Extenuating Circumstances

by Jonathan Valin

  I waved Len over to where I was standing in the doorway. In the fluorescent light his face looked green with fatigue.

  “She shouldn’t be here, Len,” I said, glancing toward Mrs. Lessing.

  “Don’t you think I know that?” he said, giving me an exasperated look. “I tried to keep her from coming, believe me. But she started to make a scene. And that was something none of us needed.” He glanced at the woman, sitting stock-still in the chair. “Meg has always prided herself on holding together in a crisis, on maintaining the family honor, no matter what. I’ve never been much on dignity myself. But it’s her son, and she felt that one of the Lessings had to be here.”

  “She’s not going to view the body?”

  He shook his head violently. “Of course not. That’s my job.”

  I patted his shoulder sympathetically. “How are you holding up?”

  “I’m too worn out to say. If I had any personality left, I’d be dead drunk. Or hysterical, like Janey.”

  Behind us in the hall an orderly walked by, pushing a gurney loaded with a corpse. Len shuddered at the sound. “God almighty, what a nightmare.”

  I hated like hell to be the one to do it, but I was about to make things worse.

  I took Len by the sleeve and edged far enough out into the hall so that Meg Lessing couldn’t overhear us. At one end of the corridor a pair of steel doors led to the mortuary. Another loaded gurney was parked by the doors. A blue cloth lay across the corpse on top; one bare, bloodless foot protruded from underneath. Len stared at the body with horror.

  It was a terrible moment to tell him about Carnova—I knew that. But I also knew that Art Finch would do it if I didn’t, and I didn’t want Len to hear the story from a cop. I didn’t want the mother to hear it at all, not in the shape she was in.

  “There’s something you’ve got to know,” I said. “Something about Carnova.”

  Len studied my face for a second, and I guess he could tell from my eyes that bad news was coming, because his own face fell. “Go ahead,” he said in a sinking voice.

  “The kid claims that he knew Ira, that he and Ira had a long-standing relationship.”

  “What kind of relationship?”

  I stared at him sadly, not wanting to say it. “A homosexual one.”

  Trumaine gawked at me for a long moment. “You’re joking.”

  “I wish I was. Carnova says that he and Lessing had been seeing one another for several years. He says that, on the night of the murder, Ira had picked him up for a sexual rendezvous. They had an argument over money, and the boy killed him.”

  “Over money?” Len said with a blank look.

  “Carnova’s a homosexual prostitute, Len.”

  At first Trumaine didn’t react. Then his face got so red that he broke into a sweat, right there in that ice-cold mortuary hallway.

  “That’s the most outrageous fucking lie I’ve ever heard in my life!” he shouted.

  “Take it easy, Len,” I said, glancing nervously through the doorway at Mrs. Lessing.

  But Trumaine didn’t hear me. “First the bastard tortures Ira, then he murders him, then after he’s dead he slanders him as viciously as you can slander another man!”

  He’d gotten so worked up, I thought he was going to throw a punch at me.

  “Why the hell did you tell me this, Harry?” he said, almost strangling on the words. “What did you expect me to say—that my best friend in the world was a queer?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then why tell me? Or did you figure I just couldn’t make it through the rest of this day without hearing one more piece of vicious bullshit?”

  “Len,” I said, “I don’t believe what Carnova said.”

  “But the cops do, right? I guess you can’t be a kind, charitable human being—a decent man with a genuine concern for other people—without being labeled a queer.”

  “The cops don’t believe Carnova, either,” I said, even though it wasn’t strictly true. “They’re going to pressure the kid into retracting the homosexual charge.”

  “Pressure him how?”

  “What difference does it make?” I said, although it was going to make a difference to Carnova. “When the boy goes to court the D.A. will use his confession as evidence. And if Carnova or his lawyers try to introduce the homosexual crap, it won’t be substantiated by the record.”

  “It won’t be in the record?” Len said, starting to cool down.

  “No. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t come out. Carnova’s lawyers may feed the story to the press. And it’s bound to get aired in court. I thought you should hear it from me first.”

