“Go,” said Maddy. “We have files to discuss.”
“Mind if I tag along?” Alex asked.
She gave Zinc a look that said, Here’s your chance to swing. If you love me, you must love me for me.
“Be my guest,” Ethan said, crooking out his arm.
As Alex rose to be escorted away, Zinc noticed two things about the unsteady lawyer. One was the smell of Scotch wafting from him. The other was the twitch that winked one eye.
Gunslinger
Vancouver
Tonight
I watched them come toward me, the three of them: my law associate, Ethan; a male who was surely his brother; and a woman who meant the Mountie in red was the luckiest guy on board. They weaved through a sea of tables from him to me, which masked the fact that my office partner couldn’t walk a straight line. Lucky for Ethan he had the beauty on his arm, for if not he might have ended up on someone’s plate. That was six days ago, just before the onboard hanging that drew me into the case, which has resulted in the Hangman’s stalking me tonight.
“Ditch him,” I said as the trio reached my table. “He’s too young for a fine-looking, grown-up babe like you.”
“If I don’t have to change his diapers, no man is too young for me.”
“Too old and you end up changing diapers too.”
She laughed.
I grinned.
It was a good start.
I scare most women.
They see me as a threat.
So it was refreshing to see her look me straight in the eye.
“You look Ethan’s age.”
“I am,” I said.
“Which makes you the pot to his kettle, right?”
She was quick.
I like ballsy women.
“Alex Hunt,” Ethan said, “meet Jeff Kline. Jeff, this is Alex. And this is my brother, Justin.”
The man I had asked Ethan to bring over held out his paw. As we shook, I wondered if this was the hand that had scrawled the hangman puzzle.
“Sit down,” I said.
They each took a seat, and as if on cue, dessert arrived. It was some puffed concoction smothered with fruit and sauce.
“Pavlova,” said Alex.
“Really,” I replied.
“For the Russian ballerina.”
“Oh,” I said. Believe me, you wouldn’t catch me dead at one of those. Girls in fluffy miniskirts and guys in tight pants showing off their stones.
“She was the ballerina known for The Dying Swan. If I’m not mistaken, early last century, when Pavlova toured Australia and New Zealand, a chef down under created this for her.”
“You learn something every day,” I said.
A forkful of pavlova slipped down my barbarian’s throat. It tasted like a ballerina’s tutu. Give me an apple pie any day.
Ethan was getting miffed at me for playing cutesy with his date. “I told Justin you wanted to hear what he did after Haddon hung.”
“Hanged,” I said.
Ethan’s face twitched.
“Hang a coat on a hook and the coat is hung. Hang a man on a gallows and the man is hanged. Unless he is as well-endowed as Pavlova’s ballet partners. Then you can properly say he’s hung, too.”
Alex chuckled.
Classy chick.
One of those women who can take on both the high and the low.
“You learn something every day,” Ethan responded coldly.
I didn’t want to do it—hey, he and I have stood together for years—but the opening Ethan gave me was too good to let close. Not only did I slip it to Alex that I was in her league, but if Justin Whitfield was the Hangman, here was my chance to let him know I was his kind of lawyer.
“That’s why you don’t walk under ladders.”
“What is?” Alex said.
“Hanging,” I replied.
“I don’t get the connection.”
“In the early days of hanging cons on Tyburn Hill in London, the condemned climbed a ladder to the noose and was ‘turned off’ to strangle. The body was left to hang for an hour under the ladder. That’s why we think it unlucky to walk under one today.”
“You know a lot about hanging,” Justin said.
He gave me that scrutinizing stare that reporters have copyrighted.
