Unforced Error

by Michael Bowen

  Melissa raised her eyebrows at Rep—What is this, the last scene of the Godfather? He tried to shrug apologetically with his. After a moment of delicious tension she acquiesced. Once the women had filed out, Archer strolled across the office to a window looking over Thirteenth Street and McGee in downtown Kansas City. He clasped his hands behind his back. Gold lettering on the window read NORM ARCHER ATTORNEY AT LAW. Sunlight streaming through the window projected the R and the C across his chest.

  “Trevelyan is the best bet,” he said. “His motive sounds like a reach, but Pendleton is a cop and Tuttle’s a woman. For some damn reason American juries will not believe that a white woman killed someone with a blade.”

  “Even though Lizzie Borden orphaned herself with an axe and Lana Turner took out Johnny Stompanato with a knife,” Rep commented.

  “They both walked,” Archer said. “Still, three alternative suspects is better than none. One of them might even be guilty.”

  “Might?”

  “Oh, odds are your boy did it,” Archer said.

  “I don’t think he did, but I can’t argue about the odds.”

  “Cops here are straight-ahead guys,” Archer said. “They’ll lie through their teeth to keep a low-life from beating a rap on some picky technicality like the United States Constitution, but they wouldn’t take a twenty to drop a speeding ticket even if there wasn’t any milk in the house. They’re gonna go with the odds. This anti-Semitism/library expansion stuff—forget about it. Even if I’d gotten the Damons in here yesterday morning and worked out statements for them without any disappearing acts, Peter would be the prime suspect. As it is, there’s no way they’re looking at anyone else.”

  “So. You want the case?”

  “You kidding?” Archer swiveled and gave Rep something just south of a grin. “This is a dream case for a guy like me. Respectable client—maybe he killed someone, but the guy had it coming. And at least he doesn’t sell smack to school children. Brave wife sitting in the front row in her Sunday best. Enough money to do a full-scale, no-stone-unturned investigation. TV cameras lined up outside the courthouse after trial each day. Couple of twists the right jury might get its teeth into.”

  “On the other hand,” Rep prompted.

  “On the other hand, seems to me there’s an alternative suspect we haven’t talked about yet. Motive, opportunity, no alibi, and explains the blood on the saber very nicely. That’s why I wanted to have this chat stag.”

  “Linda?” Rep demanded in astonishment as he parsed the comment. “That’s impossible. Linda couldn’t—”

  “I know, I know,” Archer sighed. “You know her and she couldn’t have done it. I hear that in almost every homicide rap I handle. Murder is supposed to be committed by kids from the ’ hood and stone cold gangsters like we see in the movies. We can’t imagine a normal guy who mows his lawn and whistles while he carries the garbage out or a cheerful matron who clips coupons and fusses over laundry committing murder. But they do, my friend, oh yes they do. Murder is the ultimate amateur crime. You tell me Linda Damon couldn’t knock over a gas station or hustle crack, I’ll listen. Don’t tell me she couldn’t kill a guy who endangered her marriage by using her for cheap sex.”

  “That could be a complicated defense to present,” Rep said dryly, thinking of the brave wife in her Sunday best suddenly quailing under the accusatory finger of the lawyer she herself had hired.

  “If it were easy Andy Pignatano could handle it. But I don’t want it any more complicated than it has to be. So tell me why I’m wrong about Linda. Or about Peter, for that matter. Tell me why it isn’t one or the other.”

  “The blood that isn’t there,” Rep said. “No blood on the uniform or the dress. Whoever killed Quinlan all but decapitated him, drenched the saber in blood. How did either Peter or Linda do that without splattering a drop on their own clothing?”

  “Fair point. The state will have an expert talk about blood spatter patterns and angles of dispersion, but thank God juries have common sense. Anything else?”

  “Well, it sure wasn’t Linda who took a shot at me in the library last night when I got too close.”

  “The state might say that didn’t happen at all, unless the bullet turns up—and there’s no guarantee it will. You look like an honest guy, but I’d lie to save a buddy’s butt and I’ll bet you would too. And the shooter coulda been Peter anyway. He’d certainly know the library well enough to find an obscure exit stairwell in the dark. With the lights off, maybe he didn’t know who he was shooting at. And don’t kid yourself: I could square that one with either Linda or Peter cutting Quinlan.”

