by Val Bruech
I looked at Malone expectantly.
“The third guy…” He pointed his index fingers at me like they were twin guns. “Was Sam’s son Harry. He fed Cooper the drugs…killed his best friend.”
I felt Sam’s presence at the small table. I looked at my friend, bewildered. His eyes slid away, then came back and met mine with an expression that managed to encompass both sorrow and hope.
“Al thought we hit the jackpot.” Malone’s words floated above me like cumulus clouds in a summer sky. “Problem was, Harry was just a college kid, barely survivin’ on a part-time job. Sam was a big-shot, had a lot to lose if his kid got indicted for DIH.”
Drug-induced homicide.
“Tite reeled him in,” Larry continued. “I handled the lowlifes, but I wasn’t going to mess with a lawyer. Sam was Al’s only customer.”
I shook my head, not wanting to believe but knowing Malone’s story was irrefutable. Sam faded away.
“How much did he pay you?”
“Twenty-five hundred a month. Al and I split everything down the middle.”
“How long?”
“About three years, till your friend decided he didn’t want to play anymore.”
“You remember what month Sam started paying you?”
Malone scratched his head with a grimy hand. “I s’pose this is important?”
“No, I’m wasting my time and yours.”
“Okay, okay. Don’t get huffy. Lessee, Hart kicked in spring, we wised up to the Kendall kid pretty soon. So probably June three years ago.”
Sam had written the first check on the First Midwest account the last day of May three years ago.
“How’d Al get into Sam’s chambers?”
“He went to the courthouse the day before when it was open. He waited till Sam left for the day, then picked the lock to his office and made himself at home. We had cell phones so if anything went wrong he could call but it all went according to Hoyle. I can imagine the expression on the judge’s face when he walked into his chambers the next morning and saw Al.”
Malone grinned like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. The fact that I had saved this moron from certain death was singularly depressing.
“I don’t think Al in his wildest dreams planned to murder your judge. He was gonna push the same old buttons and Sam would cave, same as always. It just didn’t go down that way.”
The apparition of Sam being savagely beaten surfaced again. This time the attacker had a face. I rubbed my eyes to make it go away.
“What I can’t figure is why Al told you anything about the cases. Why didn’t he just feed you some b.s. so you’d go far, far away?” Malone shook his head in wonder. “What a fuck-up.”
“He liked playing with fire,” I answered. “The closer to the flame, the better.”
Hmmm.
“Now that I think about it, Al kinda lost his edge when you started poking around,” Malone said. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand and I could see his brain trying mightily to fit the pieces together. “Hey, were you…” He leered, then checked himself. I gave him a look that dared him to continue.
“Um, that about do it, Marshfield?”
“As far as you and me, yup, we’re done.” I removed the five-dollar bill from my pocket and slid it back to him across the table. “You’re fired as a client, Malone. I hope someday I can forget I ever met you.” I stood. “And don’t worry, this conversation’s privileged.”
I turned on my heel and walked out into a still-dark morning.
CHAPTER FORTY
The fire at the trailer and Tite’s death were major news, but the rest of the story remained a mystery to the general population. Unfortunately, my presence at the scene fell into the “news” category, but my role wasn’t disclosed. Reporters jammed the phone lines and camped out in the lobby of my office building; after two days of their clamoring, I was desperate to be somewhere else.
The state had agreed to release Ellen Righetti without further hearings, but it would take a couple weeks for the paperwork to make its way through channels. I decided our former client needed a visit. Betty called as I was making the arrangements. We hadn’t spoken since the day she gave me her records, which seemed like a lifetime ago. I owed her an explanation so I invited her along for the ride downstate.
“Hello, Susan.” Sam’s widow slid into the passenger seat. “Your invitation couldn’t have come at a better time.”
“How so?”
“The police interviewed Harry about Cooper’s death.” Betty’s hands massaged each other like two high school sophomores on their third date.
I sighed. The only way the cops would know about Harry was through Malone. The sergeant must have cut a deal. I wondered if it included his keeping quiet about the blackmail scheme so the police would save face. Sometimes the very folks who are paid to administer justice tie her up and lock her away.
“The statute of limitations hasn’t run yet. Harry could still be prosecuted.”
“They might have witness problems.” Malone had said that the only person who knew that Harry gave Cooper the drugs was long gone. Hopefully, he’d stay that way. Malone’s testimony, if it ever came to that, would not be allowed because it was hearsay, totally based on what the third party had told him.
“They didn’t arrest Harry, but they will if they decide to bring charges. Harry told me the whole story after the cops finished with him. He’s been beating himself up over this since it happened. I suspect he’s actually relieved now that it’s not his own dirty little secret anymore.”
“He didn’t confess, did he?”
“Of course not. He didn’t live in his father’s house all those years for nothing.”
We hummed down Interstate 55 in a melancholy silence. Miles of bare farmland stretched away on both sides of the road, waiting for seed.
“Has Ross spoken to you?” I asked.
“He spoke to me after they interviewed Harry.” She fingered the scarf that looped around her neck. “He told me that Tite blackmailed Sam until he refused to pay anymore.”
Her silence was eloquent. I could forget about trying to break the news gently.
“We can’t hold one mistake against him,” I said softly.
“My son made one mistake. My husband made another one and repeated it, month after month, for three years.” There was a sting in her voice I had never heard before. “How the hell…”
I glanced at my passenger. Betty was slumped against the window, her face as pale and fragile as the dead leaves you rake up in spring after they’ve decayed all winter. “This hurts to the bottom of my soul.”
I knew a restaurant at the next exit. I pulled off the interstate, drove into the lot and turned off the engine. “When you trust someone and then they betray your trust really deeply, you wonder if you can ever take that leap again.”
She stared straight out the windshield. “You wonder about a lot of things.”
