face.
“Well, where did this come from then, missy?”
“I don’t know. I never laid eyes on it till you showed it to me now.” Maureen felt relieved. It was so much better when you could tell the actual truth.
“Have you got friends who are members of AA?”
“Have I got any friends, really, is more the question,” Maureen said, but seeing the detective sergeant’s look, she quickly added, “Not that I know of. Like I told ya: anyone too weak to be able to take a drink, Bo never trusted ’em.”
“What about your friend Mr. Taylor?”
“Uh, George? Oh, no, sure George was never here in this apartment.” Yes, that’s all she would have needed, for George to have shown up here when she was with Bo. Bo flipped if a guy even looked at her. She was never allowed to talk to anyone when they went out, and he never wanted anyone else in the apartment either. She guessed she should tell the cops about what she’d overheard last night. That’s what a good girl would do. But the way things were going, a good girl could very easily find herself dead, trussed up in the trunk of a car, up on the South Side Hills.
“We’ve spoken to Mr. Dunne,” said the detective sergeant.
“Which one?” said Maureen.
“To both of them, actually.”
“I already know that,” said Maureen, “because both of them ‘actually’ spoke to me. Thanks a lot for ratting me out to the boys, ’cause that’s really gonna make my life a whole lot easier.”
“Yes, that is one of our major concerns, Miss Brennan, making your life easier,” said Kent as McCarthy used his handkerchief to pick up the brown gallon bottle of chlordane.
Maureen blanched. She tottered to the left. Whenever Maureen got a fright, her equilibrium just went off and she kind of drifted to the left. Kent put out his hand to steady her.
“Are you okay?”
“Yea,” Maureen said, “yea. It’s just that I didn’t eat, and you know, Mom got diabetes and so I got blood sugar, and so unless I get something to eat, I just get weak.”
McCarthy opened the fridge door and used the same handkerchief to pick up the glass decanter of orange juice.
“Here, I’ll pour you a glass of this and you can knock that back in ya.”
It was the glass decanter, the one that cheap Canadian whisky comes in, the one that Maureen and Bo used to mix up frozen orange juice—the poisoned one.
“No, no.” Maureen instinctively took a step back while fighting hard to keep her face in neutral.
“Go ahead, it’s not gonna kill ya,” McCarthy said.
Yea, that’s what you think, Maureen thought. Her mind, totally out of her control, was deciding to crack jokes.
“No, no,” she said out loud. “I hate that orange juice. It’s not even real orange juice. It’s just old Tang, and it will make me all hyperglycemic. I’ll just go down to George’s and get something, some breakfast, some cornflakes or something.”
“There’s a piece of pizza here,” McCarthy said, his head still in the fridge. “You scarf that down.”
“No, no thanks.”
Kent finally intervened. “McCarthy, that’s all evidence. This is a closed crime scene.”
Maureen was somewhat relieved that Bo hadn’t eaten the piece of pepperoni pizza, and she could still see the tomato, the deli turkey and the piece of cheese, so he hadn’t eaten those either, but had he drunk some of the orange juice? She thought she remembered the decanter being about half full after she’d poured in the chlordane on Tuesday morning, and it still looked about half full. But she didn’t have a real clear picture of how full it had been. He could have downed a couple of gulps. If only the cops weren’t there, she could maybe think better and get a grasp on exactly how much orange juice there’d been.
Kent picked up the chlordane bottle. “Where did this come from, Miss Brennan? This is 100 per cent chlordane. It’s not the kind of thing people usually have in their apartments.”
“Yea,” said Maureen. “See, the landlord sent in the exterminators to get rid of the earwigs, and I did see a cockroach too one time, and buddy went off and left that, and that Flit gun too. We called him right away. He was supposed to come back and get it Wednesday morning. And by Wednesday, I was gone, and I guess . . . so was Bo.”
Gone, gone, thought Maureen’s crazy mind. Gone in a big way. Real, real gone, man.
“Miss Brennan, you’re smiling. Is there something funny?” Kent said.
“Oh, no. That’s just what ya call, what ya call it . . . I got that . . . George calls it . . . uh . . . inappropriate laughter response, and the more I get upset, the more I smile. If things get much worse, I’ll be laughing like crazy all the time. Yea, I got that,” she said again, lamely. “That inappropriate laughter response thing.”
“You were the last person to see our victim alive.”
“But Fluff was talking to him later on that same day.”
“Fluff?”
“Yea, Bo’s ex.” Maureen paused. “Fluff. Florence, I guess, is her name. Florence Dawe.”
“And she was still in communication with Mr. Browne?”
“Oh, yea. They were close. She talked to him all the time. And I never really talked to him where I left Tuesday morning. The last time I saw him was, you know, four o’clock that morning.”
“And what was Mr. Browne doing at that time?”
“He was going in to go to bed.”
“And you?”
“I was staying out here, on the couch . . . floor, really. Yea . . .” She didn’t know how much to tell them about the events of late Monday night and early Tuesday morning, how Bo had finally worn himself out hauling her around the living room by her hair, how she had stopped screaming and just lay there, like nothing, like empty clothes on the painted wooden floor, how she guessed he’d just got sick of kicking away at a dead thing, like they say that people do get sick of eating lobster, drinking champagne and kicking dead bodies. She wanted to tell them everything but feared that would put her in an even worse light.
