“That’s true. So what?”
“I don’t know. It just seems significant, that’s all. I don’t think there was any blood that came out of his nose at the scene was there?” Ben shrugged. “I don’t know,” Mark said. “I’ll check the file.”
Mark’s words percolated in Ben’s head as he pushed the SUV up to eighty and flew past the Harlem Avenue exit. Lost in his thoughts of the blood evidence, Ben didn’t notice when Mark began speaking again. There was something about the blood that didn’t seem quite right. What was it? Ben turned the thing over and over in his mind as he drove. Mark could have been talking to himself because Ben didn’t notice a word he was saying. Finally as the kernel of an idea dropped into place, Ben said, “Huh? What?”
“Hey,” Mark said pointing, “you just missed the split.”
“What?”
“You just missed the split. We needed to go to the right.”
Ben looked up and realized what Mark was talking about. He had stayed to the left when the road split instead of going off to the right toward the office.
“God damn it,” he said. “We’ll just have to get off at Route 83 and head back north.”
“What were you thinking about?” Mark asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You looked like you just thought of something.”
“Yeah, I did.”
When they got back to the office, Ben went upstairs, thumbed through his rolodex, picked up the phone and dialed.
A few seconds later, Dr. Stanley Liu was on the line. “What can I do for you, Mr. Lohmeier?” he said. Dr. Liu was the blood expert hired by the defense and one of the most renowned, and most expensive, blood and blood splatter experts in the world. To date, he probably felt underutilized by Megan’s defense team.
“I think I have a project for you, Doctor,” Ben said. “Do you have enough samples of the blood found on the scarf to do additional testing?”
“Why, yes, of course.”
“And you have the results of the blood work supplied by the State?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Good,” Ben said.
39
“Fuck, this is boring,” Ben moaned. He held up a stack of exam papers and gave them the evil eye. “I don’t know how you could do this year after year.” He tossed the papers on a stack on the conference room table.
Across the way, Mark laughed. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not that bad. At least at the end of the day you get to assign grades to the arrogant fuckers.”
“True enough, but what grades do you give them? I don’t think I’ve read any good answers yet,” Ben said.“He went to more trouble with these than I ever would have imagined. I always figured he just threw them down the stairs. The ones left at the top got A’s, the ones at the bottom got C’s. At least that’s what everybody always thought.”
“He did seem to put a lot of effort into it,” Mark agreed, “but I can’t figure out how he decided what to give credit for and what not to give credit for. I’ve got an exam over here with an 85 on it that didn’t seem nearly as good as one with a 64.”
Ben shook his head. “You’ve got to understand, he never actually practiced law. He was just a professor. He probably didn’t know what he was talking about. You’ve been doing this shit for years and you do know what you’re talking about.”
“I’d like to think so. Check this one out,” Mark said holding up a copy of an exam. “See the dark spots? I think this must have been blood. Several of these were found under him when he fell, like he had them in his hand when he got whacked.”
“Probably stuffing them into his briefcase, right?” Ben said.
“It looks that way. This one seems to have been partially graded. I guess you could call it the final exam or the final final exam.”
Ben shook his head again and stared at the exam Mark was holding. “What a shitty way to go,” he said. “Of all the good things you could do in life, to be knocked off while trying to grade the exam of some arrogant little shit who probably thinks he’s smarter than you are.” Ben paused. “Do you think we were like that?” he finally asked.
Mark shrugged.
The two men sat in silence reviewing exams for a long while. Ben got up and went to the bathroom and then returned. As Ben pushed through the door into the garage, Mark said, “I didn’t tell you. I went through Jason Hahn’s final again the other day, yesterday I think it was.”
“What’d you think?”
“Not too good, average at best. He probably got about what he deserved, not that you can tell with the way Greenfield graded papers. Another half a grade higher or so and I think he would’ve made the Dean’s List, if my figures are correct. Had he gotten an A, he may have made Law Review.”