“How about some coffee?” I asked.
She was a statute in the passenger seat. With the engine turned off, the car turned chilly in a hurry. “Okay.”
The restaurant was empty in the late morning. It was the kind of place that either hadn’t changed since the seventies or someone had spent a fortune re-creating that look. We took a window booth and gave our order to the waitress.
“I have something for you,” Betty said, digging an envelope from her purse and pushing it over to me. “Two and a half years ago, Sam and I spent a long weekend in New York.” Her lips tightened into a pencil-thin line. “We were celebrating our anniversary.”
I pulled out a half dozen four-by-six color photographs. The first was of Sam and Betty at the base of the Statue of Liberty. The second memorialized Sam at Yankee Stadium. The third pictured both of them atop the Empire State building. A different date was imprinted on the face of each picture: 9/14/12, 9/15/12, 9/16/12.
Ironclad. Except I knew the date could be changed at the touch of a button.
The waitress brought our orders.
“You’re sure this was two-and-a-half years ago, not three-and-a-half or one-and-a-half?”
“Oh, yes. For some stupid reason, I kept the airline itinerary and some other souvenirs with the photos. It was two thousand-twelve.”
She took a grateful sip of coffee while regarding me over the rim of the cup. “Give it up, Susan. Why is September fourteen, two thousand-twelve so important?”
If Sam was in New York on that date he could not have been the hit and run driver who took Anthony Cullerton’s life. I let that percolate, then recounted to Betty what Mr. Cullerton had told me about his grandson and Sam’s money orders.
“I checked what Cullerton told me against your records. The timing and amount of Sam’s withdrawals from the Great Midwest account coincide perfectly with the payments to Tite after Cooper’s death, then the withdrawals doubled in October when Mr. Cullerton started receiving money from Sam. Cullerton never told me how much the payments were.”
I leaned toward her, elbows on the table, and continued. “Sam was balancing the scales. He was giving money to someone he felt deserved it to offset what he paid Tite for blackmail.”
Betty’s fingers wrapped around her coffee cup. “I thought I knew him as well as you can know another person. How could he keep all this from me?”
The question hung in the air. She took a big breath that caught in her throat.
“Sam loved you and Harry and Gina,” I said slowly. “Sometimes when love is that strong it makes people do things that seem… unfathomable. Like you said, he was trying to protect all of you, in his own way.”
She stirred her coffee with a tarnished spoon. “That’s what we want to think, dear. Maybe he was really protecting himself.”
We again fell into the palpable silence that was becoming a hallmark of this excursion. By the time I remembered my chocolate ice cream, it had turned to a brown puddle in the bowl.
“Maybe it’s time we allowed Sam to be a human being like the rest of us,” I said.
She rotated her coffee mug in a small, endless circle on the table, not making eye contact. “I need to think about that.”
Betty wasn’t allowed to accompany me into the penitentiary. She wanted some time alone anyway, so I dropped her off at a park on the outskirts of Collinsville where the prison was located.
If it’s possible for someone in a shapeless orange jumpsuit to look radiant, Ellen Righetti accomplished the task. She had received the news of her impending release and was working on her resume, seeking a position helping ex-cons. She was quick to grasp my telling of events and Benton’s complex machinations. I’d never before offered a job to a client but I sensed in her the quickness of mind and diligence that could smooth out the bumps in my office. She seemed thrilled with the offer and thanked me, beaming widely.
The city park where I left Betty was five square blocks, flat and grassy with a couple of playgrounds, a baseball field, and tennis courts. I parked and spotted my friend near the center of the park and walked over. She was standing by a community garden: a hodgepodge of plots in different stages of care and growth, surrounded by solid wooden benches. It was a chilly day and the sun spent most of its time hiding behind rolling grey clouds. Occasionally the clouds broke and the world was bathed in a rosy hue. When Betty greeted me there was a trace of brightness in her eyes that hadn’t been there earlier.
“I’m thinking you have one deliriously happy client,” she said.
I nodded.
“You should put out a press release about Ellen Righetti. Maybe that would put a stop to this ‘Solicitor of Death’ business.”
I flinched at her reference to the media’s sobriquet for me since they discovered my presence at the scene of two recent homicides.
“Yeah, not good for business.”
“Any truth to it?” Her eyebrows rose in a question.
“I’m not ready to talk about what happened at the trailer, Betty. Maybe, in a while.”
She looked at me like she was searching for something but couldn’t find it. She slipped her arm through mine and we made our way back to the car. We settled in for the long ride back to Joliet, most of which was spent in a silence that was comfortable but profuse with thought. I dropped her at her house. The front door opened as she approached and Harry welcomed his mother with a hug.
I drove around aimlessly. “Alone Again, Naturally” wouldn’t stop playing in my head. Gilbert O’Sullivan, 1972. I couldn’t remember the words so I just hummed the melody.
THE END
Val Bruech
Valerie grew up in Chicago where she rode her bike to the library to check out mysteries. After law school, the opportunity to practice criminal defense gave her first-hand experience with wrongful verdicts, pathological liars and unsolved homicides. All of these themes are woven together in her novel, Judicious Murder. In the course of representing the unjustly accused for more than twenty years in Oregon and Illinois, she learned that the true story is usually the one buried the deepest and most difficult to uncover.
When she’s not writing she’s biking around Portland, Or., hiking in the Columbia River Gorge or swimming. Fur, the feline in Judicious Murder, is modeled after Izzy, a shelter rescue cat. Izzy had a red “x” on her cage which meant it was to be her last day on the planet. That was sixteen years ago. She and Val have lived happily together since.
Valerie’s been published in Oregon Coast Magazine and took first place in the Portland Japanese Garden writing contest. She’s a member of Willamette Writers where she served as secretary for two years.