The Interrogation - Hardcover

Cook, Thomas H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553800957 ISBN 13: 9780553800951

Publisher: Bantam, 2002

Synopsis

In his latest novel of unrelenting suspense, Edgar Award—winning author Thomas Cook journeys into the darkest corners of the human heart to tell a mesmerizing story of crime and retribution–and the forces that push even good people to the breaking point.

THE INTERROGATION

Albert Jay Smalls sits in an interrogation room accused of an unspeakable crime. The police have no witnesses, no physical evidence, but they are certain he is hiding the truth. With less than twelve hours before he must be released, Smalls will be put through one final interrogation. I

It is a search that leads into the shadowed recesses of one man’s shattered mind–and to the devastating secrets buried in a desolate seaside town. It is a quest that takes three desperate cops down a dark, twisting road as they race against the clock to find out what really happened one rainy autumn afternoon in 1952. The answers will be more shocking than anyone can imagine, blurring the boundaries between pursuers and prey, between the innocent and the guilty, between the truth that sets us free and the tragedies that haunt us to the grave.

Against a gripping backdrop of murder and redemption, master storyteller Thomas Cook probes the uneasy, shifting bonds of family, love, and unbearable loss, proving once again why he is “perhaps the best American writer of crime fiction currently practicing” (Drood Review).

About this title

Reviews

Adult/High School-A suspenseful psychological thriller with troubled characters. It is 1952. Albert Jay Smalls, arrested on suspicion of murdering eight-year-old Cathy Lake, is scheduled to be released at 6 a.m. unless compelling evidence against him can be uncovered. Police Chief Thomas Burke calls in two detectives to spend the night interrogating the young vagrant who was found living in a drainage pipe near the murder scene. Jack Pierce, one of the detectives, is staggering under his own emotional load. His daughter was murdered four years earlier, his marriage dissolved under the anger and grief, and, reminiscent of this case, the suspected murderer was released for lack of evidence. Pierce has promised Cathy's mother that this crime won't go unpunished. His partner, Norman Cohen, still reels from confronting the horrors involved in liberating a concentration camp during the war. For both men, Smalls represents one evil that they have a chance to stop and contain. During the course of this one night, readers meet peripheral characters, learn more about the defendant, and watch as the intensity builds with the passage of time. Each of these characters is struggling with unresolved issues and, interestingly, all revolve around one another in layers of surprising connections. More than just a page-turner, this novel is a psychological dissection of troubled souls trying to get through the night.
Carol DeAngelo, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Did Albert Jay Smalls strangle eight-year-old Cathy Lake to death on a rainy afternoon in 1952? Two police detectives have 11 hours to find out before Smalls is released. The Edgar-winning Cook makes the most of that brief period of time, not only braiding the intricate elements of the crime but laying open the secretive, troubled lives of at least half a dozen characters. The case against Smalls is thin no witnesses, no physical evidence. A homeless vagrant who lived in a tunnel not far from where Cathy's body was found, he's been in custody for more than a week. No one has been able to crack his denial of the murder, but detectives Jack Pierce and Norman Cohen sense he's hiding something. Employing flashbacks and parallel action while in the interrogation frame, Cook adroitly weaves back and forth between the crime itself, the subsequent investigation and the halting questioning of the suspect. More compelling, however, is his portrayal of how the crime affects Pierce and Cohen, as well as several secondary characters. Pierce, for example, is a man driven by rage: his own daughter was murdered six years earlier and her case went unsolved. Cohen, who conducts most of the questioning while Pierce plows into Smalls's past, is still numb from what he saw in Germany as a soldier. Down to the cleverly hatched, melancholy ending, Cook (The Chatham School Affair; Places in the Dark) again takes readers down a dark, treacherous road into the heart of human fallibility and struggle.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

It's 1952. Three cops take turns grilling one suspect in Interrogation Room Number Three. They have 12 hours to solve the murder of a little girl, found strangled to death in a park, before the suspect must be released. The suspect is Albert Jay Smalls, a drifter whose last place of residence was a pipe only feet away from where the child's body was found. Smalls is ill-matched for the chess game the cops play, in relay teams, as they move from the Case Files Room, to the office of the chief of detectives, back to the park, back to Interrogation Room Number Three. In its concentration on the time element, Cook's suspense tale resembles a TV drama more than a traditionally structured mystery. The ticking clock, in addition to the economy of scene, makes this an incredibly intense read, culminating in a true shocker of an ending. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Are we alone in this?