“Really? Could he really have expected an A?”
“Who knows? You met him, he probably expects an A every time.”
Ben thought about that for a minute and then asked, “Did we ever finish going through the grades to see who would get screwed by a bad final exam score?”
“Yeah, we did,” Mark said. “Not much there really. There are only a handful of good candidates.”
“Good,” Ben said.
A little while later, they heard footsteps outside in the corridor and the door of the garage opened and Casey Gardner and Brian Davenport stepped inside. Ben looked at his watch. “It’s only four forty-five,” he said. “Where are you assholes going?”
Casey held up a cardboard ticket. “Republican Day, remember?”
“No,” Ben said, “I didn’t.”
Republican Day was the biggest fundraiser sponsored by the Illinois Republican Party and it always took place on a Wednesday in the middle of summer. Everyone who was anyone in the Republican Party, and those who wanted to curry favor with them, either attended or bought tickets to the event. It included golf, which began early in the morning at various courses in the western suburbs of Chicago and culminated with dinner, drinks and speeches, not necessarily in that order, at a local country club. The guys in the office never played in the golf part of the event, you could be looking at an eight or nine hour round, but they usually tried to make it to the drinks part, which got going at about five or five-thirty.
“I think we have extra tickets upstairs,” Casey said. “Phil really wants us all to make an appearance if we can. Funk’s already not going so I was hoping you guys could go.”
“What’s up with Funk?” Ben asked.
Brian laughed. “I think his kid has swimming lessons.”
Ben rolled his eyes. “You’re kidding me.”
“His wife pulled the leash more likely,” Casey said.
Ben’s head bobbed side to side as he mulled it over for a minute. “Okay,” he finally said, “let’s go. This shit will be here tomorrow. We aren’t going to win the trial tonight anyway. I could probably use a few beers.”
At twenty minutes to six, Ben walked across the parking lot toward the main clubhouse. Guests were milling about in small groups, drinking beer while music played over the loud speakers. Typically, much of the drinking and socializing took place outside, while dinner was served in one of the banquet rooms inside. The overcast skies of most of the day had given way to a bright sunshine and the temperature hovered in the low-eighties. Ben took a pair of sunglasses from his pocket and put them on. Since he didn’t have Court today, he was dressed casually in a pair of khaki pants and an azure blue golf shirt. The air smelled like a summer barbecue, a mixture of grilling meat and spilled beer. Ben found Mark and Brian and headed over to a small hut where a couple of kegs were tapped. They each grabbed a beer and made the rounds.
Midway through his second beer, on his way inside to use the washroom, Ben ran into Karen Tilly, the Land Acquisition Manager for the Forest Preserve District. Good, Ben thought. He liked Karen. She was the kind of woman you could have a beer and bullshit with, without worrying about what you said. She was smart, attractive and had a good sense of humor. Ben could
never figure out why she hadn’t gotten married yet.
Ben introduced Karen to Mark and they talked for a little while. As she started to hand Ben another beer, she held it out and said, “I’ll give this to you if you promise you’re going to file the Spletzer case.” She was laughing. Ben had been meaning to file the condemnation complaint on a series of parcels owned by a man named Dick Spletzer for a while now, but had never gotten around to it. He recoiled in mock horror. “When’s the trial going to be over,” she asked, “Christmas?”
Ben shrugged. “We should be able to get it on file by Christmas,” he said, “maybe even Thanksgiving.”
“Great,” she said in a perky voice, “at least we have a timetable. Now we can drink.”
She gave Ben the beer and pointed out another lawyer who did work on behalf of the Forest Preserve District talking to one of the District Commissioners across the way. The lawyer was known for being a little bit too pretty and for always being on the right side of the political winds. They gossiped about him for a few minutes until Ben’s cell phone buzzed. It was Stan Disko.
“I’ve got something interesting for you on Angela Harper,” he said.
“Do tell.”
“It seems there indeed was a confrontation of sorts between the Harpers and Greenfield.”