  Len wiped the sweat from his eyes with his shirt sleeves. “I guess you’re right,” he said after a while. “I guess I had to know. I guess the family will have to know too.”

  “You still have some time. The papers probably won’t get the story for a day or two. And they’re bound to be skeptical in reporting it.”

  “Meg and Janey’ll still have to be told.” He sighed heavily. “Christ, it just keeps getting worse.”

  ******

  Finch showed up about five minutes after I’d finished telling Len about Carnova’s confession. Together, the three of us went into the morgue to go through the formal process of claiming what was left of Ira Lessing.

  It was a ghastly place. The cold steel examination tables, with the microphones drooping down above them like loose wires in an unfinished room. The freezer bank with too many doors. The dead-room stink of embalming fluid and disinfectant, and the faint sweet smell of flesh, like rot in a wall. The coroner pulled the body from the freezer bank. Something lumpy in a green zippered bag on a bright metal tray. Len stared at it for a long time—his face dazed.

  “Are you sure this is Ira?” he said to the coroner.

  The coroner nodded. “We’ve made a positive identification on the basis of dental records.”

  “Ira,” Trumaine said again, staring at the body bag.

  As we came back out into the lighted hall, Len broke down and sobbed. Finch looked away.

  After a while Trumaine collected himself. “He’ll go to the electric chair,” he said, turning to Finch.

  “You have my word on it,” Finch told him.

  ******

  I drove back to the Lessing house with Len and Meg Lessing. It had stopped raining by the time we got to Riverside Drive. Slanting sunlight broke through the storm clouds, drawing water from the hazy, distant hills. Already you could feel the fierce heat seeping back into what was left of the day.

  I helped Meg Lessing out of the car and over to the stairs. She still didn’t look as if she knew who I was.

  I said, “I’m very sorry about your son, Mrs. Lessing.”

  “So am I,” she whispered.

  Gripping the handrail, Meg Lessing walked stiffly up the stairs. When she got to the top Don Geneva came out of the front door and helped her inside.

  “I can’t believe she’s still on her feet,” Len said, looking up at her.

  “Is there anything else you want me to do, Len?”

  “I can’t think of anything—unless you could make the whole thing go away.” He stared at me for a moment, his face slack with exhaustion. “I guess we’ll have to handle it on our own from here on.”

  I started to mention Carnova, then thought better of it. But the kid was on Len’s mind, too, because he looked back at me as he started up the stairs.

  “Ira was a good man, Harry. He really was. People won’t forget that overnight.”

  “All right, Len.”

  I watched him walk up to the terrace, then I went over to the car and drove home.

  14

  OF COURSE Lessing’s murder made the front pages of both Cincinnati dailies and banner headlines in the northern Kentucky newspapers. The fact that Carnova was a male hustler was mentioned in each article, although no inferences were drawn about Lessing himself. In fact, the papers reported that Carnova had confessed to mugging Ira to
get money to purchase drugs. Lessing was made out to be the random victim of a homicidal teenager.

  It was obvious that Finch had succeeded in getting the boy to tell his story the way the D.A. wanted to hear it. When it came down to it, it was the way I wanted to hear it too. For the family, for Len. And for Lessing himself.

  I hadn’t known the man, but I’d met enough of his friends to form an opinion about him. And whether he’d been a closet homosexual or not—and I wasn’t convinced that he had been—I figured he’d earned some slack from the media and from the rest of us.

  Terry Carnova was arraigned on Tuesday morning and bound over to the grand jury without bail. An attorney was assigned to him by the court.

  On Wednesday morning I went to the cemetery to see Lessing buried. It was a hot cloudy day, heavy with the promise of rain. A steady wind blew across the cemetery lawn, lifting the skirts of the canopy above the coffin and obscuring the voice of the priest as he spoke the final words. There were several hundred people at the graveside. I stood in the midst of the crowd, well away from the immediate family. When they lowered the coffin, Meg and Janey turned away, and Len Trumaine gathered them into his arms.

