Carom Shot

by JJ Partridge

  He was convincing enough to make me feel like I was overreacting. How bad could it really be? At most, maybe a couple of hours at Champlin & Burrill. I was there often enough because of the University-related litigation and real estate matters that C & B handled. Pine and his staff would take care of the details efficiently and it could be a costly mess for the family in the not unlikely event that Judge Cremascoli, Providence’s probate judge and a former Ward Ten councilman, appointed one of Sonny’s cronies as administrator with the prospect of a whopping big fee and costly delays. Added to such good reasons, Eustace Pine might wonder aloud to mutual acquaintances why Alger Temple refused a colleague’s call for a final service.

  “Okay,” I said after deep breaths, grimaces, and moments of indecision, “but your office really has to do everything! All I want to do is sign the papers.”

  “That’s grand, Algy,” he said enthusiastically, his expression reflecting self-assurance and self-importance. “Would it be convenient to drop by the office tomorrow morning to execute the probate documents? I’ve given Mrs. Cabel the probate petition for execution by her daughter so we can waive newspaper advertising of the probate and, well, you should meet her ....”

  I knew I was scheduled to be at Champlin & Burrill at eleven for a meeting with Steve Winter, its principal litigation attorney, on the sexual bias and harassment litigation so I agreed to meet with Pine an hour earlier. I escorted him to the elevator down the hall and when I returned to my desk, I used the calendar function of my computer to note both new appointments and saw an e-mail from the President’s secretary that he had rescheduled our every-Tuesday-at-eleven meeting until three because of Reinman’s memorial service.

  The service! I had forgotten. Should I, as the putative executor, attend?

  I didn’t relish the thought. Except for checking out Marcie’s “conservative poobahs,” Reinman’s service at First Congregational would likely be an hour’s oleo of piety, following the hoary track of a reading from St. Paul, Emerson on the virtues of the teacher, a snippet of Old Testament, hymns loudly sung or mouthed depending on the familiarity of the music by those in attendance, and a brief eulogy by the church’s long-in-the-tooth minister who would use the word “challenge” a half dozen times. Reinman would be portrayed as a solicitous husband, a brilliant scholar, a committed member of our community and if the minister was “on,” the assemblage might momentarily forget the need for lunch. Before and afterward, the chatter of the University’s attendees would likely have little to do with the deceased. Academia tries to avoid the unpleasantness and inconvenience of death. Would that be true in Reinman’s case? How many of his colleagues would be there? The few who accepted him? Those who were ready to forgive and forget? The curious? Would I be prepared to defend him as his executor if things got a little abrasive?

  I decided I wouldn’t be missed.

  I leaned back in the chair with my hands clasped behind my head. Wait until Marcie hears about this! It was then I recalled my last, and very brief, contact with Reinman at the beginning of the semester.

  I had barely noticed the stooped figure standing at the curb in front of a medical building on Waterman Street. When he called to me, my face surely registered shock as I took in his protuberant black eyes and sallow skin that made each whisker a dark pockmark. I asked him how he was getting along and he shrugged listlessly, and clung to my arm as though to continue the conversation, only to be interrupted by a metallic green BMW driving up to the curb. He struggled opening the passenger door and I supported his elbow as he angled himself inside. A women’s voice thanked me for my assistance; I bent down and looked inside the car.

  Deborah Reinman reintroduced herself. We had met years before at a faculty party where she had seemed to blend into the draperies as her center-of-attention husband held forth. She had been heavy set, in unfashionable clothes, with limp, long brown hair, out-of-place and uncomfortable in the company of the glib and slim. So, I was surprised by the trim appearance of the attractive woman behind the wheel, even when her smile awkwardly gathered her features into the center of her face. She was neither the pale nor exhausted-looking wife I might have expected; instead, she seemed robust, with clear eyes, a focused expression, and spoke easily, not at all the near invisible wife I recalled.

  Some people thrive, I remembered thinking, on caring for others. Deborah Reinman must be one of them.

