Suspects by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online Page B

perpetrator. Yet the robbery had occurred not long before: the pool of blood around the victim’s head was obviously fresh.
    There was nothing Lloyd could do for the man on the floor. He had a memory of CPR from school demonstrations, and also of that maneuver you apply to someone choking on a mouthful of food, but neither was appropriate to a head wound. If the clerk was not already dead, he was well on his way, and if Lloyd stayed much longer, a customer would come in and assume he had done it. You could count on that, and though there was no evidence against him—what had he done with the money?—he would be arrested, tried, and convicted just because he was who he was, the guy people hated on sight. He just wished he could explain that to Donna.
    He left the store, remembering to walk steadily, purposefully, head lowered as if in thought. What he forgot, until he had gone thirty feet into the parking area, was that he continued to carry the half-gallon of whiskey, unwrapped. It was an advertisement of shoplifting. He should have taken a brown bag from the stack within reach on the counter. He scanned the nearby blacktop for discarded paper products. They blew all over the vast parking lot in front of the Valmarket from which he had just been fired, but either this strip mall employed better cleanup workers or it was another example of bad chance: at the moment he could not see a fragment.
    He noticed a telephone cubicle on the other side of the rank of clustered shopping carts under the covered walkway in front of the supermarket. He went there and, retaining the large bottle on the little phone-side ledge with his elbow, dialed 911. He told the operator all he knew about the apparent holdup of the liquor store, but naturally withheld his own name. Maybe he was thereby saving the clerk’s life, if any was left to save. He was not quite the total bastard people thought he was.
    Immediately on hanging up the telephone he saw a crumpled brown grocery bag in the bottom of an empty shopping cart that stood free of the long, clustered files of its fellows. He went to it and seized the bag, which turned out to be torn but would serve to mask his stolen bottle with superficial legitimacy.
    He had trekked only halfway through the parking lot when he heard the whoop of the oncoming police car, followed soon by the siren’s wail of an ambulance. Both vehicles hurtled in through another entrance to the parking area than the one to which he was heading. He glanced back at the crowds coming out of the PriceRite and the satellite shops, because it would have been suspicious-looking not to.
    Then he hiked back to the room he called home in lieu of anything better, leaned against the tiny sink in the kitchen niche, and opened the half gallon. He had not noticed the label before pouring himself a coffee mug full of liquid and taking a hefty gulp. He choked briefly and almost spewed it out: it was scotch, which he put in the category of cleaning fluids, fit to swab out toilets, open drains, but not for human use.… But the same properties that made it so filthy at first encounter served quickly enough to stun the very sense of taste by which it was obnoxious, and in no time at all, his palate anesthetized, he had not only drained the mug but refilled it. He was anxious to get to that level of consciousness at which he could contemplate his next move. Liquor worked best for this purpose. He had never tried a drug that did not dull his faculties whatever its reputation as stimulant.

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    As soon as they had obtained it, the detectives ran “Howland, Lloyd” through the computer but found no criminal record listed for a man of that name. They stayed up all night, part of which they spent revisiting the scene of the crime at 1143 Laurel.
    Next morning Moody was an observer at Dr. Pollack’s autopsy of Donna and Amanda Howland. Little in police work was more unpleasant. Though having attended many such events in