by James Yaffe
“And the paperweight definitely killed him?”
“Absolutely. The lab finished with it early this morning.”
“Did it have any fingerprints on it?”
“A couple of smudges—somebody tried to wipe it off and didn’t do a perfect job of it.”
“But good enough so the smudges can’t be identified?”
“A few years ago that might’ve been true,” Wolkowicz said. “But there’s this new technique now for bringing out fingerprints that used to be impossible to identify. There’s a lab in Denver that does that sort of thing, the paperweight is on its way there right now. Not that it matters all that much. In our opinion, our case against your client is strong enough even if it turns out there are no fingerprints.”
He rose suddenly to his feet, grinning more nastily than ever. “I’ve got another appointment. We’ll have to cut this short. I’ll end up the way I began, okay? No bail.”
“Isn’t that up to the judge, George?” Ann said. “Won’t that be decided at the hearing this afternoon? Or doesn’t the district attorney’s office bother with the formality of going to court anymore?”
She flashed him her nastiest grin, and swept out of room 211, with Atwater and me right behind her.
CHAPTER 9
THE NEXT STOP FOR Ann and me was the jail, so that we could have a talk with Mike Russo. Atwater excused himself, though, saying he had a lot of work to do back at the college. He walked away from us quickly, and with great relief, I guessed. He and his three-piece suit felt slightly unclean after an hour of slumming.
Ann and I made our way along the underground corridor, dimly lit and smelling damp and musty, which connects the courthouse with the county jail. There we had to wait for half an hour, and then we were ushered into the crummy little room where prisoners confer with their lawyers. It has a wooden table in the center with two chairs on either side of it, and there’s only one door, a heavy iron door with a small barred window set into it. A uniformed policeman stands outside this window throughout the interview, showing the world that he has a gun in a holster at his hip.
A few minutes later Mike was brought into the room by a guard. He was shaved, his hair was no more unruly than usual, and his clothes weren’t particularly rumpled, but on his face was the look of a man who’d been through the wringer. He was wearing handcuffs. One of the things I’ve never been able to get used to is people wearing handcuffs.
The guard took Mike’s off him and left the room. Mike stared down at his wrists, as if he was seeing them for the first time.
Then he gave a quick shake of his head and looked up at me. “Dave—I don’t know how to thank you. I asked for you, but I couldn’t be sure—” He turned to Ann. “It’s good of you to come, Mrs. Swenson.”
Ann gave one of her grunts. “Don’t thank me, it’s my job. When a prisoner wants the public defender, all he has to do is ask.”
“Does that mean—you will take my case?”
“I don’t have any choice in the matter, unless my caseload is too heavy at the time you ask me. Then I can dig up another lawyer for you, and the court’ll appoint him. But my caseload is light enough just now. You don’t get all that many major crimes in this cold weather. The second-story men and the muggers are mostly down in Florida working on their suntans.”
“Well, I’m grateful, I want you to know.”
“Fine. Now let’s get to work. You sit there.” She motioned Mike to the chair facing hers, across the wooden table, and I sat off to the side.
“Before I ask you any questions,” Ann said, “one thing has to be clear between us. I’m your attorney. Everything you tell me is confidential. I’m not permitted to repeat it to anybody else, without your permission—that’s the law. And that goes for Dave, too, as my representative. So what that means is, you can tell me the truth.”
“Of course I’ll tell you the truth.”
“Why of course? Most of my clients lie to me, one time or another. Even if they’re not guilty, they get the crazy idea it’ll be better for them if they lie to me. It is a crazy idea, that’s what I want you to understand. Lying to your lawyer is the best way to get your balls turned into hamburger, you follow me?”
Mike was getting a little pale. Looking scared, which was exactly the state of mind Ann wanted him in. “I won’t—I’ll try not to lie to you,” he said.
“Good. Now I’ll ask you some questions.” Ann leaned forward in her chair and fixed a steady gaze on him. “Did you kill him?”
Mike’s words came out softly, while he looked down at his lap. “No, I didn’t do it.”
“Who are you saying that to?”
“Why, I’m saying it to you—”
“Then look at me when you talk to me. Are you afraid to look me in the face?”
“No, I’m not!” Mike’s voice flashed with anger as he lifted his eyes and met Ann’s gaze. “I didn’t kill anybody—is that clear enough?”
Ann leaned back, poker-faced. “Clear enough. Now tell me everything you did last night, from the time you got home from work to the time you finally showed up at Marcus Van Horn’s party.”
“Well, my last class was over around three, and I drove home—no, wait a minute, I didn’t drive home, because I didn’t have my car. It blew a tire yesterday morning while I was on my way to school, and I didn’t have a spare, so I had to call the AAA and get them to tow me to the Firestone repair center. And after class, I walked downtown and picked up the car with the new tire on it.”
“Which wheel was it on?”
“The—uh—front left.”
“So once you collected your car, you drove straight home?”
“Right. It was a little before four when I got there.”
“And you live alone? You’re not married?”
“Not yet, thank God.”
“All right, you’re in the house. Then what?”
