Move to Strike

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  “Therefore, there is no evidence of a burglary or attempted burglary or any other linked felony, Your Honor. The 995 motion should be granted.”

  Flaherty said, “Henry?”

  “If I may, Your Honor.” It was Barbara who stood up and obtained an answering nod from Flaherty.

  Barbara turned almost lazily to look at Nikki. “We now have an admission from the defendant’s counsel that the defendant went to the property on the night of the murder. She acted furtively, she took something, no matter who owned it. She spied on Dr. Sykes. She left prints right outside the room where he was murdered. She hadn’t been invited, that’s for sure. She hadn’t established any right to those gems. Her mother had sold her rights to the decedent, and her aunt had no idea she was there. So how is it that she had the right to take them?

  “It’s a sad thing to see, Your Honor. This defendant has just been sold down the river by her lawyer in a vain attempt to save her own hide.”

  “Just a minute!” Nina said.

  “Siddown!” That was Flaherty.

  Barbara looked at the clock and said, “It’s exactly four-thirty, Your Honor.” She sat down.

  “The Court has heard and considered all the evidence, including the new testimony brought forth in this hearing,” Flaherty said. “The Court finds that there is probable cause to find that the blood sample on the murder weapon is that of the defendant. The Court finds that the testimony of Louise Garibaldi is competent. The defense motions to strike all such testimony are denied. The Court finds that there is probable cause to believe that the defendant went to the Sykes home to commit a felony, and attempted to or did commit a felony. Therefore, the Court finds that the 995 motion is denied. In its entirety.”

  “You can’t find that, Your Honor,” Nina said. “I object to all the findings and conclusions of the Court on grounds that the judge herein is biased and affected by a strong prejudice against the counsel for defendant. The Court should recuse itself. The Court is unable to objectively—”

  “The contempt hearing will be held on Monday morning at eight o’clock,” Flaherty interrupted.

  “Let me finish—”

  “Court is adjourned!”

  “You’re trying to punish me by punishing my client—”

  “Bailiff, arrest her!” Deputy Kimura came out from behind his desk. He liked her, and he didn’t want to do it, but he was about to arrest her.

  Nina showed her palms. “Eight o’clock Monday morning it is.” There was a long, strained moment while everyone waited to see what Flaherty would do.

  She would never know what stopped him. “Court is adjourned,” he said again. She fell back in her chair, saved for the moment, as he left the bench. The deputy cleared the courtroom.

  Nina didn’t want to talk to anybody, but Paul caught up to her at her car. Boosting herself into the seat, she turned on the ignition.

  “Let me buy you dinner,” he said.

  “No, thanks. I need to hurry home and shoot myself.”

  “Now, now. You couldn’t have known Rankin would go to the D.A. We’ll think of something.”

  “It’s all my fault. All I had to do was bring the opals to Court and hand them over. Now—I feel like a jack-ass.”

  “I’ll still eat dinner with you.”

  “No.” Putting the Bronco in reverse, she backed away. She drove fast until the specter of him, hands in pockets, eyes full of concern, shrank to a speck in her rearview mirror.

  CHAPTER 27

  FOR A REAL change, Paul had the rock-grotto spa at Caesars to himself. Sinking into the hot water, he had one thought, that he hoped Nina had poured herself a really stiff drink and gone to bed.

  A few minutes later, his muscles now as soft as pudding, his pain a memory, he stepped out and dried himself off just as the attendant was locking the door and turning off the lights around the tub.

  “Nobody else here?” the attendant, a smooth-cheeked fellow, said in surprise.

  “No.”

  “Amazing, on a Friday night. This must be your lucky night.”

  That being so, Paul flexed his poker hand, promising himself an hour at the table before bed to take advantage. Waste no time crying. Always get back on the horse at first opportunity. Back in his room, he changed back into his clothes and counted his cash on hand, finding enough there to make him smile. He stepped toward the door.

