“Can you ask your sister to help us think this through?”
“Sure. She lives right over in Trescott.” He picked up the phone.
Cohen’s sister answered her cell but said she was working a twelve-hour shift and wouldn’t be off till midnight. He said he had some questions about the autopsy report, and wanted her insight. She told him to email it and she’d take a look as soon as she had time.
I settled back into the easy chair as he tapped away on his computer.
“Who else had a motive to kill O’Rourke?”
“Good question,” he said. “I wish I had an idea about how to go about finding the answer.”
“You told me last week O’Rourke was a self-important asshole. If so, other people must have had run-ins with him, and any one of them might have been nursing a grudge.”
“If the cops had to interview everyone who thought Frank O’Rourke was an entitled pain in the ass, it would take them a month. The bigger question is why whoever killed him would dump the body on Danny Boothby’s front porch.”
“Right,” I said. “There’s that part.”
Cohen sighed and scratched at the shadow of a weekend beard stubbling his face.
“From your perspective, it doesn’t matter who did it, right? So long as you can convince the jury that it’s reasonable to doubt that Danny Boothby killed O’Rourke, you’ll have done your job, and made sure an innocent man didn’t take the rap.”
“I’m not so sure the jury is going to find reasonable doubt that Danny did it unless I can counter the facts that Mansfield has on his side.”
“In other words, you’ll need to explain how and why O’Rourke’s body ended up on Danny’s front porch. And that means figuring out who Danny’s protecting. Maybe it is his daughter. Maybe it’s someone who’s threatening her, or has some other hold over Danny. Why else would he be willing to stand trial?”
Cohen glanced at his watch, stood up from his desk and stretched. “This has been a pretty unconventional conversation. Perhaps I’ve said more than I should have. But we share an interest in figuring out the truth.”
“Are you willing to share information with me going forward? Off the record for now?”
He studied me. “I don’t want Danny to be convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. I don’t want anyone else to be killed or hurt. And I sure as hell don’t want to have to scrape dead fish off my steps every morning. But I also don’t want to step over the ethical line.”
“I don’t want to see your client convicted of a murder he didn’t commit either.” I stood up and pulled on my coat. “And I’ve got to protect my sources, so I won’t be able to tell you everything I know. I won’t ask you to tell me confidential conversations you’ve had with your client, and you’ll have to be satisfied not knowing where I got some of the information I’ll put into the mix.”
“We’ll both have to decide how to manage our ethical decisions as they come up,” Cohen said. “I want to be clear—the way I see it, we’re on the same side, but not on the same team.”
We walked down the stairs together.
“Speaking of ethics, have you met Emma Abbott, who DHHS hired to work one-on-one with Corrine?”
“I know her name, but haven’t met her. Why?”
“We’ve become friends over the course of the past week. That’s why your mention of ethics brought her to mind. We’re both staying at the Easterly, and we’ve compared notes a bit, mindful of the limits of our cooperation, of course. But I think if she’d been sitting in this room for the past hour, she’d have had some things to add.”
I didn’t tell him about Emma having been fired by the state, and rehired by Dorcas Simonton. That was her business, and it would be her decision whether to share it.
“Why don’t you come over after court tomorrow, and ask Emma to join us? I’m sure my sister will have called me by then, so I’ll have a better understanding of the autopsy report. If you’re willing to keep the conversation off the record, we can kick it around.”
“I expect to see Emma tonight. Is it okay with you if I let her know the outline of our conversation this afternoon? She can be trusted to keep it confidential.” The cold air rushed in as soon as I opened the door.
“Go ahead and talk to her if you want,” he said. “But eavesdropping is a way of life around here, so pay attention to whoever’s in earshot.”
Chapter Twenty
Sunday, January 11, 2015
Walking back to the inn in the fading daylight, my head was so full of theories I felt almost dizzy. Emma’s car wasn’t in the parking lot. I hoped she’d be as good as her word and arrive before dark, or at least take Route One, even though it was the long way around. I didn’t want to think of her driving across the Black Woods Road at night, even in good weather.
I settled into the armchair and called Christie. She picked up on the second ring.
“Are you okay?”
“Back in Machias in one piece. The roads have been plowed, the walk’s been shoveled, and they put me in the same room. Feels kind of like home. The more important topic is whether you, mother of Theo and soon-to-be former girlfriend of Arn, are still in one piece.”
“Hell, yeah. My son showed up at the diner before the lunch rush, came around the corner and gave me a half hug. He didn’t say anything, but he looked me in the eye for the first time in a couple of weeks. So thank you again for doing whatever it is you did.”
I wasn’t sure she’d be thanking me in a few days when Theo spilled the news he’d contacted Steve Swain and wanted to go to Florida for a little father-son time. “You still planning to connect with Arn?”
“Dinner tonight. I told him I didn’t want to wait till Monday so he cancelled his card game and suggested we go out to Lulu’s. I told him I’d rather get some takeout and eat at his house. If he wasn’t so oblivious, he might have recognized this as a hint that something’s up.”
