Extenuating Circumstances

by Jonathan Valin

  But by four-thirty I was beginning to run out of patience—and steam. After what I’d seen in Lytle Park, I knew I was going to have a long day ahead of me, and I wasn’t going to be good for anything unless I got a few hours rest. I was thinking about going back to the Riorley and catching some sleep on the office couch when I got lucky.

  Walnut was dark on the east side except around the Deco’s front entrance, where the pavement was lighted. So I didn’t spot him until he was almost at the door. But as soon as he stepped into the light, I could see that the man walking down the sidewalk was Chard. He was still grinning that vain, pretty, malevolent grin. There was no sign of the red Volvo.

  I glanced at my watch, which was showing four forty-five, then back at the door. There was no sense in making a run at him. He’d be in the lobby before I got across the street—or halfway down the block. And I was in no shape to catch a twenty-year-old kid on foot. No, it was better if he went in and up to Coates’s apartment. I stood a good chance of cornering him there if I could take him by surprise.

  As I was thinking it out Chard pressed the buzzer, and a few moments later Coates let him in. I gave him a few more seconds to clear the lobby, then stepped out into the streetlight, crossed Walnut, and walked down half a block to the small dark alley running between the Deco and the office building to its south.

  I had to jump a couple of times before I caught the ladder to the Deco fire escape. It swung down with a rusty creak that echoed up and down the alleyway. I stepped onto the first rung and started climbing.

  The thing was rickety and it was dark between the buildings. Twice I stepped in planters that tenants had placed on landings outside their windows. By the time I got to the fourth floor my eyes had adjusted to the scarce moonlight and the first dim light of dawn.

  The fourth-floor landing ran virtually the length of the building, from the bedroom window of Coates’s apartment to the living-room window of the apartment in the rear. From where I was standing Coates’s window was about ten feet away.

  Very carefully I walked the short distance to the bedroom window. Crouching down, I peered around the brick wall into the bedroom. A light was on on a bureau across from a walnut bed and bedstead. There was a desk to the right, with a fan buzzing on it, and a door opposite the window, probably leading to a bathroom. To the left was the door leading to the living room. It was closed.

  Coates had left the window open a crack—wide enough for me to get a grip on it and slowly push it up. I hoped that the buzz of the desk fan would cover whatever noise I made, but the window opened easily. A moment later I was standing beside the bedstead.

  Like the living room, the place smelled of rotted food and unwashed flesh. Here and there Coates had hung photographs on the wall—of him in a mortar board and graduation gown; of a fat, smiling older woman with a sad look in her hooded eyes; of a young Lester Coates dressed in a business suit, eighty pounds lighter and ages younger than he was now. Over the bedboard, high on the wall, a twisting, tormented Jesus was daily dying for poor Lester’s sins.

  I went over to the living-room door and put an ear to one of the panels. I could just barely hear conversation over the buzz of the fan on the desktop. Nobody was shouting. Nobody was upset. And that was good.

  I took the Gold Cup out of my shoulder holster, cocked it, unlocked it, and stepped back. With the pistol in my right hand, I gripped the doorknob with my left, turned it, and pulled the door open.

  They were sitting right across from me, on the beaten couch—Coates nearest to the bedroom door, Chard on the other end of the couch next to a floor lamp. I stepped into the room, pulling the door shut behind me.

  Chard leapt to his feet. He would have bolted for the door if I hadn’t been holding the gun on him.

  Coates stared at the kid with astonishment.

  “What?” he said in confusion. Then he looked over his shoulder at where Chard was looking. When he spotted me he clapped a hand to his fat, repulsive mouth and whimpered out loud.

  The kid’s angel’s face turned into a mask of rage. The transformation couldn’t have been more startling or complete if he’d actually sprouted horns from the knobs above his eyebrows. He bared his teeth like a cornered animal and growled at Coates:

  “You’ve done this to me, you fucker! You set me up!” His voice had a feral edge to it—a sharp, unappeasable ferocity, like the snapping of teeth.

