Rogues Gallery

by Dan Andriacco

  “Sorry, Jeff.” She didn’t look sorry. “No offense. But when a client hires me, she gets all of me. I’m totally committed. That means I’m part of every conversation related to the case and I call the shots, not the client. If the client can’t buy that, she’s not my client. I refer her to another lawyer.”

  Even without a jury to impress, Erica was dressed to the nines in a little black dress and silver jewelry. In her mid-forties, she looked younger thanks to an unwrinkled face and bright violet eyes. She wore her dark hair long. If it was a dye job, it was a good one. She probably stood about five-seven, but in those stiletto heels she was almost as tall as me. And she had lovely ankles.

  “But we’re grateful for your interest,” Ashley said. I was proud of her for speaking up, but not surprised. She’d always struck me as the independent sort. Erica looked at her like, “What you mean ‘we,’ Paleface?”

  Ashley was twenty-seven, according to the Observer, but she looked older this morning. Her wavy brunette hair was disheveled and her brown eyes made it clear that sleep had been a stranger of late. I’d always thought of her as pleasingly plump but I could imagine that with a few more days of stress her moon-shaped face would be going into three-quarter moon mode.

  “I only hope we can help,” I said. Otherwise, Popcorn will give me the cold shoulder for weeks and the Poisoned Pens will be down by one member. No, that’s not really what I was thinking. I was worried for Ashley.

  “Many defendants go to extraordinary lengths to mount a claim of accident or self-defense in the face of murder charges,” Mac noted. “In this case, invoking the ‘castle doctrine’ that allows one to kill in self-defense when fearing for her safety inside her own home would seem an obvious and easy course. However, we understand from Oscar Hummel that you have eschewed any such defense. May I ask why?”

  “Because I didn’t shoot the bastard!” Ashley blurted out.

  Surprisingly, Erica didn’t object to the undiplomatic noun. “Marvin expected us to cop a plea to involuntary manslaughter, angling for probation and no jail time, but Ashley would have had to plead guilty to a crime she didn’t commit. We said ‘no thanks.’ At that, Marvin made it pretty clear that filing charges is just a matter of getting the paperwork done. So we’re going to court and I’m going to wipe up the floor with my ex.” It wouldn’t be the first time.

  “Why is he so determined to go to the mat over this?” I asked.

  Erica snickered. “Maybe he thinks that killing asshole husbands sets a bad precedent. Not that Ashley did that.”

  “I didn’t!”

  Erica’s unhappy six-year marriage to the politically ambitious Sussex County prosecutor was one of the frequent topics of those late-night chats we’d had with her at Bobbie McGee’s. From Erica’s perspective, Marvin Slade had been riddled with insecurities about his wife’s career as a gym teacher and Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader, plus insanely jealous for no reason. After the divorce, she’d become a criminal defense attorney in revenge. By her count, she’d bested Slade in court more often than not and walked away with a good deal in every plea bargain.

  “A suspicious mind like the prosecutor’s is likely to find meaning in the fact that you have recently become a regular habitué of The Bull’s Eye,” Mac said.

  “How did you know that?” The look on Ashley’s wide face could have been surprise or something darker, but I would have bet a lot that her attorney wasn’t unaware of her newfound hobby. And I’m not a betting man.

  “Carson Allen happened to mention it. And if he mentioned it to Jefferson and me, sooner or later Mr. Slade is going to hear about it.”

  Ashley shrugged. “Well, it’s no big deal. I’ve been doing research. I’m working on a new story about a female private eye. It could be a series. At some point she’s going to have to fire a gun. I have to admit, though, I kind of like it. There’s a rush when you pull the trigger and you feel all that power, you know?”

  Maybe it would be best to keep that to yourself, Ashley.

  Erica apparently thought the same thing. She spoke up, taking the floor from her client. “This discussion is irrelevant. Target shooting is a very popular sport, including among women. There are more guns than people in this country.”

