Courting Trouble raa-9

by Lisa Scottoline

  Bennie crossed the threshold with a nonchalance that fooled no one and walked down a narrow gray corridor, as stifling as the waiting room but mercifully quiet. The only sounds were echoes of faraway shouting and the clatter of her pumps down the hall. She hit a battered button and rode the empty cab to the third floor. On the landing was a smoked glass window that obscured the guard sitting behind, who accepted the request slip Bennie passed through a slot. “Room 34,” said the guard’s muffled voice, and the door to Bennie’s right unlocked with a mechanical ca-thunk and opened a crack.

  She walked through the door to another gray corridor, this one with a set of doors on the left, each leading to a gray cubicle. Inmates entered the cubicles from doors off a secured hallway on the other side, and all the doors locked automatically when they closed. Each cubicle, about four feet by six, contained two chairs facing each other and a beige wall phone for calling the guard. Only a Formica counter divided felon from lawyer. Though it had never bothered Bennie before, it felt oddly inadequate today. She walked to the end of the corridor, opened the door to Room 34, and did a double-take when she saw the inmate

  “Are you Alice Connolly?” she asked.

  “Yes,” the inmate answered, with a cocky smile. “Surprised?”

  Bennie eyed the prisoner up and down, her gaze ending its bewildered journey at the Connolly’s face. The inmate looked like a prettier, albeit streetwise, version of Bennie herself, though her hair was a brassy, fraudulent red and had been scissored into crude layers. She had Bennie’s broad cheekbones and full lips, but wore enough makeup to enhance those features. She looked as tall as Bennie but was model-thin, so her orange jumpsuit seemed almost fashionably baggy. Her eyes—round, blue and wide-set—matched Bennie’s exactly, rendering the lawyer momentarily speechless.

  Connolly extended a hand over the counter. “Pleased to meet you. I’m your twin,” she said.

  Bennie stared at the inmate, stunned. It wasn’t possible. She didn’t have a twin. She didn’t even have a sister. Her briefcase slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor with a heavy thwap.

  Copyright © 1999 by Lisa Scottoline. All rights reserved.

  Moment of Truth

  “Jack Newlin had no choice but to frame himself for murder.”

  When attorney Newlin discovers his wife dead in their elegant home, he’s convinced he knows who killed her — and is equally determined to hide the truth. He decides to take the rap, and to seal his fate he hires the most inexperienced lawyer he can find, a reluctant rookie by the name of Mary DiNunzio, from the hot Philadelphia firm of Rosato & Associates.

  But hiring Mary may turn out to be his biggest mistake. Mary doubts Jack’s confession, and her ethics and instincts tell her she can’t defend a man who wants to convict himself. Smarter, gutsier, and more persistent than she has any right to be, Mary sets out to prove what really happened — because, as any lawyer knows, a case is never as simple as it seems. And nothing is ever certain until the final moment of truth.

  USA Today: “An edgy tale, full of surprises.”

  New York Post: “A carefully crafted tale of immorality, dark secrets, and family values gone awry . . .. Scottoline [keeps this] . . . page-turner moving to a chilling end.”

  Chapter One

  Jack Newlin had no choice but to frame himself for murder. Once he had set his course, his only fear was that he wouldn’t get away with it. That he wasn’t a good enough liar, even for a lawyer.

  The detectives led Jack in handcuffs into a small, windowless room at the Roundhouse, Philadelphia’s police administration building. Bolted to the floor at the center of the room was a straight-backed steel chair, which reminded Jack of the electric chair. He looked away.

  The walls of the room were a dingy gray and marred by scuff marks as high as wainscoting. A typewriter table topped with a black Smith-Corona stood against the side wall, and in front of the table sat two old wooden chairs. One of the chairs groaned when the heavyset detective, who had introduced himself as Stan Kovich, seated himself and planted his feet wide. “Siddown, Mr. Newlin,” Detective Kovich said, gesturing to a wooden chair across from him.