  I glanced outside: it was no longer sunny, and a closer look revealed a high gathering of gray clouds, a sure precursor of rain. Geezus! Providence’s late Novembers and early Decembers are filled with days like this: low pressure systems shoot up the coast, knock out the clear-weather highs, and are followed by dizzying sequences of sun and wet weather. I decided I would work until noon—it was likely to be fairly peaceful with most of College Hall at Reinman’s service—and walk down The Hill to South Main Street and the five blocks or so to Jerome Franks’s office.

  Where connivance and trouble awaited me.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The mournful toll of the Paul Revere bell from high in the elaborate steeple of First Congregational Church beckoned those interested in Reinman’s service and accompanied me out of College Hall and down The Hill. The peals stopped as I approached the church and almost in response, the clammy mist clinging to downtown changed to a drizzle.

  The service must have been well-attended, based on the number of cars parked bumper-to-bumper on Benefit, Thayer, and Waterman Streets. On the flagstones at the church’s front entrance, a gaggle of state troopers in Smokey the Bear hats, brown rain gear, and polished riding boots brandished umbrellas underneath its ornate portico, no doubt serving as escorts for the VIPs to and from the line of limos parked conspicuously on North Main Street. The drizzle soon became a wind-driven downpour noisily spattering the brick sidewalks, causing me to huddle under a raised overcoat collar and to pick up my pace. A car horn sounded ahead of me and a black Cadillac DeVille left a line of traffic and maneuvered between orange traffic cones to the curb. Under flipping wipers, its windshield brandished a blue, square ME sticker. A darkly tinted passenger side window slid down and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue boomed out on to the street. A plaid cap and Tariq Faud’s cherubic face, in that order, appeared. “Faculty Club?”

  “Got an appointment on South Main.”

  “I’m due back at the hospital. So I’ll drop you off?” Faud’s declarative sentences inevitably end in question marks.

  “Thanks but don’t bother,” I begged off even as a squall of rain blew in my face.

  The car door opened. Isn’t life easy when you can ignore anything you choose?

  I reached for its handle, unsure if I was getting in or going to push it shut. Faud had learned to drive on the Shari Qasr al-Ali and kept to Cairo’s tradition of hand-to-horn, bumpers are there for a purpose, driving, which neatly melded with his fellow Rhode Islanders’ abhorrence of turn signals, disrespect for stop signs, and catch-me-if-you-can mockery of speed limits. My hesitation ceased when rain began to seep down my coat collar.

  As I opened the door wider to get inside, Faud raised the window and cleared the passenger seat of chartreuse colored parking tickets which he tossed on to a pile of books, papers, and more billets-doux from the Municipal Court covering the rear seat. A medicinal odor, antiseptic and vaguely vinegary, greeted me as a chime signal, over Gershwin’s horns and violins and the roar of the Cadillac’s engine, cautioned me to lock my seat belt. Faud lowered the radio’s volume, maybe a decibel, and the car abruptly swung into the traffic.

  I wiped my head and face with a handkerchief and turned to Faud. Under his cap, his dark eyes set above chubby cheeks were focused intently at a spot directly over the steering wheel; the behemoth was directed by his leather gloved hands which were an inch or two above his lap. His torso, buried within a green macintosh that had seen a few winters, was set deeply in his seat. While he might dress like Apu from the Kwik-E-Mart, Tariq Faud, Professor of Pathology at University Medical School
and Chief of the Department of Pathology at City Hospital, grows orchids in elaborate greenhouses next to his mini-mansion on the Blackstone River, has children studying at Carter, Harvard, and Stanford, and owns lots of big, solid things like Cadillacs. He’s come very far from his days as a penniless medical student and Legal Aid referral who enlisted my help to convince the Immigration Service to lay off his mother who had become ill, according to his diagnosis, during a visit from Egypt. The beginning of her twenty year visit and our friendship.

  “I’m so exhausted from Sunday night? So late!” He looked to me for some sign of cognition or sympathy. I had none; I was too busy watching for accidents waiting to happen.