  “And yet you say the gun that killed your husband wasn’t yours.” Mac had addressed the statement to Ashley, but Erica answered:

  “My client doesn’t own a gun.”

  “It didn’t seem worth the expense just for research,” Ashley said, “so I rent a gun every time I go out to shoot. If I keep it up, maybe I’ll buy one.”

  “Would you mind telling us what happened the night of the murder?” Mac said. “I am calling it murder because you deny accident or self-defense and I presume the coroner’s office has ruled out suicide.”

  “It wasn’t suicide,” Erica said. “The gun was fired straight at his face and into his brain from at least six feet away. Marvin the Martian told us that.” She nodded to Ashley. “Tell Mac and Jeff what happened, just as you told me.”

  Ashley swallowed. “All right. It’s not like I could ever forget. It started with Ranger barking. It wasn’t a happy bark. He woke me up out of a deep sleep.”

  Mac stopped her narrative almost before she started. “As I recall, you once wrote a short, rather violent crime story about a woman taking revenge on her husband for abusing her German shepherd. Was that based on Tim’s treatment of Ranger?”

  She laughed hollowly.

  “Ashley - ” Erica began. But her client talked right over her.

  “That was pure fiction. You know how that works. I was looking for a motive, and thought, ‘What would really piss me off?’ No, Tim wouldn’t hurt Ranger. He was nicer to Ranger than he was to me! Hell, I was afraid he might try to get custody if we got divorced.”

  “And I presume the canine reciprocated his affection?”

  “Well, he never barked at Tim, just wagged his tail. He only barks when his dog sense tells him something’s wrong. Ranger’s a sweet dog - better company than Tim, frankly - but very protective. I’m really glad to have him around. Living alone, except for him, every little sound I hear convinces me that somebody’s in the house.”

  “And this time, someone was,” I said.

  She nodded. “That’s what I assumed when Ranger’s barking woke me up. I called nine-one-one right away. I was still on the phone when I heard the gunshot. I picked up my mace from the nightstand near my bed - I keep it on my keychain - and I walked downstairs, still talking to the nine-one-one operator. At first all I saw was that a man’s body was lying in the living room, not far from the foot of the stairs. The face was covered with blood, but after I stared a minute I knew that it was Tim because I recognized his hair and the jacket he was wearing. I was totally shocked.”

  If all that sounded a bit rehearsed, I put it down to the fact that she’d already told her story to Erica and to the police, probably more than once.

  “Were you more shocked that your husband was in your home or that he was dead?” Mac asked.

  Ashley had to work on that one. “Well, both, I guess. I certainly didn’t expect to see him there, dead or alive. We didn’t part on good terms.”

  “So you have no idea what he was doing in the house?”

  She shook her head, sending her tangled mess of hair flying. “None at all. He took everything that was his when he left.”

  “Maybe he was trying to steal Ranger,” I said. Hey, that actually makes sense.

  “I guess that’s possible,” Ashley allowed, “but Tim never said he wanted him. Poor baby must have felt abandoned.”

  “Did you change the locks?” Mac asked.

  “No, I never thought of that.”

  “So he could have used his own key to enter the house?”

  “That’s what he did,” Erica said, “but it was
still a B&E. That’s not an issue in the case, but I want to be clear about it. Once Tim Crutcher moved out, he abandoned his place of abode and he had no right to enter without the permission of the person who lives there, even though his name is on the mortgage. It’s just like a landlord can’t enter an apartment without the tenant’s permission. It makes no difference that Ashley and Tim weren’t legally separated, just living apart.”

  Mac rubbed his beard, clearly longing for a cigar. “Do you mind telling us how that came about, Ashley?”

  She shrugged. “I’d rather keep my private business private, but I can see that’s not going to happen. My life with Tim had become like a bad country-western song: He drank, he gambled, he didn’t have a real job, and I suspected he did have a girlfriend. One night, about six weeks ago, after he came home late the third or fourth night in a row, we had it out - screaming and throwing things, the whole bit. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but something about how I couldn’t live with him like that. And he said, ‘All right, if you’re going to throw me out, I’ll go now.’

