Phantoms

Chapter 7

The County Sheriff county authorities, headquartered in Santa Mira, were not yet aware of the Snowfield crisis. They had their own problems.

Lieutenant Talbert Whitman entered the interrogation room just as Sheriff Bryce Hammond switched on the tape recorder and started informing the suspect of his constitutional rights.

Tal closed the door without making a sound. Not wanting to interrupt just as the questioning was about to get underway, he didn't take a chair at the big table, where the other three men were seated. Instead, he went to the big window, the only window, in the oblong room.

The Santa Mira County Sheriff's Department occupied a Spanish-style structure that had been erected in the late 1930s.

The doors were all solid and solid-sounding when you closed them, and the walls were thick enough to provide eighteen-inch-deep windowsills like the one on which Tal Whitman settled himself.

Beyond the window lay Santa Mira, the county seat, with a population of eighteen thousand. In the mornings, when the sun at last topped the Sierras and burned away the mountain shadows, Tal found himself looking around in amazement and delight at the gentle, foothills on which Santa Mira rose, for it was an exceptionally neat, clean city that had put down its concrete and iron roots with some respect for the natural beauty in which it had grown. Now night was settled in.

Thousands of lights sparkled on the rolling hills below the mountains, and it looked as if the stars had fallen here.

For a child of Harlem, black as a sharp-edged winter shadow, born in poverty and ignorance, Tal Whitman had wound up at the age of nine, in a most unexpected place. Unexpected but wonderful.

On this side of the window, however, the scene was not so special. The interrogation room resembled countless others in police precinct houses and sheriffs' stations all over the country.

A cheap linoleum-tile floor. Battered filing cabinets. A round conference table and five chairs. Institutional-green walls. Bare fluorescent bulbs.

At the conference table in the center of the room, the current occupant of the suspect's chair was a tall, good-looking, twenty-six-year-old real estate agent named Fletcher Kale. He was working himself into an impressive state of righteous indignation.

"Listen, Sheriff," Kale said, "can we just cut this crap? You don't have to read me my rights again, for Christ's sake.

Haven't we been through this a dozen times in the past three days?”

Bob Robine, Kale's attorney, quickly patted his client's arm to make him be quiet. Robine was pudgy, round-faced, with a sweet smile but with the hard eyes of a casino pit boss.

"Fletch," Robine said, "Sheriff Hammond knows he's held you on suspicion just about as long as the law allows, and he knows that I know it, too.

So what he's going to do-he's going to settle this one way or the other within the next hour.”

Kale blinked, nodded, and changed his tactics. He slumped in his chair as if a great weight of grief lay on his shoulders.

When he spoke, there was a-flint tremor in his voice." I'm sorry if I sort of lost my head there for a minute, Sheriff. I shouldn't have snapped at you like that. But it's so hard… so very, very hard for me." His face appeared to cave in, and the tremor in his voice became more pronounced." I mean, for God's sake, I've lost my family. My wife..". my son… both gone.

Bryce Hannnond said, "I'm sorry if you think I've treated you unfairly, Mr. Kale. I only try to do what I think is best.

Sometimes, I'm right. Maybe I'm wrong this time.”

Apparently deciding that he wasn't in too much trouble after all, and that he could afford to be magnanimous now, Fletcher Kale dabbed at the tears on his face, sat up straighter in his chair, and said, "Yeah…

well, uh… I guess I can see your position, Sheriff.”

Kale was underestimating Bryce Hammond.

Bob Robine knew the sheriff better than his client did. He frowned, glanced at Tal, then stared hard at Bryce.

In Tal Whitman's experience, most people who dealt with the sheriff underestimated him, just as Fletcher Kale had done.

It was an easy thing to do. Bryce didn't look impressive. He was thirty-nine, but he seemed a lot younger than that. His thick sandy hair fell across his forehead, giving him a mussed, boyish appearance.

He had a pug nose with a spatter of freckles across the bridge of it and across both cheeks. His blue eyes were clear and sharp, but they were hooded with heavy lids that made him seem bored, sleepy, maybe even a little bit dullwitted. His voice was misleading, too. It was soft, melodic, gentle. Furthermore, he spoke slowly at times, and always with measured deliberation, and some people took his careful speech to mean that he had difficulty forming his thoughts. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Bryce Hammond was acutely aware of how others perceived him, and when it was to his advantage, he reinforced their misconceptions with an ingratiating manner, with an almost witless smile, and with a further softening of speech that made him seem like the classic hayseed cop.

Only one thing kept Tal from fully enjoying this confrontation: He knew the Kale investigation had affected Bryce Hammond on a deep, personal level. Bryce was hurting, sick at heart about the pointless deaths of Joanna and Danny Kale, because in a curious way this case echoed events in his own life. Like Fletcher Kale, the sheriff had lost a wife and a son, although the circumstances of his loss were considerably different from Kale's.

A year ago, Ellen Hammond had died instantly' in a car crash.