  Coates started sputtering. “Tommy, I didn’t. I swear on all the saints I didn’t!”

  The fat man hopped to his feet with that astonishing agility that some fat men seem to have. He turned to me and raised his arms, as if in prayer.

  “Please, tell him,” he said, coming at me with a desperate look on his face. “Tell him I didn’t do it!”

  “Stand away!” I shouted at the fat man.

  But he kept coming.

  I stepped to the right, out of Coates’s path. But the kid was on the move too. As I struggled with Coates, Chard came up behind him and whipped his right arm at the back of Coates’s bald head. I saw the glint of metal, and then the fat man’s heavy-lidded eyes literally popped open. Coates clapped both hands on the back of his head and shrieked—his face melting with terror and pain. He took one of his hands away from his head and stared at it in horror. The palm was covered with blood. His eyelids fluttered and his flesh turned white.

  “Oh sweet Jesus!” he cried, and collapsed against me with a groan.

  “Get off me, you fat son-of-a-bitch!” I shouted, trying to push him back.

  Before I could free my arms Chard whipped his left hand into the floor lamp, knocking it over. The bulb went out with a blue flash, leaving the room in darkness. I heard the kid scramble across the tile. A second later the front door flew open, and an ingot of hall light fell onto the floor like a dead weight. Chard was through the doorway immediately and down the hall.

  I managed to push Coates off me. As he slumped to the floor I ran across the room into the hall. But by then Tommy T. was down the staircase, on his way to the street. I stood in that peeling hallway, listening to his footsteps in the stairwell, and cursed at the top of my voice:

  “Goddamn! Son-of-a-bitch!”

  Nobody on the floor even opened a door. Not for me or for Lester, who was still groaning in the living room.

  I locked the automatic, holstered it, and walked back into the dark living room. I could just make out Lester’s bulk on the left side of the room. I could smell urine, where Lester had wet himself. He was groaning steadily. I stepped over him and opened the bedroom door.

  I glanced at the tormented Jesus above the bedstead, then went over to the desk, picked up a phone, and called an ambulance.

  30

  I MANAGED to find a light bulb in the bathroom closet and a towel to stanch Coates’s head wound. By the time the life squad arrived Lester was sitting up on the living-room couch—the bloody towel pressed to the back of his head, his bathrobe reeking of piss. He’d recovered enough of his composure by then to think ahead, and the one thing foremost in his mind was Tommy T.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” he said with dismal lucidity as one of the paramedics put a compress bandage on the back of his head. “I’ve got to leave town.”

  “You gotta go to the hospital first,” the paramedic said grimly. “That’s a razor cut, and it’s deep.”

  Coates laughed feebly. “He carries a straight razor in his pocket.”

  “Who does that?” the other paramedic said.

  Coates didn’t answer him. Instead, he looked directly at me. There was blood smeared on his cheeks and down his robe and neck. “He knows about you.”

  “You told him?”

  Coates nodded. “Something else. He’s going to leave. I don’t know why, but he said he was going to leave soon. He’s getting money. I don’t know from where, but he’s getting a lot of money, and he’s going to leave.”

  “You still think he didn’t have anything to do with Lessing’s murder?”

&nb
sp; “What difference does it make what I think?” Coates said with a bitter laugh. “I wouldn’t live long enough to say what I think. He thinks I’ve betrayed him and he’ll kill me.” His mouth began to tremble. “I’ve got to get out.”

  “Just calm down, mister,” one of the paramedics said.

  “Two kids were killed this afternoon on the west side,” I said to Coates. “Kent Holliday and Kitty Guinn.”

  Coates looked shocked. “I know them.”

  “Chard made threats against both of them.”

  “It wasn’t Tommy,” Coates said defensively. “He was with me this afternoon.”

  “I’ve heard that before, Coates.”

  “Christ, why would I lie about it now! I was with him.”

  I stared at the man—at his blood-smeared, exhausted, hopeless-looking face—and knew that he wasn’t lying, not this time. I also knew that it didn’t make a difference. Chard might not have done the actual killing, but he’d driven the girl to it. And I’d let it happen.