  “Thank you.” Jack took a seat, noting that the detective had bypassed the steel chair, evidently reserved for murderers who weren’t wealthy. Special treatment never suited Jack. A bookkeeper’s son, he had worked his way through school to become an estates lawyer who earned seven figures, but even his large partnership draw remained a pittance in comparison to his wife’s family money. He had always wished the Buxton money away, but now he was glad of it. Money was a good motive for murder.

  “You want a soda? A Coke or somethin’?” Kovich asked. The detective wore a short-sleeved white shirt, light for wintertime, and his bullish neck spread his collar open. His shoulders hunched, powerful but gone to fat, and khaki-colored Sansabelts strained to cover his thighs. A bumpy, working-class nose dominated his face and he had cheekbones so fleshy they pressed against the rims of his glasses, large gold-rimmed aviators. Their bifocal window magnified his eyes, which were earth brown and addressed Jack without apparent judgment.

  “No, thanks. Nothing to drink.” He made deliberate eye contact with Detective Kovich, who was closer and seemed friendlier than the other detective. Propped against the wall on a thin Italian loafer, he was black and hadn’t said anything except to introduce himself. Hovering over six feet tall, rangy and slim, he had a face as narrow as his body, a small, thin mouth, and a nose a shade too long in proportion to high cheekbones. Dark, almost-onyx eyes sat high on his face, like judges atop a dais.

  “Let’s start by you telling me something about yourself, Mr. Newlin.” Kovich smiled, showing teeth stained by coffee. “By the way, just for the record, this interview is being videotaped.” He waved vaguely behind the smudgy mirror on the wall, but Jack didn’t look, steeling himself to be convincing in his false confession.

  “Well, I’m forty-three. I’m a partner at Tribe & Wright, heading the estates and trusts department. I attended the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Yale, and Girard before that.”

  Kovich nodded. “Wow. Impressive.”

  “Thank you,” Jack said. He was proudest of Girard, a boarding high school established by the trust of Stephen Girard for fatherless boys. Girard was a Philadelphia institution. He never could have made it to Yale or any other university otherwise.

  “Where you from?”

  “North Philly. Torresdale.”

  “Your people still up there?”

  “No. My father died a long time ago and my mother passed away last year, from lung cancer.”

  “I know how that goes. I lost my mother two years ago. It’s no picnic.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said. No picnic. It was such a rich understatement, his mouth felt bitter. His mother, gone. His father, so long ago. Now Honor. He cleared his throat. “Maybe we should move on.”

  “Sure, sure.” Kovich nodded quickly. “So, you’re a lawyer at the Tribe law firm. Pretty big outfit, right? I read somethin’ about them in the paper, how much they bring in a year. They’re printin’ money.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read. Reporters have to sell newspapers.”

  “Tell me about it.” Kovich laughed, a harsh guttural noise that burst from his throat. He turned to the other detective, still standing against the wall. “Right, Mick?” he asked.

  The detective, who had introduced himself as Reginald Brinkley, not Mick, only nodded in response, and the pursing of his lips told Jack he didn’t welcome the attention. Brinkley, also middle-aged, wore a well-tailored brown sportcoat with a maroon silk tie, still tight despite the late hour and affixed to his white shirt with a gold-toned tie bar. His gaze chilled the room and the uptilt to his chin was distinctly resentful. Jack didn’t know what he had done to provoke the detective and only hoped it worked against him.

  “So, Mr. Newlin,” Kovich was saying, “hey, can I call you Jack?”

  “Of course.”

&nb
sp; “You got any other family, Jack? Kids?”

  “One.”

  “Oh yeah?” Kovich’s tone brightened. “What flavor?”

  “A girl. A daughter.”

  “How old?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “I got a sixteen-year-old!” Kovich grinned, showing his bad teeth. “It’s a trip, ain’t it? Teenagers. You got just the one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me, I got a thirteen-year-old, too. Also a girl. Houseful of blow dryers. My wife says when they’re not in the bathroom, they’re in the chat rooms. Yours like that, on the computer?”