Seven-year-old Timmy, sitting on the front seat beside his mother, had suffered serious head injuries and had been in a coma for the past twelve months. The doctors didn't give Timmy much chance of regaining consciousness.

Bryce had nearly been destroyed by the tragedy. Only recently had Tal despair.

The Kale case had opened Bryce Hammond's wounds again, but he hadn't allowed grief to dull his senses; it hadn't caused him to overlook anything. Tal Whitman had known the precise moment, last Thursday evening, when Bryce had begun to suspect that Fletcher Kale was guilty of two premeditated murders, for suddenly something cold and implacable had come into Bryce's heavy-lidded eyes.

Now, doodling on a yellow note pad as if only half his mind was on the interrogation, the sheriff said, "Mr. Kale, rather than ask you a lot of questions that you've already answered a dozen times, why don't I summarize what you've told us?

If my summary sounds pretty much right to you, then we can get on with these new items I'd like to ask you about.”

"Sure. Let's get it over with and get out of here," Kale said.

"Okay then," Bryce said." Mr. Kale, according to your testimony, your wife, Joanna, felt she was trapped by marriage and motherhood, that she was too young to have so much responsibility. She felt she had made a terrible mistake and was going to have to pay for it for the rest of her life. She wanted some kicks, a way to escape, so she turned to dope.

Would you say that's how you've described her state of mind?”

" Yes," Kale said." Exactly.”

"Good," Bryce said." So she started smoking pot. Before long, she was stoned almost continuously. For two and a half years, you lived with a pothead, all the while hoping you could change her. Then a week ago she went berserk, broke a lot of dishes and threw some food around the kitchen, and you had hell's own time calming her down. That was when you discovered she'd recently begun using PCP-what's sometimes called 'angel dust' on the street. You were shocked. You knew that some people became maniacally violent while under the influence of PCP, so you made her show you where she kept her stash, and you destroyed it.

Then you told her that if she ever used drugs around little Danny again, you'd beat her within an inch of her life.”

Kale cleared his throat.." But she just laughed at me. She said I wasn't a woman-beater and I shouldn't pretend to be Mr. Macho. She said, "Hell, Fletch, if I kicked you in the balls, you'd thank me for livening up your day."“

"And that was when you broke down and cried?" Bryce asked.

Kale said, "I just… well, I realized I didn't have any influence with her.”

From his window seat, Tal Whitman watched Kale's face twist with grief-or with a reasonable facsimile. The bastard was good.

"And when she saw you cry," Bryce said, "that sort of brought her to her senses.”

"Right," Kale said." I guess it… affected her… a big ox like me bawling like a baby. She cried, too, and she promised not to take any more PCP. We talked about the past, about what we had expected from marriage, said a lot of things maybe we should have said before, and we felt closer than we had in a couple of years. At least I felt closer. I thought she did, too.

She swore she'd start cutting down on the pot.”

Still doodling, Bryce said, "Then last Thursday you came home early from work and found your little boy, Danny, dead in the master bedroom. You heard something behind you. It was Joanna, holding a meat cleaver, the one she'd used to kill Danny.”

"She was stoned," Kale said." PCP. I could see it right away. That wildness in her eyes, that animal look.”

"She screamed at you, a lot of irrational stuff about snakes that lived inside people's heads, about people being controlled by evil snakes. You circled away from her, and she followed.

You didn't try to take the cleaver away from her' "I figured I'd be killed. I tried to talk her down.”

"So you kept circling until you reached the nightstand where you kept a.38 automatic.”

"I warned her to drop the cleaver. I warned her.”

"Instead, she rushed at you with the cleaver raised. So you shot her.

Once. In the chest.”

Kale was leaning forward now, his face in his hands.

The sheriff put down his pen. He folded his hands on his stomach and laced his fingers." Now, Mr. Kale, I hope you can bear with me a little bit longer. Just a few more questions, and then we can all get out of here and get on with our lives.”

Kale lowered his hands from his face. It was clear toTal Whitman that Kale figured "getting on with our lives" meant he would be released at last." I'm all right, Sheriff. Go ahead.”

Bob Robine didn't say a word.

Slouched in his chair, looking loose and boneless, Bryce Hammond said, "While we've been holding you on suspicion, Mr. Kale, we've come up with a few questions we need to have answered, so we can set our minds to rest about this whole terrible thing. Now, some of these things may seem awful trivial to you, hardly worth my time or yours. They are little things.

I admit that. The reason I'm putting you through more trouble… well, it's because I want to get reelected next year, Mr. Kale. If my opponents catch me out on one technicality, on even one tiny little damned thing, they'll huff and puff and blow it into a scandal; they'll say I'm slipping or lazy or something." Bryce grinned at Kale-actually grinned at him. Tal couldn't believe it.

"I understand, Sheriff," Kale said.

On his window seat, Tal Whitman tensed and leaned forward.

And Bryce Hammond said, "First thing is-I was wondering why you shot your wife and then did a load of laundry before calling us to report what had happened.