“You mean the husband?”
“Yeah, the husband. Apparently, despite what we’ve been told, the good professor did show some extra curricular interest in his colleague.”
“What was her reaction? Did he complete the pass?”
“Not sure yet. I’m still checking, but my source tells me that the interest may not have been entirely unwelcome.”
“Really,” Ben said, “who’s your source?”
“Can’t say right now, but I’ll keep digging.”
“Good. Go for it. Keep me posted.” Ben signed off and put the cell phone back in his pocket.”
“What was that all about?” Karen Tilly asked.
“Can’t say,” Ben said. “If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you.”
She pinched his arm. “Come on, come on, tell me. Is it about the Law School Murder?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“It sounded like good news,” Mark said.
Ben put a finger to his lips and looked up at the sky in a thoughtful pose. “Well, let’s put it this way,” he said. “I just found out that the dead guy may have been hitting on one of his fellow professors despite protestations to the contrary.”
“Ooh,” she said, “sounds juicy.”
“Could be,” Ben said continuing. “And he may not have been entirely unsuccessful.” More oohs and aahs. “We always assumed the two of them hated each other, or so everyone says.”
“Maybe it was a love affair gone bad,” Karen said. “You know, a lot of women like getting hit on. They look at it as good fun. It’s kind of like the thrill of the hunt. It’s usually the husbands or boyfriends who don’t like it.”
Ben nodded. He could understand that.
“Which one is it?” Mark asked.
“The one who won’t talk to us,” Ben replied.
Mark raised his eyebrows. “That is interesting,” he said.
40
Ever since he had talked to Disko the night before, Ben couldn’t get the whole Harper thing out of his mind, especially when coupled with Karen Tilly’s comments about husbands and boyfriends and Stephen Harper’s behavior at the reunion. He even called Professors Seagram and Makra at the law school, but they couldn’t confirm anything. They were both surprised to hear of a possible link between Angela Harper and Daniel Greenfield, although Makra did say that he had witnessed Stephen Harper’s temper on display a time or two in the past. Ben spent most of the day by himself in the garage letting things spin around inside his head while he tried to put what he knew into some perspective.
Ben often found it helpful to put what he knew and didn’t know about a case in list or chart form, which made him focus on the big picture rather than on those facts or events that had been occupying most of his recent attention and that he couldn’t get out of his head. He took a large easel from the corner of the garage next to the safe and pulled it out in front of the bookshelves behind the conference room table. He fastened a large white artist’s pad to the easel using some two-inch binder clips and wrote notes on the pad using a black Sharpie.
He broke the notes down into categories, using one sheet per category, and flipped between sheets as he brainstormed. The exercise unleashed a torrent of built-up energy and Ben felt the adrenaline surging through him as his problem-solving mode kicked into full gear. He tried to distinguish between what he knew, what he suspected and what he didn’t know at all. He created a timeline of events leading from 1991 when Megan first started seeing Greenfield all the way up to the present, searching for patterns, gaps, and connections that he had previously missed.
By six-thirty, he could feel his energy begin to wane and he decided to head out for a quick bite to eat. Forty minutes later, back in front of the easel, Ben stood trying to assemble the pieces of this complicated puzzle. After a couple of more hours of work, moving and re-moving pieces, massaging and tweaking others, Ben reluctantly concluded that he may already possess more of the pieces than he originally suspected. The holes in the narrative, from which he would weave the common theme that would form his defense, felt more like a lack of recognition, than a lack of information. There are more than enough pieces here, he thought.
He flipped over to a clean white sheet and wrote SUSPECTS on the top and underlined it. Then he made a list beginning with Sylvia Greenfield, followed by Joseph Cavallaro, Angela Harper, Stephen Harper, Nora Fleming and Jason Hahn. Below Hahn’s name, he wrote the word OTHERS and then drew a line separating the first list from one additional name - Megan Rand. He stood before the list and studied it, his arms crossed, his left hand on his chin in a picture of intense contemplation. He stood there for a long time, his eyes going back and forth between the various names. Two jumped out at him. The first, Stephen Harper, displayed quite a temper in Ben’s only encounter with him, a temper confirmed by Stan Disko’s digging. Second, he kept coming back to the word OTHERS written near the bottom of the list.
