by John Dunning
“It doesn’t have to be exact, here and now. Just the true gist of it. There’s a tape, as you know. We can get the exact wording later if you can’t remember it now.”
“I’m trying to recollect.”
“Take your time.”
“She said there’d been a shooting. Her husband had been shot.”
“Yes, that’s what the tape will show. There had been a shooting. For all you knew at that moment, it had been an accident. Isn’t that right, Deputy?”
“I knew it hadn’t been any accident.”
“From what, just the sound of her voice?”
“That’s right.”
“From your vast experience and the sound of her voice.”
“Don’t you belittle me,” Lennie said, and Miss Bailey closed her eyes.
Erin smiled. “I certainly don’t mean to, Deputy.”
Miss Bailey came up from her chair. “Your Honor, these personal attacks—”
“Just ask the questions, Ms. D’Angelo.”
“How many shootings have you investigated in your career, Deputy?”
“I know what guilty people sound like.”
“That must be a great talent in your line of work. So the answer to my question is what? Fifty?…Ten?…Two?”
“You know we haven’t had many shootings here.”
“The answer then is none. Is that right?”
“The woman was hysterical.”
“I’m sure she was. Her husband had just been killed.” Erin looked at her notes. “All right, you got up there, the door was open, you went inside and found Mrs. Marshall at the table. Is that it?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, if it wasn’t exactly like that, Deputy, would you please tell us what was different about it?”
“I’ll have to refer to my report.”
“I have a copy of it here. Do you want to look at it?”
“No, I remember now.”
“Then tell us, please.”
“I called in through the open door. Nobody answered, so I went in. Hell, for all I knew Marshall might still be alive, bleeding to death in there.”
“So you went on in. Were you armed? Did you take out your weapon?”
“You better believe it. It’s easy for you to ask sarcastic questions here in this nice warm courthouse. You try going out alone to a scene like that and see how you like it.”
“So you walked in on Mrs. Marshall with your gun drawn.”
“And I was right, wasn’t I? Her husband was dead at her feet and there wasn’t any ifs or maybes about it.”
“No, there weren’t. And you immediately assumed that she had done it.”
“Well, he had two lethal wounds, so I knew right off he didn’t do it to himself. Nobody else was there.”
“Nobody you saw. Tell us what happened then.”
“I spoke to her. She looked up and said, ‘I shot Bobby.’”
He said this smugly, with a smirk of victory, as if he had just put the biggity-ass, hotshot lawyer in her place. Erin nodded and said, “I understand you spent some time down at the station trying to get her to confess. Now you’re telling us she’d already confessed, is that correct?”
I glanced at the prosecution table, expecting an objection that never came.
“She gave me a verbal confession, first words out of her mouth.”
“And at the station you were trying to…”
“Get her to sign it, what do you think?”
“Without a lawyer present to protect her interests.”
“I had already read her her rights—twice, in fact. Once up at the house, once in the jail.”
“Which no one but yourself saw or heard.”
“Freeman was there when I gave her her rights the second time.”
“Freeman being the old jailer.”
“That’s right.”
“So she gave you this spontaneous confession at the house. Did she repeat that at the jail?”
“Yeah. Not to me, but—”
“Why do you suppose not?”
“Someone had arrived and told her not to.”
“Ah. Who might that have been?”
“You know who it was.”
“You mean the photographer, Mr. Gilstrap, is that correct?”
“Yeah,” Lennie said with obvious reluctance.
“Good thing he was there, wasn’t it?”
“Good for you maybe; it gives you something to chew on. But lemme tell you something, lady, what he did was totally off-base. He was interfering with an officer of the law in an official duty. Whatever he says, I’d take with a grain of salt if I were you.”
“Thank you, officer. He’ll give us his version shortly.”
“He’ll say I’m lying. Are you calling me a liar?”
Miss Bailey leaned forward. “Lennie —”
“Goddammit, I don’t have to sit still for that shit.”
“Let’s assume somebody was lying,” Erin said. “You’re saying it was Gilstrap, is that correct?”
“I’m saying what I just said. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“I think you’re saying a good deal more than that, Deputy. In fact you know exactly what Mr. Gilstrap observed that day.”
“I know what he thinks.”
“He’s here to testify to what he saw. Under oath, sir, as you are.”
“Don’t talk to me that way. I don’t lie.”
“He thinks you sealed up the house and left—”
“Now that is bullshit.”
The judge picked up his gavel. “Sir, you will not use gutter language in my courtroom.”
Lennie stared ahead as if he had heard none of this. Erin leaned over into his line of vision, and in that moment there were just the two of them locked in a battle as old as time. “Are you going to tell us you did not seal up the crime scene and leave Mrs. Marshall’s children inside?”
“That’s a fuckin’ lie.”
The gavel rapped; the judge roared something about contempt. Lennie said, “It’s a lie, it’s a lie, it’s a goddamned lie. Read my lips and go to hell.” Erin said, “Your Honor, may the record reflect that the witness appears to be enraged by this line of questioning and that his attitude toward me is one of extreme hostility.”
“So ordered.”