6:00 P.M., September 12, Trevor and Madison

Eddie Lambrusco pressed down on the brake and steered Siddell Carting Truck 12 over to the curb. Five metal garbage cans stood in a sloppy line at the edge of the street. All were swollen with the day's refuse, but Terry Siddell, Eddie's shift partner for the night, made no effort to deal with them.

"Well, you getting out or not, Terry?" Eddie asked.

Siddell didn't move, but that didn't surprise Eddie. Siddell wasn't used to taking orders. Eddie was used to nothing else. Except when he was with his daughter, Laurie, saw himself reflected in her adoring gaze and suddenly felt like a man again. He thought of Laurie now, the way her eyes had followed him out the door of her room that morning. Don't go, Daddy. Any man would do anything for such a sweet kid, Eddie thought. Anything he had to do to make her happy. And yet he'd not been able to stay with her. He knew that other fathers would be with their kids tonight, all curled up on the family sofa, watching Sid Caesar or Uncle Miltie. But not Eddie Lambrusco. Old Man Siddell would never have given him the night off just because his daughter was sick. With that bitter recognition, Eddie returned his thoughts to the job at hand.

"Look, Terry, we got a full twelve-hour shift," Eddie said, making sure that the raw hostility he felt for Terry Siddell didn't show.

Siddell peered morosely into the night. "Twelve hours," he griped. "Twelve fucking hours."

It wasn't just the hours, Eddie knew. It was that Terry had to spend them with a guy like Eddie, a little guy, going nowhere, without power or influence, a guy who could never make Siddell pay for anything he did, which Eddie yearned to do . . . just once.

"Nobody likes a twelve-hour shift," Eddie said. Again he thought of Laurie. Her sickness. Her fever. The way she'd vomited through the night. Then his mind shifted to her mother, snatched from the secretarial pool, screwed, and tossed aside. He'd scooped something out of her, the guy who did that, so that she'd collapsed from the inside, abandoned her husband and daughter, leaving nothing behind but the lingering smell of her afternoon gin.

The terrible loss that had been inflicted upon his life abruptly swept down upon Eddie Lambrusco, a grown man who couldn't hold on to a wife or stay home with a sick daughter or say "Go fuck yourself" to anyone at all, not even the little punk who sat whining at his side.

"So, you getting out?" he asked.

"Okay, okay," Siddell answered sourly. He grasped the door handle, jerked it up, and pulled himself out of the truck, leaving the door open behind him.

"Fucking wimp," Eddie growled under his breath. He leaned over and violently jerked the door closed, imagining Siddell's right hand smashed by the impact, screaming for him to open the door, release him, gazing in horror at his mangled fingers when he did. The only problem was that such vengeful fantasies were brief, and in their wake Eddie felt only smaller and more powerless.

In the wide rearview mirror, he watched as Siddell lumbered toward the bulging cans. Christ, he thought, what a lousy break. A twelve-hour run ahead of him, every second of it with a rich kid who'd be his boss in five years, another jerk he'd have to answer to. He imagined Terry Siddell behind a big desk, dressed in a suit and tie, pinkie ring on his finger, puffing a big cigar as he handed him the pink slip. Sorry, Eddie, but we just can't keep you on.

In the old days he'd been partnered with Charlie Sweeney, and the two of them had laughed the night away. If Eddie hadn't lost his job with the city, they'd have still been partners, gotten the work done, cleaned up the whole area around police headquarters, the park, Briarwood, where the big Dumpsters bulged with the dreadful garbage of Saint Vincent's Hospital, and finally the crumbling tenements of Cordelia. They'd have laughed their way through the whole damn thing because Charlie was a jokester, a guy who made faces and could imitate the people he saw on the street. Charlie moved the clock forward one gag at a time, lightened the load for everybody else. Every shift run, Eddie decided, needs a comedian, and he knew that without Charlie, tonight would be long, the work arduous, and there'd hardly be a moment when he wasn't brooding about Laurie, chewing at the fact that he wasn't with her, despising himself for leaving her alone.

A clatter sounded behind the truck, the intentionally vicious noise Siddell always made, rolling the cans back and forth and banging them against the metal sides of the truck as if trying to get even with Old Man Siddell for making him work for his supper. Amazing, Eddie thought, what some guys feel entitled to. He reached in his pocket and drew out the battered pocket watch he'd inherited from his father, a laborer's timepiece with its chinks and scratches and slightly skewed hands that circled turgidly around the yellowing dial. After a lifetime, he thought, this.

