Booked to die cj-1

by John Dunning

  I gave a dry little laugh. “That poor kid.”

  “Save your sympathy. That poor kid is gonna put you under, if I let her. Which, given the handsome fee you’re paying me, I don’t intend to do.”

  “I can’t help feeling sorry for her. None of this is her fault.”

  “It’s all her fault. Don’t even think of asking me to go easy on her.”

  “No,” I said. “Do what you have to.”

  “I always do, Clifford. Now, what do you want to do about this afternoon?”

  “You’ve probably rearranged your whole life for this.”

  “I have made a few minor adjustments, yes. But don’t let that worry you; I can always take off and go fishing with my kids.”

  “No, let’s do it. I’d sure like to be out of there by three o’clock if I can. It’d be nice to have some of the day left.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Mose said.

  I called the mortuary and made arrangements for Miss Pride. I called the cemetery and arranged for a burial plot.

  I called Hennessey downtown.

  “Where the hell have you been?” It was starting to sound like a catchphrase, something people automatically said when they heard my voice.

  We decided to meet for lunch in a place not far from City Hall: from there I could walk over to Levin’s office and be there in plenty of time. It was already eleven-fifteen, so I went right over. All I wanted was a beer and a raw egg: Hennessey ate half a horse, with french fries. “Jesus, Neal, you’ll be lucky if you live another year,” I said, and knocked wood. I hoped he’d live forever, the sweet old son of a bitch. Hennessey had his stern look on. “Let’s get down to cases, buddy,” he said, and though I somehow guessed that he didn’t mean it, I managed to give him my rapt attention.

  “I been trying to get you for twelve hours,” he said.

  “I went for a walk in the mountains.”

  “What’d ya do there?”

  “Walk. Think. Look at butterflies.”

  “It snowed in the mountains last night. There ain’t no butterflies.”

  “The pretty kind, Neal, that ski and walk on two legs.”

  There was a long silence. Hennessey had been my partner forever, it seemed: he had deliberately taken a more or less subordinate role because we did our best work that way. But he knew me inside out: he knew when I began to bend the rules because he had seen me do it often enough. He said, “Y’know, my bullshit detector’s going crazy here. The needle’s knocking the roof off.”

  I ignored that. “What did you get from McKinley?”

  He ignored that. “Cliff, what the hell are you up to?”

  I said, “Actually, that elephant sandwich you’re eating doesn’t look half bad. Maybe I’ll have one.”

  “C’mon, Cliff, stop screwing around. Look, I’ll ask you point-blank: are you messing around in this case? If you are, Cameron’s got a big package of trouble all wrapped and ready to dump right on your ass.”

  “When I came back from the hills this morning, I sat down and made up a list of all the things that bother me. My psychiatrist told me to do that. It’s better than scream therapy, Neal, but you know what? I couldn’t find Cameron’s name anywhere on it.”

  “God damn it, he’d better be on it.”

  “Are you gonna eat that pickle?”

  “Sure I am. Listen, do you want to talk to me or not?”

  “I might, if you’ll pull the cork out of your ass and stop being a cop for thirty seconds.”

  He took a long breath and held it. As he let it out, he said, “I’d just hate to see you take a fall.”

  I gave a little shrug. “Are we all finished with the dance now? If we are, I’ll tell you something: the real truth, forty-carat, government-inspected stuff. You can take it to the bank, Neal. You ready? Here it is. This boy is dead meat. I don’t know who he is or where he’s hiding, but his ass is mine. He can’t go far enough and he can’t dig himself a deep enough hole. That’s on the record, and frankly I don’t give a fuck what Lester thinks.”

  I picked up his pickle and bit the end off. “Does that answer your question?”

  “Yeah,” he said grimly. “It’s also what I was afraid of.”

  He ate the rest of the pickle fast.

