The Pink Pony

by Charles Cutter

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Zeke, I wonder if I’m about to open Pandora ’s box.”

  Eve came in. “Unless that’s a centerpiece, you need to get that box off the table before we eat.”

  “This is the Brady box,” Burr said, delighted with his cleverness.

  “It looks like a banker’s box to me. We have hundreds of them.”

  “This one has all the evidence that Karpinen has.”

  “What did you find?”

  “I haven’t opened it yet.”

  “Open it up. The beef tenderloin will be done soon.”

  “Don’t be in such a rush.”

  “Come on, Burr.” She took the top off.

  Burr peered inside the box. It was less than half full.

  “Let’s find out before the meat goes from rare to well done.”

  The thought of well-done beef tenderloin shook Burr to the very core. Out came the papers. He rummaged through them. File after file. The crime scene report, the autopsy, interviews. It looked like he already had all of this.

  But what about this? Here they are. The fingerprints.

  He compared the fingerprints on the Christmas lights to Murdo’s. They matched.

  “Find anything?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Make the horseradish sauce. I have fresh dill from the herb garden at the Iroquois.”

  Jacob walked in. “Get to it, Burr. We don’t want the meat overdone.”

  “Just a minute,” Burr said. There were four sheets of fingerprints. Burr studied them, print after print. All Murdo’s. “Damn it all.”

  “Damn what all?” Jacob asked.

  “Murdo’s fingerprints are all over the Christmas lights.”

  “That’s what Karpinen told you,” Eve said.

  “Please, Eve. Go check the tenderloin,” Jacob said.

  “Hush. I set the timer.”

  Burr looked at the prints again. Some of them were blurry. He held up one of the sheets to the light. “Jacob, would you get your magnifying glass? The one you use to tie those size 20 tricos.”

  “You’re no fingerprint expert.”

  “Please.”

  Jacob returned with the magnifying glass.

  “These are all Murdo’s.”

  The timer went off. “Eve, for God’s sake, check the meat,” Jacob said.

  She didn’t move. “What is it, Burr?”

  “This can’t be all there is,” Burr said.

  “What?”

  “Eve, I beg you. Check the meat.”

  “Be quiet.”

  Burr rummaged through the banker’s box. Finally, “Here it is.”

  “Here’s what?” Eve said.

  Burr pulled out another sheet of fingerprints. “Here it is.”

  “Here’s what?” Eve said.

  “Smudges. A sheet of smudges.”

  “A sheet of smudges?”

  “This is what I’ve been looking for. These are the other fingerprints that were on the lights. It’s what Karpinen didn’t want me to have.” Burr passed the file to Eve. “Keep this in a safe place.” He took the file back. “First take out the meat. I’ll make the sauce.” Burr put the fingerprints back in the box and disappeared into the kitchen.

  * * *

  Burr chewed on a rare piece of the tenderloin. “I just can’t do it.”

  “I’m your partner.”

  “It’s a family secret.” Burr stabbed another piece of zucchini. “This is perfect.”

  “Thank you,” Eve said.

  “I know it has horseradish, cream, and dill.”

  “I’ll leave you the recipe in my will.”

  “What about the smudges?” Eve said.

  “They’re probably Murdo’s smudges,” Jacob said. “I think you added a dash of tarragon.”

  “They might be Murdo’s smudges. But they might not.”

  “You can’t base your entire defense on smudges,” Eve said.

  “Tarragon is not the secret ingredient,” Burr said. “A smudge or two may be just the reasonable doubt we need. Eve, I need you to find me an expert on smudges.”

  It’s mayonnaise, but I’ll never tell.

  * * *

  The man with the missing finger pointed the knife at Burr’s nose, the tip of the blade so close that Burr’s eyes crossed when he looked at it. He didn’t think it was a genuine display of affection, stepped back, only to find himself up against a wall.

