Dead End

by Brian Freemantle

  There was a palpable desperation in Hanson’s repetitive conclusion, culminating with: ‘You killed her, didn’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Chased her, in the dark?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Rammed her off the road?’

  ‘Why should I have done that, to the woman I loved and decided I wanted to set up home with?’ It was not instinctive. It was a reaction that had been growing in Parnell’s mind throughout the rephrasing and repetition but the timing was devastating.

  Hanson had been bent over his legal pad, intent on his listed, hopefully hammer-blow questions. He came up startled by a question in return, not a denying response. Hurriedly he said: ‘That’s what I’m asking you to tell me.’

  ‘As I have repeatedly tried to explain, there is nothing to tell,’ retorted Parnell. ‘Except to repeat, as many times as you have repeated yourself, that I did not chase by car, crash into, try to kill or successfully kill Rebecca Lang.’

  ‘Points and denials that I believe already to be well established, Mr Hanson,’ said the judge. ‘I think it’s time to get to submissions. I would like to hear yours.’

  The confidence had gone from the prosecutor. He spoke coherently, prepared – prepared, clearly, before the courtroom reversals – but his argument lacked conviction or belief. He stressed the seriousness of the accusations and insisted even more serious charges were to follow, and demanded that the remand be in custody for the investigation to proceed to enable those additional charges to be formulated.

  Barry Jackson’s rebuttal was as forceful as Vernon Hanson’s had been falteringly weak. The prosecution’s grounds for a remand in custody had not been proved by a failed, premature and inadequately conducted investigation upon which he might at some later stage invite the court’s comment. Richard Parnell was a man of unquestioned rectitude and integrity. He totally and utterly refuted all the current and any subsequent charges and was prepared to offer in his own recognisance whatever bail the court might demand. Parnell was further prepared to surrender his passport to the court and report daily to any police authority, although Jackson invited the judge to rule that that authority be other than the one involved in the ongoing investigation.

  Throughout the submission, Hanson, the two officers and Professor Jacob Meadows sat stone-faced, not looking at anyone. The Dubette lawyers Peter Baldwin and Gerald Fletcher also remained expressionless.

  ‘I want counsel to approach the bench again,’ insisted the judge.

  This time it was Jackson who did most of the gesticulating, but when they returned to their places Hanson said: ‘I would once more like my strongest objection to any bail application to be placed on record, in view of our discussions.’

  Judge David Wilson said: ‘Let it be so recorded, but it is in view of that discussion and, at the moment unsubstantiated, observations of defence counsel Barry Jackson that I am minded to take an unusual course. I have concerns about several aspects of this custody application. I do not consider it is one upon which I can, or will, give an immediate decision from the bench, until matters raised by Mr Jackson have been resolved. I fully recognize, however, that this court is considering a person’s freedom or detention, albeit how brief of either. Mr Jackson, where is your client’s passport?’

  Before his lawyer fully bent towards him, Parnell said: ‘The apartment,’ loud enough for the judge to hear.

  ‘So,’ nodded the black-robed man, without waiting for the relay. ‘I am putting the accused into the temporary custody of a court official and yourself, Mr Jackson, for the passport to be retrieved and returned here, at two o’clock today, to be placed in the custody of this court, should it be my decision to grant the bail application. During that adjournment I shall properly and fully consider both submissions made to me this morning, hope to get guidance upon the matter that has so far not been disclosed in open court, and rule accordingly. Until then …’

  Everyone rose, to the usher’s order.

  It was the same usher whom Wilson appointed their court escort, with the admonishment that any overheard conversation between Jackson and Parnell was wholly governed and protected by client confidentiality. Despite that instruction, Parnell waited for Jackson’s lead in the car taking the three of them to the apartment, the usher driving. Almost before they cleared the court precincts, Jackson said, ebulliently: ‘We got our breaks!’

  Parnell said: ‘I still need to know what the hell that is! Or was! Or perhaps still is! This really is Perry Mason!’

  ‘I know,’ grinned Jackson. ‘Tomorrow’s headlines are going to be twice as big as today’s.’

  ‘Please?’ implored Parnell. He ached with the strain of the concentration with which he’d had to hold himself in court. ‘What in Christ’s name is the importance of AF209?’

  ‘I haven’t confirmed that yet,’ said Jackson. ‘Until I do, it remains a matter for the closed court.’

  ‘So, how come I got released like this?’

  ‘Professor Jacob Meadows,’ announced Jackson. ‘His expert evidence has been discredited on three appeals. One, two years ago, overturned a judgment of Judge Wilson. I couldn’t believe Hanson’s court list when I saw it this morning. That’s why I so easily got the court protection order with the cars. I just busked the questioning in court, believing even less that I’d get the admissions that I did from him.’

  ‘There’s still a lot I don’t understand, about what’s being claimed,’ protested Parnell.

  ‘Me, too,’ conceded Jackson, soberly now. ‘I didn’t know how right I was last night, about opening up cans of worms. There could be some we don’t want to see.’

