Trick Question

by Tony Dunbar

  “I love you, Baxter.” It was a complaint, or a question.

  He grabbed her jaw in his hand so that her lips were squeezed together and her ears hurt. “So, you should do what I tell you to do,” he said fiercely.

  But why should I? she screamed inside.

  “Ow!” she protested.

  CHAPTER 24

  “You don’t have any coffee, do you?” Flowers asked Tubby.

  “I just put a pot on,” Cherrylynn said. “It’ll be done in a minute.”

  The morning was gray, and it seemed even grayer from the forty-third floor, where you could see the river, the lake, and the sky all competing for dreariness.

  Tubby was still groggy from dealing with Central Lockup, springing O’Rourke from the drunk tank, which had taken until the wee hours, and Flowers looked discouraged. Only Cherrylynn seemed wide awake and full of pep.

  “Now, where were we, Mr. Flowers?” Tubby asked.

  “I spent too much time in Cletus’s neighborhood yesterday. I found absolutely nobody who would really claim to know the man – certainly no one who would testify as to his good works and moral rectitude. One lady said he was good about picking up his trash cans after the garbage men came. I didn’t think you could use that. I also failed to find someone who could verify his whereabouts on the Friday of the murder.”

  “We know he went to work,” Tubby said.

  “Yeah, but I thought maybe we could show what he did before and after his shift – like maybe he didn’t act like a man who had just murdered someone and stuffed him in a freezer. But no one could, or would, tell me anything.”

  “It’s a real problem,” Tubby said, “that Cletus has no recollection at all about what he did on the Friday of the murder. He just says he went to his job, but he can’t remember any details, or even what else he did that day. I suppose it’s not so strange. It all happened four months ago.”

  “People are always skeptical when the accused has no alibi,” Flowers commented.

  “Hell, I’m skeptical, and I’m his lawyer. But I guess it’s not surprising. How many of us recall what we did last week?”

  Cherrylynn and Flowers swapped glances.

  “I usually do, Mr. Dubonnet,” she said.

  Flowers just shrugged.

  “Well anyway, where do we go from here? Who’s got an idea?”

  “I don’t have any ideas, boss,” Cherrylynn said, “but Magenta Reilly told me that Dr. Valentine’s wife has been going out with Bennett for months. She didn’t keep it a secret from him, but she sure did from everyone else because she wanted alimony if he sued her for a divorce. She told him she didn’t care if he left, so long as he paid her a lot every month for support. She claimed she put him through medical school and he owed her. She was real abusive, and even would attack him physically, I mean.”

  Tubby couldn’t get over his surprise. “You got all this from the medical student you had coffee with?” he asked.

  “Yes sir,” she said proudly. “And Dr. Valentine also told Magenta he was going to leave his wife, just as soon as he finished some very important project. He said he had to concentrate on his work to get it done, but after that the marriage was all over. He was going out the door.”

  “Valentine confided all this to Magenta?”

  “Yes sir. Valentine even told Magenta he loved her. She’s pretty broken up.”

  Tubby kept staring at his secretary, but his mind was elsewhere.

  Cherrylynn and Flowers looked at each other, and around the office, and at their hands.

  “Do we know where Bennett and Mrs. Valentine were on Friday when Valentine was killed?” he finally asked.

  “Bennett says he worked at his clinic until five-thirty, then went home and watched TV. Ruby Valentine says she finished her shift at the hospital at seven o’clock, then she also went home and watched TV. The police verified that both of them were at their jobs, like they said. Since the coroner couldn’t be very specific about the time of death, due to the frozen nature of the body, I couldn’t think of any more probing questions to ask.”

  “In your opinion, could either of them have gotten into Moskowitz lab without being seen?”

  “Going by my own experience, Tubby, you can get into that joint just about anytime without being noticed. You may be seen, but if you dress like a doctor or a nurse, and don’t ask directions, nobody is likely to remember you.”