  The phone rang. He decided to ignore it, but it rang again and again. Turning back, he pressed the receiver to his ear. “Yes,” he said. The “s” extended into a sibilant hiss.

  “What’s got you so pissed?” Ginger said. “On a losing streak?”

  “Exactly the opposite,” Paul said. “That is, until you called and interrupted a certain aura I had going that was shepherding me downstairs toward a mind-boggling jackpot.”

  “I won’t apologize. It’s been a hairy day. I’ve got something for you on the airplane parts. Sorry it took so long. Here’s what we’ve got. That fuel screen you gave me? I discovered a trace substance on it.”

  Yes! So, tonight was indeed a lucky one, and the stars had steered him here, to this phone call with Ginger. Here came the culmination to every chase sequence, the crash and denouement that explained all. “You found water,” he said, full of hope.

  “No,” she said.

  Leading him to a different sort of crash, then. His own. No water, no deliberate stall, no sabotage. Shit.

  “Something remarkable. Something I bet you never expected. I found . . . well, I won’t go into the chemistry. Or would you like me to?”

  “Just tell me what you found.”

  “Okay. Styrofoam.”

  “Like the ball I gave you?” he said. Like the ones he had seen in LeBlanc’s apartment.

  “Exactly. Like the little white ball that was under the seat.”

  “Styrofoam. Uh . . . could you see it on the screen? I mean . . .” What did he mean? He took his old hypothesis out of the fire, shook the ashes off, and looked for something new. “Is it possible this Styrofoam was somehow used to plug the fuel line so that the fuel from the tank couldn’t make it into the line?”

  “No. Because I found only traces. Styrofoam degrades in airplane fuel.”

  “Huh. Ginger, why would someone put that into the fuel? Can you think of any reason . . .?”

  “There’s more. Finding it on the fuel screen did make me fussy about inspecting the ball. After looking at it and taking some pictures, I was going to cut it into thin slices so that I could do three-D imaging on the computer . . . and by the way, that takes me for-effingever . . . but before I got to that point, I took a look at the ball under the microscope. Guess what I found!” she said triumphantly. “Something that didn’t belong. An alien invasion. A solvent-based glue.”

  He knew from the sound of her voice that he should be excited. He just didn’t know why. “Go on,” he said cautiously.

  “The ball had been cut in half and glued back together.”

  He still didn’t get it.

  “And hollowed out,” she went on, almost gleeful. “And injected . . .”

  “With water!” he hollered. “Hot damn!”

  “Well,” she said, “that’s theoretical. I can’t find evidence of water except the hollow in the center of the ball that might have contained it. It’s long gone, if it ever existed. The injection site was fairly large. Probably used a turkey baster. Then your perp stopped up the hole with more glue.”

  “But . . .” Paul said, picturing the turkey baster on the floor in LeBlanc’s living room, “why, Ginger? If someone wanted to put water in the tank and force a stall, why not just pour some water into the fuel?”

  “The time factor,” Ginger said. “I tested an exact match of this Styrofoam, same density, same glue type, etcetera. Popped it into some fuel. Not airplane fuel, just gasoline, but it would give similar results. It took a long time, over an hour, for the Styrofoam ball to deteriorate to invisibility. How soon enough water might come out of several ball
s to cause engine failure, I couldn’t say for sure. But various factors within the tank might mean the balls would degrade at a different rate. Enough of the water would have to accumulate to cause more than just sputtering, according to my friend the pilot. Also, the balls alone, if there were enough of them, might displace enough fuel to mean the pilot would have the added problem of not enough gas to make it to his destination, but the fuel gauge would show sufficient amounts.”

  “So the plane wouldn’t stall immediately and the crash would happen sometime after the sabotage,” Paul said. “How many balls would it take to make, say, a cup of water?”

  “Quite a few, but the tank would hold plenty.”

  “The size of the Styrofoam ball was probably dictated by the size of the opening to the fuel tank,” Paul said.

