Wildcat Wine

by Claire Matturro

  “It’s a .38. Forensics has determined that it is the murder weapon.”

  There was a long moment during which none of us spoke and during which I wasn’t sure I inhaled or exhaled.

  “My source suspects that apparently there are fingerprints on the weapon. Tired will exhaust all possible legal avenues open to him until he gets both your and Bonita’s fingerprints to do a comparison.”

  “Did . . . do the fingerprints match Dave’s?”

  “I’m sure they do not or Dave would be in custody by now.”

  I exhaled.

  “The gun has the initials JEB scratched on it, but it is not registered to anyone, or, that is, nothing showed up in the NCIC computer,” Philip added.

  My breathing stopped again, and that peculiar choking sensation settled in my chest and I coughed.

  And in the act of coughing, I remembered the Saturday when Dave had appeared at my door, bringing with him not just stolen wine but a whole personal Pandora’s box of mini-Armageddons, that I had pulled a .38 with the initials JEB from his backpack and pretended to shoot out my window. Then I’d handed the gun to Bonita.

  My God, I thought, I had framed myself and my loyal secretary for the murder of my own law partner.

  Chapter 28

  With Jackson’s careful tutelage, I had learned to maintain a classic poker face under even the most vexing of circumstances. And when pressed to a wall by an opposing counsel, I can smile benignly and blankly and lie straight through the crisis.

  In other words, I am a good trial attorney.

  Jackson saw to that before he turned me loose in a courtroom.

  Notwithstanding those hard-earned skills, when I realized that Tired Johnson had in his official possession Dave’s gun—a gun that had been used to kill Kenneth Mallory and that probably had both my and Bonita’s fingerprints all over it—I blanched to the point that Bonita rose toward me, her sweet face a furrow of concern.

  And then she said, “Madre de Dios.”

  Philip, who had been studying me, turned toward Bonita.

  “I take it there is something about that gun that the two of you know, but that I do not. This might be an excellent time to share that knowledge with me.”

  “Attorney-client privilege,” I said. “For both of us.”

  “Absolutely.”

  But I remembered that Philip had not done a retainer agreement with either of us and that no money had changed hands, so in a fit of technicality neurosis I made Philip practically take a blood oath of secrecy that transcended the mere attorney-client privilege. Plus I made him write out a hasty retainer agreement in which he verified that he legally represented both Bonita and me.

  After Philip’s multifaceted reassurances, I spilled my guts in a carefully edited version. I told him about Dave leaving his backpack in my house while he went out, and about the gun in his backpack, how Bonita and I had more or less played with it, and then how Dave had reclaimed the backpack, and left, with Benny in tow. But I left the story about the sacks of money, and breaking and entering, and my fears about Benny for another time. Like, you know, hopefully never, or long after some villain I didn’t know was doing time for Kenneth’s murder.

  “I’m glad you both realize the gravity of the situation,” Philip said. “Although, as I’ve counseled you both already, you need to be cognizant of the fact that Investigator Varnadore took that gun without either permission or a warrant, and it would therefore be inadmissible evidence because—”

  Here, Philip paused and turned to me.

  “Because I had an expectation of privacy in the trunk of my Honda.”

  “Excellent.” Then Philip turned and studied Bonita, potential murder suspect and fellow conspirator to obstruct justice. Not bad for a good Catholic mother with quiet ways. Clearly my karma was contagious, even if my obsessiveness was not.

  Then I turned back to Philip and waited for him to connect all the dots. He was quick, I’ll give him that.

  “Bonita, I will need to talk with Benny, today, as soon as he is out of school,” Philip added.

  “Yes. I will see to that.”

  “And he needs to understand, as do you, that as he is a minor, neither Tired nor any law-enforcement officer can talk to him without your permission. And under no circumstances will you give that permission. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you will make Benny understand.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I will need to interview Henry, and your other children, to make sure that their stories are all the same concerning the night of Kenneth’s murder, and to test the believability of the alibis.”

