“Where did you hear about him, Len?”
He flushed again. “Finch mentioned him once,” he said. “A few weeks ago. Carnova’s lawyer had some ugly theory about this Chard and Ira. Finch didn’t buy it. I didn’t either. Why do you care?”
“Because I think Chard may have been involved in Ira’s murder.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he snapped. “Carnova confessed to the killing. He didn’t mention any accomplice. And what the hell would Janey have to do with it, anyway?”
“Chard got two checks from Ira early in June. Money to pay for rehabilitation at the Lighthouse Clinic. Janey apparently endorsed the checks.”
“I don’t believe it,” Trumaine said flatly. “She never endorsed Ira’s checks.”
“Someone did.”
“So what? Maybe Millie did it—she’d sign checks for both of us on occasion. So the kid had a couple of checks. Ira handed out money all the time. He was a charitable man.”
I hadn’t wanted to get into it with him because I’d known how he’d react. I guess I should also have known that he’d be familiar with Chard. After all, he’d spent almost two months working closely with the police, the D.A., and everyone else associated with the case. Months spent trying to ensure that this very issue—the question of Lessing’s homosexuality and the bearing it had had on his murder—wouldn’t become the focus of the trial. He was protecting the family. He was protecting his friend. He was trying to keep the girl sane. But looking at the angry embarrassment written on his face, hearing the defensive tone in his voice, knowing that he’d tried to bribe O’Brien into laying off the beat-freak issue, I didn’t believe that Len still thought that Ira Lessing was the chance victim of a homicidal teenager.
I didn’t say that. It would have made him that much more defensive. Besides, I liked the man too much to call him a liar.
“Len, I’m not trying to hurt you or Janey or the family. But there are reasons, good reasons, to think that Carnova didn’t act alone.”
“You can prove that?”
“I have some evidence pointing to Chard. None of it conclusive.”
“Then for God’s sake drop it, Harry. For her sake. She can’t take more bad news. It’ll kill her.”
The girl stirred on the couch and Len shuddered nervously. “She’s worn out,” he said, looking panic-stricken. “Can’t you see that for yourself?”
“You don’t care, Len, that Chard will walk away?”
“I care about this.” His hand hovered above Janey’s face. “She’s had a horrible life, Harry, except for the past few years with Ira. You don’t understand how horrible.”
“I’m sure the last two months have been tough.”
“That’s not what I mean.” He took a deep breath, as if he were summoning his strength. “Look, if I tell you something about Janey, will you promise never to repeat it?”
I didn’t particularly want to have my sympathies played on. But the man obviously wanted to talk me out of going any further, and I was more than a little curious about the Lessings. So I said, “You have my word.”
“Janey’s father . . . ” Len’s face got very red. “He abused her.”
“Janey was sexually abused as a child?” I said, feeling sorry that I’d heard it.
He nodded unhappily. “A young child.”
“Did Lessing know that?”
“From the start. Almost by instinct. On that very first night I introduced them, he knew. We talked about it later on, when we were driving back to school, and he’d guessed it all.”
“Perhaps he’d already had some experience with parental abuse,” I said, thinking of what Raymond the bartender had said.
“I’ve wondered about that myself, seeing what a heartless bastard his dad was. And over the last few months . . . well, you can’t help thinking all sorts of crazy things. But if it was true, Ira never told me or anyone else I know. If it was true, he kept it inside of him and concentrated on work and charity and Janey.”
“That would have been in character, wouldn’t it? Keeping it inside?”
“Jesus, Harry,” Len said in an outraged voice. “Do you have to turn it all against him, even his pain? If you could have seen how gentle and kind he was to Janey, how patient and understanding . . . He gave her a sense of identity, without making any demands on her strength. He let her escape her past.” His face flushed guiltily and he ducked his head. “I couldn’t ever do that.”
“Why not, Len?”
He wouldn’t look at me. He didn’t answer, either, for a long time.