  “I agree,” Tubby said. “I don’t think they even remembered me.” He sounded offended. “So,” he concluded, “we have nowhere to go.”

  “There’s the missing medical research Valentine was working on,” Flowers suggested.

  “Right,” Tubby said. “Dr. Tessier has offered to bone up on Valentine’s past writings. Maybe that will point us somewhere. She especially asked that you drop off the copies personally.”

  “They all axed for me,” Flowers sang.

  “Go to it then,” Tubby said, “and let’s try to get back together early afternoon. I’m going to see Cletus now.”

  “How’s Mr. O’Rourke?” Cherrylynn asked.

  “My co-counsel is probably waking up now with a monster hangover. It took me till after three o’clock this morning to get him out of jail, and he looked pretty bad. I took him home. He said he would come here this afternoon, but who knows.”

  “What should I do with him if he shows up?” Cherrylynn asked.

  “Just put him in the conference room and ask him to read the file. Maybe he can figure something out.”

  Nobody would venture an opinion on that.

  “He used to be a good lawyer,” Tubby said. “Really.”

  “You want me to talk to Denise DiMaggio about how she knows Dr. Swincter?” Flowers asked quietly.

  Tubby sighed. “No,” he said. “I guess I’ll try to see her after I pass the jail.”

  “It ain’t gonna be long now,” Cletus said, “until they find me guilty and fry me.”

  “It’s lethal injection now, Cletus – and you’re a long way from that. You are smart to face the possibility though. You have an option to consider too. You could plead guilty. I believe we could make a deal for life without parole – maybe even forty years straight time.”

  “Screw that. I ain’t killed nobody.”

  “That’s fair, Cletus. I always think it’s bad policy to plead guilty when you’re innocent. This is a tough one to handicap, though. Being conservative, I’d say that the odds are sixty to forty in favor of you getting convicted. And if you’re convicted, I’d say the odds are fifty-fifty in favor of you getting the death penalty.”

  “What kind of lawyer I got? A hopeless one?”

  “No. Just straight up with you.” Tubby tried to hold Cletus’s eyes with his own. “You haven’t got an alibi. You had a motive because Valentine wanted to get you fired. You were there the night of the crime. You got caught with the man’s head in your hands. The district attorney will make a very entertaining speech about that.”

  “And what you gonna be doin’? Scratchin’ your head? Watchin’ the bees?”

  Tubby slapped his palm on the cracked Formica. “Are we having some kind of personality conflict? Or are you like this with everybody?”

  “Okay, man, say your piece.”

  Tubby took a deep breath.

  “Is there somebody, like your mother, or a brother or sister, who could speak well of you in the courtroom?”

  “My mother died last year, and I don’t know where my brothers and sisters live. I stay to myself.”

  “How about your patients, the ones you do healings for?”

  “They come to me for cures. I don’t go to them. They respect what I can do, but I wouldn’t have them coming down here to say anything about that in court.”

  “It would help if somebody would speak for you.”

  “They ain’t nobody who will.”

  “Dr. Trina Tessier says she will – all because you helped her when she ran out of gas.”

  “She’s all right,” Cletu
s conceded. “I like her okay. She can testify if she wants to.”

  “Thanks. Have you had any luck summoning up the spirits? Have you had any visions about who might have done this crime?”

  “You can make fun of me, but I got my ideas about it,” Cletus said.

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ll tell ’em when I get on the witness stand tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think you’ll be taking the witness stand, Cletus. If you do, they can ask you all about your prior bust for drugs, not to mention your religious practices. They’ll make it sound like Valentine was part of a ritual sacrifice.”

  “I will tell my side of it,” Cletus said hotly.

  “Give me a hint. What would you say?”

  “I’d talk about the laws of the universe. The order and the balance, and what happens when you violate that order, like when you gives lots of animals diseases and kill them.”

  “Yeah? What happens?”

  “You get punished. That’s what I’m gonna say.”