  “That’s right. I’m told the opening to the fuel tank on that Beechcraft is about two and one half inches. That would severely limit the size ball that could be inserted.”

  “Someone went to a lot of trouble to make sure that plane went down.”

  Ginger had been thinking. “What I want to know is what kind of person knows that Styrofoam degrades in fuel?”

  “Any mechanic,” Paul said promptly, his memory jogged. “I worked in a car repair shop during a summer in high school and I’m sure I heard it mentioned there. And any mechanic would certainly know sufficient water in the fuel tank will bring a plane down.”

  And the Beechcraft’s mechanic, Dave LeBlanc, not only knew, he had foam balls and a baster lying around in the stuff in his apartment. Jackpot!

  “You sound like you have someone in mind.”

  He wondered how soon he could get a plane to LA. He had heard there was a new service operating regular flights out of Tahoe. Maybe he would try them first, save himself a trip to Reno. “I wonder,” Paul said, “how that ball ended up under Christopher Sykes’s seat and not in the tank.”

  “What I think? We’ll probably never know, but I think that boy saw a pile of them somewhere, and picked one up before he got on the plane. So many boys find balls irresistible. Can’t imagine why.”

  Ginger was making a little joke.

  “He was kind of old for that. He was in college,” Paul said.

  “And your point?” she said.

  “He left something behind for us to find,” Paul said, grappling with the lamentable truth that all the insight in the world could not bring back Skip Bailey or Christopher Sykes. “Without that ball, we would never have known what caused that plane to crash.”

  “He didn’t leave you a clue on purpose,” Ginger said, “but if you believe in a just universe once in a while, it has spoken.” She paused. “How old was he, the boy that died?”

  “Nineteen,” Paul said. “The pilot, Skip Bailey, was in his fifties. He had a wife that loved him.”

  “Sad,” Ginger said.

  “At least his reputation won’t go down with him. I have to call the airport. And LA. And the NTSB investigator. I have to call Nina.”

  Nina sat in front of the fire eating take-out pizza with Bob, hardly hearing what he was saying. Something about school. The shock was wearing off by now and she was furious at Flaherty for taking his anger at her out on Nikki. He had looked right at her as he denied every motion, letting her know why he was doing it. She had liked Flaherty, but he was a rotten old—and he wasn’t done with her, either. Her head reeled. She would have to spend the weekend trying to save her own hide, as Barbara so elegantly put it. Right now she was so tired she just wanted to fall into unconsciousness and never have to move her brain again.

  She woke up in bed with a vague recollection of Bob guiding her upstairs. Nine P.M. Charming. She must have fallen asleep by eight. She was so far beyond screwed this time—next stop, the El Dorado County Jail. Awake again, the kind of awake where her eyes were popping out of her head with fatigue, she trudged downstairs, seeing the light under Bob’s door, and stood at the kitchen window looking out, Hitchcock at her side.

  She looked out onto the summer night, at the end of some kind of line. It struck her then that she could look out now, go out now, live now, without worrying every second about Him. Even jail didn’t seem so important when she finally and thoroughly realized this. She spent some time basking in the relief and almost fell asleep standing there. She mumbled a few words in the direction of the moon toward her husband, words like, he’s gone, we’ll be all right.

  Leaving the window, she stopped at the kitchen cabinet on her way back up to bed and opened it up to get a vitamin. Vitamins made her think of Ginger and chemistry, which made her think about that funny little word which she’d never heard before this case, an almost unpronounceable word.

  Allele. And it was so simple. She thought she knew where the blood on the sword had come from. But she couldn’t do any more, sleep was stealing her consciousness away, the sweet dreamless sleep she’d been denied so long, and she unplugged the phone and tumbled into bed.

  Paul arrived in LA at 10 P.M. after a dash to the Reno airport. He rented a car and drove directly to LeBlanc’s apartment building in Newport and rang the manager’s doorbell.