“Because I was part of it,” he finally said in a terrible voice. “I knew about Janey’s dad and I never told anyone. She didn’t want me to. She was afraid, and I . . . I was afraid for her.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“Oh, can’t I?” he said with a horrible laugh. He plucked at his tight-fitting shirt, at the layered flesh underneath it, as if the fat were something he wore in penance for the past. “I will never stop blaming myself for that. I let her down when I was all she had. I’ll never do that again. This time I’ll fight for her. I swear it.”
I stared at him, at the angry, shamefaced schoolboy that had emerged from inside him. “Forget it, Len,” I said. “It won’t come to that. You have my word.”
26
I HAD a much better picture of the Lessings now, wife and husband. I even had a lead to follow—Millie the secretary, who sometimes signed the checks for Mr. L. I hadn’t actually shown her the checks the day I took them from Lessing’s office; it was possible she’d endorsed them—or knew who had. And Lessing & Trumaine was no more than a few blocks away. But it was just too far to travel to find out the truth about Tommy Chard. At least that was the way I felt at that moment.
I headed back across the river, back to the city. On the way I thought about Trumaine, a fat, unhappy kid who’d grown into a fatter, unhappier man because he’d blown his one chance at love, because, at the age of ten or eleven, he couldn’t muster the heart to speak the unspeakable.
And now I wasn’t going to speak it either. I knew it as I drove away from Riverside Drive. There had been too much unhappiness visited upon all the actors in the Lessing case, victims and persecutors alike. The extenuating circumstances kept extenuating, further and further back into each one’s past, until the lines converged in lonely childhoods where there wasn’t any love to be found. That wasn’t the kind of damage I could fix or that a court could settle. Chard would get his due, inevitably. But not this day, not this case, not by me.
I parked in the underground garage on Fifth Street and walked back to my office. I knew I was going to have to call O’Brien sooner or later. But before I did that I wanted to pay Naomi Trimble a visit. She’d done a brave thing, a dangerous thing, coming to see me. So had her cousin Kent. I owed her an explanation of why I was backing off.
I found the tag of paper with her address on it in the top drawer of my desk. She lived on State, in the heart of the Appalachian ghetto. It was a short drive, and I had nothing but time on my hands that afternoon.
******
The house on State was a few doors up from the iron fretwork of the Elberon overpass. I parked on the west side of the street, in the heavy noonday shadow of the viaduct, then walked across to number 310. It was a frame one-story bungalow, sided in shingles, in a block of frame bungalows built on the sloping bias of the street. The shades were drawn in the two front windows of 310 and in the tiny window of the door. I stepped up on the stoop and knocked. No one answered.
Naomi Trimble had said that she worked nights, so I figured she was probably asleep. As I stood there on the stoop a woman in a floral housedress, her red hair wrapped in a scarf, stepped out of the door of 312 and stared at me with naked curiosity. She had a blotchy alcoholic’s face, puffed up around the eyes and collapsed at the cheeks where her back teeth had been pulled. She was probably in her mid-thirties, but hard drinking had turned her into an old woman.
“Y�
��all looking for Naomi?” she said, putting a hand to her brow to shield it from the sun.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You a bill collector?”
“A friend,” I said.
The woman smiled a salacious, broken-toothed smile. “A friend, huh? Well, I don’t think she’ll be seeing no friends this afternoon.”
“Why is that?”
“She run on out of here after that guy come to see her ‘round nine this morning. They had some words, I can tell you! Heard them shouting from next door.”
“What guy is this?”
“Don’t know his name. Just a young guy—good-looking but kinda mean. I seen him around the neighborhood a couple times. Used to pal with Terry Carnova and that bunch of no-goods.”
It didn’t have to be Chard, but it certainly sounded like him. I stared nervously at Naomi’s door. “Do you know when she’s coming back?”
The woman shook her head. “Way she was worked-up, she may not come back.”
