“Yes, sir. I’m Sergeant Payne, and this is Detective Lassiter.”
“Let me tell you how it is, Sergeant. Sometime tonight, in there, a man is going to appear before the judge to have both the suspension of his DUI sentence and the suspension of the revocation of his driver’s license challenged by me. I personally got him again for DUI two nights ago, and one of my not-too-smart officers let him go on his own recognizance after he’d had time to sober up. He’s a lawyer, and he’s got a damned good lawyer, and nothing would make either of them happier than for them to show up only to hear that I’m not there. I think they’re sitting in a car someplace waiting for some other lawyer to call, telling them I’ve gone. You follow me?”
“Yes, sir. Another continuance. And you don’t want that to happen.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I understand, sir. I was a little concerned that your peeper would get out on bail.”
“That’s not going to happen, not tonight,” the chief said. “Kenny, you bring these officers up to date on what happened last night. We can do that much. And later tonight, if you’d like, or in the morning-which would be better for me-we can talk about what we’re going to do about this Peeping Tom Jabberwocky caught.”
“Yes, sir, Chief,” Sergeant Kenny said.
“And tell the people in the lockup that the only person who can let Mr. Homer C. Daniels out of his cell is me.”
“Yes, sir, Chief.”
Sergeant Kenny led them through a corridor, then a locked door into what was obviously the administrative department of the Daphne police department. It was a fairly large room with several rows of desks. Offices opened off it, and Matt saw signs identifying those of the chief, the deputy chief, and then-just as they reached it- one reading “Sgt. Kenny.”
He waved them inside, closed the door, and gestured for them to sit down.
“Okay. I don’t know how much you know-”
“Not much,” Matt said.
“I don’t know how many details you have, so if I start telling you something you already know, stop me.”
“Sure.”
“I don’t think the chief dislikes Colonel Richards,” Sergeant Kenny said, “but the chief doesn’t know what a fine officer the colonel was when he was in Special Forces. I do.”
“And does the chief know that you know-”
“I don’t think that’s ever come up in conversation, come to think of it.”
“I understand.”
“Good,” Sergeant Kenny said.
He met Matt’s eyes for a long minute.
“Okay. I wasn’t there at the Yacht Club, but the dispatcher called me at the house and told me what had gone down. So I came here. And while they were booking him, a concerned citizen who didn’t identify himself called me and said he smelled that this peeper was more than a peeper.”
“Interesting.”
“Well, after they booked him…”
“On what?”
“Peeping. It’s a misdemeanor.”
Matt nodded.
“Our detective sergeant and the chief interviewed him. I got to listen.”
“ ‘Your’ detective sergeant?” Olivia asked.
“Yes, ma’am, we have two. A detective and a detective sergeant. ”
“I see.”
“This was three o’clock in the morning. And this guy said he wasn’t going to say anything, even give us his name, without a lawyer.”
“He’d been Mirandized?”
“Sure. Well, hell, I thought that was a little strange. This wasn’t even serious. Not even like DUI. This was peeping. We catch peepers every couple of weeks. The judge fines them two hundred dollars and court costs, and threatens them with having to register as a sex offender if they get caught again. I can’t recall any peeper ever going to jail.”
“I understand.”
“Then the chief tried to identify this guy through the car, and got nowhere. That made him a little more suspicious, so he charged him with leaving the scene of an accident, which is either, depending on the circumstances, either a first-class misdemeanor-thirty days in our jail, max- or a felony.
“Anyway, they just left him in a cell to think things over. I guess he did, because in the morning-just before you called-when the chief got him a lawyer, he’d changed his tune. Now he was all remorse. He was ashamed, and was going to be embarrassed when all this came out, and all he wanted to do was take his punishment.”
“Had you identified him by then?”
“He gave us his name, and said he was from Las Vegas, and that he’d borrowed the car from Fats Gambino in Mobile, said he was doing business with Gambino, told us Gambino would confirm that, and practically begged us not to tell Gambino why he’d been arrested.”
“And then you had to wait for Gambino to come to work?”
“Yeah. And while we were waiting for that, you called. And asked about the knife.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, Fats confirmed what he had told us, and said he’d loaned him the car to go to Biloxi to play blackjack. And offered to get his bail.”
“And?”
“We told him bail hadn’t been set, that he hadn’t been arraigned. And then, an hour after that, Fats called back, said he’d just got the New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune. It had the picture of old Mr. Galloway standing over him in it. And Fats wanted to know if the guy on the ground was the one who was driving his car, and the chief said yes, it was, and Fats threw a fit. He wasn’t going to make bail for a pervert, et cetera, et cetera, and asked was there any way he could get his car back without his name being connected with it. The chief told him he’d see what he could do, but couldn’t make no promises.”
Sergeant Kenny let this sink in for a moment, then went on.
“By this time, the chief-who’s a nice man-is starting to feel sorry for this guy. And the mayor says that enough people have been laughing at Daphne and Jabberwocky, and that if he had his druthers the municipal judge would set bail high enough to hurt him when he jumped it, but not too high that he couldn’t afford to make it or jump it-something on the order of a thousand dollars, maybe less-and that would be the end of it.
“The chief was willing to go along. There was your phone call, but you told the chief you were going to send a telex saying who you were, and you didn’t, so he thought it was likely you were some wiseass reporter…”
“I completely forgot about that,” Matt said. “When I showed my lieutenant the newspaper, the next thing I knew Olivia and I were on the way to the airport. I’m sorry.”
“And then you showed up here,” Sergeant Kenny said. “And that changed things.”
“We’re really anxious to bag our doer, Sergeant,” Olivia said. “Dr. P… the psychiatrist who did a profile said that the doer was going to be really frightened when he realized he had killed someone, and do one of two things- go underground for a long time, or keep doing this sort of thing, knowing that he could only be executed once. If this is our doer, he obviously wasn’t frightened into going underground. ”
Sergeant Kenny considered that for a moment.
“Can I ask how you got involved in this, ma’am? Just curious. ”
“I was next up on the wheel at Northwest Detectives when the brother found the victim,” Olivia said. “So I got involved that way.”
“You know what she means, Sergeant?”
“No, but I’m guessing she was the first detective on the scene, and then you got involved because it was a homicide.”
“Right.”
“So why do you two think this guy is your man? Because of the knife?”