  ******

  I caught a few hours sleep on the office couch, enough to keep the staggers away. Around eight I got up and drank half a pot of coffee. It was too early to call O’Brien—to see if he’d gotten anywhere with Finch. But it wasn’t too early to stake out the plastics shop. I grabbed my sport coat from the rack by the desk and started out the door.

  It was another misty morning, sticky and hot, with the promise of fiercer heat later in the day. I’d already broken into a sweat by the time I pulled up to the door of Lessing & Trumaine. I got out of the Pinto and walked over to the fenced lot. Trumaine’s red Volvo was parked in the back, in the stall with his name on it.

  I went around to the front of the building and into the anteroom. Bronze-haired, chatty Millie was sitting at her desk, typing on her word processor. She looked up at me and smiled.

  “Long time no see,” she said in her jangly voice.

  “Long time,” I said. “Is Len in?”

  “Nope. He came and went.”

  “His car’s outside.”

  “Mrs. L. picked him up about ten minutes ago. Mr. T. said they had to go on over to the lawyers’ to settle up some of Mr. L.’s estate.” Her face fell when she mentioned Lessing. “I still get sad every time I think about it.”

  “Did Len say when he’d be back?”

  “Around noon, I think.”

  I sat down on the chair across from her desk. “I guess I’ll have to catch him after lunch.”

  “Well, don’t expect him to be real friendly,” Millie said acidly. “He was in here before I was this morning, looking like he slept in his clothes and acting mean and nasty. He stayed that way till he left.”

  There was a chance that he had slept in his clothes, just as I had. And spending part of the night with Chard would have ruined anyone’s mood. “Did he say why he was upset?”

  “You think he’d ever tell me the whole of it?” she said scoffingly, as if Len were her own unruly child. “He’ll just fume and bark at every little thing till he works it out of his system. Like this morning he was all p.o.’d ‘cause I don’t have the accounts caught up from last week, when he knows darn well I’ve been busy with the inventory. Then, to top it off, he starts asking me fool questions about some checks I signed from four months ago.” Millie literally threw up her hands in disgust. “Now how the heck am I supposed to get the accounts caught up if I gotta take time out to go over the books from four months ago?”

  I didn’t know if the Lighthouse checks had led to the meeting with Chard, but I’d mentioned them the day before—and Len had claimed that Millie had signed them, rather than Janey.

  I said to the girl, “I might have put that check idea in Len’s mind. Remember those checks I took from Mr. Lessing’s desk, the ones made out to the Lighthouse?”

  “It wasn’t those, “Millie said flatly. “I didn’t have nothing to do with those.”

  “You didn’t sign those checks?” I said with surprise.

  “Heck no.”

  “Then which checks was Len talking about?”

  Some of the high jinks went out of Millie’s face. “Mr. Stoner, I don’t know if I should talk about it,” she said, sounding secretarial.

  I tried smiling at her. “It’ll stay between us.”

  “I don’t know,” she said again.

  “Look, Millie,” I said, putting a bit of urgency in my voice, “Len may be in a bind. I’d like to help him out. But I need your cooperation.”

  She ducked her head. “I signed some checks for Mr. L., back in May.”

  “When in May?”

  “Starting the first week.”

  “There was more than one?”

  “One a week, right through the end of the month.”

  “Who were they made out to?”

  She didn’t answer directly. “They was just the usual handouts. I done it before for Mr. L., when he was too busy to be bothered. And Mrs. Lessing said specifically not to bother him about it, so I just went ahead and made them out.”

  “Janey authorized these checks?”

  “Not her. The other Mrs. Lessing. His mom. She called to the office and said to give this boy a check for two hundred dollars if he come in. So I did. She called again the next week, and I done it again. Right through to the beginning of June.”

  “Did Lessing ever ask about these checks?”

  “I mentioned them to him myself, first of June. You know—kind of kidding him about all the money he was spending on this one charity case.”

  “And what did he say?”

  She shrugged. “He didn’t say nothing right away. But later on that day he said everything was okay.”

