Two detectives and Lieutenant Marx stood around Jimmy Sung, taking turns talking to him. Another man stood in the shadows. I went to him, expecting to find Captain Gazzo-Homicide chief, and, most of the time, my friend. It wasn’t Gazzo. It was a big, heavy man with a pale, massive face and small eyes. Captain Olsen, Narcotics downtown.
“A narcotics angle, Captain?” I said.
“Gazzo’s on vacation, I’m filling in on Homicide. You’re a lucky man, Fortune. You can collect for doing nothing.”
“I won’t feel bad,” I said. “You’re sure, Captain?”
“Listen and find out.”
Marx and his two squad men were soft-hammering, casual, putting Jimmy Sung at his ease. It wasn’t working.
Jimmy sat rigid in the chair, his soft hands on his thighs under work pants. His feet were flat on the floor, in sneakers, and his back was stiff and straight. His black eyes were fixed straight ahead. He seemed taller, even younger, and his alcoholic eyes were bright. His puffy face had a thin smile. Not amused-a tigerish smile, almost contemptuous. Like a soldier captured by the enemy, waiting for torture, sure they would get nothing from him. I had the illusion that if Jimmy Sung opened his mouth, all that would come out was name, rank and serial number.
“You went to rob the shop,” Lieutenant Marx said. “For booze money, right? You didn’t know Eugene Marais was there. You had to hit him. You started looting the store, decided to tie Marais up. You found he was dead, panicked, and ran.”
Jimmy Sung said nothing, didn’t move, his shoulders tense like a man about to be beaten. A man who expects to be beaten.
A detective said, “Come on, Jimmy. We don’t think you knew what you were doing. Make it easy.”
“We know about those years in that state hospital,” the second detective said. “You’re not responsible.”
The stocky Oriental moved his eyes; black eyes with anger in them now. “A lie, that hospital. You hear?” His eyes looked straight ahead again. “I’m home all night.”
I heard it in his voice-colorless, flat. He didn’t believe what he had said himself. He didn’t believe it, he didn’t believe that the police would believe it, but it was his statement. A man who would confess nothing.
Lieutenant Marx sighed, held up a small, jade Buddha. “Here it is, Jimmy. On the list of what was taken from the pawn shop. Found in your apartment. You know it, and we know it.”
“Not the same Buddha,” Jimmy said.
“It’s got Marais’s pawn mark on it.”
“I never saw it. Someone put it in my place.”
“It was in your bookcase, your woman saw it the day after Eugene Marais was killed. You told her it was yours.”
“Mr. Marais gave it to me.”
“It was still on the inventory, Jimmy.”
“Mr. Marais forgot to take it off.”
I listened to Jimmy Sung change his claim each time Marx disproved the statement before. Simply, blandly coming up with a totally different claim, and all the time sitting there rigid, his eyes glittering with something peculiarly like pride, waiting for the blows to start. He was denying with his words, changing his claims to meet each charge, but his eyes and body were not denying, not even protesting, simply rejecting. As if he didn’t really care what he said, or what was believed. Resigned to be found guilty.
I said, “That Buddha is all you found, Lieutenant?”
“Isn’t it enough for you?” Captain Olsen said behind me.
“One piece?” I said to Olsen, to all of them in the dark room. “Where’s the rest? Why keep one piece? Come on, it looks to me like some crude frame-up. Jimmy’s no thief.”
“I’d agree, Dan,” Lieutenant Marx said, “if we hadn’t also found this at Eugene Marais’s shop.”
He held a half-pint bottle of vodka. Some brand I’d never heard of. Marx held it in a handkerchief.
“It was on the floor in the backroom, half empty. We found the liquor store clerk who sold it to Jimmy at about ten that night. It was the only half pint he sold, it’s a brand only his store carries around here-a cheap brand for bums and alkies. The bottle has Jimmy’s prints on it. Clear.”
I looked at Jimmy Sung. He still sat unmoving, that thin smile on his face, his bright eyes alert.
“Jimmy’s woman says he left his place about nine-fifty. So did she. No one knows when he got home.”
In a silence, everyone looked at Jimmy Sung. For a time, he didn’t change. Then he licked his lips, lost the thin smile.
“Okay, we played chess. I got there maybe ten o’clock, left maybe eleven o’clock. Mr. Marais was alive. I swear.”
A long breath seemed to go through the dark interrogation room. Jimmy had confessed, the denial didn’t count. Jimmy had been there, he had had a piece of the stolen property.
“Book him, Marx,” Captain Olsen said, and walked out to tend to more important business than Jimmy Sung.
After the two detectives took Jimmy Sung out, small and silent between them, Marx and I sat alone in the interrogation room. I lit a cigarette.
“The rest of the stuff?” I said.
“In the river. In some sewer. We’ll look, maybe Jimmy’ll tell us now, but it doesn’t matter. He’s a drunk, Dan, and maybe half crazy, too. When a drunk needs booze money he gets desperate and stupid. We found out that he was in a mental hospital out in California for six years about twenty years ago. It fits, Dan.”
It fitted. I went out to call Viviane Marais to tell her the reason her husband had died. She wouldn’t like it. Chance, a stupid act of a half-crazy alcoholic. Marty wouldn’t like it, either. It would depress her more. Damn!
7
Most men are guilty of the weak hope that if something isn’t talked about it will, somehow, go away. I’m no exception, so I didn’t tell Marty about Jimmy Sung and how Eugene Marais had died. She heard anyway.
Two days after Jimmy had been booked, the oven-night of the city outside, we were in my bed talking about our vacation plans. I was talking. Marty had been silent for some time. Then she sat up, leaned down over me, and kissed me. She held my shoulders hard-too hard, and a moment too long. It was a kiss that had a lot of years in it, and a decision.
She got out of bed, began to dress. It wasn’t quite midnight, not even time to sleep. I lit a cigarette.
“I have to go away, Dan, alone,” Marty said. “I have to.”
“I have the money, Marty,” I said.
“One job. No plan, no growth. You live in space, Dan, not in time. Now is always. Maybe you’re right, I don’t know.”
“When will you know?”
“Probably too late. I’ll call you when I get back.”
So she went. She would think, but in the end…? A woman doesn’t go off alone to think about her relationship to a man unless she has some alternative to think about too.
What Viviane Marais was thinking about I wasn’t sure, either. I called her on the phone to tell her about Jimmy Sung the afternoon he was booked. She was silent on the other end for a time.
“Then there is nothing for you to do,” she said at last. “Unless you have some doubt, Mr. Fortune?”
Did I have a doubt? Yes and no. Jimmy Sung fitted, and yet there was still the bulk of the stolen goods, Jimmy’s weak lying I couldn’t understand, and the clumsiness of it all. But all of that could be answered by the confused thinking of an unbalanced drunk, and the police would try to answer it all. They had no axe to grind over Jimmy Sung.
“I don’t think I can do much, Mrs. Marais,” I said. “So I worked one day. You want fifty dollars back?”
“No, I think not,” Viviane Marais said. “So, Jimmy it was? An accident after all? Chance? It would have
