Bert Silver takes charge of their suspect as soon as the front door opens, addressing him by name and making it clear, in a single declarative sentence, that half the police department has come to request the honor of his presence at headquarters. The other detectives slide past the two and begin moving slowly through a fetid, cluttered three-room apartment.

The old man moans and shakes his head, then tries to formulate an argument from a series of seemingly unrelated syllables. It takes a few minutes for Bert Silver to get the hang of it.

“Nuh gago t’nite.”

“Yeah, you do. We need to talk to you. Where are your pants? Are these your pants?”

“Dunwanna go.”

“Well, we have to talk to you.”

“Nuh… dunwanna.”

“Well, that’s the way it’s got to be. You don’t want us to have to arrest you, do you? Are these your pants?”

“Blackuns.”

“You want the black ones?”

As Bertina Silver assembles their suspect, the other detectives move carefully through the rooms, looking for blood spatter, for serrated knives, for a small, star-shaped gold earring. Harry Edgerton checks the kitchen for hot dogs or sauerkraut, then returns to the bedroom, where he finds a thick red stain by the old man’s bed.

“Whoa. What the fuck is this?”

Edgerton and Eddie Brown bend down. The color is purple-red, but with a high gloss. Edgerton puts his finger to the edge.

“Sticky,” he says.

“Probably wine,” says Brown, turning to the old man. “Hey, my man, did you drop your bottle here?”

The old man grunts.

“That ain’t blood,” says Brown, laughing softly. “That be Thunderbird.”

Edgerton agrees, but pulls out a pocket knife and pries up a small piece of the substance, then drops it into a small glassine bag. In the front hall, the detective does the same thing with a red-brown smear that runs across the plasterboard for about four feet. If either sample comes back blood, they’ll have to return with a warrant and take fresh samples for evidence, but Edgerton believes that the possibility is remote. Better to let the lab techs test a sample tonight and be done with it.

The old man looks around, suddenly aware of the crowd.

“Whaterey doin’?”

“They’re waiting for you. You need a jacket? Where’s your jacket?”

The old man points to a black ski jacket on a closet door. Silver grabs the garment and holds it up for the old man, who slowly negotiates his arms into the sleeves.

Brown shakes his head. “This ain’t the guy,” he says softly. “No way.”

Fifteen minutes later, in the hall outside the sixth-floor interrogation room, Jay Landsman comes to the same conclusion. He stares through the small, wire mesh window of the door to the large room. The window is a one-way affair: Landsman’s face cannot be seen from inside the eight-by-six-foot cubicle; the window itself appears to be almost metallic, something between steel plate and dull mirror.

Framed in the small window is the old man from the south side of Newington -the old man who supposedly knew about this murder before anyone else in the neighborhood. Yet here he sits, their latest suspect, a stone-cold smokehound apprehended somewhere on that well-traveled road between Thunderbird and Colt 45, his zipper down, the buttons of his soiled work shirt secured in the wrong buttonholes. Bert Silver didn’t exactly waste time worrying about wardrobe.

The sergeant watches the old man rub his eyes and slump against the metal chair, then lean forward to scratch himself in buried, forbidden places that even Landsman doesn’t want to think about. Though he was roused from stupor and squalor less than an hour before, the old man is now fully awake and waiting patiently in the empty cubicle, his breath wheezing at regular intervals.

This in itself is a bad sign, clearly contradicting Rule Number Four in the homicide lexicon, which states that an innocent man left alone in an interrogation room will remain fully awake, rubbing his eyes, staring at the cubicle walls and scratching himself in the dark, forbidden places. A guilty man left alone in an interrogation room goes to sleep.

Like most theories involving the interrogation room, the Sleeping Suspect Rule cannot be invoked across the board. Some novices not yet accustomed to the inherent stress of crime and punishment are prone to babbling, sweating and generally making themselves sick before and during an interrogation. But Landsman can hardly be encouraged when he sees that the old man from Newington Avenue, drunk and disheveled and hauled from his bed in the middle of the night, is still unwilling to take his present condition as an anesthetic. The sergeant shakes his head and walks back into the office.

“Geez, Tom, this guy looked a lot better before we got him down here,” Landsman says. “I can’t see him being anything but a smokehound.”

Pellegrini agrees. The old man’s appearance in the homicide unit and his almost immediate dismissal as a suspect by Landsman mark the last stage in the transformation from aging alcoholic to suspected child killer and back to harmless drunk. For the old man, it was a frenetic, three-day metamorphosis of which he had remained blissfully unaware.

From the moment that the Whitelock Street carryout owner first uttered the old man’s name to Landsman and Brown, everything looked good.

First of all, he told the woman at the carryout about the child’s murder at 9:00 A.M. on Thursday-even before the detectives had cleared the crime scene-and he behaved strangely while doing so. But how could he have known about the little girl’s murder at that time? Although the elderly couple living at 718 Newington had told several neighbors of the discovery before calling the police, there was no indication that they had talked to the old man across the street. Moreover, the detectives had almost immediately barred onlookers from the alley behind Newington; because the old man lived on the south side of the street, he should not have been able to see the body.

Then there were the rape charges-old ones to be sure-with no indication of conviction or sentence on the sheet. But when detectives pull the reports from Central Records they find one of the victims to be a young girl. Also, the old man appears to live alone and his first-floor rowhouse apartment is in the 700 block of Newington, a short run from where the body was dumped.

A bit thin, perhaps. But Landsman and Pellegrini both know that four days have passed since the discovery of the body and at this moment, there is nothing better on the horizon. The first and seemingly best suspect developed thus far-the Fish Man-was brought downtown for an interview two days ago, but that interrogation had led them nowhere.

The Fish Man showed little interest in talking about the death of a child who had once worked in his store. Nor did he seem at all interested in accurately establishing his own whereabouts on Tuesday and Wednesday. After overcoming a general loss of memory, he came up with an alibi for the Tuesday of Latonya Wallace’s disappearance-an errand across town that he had run with a friend. Checking on the alibi, Pellegrini and Edgerton found that the trip had in fact occurred on Wednesday, leaving them to wonder whether the man had lied intentionally or had simply confused the days. Moreover, in checking the alibi, the detectives learned that the Fish Man had invited two friends up to his apartment to eat chicken on Wednesday evening. That, of course, left an obvious problem: If, as the autopsy seemed to indicate, Latonya Wallace was abducted on Tuesday, killed on Wednesday night and then dumped in the early morning hours of Thursday, then what was the Fish Man doing running errands on Wednesday afternoon or cooking a chicken dinner on Wednesday night? A full statement was taken from the Fish Man at the Saturday interrogation and, given the number of unanswered questions, both Edgerton and Pellegrini considered him a suspect. Still, the problems with apparent time of death-based on the extra, partially digested meal and the lack of decomposition-had to be overcome.