  Because of the number of mourners, it took awhile for the traffic to clear out of the cemetery grounds. Rather than wait in the line of limos, I sat on a bench under an elm tree until most of the other cars had driven off. As I was sitting there Sam Kingston walked past me. At first I didn’t recognize him without his doctor’s white frock coat. Just another sad face in a sea of sad faces. But when I saw him stop by a car with the Lighthouse insignia on its door, I went over and said hello.

  “Oh, hello,” he said uncertainly.

  “Stoner,” I said. “The private detective who was working for the Lessing family? The guy who gave you the canceled checks?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said with a polite smile. “I couldn’t place you for a second. I’ve had a tough time remembering anything this week.”

  “It’s been a bad week, all right.”

  The smile on his face faded away. “It’s a terrible loss. To the family. To the community. To me, personally. Honest to Christ, I haven’t felt this bad since my father died.”

  “At least they got the kid who did it.”

  Kingston ducked his head, as if I’d somehow embarrassed him. “You know, we treated that bastard at the clinic.”

  “Carnova?”

  “We treated him a few years ago. Nasty little redneck son-of-a-bitch. Loud-mouthed, selfish, ignorant and proud of it. The only reason he entered the program was to get free methadone and to try to steal drugs from the infirmary.” Kingston stared at me balefully. “I keep wondering if that’s here he heard about Ira—from somebody at the clinic. Or maybe he saw him there. Ira used to come in from time to time—to say hello and talk to the kids. I don’t know. It just haunts me.”

  “You didn’t make Carnova what he is, Doc.”

  “I know that,” he said, straightening up. “It’s just . . . I’m going to miss Ira.”

  I stared across the access road at the deserted grave, its canopy still fluttering in the hot wind. “He was well liked.”

  “He was loved,” Kingston said. “And when it comes down to it, there really isn’t anything better you can say about a man.”

  Kingston started to get into the car, then turned back to me. “By the way, I gave those checks you left to a cop named Finch. He said you’d sent him to us.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “I got the feeling he didn’t think they were important.”

  “They probably weren’t. Did you ever show them to your bookkeeper?”

  He nodded. “Marty said a kid brought them in in early June. I wasn’t around, but Marty talked to him.”

  “It wasn’t Carnova, was it?”

  “No. I forgot his name. Just a teenage kid with a handout.” Kingston got into the car. “The sort of thing Ira was always doing.”

  ******

  Several weeks went by, shot full of July heat. Between running credit checks and investigating insurance claims, I followed the progress of the Lessing case in the newspapers. In early August, Carnova was bound over for trial, and a court date was set for the middle of September. About that time the papers began to hint at the possibility of a homosexual relationship between Lessing and Carnova, based on testimony at the grand jury hearings. The articles were buried in the local sections of the papers, perhaps out of deference to the dead man. But I couldn’t help wondering how Janey and Meg had felt, seeing Ira smeared like that in print.

  No one from the immediate family commented publicly on the accusation. All they could have done, anyway, was to deny it. And Meg Lessing was too proud a woman to dignify gossip about her son. But several of Lessing’s friends, Don Geneva among them, called Carnova a liar.

  As the days passed Geneva assumed the role of spokesman for the family, both in the papers and on TV. It was a tough job and it said something about the man—about his loyalty to the Lessings and to his dead friend—that he would volunteer so much of his time to insulate them from embarrassment and scandal.

  I couldn’t say exactly how I felt about seeing the thing finally come out in print. Outraged for Lessing and his family, certainly. But a little curious in spite of myself. About the grand jury hearings, about what would be said at the trial. On the whole, I guess, I was glad I was out of it—glad I’d never had to answer in my own mind the questions that were being raised about Ira Lessing’s character.

  Then, early in the morning on the first day of September, that all changed. Around 9 A.M. I got a call from Carnova’s attorney, a guy named Jack O’Brien. He sounded polite and pleasant on the phone, but I found myself disliking him immediately. I knew why too—because he represented Carnova, because he was bent on dragging me back into the case.