“Nervous?”
“Nah, a little bit sad. And a little bit mad. But I’m ready to cut myself loose, and the idea of being free of Arn and his self-involved life is exhilarating.”
* * *
An hour or so later Emma showed up at my door, parka unzipped, a suitcase propped against her right knee. “Sorry I’m kind of late. I was delayed leaving Ellsworth.”
“Everything okay?”
“Great. You still want to have supper together?”
“My stomach’s been grumbling for an hour.”
Emma’s full-tilt smile turned me inside out.
“How ’bout the pub?”
“Be back in less than five minutes.” She picked up her suitcase. “If we’re lucky, there’ll be a Red Sox replay on TV.”
I’d already decided to hold off telling her about my afternoon ride with Leslie. If Cohen managed to get the official Dispatch tape and it differed from the transcript provided by the state, heads would roll without any help from me. The last thing I needed was for Leslie to lose her job. The fewer people who knew her part—and my own—in bringing Shaw’s deception into the open, the better.
We didn’t sit at the bar and we didn’t talk about Emma’s boys of summer. Instead I steered her to a spot against the back wall, as far as possible from the other occupied tables. After we ordered beers and a plate of nachos, I scooted my chair closer to hers.
“So your weekend was quiet?”
“No unfamiliar trucks pulled into my driveway, and I don’t think anyone followed me around the grocery store.”
“Maybe our homicidal pal didn’t track me to your house after all.” I lowered my voice and filled her in on my dance-round-the-confidentiality-rules conversation with Cohen.
She recoiled when I described his monkfish doormat. “A dead fish on the front steps—do you think the O’Rourkes would do that?”
“Doubtful. But maybe they hired someone local to harass him a little bit, and leaving a rotting fish on the doorstep is the way they send a shot across someone’s bow around here.”
“Why? They don’t want him to defend Danny?”
“It sounds absurd, but that’s got to be it. Cohen’s got two routes to get Danny acquitted. Self-defense, or someone else did it. Before the trial started, everyone expected his case would be self-defense. But his cross-examination of witnesses last week signaled he’s taking the other path. And somebody doesn’t want him to go there.”
“He might be trying to keep his options open.”
“As in, ‘my client didn’t do it, but if he did, it was self-defense’?”
“That wouldn’t fly, would it?”
The nachos were delivered to our table, the cheese still bubbling from the broiler. After telling the server we’d signal when we wanted further attention, Emma took a sip of her beer and leaned her head close to mine.
“I don’t mind telling you I’m feeling confused.”
I picked up a nacho chip and dragged it through a little cheesy pool studded with onions and peppers.
“Defense attorneys have well-honed bullshit detectors. They have to, if they’re going to be successful. Cohen never said this—it’s a wild-ass guess on my part—but I think the story Danny gave Cohen seemed plausible until last week, when somebody said something that made Cohen realize Danny wasn’t telling him the whole truth.”
I spun the plate around so we could work on the side of the nacho mountain that had more tasty stuff mixed in with the chips.
“Cohen’s not a particularly experienced guy, but he’s smart. If Danny’s a bad liar, he’s not going to put him on the stand to tell some cockamamie story that won’t add up.”
Emma picked a slice of jalapeno off a big chip and set it on the side of the plate. “With self-defense, doesn’t the defendant pretty much have to take the stand?”
“Almost always. Unless there was a witness to the murder who can testify that it was a kill-or-be-killed situation for the defendant.”
“The only witness in this case was Corrine,” Emma said.
“Who—I learned today—was never interviewed by the cops.”
Her silence and a sudden break in eye contact told me Emma had known about the lack of an investigative interview long ago and wasn’t willing to talk with me about it, not even about how unusual it was for the cops to give an eyewitness a pass. She studied the table as she munched a chip, no doubt worrying about violating her ethical obligations to Corrine.
I shifted back to my earlier topic of speculation. “Cohen’s convinced Danny didn’t kill O’Rourke. Not in self-defense, not deliberately, and not by mistake.”
The server was approaching with one of those “how is everything?” looks on her face. We each ordered another beer and a bowl of chili. Once she was out of earshot I sketched out the theories Cohen and I had discussed—that Danny was taking the rap for whoever committed the murder on his front porch, or that O’Rourke had been killed someplace else, and the killer framed Danny by sticking a knife in O’Rourke’s chest and dumping him at the Boothby home.
Sidestepping the obvious implication that if Danny voluntarily was covering for someone that someone was most likely Corrine, she leaped for the other theory.
“If Danny was being framed, why wouldn’t he say so?”
“That’s the key question, isn’t it? If someone orchestrated a scenario to make it look like Danny killed O’Rourke, they went to a hell of a lot of trouble. And if Danny’s willing to stand trial with a vague claim of self-defense rather than tell his attorney what really happened, that implies Danny believes being convicted of a murder he didn’t commit is preferable to the truth coming out.”
“So what’s worse than being convicted of murder and spending the rest of your life in prison? What could be worse than that, especially because a long jail sentence would orphan your child?”