  “That’s what I mean.” The man took another step toward Burr, who had nowhere else to go. With the knife still perilously close to his nose, and still looking at the world a bit cross-eyed, Burr saw that it was the ring finger on his left hand that was missing.

  Why does everyone point weapons at me?

  “I’m afraid I don’t see what you do mean,” Burr said.

  The man turned and flung the knife at the wall behind him, where it stuck in the plank. “You can’t just jump in here and surprise me. I could have cut myself, what with the knife and all.”

  It looks like you already have.

  “I knocked and you said to come in.”

  “I got wrapped up in my carving. Don’t scare me like that. You’re about as bad as my sister. She always spooks me like that.”

  I wonder if he goes after her with a knife when she spooks him.

  “My name is Burr Lafayette. I think my secretary told you I’d be coming.”

  “That’s right.” He thrust his hand at Burr, who shook it. “Stanley Mueller. Call me Stan.”

  Burr had driven south on I-75, this time to Bay City, then up the east side of Saginaw Bay to Fish Point, a wisp of land that stuck out into the bay, barely above lake level. A state refuge and miles of cattail-choked shoreline. Paradise for ducks and geese. Burr was delighted that Eve had sent him to a decoy carver. He’d found the nine-digit Mueller in a garage behind his house, a garage turned into a wood shop. He smelled wood shavings, paint, and mildew. Decoys everywhere in all stages of incompletion. Canvasbacks, bluebills, redheads, mallards, teal.

  What a great place.

  “This is what I do since I retired.”

  Burr thought Mueller looked a bit young to be retired. Medium height, trim. His head was shaped like a cement block. He had short black hair without a touch of gray and a nose that couldn’t belong to a teetotaler. But it was the glasses that got Burr’s attention. Thick lenses in big, black frames that gave Mueller frog eyes.

  “Did it for the state police for almost thirty years, but I still work prints. Freelance, dontcha know. Mostly for criminal lawyers. I don’t much like that part.”

  “My client is not a criminal.”

  “They never are. Let me see what you got.”

  Burr handed the file to Mueller, who opened a door at the back of the garage and motioned for Burr to follow into his office. Sunlight filled the room. Mueller sat down at a metal desk and turned on a light that drowned out the sunlight. He studied the fingerprints, glasses on, glasses off, then with a magnifying glass. After about fifteen minutes, he closed the file, opened one of the drawers, and pulled out a bottle of Jim Beam and two glasses. He poured two fingers in each and handed one to Burr.

  That explains his nose.

  Mueller drank the two fingers of whiskey and poured himself another.

  “The prints lifted from the lights definitely match Murdoch Halverson’s,” Mueller said. “What kind of name is Murdoch anyway?”

  “It’s a family name. I’m interested in the other fingerprints.”

  “The other fingerprints?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean the smudges?”

  “Can you identify them?”

  The retired fingerprint expert shook his head. He drank the second two fingers. He bent over the smudges again
, magnifying glass in hand. After about five minutes, he stood up and went out a door at the back of the office. Burr followed him outside to what looked like a very successful vegetable garden – beans, peas, tomatoes, zucchini, and the tallest sweet corn Burr had ever seen, mixed with a few even taller plants.

  “I might be able to make out some of those smudges. Might. No guarantees, mind you.”

  “That would be helpful.” Burr sipped his whiskey.

  “Problem is, I don’t have a database anymore, so even if I could make them out, I’ve got nothing to compare them to.”

  Burr kicked at the dirt. “I may be able to get you fingerprints to compare.”

  “That’s what I’d need.” Stanley reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette. “It will be expensive.”

  Everything I do is expensive.

  Stanley lit up. The sweet smoke drifted over to Burr.

  I’m surrounded by potheads.

  “Medicinal. For my glaucoma.” He pointed at the tall shaggy plants growing in the corn. “This is my pharmacy.”

  * * *

  “All rise,” Henry Crow said.

  The judges must share the same bailiff.

  Judge Lindstrom made his entrance.