  ******

  I got Meg Lessing’s address on Sunset Avenue from Millie. It was a street in Highland Heights, just a few miles from Covington. Before leaving I asked Millie to whom Mrs. Lessing had wanted the checks made. I already knew, but I wanted to hear her say it.

  “Well, I guess it don’t hurt to tell you,” Millie said. “His name was Tom T. Chard. I remember ‘cause he always wanted me to put that ‘T.’ in the middle there. He seemed to get a kick out of that.”

  I’ll bet, I said to myself. To Millie I said, “Did you tell Len all of this this morning?”

  She nodded.

  “He never asked about it before today?”

  “Nope. Why should he? He didn’t have nothing to do with that kid.”

  He didn’t then, I said to myself. But he did now.

  I thanked Millie for her help, got up, and went to the door. “Tell Len I need to talk to him, Millie. Tell him it’s important.”

  She promised she would.

  31

  IT TOOK me about ten minutes to get to Sunset Avenue, driving due west through the fringes of Covington, where the city dies off in blocks of Quonset liquor stores and the concrete plazas of used-car lots. I took Devou Park Road up into Highland Heights, winding through sun-streaked, rolling acres of parkland to the bluffs that ring the city.

  Sunset Avenue was on the very top of the tallest bluff—an exclusive street with a spectacular view of the river and downtown Cincinnati. Unlike the upwardly mobile French Quarter houses of Riverside Drive, the homes on Sunset were older, more typically suburban, less fashionably modern ranch and split-level, fed by cement curlicues of driveway and surrounded by great green swatches of well-tended lawn. These were homes meant for family living—kids, dogs, pool parties, outdoor barbecues with the neighbors. The good life, circa 1960. Riverside was strictly eighties—self-contained, glitzy, easy to keep.

  The differences struck me as significant, but then I was thinking about the difference between Meg Lessing’s world and that of her son—a difference she’d seemingly discovered months before his death. There was no other way to account for the series of two-hundred-dollar checks she’d authorized to Tom T. Chard—in Lessing’s name. They might have been blackmail payoffs; they might have been hush money. But I had trouble believing that it was just good old-fashioned
generosity that had impelled a woman like Meg Lessing to fork out two hundred bucks a week to a kid like Tommy T.

  The fact that she’d paid the boy off with Lessing’s funds, rather than using her own checkbook, was also interesting. It could have been that she’d wanted to disguise the extortion plausibly as charitable contributions—to protect herself and her son as well.

  The woman’s home was midway down the block, a split-level with a redwood deck in back, sprung above the cliff face like a diving board. The house proper was sided in cedar shingles that had weathered to a powdery pewter gray. A long driveway ran up to the front door, cutting across a bluegrass lawn whipped by the lazy loops of sprinklers. A plaster Negro jockey nestled in the grass near the front door, stiff and wild-eyed as a jackrabbit.

  I parked the Pinto in the shade of a carport and walked up to the stoop.

  I knocked, and a moment later Meg Lessing opened the door. Behind her a short hall opened onto a stark, sunlit living room, furnished gravely in ladder-back and linen. The room ended in a fieldstone wall with a fireplace built into it. Above the fireplace was a large painting of the woman standing with her hand on the shoulder of a burly silver-haired man—Meg Lessing and what I took to be her husband, Tom. The man in the portrait was smiling flaccidly, like a well-oiled drunk.

  “I need to talk to you, Mrs. Lessing,” I said to the woman.

  She stared at me defiantly with those cold, stony eyes. Her fingers played nervously with the gold cross around her neck.

  The past few months had clearly taken their toll on Meg Lessing, just as they had on her daughter-in-law. She’d lost a good deal of weight, enough for it to show in her face and figure. But she hadn’t lost her bearings, as Janey had. She looked every bit as tough as she had on the night I’d first met her—the night that her son’s bloody car had been found in the Terminal lot. It gave me pause to think that she’d known about Chard at that very moment—and hadn’t said a word to me or to the police. In fact, she’d wanted me out of the case—wanted to “keep it in the family.”