“You’ve gone a bit pale, Deputy,” Erin said. “Would you like some water?”
“You just go to hell.” He looked at Gill, then at Miss Bailey, and finally, at last, at the judge. In a watery voice, he said, “Your Honor…”
Softly, Erin said, “May I just ask a few more questions, Your Honor?”
And the judge, in his steely voice, said, “Go on.”
Go on, fry the bastard.
“Are you people gonna sit still for this shit?”
Miss Bailey rose from her chair. “Your Honor…”
“Hey,” the judge said, motioning her down. “He rigged his own sail.”
“Did you seal up the house,” Erin said, “and then go back up there—”
“No!…No, I did not!”
“—and while you were there the second time, did you destroy every blood trace that that kid had put on the walls after you left them in there—”
“You…are…outta…your…fuckin’…mind.”
“All the bloody little fingerprints—”
“No, goddammit, no!”
“All the smears on the wall—”
“I’m not saying another word to this bitch.”
“What did you do with the bloody police tape with the fingerprints all over it?”
“You looked at the crime scene photos. You see any tape with blood on it?”
“I’m talking about the other tape, Officer Walsh. The original tape you used to seal the room before the kid got in there and messed it all up.”
“That never happened.”
“Let me suggest, Deputy, that you did return to the Marshall house. And at that time you discovered that the children had smea
red blood on the walls and had even handled the police tape with their bloody hands. And let me also suggest that when you saw what they had done, you destroyed that police tape and replaced it with a fresh one, and that you also washed all the smeared blood and handprints off the walls. Isn’t it true that this is in fact what you did.”
Lennie looked at the DA. “She’s gone crazy. She’s gone fuckin’ nuts.”
Erin smiled at him, not unkindly.
Lennie looked imploringly at Miss Bailey. “What the hell are you doing to me? We’re supposed to be on the same side, for Christ’s sake! How can you let her do this?”
“Better now than at the trial,” Erin said. “Right, Miss Bailey?”
“I wasn’t talking to you, goddammit! Can’t you understand English?”
“Your Honor, I would once again ask that the record reflect—”
“Fuck you! Fuck you all!”
Suddenly he got up and pulled open his jacket, and for just a moment his hand came to rest on his gun. Everyone in the room tensed. Miss Bailey said, “Jesus Christ, Lennie, what are you doing with that gun in here?” Lennie whirled, kicked over the chair, shattered it against the wall, and stalked out. We all sat and stared at one another, and for a moment no one knew what to say.
The judge recovered first. “I want a warrant sworn out for that man’s arrest,” he said to the sheriff. “Then you get out there and find him.”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked at the two sides. “Is there any reason why I shouldn’t rule right now on the motion to suppress?”
Gill stood and said, “Well, Your Honor, I would respectfully request a continuance until Deputy Walsh is found and we have a chance to assess his bizarre behavior here today.”
“What’s to assess?” Erin said. “It’s clear that his entire investigation is tainted and his testimony has been full of lies from the beginning. So while they’re assessing things, our client continues to sit in jail based largely on the word of a man who did everything but pull a gun on us all.”
“I’m inclined to agree,” the judge said.
“At least, let us find him, Judge,” Gill said.
“I’ll give you till the middle of next week,” the judge said. “I’ll be out of town till next Wednesday. If Deputy Walsh has not been produced by then and brought in here as a prisoner, unarmed, I will suppress his entire testimony.”
“Thank you, Your Honor.”
The judge got up and went into his chambers.
Gill cleared his throat. “I think we might be willing to look at a lesser charge. What would you say to man one?”
“She killed him in the heat of an argument,” Miss Bailey said.
“Whoever killed him might’ve done that,” Parley said in a soft, corrective tone.
Whoever it was had killed him, then shot him again for good measure. Miss Bailey was right about one thing: that was indeed hot blood at work. Erin smiled, gracious now, and said, “Of course we’re obligated to take your offer to our client. But there’s no way I could advise her to accept such a thing.”
Of course they knew that too. No one asked what the defense would suggest, but at some point Erin, in her softest voice, told them anyway: “C’mon, guys. How about dropping these charges and letting her get back to her children?”
40
We headed toward the Christmas season on a high note. Lennie had disappeared. The Wednesday deadline came and went; the judge threw out all of Lennie’s testimony, and there was a mood of celebration at lunch that day. “Essentially this leaves them with no case,” Erin said.
She hoped that afternoon for word from the district attorney that the charges were being dropped, but it didn’t come. “It’s starting to look like they intend to string us along till the fat lady sings,” she said for my ears only. “I still think they’ve got to dismiss, but until they do I’ve got to prepare for trial.” In mid-December Miss Bailey was conspicuously everywhere. She personally conducted all the interviews yet again in her rugged determination to salvage their case. We saw her in the stores and hustling across the street from the saloon where Bobby Marshall occasionally drank and bought the boys a beer. I ran into Hugh Gilstrap downtown and learned that she had been out to see him twice that week. But the case was as cold as the high mountain passes, and with every passing day it got colder.