  Jack cleared his throat again. “I don’t mean to be impolite, but is there a reason for this small talk?” He didn’t want to go there and it seemed like something a murderer would say.

  “Well, uh, next-of-kin notification is our job. Standard procedure, Jack.”

  He tensed up. He should have thought of that. The police would be the ones to tell Paige. “My daughter lives on her own. I’d hate for her to hear this kind of news from the police. Can’t I tell her myself?”

  “Sixteen, she’s on her own already?”

  “She’s legally emancipated, with a promising career.”

  “Legally emancipated, what’s ‘at?”

  “My wife and I filed papers, I drafted them myself, essentially saying that she’s legally an adult. She lives on her own and earns her own money. She’s a model, and, in any event, I really would prefer to be the one to tell her about . . .her mother.” He paused. “I could call her after we talk. I mean, I do want to make a full confession, right now.”

  Kovich’s lips parted slightly, and behind him, Brinkley’s eyes narrowed.

  Jack’s mouth went dry at their reaction. Maybe he’d gone too fast. “I mean, I feel awful, just awful. A horrible thing happened tonight. I can’t believe what I’ve done. I want to get it off my chest.”

  Kovich nodded encouragingly. “You mean you want to make a statement?”

  “Yes. A statement, that’s right.” Jack’s voice sounded authentically shaky, even to him.

  “Okay. Good. Bear with me.” Kovich turned toward the table, his chair creaking, and picked up a form, thick with old-fashioned carbons. He crammed it behind the typewriter roll, fighting a buckle in the paper. The detective wasn’t overly dexterous, his hands more suited to wrestling fullbacks than forms. “Jack, I have to inform you of your Miranda rights. You have the right to remain silent, you -”

  “I know my rights.”

  “Still, I gotta tell you. It’s the law.” Kovich finished a quick recitation of the Miranda warnings as he smoothed out the uncooperative form, rolled it into the machine, and lined up the title, INVESTIGATION INTERVIEW RECORD, HOMICIDE DEVISION. “You understand your rights?”

  “Yes. I don’t need a lawyer. I wish to make a statement.”

  “You mean you’re waiving your right to counsel?” Kovich nodded again.

  “Yes, I’m waiving my right to counsel.”

  “Are you under the influence of drugs or alcohol at this time?”

  “No. I mean, I had some Scotch earlier. Before.”

  Kovich frowned behind his big aviators. “You’re not intoxicated at the present time, are you?”

  “No. I only had two and that was a while ago. I’m perfectly sober.”

  Kovich picked up another form, two pages. “Fine. You gotta sign this, for your waiver. Sign the first page and then you have to write on the second, too.” He slid the sheets across the table, and Jack signed the top page, wrote “yes” after each question on the second page, and slid both back. “We’ll start with your Q and A, question and answer.” Kovich turned and started to type numbers in the box on the right, CASE NUMBER. “It’s procedure. Bear with me, okay?”

  “Sure.” Jack watched Kovich typing and had the sense that confessing to murder, even falsely, could be as mundane as opening a checking account. A bureaucratic occasion; they typed out a form in triplicate and processed you into prison for life.

  “State your name and address, please.”

  “My name is Jack Newlin and my address is 382 Galwith’s Alley.” Saying it relaxed him. It was going so well, then the black detective cleared his throat.

  “Forget the Q and A for a minute, Mr. Newlin,” Detective Brinkley said, raising a light palm with long, thin fingers. He straightened and buttoned his jacket at the middle, the simple gesture announcing he was taking charge. “Tell us what happened, in your own words.”

  Jack swallowed. This would be harder to do. He tried to forget about the hidden videocamera and the detective’s critical eyes. “I guess I should tell you, my marriage hadn’t been going very well lately. For a year, actually. Honor wasn’t very happy with me.”

  “Were you seeing another woman?” Detective Brinkley’s question came rapid-fire, rattling Jack.

  “Of course not. No. Never.”

  Kovich, taken suddenly out of the picture, started typing with surprising speed. Capital letters appeared on the black-ruled line: NO. NEVER.

