by A. W. Gray
“Yes.” No expression in Leslie’s voice, eyes vacant and matter-of-fact.
“Did Susan take them, too?”
“All the kids did. Susan probably more than any of us.”
“Did Mr. Rathermore ever mess around with Susan that you remember?”
“Yes, ma’am. Never alone, but a few times she’d be with some other girls and they’d all … you know.”
“Get into bed with Mr. Rathermore?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Sharon swallowed hard. “Leslie, have you talked to Susan lately?”
“Sure. Just last night,” Leslie said. Curt Schlee lifted his head in shock. Likely he hasn’t reviewed today’s tapes, Sharon thought.
“Where is Susan, Leslie?” Sharon said. “She’s not in school.”
Leslie raised her eyebrows. “Didn’t you know?”
Sharon and Black exchanged confused looks. “I’m afraid we don’t,” Sharon said.
Virginia Schlee broke in. “Susan Rathermore is in the hospital. Do you know Havenrest?”
Sharon nodded. Havenrest was Dallas’ most uppity-up psychiatric hospital. Lovely grounds, lawns like carpets, tall, beautiful trees. Bars on many of the windows. Many padded cells.
“Two days after her father died,” Virginia said, “Susan cut herself with a razor. Slashed her wrists and arms. She’s been at Havenrest ever since.”
Black gave Sharon a questioning look. She nodded as she said, “It’s typical. Classic sex-abuse victim, self-mutilation. They get violent with guilt.” She mentally included Sheila Winston as an expert witness for the defense. Sheila despised expert witnesses because most of them would say anything they were paid to, but she’d jump at the chance to get into the Rathermore case once Sharon filled her in on the details. Sheila will testify without charging a fee, Sharon thought.
“Mrs. Schlee, I’ve got to ask you,” Black said. “You seem to know a lot about what went on over at the Rathermores’.”
Virginia laughed mirthlessly. She bent forward to glare around Leslie at Curt Schlee, then faced Black. “We didn’t know what was going on over there,” Virginia said, “or Leslie never would have been involved. But our daughter got friendly with Midge to begin with because Curt thought it politically correct to have Bill Rathermore for a buddy. Curt pushed Leslie into the relationship with Midge. Thought it would be nice for our kid to be one of the Rathermore children’s playmates. What he didn’t know was that it wasn’t exactly Midge who wanted to play with Leslie. It was Midge’s father.”
“Leslie, these things you’re telling,” Black said. “Have the police and district attorney known about them all along?”
Leslie looked at her mother. The teenager’s upper lip quivered, and for the first time Sharon thought that the girl might break down.
Virginia placed a hand on her daughter’s arm. “I’ll answer that one, Mr. Black,” Virginia said. “With a question. Since the homicide detective, in cahoots with my husband, concocted the story about Leslie’s having only dated one of the boys, what do you think?”
Black lowered his head, muttering. Sharon wrote on her notepad, “Stan Green is a lying horse’s ass,” then scratched through that and wrote instead, “Prosecution’s knowledge of kids having sex w/Bill Rathermore—investigate.”
“Leslie,” Sharon said, “what about Mrs. Rathermore? Did she know that Mr. Rathermore was messing around with those girls?”
Leslie touched the front of her honey blond hair. “She was right there in the house. While some of the kids were in back with Mr. Rathermore, the rest of us would be in the living room talking to Mrs. Rathermore and doing some dope. Or drinking, some of the kids. I never drank any.” She glanced at her mother as though abstaining from alcohol was a point in her favor.
The thought that there were people in the world like Linda Rathermore made Sharon absolutely ill. “Did Mrs. Rathermore ever participate in the sex?” Sharon asked.
“Not with any of the girls,” Leslie said.
Sharon turned a page on her notepad. “With the boys who came over?”
“I never saw her,” Leslie said. “But I’ve heard.”
“But you can’t remember any specific time when Mrs. Rathermore might have had sex with any of the boys?”
Leslie seemed deep in thought. “No, ma’am.”
“So you couldn’t testify to that.”