“I worked for an hour or so, correcting student papers. That’s always pretty depressing, so around five I put some music on the stereo and started fixing my dinner. That’s a little early for me, but I was supposed to meet Dave at Marcus Van Horn’s house at seven-thirty—”
“What music did you put on the stereo?”
“Let me see—Bartok. The Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. It’s kind of loud and dissonant.”
“Do you think any of your neighbors heard it?”
“I doubt it. I like it to blast out at me, and the neighbors used to complain, but since then I’ve been shutting the doors and windows whenever I turn on the stereo. They haven’t complained lately, so I assume that’s been doing the trick.”
“While the music was on you fixed your dinner?”
“That’s right. You want to know what I had? Spaghetti and meat sauce, courtesy of Chef Boyardee. Followed by mint-chip ice cream. The whole thing washed down with a bottle of beer. Coors Light, if that’ll help you any. And after dinner I went to sleep.”
“That was around what time?”
“Six thirty-five on the dot. I looked at the clock, because I set the alarm for seven. I don’t live too far from Van Horn’s house, takes me ten minutes to get there, but I had to put on my good suit before I left. Our chairman is always saying how informal his parties are, everybody should relax and let their hair down. But the fact is, if you show up without a jacket and a tie he gives you a very unfriendly look.”
“So you never expected to get more than twenty-five minutes’ sleep?”
“That’s right.”
“Doesn’t seem worth the bother of lying down, not to mention taking the chance of oversleeping.”
“I know that. To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand what came over me. I wasn’t even particularly tired when I got home yesterday. But I was just finishing dinner when this sudden drowsiness hit me. My head was whirling, and I could barely keep my eyes open. I told myself I couldn’t show up at Van Horn’s and fall asleep in his living room, so I decided to take a quick nap.
“The next thing I knew it was after eight-thirty. My alarm was still ringing, it must’ve been ringing since seven, that’s what finally woke me up. I had one hell of a headache, but I rushed like hell to get some clothes on and put my hair in more or less reasonable shape, and I drove like a maniac. I got to Marcus’ house a little after nine—and a few minutes later the law showed up.”
“They didn’t arrest you then, though.”
“They asked me a lot of questions, and around eleven-thirty or so they let me go. It never occurred to me they weren’t satisfied—it never occurred to me that anybody could think—Well, they were on my doorstep bright and early this morning, and now you know as much as I do.”
He kept his eyes anxiously on Ann’s face. As usual, though, there was nothing anybody could read there. The Great Deadpan, that was Ann Swenson when she was talking to a witness, and a lot of the time when she wasn’t.
“Okay,” Ann went on, “you know there’s evidence your car was parked near Bellamy’s house last night—and after you got your new tire?”
“Yes, the assistant DA’s been asking me about that all morning. I just can’t understand how my car got out to Stu Bellamy’s neighborhood. I didn’t drive out there yesterday, before or after I got my new tire.”
“Could somebody else have driven your car out to Bellamy’s house, maybe during that hour and a half you were sleeping?”
“I’ve wondered about that. But I’m damned if I can see how. There’s only the one set of keys. Obviously I had them with me when I drove home yesterday afternoon, and I had them with me later when I drove to Van Horn’s house.”
“Have you ever lost them?”
“No, I can’t—Wait a second, here’s a funny thing. A couple of days ago I was having lunch at the college cafeteria when I happened to notice my key ring was missing. It has all my keys on it—to the house, to my office, and the car keys. I didn’t have any idea where I might’ve left it—I’d been in two different classrooms that morning, and had a conference with my chairman in his office, and dropped in to see a couple of my colleagues. But when I got back to my office after lunch, there was the key ring, sitting right on my desk. I didn’t remember taking it out while I was in there earlier, but that must’ve been what I did.”
“Tell me some more about your dinner,” Ann said. “How did the food taste to you?”
“Same as usual. I didn’t notice anything—”
“Was there anything you ate last night that you’re always in the habit of eating? Some favorite food that everybody knows you like?”
“Well, I guess everybody knows how crazy I am about mint-chip ice cream. It’s kind of a joke, the way I always order it when I go out. Come to think of it, there’s another funny thing.”
“What?”
“I didn’t even realize, when I started fixing my dinner last night, that I had any mint-chip ice cream. I thought I’d run out of it, and nothing was left but chocolate and strawberry. Only, when I looked in the icebox, it turned out to be just the opposite. There was no chocolate or strawberry, nothing there but this carton of mint chip.”
“A new unopened carton?”
“No, it was opened, about half full.”
“Do you still have that carton in your refrigerator?”
“Well, no. Actually I ate all of it—there wasn’t really that much—so I threw the carton away.”
Ann sighed. “I don’t suppose you know of anybody who might confirm your story about last night? Nobody called you on the phone while you were in your house? Nobody came to the door?”
“If anybody came to the door, I didn’t open it for them. I was dead to the world. And I’ve got one of those phones where you can turn the noise level down to practically nothing. I did that when I started my nap.”