“Great,” I said under my breath. To the woman I said, “Would you tell her Harry Stoner stopped by? Tell her to call me.”
“Stoner,” she repeated. “I’ll do that.”
But I had my doubts. In a couple of hours the woman probably wouldn’t be able to think about anything except hitting the glass with the bottle.
When she went back in I took a pencil and a piece of paper out of my notebook, wrote down a short message, saying I’d stopped by and would come back later that evening, and left it in the door.
******
I took Ninth Street back to town, then went south on Vine to the underground garage again. After parking the car I walked down to the Tri-City Building and Jack O’Brien’s office.
When I knocked on the door to the suite, O’Brien himself answered.
“Secretary’s gone to lunch,” he said, looking a little embarrassed at having to act as his own receptionist. “I was grabbing a bite myself, back in the office.”
“Have your lunch.”
“Fuck it,” O’Brien said miserably. “I don’t feel like eating.”
“What’s the trouble, Jack?”
He shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”
I followed him into the inner office. O’Brien sat down behind his desk and stared at a half-eaten corned-beef sandwich sitting on a paper plate in front of him.
“I love corned beef,” he said wistfully.
I smiled. “What the hell ruined your appetite?”
“Terry Carnova called me in for a conference at the Justice Center about an hour ago. I thought it was going to be more of the usual bullshit. You know, the guards aren’t treating him right, the other prisoners are giving him a hard time—that sort of thing. Instead, he tells me he wants to plead guilty to all charges. He doesn’t want me to put up a defense of any kind. He particularly doesn’t want anyone else implicated in the Lessing murder. There wasn’t any question who he meant, either. Because when I tried to argue him out of it by telling him that his pal Tommy T. was going to laugh at him when he went to the electric chair, he said that was the way he wanted it. Chard had had nothing to do with the murder; it had been between him and Lessing from the start.”
“Isn’t that what he’s always said?”
“Yes and no. He’d begun to loosen up a little over the last few weeks. To tell me a few things about his relationship with Lessing. You know—to humanize it and himself.”
I gave him a grim look. “Just how did he manage to do that?”
“Don’t start with me, Stoner,” O’Brien said irritably. “That man you’re so fond of defending was a fucking weirdo. Maybe he wasn’t always that way. Maybe he was a great guy in his off time. But not on summer nights. Not after this spring.”
“What happened this spring?”
“Terry said Lessing changed,” O’Brien said. “Before the spring he was just a guy looking for somebody to hold hands with—some kid he could play daddy to. Then something must have happened to him, something that really screwed him up, because by June he was a completely different kind of cat—sick, snarly, looking to get hurt. That’s what Terry said, anyway.” O’Brien stared disgustedly at his corned beef. “I was just winning that kid’s confidence. Now . . . it’s like day one. All he wants to do is get the thing over with and take his punishment.”
“Do you have any idea what changed his mind?”
“The fact that he got a visit from Tom Chard around eleven this morning should tell you something.”
“You think Chard threatened him?”
“I think he’s been threatening everybody. I tried to talk with Naomi Trimble early this morning, and she wouldn’t say a word about Chard or Terry. And I haven’t been able to get hold of Kitty Guinn since last night.”
“They’ve always been afraid of Chard, Jack.”
“Yeah, but this is different. It’s like Chard’s suddenly gone on a rampage, like something’s set him off.” He stared at me curiously. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you, does it?”
I’d toured Tommy T.’s world the night before, asking questions, stirring up trouble. If the kid had come back to the Underground or the Ramrod or gone to visit Coates later that night, he would have heard about me wherever he stopped.
I said, “It might.”
“Does that mean you’re onto something?”
“Nothing solid, Jack.”
O’Brien got a belligerent look in his eye, as if he intended to grill me about Chard, then gave it up with a sigh. “Aw hell, what do I care? It was a lousy case anyway. I don’t know why I got so worked up about it to begin with. I guess twenty-five years of rewriting wills and probating estates makes you a little trigger-happy when you finally do get something with flesh on it. We’d have been lucky to get Terry off with twenty-to-life.”