  Not if I can help it, Tubby thought.

  “So you think Valentine was punished for killing mice? Who did the punishing?”

  “It don’t matter who done it, just that it got done.”

  “You don’t care that they’re blaming you for it?”

  “Sure, I care, but that’s just their system, man. I’m the handiest one to blame.”

  As Tubby walked out through the sliding bars he was thinking that Cletus at least had that part right.

  Denise told Tubby she could meet him after she finished teaching at three o’clock. She suggested the Daily Grind coffee house on Magazine Street. He said okay because it was close to where he lived. He was astonished upon arrival to find chicory coffee on the menu, unheard of in a “gourmet” coffeehouse, and he was enjoying the strong brew when she walked in. She waved at him on her way to the counter.

  “Howya doing?” he said when she brought her mug and saucer to the table. “What’s that you got?”

  “It’s a blueberry scone,” she said. “Want to try it?”

  She passed her plate to him, and he pinched off a warm crumb from the biscuit.

  “It’s not real sweet,” he mentioned.

  “No, not very,” she said.

  So what’s the point? he wondered, but Denise seemed to think it was just right.

  “You never had a scone before?” she asked.

  “Not that I recall,” he said. He did not expect they would ever form a regular part of his diet.

  “You said you wanted to talk to me,” Denise reminded him.

  “Yeah. You told me that you came to me because Monique Alvarez recommended me.”

  “That’s right,” Denise said.

  “It had nothing to do with any of the cases I’m working on?”

  “No,” she said, putting a square white napkin carefully under her cup.

  “Well then, what the heck were you doing meeting Randolph Swincter at a bar the other night?”

  He said it quietly enough, and she did not collapse in shock, but something about his tone or her gasp penetrated the mellow atmosphere of the establishment, and caffeine fanciers at two nearby tables paused in their conversations to see how she would answer.

  “I, uh, went there with a friend of mine,” Denise said, laying her spoon neatly on the napkin. She raised her eyes to Tubby’s as the strains of violins on the sound system got loud enough to drown out whispers. “I didn’t know when I first came to see you that the murder case you told me about was Dr. Valentine’s.”

  “But now you do.”

  “I know, but me going to that bar had nothing to do with your case.”

  “Tell me about it anyway,” he insisted.

  “I used to see Whitney Valentine at bars,” she said. “He used to give, like, these health lectures, on aerobics and stuff, and he talked to us at the gym one time. He was real good-looking and not shy, if you know what I mean.”

  Tubby frowned. “No, what do you mean?”

  “He asked all the girls out. Me, Carmella, the others too. I mean, he seemed to have lots of money, and he liked to party.”

  “Did you party with him?”

  “I went out with him on maybe one date. Honestly, Mr. Dubonnet. But Carmella started going out with him.”

  “And so, what?” Tubby asked.

  Denise lowered her voice so that he had to lean forward to hear her.

  “He gave her drugs, like prescription painkillers. And he gave her stuff that doesn’t show up on the drug scans they make us take.”

  “Do you all use drugs?” Tubby asked in dismay.

  “No,” Denise said, raising her right hand. “I don’t. Carmella is the main one I know who does.”

  “Couldn’t you be kicked out of boxing for hanging around drugs, or protecting people who do?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Well, why did you meet Swincter?”

  “Carmella asked me to. After Valentine got killed, she couldn’t get her stuff anymore. It was okay for a while because she had a bunch stored up. But when she ran out she called up Valentine’s partner to see if she could get some more from him.”

  “How did she know Swincter?”

  “He was always hanging out with Whitney. We all knew him. He was just, like, this guy that Dr. Valentine had with him when we went out at night.”

  Tubby rested his chin on his fist.

  “How did Swincter react to this request for drugs?”

  “Okay. He told Carmella to meet him at the bar. She was afraid to go by herself because Swincter is a little bit creepy, and she got me to go with her. That’s all there was to it.”