“I don’t suppose,” Leslie said.
Sharon explained to Virginia Schlee, “Leslie couldn’t testify to anything someone told her. It would be hearsay.”
Virginia permitted herself a little smile. “My husband’s a lawyer, Miss Hays.”
Curt Schlee seemed to shrink. At the moment it was easy to forget that he was a lawyer, or anything else other than a jerk who’d sacrificed his own child’s well-being for political reasons. Finally Sharon said, “Who told you about Mrs. Rathermore and the boys, Leslie?”
“Midge. Susan, too, I think.”
The answer didn’t help. The defense team had already made up its mind that putting Midge on the stand would be suicide, and with Susan currently in Havenrest’s rubber room, it didn’t appear that she would be much good as a witness, either. “No one else told you about it?” Sharon said.
“No, ma’am.”
The corners of Sharon’s mouth tugged in disappointment. She expelled a breath.
“Let’s talk about,” Black said, “when you met those boys at the Rathermores’.”
“Troy and Chris,” Sharon added.
Black cleared his throat and crossed his legs. “The first time you ever saw them in your life was at the Rathermores’?”
Leslie shook her head. “No, I’d seen those dudes. Around at some dances.”
“But you’d never talked to them?”
“No, sir. I was over one day and Midge and those two guys were doing a line in the living room. Susan was there, too.”
“What did y’all talk about?” Black said.
“Just stuff, mostly. Midge was always talking about how she hated Mr. Rathermore. She said that to everybody, so much that the kids just thought she was a crybaby. Nobody paid much attention to her.”
Leslie paused. The only sounds were Curt Schlee’s loud breathing and the scratching of Sharon’s pen on her notepad. Leslie went on, “Midge was going on and on about how he made her do this and that, the way she always did, and the first thing you know this Chris dude goes, ‘Well, if you hate your old man so much, why don’t you just kill him?’”
Sharon felt a quick chill. Black exhaled through his nose before saying, “You’re sure he said that to her?”
“I was right there,” Leslie said.
“It’s important the way it happened. You’re sure Midge didn’t come up with the idea first?”
Leslie wrinkled her nose. “Midge’s elevator doesn’t go all the way up, don’t you know that?”
“We’ve spent time with her,” Sharon said.
“Well, she never thought anything up on her own,” Leslie said. “Do you know that the boys used to line up on her?”
Sharon swallowed bile as she nodded.
“Well, she wasn’t hanging around asking them to. But Midge was so dumb, anything anybody told her to do … the guys would just go, ‘Wouldn’t you like to lay down in the backseat?’ And Midge would do it like she was a trick dog or something. A guy told me one time, he was in one of those lineups, he told me that while they were, you know, doing it, that Midge was chewing gum and humming a tune.”
More classic abused-child behavior, Sharon thought. While it was happening, Midge would shut it all out by drifting away to fantasy land.
“When Chris asked her about killing her daddy,” Black said, “what did Midge tell him?”
“Nothing, right then,” Leslie said. “That was a couple of days later.”
�
��You mean, when you kids were over at the Rathermores’ another time?”
“Right. Me and this other girl had been in back with Mr. Rathermore.” Leslie shot a guilty look at her father, who cringed. “We came out,” she said, “and that time it was just the three of them, Midge and those two dudes. Chris did all the talking. He had a pad and pen, just like you.” She nodded at Sharon, who quit taking notes and listened. Leslie was a pretty, perfectly groomed teenager, her posture trim and perfect as if she were discussing plans for the homecoming dance.
“Anyway,” Leslie said, “Chris was asking Midge all kinds of stuff. Like, did she know how much money she’d get if Mr. Rathermore got wasted, stuff like that. He asked her for the code to the burglar alarm. She gave it to him and he wrote it down.”
Black frowned. “Sharon, didn’t the Leonard boy testify—?”
“That he got the information at a shopping mall,” Sharon said. “Why would … ?”
“So we’d think there weren’t any witnesses to Midge givin’ out the alarm code.” He returned his attention to Leslie. “This could be a problem, Leslie. If you testified, the prosecutor would ask you, if you heard all this, why didn’t you tell somebody? Call the police or …” He trailed off.