  All he wanted, he said, was a little of my time. Only I didn’t want to give him that much of an opening.

  “I’ve got a pretty busy schedule,” I said brusquely.

  “I can subpoena you,” Jack O’Brien said in his affable voice. “In fact, I will subpoena you if I have to.”

  “For what? What the hell do I have to do with your client?”

  “Let’s not kid each other, Mr. Stoner. We both know that you witnessed Terry’s confession.”

  It wasn’t hard to figure out who’d told him I’d been in the interrogation room—the girlfriend, Kitty Guinn.

  “Look, it’ll only take a few minutes,” O’Brien said. “Half hour tops. You’ll save me some time and save yourself some grief.”

  ******

  O’Brien’s office was in the Tri-City Building, on the corner of Fifth and Race, within easy walking distance of the Riorley. On the way over there I wondered what I was going to tell the guy. I already knew what he was going to ask.

  Art Finch and the cops had worked hard on Carnova—to get him to retract the homosexual accusation, to get it off the record. It was a cinch that O’Brien knew that as well as I did.

  Bullying the kid into changing his story, simply because the cops hadn’t liked it, wasn’t strictly legal. But in both versions of his confession Carnova had freely admitted murdering Lessing. And when it came down to it, that was all that mattered to me. Carnova was guilty, and I wasn’t going to help him slip out of a death sentence. Even if I’d believed that the kid was telling the truth about Lessing’s homosexuality, I’d have felt the same way.

  So I made up my mind to lie to O’Brien if he questioned me about the interrogation. It wouldn’t be much of a lie. Just enough to hang the little bastard.

  15

  AS LAW offices went, the Tri-City wasn’t the high-rent district. O’Brien’s suite was on the sixth floor at the end of a dark, dingy hallway, intermittently lit by greasy yellow fixtures and pale daylight filtering through the pebbled glass of office doors.

  The furniture inside the anteroom was beaten at the legs and corners. The carpet smelled of mildew. The secretary, playing hunt and peck at
the typewriter, looked like a temp. She buzzed O’Brien after I gave her my name, and he came out of an inner office to meet me. I guess I’d expected a younger man—an up-and-comer. But he was in his late forties. Thin, stoop-shouldered, bald. He had a movie mortician’s face—long, dour, sunken, vaguely haunted about the eyes. He held out his hand and I shook with him.

  “I just want you to know, before we start here, that I didn’t take this case on my own. It was assigned to me by the court.”

  I nodded. “I understand.”

  “I don’t like Terry Carnova. But he’s my client, and he’s getting a raw deal.”

  “He’s getting what he deserves,” I said.

  “Why don’t you hold off on that until I’ve had a chance to say my piece?”

  He waved me through a door into the inner office. Kitty Guinn was sitting on a tufted couch across from O’Brien’s desk. She didn’t look at me as I sat down beside her. But I could tell from her pallid face that she was nervous.

  O’Brien settled in behind the desk, shooing away some loose papers in front of him.

  “You’ve met Kitty, I know.” He smiled at the girl and she smiled back at him anxiously. She was wearing a white summer dress that made her look like a candle wrapped in tissue paper. “Kitty, why don’t you tell Mr. Stoner what you’ve told me?”

  “I done already told him,” she said in a shaky voice. “Terry didn’t kill that man.”

  O’Brien smiled without showing his teeth—tight-lipped, like a man with loose dentures.

  “Is that it?” I said.

  “That’s part of it.” He linked his fingers and settled his hands on the desk, leaning forward. “Terry Carnova is protecting a friend of his. A boy by the name of Thomas Chard. Tommy T. to his friends. It was Tommy who committed the murder. Terry’s no more than an accessory.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Yeah?” He leaned back again in his chair. “Let me ask you a question, Stoner. When Terry confessed to the murder, what weapon did he say he’d used?” He didn’t wait for me to reply, which was a good thing because I had no intention of talking about the interrogation. “He said he used a rock, didn’t he?”