"Yeah. She made like you figured that he was punking me."
"Basically."
"Great fucking news."
"But, William, it means—"
"It means—" he shouted, then he lowered his voice to a raspy but conversational level. "It means that I did things with him and to him and it's gonna be all over the news tonight."
"Yes, but it also means you're off the hook for Jennifer's murder. You didn't kill her, and the police and everybody know you didn't."
"Yeah, terrific. But the police and everybody don't got to do a year with the wrong kind of sign hanging around their necks, you dig?"
"What do you mean . . . ?"
"Jail, man. In-car-cer-a-tion. Twelve fucking months for the gun charge. Or did you forget about that?"
"I guess I did."
"Yeah, well, too bad you ain't running the system. They ain't gonna forget about it."
"Maybe Rothenberg can work something out."
William shook his head. "You don't know shit, man. Gun charge is automatic. No deals, no probation, no parole. One year gone."
"Look, they've got to control for things, at least. They'll give you credit for the time you've already served."
"Oh, great, man! Wonderful system. One down, just eleven to go, huh?" He hitched his seat forward, clenching and unclenching his lists and his teeth. "Well, let me tell you something, mother'. This the same system that encourage me to step up in class. To go from home to U Mass, and U Mass to Goreham. But it didn't 'control' for the bloods back on Millrose Street that made me buy the piece, or the dudes in the dorm at Goreham, or the shrink who was supposed to be helping me instead of helping himself to me. You got that, Jack? This system of yours has fucked me but good. And now it's gonna keep on fucking me by way of any mother' doing hard time with a hard on. Thanks, man. Thanks a lot for all you and your system done for me."
William stood and gestured impatiently for the guard.
* * *
The proceedings against Marek were to be held in courtroom 9A. Like most of the new courthouse, 9A was carpeted and acoustically perfect, a modem butcher-block arena for deciding which side had hired the better lawyer. The camera crew was still setting up off to the left. The courtroom was nearly half full already, and it looked like old home week. I could see Chief Wooten talking intently with a shrugging guy at the district attorney's table. Officers Clay and Bjorkman were sitting in the first row. When Clay saw me, he got up and said something to the chief. The prosecutor looked at me and mouthed "Him?" Clay nodded and the prosecutor, now ignoring Wooten, started walking back toward me. Before he reached me, I spotted Homer Linden in one corner on the left waving to me sociably and the backs of Sam and Tyne Creasey in the first row on the right. Sam Creasey stood and moved over to his camera crew, directing one of them. Then Creasey began looking through one of the big black cases as the prosecutor drew even with me and said, "C'mon."
* * *
"You're kidding."
He said, "Wish I was."
The assistant district attorney's name was Gibson. He was sturdy and paramilitary in a three-piece suit. I didn't like what I'd just heard him tell me in the little conference room outside 9A.
"You mean that even if the tape had come out perfectly, it still wouldn't be admissible?"
"That's right. You want the short version or the long one?"
"The short one, please."
"Okay. We have a statute in-this commonwealth, call it Section Ninety-nine. That statue says generally that the police can't tape a conversation. without a warrant. Section Ninety-nine has an exception, though, that basically says that if one party to a conversation agrees to the interception, then we don't need the others to consent nor do we need a warrant."
"That's what happened, though. I was a party to the conversation, and I agreed to the taping."
"Yeah, but the exception requires you to be a law enforcement officer, which, even stretching things, you aren't. And the taping has to be done to prove certain 'designated offenses' connected to some kind of 'organized crime.' Our boy Marek doesn't fit."
"So what does that mean? Aside from the fact we can't use the tape."
Gibson tugged on an earlobe. "It means that you, Wooten, and O'Boy broke the law."
I stood up, walked over to the window to calm down.
"The assistant DA yesterday, the one Wooten and O'Boy and I met with before the taping. He approved all this."
"That kid's been in the office barely a year. Wooten calls him—he's Wooten's brother-in-law's kid, by the way—Wooten calls him with this maybe big case opportunity, so the kid speed-reads the statute, Section Ninety-nine. The kid misses the organized-crime part, which is interpreted in Supreme Judicial Court cases and elaborated in a Massachusetts Law Review article to the point where a dim ten-year-old could deal with it. The kid, however, misses it, like I said, signs out the wire equipment, and . . . Well, you know the rest."
I turned back to Gibson. "Does this foul-up mean that even I can't testify on what Marek told me?"
"Hard to say. The statute just limits recording or eavesdropping on conversations. A party to the conversation should still be able to testify about what the prospective defendant, here Marek, said during the conversation."
I thought about it. Even embellished, my version of what was said wou1dn't be convincing. "If you were to handicap it right now, what would you say?"
"Too early to tell."
"Meaning I've got a great theory, we both believe Marek's the killer, but you don't have the ammunition to prove it."
"Like I said, it's too early. Hell, we're months from the trial, and evidence has a way of falling into your lap. I'll tell you this, though. Marek's hired himself one of the best. If there's a rug this can be swept under for him, the lawyer you'll see today is the broom that can do it."
He stood up. "We'd better be getting back in."
* * *
Gibson moved up the aisle. There was a new face at the otherwise empty defense table. A distinguished, graying man who shook hands with and smiled at Gibson. A lawyerly replica of Marek. I felt sick.
"John?"