Others, he thought, there had to be others, but who were they and what was their story? Drugs? That didn’t seem likely. Greenfield was a small-time recreational drug user like so many other children of the 1960’s. Nothing seriously pointed in that direction. Gambling? Same thing. His personal relationships? Now that made more sense. That brought him back to Sylvia Greenfield. They had a bad divorce to be sure, but from what Ben could figure, he was the more bitter of the two. She had gotten rid of him. Why would she kill him now several years after the divorce? Something would have had to trigger it and they hadn’t come up with anything. On the other hand, if revenge was a dish best served cold, Sylvia Greenfield was plenty cold enough.
Then Ben thought of jilted lovers and their spouses. He looked at Nora Fleming’s name. His gut told him no, but then again, she was in town at the time of the murder and knew her way around the law school. He took the Sharpie and drew an arrow next to Fleming’s name and wrote, HUSBAND. A more likely candidate? He reminded Ben a little bit of Stephen Harper. Possible. But Andrew Scott wound up winning the prize. Nora had married him after all. Unless something came up and Greenfield wanted to get back together?
Ben stepped back from the names and paced around the garage. He walked over and spun the dial on the safe. After a moment, he climbed into the shoe shine chair and looked across the room at the list hanging from the easel. Hands in his pockets, he got up and walked over to the door as commuters veered off the sidewalk from the train station and cut through the parking lot on their way home from work. He watched them walk by, heads down and purposeful. The sun began to sink low off in the horizon. Ben turned and walked back to the conference room table, pulled out a chair and sat down amid the files scattered all around him.
Still, the names on the ea
sel called out to him. Personal life and work life, he thought. The work life could only mean students and fellow staff members. How many law professors would be willing to get their hands dirty literally and figuratively by killing a colleague in his office? Most of them became professors of law in the first place because they didn’t want to get their hands dirty practicing out in the real world. They could enjoy the cushy life on the outskirts of reality, never really jumping into the fray, yet close enough to feel part of it themselves. All the while, lording it over unsuspecting law students with the righteous air of expertise mixed with arrogance, wisdom borne of other people’s labors.
That could explain the scene of the crime. Students and even some staff members might not know where Greenfield lived or maybe they were unfamiliar with his neighborhood and didn’t feel comfortable attacking him there, but they would know the law school and how it emptied out during the holidays between semesters. Ben sat transfixed by the names for a long time before rummaging through a box and pulling out an expandable folder marked, “Jason Hahn.” A while later, he pulled out a similar file marked, “Angela Harper”, studying the contents for the sixth, seventh or maybe tenth time.
Ben finished the last watery remains of a root beer poured hours earlier. He felt spent, drained, like a child’s toy low on batteries. Everything seemed to work, just not as quickly as usual. He remembered reading somewhere, probably on the internet, that the human mind continually works on problems while sleeping, turning them over and analyzing them even as the needed rest refreshes and replenishes it. Maybe that’s what I need, Ben thought, more sleep. Sensing a plan, Ben tossed his pen on the table, stood and arched his back, his hands on his hips. He stifled a yawn, then turned out all the lights in the garage and shut the door behind him. He walked upstairs and checked his e-mail one last time before grabbing his briefcase, shutting off the lights and coming back down.
He punched in the code setting the alarm giving himself a minute or so to finish locking up and get out of the building. He paused before hitting the final button on the alarm and tried to remember where he had parked. Out back, he thought, then hit the button, flipped up the lid on the control panel and walked briskly down the corridor through the copy room and out the back door. He locked the door with a key on his ring.
Final Exam: A Legal Thriller Page 27