  “This is now my full-time job,” I said. “You want to talk turkey, fine. How much time do you have in a day? Did you guys ever get through checking out that U-Haul lead? Well I did, because I’ve got nothing else going with my time. My business is closed for the duration and I’m on this guy full-time. I can’t wait for you guys, Neal, because you’ve probably got ten other cases on your desk right this minute. Hey, I know how it goes. I also know you’ve got to get on something like this right now, because evidence tends to dry up. I’ve already found something that would be ashes now if I’d waited for you. No offense.”

  “What evidence? What the hell’ve you found?”

  “Only something that puts a whole new slant on things. Don’t ask for specifics if you’re not willing to punt the football. It’s a two-way street. That’s simple manners, and I know Mrs. Hennessey didn’t raise anything but polite little walruses.”

  “You’re out of your mind. Cameron’d have a hematoma of the left nut if he thought I was sharing information with you.”

  “It’ll give him something to play with. Look, I’ve got to go, I can’t sit here and bullshit all day. You’ve gotta make up your mind.”

  He sat perfectly still, struggling with the forces of good and evil.

  “Don’t hurry on my account,” I said. I looked at my watch. “I’m due at an appointment, where I’m getting my ass sued off, in thirty minutes.”

  “One time and one time only,” Hennessey said. “What do you want to know?”

  “All the good poop. What happened at McKinley’s. You can put in a lot of color. Tell me if her cheeks were rosy or pale when Lester broke her door open and wrestled her down just as she was about to throw the tape into the fire.”

  “You should do stand-up comedy.” He fished in his pocket for a small notebook and leafed through the pages. “At eleven forty-eight yesterday morning, your police department, accompanied by officers from Jefferson County and acting on a warrant signed by District Court Judge Harlan Blakeley, scaled the fence at the mountaintop residence at the end of Road twelve, otherwise known as Crestview Street…”

  “I think I’ve seen this one. In a minute it snows and turns into Bambi. I really don’t have time for this much color.”

  He put his notebook away and looked at me long and hard. He was a cop who went by the book, and it broke his heart when he had to go the other way.

  “She gave us the tape.”

  “No kidding. Was it all there?”

  “Seemed to be.”

  “How about the part I erased?”

  “Entirely different tape. You remember she had taken the tape out so she could play it for you when you arrived. She had already put another one in the recorder. The tape we wanted was still in the player when we got there.”

  “Did you listen to it? Stupid question. What was on it?”

  “Same thing you heard.”

  “What’d you make of it?”

  “We think it was the killer who came in at the end. Almost had to be, the way it goes. The time’s about perfect, and the guy—Peter, right?—seems to fall apart right at that moment.”

  “Could you make anything out of the section where they’re talking together?”

  “It was pretty much of a mess. I’ve listened to one of the copies maybe two dozen times and I can’t get it. The lab boys have the original; maybe they’ll do some good with it. They’ve got the equipment: they can do some amazing stuff, separating voices. They might have something for me later today.”

  “Would it be too much to ask… you know, for old time’s sake… could you tell me what they say?”

  “I’m already a dead man. What’s one more shot in the head?”

  “What was McKinley like w
hile all this was going on?”

  “Couldn’t‘ve been more cooperative. Went right to the tape player and handed over the tape and we were out of there in ten minutes. Even Lester liked her.”

  I sat quietly, lost in thought.

  “Your turn,” Hennessey said.

  I started with the U-Haul rental: told him how Peter had rented the truck and gave him the gas station’s address. I told him about Portland, and the lovely Mumsy Bonnema. I told him about Peter’s books: where I had found them, what I thought they were worth, where I had put them. He kept his eyes closed, a suffering man, all the time I was telling it. At the end, he said, “I don’t wanna know how you found out all this, do I?”

  “Probably not.”

  “So what the hell d’you expect me to do with it?”

  “I’ll try to find a way to get it to you. For now, let’s say there’s a gray point of law involved.”

  “Let’s say your ass is gray. Come on, Cliff, what am I supposed to do? Just how the hell am I supposed to have gotten those books from Oregon to Denver, let alone found out where they were in the first place?”