  “The girl ...? The homicide in the newspaper?” he insisted, his voice filled with impatience, either at me or the rain-slowed traffic, or both. “Really, Algy,” he continued, undaunted although peeved at my slow reaction, “they call me at home ..., after midnight on Sunday night? Too late, much too late? ‘Call somebody else,’ I said. ‘I don’t do crime scenes,’ I said.” Faud’s hands left the steering wheel for a frustrated wave as he braked, reluctantly and with an epithet, for a traffic signal. “Excuse me, Algy, but I remind you that College Hall is always urging more cooperation between the faculty and the government. Do you know what that means? Asinine telephone calls in the middle of the night? More work for me and less for some nincompoop state employee?”

  “You’re Chief of Pathology,” I said defensively.

  “What, Algy, you joke?” The light changed and we continued up North Main Street toward Pawtucket, in the opposite direction from Franks office. “They called me because the Chief ME and the associate are both out of state for Thanksgiving! The first assistant, he went to the Cape for the long weekend and couldn’t be called back for some hocus-pocus reason? And the second is out on maternity leave as of last week? So, besides the fact that this girl was dead more than thirty-six hours before she was found, nobody could get to her for another couple more! The police finally got hold of the Chief ME who runs down his list and tells them to call me, you know, because I’m on this panel? Stupid! I’m supposed to cover in real emergencies? So because I got a title, I have to go down to this crummy tenement and I start cooperating at two in the morning?”

  He muttered something like ara fi ardak which I took to be a pithy Arabic curse; I was focused on how close the Cadillac was to climbing up the rear of a slow moving Kia. “Am I a forensic person? No! But they got to have somebody with a title to get the body out of there! I take the temperature, scrape the blood, and give her a prep. No rape kit. I had to use Q-Tips from her medicine cabinet! Then, I get to check her into the morgue? I get to go home after five? Pardon me, Algy,” he said, “but I get tired cooperating.”

  “Well, what happened?” I tried to sound polite but disinterested, even as I disposed to mine any information he possessed.

  “Damned if I know! Asphyxiation, I said. Pretty obviously, the pillow on the floor. Blood stains on it and she had cotton threads under her nails, pressure points on her face, lint and threads in her mouth, up her nose? Not strangled though, like they said on the news. Suffocated! The rigor was gone ..., you know, ‘twelve hours on and twelve hours off?’ Bruises on her face and lips where she was hit before her suffocation. More on her chest and shoulders, like maybe somebody sat on her and pinned her shoulders?”

  He blasted the horn to express frustration with the Kia, spun the steering wheel, and the huge sedan lunged up The Hill on Knowles Street where cars parked illegally on both sides of the narrow incline induced me to hold my breath to squeeze through unscathed.

  “But rape? Was she raped? Like these others?” The car slowed but didn’t stop at Prospect Street where we made a right turn and began a circle back towards downtown. “The assistant ME, who finally gets in from his tryst on the Cape, said ‘probable rape’. How come? I’d like to know? When I left, it wasn’t rape. No scrapes, no cuts, no skin under the nails, no lacerations in the vagina ....” He pressed the car horn impatiently at two pedestrians who scurried across the slickness of the street in front of the Woods-Gerry Museum, unaware of their peril. “Sex? The swabs showed that. Semen all over, sure. From when? From whom? And any connection?”

  I’ve heard Faud on other occasions when he got wound up in the nauseating details of his specialty. Basically, I’m squeamish and came damn close to fainting at my one and only autopsy. “I guess everyone assumed it was The Stalker.”

  “Oh,” he said disparagingly, “of course. Of course, The Stalker. That’s all the cops could talk about? But since the rigor was gone, best guess would be sometime late Friday night, maybe early Saturday? Not Saturday night into Sunday, I pointed out, and she’s white, but ... no, it has to be The Stalker?” His right index finger went next to his nose as he turned his face to me, leaving the car’s piloting to its weight and momentum; my hands went palm-down on the dashboard. “Sure there was sex. Pizza and sex. Pepperoni and onion pizza and ... sex. Sex from the obvious and pizza from the Ronzio’s box on the floor!” He took a sly, fleeting glance at me and nudge, nudged me, Eric Idle-like, with his elbow. “Maybe it was The Stalker? Who knows? Suffocation can take a couple of minutes and she looked like a healthy enough specimen. She wasn’t tied up or anything like that? Maybe he held her down, killed her, and that’s when he did his business?”