“The Hangman fascinates me.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because hanging is how the common law has always exacted judicial retribution. Pharaoh hanged his baker, the Bible says. It also mentions a gallows fifty cubits high. The gallows was brought to Britain by Anglo-Saxon invaders. It’s fair to say the cross and the noose took hold at the same time. The Hangman goes to a great deal of trouble to hang his victims. When I ask myself why, the answer I get is biblical retribution. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. The Hangman isn’t a killer in the usual sense—he’s an executioner on a mission. What this Hangman is doing is what hangmen have always done: He’s punishing the guilty, and he’s deterring those who might transgress by driving home the consequences of not toeing the line.”
Think about that, I thought.
If you’re the Hangman, Justin, am I not the gunslinger you want if the cops bust you?
One who understands?
“You’re mixing metaphors, Jeff.”
It was Alex speaking.
She was turning the tables on me for making Ethan look ungrammatical.
“How so?” I asked.
“‘Towing the line.’ You can’t mix driving a car with towing a barge. That’s like saying, ‘The president will put the ship of state on its feet.’ You’re mixing wheels and feet.”
I grinned. “Alex, you’re the lowest snake in the grass who ever stabbed a man in the back.”
“See,” she said. “You know better.”
“Actually, it’s you who got it wrong.”
“Oh? How so?”
“A mixed metaphor is the use in the same expression of two or more metaphors that are illogical in combination, agreed?”
“Yes,” she said.
“To ‘drive’ can mean to operate a car. But it can also mean to send by force, agreed?”
“I suppose.”
“When a judge condemns a convict to hang, what he says at the close of the sentence is this: ‘And may God have mercy on your soul.’ God lives in heaven, and He’s our Maker, so heaven is where a soul comes from and where, if God has mercy, it goes ‘home.’ Thus when a hangman breaks a convict’s neck, it can literally be said that the condemned is ‘driven home.’”
Justin rolled his eyes. “God save us from lawyers,” he groaned.
“And you’re in trouble on another front,” I added. “Somewhere along the way, you picked up the expression ‘to toe the line’ and wrongly fixed it in your mind as ‘to tow the line.’ It’s T-O-E, not T-O-W. So while we both agree that ‘to toe the line’ means to conform strictly with a rule or law, you see the image of that metaphor as a person towing a barge along a straight and narrow canal with a tow line over her shoulder as she trudges the towpath alongside the water.”
“I’m wrong?” said Alex.
“The origin of that phrase is this. The hangman on a British gallows chalked a line on the trapdoors as a guide to where the condemned should stand. Cons who did as they were told ‘toed the line.’ But cons who roughed up and refused to go peacefully were driven home, so to speak, strapped to a board.
“Sorry, Alex, but either way you lose. Both of my supposedly ‘mixed’ metaphors relate to hanging.”
“You learn something every day,” she said, adding her lesson to Ethan’s and mine.
“That’s how it’s done,” I said, with a meaningful wink at Justin. “Before your toe is on the line, / It’s time to call for Jeffrey Kline.”
* * *
“Ethan tells me you were present when the verdict came in?”
“Yes,” said Justin.
“What was that like?”
The four of us had moved to the Captain Ahab Bar. As wi
ne bottles flowed and ebbed to and from tables in the dining room, the Moby Dick crowd was getting drunk and rowdy. We had escaped to the quieter lounge to talk about Haddon. With candles on wooden tables, nets and harpoons on the walls, the bar was supposed to capture the flavor of Melville’s Lahaina.
“You’re a lawyer,” Justin said. “You know what it was like. The almost-sickening tension in court as the jurors filed in. They were pale and nervous. Only one—Busby—looked at Peter. The foreman delivered the verdict in a tired voice. No sooner had he rendered it than Peter exploded in court. ‘You call this a justice system?’ he yelled at the judge. ‘Where’s the goddamn justice in it for me?’”
“Was Haddon removed?”
“The court adjourned for sentencing. Peter was crying as they led him away. The father of the dead child cursed Peter’s attorney. ‘No champagne this time, pal,’ he said.”
“Did you report the proceedings?”
“No,” Justin said. “I didn’t enter the case until the appeals ran out.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I guess I believed in justice.”