  “I guess you’ll have to follow the evidence, like a good cop always does.”

  “Right through you. I’ll send you postcards in Canon City.”

  “Yeah, 1 thought of that. Maybe I will have to do some jail time before it’s over. I just know I couldn’t leave those books in Portland. By now they’d be ashes in Mumsy’s back yard.”

  “You wouldn’t be so particular if the evidence was pornography or dope.”

  “You may be right.”

  “You know I’m right.” He finished off his beer. “You’re crazy, Cliff, you really are.” He got up and put on his coat. “You’re crazy,” he said again. “God dang, you were a good cop, though. You sure were a good cop.”

  37

  “This is getting us nowhere,” Levin said. “You admit you hated Mr. Newton. You admit you harassed and persecuted him for more than two years prior to the incident in question. You admit you kidnapped—threatened and beat and illegally handcuffed and detained—Mr. Newton, not in the legal performance of your duty as a Denver police officer, but out of sheer malicious hatred. Then you took Mr. Newton, against his will, for a little ride. Sounds like something out of The Untouchables, Mr. Janeway, but this is what, by your own admission, seems to have happened that night. All these things you have admitted for the record, and now, when we come to that little clearing by the river, you would expect us to believe that you removed the handcuffs from Mr. Newton’s wrists and not only allowed him an even break but actually let him strike the first blow?”

  Mose leaned across the table and in a very weary voice said, “Counselor, if you keep asking questions like that, we’ll all be old men before this thing ends. The golden age of oratory is over.”

  “Mr. Moses, this is a deposition, not a trial. I believe the rules allow me to obtain information in my own way.”

  “As long as you don’t actually expect him to answer that.”

  Levin puffed on his cigar. He was a little man with a New York accent, a tough Jewish lawyer as someone, 1 forget who, had said. He turned and looked at me down the length of the table. “Let me ask you this. Are you seriously asking us to believe that you removed those handcuffs and inflicted the severe body and facial damage”—he opened the package of photographs and threw them across the table—“to Mr. Newton that we see in this evidence?”

  “That’s what happened.”

  “Now Mr. Newton is a big man, would you agree with that?”

  “No.”

  “Nevertheless, he’s bigger than you are, by quite a bit.”

  “He’s got more beef, if that’s what you mean.”

  “How would you describe Mr. Newton, Mr. Janeway? Just his physical appearance, please.”

  “He’s a white male, approximately six feet four inches, two hundred thirty pounds, muscular, brown hair, brown eyes, sometimes wears a mustache.”

  “And yourself? Describe yourself in the same terms.”

  “White male, five-eleven, one ninety, dark hair, dark eyes…

  “Mr. Newton outweighs you by some forty pounds, by your own description.”

  “About that.”

  “His reach is longer…”

  “Yeah.”

  “And would you say that Mr. Newton carries much fat on him?”

  “Not much.”

  “How much?”

  “None that’s evident.”

  “In fact, Mr. Newton is a bodybuilder, isn’t that right?”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “He boxes, lifts weights…all in all, for his age, a prime specimen of manhood, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Look,” I said, “if you want to ask me questions, go ahead and ask. Don’t make statements and try to get me to agree with them.”

  “Here’s a question for you, then. Do you expect us to believe that you took on this man on equal footing—in spite of the fact that his wrists still bore chafe marks from the shackles that you bound him with—that you released him and defeated him so overwhelmingly in a fair fight?”

  “Is that the end of it?”

  “Answer the question, please.”

  “The answer is yes.”

  “How did you do it, Mr. Janeway? Frankly, I find it a little hard to believe. How did you conduct this fight and bring it to such a successful conclusion, from your viewpoint?”

  “I beat the hell out of him. He tried to beat the hell out of me, but he lost.”

  “And you expect me to believe that.”

  “I don’t particularly expect anything from you, sir.”