  “That wasn’t what I’d meant. I even tried to talk him into staying, but he wouldn’t have it. The next day I realized that the break was for the best. I was only eighteen when we married. I was in college and he was a high school dropout. My parents, who are a lot smarter than I am, helped me with tuition so that I could finish school even though they disapproved of Tim. The marriage was a mistake - that was soon obvious - but I tried to make the best of it.”

  Erica, proving that she had a tender side when her claws were retracted, put a comforting hand on her client-employee’s shoulder. “We do a lot of divorce work between criminal cases. I kept hoping that Ashley would see where all this was going. She was supporting that loser.”

  The Crutchers had no children. Maybe Ashley wanted to stay together for the sake of the dog.

  “Tim had a decent job doing maintenance work for the Sussex County Recreation Department but he lost it earlier this year,” Ashley said. “He said he was fired for talking back to his supervisor. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it’s certainly plausible. Now he just does - did - odd jobs for Meredith Blake.”

  She didn’t have to explain who that was. Everybody who’s lived in Erin more than five minutes has heard of our wayward heiress. The only difference between Meredith Blake and one of those thirty-something Hollywood stars who have never grown up is that she isn’t a Hollywood star. I’d heard her called “Meredith Flake” or “Blake the Flake” ever since I came to St. Benignus as a student. I wouldn’t lower myself to such cheap wordplay, of course.

  “Do you have any idea who killed your husband, Ashley?” I asked.

  “All I know is, it wasn’t me.” She paused, then decided she couldn’t let well enough alone. “After all these years of reading murder mysteries, it’s weird to be in the middle of one. I’m sorry Tim’s dead, I guess, but I’m not sorry to be getting a reboot on my life.”

  “She didn’t say that,” Erica said.

  V

  “What do you think?” I asked as Mac drove us back to campus in his red 1959 Chevy convertible.

  “Ashley did not kill her husband.”

  “Of course not! You had a doubt?”

  “I always have doubts, old boy. She would not be my first friend who committed homicide.”

  Point taken.

  “Okay, so what convinced you that she didn’t?”

  “The dog in the night-time.” Not that again! “As you well know, Jefferson, one of the most famous passages in the entire Sherlock Holmes canon is the one about the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

  “Yeah, yeah. ‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’ ‘That was the curious incident.’ The dog didn’t bark because he knew the intruder.”

  “Exactly. In this case, the dog did bark. And, as Holmes said in another story, ‘dogs don’t make mistakes.’ Ergo, the dog was not barking at Tim Crutcher. Someone else was with him - his murderer.”

  That all seemed like a huge load of nothing to me. “Well, sure! The man didn’t shoot himself, so there had to be somebody else with him if Ashley was telling the truth.”

  “Unlike you, however, I did not presuppose her veracity. It was the telling detail of the dog barking that convinced me that she was being truthful. Having read her stories, I do not believe she would have made that up. She is not that subtle.”

  That seemed like a pretty thin reed to me, but then I wasn’t looking to be convinced. “I would have thought the fact that she turned down a sweet deal from the prosecutor was a good argument for her innocence.”

  Mac nodded. “There is that as well.”

  “So Crutcher and somebody else enter the house together in the early hours of the morning, using Crutcher’s key. And then what - some kind of a falling out that ends in a shooting?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “What were they doing in the house?”

  “The answer that springs to my Sherlockian mind is that they were retrieving something that Crutcher had hidden there, à la ‘The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,’ even though Ashley believes he took everything with him.”

  “Like what? And if Crutcher did leave something behind, why?”

  Mac shrugged his massive shoulders. “The possibilities are endless. Whatever this theoretical object was, it must have been something that he did not want Ashley to know he had, and therefore he could not remove it in her presence.”

  “So it could be drugs, money, almost anything that could be hidden in a house - if it even exists.”