  The usher was lucky with a meter very close to Parnell’s apartment, outside of which there was already a waiting phalanx of cameramen. The usher said: ‘I suppose I’ve got to come in with you. This is a first for me as well.’

  ‘Come and get your moment of fame,’ said Jackson.

  They endured the flashlights and strobes and Parnell was conscious of faces at windows, as there had been when he’d left the Dubette building. Inside the apartment, he went directly to the bureau and retrieved the passport. As he turned away, offering it to the usher, Jackson nodded towards the telephone and said: ‘Your light’s flashing. You’ve got a message.’

  All three men stood looking down at the apparatus while the message rewound. Then a bright voice said: ‘This is the Acme Toyota garage, 9 a.m. Monday, responding to Ms Lang’s message of Saturday. Sorry we haven’t been able to get back to you sooner, Mr Parnell. You want to call us on 202-534-9928, we’ll fix a time either in DC or McLean to sort a repair estimate for your Toyota. Like we told Ms Lang, our estimates are free and we are the authorized Toyota repair shop in the DC area. Look forward to hearing from you.’

  Jackson extracted the tape from the machine with a surgeon’s delicacy and said: ‘This has gone beyond luck. We’re now into I don’t know what …’ He looked Parnell up and down, disdainfully. ‘I’ve got calls to make. And while I’m doing that, you got time to clean yourself up and put on something you haven’t slept in. You got to start making yourself look good for the cameras, because there’s going to be a lot more of those around before the day’s out.’

  Thirteen

  Richard Parnell showered for a second time to wash off the imagined smell of detention and chose a collar and tie to go with the discreetly patterned sports jacket to match Jackson’s conservatism. The lawyer nodded at his reappearance and said: ‘That’ll do fine for whatever the hell else is going to come today. I’ve lit a lot of fuses and there could be a very big bang.’

  ‘I don’t understand a word you’ve just said and I need to know when I’m going to,’ protested Parnell. He felt like a specimen under one of his own microscopes, an essentially alive but inanimate object blindly writhing and twisting.

  ‘You’ll know when I know,’ promised Jackson. ‘For the moment, we’re going an inch at a time, starting from when we leave here. If we get ambushed again you say
nothing. I do all the talking. But we don’t hurry. Guilty people hurry and, sure as hell, Richard my friend, we ain’t guilty. But other people are, exactly of what I’m not at this moment quite sure. So we’re lighting as many more fuses as we can.’

  There was the expected media encirclement outside the apartment, and Jackson murmured it was just what he’d wanted, and waited patiently for them all to get into position with their cameras focused before announcing that there had been a sensational development which he was unable to disclose until it had been brought before Judge Wilson, with whom he had been in telephone contact and who had delayed for one hour the original court resumption for this new evidence to be produced. That new evidence had elevated the investigation into the tragic death of Rebecca Lang to a federal level, the circumstances of which would become clear later that day. In the car, the usher once more at the wheel, Parnell demanded: ‘What federal level?’

  ‘Flight AF209,’ said Jackson. ‘It rang a distant bell. I had my office check it out while you were cleaning up. And then spoke to guys I know at the J. Edgar Hoover building. It’s a Paris to Washington DC flight that was cancelled four times about three months ago after intelligence electronic eavesdropping picked up a reference to a terrorism attack.’

  ‘It was in Rebecca’s bag!’ said Parnell, disbelievingly.

  ‘You heard what Bellamy and the Montgomery woman said in court.’

  Had it anything to do with the mystery French consignment? wondered Parnell, at once. ‘Why this one number?’

  ‘That’s a question you’re going to be asked a lot of times over the next few days,’ predicted Jackson. ‘Like I said, I’m not sure we’re going to be happy with all the cans of worms we’ve opened. This is now an FBI and Homeland Security investigation.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting Rebecca could have been involved … no, that’s too absurd even to think about …’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to think about it a lot,’ said Jackson.

  ‘There was some stuff from Paris that didn’t arrive in the usual way,’ disclosed Parnell, at last. ‘Rebecca was curious. It turned out to be some check experiments that didn’t work out. According to the research vice president, the project was cancelled.’

  ‘You think it’s connected with that?’

  In the driver’s seat the usher shifted and said: ‘I’m becoming uncomfortable about the confidentiality restrictions of this.’

  Jackson said: ‘You’re bound by a specific court order – the judge is going to be told.’ To Parnell he said: ‘In court you leave everything to me, understood?’

  ‘With as much difficulty as I’m having understanding anything,’ said Parnell.

  Suddenly alert to where they were, Parnell said: ‘Hey, you took the wrong turn – we’re going back into Washington!’

  ‘Stop to make first,’ said Jackson. ‘We’re going to Crystal City, to the Acme body shop. No need for you to come in when we get there. You just stay in the car.’

  ‘Remember who I am?’ demanded Parnell, rhetorically. ‘I’m the person accused of what amounts to murder. I have the right!’

  ‘I’m not contesting that right,’ shot back Jackson. ‘And I haven’t forgotten who you are or what you’re accused of. You stay in the car because I think it’s best – the best for you. So that’s what you’ll do.’