  “If it’s either one of them, though,” Rep said, “we have a two-piece puzzle: a tawdry fling and a bloody saber.”

  “Nice and simple,” Archer said. “The way most murders are.”

  “Nice and simple, though, leaves a lot of pieces unaccounted for. And not just the anti-Semitism pieces.”

  “Maybe we’re actually sneaking up on reasonable doubt,” Archer said. “What pieces would those be?”

  “The money pieces. Jackrabbit Press publishes maybe eight titles of paperback-original genre fiction every year. Say eight-ninety-five each retail, to be generous. That means Jackrabbit Press sells them for less than five bucks a pop, with a gross profit of maybe two dollars per copy.”

  “So what? I thought Jackrabbit Press did lots of other stuff besides the bodice-rippers to make money.”

  “It does,” Rep said. “The D and B I looked over when I prepared my pitch to Lawrence said it gets millions a year in overseas printing and distribution work, mostly from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia.”

  “So there’s your money pieces right there.”

  “Not really. Unless John Paul Lawrence is publishing paperbacks as a hobby the bodice-rippers still have to pay their own way. How could it make sense for Jackrabbit Press to pay Tommy Quinlan DeLorean wages? How could it think about paying me a hundred-thousand dollars just to defend a possible exclusive right to use this fictional military unit to promote Civil War romance novels? They’d have to sell fifty-thousand additional copies just to break even—and that’s before they’ve spent a penny on the make-believe soldiers themselves. A romance novel that sells fifty-thousand copies total is a pretty big deal. Those let’s-pretend soldiers would have to turn two or three titles into mega-hits just to pay the legal bill. Put that together with Quinlan having some kind of mysterious midnight meeting and what do you have?”

  “I don’t know,” Archer said. “Drug dealing? Money laundering? Or maybe just a boss who had to get a party over with before he could hold a production scheduling meeting that couldn’t wait.”

  “Like I said. Puzzle pieces.”

  “When the OJ verdict came down,” Archer said, pursing his lips, “I was driving back to KC from St. Louis. I’d had an argument in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals that morning, and the news hit about ten miles onto I-70. All the way back I heard call-in radio feedback on the verdict. The only other time I heard anger like that was after nine-eleven.”

  “I can imagine,” Rep said.

  “Thing is, the callers weren’t mad because a brother had beaten the rap. They were mad because a rich guy was gonna walk. O.J. Simpson stood for every time they’d had the electricity turned off for missing a payment, every time they’d had to have macaroni and cheese for dinner on Thursday because there was a strike at Ford Claycomo and cash was short, every time they had to buy their kids Converses instead of Nikes.”

  “And Peter Damon is OJ?” Rep asked.

  “Romany Road ain’t quite Brentwood, but it looks pretty fancy from Blue Springs or Raytown. Or from anywhere much east of Troost, for that matter. If we just pick holes in the prosecution’s evidence and make some noise about Pendleton sending his own boys over to grab the saber, maybe find a few other wives Quinlan rogered so we can put their husbands on trial—that Criminal Law 101 stuff isn’t gonna get it.”


  “The OJ syndrome is that bad, huh?”

  “That bad and worse,” Archer said, glancing over at Rep. “Count Basie called Kansas City a happy town. He was right. Our cooking is better than New Orleans’, our honest politicians are cleaner than Minnesota’s, our crooked politicians are more colorful than Chicago’s, and our jazz is better than what passes for blues in St. Louis. But don’t let that cheerful attitude fool you. Southern populist working-class resentment is bred in the bone here. It’s not just a question of dealing with the OJ syndrome, we’ve gotta turn it in our favor. We gonna save Peter without putting Linda in the soup, we have to find someone richer than Peter Damon doing something nasty in this story.”

  “Peter didn’t own a DeLorean, for starters,” Rep said.