  I noted, as no doubt did Bonita, that Philip didn’t say the veracity of the alibis, but the believability. Not whether they were true, but only whether someone would believe that they were true.

  “Then I need to talk at length with Dave and Cat Sue and find out more about this Michael Andrews Daniels—”

  “Who is that?” Bonita interrupted.

  “The dead man in the swamp,” I offered and wondered what Benny had told her, if anything, about the day he and Dave found Michael Andrews Daniels in Myakka.

  “While Benny is still in school, I’m going to track down Dave and have a detailed conference with him,” Philip said.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No. Please do not. You distract me,” Philip said and rose from his chair. And then, while standing, he smiled a tight, thin-lipped smile that did not do justice to his sensuous mouth. “Now that I’ve convinced you of the gravity of the situation, let me reassure you.”

  “Oh, please.” Reassurance I needed.

  “First, Tired is not likely to be able to use that weapon in any legal proceedings against either of you because he did not have a proper warrant or permission.”

  “But, what about that . . . I forget the name of the doctrine, but it means that if the law-enforcement officer was likely to discover the evidence by other means, the courts might still admit it into evidence? Couldn’t Tired use that gun against us in court under that doctrine?”

  While I was wondering how Bonita knew that much about criminal law, Philip made a small noise deep in his throat, almost like an aborted laugh, and I turned to look at him.

  “I am glad you asked that,” he said.

  In my years of observing lawyers at work I’d noted that more often than not when they say something like that, they mean the exact opposite.

  But Philip seemed sincere. He launched off as if he was Professor Criminal Procedure and Bonita and I were the cute girls in the front row. “The Nix versus Williams case, before the United States Supreme Court. One of its law-and-order opinions.” Blah, blah, blah, he explained and explained.

  “It is, frankly, a possibility that the gun would be deemed admissible under a Nix v. Williams analysis. But do not underestimate my ability to convince a judge to exclude evidence. It is one of the things I do best. Further, I do not think we will ever get to that point, and if we do, I am confident of my ability to convince a judge that—” And he turned to me, and pointed.

  “That my expectancy of privacy outweighs any other point of view.”

  “But do cars have the same protection against illegal search and seizure that a person’s home does?” Bonita asked.

  “It depends,” Philip said, launching into his second criminal-procedure lecture. “The protection in the Fourth Amendment against unwarranted search and seizure is generally applicable to automobiles as well as a person’s home. However, courts tend to limit that protection at times. Because a person rarely lives in an automobile, the expectancy of privacy in an auto is not as sacrosanct as with a private residence. The Fourth Amendment protection against unwarranted searches depends upon where the auto is, who is driving, who claims the protection, and where the contraband is located. Say a gun or drugs in plain view—the defendant has a problem. Or where the safety of the officer is involved, courts favor the law-enforcement officers’ rights to protec
t themselves. But courts generally accord the trunk of a car a high degree of protection because—”

  “A person has an expectation of privacy,” I said, getting just a bit tired of the game.

  “Yes, precisely,” Philip said, standing at the door like a man on a lecture circuit missing his cue. “Now my final point is that it is highly unlikely that any of your prints survived on the gun. Criminal forensics is probably not a field either of you has had much exposure to, given the nature of your law practice.”

  Uh-oh, lecture three coming up.

  “If both of you played with the weapon in question by simply picking it up and dry-firing it, it is not very likely, due to the nature of the surfaces and the act itself, that your particular actions, would leave latent prints of value. If the weapon had been a semiautomatic, you might well have left latent prints of value by handling the magazine if either of you pulled it out, or, since this was a revolver, Lilly might have also left latent prints of value when she opened and closed the cylinder, checking to see if the weapon was loaded. However, we know that the gun was loaded and fired, six times, after Lilly checked the cylinder. Since it was loaded and fired, there is a very strong likelihood that any latent prints of value on the cylinder were destroyed by handling and firing. Assuming that the person who used the gun to shoot Kenneth wore gloves, these gloves would not protect latent prints of value already there. Any movement of fingers, even with gloves, over latent prints on a pistol’s trigger or magazine would destroy their value for comparisons. And, of course, if the person using the weapon had not worn gloves, but wiped down the weapon after using it, all latent prints should be destroyed.”