Erin spent long hours alone, reading case law and making notes, and at night she and Parley went over and over the people’s case. At least once a day she went to the jail and visited with her client for an hour or more. “Mostly we go over the same stuff,” she told me. “Occasionally she remembers something new, but never very much and nothing of any value.” I asked if they had ever been able to talk about their old days, and Erin said yes, they had finally broken through that ice. “So how are you with her now?” I asked, but she shrugged and said, “I still don’t know. I’m still uneasy. She’s eager and I’m distant, and I guess that’s how it’s going to be, at least for a while.” But I could see that she wanted something, some final answer to an enigma that had been on her mind for more than ten years.
I passed my time covering the same ground Miss Bailey was raking over: I talked to people, I went over the scene, I combed through the town and called Rosemary in Social Services and wandered in the hills above Laura Marshall’s house. I made out-of-state phone checks daily, trying to pin down where the Preacher and the Keeler boys might have run. I called booksellers cold: dealers in Arkansas and other places where Kevin Simms, also known as Earl Chaplin, had been known to live, and in Oklahoma, which the Keelers had once mentioned was their home base. I figured they had gone to ground. The Preacher would open a bookstore somewhere well off the beaten track; he’d sell off what stock he had and he’d dream of bigger things. Maybe somewhere, someday, he’d try another scam.
Near the end of the week the answer popped up from an ABAA bookseller, some man I had never seen or heard of in far-flung Texas. The elusive Kevin Simms had come into his bookstore yesterday, asking questions about the walk-in traffic in that part of town. “He says his name’s William Carroll. He’s looking at a vacant store about a block away,” the fellow said. “He talks like he’s already made up his mind.” I thanked him and left him with a warning: “Don’t buy any of his signed stuff, no matter how cheap he makes it. And please, whatever you do, don’t tell him we had this conversation. He may be a witness in a murder investigation.”
I reported this to Erin and she made notes, taking down the fellow’s name, address, and phone number. The way the case looked now, Kevin Simms and the whole issue of signed books was irrelevant. But she had a subpoena prepared for Earl Chaplin, aka Kevin Simms or William Carroll, perhaps doing business in Huntsville, Texas. She wasn’t sure yet whether or how to use this. “We’ll have to spring it on him fast to keep him from taking off again, and we’ll need grounds for his arrest if we want to assure his appearance. And those two buffoons who worked for him: God knows where they are now.”
If they weren’t with him in Texas, I had their addresses in Oklahoma and the plate number for that truck. I had found the name of their insurance company—there was no claim on file as of last week. “I can’t find any evidence that they actually towed the truck in—I think they may have just left it up there, in which case it’ll sit there at least till the road opens again in the spring, and maybe forever.”
“If we can keep it simple, we’ll be better off,” Erin said. “They’ve got to prove she did it and we’ve got to counter whatever evidence they put on. Her confession is their big enchilada. That’s it in a nutshell, and Lennie’s the unshakable millstone around their necks. If they can’t find him and they can’t get past that, what do they do?”
They asked for a continuance, a move Erin vigorously opposed. There was a hearing in the judge’s chambers and His Honor came down with unexpected grit on our side. The woman had been sitting in jail, for God’s sake, separated from her children since October. Fish or cut bait.
They
dropped the charges a week before Christmas.
Erin’s law firm had given her a long leash and she wasn’t expected back in the office till mid-February. “You can go on back to Denver if you want to,” she told me. “I know you’ve been itching to get away from here and I don’t blame you. But I think I’ll stay around for a few days.”
Laura had asked her to, she said: “There are some things we need to tidy up, a bunch of legal odds and ends and money matters. She’s only now beginning to realize how much this thing may wind up costing her.”
And there was still the old stuff between them, all the things that Erin had avoided and now needed to face. “I didn’t just come out here to get her off, I’ve always known that, even when I wouldn’t say so. It’s hard for me to make even you understand why she was so important to me in those old days. Have you ever had a friend like that?…She’s just never been out of my mind. I believe there’s an answer to us, somewhere in that head and heart of hers, and now I want to find out what that is, for my own peace of mind.”
Sure, I understood that. “I’ll stick around too, if it’s all the same to you; give you something to warm your feet on at night. And my store’s doing fine; Millie says I should take off more often. Denver’ll still be there when we get back.”
By Christmas week the streams had frozen over and the kids were out skating, building snowmen and ice forts. At one house south of town, a row of tiny igloos was going up on each side of a long driveway. The snow that year was just short of sensational. There hadn’t been much recorded in Denver so far, but here in the mountains, and particularly in Paradise, there were drifts as high as a car, a wonderland for kids and even for old duffers who appreciated a good snowball fight. Back-country skiers were flooding into town.
Within a day of her release, Laura rented a house in town for herself and the kids. She planned to have her place recarpeted and remodeled so that maybe they’d be able to go up there again without those constant reminders of what had happened. But when all was said and done, she thought she would sell the place, pay her legal bills, take the kids and move somewhere out of state.
“I think I need to get a new start,” she said more than once after her release. “Paradise just has too much old baggage attached to it.”