“We were, you know, not getting along that good,” Maureen said finally.
“You were often not getting along ‘that good,’ were you, Maureen?” The detective sergeant made air quotation marks around “that good.”
“Yea, I s’pose,” Maureen muttered.
“Mr. Browne was often violent toward you, Miss Brennan, and you told us earlier, you said yourself, that being the recipient of Mr. Browne’s violence could well cause someone to retaliate, and that retaliation might get out of hand.” Detective Sergeant Kent’s eyes had Maureen locked in the eye hold again.
“Are you interrogating me?” Maureen tried to break eye contact with the detective sergeant. She was aware that she was shifting around from foot to foot and generally acting like someone who had something to hide.
“You have a long history of domestic disputes involving Mr. Browne, and you were often at the receiving end of Mr. Browne’s blows. Did you do anything to provoke this violence, Miss Brennan?”
“Breathed.”
“What?”
“Well, sometimes that’s all I’d have to do: breathe. Just the sound of my breathing, he said, would send him into a red rage and then . . .” Now it was Maureen who tried to hold Kent’s gaze, but he looked away.
“Why didn’t you bring charges against him?”
“Right,” said Maureen. “Why didn’t you?”
“Well, we can’t, by law, bring charges in that instance,” Kent said. “The theory being that couples involved in domestic disputes are in a ‘special relationship,’ and the police and the courts and other people should not interfere in that ‘special relationship’ unless called upon to do so by one of the parties involved in that ‘special relationship’ . . .” His voice trailed off.
“I was afraid to charge him—afraid of what he might do to me if I did,” Maureen said.
McCarthy burst in, “Did you kill him, Miss Brennan?”
Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. I don’t know. Maureen’s crazy mind was racing, pushing her to say everything it was thinking.
“Why would anyone do something like that?” Maureen said aloud. McCarthy pointed at her and then at Kent.
“See that, Sergeant Kent? See that? That’s classic. She’s evading the question, plus she’s trying to disassociate herself from the event by taking the ‘I’ out of the sentence. She’s opting out. She’s a textbook case of a Deceptive Individual.”
“Okay, McCarthy, you read the Behaviour Systems Analysis Review section of the police manual. Good for you. As you can imagine, I’ve read it too, and I can see where you paid special attention to the profile of the Deceptive Individual, but I wonder how you managed to miss the part in the Reid Nine Steps of Interrogation Method that states, categorically, that the interrogator must allow the subject to go through their entire story, so that the suspect can give the ‘pure’ version of the events. Do you remember that part of the training, McCarthy? Do you?”
“I’m a suspect?” Maureen said.
McCarthy kept his head down and looked suitably abashed.
“Shure Bo used to murder me—I mean, he brutalized me. How could I get someone the size of him all trussed up and into the trunk of his car?”
“How do you know the victim was trussed up inside the trunk of his car?” McCarthy shot back.
Maureen looked at him. “’Cause you said he was? Remember? The first time I was talking to you.”
“Oh yea,” McCarthy mumbled.
The look Kent gave McCarthy seemed to put a hole right through the young cop’s know-it-all facade, and Maureen could see all his cockiness leaking out through it.
Maureen wanted to tell them that Jacky Dunne was in AA. She could just say that she’d heard a rumour and that she didn’t know for sure, but Christ, with blabbermouth McCarthy, she couldn’t afford to be caught with her mouth going and get in any more trouble with the Dunnes.
The officers detained her at the apartment for a couple of hours. McCarthy mostly kept his mouth shut, but Kent really gave Maureen the gears. He asked, “Could you tell me in more exact detail about the events of the night of December 7, morning of December 8 . . .” And when she described them, he asked her to go even further into the details, followed by “Miss Brennan, what made you decide to . . .” and “When and why didn’t you . . .” Then he started in all about her emotions and how she was feeling then and how she was feeling now. What was her reaction when she’d first heard the news? How did she feel after that Monday night beating? Those were really hard questions for Maureen to answer because she was never quite sure how she felt at any given moment. It usually took her a couple of months to figure out how she felt. Plus, by the time the cops had gotten to the feelings and emotions part, Maureen was already worn down to a thread, and so she just shut up out of it. She had a right, she remembered, to remain silent, and that’s exactly what she was going to do, even though remaining silent was against the very nature of her being. She was going to remain silent and, unless they were going to arrest her, walk out the door.
“Maureen, even though you would never go through with it, would you ever think of murdering Trevor ‘Bo’ Browne?”
A silent Maureen was almost to the door when she turned.
“No. Why would I think about that?”
“You never thought about it? Not once? Not even when he beat you so badly that”—the detective sergeant reached into a folder and took out a page and read—“you were ‘detained overnight at the Grace General Hospital with a broken rib and a fractured collarbone,’ and the admitting doctor was concerned about a concussion and a possible brain bleed?”
“Yea, not even then,” Maureen lied. But was she really lying? Because she had had no intention of killing Bo. But if she hadn’t meant to kill him, then what in the name of God had she meant to do? And how much chlordane would it take to kill a person? Maureen didn’t have a clue.
The detective sergeant told her to come down to the station first thing tomorrow morning.