  “Be seated,” Henry Crow said.

  Burr sat in the gallery with a collection of mostly men, mostly middle-aged, all in ties, a group he assumed was composed entirely of lawyers. He looked around Lindstrom’s courtroom, a cut above Judge Maki’s, a circuit judge a decided rank and pay grade higher than a district judge. Lindstrom’s courtroom had hardwood floors, a fresh coat of vanilla paint on the walls and, miracle of miracles, a window. A window just above a portrait of Father Marquette. A big window framing a sugar maple in the prime of life.

  “Welcome to motion day,” Judge Lindstrom said. He slipped on reading glasses. “Where shall we begin?” he asked himself. The judge flipped through his files. Casually, Burr thought, especially considering what might be at stake for the various and sundry litigants.

  Motion day was a day for lawyers, not witnesses, not clients, not juries. A day when lawyers fought with other lawyers over legal issues, usually procedural niff naws such as evidence, witnesses, consents, stipulations. Matters civil and criminal. Here and there, a constitutional issue, habeas corpus, due process and illegal search and seizure.

  The lawyers in the gallery waited, patiently and impatiently, until their turn. Burr had found neither rhyme nor reason to the order the judges followed on motion day. In a more prosperous time, judges actually liked Burr and called him first.

  This, however, was not a prosperous time. Burr waited and waited. Through the evidence motion in a grand larceny case, through the unlawful search and seizure motion in a drug bust, through the stipulation in a timber accident, through the settlement agreement in a property line dispute. And so on. Ad nauseum. Ad infinitum. It was bad enough that he sat with his back to the door. It would be worse yet if Karpinen sat behind him, but so far, he hadn’t seen the prosecutor, which was a bit dicey for him. Karpinen would likely be defaulted if he wasn’t here when Burr’s motion was called.

  Burr drummed his fingers, tapped his pencil, left for the restroom during a long-winded motion about a railroad right-of-way, dozed during a motion for alimony that dragged on and on, more so because Lindstrom was deaf as a stone, especially in his left ear.

  Then Karpinen showed up. He sat down near the front of the courtroom and nodded at the judge. Lindstrom summarily disposed of the motion at hand, something about a recalcitrant witness. It didn’t look like either lawyer was happy with the ruling.

  “People versus Halverson,” said the clerk, a dowdy woman of indeterminate age. Karpinen limped to the prosecutor’s table, Burr to the defense table. Burr sat and shuffled his papers.

  “Mr. Lafayette,” Judge Lindstrom said.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Burr said.

  “Did you have something you wanted to say?”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” Burr said, standing. He pulled down the cuffs of his white shirt which didn’t need pulling down and straightened his royal blue tie with the white checks that didn’t need straightening.

  “When you’re done preening, come over here and say it to my good ear.”

  “Gus, you stand next to Mr. Lafayette.”

  Karpinen limped up to Burr.

  “How’s the hip today?” the judge said.

  “It’s my knee.”

  “Right.” The judge looked at Burr. “Did you have something you wanted to say, Mr. Lafayette?”

  “Your Honor, an examination of the fingerprints provided by the prosecutor has revealed that there may indeed be fingerprints of additional persons on the murder weapon. That is, the Christmas tree lights. The defense asks that subpoenas be issued to those persons listed on the motion in order that we may determine who these additional fingerprints belong to.”

  “Your Honor, the other fingerprints aren’t identifiable. They’re smudges.”

  Lindstrom turned his good ear to Karpinen. “Smudges?”

  “That’s right, smudges.”

  The judge turned his good ear to Burr.

  “Your Honor, our expert believes he might be able to determine who they belong to.”

  “That’s impossible, Your Honor. If it could have been done, we would have done it.”

  “You didn’t try,” Burr said.

  “Stop it, both of you.” Lindstrom studied the motion. Then he counted on his fingers. “I count seven. You want me to compel seven people to submit to fingerprinting based on what the prosecutor terms smudges?”