Siddell groaned as he crawled back into the truck. "Okay, let's get out of here."

Eddie glanced in the mirror. A trail of garbage lay strewn across the wet street. "Next time try to get some of it in the truck, Terry," he said, relishing what he knew would be only a fleeting moment of authority over Terry Siddell.

Siddell's lips jerked into a scowl. "Fuck you, asshole."

Eddie gave no indication that he'd heard Siddell's insulting reply. After all, what could he do about it? Punch the little shit's lights out and get fired for it? No. He couldn't do that. He'd gone that route before, been fired by the Parks Department and the Sanitation Department and even the private carting service where he'd worked before being hired by Old Man Siddell. No, he had to control himself now. For Laurie's sake. Because she needed things.

And so he swallowed his rage, grasped the black knob of the gearshift, stomped the clutch, and stirred the truck back onto the deserted avenue, his eyes locked on the street ahead, where, at the end of it, the great stone facade of police headquarters loomed.

As the truck lurched forward, Eddie let his gaze drift up the side of the building. On the top floor, he could see a solitary figure in a lighted window, staring down at the darkening street, head bowed, shoulders slumped, as if beneath a weight he could not carry anymore.

6:12 P.M., Office of the Chief of Detectives,

227 Madison Street

Chief of Detectives Thomas Burke peered through the arched window of his sixth-floor office, hands clasped behind his back, staring down at the city's tangled streets. At the corner of Madison a garbage truck made a clumsy rocking turn, a spume of trash blowing behind it. Is that what dooms us in the end, he wondered, a million small neglects?

He had no answer to this question, and he looked out across the city, where lights had begun to flicker in the distant apartment houses as the day workers returned to their rooms like birds to their nests. The image, he knew, was from one of his son's poems. What had Scottie called the city? A rookery of scars.

He closed his eyes briefly, tried once again to fathom his son's fall. Where had it come from, Scottie's utter lack of nerve, the way he'd curled into a ball of defeat and let life squash him like a can in the street? A little spine would have saved him, Burke thought, but there'd been no sign of that. No sign of muscle, sinew, the strength required to take a punch. He thought of Rocky Marciano, the championship bout that was coming up. That's what Scottie had needed, a touch of the fighter in his soul. But Scottie had hit the mat in the first round, and never gotten up.

When Burke opened his eyes again, the great bridge rose mutely before him, its stone ramparts towering above the unreflecting waters of the harbor. The bridge was often lost in spooky fogs, but this evening, as night fell, it glowed in a pale blue light. Burke thought of ghost ships in the mist, of the coffin boat that had disgorged some half-starved ancestor at the harbor door a century before, a scullery maid or landless tinker. Scottie had failed to grow the thick hide and sharp fangs of these wolfish forebears. If subjected to some final interrogation, Burke wondered what answer his son would give to the one question he should have asked him. Why didn't you fight back?

A knock at the door.

He turned to face it. "Come in."

It was Commissioner O'Hearn, tall and erect in the doorway, all but gleaming in his dress uniform, the police-brass equivalent of a tuxedo. His luxurious black coat was folded neatly over his crooked arm, his cap held delicately in recently manicured fingers, and in that pose the Commissioner looked decidedly aristocratic, like an old European military man, trusted adviser to the Kaiser or the czar. Only the lilt of his voice betrayed his shanty-Irish roots.

"Did you ever figure, Tom, that I'd end up wearing a monkey suit like this?" the Commissioner asked.

"No, never," Burke replied.

What he remembered were two kids from the slums, throwing rocks in the river, leaping off the pylons, racing across the bridge fast as the wind that hummed through its steel cables, playing them like massive harp strings. They'd sneaked into movie houses, stolen apples from peddlers' carts, both of them orphaned by fathers dead from drink and raised by mothers increasingly bitter, looking every day more ragged and used up, like the clothes they washed. Then the Dealer of the Cards had unexpectedly switched the deck and sent them Officer Horace Miles, the beat cop who'd taken two street urchins under his wing, offered a way they might escape the iron grip of Harbortown. You two don't have to end up like the rest of this scum, you know.

"I've never learned to like them, Tom." The Commissioner shook his head. "...

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0553800957
• ISBN 13: 9780553800951
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304