Justin, Alex, and I were drinking coffee in the bar as the ship turned west. A compass sunk in the tabletop tracked direction. Already drunk and sulking because of my earlier put-down, Ethan was ordering one stiff drink after another.
“Easy,” I said.
“Mind your own business, Jeff.”
“Why did the appeal process fail?” asked Alex.
“The authorities were convinced that the right man had been convicted. Haddon’s lawyer saw to that by leading evidence of insanity at his trial. That’s how everyone knew for certain that Peter was the killer, and that became a strong dynamic in the state’s pursuit of him through the upper courts.”
“A psycho child-killer?”
The reporter nodded. “Peter’s lawyer had overplayed his hand. The jury had legitimized the state’s case with its verdict. The defense was forced to allege that Anna’s father and the two snitches were lying, that the hairs and fibers didn’t match or the lab had botched the job, that the wagon driver had not heard Peter admit to underage sex, and so on. That gave the state its rebuttal. What the attorney for the appellant was alleging was a huge conspiracy involving civilians, scientists, police, and prosecutors—all to railroad an innocent man.”
“It does sound outlandish,” Alex admitted.
“The courts thought so too. With so many bits of evidence pointing to Peter, it seemed too coincidental to be coincidence. Either he was guilty or he had the worst luck in the world. As it turned out, he did have the worst luck in the world.”
“It’s hard to overturn a jury verdict,” I cut in. “Jurors are the triers of the facts, and once evidence is weighed by them to determine the facts of any case, an appeal court won’t set the verdict aside unless you can undermine it.”
“Which the defense couldn’t. Once the verdict was in, the state’s case hardened.”
“Testifying under oath makes witnesses hunker down,” I said. “Lying in court is perjury. That can send you to jail.”
“A decade passed between Anna’s death and Peter’s hanging. In that time, DNA testing was invented. Semen stains were found on Anna’s underwear, but the science wasn’t refined enough by 1993 to get a workable sample to compare with Peter’s DNA.”
“Time ran out,” I said.
“Because there was a deadline. Had Washington not revived the death penalty, Peter would have been alive when refined DNA testing became possible.”
“So how do you fit in?”
“As it became obvious that the courts wouldn’t come to Peter’s rescue, his only hope became a pardon from the governor. By then, I was crime reporter at the Seattle Star, so he summoned me to death row and begged for my help.”
“Investigative reporting?”
“In a way. I tried to interview the father of the dead girl about why he changed the crucial time he said he got home, but George Koulelis refused to let me in. Having struck out there, I tried to find the snitches, but both had been released from jail, thanks to having testified against Peter, and had disappeared back into the woodwork.
“Finally, in a last-ditch effort to influence the governor, I wrote the usual polemic about capital punishment. I began with a quote from Clarence Darrow, in the hope that America’s all-time greatest lawyer could undo the damage Peter’s counsel had done:
Every human being that believes in capital punishment loves killing, and the only reason they believe in capital punishment is because they get a kick out of it. Nobody kills anyone for love.
“I finished with words to the effect that killing was a cruel, brutal, barbaric act. As state-sanctioned vengeance, it didn’t deter crime, and it was the enemy of justice because it was so irrevocable, irreparable, and ultimately final that it prevented correction of those mistakes that slip through the system.
“The governor didn’t respond, but I got a lot of hate mail. And someone sent me a quote by Ambrose Bierce to counter Darrow’s: ‘A hangman is an officer of the law charged with duties of the highest dignity and utmost gravity.’”
“That was the end of the line?”
“Yes,” Justin responded. “Peter asked me to spend his last hours with him. It was snowing on Valentine’s Day when I arrived at the prison. I expected to find a psychological wreck. But what I found was a man facing death with dignity. You know that famous quote from Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1777: ‘Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’
“That’s what Peter was like in those final hours. Just before the priest came to give him last rites, he asked me as a last wish to prove he was innocent after he was hanged.