Leslie rolled her eyes. “We didn’t think they were serious. Besides, none of us liked Mr. Rathermore. He was just this horny old dude that gave us dope if we’d let him mess around. I don’t think anybody cared if they did kill him.” There was no apology whatsoever in the teenager’s voice. If those other kids were going to commit murder, so what? What have we come to? Sharon thought.
Russ Black thoughtfully pinched his chin. “Leslie, one more time. You’re sure it was the boys that gave Midge the idea? She never thought of it on her own?”
Leslie crossed her legs and rocked one foot up and down. “No way. Midge was just going along with those dudes.”
Sharon remembered a case she’d handled at the DA’s office and wrote herself a note. The case had to do with a group of teenage boys robbing a service station, and one kid’s defense that the others had talked him into it. Sharon was pretty sure that just going along with the crowd didn’t absolve Midge of guilt, but she was going to look it up. If nothing else, the fact that these two smart boys had talked dull-witted Midge into hiring them to kill her father should make some points with a jury.
Black now said, “So we’ll be sure. These boys were sitting right there in front of you, and they were talking about murdering this man, and you never thought to tell anybody about it?”
Leslie seemed to think that one over. She wet her lips. “It sounds weird to older people, I guess. But you’ve got to understand, the kids we know talk about killing people all the time. It just wasn’t any big deal.”
Sharon exchanged nary a word with Russell Black as the two of them walked back to the car, strolling underneath fifty-foot elms and sycamores shading a hillside covered with dark green English ivy. The landscape below them descended to Lakeside Drive, and across the street an even steeper grade formed the eastern bank of Turtle Creek. The creek was swollen from the torrents of spring, which had ended the first week in June, the murky water running deep and silent on its way to the Trinity River. In late summer the flow would be down to the barest of trickles.
Sharon was so caught up in her thoughts that she barely noticed when Russ Black stepped up to open the car door for her. She sat in the passenger seat, swung her legs inside, and cringed slightly as her boss slammed the door with a solid thunk. Sharon pictured Leslie Schlee as she’d sat demurely between her parents and told of bloody murder. A second image flashed in Sharon’s mind, this picture of Stan Green and Curt Schlee as they schemed to make the girl’s story fit both of their needs. The detective needed a conviction, and Schlee wanted to keep his family name out of the paper. If the concocted story happened to be in Leslie’s best interests, all the better. If not, so what?
The Buick rocked as Black got in behind the wheel. He reached around to insert the key in the steering column and turned the switch. Dash lights glowed red and the seat belt warning bell ding-dinged. Black paused with his thumb ready to turn the starter switch, and swiveled his head toward Sharon. His expression was grim.
“Over twenty years,” he said, “I been tryin’ cases against Dallas County. Every time they pull one of these shenanigans I think I’ve seen ’em all. Then they come up with a new one. Just dealin’ with those people, sometimes I feel like I need a bath. All these mixed-up kids killin’ people, that’s bad enough. But it’s really not the kids’ fault. That homicide cop Green. Milton Breyer. Leslie’s daddy, too. They’re the ones that ought to be in jail.”
Black started the engine and the Buick cruised down the drive into the street. Sharon turned her face to the window and swallowed a lump from her throat.
27
The American Airlines Boeing 727 carrying Anthony Gear in from Baltimore rolled to the gate under a blistering late June sun. The accordion walkway moved away from the building like a probe, clamping onto the airliner’s side. Jet engines whined to a standstill.
Within the terminal, Sharon drummed her fingers on the railing, checked her watch, and paced back and forth. She’d been waiting—craning her neck to peer through the huge picture window overlooking the runway, going inside the gift shop to browse through the paperback novels, hustling down to the restaurant to give an estimated time or arrival report to an irritated Russell Black every fifteen minutes or so—for an hour and a half. Since they’d driven the competition out of business and assumed a virtual throat lock on interstate traffic at DFW Airport, American apparently saw no point in being on time.