  “Was she seeing another man?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. We just had problems, normal problems. Honor drank, for one thing, and it was getting worse.”

  “Was she alcoholic?”

  “Yes, alcoholic.” For the past year Jack had been telling himself Honor wasn’t an alcoholic, just a heavy drinker, as if the difference mattered. “We fought more and more often, then tonight she told me she wanted to divorce me.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told her no. I was shocked. I didn’t want to. I couldn’t imagine it. I love—I loved—her.”

  “Why did she ask you for a divorce?”

  “Our problem always came down to the same thing, that she thought I wasn’t good enough for her. That she had married down, in me.” That much was true. The sore spots in their marriage were as familiar as potholes in a city street and they had been getting harder and harder to steer around.

  Brinkley nodded. “What started the fight tonight?”

  “Tonight, we were supposed to have a dinner together, just the two of us. But I was late.” Guilt choked Jack’s voice and it wasn’t fraudulent. If he had gotten home on time, none of this would have happened, and that was the least of his mistakes. “She was angry at me for that, furious, and already drunk when I got home. She started shouting at me as soon as I came in the door.”

  “Shouting what?”

  “That I was late, that I didn’t care about anybody but myself, that she hated me. That I’d let her down. I ruined her life.” He summoned the words from the myths in their marriage and remembered the details of the crime scene he’d staged. He’d found his wife dead when he came home, but as soon as he realized who had killed her and why, he understood that he’d have to make it look as if he did it. He’d suppressed his horror and arranged every detail to point to him as the killer, including downing two full tumblers of Glenfiddich in case the police tested his blood. “I poured myself a drink, then another. I was getting so sick of it. I tried for years to make her happy. No matter what I did I couldn’t please her. What happened next was awful. Maybe it was the Scotch. I don’t often drink. I became enraged.”

  “Enraged?” Brinkley cocked his head, his hair cut short and thinning, so that his dark scalp peeked through. “Fancy word, enraged.”

  “Enraged, yes.” Jack willed himself to go with it. “I mean, it set me off, made me angry. Her screaming at me, her insults. Something snapped inside. I lost control.” He recalled the other details of the faked crime scene; he had hurled a crystal tumbler to the parquet floor, as if he had been in a murderous rage. “I threw my glass at her but she just laughed. I couldn’t stand it, her laughing at me like that. She said she hated me. That she’d files papers first thing in the morning.” Jack wracked his brain for more details but came up empty, so he raised his voice. “All I could think was, I can’t take this anymore. I hate her threats. I hate her. I hate her and want her to shut up. So I picked up the
knife.”

  “What knife?”

  “A butcher knife, Henkels.”

  Kovich stopped typing, puzzled. “What’s Henkels?”

  “A fancy knife,” Brinkley supplied, but Kovich only frowned.

  “How do you spell it?”

  Jack spelled the word as Kovich tapped it out, but Brinkley wasn’t waiting. “Mr. Newlin, where was the knife?” he asked.

  “On the dining room table.”

  “Why was a butcher knife in the dining room?”

  “It was with the appetizer, a cold filet mignon. She must have used it to slice the filet. She loved filet, it was her favorite. She’d set it out for an appetizer. The knife was right there and I took it from the table.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “This is hard to say. I mean, I feel so . . .horrible.” Jack’s face fell, the sadness deep within, and he suddenly felt every jowl and furrow of his age. He didn’t try to hide his grief. It would look like remorse. “I . . .I . . .grabbed the knife and killed her.”

  “You stabbed your wife to death.”

  “Yes, I stabbed my wife to death,” he repeated, amazed he could form the words. In truth, he had picked up the bloody knife, unaccountably left behind, and wrapped his own fingers around it, obliterating any telltale fingerprints with his own.

  “How many times?”

  “What?”

  “How many times did you stab her?”

  Jack shuddered. He hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t know. Maybe it was the Scotch, I was in kind of a frenzy. Like a trance. I just kept stabbing.” At the typewriter, Kovich tapped out, JUST KEPT STABBING.