  “That is indeed a large if, I grant you.”

  “And it doesn’t get us any closer to knowing who killed Tim Crutcher.”

  VI

  Marvin Slade looked a lot different with his clothes on - business clothes, I mean. I’m used to seeing him dressed a lot more casually or not at all at Nouveau Shape, the co-ed gym where Lynda and I work out together most mornings. Maybe that’s why he agreed to see Mac and me early that afternoon, but I doubt it. More likely he wanted to find out what Mac was up to, knowing him only by reputation. Maybe, aware that we were in communication with his ex, he also wanted to send back a message to Erica that he wasn’t going to collapse like a cheap umbrella.

  Instead of gym shorts or a towel, Slade was wearing a brown suit with the jacket off, yellow suspenders, and horn-rimmed glasses. His scant remaining hair was a darker shade of brown. I probably wouldn’t have noticed the gray roots if Erica hadn’t told us they were there. Slade was only in his late forties, but he’d been doing a comb-over for a decade or more.

  He came out from behind his desk and greeted us entirely too effusively. “Jeff! Good to see you!!” You just saw me in the sauna on Friday, Marv. “And Professor McCabe - I’ve always wanted to meet you.” He pumped our hands. I tried to figure out what he was running for. Mayor would be a come down from countywide office. Maybe he wanted to go to Washington.

  “Thank you for agreeing to see us.”

  “Glad to do it, glad to do it. Coffee?”

  The pleasantries went on like that for a while. Finally, Slade eased into the reason for our visit with all the smoothness of a riverboat gambler producing a four-ace hand.

  “Frankly, fellows, I was really surprised when you called me.” He put out his arms in what I took to be a gesture of surprise. “I mean, Professor, you’re an honest-to-God amateur sleuth who solves mysteries just like Dan Devlin in your books.” That’s Damon Devlin. “I buy every one as soon as it comes out.” Liar. “But there’s no mystery here. Ashley Crutcher killed her husband. Case closed.”

  “I think not,” Mac said cheerfully. “Her attorney seems quite resolved to fight any charge you decide to bring against Ashley.”

  Slade made an admirable attempt to maintain his bonhomie. If he hadn’t raised his voice, he
would have pulled it off. “The charge will be first-degree murder. Perhaps Ms. Crutcher would be better served by a different counsel. I offered her lawyer” - he apparently couldn’t bring himself to utter the name - “a good deal that would have made this easier for all of us, but she turned it down.”

  He took a breath. “Look, I’m not happy about going to trial on this. I tried to avoid it. I know that a lot of folks in town will be sympathetic to Ms. Crutcher’s situation, being in a lousy marriage.” Erica, for one. “But she doesn’t claim to be an abused spouse, and she doesn’t claim that she was defending herself. If she did that, she might walk. No, Ms. Crutcher claims that she didn’t shoot him. But nobody believes that. It just won’t wash. Why didn’t she take my offer of manslaughter, a shooting in the heat of an argument? That would have got all of us out of this mess.”

  It all sounded so reasonable that I almost jumped up and said, “Yeah, why not?” But a cooler head, that of Sebastian McCabe, prevailed.

  “Because, as an innocent woman, Ashley quite naturally balks at the idea of admitting to a wrong that she did not commit.”

  Slade shook his dyed and combed-over head. “No, no, no. That just won’t wash, it just won’t. She had motive, means, and opportunity - the classic trio.” He held up three fingers in case we missed that. “Let’s take them in reverse order. First of all, the shooting took place in her and her husband’s house. Nobody else was around.”

  “On the contrary, Mr. Slade,” Mac interrupted. “Someone else was around - Tim Crutcher’s murderer, the person who entered the house with him.”

  “Says who?”

  “Ranger, the family dog whose barking alerted Ashley to the intruders.”

  Slade gave Mac a withering glance. “Let’s move on. As for means, the gun was still on the floor when the Erin police arrived.”