“So you’re going to plead him guilty?”
“What choice do I have?” O’Brien said. “The trial starts next Monday.”
27
I BROODED about what O’Brien had said on my way uptown to the Riorley. If Carnova had decided on his own to plead guilty, I wouldn’t have cared. In fact, given the situation with Len and Janey, I might have been relieved. But the fact that he’d been intimidated into doing it by Chard—and that I was part of the reason—bothered me a lot. It bothered me even more that Chard had apparently threatened Kitty Guinn and Naomi Trimble.
Tommy T. had probably been feeling pretty safe up until the night before, when I’d come barging into his world, asking leading questions. I hadn’t really tipped my hand at the two bars, but I had with Coates. I’d frightened the man badly, and I’d made him betray his friend. He might have felt guilty enough afterwards to seek Chard out and tell him that a cop was on his tail. After two and a half months of feeling safe, Tommy T. could well have had a violent reaction to that kind of news.
I told myself that Chard wasn’t my business anymore—that I’d made a decision and I’d have to live with it. But the whole thing left a taste that I knew wasn’t going to go away for a long time to come.
******
Around four that afternoon I got a call from Don Geneva.
“Look, Stoner,” he said, “I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to help you with this Tom Chard business after ail.”
I should have told him that it didn’t matter, but I didn’t. Instead I asked, “Why?”
“The family doesn’t want any more complications. If you had solid evidence, it might be different. But as it stands, they don’t want me to get involved.”
“They?”
“Meg, actually. I couldn’t get hold of Len. She was . . . ” He cleared his throat noisily. “She had a very bad reaction to this thing. It surprised me a little.”
After what Janey had said it didn’t surprise me at all. It was clear that Meg and Len were the powers behind the cover-up, and that, for different reasons, each one was prepared to sacrifice the truth to avoid further scandal.
“That’s all right,” I told Geneva. �
��I’ll handle it on my own.”
“Stoner, I wouldn’t if I were you,” he said, suddenly sounding very much the lawyer. “You don’t have any right to involve yourself in this matter. In fact, your interference could constitute illegal tampering.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said with a bitter laugh. “Are you threatening me?”
“I’m stating the facts as the family sees them.”
“All of this because her kid was gay?”
“Just stay out of it,” Geneva said, losing his cool. “You don’t have the right to pass judgment on them. Or on him.”
He hung up with a bang.
******
It was just about quitting time when I got the second call. In fact, I’d closed shop fifteen minutes early, gotten the office bottle out of the desk, and begun to drink. I drank to take the bad taste away. But it wouldn’t wash out; it kept getting worse.
When the phone rang I was feeling mean enough to say just about anything to anyone. As it turned out I didn’t do very much talking.
It was Jack O’Brien. I could tell from the traffic noise in the background that he was calling from an open-air phone booth. And it was clear from his voice that he was upset.
“Stoner, could you come over to . . . ” He went off the line for a second, and I heard someone else talking excitedly.
“I’m sorry,” he said when he came back on. “The address is 4678 Baltimore. Can you get over here right away?”
“Why?” I said, lifting the glass of booze to my lips.
“It’s Kitty Guinn.” A truck rumbled past him on the street, and I couldn’t hear what he said next.
“Say again?”
“I said she’s dead,” he shouted over the roar of the truck.
“Dead?” I put the glass down on my desktop.
“So is the other kid.”
“What kid?”
“Kent Holliday.”
******
It took me about twenty minutes to make it to Baltimore Avenue in South Fairmount. I didn’t have any trouble finding the right address—there was an ambulance in the driveway and patrol cars up and down the block. Guys in work clothes, just home from second shift, their anxious-looking wives, their excited kids, were standing on porches, staring fixedly at the doddering frame two-story with all the cops inside it. I parked three doors up and walked back down to the crime-scene barricade.
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