drove across a rain-lashed San Francisco to fetch Professor Whitlaw, and when they returned, they found Dean Gardner already ensconced in front of the fire in the living room.
On her trip out, Kate had stopped to photocopy the transcripts of the first two interviews, both the abortive one from Friday morning and the longer but even less productive Saturday session. The one from Sunday morning had not yet been transcribed, but she had the tapes from all three.
Coffee and tea and the preliminary rituals were dispensed and then Kate handed out Friday’s interview. The rain on the windows sounded loud as Lee, the dean, and the professor all dove into the pages with the quick concentration of people who live by the written word, all three with pencil in hand. Kate followed more slowly behind them. She had two pages yet to go when the two academics and then Lee began to discuss what they had read, but since she knew how the story ended, she allowed her stapled sheaf to fall shut.
“I should make a couple of comments about what you’ve read. First, Inspector Hawkin’s abrasiveness was more or less deliberate, and certainly he played it up when Sawyer responded to it. In the first two sessions, the idea was to make me look like a paragon of understanding,- for some reason Erasmus—Sawyer—had already responded to me, and there was a degree of rapport before his arrest.”
“Good heavens,” said the professor. “Do you mean to tell me that isn’t just an invention of the television police dramas? There is even a name for the technique, isn’t there?”
“Good cop, bad cop,” suggested the dean.
“That’s right.”
“We use it a lot,” answered Kate, “though it’s not as simple as it sounds. Perpetrators—the accused—are human beings, and most of them want to be told that they’re not really all that bad. Sympathy is a much more effective tool, whether you’re in an interrogation or in a street confrontation, than swagger and threat. All we did was exaggerate an existing situation to emphasize the contrast and make me appear, frankly, on his side.”
“And was David taken in by this little play, Inspector?”
“Professor Whitlaw, your friend David is a tired, confused seventy-two-year-old man who has been living in a carefully constructed dream for the last ten years. I think he is partially aware that he is being gently manipulated, and I think he is allowing it.
“I want to be up front about this. What I’m looking for is a way of making David Sawyer talk. I could tell you it’s for his own good, I could even tell you I want to help acquit him of the charges because I don’t think he’s guilty, but I’m not going to bullshit you. I don’t know if he did it or not. I think he would be capable of hitting out in a moment of great anger,- I think most people are. I do not believe it was premeditated, and, in fact, I think the charge will be reduced next week.
“So. What I’m saying is this: Yes, I’m a cop, and yes, it is my job to compile evidence against your friend. There may be things you don’t want to tell me, and there are sure to be things I’m not going to tell you. Are those ground rules acceptable?”
Professor Whitlaw looked determined and nodded, Dean Gardner looked devious and reached for the Saturday transcript, and Lee—Lee was looking at Kate as if she’d never seen her before.
“Hey,” said Kate with a shrug. “It’s what I do.”
Lee let out a surprised cough of laughter and shook her head. Kate handed her the transcript.
Kate did not bother to read along, as the session was clear enough in her memory. Instead, she went into the kitchen to make another pot of coffee and put on the kettle for Professor Whitlaw’s tea, and as she stood and waited, her eyes went out of focus and she thought about what she had just told them.
A great deal of any police officer’s time is spent on the thin line that divides right from wrong. Representatives of Good, cops spend most of their life in the company of Bad, if not Evil, and often find more to talk about with the people they arrest than with their own neighbors. In a fair world, ends do not justify means,- to a cop, they have to.
She had gone to see Erasmus on Friday before she left, as Hawkin had asked. She found him sitting on the bunk in his cell, his eyes closed and his lips moving in a murmur of prayer or recitation. His head came around at the sound of her approach and he watched her come in, his eyes neither welcoming nor antagonistic, simply waiting. She sat down on the bunk next to him.
“Hello, Erasmus. David. Are you comfortable?” She laughed at the sweep of his eyes. “Yeah, I know, stupid question. What I meant was, can I bring you anything?”
“O, thou fairest among women!” he said in wan humor.
“I don’t know about that. Something to eat tomorrow? Jail food isn’t the greatest.”
“The bread of adversity and the water of affliction.”
“I hope it’s not quite that bad.”
“The abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep,” he said in a gentle refusal of her offer.
“I wasn’t offering rich abundance, but I might stretch to a cheese sandwich and some fruit.”
His eyes lighted up at the last word, though he did not say anything.
“Nothing else?”
He hesitated, then said, “I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here.”
“Your books? From your backpack. Yes, I’ll have them brought to you. Writing materials? Another blanket?”
He smiled a refusal, then his right hand came up and nestled into his neck, his index finger stroking his beard. He cocked his eyebrow at her. “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me,” he suggested.
“Urn, your staff? I’m sorry, I don’t think I could get that approved.” Even if I could get the laboratory to hurry up with it, she thought.
He shrugged a bit wistfully. “Naked came I into the world, and naked shall I return. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
She hesitated and then risked a joke. “I don’t think even Inspector Hawkin himself thinks he’s God.”
His smile was warmly appreciative, but somehow she got the uncomfortable feeling that she’d given something away. She stood up, and he rose with her.
“I’ll see if I can get your books released tonight, and I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”
He surprised her by putting up a finger to stop her, then bent down to look into her face. “Be strong, and of good courage,” he told her. “Be not afraid.” And when she could find no answer to that, he merely touched her shoulder and, sitting back down on the too-short bunk, said, “I will lay me down to sleep, and take my rest.”
That last little episode was what she had had in mind when she said that David Sawyer was cooperating with his seduction. He knew what she was doing, and moreover he knew what it was doing to her.
No, she did not like cozying up to that old man in order to pry him loose from his secure rest,- she was honest enough with herself to admit that she felt dirty using his affection against him. Feeling dirty was, of course, an occupational hazard, and so far it had never kept her from doing her job.
But all in all, she would much rather play bad cop.
¦
The readers in the living room were coming back to life and the coffee had finished dripping, so she moved back out to be hostess for a few minutes. When the cups were full and hot, she paused, the tape of the Sunday session in her hand.
“Al Hawkin was not there this morning. This was partly technique but mostly because he had other commitments.” (As if Al would allow previous commitments to stand in the way of an important interrogation session unless it was toward a greater goal, Kate thought to herself.) “I conducted the interview” (stick with that less-loaded term) “and another sat in— and only sat in. I don’t think she said a word the whole time, except for saying Hello when I introduced her to Erasmus. Sorry—Sawyer.”
“His
Kate slipped the cassette into the player and sat down with a cup of coffee. Her own voice came on, sounding stifled and foreign as it always did, with the formalities, then explaining to the prisoner Hawkin’s absence and Officer Macauley’s presence. After that the interview began.
The recording, on more than one cassette, ran for nearly three hours, and there was even more silence on it than Kate remembered. Long stretches of silence. Many questions were unanswered, or perhaps unanswerable,- at other times, remarks were offered that seemed to have nothing to do with Kate’s questions—even at the time, Kate had thought that the pronouncements seemed plucked out of thin air. Hawkin, on the telephone afterward, had