  “So, any prints on that gun are likely to be the prints of the person who killed Kenneth?” I asked, thinking my education of forensics via televised cop shows and mystery novels might be a bit short of the ideal.

  “Possibly. Perhaps. Or, of the person who moved the weapon to the trunk. The important thing for our immediate concern, however, is that it is highly unlikely that those prints Tired has on that weapon are either yours, or Bonita’s.”

  “Then why not just go and give him our prints, look like we are cooperating?” I asked Philip.

  “I will not give Tired my prints,” Bonita said.

  The shortness of Bonita’s tone of voice made me swing my head around and stare full throttle at her.

  Philip broke the silence. “You are cognizant of the potential conflicts of interest here, are you not?”

  Oh, that again. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

  “Dave was my first client. I cannot continue to represent either of you if such representation is at odds, real or perceived, with protecting Dave. And if representing Lilly presents any conflict, real or perceived, with representing Bonita, then I must withdraw as Bonita’s counsel.”

  “Unless we sign a waiver, which we will do,” I said, thinking, Yeah, I read the ethics rules too, bud.

  “Very well, then, you two talk it over. Now, let me go forth and find Dave.” And with that, Philip finally left.

  As he closed the door behind him, Bonita looked at me and asked, “You trust him?”

  “With my deepest secrets,” I said, and tried but failed to smile.

  Of course, I didn’t trust anyone, not even myself, with my deepest secrets.

  The bigger question to me at the moment was whether Bonita trusted me.

  “Why won’t you give Tired your prints? You heard what Philip said about our prints on the gun.”

  “What if he is wrong?” she answered, and then stood up and left my office, closing the door behind her.

  Well, damn, I thought. She didn’t trust me.

  Then I wondered where Bonita thought her prints might be that she didn’t want Tired to find them.

  Given the anxieties of the afternoon, what was left of it crept along with Bonita and me trying our best to avoid direct conversation while conducting activities that we could bill clients for, but speaking strictly for me, I mostly stared at paper and ruminated.

  So it seemed perfectly in accord with the cosmic plan to toss mierda upon the heads of Bonita and me that day that Benny’s high school counselor called Bonita to report that he had not been in school that day or the day before and that he had missed two days last week.

  Playing hooky.

  Not a Benicio behavior pattern.

  This Bonita confided to me as I leaned over her desk, where I’d come running at the sound of a phone call that she didn’t switch into my office for me, blatantly eavesdropping.

  “I’m going to go look for him,” she said.

  Where in the whole wide world Benny might be, with the unwise energy of a fifteen-year-old boy with a Ford truck and all the riches from his sack of swamp man’s money, I didn’t want to contemplate. But I didn’t object to Bonita leaving to search for him.

  Not too much after Bonita left, I gave up pretending to practice law and headed home, tail to tail with the rest of the worker bees’ cars on Shade Avenue, to the relative sanctuary of my own house.

  There, I opened a bottle of poor dead Earl’s wine, drank half a glass before tending to an increasingly indignant Bearess, and then collapsed in my living room, drinking the second half of the glass, and desperate for a distraction from the wheels digging ruts in my brain.

  In all the chaos of the last days, I had never read the Sunday paper. Though it was Tuesday night, I thought old news, the funnies, and pithy features might calm me down and I fetched the paper from the recycling bin and spread it about me as I sat on my yoga mat on my dust-free, shinny-as-new-terrazzo floor. The scattered paper lasted precisely ten minutes before I had to gather it up and throw it out. Papers, litter, trash, people, anything on my bare floors for any length of time makes me crazy. Perhaps this can be traced back to some kind of rebellion against the utter mess and garbage of the house of my childhood.