“I was in tears.
“I promised I would.
“That night I wrote an article that was published the next day in the Seattle Star.”
“This article?” I said. And from a vest pocket in my barrister’s robes I pulled a photocopy of the newspaper piece Ethan had shown me earlier that day at our office:
“I’M INNOCENT!”—CONVICT’S LAST WORDS
HADDON HANGS
Justin Whitfield
Seattle Star
Walla Walla—He stood before us on the gallows of the state penitentiary, a moment before the hangman cinched the noose around his neck and dropped him to his death, to protest his innocence one more time.
“My last words are—”
His voice broke.
“That I am innocent, innocent, innocent. Be under no illusion. This is injustice. I owe society nothing. I am—”
He choked the words.
“An innocent man. Something wrong is taking place here tonight.”
Then it was over. Peter Brice Haddon was dead. And now I am left with the nagging suspicion that the State of Washington hanged an innocent man …
“Yes,” said Justin. “That’s the one. Publishing it brought more hate mail. But among those damning letters was a troubled one tipping me anonymously to a cover-up at the lab.”
“Which lab?”
“The lab that did the hair and fiber tests. From my secret informant, I learned there was a contamination problem at the lab back when it did the tests on the fibers recovered from Anna’s clothes and the trunk of Haddon’s car. An internal search for the source of that contamination went on for years, and finally the only solution was to move the lab.”
“But testing continued?”
“All the while. Hard as it may be for some people to believe.”
“Not me,” I said. “It’s like pollution. You don’t see company employees running to the press to blow the whistle on the hand that feeds them.” I winked at Alex. “Are those metaphors mixed?”
“The lab techs really mucked it up,” Justin said. “The samples taken from Anna’s clothes and Peter’s car were contaminated with foreign fibers at the lab. Then scientists analyzed those samples to see if there were fiber matches, effectively creatin
g the ‘matches’ that indicated Peter had driven Anna from her home to where she was killed in the trunk of his car. That’s why the lab found fibers on Anna’s underwear, the match that Peter’s lawyer couldn’t answer at the trial with an argument of random transfers.”
“Junk evidence,” I commented.
“Which made Peter a suspect and got him charged,” said Alex.
“Got him convicted too,” Justin added. “The junk evidence intensified in impact when the state attorney gave his closing address to the jury standing beside a chart mounted on an easel. Arrows linked photos of the car to shots of Anna’s pathetic remains to connect the matches. ‘Good old common sense will tell you that Anna was abducted in Haddon’s car,’ he said.”
“What about the hairs snagged in the chain of the locket?” Alex asked.
“After the fiber bombshell exploded, I got another tip from my informant. Stored in the lab, I was told, were samples of hair snipped from Anna’s classmates at the time her body was found. They were to be analyzed for the purpose of exclusion. Then Peter was arrested after his hair matched, and testing of those samples was never done.”
“Was it later?”
“Yes, I forced the matter. And sure enough, hair from two of Anna’s classmates matched as closely as had Peter’s.”
“Unbelievable!”
“Hardly,” I said. “Didn’t anybody watch the O. J. Simpson trial? That’s what happens when lab techs play Sherlock Holmes. They get so caught up in trying to be of help to the police that they forget the fundamental rule of scientific method: They are to work vigorously to challenge and disprove a hypothesis, rather than to prove it.”
“That’s the excuse I got for the oversight,” said Justin. “The tech on the Haddon case had been too busy analyzing other samples that might strengthen the case against him.”
Ethan was turning puke green around the gills. He looked like he was seasick on a tossing tide of booze. I feared he might hurl the dinner in his stomach at us.
“Fresh air, Eth?”
He ordered another Scotch.
“Next, I went after the snitches,” Justin continued. “We have a recipe for disaster in the States. You don’t have minimum sentences and a ‘three strikes rule’ in Canada, do you?”
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