Free Rust On the Razor by Mark Richard Zubro Page A

suit.
    The drive of a few blocks took only moments. Cody led me up the steps of the police station. It was two stories tall, with four windows on both sides of the front door. The woodwork around them was painted white. It could have
used another coat. Inside, the linoleum floors were faded yellow with black flecks. Pine, stained dark brown, covered the walls halfway to the ceiling; the upper portion was painted pale beige. The first floor was basically one large room with offices around the sides, separated by glass partitions that reached only three-quarters of the way to the ceiling. A reception desk was immediately to the left as I walked in, staffed by a gray-haired woman answering the phone. A low wooden railing separated the reception area from the rest of the fifty-by-fifty-foot space.
    Two African-American men in cop uniforms stood off to my left on the far side of the room. Four white people in plainclothes worked at various desks on the other side of the railing. I noticed potted plants and pictures of families on desktops. One desk had a typewriter with a yellow rubber duck on top—it had the friendliest face of anybody or thing in the place.
    I was fingerprinted and subjected to paperwork being filled out. All the people talked more slowly than I was used to in Chicago. For a few of them I wanted desperately to reach over and press their fast-forward button. It didn’t seem like they’d ever get done speaking. Everyone was reasonably polite, but nobody moved a speck above slow, as if time were theirs to play with. All this took until after twelve. Finally, they led me up stairs that were immediately behind the reception desk. I saw a hallway as dreary as the space below. They put me in the first room on the right.
    It was not a suite at the Ritz. The best thing about it was that there were no rats or crawling critters visible. There was a chair, but one of the legs was slightly shorter than the other, which made sitting in it annoying. The table in the center of the room could have been shellacked and made into a shrine to the criminals who had carved their initials, names, what I hoped were nicknames, and obscene
graffiti into it. The window had wire mesh on the inside.
    Nobody stayed in the room with me. For comfort I finally moved the table against a wall and sat on top of it. I waited and wondered. No doubt in my mind that I was a suspect. I tried the door. Locked. I decided if there was a fire I could batter the table or chair through the mesh on the window and jump two flights down. They hadn’t taken my wallet, watch, other valuables, or shoelaces.
    There was no air-conditioning and I had no way to remove the wire mesh and open the window to get some fresh air. At first I sweated a fine mist of damp all over my body. Then I started to drip. An hour later, when rivers of moisture were running off me and with my worries mounting, Wainwright Richardson came in.
    I neither gave nor got a cheery greeting. He refused my first and all subsequent requests for water. Richardson took the chair, turned it backwards, and straddled it. He had to lean forward so the short chair leg rested on the ground. I guess it doesn’t do to rock back and forth while grilling a suspect.
    â€œYou’re in a lot of trouble,” he said.
    â€œI want my lawyer.”
    â€œDon’t you start that with me. We aren’t up north. We take our slow time down here and we do things right.”
    â€œIf you’re doing things right, you’re tracking the sheriff’s movements from last night, finding out who saw him last, seeing if there were any witnesses for this morning, checking to see who had grudges against him. I want my lawyer.”
    â€œYou talk a lot for somebody in so much trouble.”
    â€œI’m just enchanted with the luxury of the surroundings and the charm of my hosts.”
    â€œWhy’d you kill him?”
    â€œI want my lawyer.”

    â€œNow, we’re not getting