Dead Center ac-5

by David Rosenfelt

  Coming here is feeling like a major mistake.

  Fortunately, I come in under cover of darkness, since it’s almost nine o’clock when we finally arrive. Findlay is a conventional small town, larger than Center City, with about an eight-square-block town center. The largest building is the Hotel Winters, a stately, six-floor establishment that Richard Davidson mentioned was a prewar building. Based on the look of it, I think he was talking about the Revolutionary War. Tara and I enter, secure in the knowledge that we’re not going to find a casino adjacent to the lobby.

  In fact, we also don’t find many people in the lobby, just a bellman and two guests sitting on high-backed chairs, reading. The front desk is unmanned, and I’m reduced to ringing the small bell on the desk repeatedly to attract attention. Finally, a sleepy man of about seventy comes out from the office, trying to comprehend through the grogginess that there is actually someone up at this hour. Worse yet, that person is seeking his attention.

  Fortunately, Davidson has made the reservation and has me in what the clerk describes as the presidential suite on the top floor. My sense is that it isn’t often occupied, and perhaps has been empty since President Jefferson himself used it.

  I have my key in my hand when the clerk finally realizes that Tara is standing next to me.

  “We don’t usually allow dogs in here,” he says.

  I nod and hand him the key. “That’s fine. Why don’t you just direct me to a hotel that does?”

  He hesitates but doesn’t take the key, not wanting to blow the suite sale. “I suppose it will be all right.”

  “We’ll let Tara be the judge of that,” I say, and we head upstairs to sample the accommodations.

  The room is the kind you’d expect if you drove up to a New England bed-and-breakfast and planned to spend the next day antique shopping. The only problem with that is that it’s on a high floor, and if I were going to spend an entire day antique shopping, I’d be looking to jump out the window.

  Everything is so old that the lobby seems modern by comparison. There’s a canopy bed with a mattress so soft that it’s going to take a crane to get me up in the morning. The bathroom fixtures, when initially manufactured, must have ushered in the era of indoor plumbing, and it was probably fifty years after that before someone figured out that the hot and cold water can come out of the same sink faucet.

  A note has been left in the room by Davidson, informing me that he has set up a meeting at nine tomorrow morning with Calvin Marshall, Jeremy’s current lawyer. Davidson will be there as well, but he will understand if I don’t want him to sit in.

  I’m too exhausted right now to know what I want. I give Tara a biscuit and start to climb into bed. I briefly debate whether I should bring a cell phone with me, since there’s a possibility I’ll sink so far into the mattress that I’ll have to call 911 to get out.

  “Tara,” I say, “why the hell did we decide to come here?”

  Tara’s look tells me in no uncertain terms that she did not participate in this particular decision, but she’s too diplomatic to come right out and say it.

  I wake up at seven after a fairly decent sleep, and start to get dressed to take Tara out for a quick walk before showering. While getting dressed, I attempt to turn on the Today show, an act made much more difficult by the fact that there is no television in the room.

  No television! It’s possible I’m in still another Twilight Zone episode, and this time I’ve woken up in a prison camp or maybe back in colonial times. Either way, I can do without food, sleep, or sex (I’ve proven that), but not without television.

  On the way out with Tara, I stop at the front desk and report that someone has stolen the television from my room. “Oh, no, sir,” he says, “not all of the rooms have televisions. Some of our guests prefer it that way.”

  “What planet are those guests from?”

  “Sir?” he asks.

  I need to stop being so obnoxious; it’s my own fault that I’m here. “Look, I’m going to need a television. Can you take one from another room? Or if you want, you can move me into a room that already has one. Maybe the vice president’s suite… or even the secretary of state’s.”

  He promises to take care of the problem, and Tara and I go out for a brisk walk. The temperature is in the low forties, and it actually feels invigorating. We find a small place for coffee; I would get Tara a bagel, but there’s as much chance that they sell aardvark smoothies as bagels. She settles for a couple of rolls, and I have a terrific blueberry muffin.