  “What happened at the bar?”

  “Nothing. All he wanted to do was hit on us. He wasn’t going to give Carmella anything. I think he was suspicious about something. He made what I considered to be a crude pass. I got mad and left.”

  “That’s it?” Tubby asked.

  “Really,” she said.

  He looked out the window at an attractive young woman herding two girls in pink ballerina outfits past the police station across the street. Mothers were getting younger and younger, he reflected.

  “I can’t stand it when clients lie to me,” he said.

  “I’m not lying,” she protested.

  “It’s not that I have so many clients I can turn away all the ones I don’t personally like. It’s not necessary that I like them all. But they’ve got to tell me the truth. Generally speaking, I don’t care if you’re guilty as hell if you tell me. I’m not wasting my time and my reputation on people who lie to me.”

  “I promise you.” Denise looked like she might cry. “I’m not.”

  Two young women studying Civil Procedure at the next table glowered at Tubby. He glowered back.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “I believe you. I’m just too trusting sometimes, and I don’t want to be taken advantage of.”

  “I’m the same way,” she sniffled. She rubbed her nose with her hand. She had some muscles in those arms. “I just want to be liked. I seem to meet all the wrong people… Why is it so hard?”

  “Eat your scone,” he said. “Tell me what you taught your students today.”

  Denise sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. Then she laughed. “I showed them some mathematical puzzles where you can prove that two and two doesn’t always add up to four.”

  After he said goodbye to Denise, Tubby drove slowly down Magazine Street. He had told Denise he believed her, but it would have been more truthful to say he wanted to believe her. He saw the Open sign on the window of Tee Eva’s Famous Pie Shop and skidded to the curb.

  He tapped on the sliding glass window, trying to look past the newspaper clippings and photos of famous people who liked her pralines and jambalaya to see if anyone was in the dim kitchen.

  The glass slid back, and Tee Eva, gold lame sun hat with a visor on her head and gold-framed eyeglasses on her nose, smiled at him.

  “Hi, darlin�
�,” she said. “You must be hungry.”

  “Have you got your pecan and sweet potato pies today?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “I got sweet potato, pecan, or pecan-and-sweet-potato. Which would you like?”

  “I’ll take one of each,” he said, and watched the slender woman move around her small kitchen collecting his pies and a plastic Time Saver bag to put them in.

  “Have you ever had a scone?” he called through the window.

  “You mean those English tea cakes? Sure I’ve had them.”

  “Really? Where have I been?” Tubby said.

  “They ain’t exactly New Orleans, honey,” she consoled him.

  “Do you like them?” Tubby asked, taking his bag.

  “To me, scones is not a big deal,” she said, and favored him with a sparkling smile.

  “Okay,” Tubby said.

  Tubby reached Monique on the phone.

  “It’s been too long,” he said. “How’s the bar? How’s Lisa?”

  “We’re doing just fine, Mr. Tubby. I want you to come and visit us.”

  “I plan to do that soon, just as quick as things settle down here a bit.”

  “I want to thank you for helping out my friend Denise.”

  “Let me ask you a question about her. Is she all right? I mean, do you trust her?”

  “Denise? Sure. I mean I haven’t known her very long, but…. Why do you ask that?”

  “It’s just that she dated the deceased in a murder case I’m taking to trial. It’s a bad coincidence.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that. I met her when I started going to the gym to work out. She’s been completely straight with me. She’s from Vacherie, and I’m from Alabama, but we had a lot of the same stuff in the past. I think she lacks confidence, is all.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “For some women, it has a lot to do with everything,” Monique said angrily.

  “Sorry,” Tubby retreated. “I mean, what’s it got to do with being honest?”

  “I don’t know, but she had a really screwed-up childhood. I don’t think she had anything like a model home life. And being from the boondocks, she thinks she’s dumb. She doesn’t even realize she’s pretty. She needs lots of encouragement.”