Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [81]
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, you need to preserve your ability to use me as witness on my own behalf. You can’t put me on the stand if you know I would perjure myself.”
“Good. So let me ask the questions in my own peculiar way. This is not a tell-me-what-happened. It’s not like interrogating a suspect, all right? We have to do this surgically.”
“You’re talking to a pro,” I assured him. “Although it might not appear that way, under the circumstances.”
“I never forget who I’m talking to,” Devon said.
He produced a leather binder and a Cartier pen with a blue stone in the cap. In the following weeks, I would watch that stone as it whipped legal arabesques around my words.
“If the police were claiming that you were in apartment ten in Tahiti Gardens at nine-thirty p.m. Monday night, would they be wrong?”
“No, they would not be wrong.”
“If they claimed you fired a weapon at Detective Andrew Berringer, would they be wrong?”
“They would not be wrong, but—could I ask one thing?”
He waited.
“Is there some legal way I can stay involved with my kidnap investigation?” I told him about the Brennan case and how close we had come to capturing him.
“Not when you’re suspended from the Bureau, darlin’.”
“The Bureau’s going to drop the ball.”
“Nothing you can do about it.”
“Any way I can stay in touch with the victim?”
“Why would you want to stay in touch with the victim?”
“She’s a fifteen-year-old girl. Her world just ended. I don’t want to personally let her down.”
“Have you been very close to this little girl? Helped her through …” He gestured with the pen, indicating spirals of unnamed suffering.
“Yes.”
He wanted to know more. After I described our morning talks and how Juliana had opened up to me, his belly jumped and he belched like a bald, satiated Roman emperor, and went back to the shooting.
“If the police were to claim you were a frustrated, jealous woman who was trying to avenge a betrayal by her lover, would you have some other explanation? Yes or no?”
The blue-stoned pen tapped against the pad.
“Yes or no?” he prompted.
“Can we stop playing games and can I just tell you—”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“What would be your explanation?”
“I wanted to stop him.”
Devon nodded encouragingly.
“You wanted to stop him from what?”
“From hurting me any more. Physically hurting me.”
“Would that involve some kind of self-defense on your part?”
“Yes, it would.”
“Would it be true to say you shot him in self-defense?”
I had seemed to lose direction, lost in some elastic loop of time.
“Yes.”
“Did you feel in physical danger?”
“I just wanted him to leave.”
“Did he leave?”
“No.”
“What did he do?”
“He attacked me. He wouldn’t stop. I kicked him in the groin and he backed off, and I warned him, but he came back at me. I dropped to the gun. I warned him again. I started shooting. We fought over the gun, and he got it away from me. He never stopped once he started coming at me, and I kept pulling the trigger.”
“So he kept coming.”
“He did.”
“Even when you warned him, showed him the gun?”
“That’s right.”
“Even when you shot him, he didn’t run, or take evasive action?”
“No.”
“Nothing was going to stop him.”
I was unaware of everything except Devon’s rapid breath on the other side of the mesh, intimate as a priest’s.
“Why,” I said, faltering, “didn’t he stop?”
“I think it’s very possible,” Devon answered, “Detective Berringer went to your apartment with the intention of killing you.”
“Killing me?”
“You thought it was the other way around?”
“I was the one with the gun.”
“Yes,” said Devon, “that was the surprise.”
After a moment I shook my head, as if waking from a dream.
“You’re kidding, right? This is one of those outrageous legal arguments—”
“You can’t be objective,” Devon said. “I can. All I hear is you blaming yourself. It is absolutely not out of the question that this cop, who is used to violence, possibly depressed, despondent, getting older, close to retirement, financial problems, high on