  “We’re communicating.” Archer spun towards Rep and his voice took on the kind of pulpit resonance that Rep imagined juries heard from him. “Turns out what you said before is exactly right. The money pieces are the key. This case reeks of money. Five-figure checks being thrown around like confetti. Fast cars, fast lives, fast sex. There’s a Quinlan-money connection at Jackrabbit Press. There has to be.”

  “Do you really think it has anything to do with the murder?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I think,” Archer said. “All that matters is what the jury thinks.”

  “So we have to put some of those puzzle pieces together.”

  “Right. Get ourselves a plausible dirty-money alternative scenario going and tell the jury, ‘ We gave the police this. We handed it to them on a silver platter. But they didn’t investigate it because they didn’t wanna uncover anything about Mr. Quinlan that might embarrass Massa John Paul Lawrence with his fancy donations and his political pull and his big country house.’ ”

  “Pretty raw,” Rep said.

  “So is the death penalty.”

  “Touché.”

  “It can’t just be a clever story with winks and nudges, though. We’ll need some honest-to-God, sonofabitchin’ evidence.”

  A light bulb went off over Rep’s head. The evidence, if there was any, was at Jackrabbit Press. It wouldn’t be there for long. The police wouldn’t go after it. Archer couldn’t go after it. He couldn’t tell Rep to go after it. All he could do was state the obvious and hope Rep had at least as many street smarts as your average white guy.

  Saying yes meant crossing a line, as he had when he’d braced Trevelyan—who, now that Rep thought about it, was slow enough for Rep to outrun. That made him a plausible suspect for last night’s library shooting. And Rep had no trouble seeing him at a shady midnight meeting with Quinlan. But taking Archer’s hint meant more than holding Linda’s hand and searching a few databases. If there was nothing at Jackrabbit Press, it meant acting like fools. And if there was something there, it meant going in harm’s way.

  “If I were you I’d start now,” Rep said. “The next thing I’ve got to do is call Andy Pignatano.”

  Archer glanced over at Rep for a long moment. Then he nodded. They were on the same page.

  “There is the matter of my retainer,” he said. Which I really shouldn’t take from Linda until we clear up the little detail of whether I’m going to accuse her of murder.

  “Oh, right,” Rep said. “Do you take American Express?”

  Archer’s eyes opened quite wide. For the first time that morning he seemed on the verge of laughter.

  “I have been practicing criminal law twenty-seven years,” he said, “and that is the first time that anyone has ever asked me that question.”

  Chapter 21

  “Have you ever taken money or drugs for sex or had sex even one time with anyone who has?”

  “No,” Linda answered mechanically. Melissa’s throat clinched a bit as the young woman in the starched white uniform noted Linda’s answer.

  “Since 1977 have you traveled to sub-Saharan Africa or had sex even once with anyone who has?”

  “Ah, no.”

  This is a LOT worse than the confessional, Melissa thought. Adultery isn’t for blood donors, at least if they’re as scrupulous as Linda.

  “Do you understand that you can be HIV positive and feel fine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you donating blood for the purpose of being tested for AIDS?”

  “No.”

  “Do you understand the use of the bar-code?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then.” The young woman handed Linda the card she had been filling out and a piece of adhesive backing with two bar-code labels on it. One was marked USE MY BLOOD, the other DESTROY MY BLOOD. Then she ostentatiously turned her body away from Linda.

  “All right,” Linda said a moment later, handing the card back with the USE MY BLOOD bar-code stuck on it and the other disposed of.

  Cognitive dissonance, Melissa thought as they got up to go to the couch where Linda’s blood would be drawn. The cognitive dissonance assailing her now made the problem she’d mentioned to Linda at the beginning of this misadventure seem like a romp in the park. Trying to believe two contradictory things was hurting her head more than freshman term papers did.

  Thing one: Peter didn’t do it and neither did Linda.

  “Which arm would you like to use?” a different, not so young woman in a starched, white uniform was asking Linda now.

  “The left.”

  “May we see both arms please?” Just in case you’re a needle-drug user.

  “Of course.”