We sat in silence, contemplating the question. Emma finally fixed her deep green eyes on mine. “I know that you’re thinking the logical answer here is that Danny is protecting Corrine. But I just don’t see it.”
“It’s hard to imagine a twelve-year-old girl stabbing a guy to death.”
“It’s hard to imagine this particular twelve-year-old girl doing that. Not the physical part, but emotionally. If she stabbed Frank O’Rourke to death, she’d be manifesting very different behaviors than what I’ve seen. There’s no guile in her, no calculation about what to say. She doesn’t talk much, but what she says is unfiltered. She’s worried about her father, worried about her grandparents. Not lugging around a suitcase of guilt about having stabbed a guy.”
“This is where Cohen and I got stuck. If Danny didn’t stab O’Rourke, and Corrine didn’t either, how’d he wind up on the Boothby front porch with a knife sticking out of his chest?”
I sipped my beer while the server removed the platter of now-cold tortilla chips and congealed cheese. “Cohen suggested that the three of us meet at his office to talk after court winds up tomorrow. He’s got ethical constraints, of course, meaning he’s not going to tell us anything that Danny’s told him.”
“I’ll be there, but I also have to be careful what I say. This is getting complicated.”
“Yup. Three people walked into a bar—a lawyer, a psychologist and a newspaper reporter,” I said. “The joke would be if they were all so preoccupied with their ethics that an innocent man was convicted, and a killer went free.”
Fresh drinks and bowls of chili interrupted our case-related talk and when the server went away we didn’t pick it up again. Emma told me about a movie she’d watched Saturday night. I filled her in on most of my weekend—the footrace with Theo, Thai food with Christie, even Christie’s plan to break up with Arn.
I left out the part about reconnecting with a former flame and getting laid for the first time since Megan left. That was my private business.
Emma took it all in with the patience of a person who listens for a living.
“What’d Christie say when you told her about the guy chasing you in the snowstorm?”
“She was interested.”
“Upset?”
“Nah. Christie doesn’t get upset, not about me anyway. We’ve known each other a long time. She knows I’m pretty good at taking care of myself.”
“Are you?” A small smile played around the corners of her mouth. “I’ve been wondering about that.”
“I’m very self-sufficient.”
“I’m sure that’s true. But that’s a different thing than taking care of yourself.”
“I’m not sure I see the distinction.”
“Not to get all therapist-like on you, but taking care of yourself means you consider not only what you need, but what you want. And then figuring out how to get not just your basic needs met, but how to satisfy those wants as well.”
“What makes you think I don’t do that?”
“I don’t know you well enough to know whether you do or don’t. And I don’t mean to get all shrinky on you. I think what happened to you last week was enough to shake even a self-assured person like yourself, and when you have that kind of experience, it’s good to talk it out with someone you trust.”
I chased my last bite of chili with a swig of beer, thinking about how cathartic it was to tell Christie the whole complicated story, and how liberating it felt to make love with Alison. Maybe someday I’d find myself a lover who was also my best friend—if she hadn’t taken off for Africa, Megan would have fit the bill, and maybe Emma had potential—but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to have one woman I could tell everything and a separate sex partner. It was sure as hell better than having no one to talk to and living a celibate life.
* * *
Emma and I
walked back to the inn through snowbanks so tall the sidewalk felt like a tunnel. The previous week’s bitter cold had abated and the wind was quiet. We took our time, walking side by side, shoulders almost touching. It was nearly nine o’clock, and while one part of me wanted to hang out with Emma for the rest of the evening, I didn’t want to miss a call from Christie if she dialed me up after her last supper with Arn.
Emma eliminated my conundrum by announcing that she had some work-related reading to do. She bid me good-night at my door with a grin and a pat on the shoulder, before jogging up the next flight of stairs to her room. I thought we were at least on good-night hug terms, but this time she’d shut me down before I had a chance to get that much. I hadn’t found the right moment to ask if she had a boyfriend, but was beginning to believe she must. Either that or my usually fine-tuned radar needed calibration, because I sure as hell was getting a strong mutual attraction vibe.
I honored my pact with Leah by reporting in. She said there’d been no more calls to the City Desk and reminded me that the price of her agreement not to tell the powers-that-be about the Black Woods Road chase was my promise to call her at least twice a day.
“I want you to dig out the truth, but not at the price of my job. If I’m going to sleep nights I need to hear your actual voice. And don’t do anything stupid.”
There was no email from scrapper64 when I logged on to the computer. I cruised around online for a while, reading the lackluster coverage of the trial in Maine’s other weekend papers. No surprise there. If you don’t make an effort to know the players, much less sit through the testimony, you don’t have much to report other than the basic facts that had been known for months.
Sprawling in the easy chair, I found Bill Moyers on public television and settled in to watch his interview of a former hedge fund manager who’d turned into a whistleblower when his conscience got to him. A half hour later my cell phone rang.
“Did I wake you?” Christie said. “Sorry to call so late. I just got home.”
“I’m still up. Hoping you’d call. How’d it go?”
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