  I take Tara back to the hotel, shower, and dress. I feel guilty about leaving her in this room all day, and if I stay here long, I’m going to have to make other arrangements for her. For now I give her a couple of extra biscuits as a peace offering, and she seems content to crawl onto a pillow and go to sleep.

  It’s a three-block walk to Calvin Marshall’s office, which in Findlay means it’s on the other side of town. I walk at a brisk pace, and even in this small town it’s amazing I’m not hit by a car, since I focus all my attention on watching for any sign of Laurie. My hope is that I see her, or don’t see her, I’m not sure which.

  There is a small sign indicating that the office of Calvin Marshall, Attorney-at-Law, is above a travel agency. Waiting for me at the entrance is Richard Davidson, and the look of relief on his face when he sees me is palpable. Obviously, he was afraid that I would change my mind and not come to Findlay.

  “Mr. Carpenter… thanks so much for coming.”

  “Andy,” I correct him.

  He shakes my hand. “Andy. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing.”

  I take a few moments to remind him that all I’m doing is checking things out, that I haven’t agreed to become involved in the case. He nods vigorously that he understands that, but I’m not sure that he does. Then he asks me if I want him in the meeting with Calvin Marshall.

  “Actually, I don’t,” I say. “I think it’s better just the two of us for now.”

  Again he nods vigorously, showing his full understanding. I could tell him the Vancouver Canucks were going to play the Yankees in the World Series, and his nod would be just as vigorous. He wants me on his side.

  I head up the stairs to Calvin Marshall’s office. It’s two flights, and I notice with some annoyance that I’m breathing heavily when I get to the top. Apparently, working the remote control is not putting me in the kind of shape I’d like to be in.

  The door is open, but I don’t see anyone in the cubbyhole that qualifies as a reception area, so I knock.

  “Come on in, hotshot!” says the voice in more of a drawl than a yell.

  Since I’m the only hotshot in the doorway, I enter and walk into the office. I turn a corner and see a person I presume to be Calvin sitting on a chair, feet up on another chair, scaling baseball cards into a wastebasket. This could well be my kind of guy.

  “Help yourself to some coffee,” he says without looking up.

  I look to the side and see a pot of coffee, about a third full. I pour a cup, which takes a while because it’s so thick. “You sure this isn’t kerosene?” I say.

  “It ain’t Starbucks fancy, but it drinks good going down,” he says. “I’d have my secretary make a fresh pot, but she quit in July.”

  I walk over to him, coffee in my left hand, my right extended in an offered shake. “Andy Carpenter, visiting hotshot.”

  “Calvin Marshall, grizzled, cantankerous small-town attorney” is his response as we shake hands. He’s probably in his late fifties, gray-haired but not particularly grizzled. At least that’s not what I notice; what I notice is that he’s missing his left leg.

  Unfortunately, I do more than notice the missing leg; I stare at where it would be if it weren’t missing. He catches me on it. “I used to climb mountains for fun,” he says. “I got trapped in a landslide… a boulder pinned me down. Had to cut my own leg off to get free.” He shakes his head at the memory. “Sort of took the fun out of mountain climbing.”
>
  “What an awful story,” I say.

  He nods. “And it’s also bullshit. I had bone cancer when I was twelve years old.”

  I can’t help but laugh out loud at the blatant lie.

  “You think bone cancer is funny?” he asks.

  “I think it’s funny that for no reason you told me a totally bullshit story thirty seconds after we met,” I say. “Why exactly did you do that?”

  “It’s the way I test new people,” he says.

  “And did I pass?”

  “I don’t know… I haven’t graded it yet.”

  I tell him that I’m here to talk about the Jeremy Davidson case, but Richard has already briefed him fully about my purpose. He doesn’t quite understand it. “You live in civilization, you like to win cases, yet you travel to the middle of nowhere to get involved in a sure loser. Now, why is that?”

  “Richard and his wife adopted Jeremy when he was an infant. I knew his real parents very well. They died in a plane crash. I was… I am… Jeremy’s godfather.”