  The apartment building looked exactly the same. Eddie opened up, wide awake and holding a beer, the TV mumbling behind him, and Paul said, “Has he been back?”

  “Hey, man, I was gonna call you. He came back a couple days ago. He wouldn’t tell me nothing, just handed me a check for the rent plus the damages and went into his place. Said he had a major windfall and was up on his luck. I asked was he gambling but he laughed and said ‘Hope not.’ ”

  “That’s so good,” Paul said. “So fine.”

  Stopping at the grungy green door of Apartment 108, he knocked. LeBlanc didn’t answer. Big surprise. With Paul outside waiting for him, no wonder he was scurrying for cover like a bunny rabbit caught with prime radishes between his blunt little teeth.

  Checking to ascertain that Eddie had indeed retreated back to his TV, he set the cane down, pulled himself back, and gave the door a hard shove. To his surprise, it sprang open immediately. Cruddy hardware; it figured.

  Nobody sat on the mud-colored, ripped futon. The television, tuned to an old movie on TNT, but muted, infected the background with a low-level radiation buzz. Just like before, the galley kitchen smelled of old beef, with cupboards a matching color. The only bathroom had been crying for Mr. Clean since the days when his jingle jangled into the minds of all America.

  The bedroom door was closed. Paul stayed to one side, turned the handle silently, flung it open, and jumped inside, his gun ready.

  Dave LeBlanc lay on the bed. He was dead. He had bled all over the nasty brown comforter that matched the torn futon, the kitchen cupboards, and the stinking beef.

  CHAPTER 28

  “GINGER?” NINA SAID into the phone. “Me again.” It was Saturday morning. She had slept, slept endlessly, and realized in the morning that she had not even turned in her sleep all night.

  Paul had just called from LA to grump about her turning off the phone for once in her entire life, and to tell her about Dave LeBlanc’s murder. Working the LA connection, he was on his way to Connie Bailey’s house in Redondo. Then, he told her, he wanted to see Jan Sapitto, the plastic food maker, to ask her some more about the Sykes marriage, saying that the alibis in this case were all too shaky and needed a good kick.

  She was upstairs in the attic bedroom with its sloping ceiling, holding the phone to her ear, feeling very tense, very excited.

  The case was breaking, shattering soundlessly, like a bright light going off. She almost had it, but not quite.

  “Hi, doll,” Ginger said.

  Nina said, “You know, Ginger, there’s nothing like a good night’s sleep.”

  “Uh huh,” Ginger said warily.

  “I was too close to the case, preparing for this hearing. You can’t process new information that comes out in court until later—you’re much too busy making sure that you get your planned evidence in. So it’s only now that I come t
o a conclusion that is obvious if you think about it. Nikki’s father. You mentioned him. He permeates this case with his absence. He’s ignored in all the equations, and I think that’s why we’re not getting our answers. So I put it to you: if Nikki inherited the third allele, and it’s not Nikki, and it’s not her mother, then doesn’t it make sense that it’s her father?”

  “You said he’s been out of the picture for years.”

  “Yes, he has. But you see, I’m unwilling to accept that the blood is Nikki’s. That only leaves her father.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “I had Paul check into it early on, but other than some scribbled postcards that are almost illegible, the trail’s been cold for a long time. I just called Daria Zack. I believe she really doesn’t know where he is. She tried to help. Said he was a musician, loved mountain biking, played in local clubs until he settled down and started trying to make a living for his family. He left six years ago, and no one seems to know where he might have gone. Ginger, in the lab report . . . they didn’t note any degradation.”

  “Correct.”

  “Would a sample degrade if it was old?”

  “Well, sometimes. It would depend on how old, conditions, etcetera.”

  “Tell me,” Nina said. “Is it remotely conceivable this blood could have gotten on that sword, say, five years ago, or six, or even sixty?”

  “It’s much more likely to be five years than five hundred, if that’s what you want to know.”

  “So it could be from six years ago, when the father disappeared,” Nina said.