Sharon walked over to stand at the head of the welcoming ramp. She had on the same clothes she’d worn to the office, brown spike heels and a beige summerweight business dress. Passengers deplaned, men in slacks and sports shirts or suits, some with carry-on luggage slung over their shoulders, and women in everything from shorts to business dress. One lady held a toddler by the hand. Sharon rose on the balls of her feet in anticipation. One man, a thirtyish guy with a narrow waist, tailored shirt and pants, and a mountain of brown hair sprayed into an immovable sculpture leered at her. She showed him an irritated smirk, then quickly looked away.
Gear was next to last to deplane, moving leisurely along behind a portly woman who was pulling a suitcase on rollers behind her. The detective’s collar was undone, his yellow tie loosened to the third button on his shirt. A big brown satchel bumped the hem of his sports coat. He spotted Sharon, showed a crooked grin, raised a hand to shoulder level, and waggled his fingers. He stopped before her. “American sucks,” he said.
“Tell me about it. Russ is in the coffee shop.” She wasted no time, leading the way on padded red carpet toward the restaurant, sidestepping people who did column-rights into the rest rooms and baggage-claim area. A fiftyish woman hissed, “Well, I never,” as Sharon dodged around her. Sharon showed the woman an apologetic smile, waved a come-on to Anthony Gear, and hurried on.
The restaurant was a serve-yourself, people lined up at the cash register carrying paper cups of iced-down soft drinks, doughnuts, wrapped sandwiches, hamburgers and hot dogs heated by microwave. Black was in a rear booth studying Sharon’s child-abuse brief, trying for the millionth time to shoot holes in her argument. So far her theory had shown to be bulletproof.
Sharon and the detective went through the serving line; she filled a cup with ice and Coke while he poured himself steaming black coffee. He didn’t offer to pay. An old government trick, Sharon thought. She handed a five over the counter, received a single and jingly change in return, and carried her drink over to slide into the booth beside Russ Black. Gear sank heavily across the table, blew on his coffee, and had a sip.
“I still can’t find a damn thing wrong with this,” Black said, rattling the pages of the brief.
“Trust me,” Sharon said. “You won’t.”
; “We got to hope the judge can’t, either.” Black looked at Gear. “Well?” He’d cautioned Sharon not to be overly friendly with Gear, and she’d noticed that Black’s attitude toward the detective was somewhere between lukewarm and ice cold. They work better when you don’t buddy around with ’em, Black had told Sharon. Let ’em know that their next check depends on performance, and if they screw around you’ll cut ’em off quicker’n a minnow. With Gear, she noted, the strategy seemed to work like a charm.
“That’s my first trip to Baltimore,” Gear said, settling back. “As different from Dallas as night from day.”
Black scratched his nose. “What’d you find out?”
“Old,” Gear said. “Little narrow streets, two cars can barely pass in opposite directions.”
“They built them,” Sharon said, “before there were any such things as automobiles. For horse-drawn carriages.”
“Some of the houses,” Gear said, “aren’t five feet from the curb. Great seafood in that town. Fresh lobster and shrimp. It’s kind of like … you ever been to Boston? It’s like Boston, only without all the graveyards.”
“Revolutionary War cemeteries,” Sharon said.
“That’s real nice,” Black said, testily rattling paper. “But today they got cars. What’d you find out?”
“They’ve got a new courthouse,” Gear said to Sharon, “and you should see the old one. Got those thick stone walls.”
“You’re spendin’ our client’s money to go sightseein’,” Black said.
Gear showed a peeved expression. “I never went sightseeing until after I finished working.”
“Then you should have been on the seven o’clock flight yesterday evenin’,” Black said. “What do you know about Linda Haymon that we didn’t already know?”
“Harmon,” Gear said.
“Harmon, Haymon. Dammit, what did you find out?”
Gear casually picked up his coffee cup. Visible beyond him through the restaurant entry, passengers dragged luggage along behind them as they moved up in the ticket-counter line. Gear sipped and swallowed. “Quite a bit,” he said.