  He looks at me strangely. “Bullshit story?” he asks.

  I smile. “One hundred percent. Not bad, huh?”

  He laughs. “Not bad at all.”

  Having established a relationship supported by a sea of bullshit, we get down to business. Calvin really does see the case as an almost sure loser. “I’m not saying he did it, but the evidence is sure saying it.”

  “What’s your gut?” I ask.

  “My gut doesn’t trust anything that comes out of Center City,” he says. “Not even two murder victims.”

  “I stopped there on my way in.”

  “Friendly place, huh?” he asks.

  “Everybody was in some kind of meeting, except a cop. He questioned me like I was Osama bin Laden.”

  He nods; what I am saying is no surprise. “It wasn’t a meeting; it was a religious service.”

  I can’t conceal my surprise. “What religion is that?”

  “They call themselves Centurions.”

  “And the town is named Center City?” I’m seeing a pattern here. “Is the town named after the religion, or the religion named after the town?”

  He shrugs. “Sort of one and the same. They have some kind of longitude/latitude formula which shows that the piece of ground the town is on is the spiritual center of the universe, and everything else comes off it like spokes on the wheel. That wheel runs their lives, and has been for over a hundred years.”

  I don’t know what he’s talking about when he says that the wheel runs their lives, but now is not the time to analyze their religion. “How does all this relate to the murders?” I ask.

  He shrugs again. “Probably doesn’t. But the pressure on that girl not to marry outside the religion would have been overwhelming. People born in that town stay in that town, and nobody from outside moves in. That’s just the way it is.”

  We talk some more about the case, but the local prosecutor has not yet handed over much material in discovery, so Calvin doesn’t know that much about it yet. He does know Jeremy Davidson, though, and has known his family for years, and he doesn’t believe him to be a brutal murderer. “It doesn’t compute,” he says. “These girls got stabbed maybe ten times each. I just don’t think this kid is capable of that, no matter how pissed off he might have been.”

  His feelings pretty much mirror Laurie’s, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that people are not always what they seem and that you find murderers in the strangest places, shapes, and sizes.

  The arraignment is going to be today at eleven-thirty, and Calvin invites me to sit in on it. Afterward I’ll be able to meet Jeremy and hear his side of it. “You think you’re going to jump in?” Calvin asks, referring to my taking on the defense.

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “You’re going to have to decide soon. This thing is going to move quickly.”

  I nod. “I know. If I do come in, will you stay on as second chair? I’m obviously going to need local help.”

  “Whoever handles this is going to need all kinds of help,” he says. “Yeah… why not? Count me in.”

  • • • • •

  COURTROOMS ARE THE nation’s common denominator. They have the same feel wherever you go. North or South, rural or urban, it doesn’t matter. When you walk into a courtroom, you feel like something important is going to happen. It’s the one place where society seems to have a right to take itself seriously.

  Not that they all look alike. This particular courtroom could be Findlay’s tribute to To Kill a Mockingbird. My guess is that it looks exactly the same as it did fifty years ago, with the notable exception being the laptop computer sitting atop the judge’s bench.

  Calvin is sitting at the defense table when I arrive, but he is not the focus of my attention. George Bush, Angelina Jolie, and Shaquille O’Neal could be dancing a naked hoedown on the table and I would barely notice, since in the far corner of the room, talking with three other people, is Laurie. She looks the same as always, which is disappointing. I had hoped she would have gained thirty pounds and had her face break out in pimples since I saw her on TV.

  She doesn’t see me, so I pretend I don’t see her. I walk down toward Calvin, shake his hand, and try to get myself under control. He can tell something is going on. “You nervous?” he asks with some surprise.

  I fake a laugh. “Yeah. I’ve never been in a courtroom before.”

  He points toward the prosecution table. “That’s where the bad guys sit.”

  I don’t want to look in Laurie’s direction, so I might as well make conversation. “Which one is the prosecutor?”

  “Lester Chapman. He’s not here yet, the prick.”

  “Let me guess… you don’t like him,” I say.