I turned my head. It was Sam Creasey. He had one of those black, snap-open videocassette cases in one hand and a concerned look on his face. "Sam, I heard about the license. I'm—"
"That can wait. I saw you go out with the prosecutor. What's going on?"
I shook my head. "Nothing, Sam. He just wanted to hear my side of it."
"John, please don't bullshit me on this. It's too important. What is it?"
I tried looking him in the eye, but it wasn't easy. "The prosecutor didn't say it this bluntly, but I don't think he can prove a case against Marek."
Creasey looked as if he'd been slapped. "I knew it. I knew it yesterday, when the call came in at the station. It didn't feel right. The way everything else has gone against us . . . John, there's no doubt in your mind that he did it, is there?"
"That Marek killed Jennifer?"
"Yes."
He was entitled at least to that. "No, Sam. No doubt."
He hung his head, then shook it off and looked back at me. "I don't see Mrs. Daniels."
"I called her, but she said, all things considered, she wasn't up to seeing"—I gestured with my hand—"this."
"I think I know how she feels." He looked over to his wife, sitting ramrod straight in her bench. "I wonder if you'd mind sitting with us, with Tyne and me. I think Tyne would really appreciate it.
"Be glad to," I said.
We walked up to the front row, Creasey motioning for me to go in first. He whispered to me, "Could you sit on the other side of her, John? In case she faints or anything?"
I nodded and Creasey said gently, "Tyne, you remember John Cuddy. He came to the house about Jennifer."
Tyne looked up at me, then stared ahead.
"Tyne," said Creasey in the same soft voice. "Let John past you, please?"
His wife shifted sideways, and I slid past and sat nex
t to her. I and everyone else immediately had to stand as the court officer intoned, "Co-o-o-ourt. All rise."
The judge ascended the bench and the case was called by the clerk. As the audience settled back down, two uniformed sheriffs officers brought Marek in from a side door, no handcuffs. Marek was in a suit and looked marvelous despite his several jail meals. He smiled and shook hands with his attorney. As Gibson the prosecutor began speaking, Marek swung his head around, looked at me, and sneered, not ten feet away from us.
What came next takes a lot longer to relate than it did to happen. As Gibson paused for a question from the judge, I heard Creasey click open the videocassette case. I leaned forward to look at him across his wife, and he said quietly, "Tend to Tyne." Then Sam drew a short-barreled revolver from the case, stood up, and barked "Marek!" so sharply that the psychiatrist jumped while turning around to face us. Creasey pumped five shots into Marek as Marek's lawyer dived to the left and I threw my arms around Tyne and tackled her to the floor. Uniformed officers began firing at Sam, with several rounds either missing him or plowing through fleshy parts and lodging in the wall and bench around us. The impact of the slugs that definitely hit Creasey lifted him up and over the back of the pewlike seating, into the laps of the people behind us. There was a moment of stunned silence, smoke literally hanging in the air of the room. Then screams and yelling and everybody pushing and shoving as I helped Tyne back to a sitting position. She turned to me with that same vacant stare and said simply, "Thank you."
As I stood up, Bjorkman was craning over the aisle side of where Sam Creasey had fallen. I couldn't see the body, but Bjorkman, pointing with his gun barrel, said, "Those two there, the ones right above the heart. Those are mine."
I said, "Bjorkman?"
He turned that distorted baby face of his toward me, and I smashed his nose flat with my right fist. I had cocked my left when I heard Clay's voice say "Stupid shit," and then the lights went out.
* * *
"I should have seen it coming, kid."
How?
"The kind of man that Sam Creasey was, the way he talked with me about Texas justice, the camera guy letting on that Creasey had checked the videotapes personally that morning . .
Lean down.
I bent over, still a little rocky from Clay's competent sapping a few hours earlier. The afternoon breeze was cool, but when the wind stopped, the air had that faint oven glow that made summer seem imaginable, even close.
Its not your job to keep guns out of courtrooms. Or to keep people who have them from using them.
"Funny, I told Marek something like that. That it wasn't my job to see him hang, just so long as I got my client off."
How is William taking all this?
"Not too well when I saw him. He's pretty upset over the ride the system's given him."
Its not hard to see why hes bitter. Do you think he 'll come through all this?
"I don't know. Maybe if Murphy took some more personalized interest in him."
Like a role model?
"Yeah."
Don 't you think that maybe William has had enough of authority figure role models? His brother, Marek . . .
"Me."
She tried to laugh. Its hard to think of you as either an authority figure or a role model.
"I guess I think of me as something else too."
And what's that?
"A Sam Creasey. Just a little luckier."
Creasey must have thought he didn't have anything left to live for. You do.
"Yeah."
* * *
I was just outside the cemetery gates and onto the sidewalk when I became peripherally aware of a red car slowly drawing even with me. I reflexively slid my right hand inside my jacket and back to my empty right hip. I hadn't remembered my gun when I'd picked up the car after court.
I could feel more than see the driver leaning over and rolling down the passenger side window. A wonderful voice said, "When I heard what happened at Middlesex this morning, I thought you'd come here."
I let out a breath and walked over to the Honda. Nancy Meagher smiled at me. Her hair was shorter, but everything else seemed the same. Which meant great.
"Good to see you again," I said,
"You too. How about a lift home?"
"My car's just a block away, and besides, I live way over in Back Bay."
Nancy smiled wider. "No, dunce. I meant a lift to my home."
I opened the door and climbed in.
So Like Sleep - Jeremiah Healy Page 19