  But then, Melissa thought, there’s Thing two: the bloody sword. She had gone over the timing again and again, trying to imagine some way Quinlan could have gotten from the seduction manqué of Melissa at his DeLorean to the encampment Port-a-Potty and had his throat cut, with the murderer having time to get back to Jackrabbit Press and replace Peter’s saber, all before Peter got downstairs and retrieved the weapon. The conclusion was always the same: No way. In honor of Klimchock, in fact, make that, no bloody way.

  “Please make a fist and squeeze the ball. You’ll feel a sting.”

  A little gasp from Linda as the needle went in. The pain was slight, Melissa knew from her own experience, but she had the feeling that Linda was embracing it, welcoming the physical hurt as a token of atonement. Maybe that instant of pain and the tedium before and after it was why she’d insisted on keeping an appointment any sane person would have cancelled.

  Melissa’s cell-phone rang and she answered it.

  “Hello, Nora,” Rep said, “this is Nick.”

  “Developments?” Melissa asked.

  “I’ve gone out on a limb. I called Pignatano and promised him that we could produce Linda at Jackrabbit Press for some in-depth Q and A with him and Lawrence. He’s got us penciled in for mid-morning tomorrow. But that’s only if you two buy into the concept after we’ve had a chance to talk. If you don’t, I’ll call him back and beg off.”

  “Don’t you like Archer?”

  “I like Archer a lot,” Rep said. “But Pignatano doesn’t know that. The Pignatano appointment is basically Archer’s idea. At least I think it’s his idea.”

  “What exactly is the idea, and why does it involve seeing Pignatano?”

  “The idea is to get us inside Jackrabbit Press, and chatting with Pignatano is the only way I can think of to do it.”

  “In other words,” Melissa said after pausing for a moment, “after your very dogmatic lecture, we’re going to play Nick and Nora after all?”

  “Maybe not Nick and Nora. Maybe just Jerry and Susan North.”

  “I don’t think Jerry and Susan will work,” Melissa said. “All the real work in those stories is done by a couple of New York detectives, who tumble to the solution when Susan unwittingly blurts out a key insight in the second-last chapter. Until then all she does is stumble over corpses, and all Jerry does is mix martinis and occasionally light Susan’s cigarettes. Given our rather moderate habits, that would leave you with too much idle time.”

  “Nick and
Nora then,” Rep said. “But I’ll be counting on you for a searing insight even so—a witting one, if possible.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Melissa said. “You can pick us up in about an hour, after the donation is complete and Linda has had her juice and cookies. We’ll talk things over and figure out what to do next.”

  “What Linda’s going to do next is sit down with Norm Archer and work on a statement for the police, and I’m counting on you to get her back to Archer’s shop for that purpose. Because what I’m going to do next is learn anything I can about cases where Pignatano represented Lawrence or Jackrabbit Press. By an hour from now I should have made it to the records room of the federal courthouse here. I’m hoping you can meet me there.”

  “Count on it,” Melissa said. “One hour.”

  She put the cell-phone away and settled back in her molded fiberglass chair, wondering how to stumble over a searing insight. She glanced at Linda, who lay back with her eyes closed, a troubled expression marring her face. Looked at the clear, plastic tube leading from Linda’s left arm, tracked the rich flow of blood that Linda’s strong, young heart was pumping through it, followed the flow up the tube to the slowly-filling plastic bag at the top.

  There Melissa’s gaze stopped, and her world suddenly took on an exquisite clarity. Every speck of cognitive dissonance evaporated from her psyche. She had seen a Baggie-on-steroids like that before, with thick sides and seals that looked like they meant business. And the guy who’d shown it to her had been a marathon runner.

  ***

  “Any luck?” Melissa whispered to Rep fifty-eight minutes later.

  “Zilch,” Rep said, pushing back in discouragement from the carrel where a desk-top computer terminal blinked unhelpfully at him. “All I’ve established in more than three-hundred dollars worth of non-billable time spent pawing through index cards and doing mouse-clicks in the basements of two courthouses is that neither Jackrabbit Press nor John Paul Lawrence has ever been represented by Andy Pignatano or anyone else in either a civil or a criminal case in the Jackson County Circuit Court or the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri.”