  With that particularly repulsive thought, he gave the car’s brakes a good test at the bottom of The Hill at South Main Street, near the Cable Car Cinema. I gave him Franks’s address and almost immediately, he pulled over and double-parked. His voice was terse when he said, “Her slip was over her head, with nothing else on, no panties, no bra. The cops said there were latents all over the place, mostly smeared, but lots. There will be hairs, short and curly with roots, so a microphoto analysis will give up something as to the sex? Maybe they’ll match The Stalker. From the semen, they get a blood type, and there’s enough of everything for lots of DNA tests. But, Algy, you still have to work backwards from that. You got to have matches for DNA and fingerprints. By the time they get it analyzed, even assuming the cretins at the state lab get it right, if it was The Stalker, he’ll still have plenty of weekends to ply his trade.”

  “True,” I replied and thought that if Lavelle Williams had sex with the victim before the murder—as Reverend Thomas had intimated—he’d be a match!

  I said, “thank you” as I shook Faud’s offered hand and left the car’s protection. Faud leaned over the passenger seat to catch the closing door and looked up at me. “You know, Algy, it’s so emotional again? No sense of anything but right now and how screwed up it is? All these groups and marches and with these assaults and what’s going on downtown ...? Is it crazy time again? If it is, forget more cooperation from me or anyone else.”

  * * *

  Jerome Franks’s office was in a line of nearly identical, buff-colored, two-story clapboard buildings from the early 1800’s which, when I was growing up, housed plumbing suppliers, paper jobbers, and secondhand stores and now served as prime office space for lawyers, accountants, and insurance agents. The sagging asbestos roofing of yesterday had been replaced by neat rows of slate and shingles, grimy shop windows were now mullioned and clear, and chimneys were no longer vulnerable to any stiff breeze off the Bay. To the right of each doorway was a brass plate etched with italicized script that discreetly indicated the present occupant. It was all so pristinely historic that it made me nostalgic for the neighborhood’s remembered tawdriness.

  When the door to the Jerome A. Franks Law Offices opened to dark purple walls, a mauve rug, and chairs covered in a wretched orange, it was jarring. Adding to the claustrophobic effect were two large oil paintings on the facing walls of the reception area, great smears of orange, yellow, and red. Equally unsettling was the big hair brunette in a bulging green sweater layered with gold chains, who gave me the once-over from behind a glass-topped desk. A name plaque, next to a nail brush, identified her as Angela DeMartini.

  “Yah
ess?” she said with classic Cranston nasalness.

  “I have an appointment with Mr. Franks. My name is Temple.” To myself, I sounded like a self-important ass but there was no reaction in the big brown eyes under smudgy mascara and false eyelashes. In fact, no reaction at all as though her mind was off shopping at Garden City. Then, she blinked and brushed aside shoulder-length ringlets to glance at an open engagement book. “Yer early. Mr. Frah-anks will be wid ya shortly.” She made an elaborate gesture with a multi-braceleted hand toward a grouping of chairs under one of the smears.

  A faint recollection of Michelle Pfeiffer as Angela DeMarco in Married to the Mob stirred in my memory—this Angela could have been her first cousin—as I hung my overcoat on a rack by the door. Ms. DeMartini was now on the telephone and it was all “yadda, yadda, yadda” and jingling bracelets. How did she get the job? Was she some Mafia don’s niece?

  I sat where directed and took a tattered Sports Illustrated from a pile of magazines all about six months old. As I flipped through its soiled pages, I considered: when had I last been in the office of a criminal defense lawyer? Ever? Not while at Champlin & Burrill where my partner, Jim Bryan, a former deputy attorney general, handled cases when a corporate client or a government official had a brush with the criminal law or was accused of corporate skullduggery. Years ago, when I was a fledgling prosecutor? No, not for the level of crime I dealt with; the lawyers came to me to cop misdemeanor pleas in the windowless cubicles of a justice factory also known as the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building. Very few pleasantries and a lot of wheedling characterized those brief encounters, where the justice dispensed had little to do with the noble sentiment carved into the building’s façade: “Equal and Exact Justice To All Men Of Whatever State and Persuasion.”