  “I should apologize for belaboring the point, but I find it very hard to believe—”

  “You’ve said that,” Mose said. “Get on with it.”

  “I’m trying to find out how he managed it,” Levin said.

  “It wasn’t by the Marquess of Queensberry rules,” Mose said. “They were two guys brawling in the country. You ever been involved in a fight like that, Levin? One guy throws a punch, then the other. The guy with the most heart usually wins.”

  “I don’t know anything about this so-called heart, Mr. Moses. What I do know is what I see in evidence before me. This is a small man, compared with my client. My client is a man supremely conditioned to such physical combat, yet he was the only one who was physically battered. I’m trying to find out, if the handcuffs really were off, how that happened.”

  “It’s simple,” I said.

  “If it’s so simple, please explain it to me.”

  “Bring your client in here, clear away the furniture, and I’ll show you how it happened.”

  38

  “I don’t think he’ll ask that question again,” Mose said. “I might have to do it for him.”

  “Why would you do that?” I said.

  “Are you kidding? You couldn’t have a more perfect answer to the most damaging question we’ll get in the whole trial.”

  “How can it hurt us if nobody asks it?”

  “Because it’s there, Clifford, whether anybody asks it or not. They’ll look at you, they’ll look at him; then they’ll look at those pictures and they’ll ask it themselves. So I’ll bring it out. You’ll say the same thing all over again. Clear the court, bring him on down here, I’ll show you how I did it. Jesus, I love it. You don’t say it in any flip or arrogant way. Whatever you do, you don’t act disrespectful to the court. You just say it, like you have no doubt whatsoever that it’ll turn out the same way again. I’m even flirting with the idea of asking the court’s permission to stage a fight between the two of you just for the benefit of the jury. That kinda shit’s a little risky and it smacks of an old Perry Mason rerun. The court would never allow it, but it sure makes points. Once you say it, and mean it, the jury never forgets, no matter what that old man on the bench tells them.”

  We were sitting in a little cafe across from Levin’s office, doing the postmortem on my deposition. Lev
in had eaten up the afternoon: it was four-thirty and already the streetlights were on. Hard to believe I had been in Oregon just this morning. I felt depressed, as if I had lost a week instead of one afternoon.

  “Next time don’t look so fierce,” Mose said. “Lighten up a little. Think of this as a popularity contest, which it often turns out to be. I know that’s distasteful to a purist like you, but a smile at the right time—if it’s not forced—can sometimes pay big dividends.”

  I gave a big stupid grin.

  “There you go,” Mose said. “Now you’ve got it. Nobody’ll find against a retard.” He signaled for more coffee. “Come home with me for dinner.”

  It sounded good. They were all good people, Mose and his wife, Patty, and their two kids. The daughter I had saved was now nineteen. She was a forest ranger, a child of the earth, a lovely young woman. I hadn’t seen her in a long time.

  But not tonight. “Think I’m gonna work awhile,” I said. “I’ve gotta make something out of this day.”

  “You’re a real Type-A, Clifford,” Mose said over his coffee. “You better learn to relax, pal, or what happens to you won’t be so funny.”

  I was looking through the front window when the Lamborghini pulled up and stopped in front of Levin’s office. Jackie Newton and Barbara Crowell got out just as Levin began to close shop for the day. It was cold in Denver. They huddled for a moment at the front door, then Levin pointed at the cafe and they started across the street. Mose must’ve seen me tighten up. He looked where I was looking, but we didn’t say anything. A little bell rang when they came in. The place was crowded: the only open tables were against the far wall, and they had to walk past us to get there. Levin saw me and hesitated. He said something to Jackie and they all looked. Jackie smiled and said something: he pointed to one of the tables and they came toward us. Barbara passed two feet from where I sat. I hadn’t seen her in all these weeks: she looked haggard, worn out, drained of life.

  “Hello, Barbara,” I said.

  She couldn’t look at me. Her mouth quivered, and Jackie took her arm and propelled her past our table. They sat in a far corner, as far away as possible.