“What about your car? At nine o’clock, when you drove it from your house to Van Horn’s, did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”
“It drove the same as usual. I always have a little trouble getting it started, it’s kind of old—”
“It’s fifteen miles or so from your house to Blackhawk Road. Did you notice if your mileage had gone up thirty miles from when you drove home yesterday afternoon? Or if there was less gas in the tank than you would’ve expected?”
“I never pay attention to things like that. I’m sorry, I’m just not the kind of person who treats his car as if it were his baby.”
“You know Bellamy was on the phone, talking to people at Van Horn’s party, when he got killed?”
“Yes, I’ve heard.”
“You were there, I understand, when Bellamy and Samantha Fletcher had the conversation that led to that phone call?”
“Sure, the great Richard Wright controversy. It was last week sometime. Stu and Samantha and I were through with our office hours, we were in the lounge having a cup of coffee. And the usual argument along with it.”
“What’s the usual argument?”
“Oh, Samantha saying that in every society and every period of history men have been afraid to accept women as equals. And Stu saying that, even if there’s been prejudice and discrimination in most if not all societies, there’s always been a reaction against it, too. The really great writers and philosophers and so on have always championed human rights and equality of the sexes.
“Well, the upshot of it this time was, Samantha challenged Stu to mention a single male writer who wasn’t a sexist. And Stu, not being the type to sit still for a direct challenge, came up with Richard Wright—he’s a black writer who wrote in the forties and fifties. Stu said there were passages in Wright’s autobiography Black Boy, and particularly the very last paragraph, that completely contradicted her wholesale condemnation of male writers. Samantha told him to show us that paragraph, and she guaranteed that what it would really prove was that Wright’s concern was for black men, that he was fundamentally indifferent to the rights of black women.
“So Stu said he’d dig up the paragraph when he got home—he knows, knew, more about American black writers than anybody else on the faculty, including any of the blacks. But neither of us got a call from Stu that night, so I figured we wouldn’t be hearing any more on the subject.”
“Why did you think so?”
“I figured he’d looked up the paragraph in Black Boy and found out Samantha was right about it, so he was going to let it drop. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t have been more surprised when I heard he phoned Samantha at that party to read her the passage. I mean, it proved that she was right and he was wrong, and Stu just wasn’t the type who enjoys admitting when he’s wrong.”
Ann nodded and then, without raising her voice or changing her expression or giving any indication that she was about to pounce on him like a tiger out of the underbrush, she said, “What did you mean by what you told Dave at the poetry reading the night before last—that you were on the verge of committing a murder?”
Mike darted me a look, kind of reproachful. I met it with no expression at all.
He turned back to Ann. “That was a damn fool thing to say, I know it. I was out of my mind—I’d just heard about this tenure business—”
“What about this tenure business?” Ann said. “You wanted tenure, and you knew you’d get it if Bellamy was out of the way. Didn’t that make you feel like killing him?”
Mike couldn’t have been paler. But he didn’t lower his eyes again. He kept them on Ann’s face. “I’m not supposed to lie to my lawyer? All right, I’ll tell you exactly how I felt. Marcus Van Horn called me into his office on Tuesday afternoon, that was the day of the poetry reading, and broke the news to me, and—God, I hate that office of his!”
“Why so?”
“You’ve never been in it, I suppose. Nobody knows how many years it’s been since he saw the top of his desk. It’s a foot thick with old memos which he’s probably never read, student papers which he might someday get around to correcting, manuscripts, newspaper clippings, a tape-recording machine with tapes scattered all around it, open
books, a torn poster from the Old Vic, 1957. Somewhere under all that debris is his office telephone, but half the time, when it rings, he can’t find it in time to answer. And most of this junk is overflowing onto the floor, you can’t move six inches without tripping over something. Looks like a bombed city—very appropriate place for a death sentence!”
“If you lost your job at the college,” Ann said, “would it really be a death sentence for you?”
Mike managed to keep his voice steady. “Suppose I give you a little bit of autobiography—is that all right? I was born in the east Bronx. Do you know that section at all? You must know it, Dave, you’re from New York. Mostly Italians in those days, the blacks and Puerto Ricans have driven them out in the last few years. When my father died I was in junior high school, and he didn’t have much to leave to my mother and me. Nothing but the store—he sold and repaired phonographs and TV sets—but we couldn’t get rid of it because the bills and debts were more than it was worth. So Mom took it over, and kept it going, God knows how.”
“You couldn’t give her much help?”
“I worked in the store on weekends and in the summer, but never on school days. She wouldn’t let me. Nothing was going to interfere with school. She knew how things worked in America, how you don’t get ahead unless you’ve had an education. She rode herd on me every night, making me do my homework and get good grades. She didn’t let me get distracted by girls and parties. I got a full scholarship to Stanford, and later to grad school at Yale, and I never would’ve done it if it wasn’t for her.”
“Did she always want you to become a college professor?”
“When I told her that’s what I wanted to do, she gave me a look, as if her little boy had suddenly gone out of his mind. But I explained what it meant to me, how I wanted to teach the books I loved to people who were young enough so maybe I could make them love those books, too. She saw I was serious about it, and she stood behind me on it, whatever she might think about it herself.”