  Piles and drifts of papers, magazines, dirty clothes, dead houseplants people were foolish enough to give us, Christmas wrapping paper dating back centuries, dirt, mold dating back centuries, vermin of myriad kinds and size—the house my mother didn’t keep and from which she passively evicted brother Delvon and me when I was fifteen. We’d come back from an extended school-skipping spree in Florida and found she had sold our bedroom furniture and our clothes.

  Wholly unknown to social services, or anyone else, even presumably my father, who appeared to go through life without rudimentary sensory perceptions, Delvon and I just moved in with Farmer Dave, who despite being fifteen years older, became my lover in no time at all. I had adored him since I was a puppy and he’d brought Delvon home from kiddie detention on the back of his Harley. Dave had picked Delvon up hitchhiking since the bus didn’t wait for those held after school, and the two of them had bonded on some deep level from their very first “Hey, man.” In light of the depth and immediacy of the attachment between them, I had always figured Delvon and Dave had been buddies in their past lifetimes, which, given their juvenile souls, probably didn’t predate the 1800s, and if their age difference mattered, I had never noticed it.

  When we moved in with him, Dave had forty acres of cleared, high land in a snake-and-bug-infested corner of the county, and Delvon and I and Dave became ace farmers of skunk sativa, a hybrid marijuana with a kick-ass high. Money was never a problem; I went to school often enough, in decent clothes, and with no telltale signs of abuse, addiction, or abandonment, and nobody asked why I never answered the phone at the house of my parents.

  I was gone from the grim, dark, dirty house of my childhood. I didn’t look back. Delvon, Dave, and I were family. We took care of each other, and I learned to cook, to garden, to sew, and to be an ace gardener, and finally, in my senior year, seized by an ambition to be more than the common-law wife of a pot farmer, I learned to study. I discovered I was smart. When I went off to college, I began to grow up and adapt myself to the regular world, but Dave neither matured nor adapted. We stopped being lovers. But we never stopped loving each other.

&
nbsp; And so there it was: My loyalty today to Dave was as strong as it had been twenty-one years ago. Translation: There was no way I could tell Tired that the gun and bullets used to kill Kenneth had been in Dave’s possession just days before the murder.

  Of course, there was no readily apparent reason for Dave to shoot Kenneth, so none of any of this made any kind of sense, but there you had it. Dave never wholly made sense. In another lifetime, that had been part of his charm.

  But charm has a short shelf life when three bodies are somehow laid at the feet of the man smiling between his pigtails.

  Chapter 29

  Though I rose early, fit in a killer workout at the Y, and landed at my Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley office wearing a steel gray dress that screamed serious-lawyering day, my plan was busted by Bonita.

  That she sat in my office and drank from my private stash of coffee was my first clue that I wasn’t going to like this day any better than the day before.

  “Benny has been skipping school.”

  “Yeah, I got that yesterday.”

  “The reason he has been skipping school is that he is tracking that jaguarundi. Back in Myakka, in the state park. I found him yesterday, parked way out on Clay Gully Road, where he’d just hiked back to his truck.”

  Before I sat down at my desk to absorb this, I poured myself a cup of coffee, opened my mini-fridge, and topped off the coffee with enough milk to cool it down and add a couple of hundred calories.

  “Why’s he so . . . obsessed with a jaguarundi?” I asked, but wondered if that was just the excuse. The excuse to go back to where he and Dave had been, to the scene where all of this had started, or that is, had started for Benny.

  “He is increasingly obsessed by the wildcat and I do not know why. Benny’s done this before. Even before going off with that Dave. Since, I don’t know, since he wrote that paper on the jaguarundi for school. You know, the one you mailed to Dave.”

  Well, yeah, of course I remembered that paper. If I hadn’t sent it to Dave, maybe none of this would have happened; that is, maybe it would have all happened, but without Benny, Bonita, and me being slap dab in the middle of it. I was very sorry now that I had mailed a copy to Dave, but we know what the road to hell is paved with.