  “He’s an okay lawyer, but he’s covered with about ten layers of bullcrap. He’s maybe five feet tall… without the bullcrap he’d be four foot three.” Calvin says this loud enough so that a woman at the prosecution table can clearly hear him, though she pretends not to.

  He notices this as well, which prompts him to up the ante and the volume. He points to the woman. “That’s his assistant, Lila Mayberry. Word is that Lester and Lila are making sticky sheets. Course, I myself don’t believe it. I mean, look at her. Lila’s tall… she could eat watermelons off Lester’s head.”

  At that moment a man who could only be Lester enters and walks to the prosecution table. Calvin was right: Lester is no more than five feet tall. “See what I mean?” Calvin says. “He spends his life looking up at the world.”

  Lila takes Lester’s arm and talks softly to him, occasionally glancing at Calvin as she does so. My guess is, she is updating him on Calvin’s insulting monologue.

  “Hello, Andy.”

  I look up knowing exactly who I am going to see: Laurie. She has a smile on her face and her hand extended. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “Hi,” I say, my crackling wit coming to the fore. I shake her hand, wishing mine weren’t already shaking on its own. “I just arrived last night.”

  “Hello, Calvin,” she says, and he returns the hello.

  “All rise,” says the bailiff, and Laurie quickly retreats from the table, lightly touching my arm as she does so. Calvin watches her go and then whispers to me, “I got a feeling there’s more going on here than meets the eye. You want to let me in on it?”

  “No.”

  Calvin is not the type to take “no” for an answer. “You’re here two days and you got something going on?” he asks. “I’ve been here since the Eisenhower administration and I can’t get arrested.”

  “Calvin…” is my feeble attempt to get him to drop it.

  He shakes his head in probably mock disgust. “You two-legged people really have it made.”

  The bailiff, not privy to Calvin’s monologue, continues. “Findlay County Court is now in session, the Honorable Matthew Morrison presiding.”

  Judge Morrison comes striding into the room and takes his sea
t at the bench. He is maybe sixty years old, a large imposing man who packs a good two hundred thirty pounds onto his six-foot-two-or three-inch frame. He could stand to lose ten or fifteen pounds, but not much more than that.

  He instructs the bailiff to bring in the defendant, and moments later Jeremy Davidson is brought into the room and sits on Calvin’s left, while I’m on Calvin’s right. Jeremy is slightly shorter and thinner than his father, hardly the fearsome presence that one would think everyone is here to deal with. Calvin whispers an introduction, and Jeremy and I shake hands. His handshake is weak, and he is clearly petrified. It’s an appropriate feeling whether he is guilty or innocent; life as he knows it is over.

  My initial reaction to Jeremy’s demeanor is to want to help him, though that reaction is more emotional than logical. Fear and worry in a defendant are not a sign of innocence; if he were guilty, he’d have just as much or even more reason to be afraid.

  Judge Morrison then peers down at the assembled lawyers. When he looks at our table, he says, “I do believe there’s a face I don’t recognize.”

  Calvin stands. “Andrew Carpenter, Your Honor. At this point he is a consultant to the defense.”

  The judge nods, unimpressed. He must not watch a lot of cable TV. He then turns to Lester. “Talk to me,” he says, and Lester launches into a summation of the dire situation in which Jeremy Davidson finds himself.

  Like courtrooms, arraignments are consistent everywhere. Nothing of real consequence ever happens, and no real news is made. Calvin does all the proper things: He has Jeremy plead not guilty and then asks for bail. The judge denies the request without a second thought, or even a first one. Bail in cases like this simply does not happen.

  Judge Morrison asks Calvin if he plans to waive Jeremy’s right to a preliminary hearing, and Calvin says that he does not. That hearing will be to determine if the state has probable cause to try Jeremy for the murders. It is a very low threshold of proof for the prosecutor, and he will prevail, but it is still a smart move for Calvin to demand it. In the process he, or we if I take the case, will be able to get prosecution witnesses on the record, which will be helpful in cross-examination at the actual trial.