  “Actually, there are eight, Your Honor.”

  “While you’re at it, why don’t you ask me to order everyone who was in The Pink Pony that night to be fingerprinted?”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary, Your Honor.”

  “I’m sure you are aware that fingerprinting, especially fingerprinting when there is very little basis for supposing any of these persons are, or might be, suspects, is an intrusion almost without precedent.”

  “Your Honor, this is crucial to the defense.”

  “He’s offside,” Karpinen said.

  Lindstrom ignored Karpinen.

  “Counsel, at this point, the poor souls on this list are not suspects. They are barely persons of interest. I will not have their Fourth Amendment rights trampled on. If at some point, any of these people become persons of interest, I may reconsider.” Lindstrom stared at Burr, then Karpinen. “And one more thing. It is now approaching Labor Day. Finish your preparation, then we’ll have our trial. And by God, it had better be over before deer season.” Lindstrom smacked his gavel on its base. “Motion denied.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “This is lunacy and you know it.”

  “Jacob, it’s not lunacy. It’s a calculated risk.”

  “It’s reckless.”

  Burr sliced off a piece of the strip steak. He dipped it in the sauce and chewed it slowly. It’s good, but it’s not as good as mine.

  “We have all to gain and nothing to lose.”

  “I am an attorney, a researcher, and a writer of appellant briefs. I know nothing of fingerprints.”

  Burr washed the aged Black Angus down with a swallow of a fairly pedestrian Meritage, the California wannabe of Bordeaux. “No one will suspect a thing.”

  “Your wretched fingerprint expert should do it. If he could stay sober and straight long enough.”

  “He has good-looking plants. You might want to get to know him.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that you can buy me this steak and I’ll do your bidding.” Jacob took another bite “It won’t work, not this time.” Jacob took a bite of his Caesar salad. “The dressing is spectacular.”

  “It’s the anchovies.” Burr h
ad brought Jacob to the Machus Red Fox on Telegraph in Bloomfield Township. A one-story squarish building with mud brown timbers and ivory stucco. It was so dark inside that Burr wished he’d brought a flashlight. He’d held the candle-in-the-glass centerpiece up against the menu, and even then, he had to ask the waiter for help. But the Red Fox did lend itself to assignations. Assignations of all kinds, romantic and otherwise.

  “It’s much more cost effective if you do it,” Burr said.

  “You mean cheaper.” Jacob turned his attention back to his steak.

  Burr took a plastic box the size of a cigarette pack from his navy-blue blazer and handed it to Jacob.

  “What is this?”

  “Try it out on me.”

  “Try what.”

  “Take my fingerprints.”

  “In here? It’s much too dark.”

  “If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere.”

  Jacob studied the package. He poked his salad. “This is a silly place to experiment.”

  Burr sipped his wine, much smoother now.

  I guess it just takes a little longer to open up.

  He smiled at Jacob. “Silly isn’t a word I would use for the Machus Red Fox. Especially at this table.”

  “Why not?”

  “This was the last place Jimmy Hoffa was seen alive.”

  Jacob stopped chewing.

  “For all I know, Jimmy Hoffa is part of the anchovy paste in the dressing.”

  * * *

  They spent the night at the Townsend in downtown Birmingham, far and away the best hotel in metro Detroit. It occurred to Burr that the money he saved substituting Jacob for Mueller, he’d just spent on the Townsend.

  I love a good hotel.

  Just before eleven the next morning, Burr and Jacob walked into the shop of R. Benjamin Fishman, Importer, Clothier and Haberdasher. He’d been the cook on Fujimo. Burr thought it highly unlikely that the cook was the killer, so this would be a virtually risk-free place to experiment.

  Only two doors down from the Townsend, Fishman’s was a small shop with a plate glass window that drowned a well-dressed mannequin in sunlight. Burr looked at a label on a sport coat. Pricey indeed.