  ‘I’m a client!’ protested Parnell. ‘And I’m not used to being talked to like that!’ and winced at his own pomposity.

  ‘Look at it as a learning curve,’ dismissed Jackson.

  They went over the Potomac high, at the Arlington Bridge, to miss the traffic build-up, and as they turned along the George Washington Memorial Parkway, Parnell saw the Tidal Basin to his left and remembered boastfully rowing Rebecca upriver and unthinkingly said: ‘Oh Christ!’

  ‘What?’ demanded Jackson, beside him.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You said something.’

  ‘It’s not important.’

  ‘Everything’s important!’

  ‘I just thought of something.’

  ‘Everything you think about is important,’ insisted the lawyer.

  ‘This wasn’t,’ refused Parnell. Except that it was: it was the first proper, deeper realization – deeper than that which had registered with him in Burt Showcross’s overcrowded office the previous day. Rebecca was dead, he thought, stepping the words out in his mind. He wasn’t any more going to take her rowing on the river or to a restaurant where their meal and wine was chosen for them, or to a shack on a bay that looked as big as an ocean, to glue themselves up eating crabs so small you ate everything, shells and all. Someone had killed her, murdered her! And tried to make him a victim – frame him as the murderer – as well. Why? What had she – they – done for anyone to do all that? Hate them so much to do all that? Parnell rejected the threadbare phrase that came automatically to mind. He’d make it make sense! What could AF209 mean except Rebecca’s obsession with that damned French business? Who – where – was the runaway lover? Rebecca would have taken him to her uncle’s restaurant – introduced him, given the man a name, just as she’d introduced Parnell. A place, the obvious place, to start. Bethesda! Even more obvious. There had to be a clue there, among her personal belongings: a photograph, a letter, a name in an address book, no matter how much she might have despised the man for her abandonment. Belongings he had no way, no right, to examine, he reminded himself. He had to find a way, any way. He’d do it – find it. Parnell came out of the reverie at their entry into an industrial park, conscious that Jackson was leaning forward to guide the court official at the wheel, actually gesturing directions from an earlier torn-off page from the much used legal pad. Almost at once Parnell saw the neon sign of the Acme repair facility, the lettering of its Toyota appointment almost as big as the name itself. The forecourt and a lot of what he could see behind the warehouse-sized building was a dead cars’ graveyard.

  ‘Wait!’ insisted Jackson.

  The usher shifted, uncertainly. ‘I shouldn’t leave him. I’m responsible.’

  Parnell said: ‘You mind not talking across me, like I don’t exist?’

  ‘Just give us a moment,’ Jackson asked Parnell, no longer demanding. ‘You’ll understand soon enough.’

  It was only a moment. Parnell straightened at the returning approach of Jackson and the court officer. Another man and a woman walked with them almost to his car before detouring to another vehicle, predictably a Toyota.

  ‘All set,’ announced Jackson, coming heavily into the back seat beside Parnell. ‘They’re going to follow. Manager and the gal whose job it is to pick up all the weekend messages. And did she do a hell of a good job!’ He held up another cassette. ‘Rebecca’s voice is on it. I didn’t want you to have to go through hearing it more than once, later in court.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Parnell. ‘And thanks.’

  Parnell was by now accustomed to the waiting media scrum, to which Jackson repeated what he’d said outside the apartment. Everyone from the morning arraignment was already waiting inside. Parnell took the seat he’d previously occupied. Jackson sat the two Acme garage employees in the first row beyond the separating court rail, beside two men to whom he spoke after shaking hands. Finally he crossed for a whispered conversation with Vernon Hanson, showing the prosecuting attorney the two tape loops and indicating the four beyond the rail. They were interrupted by the court usher, returning from the judge’s chambers. At once the two lawyers followed the man back through a door from which he’d just emerged. The usher continued on, gesturing to the two men whom Jackson had greeted. One, a slightly, studiously bespectacled man, pushed through the rail and followed the usher with an awkward, stiff-legged walk.

  It was ten minutes before they returned, the usher with a tape replay machine under his arm. Bending close to Parnell, Jackson said: ‘Judge Wilson listened to the tapes and heard who I intended to call. Hanson wanted to withdraw the charges there and then but I argued it should be d
one in open court and the judge agreed. It’s payback time for Jacob Meadows … and you …’

  Everyone rose to the judge’s entry and this time the lawyer gestured for Parnell to sit immediately after the man was settled. There was a momentary uncertainty before Hanson rose, hurriedly but no longer with jack-in-the-box urgency, and announced that in the light of new evidence, of which the judge was aware, he wished to withdraw all the charges.

  ‘I am aware of what has developed,’ agreed the black-gowned judge. ‘And in view of the considerable publicity this matter has already aroused, I believe, in fairness to Mr Parnell, that these new facts should be entered into the public domain. I also think there are other matters that have been brought to my attention that should be discussed in open court. After that, you may withdraw your charges, Mr Hanson, but not before …’ He turned into the court. ‘I believe there is another attorney who wishes to make an application before me. I understand that neither Mr Jackson nor Mr Hanson has any objection?’

  Both lawyers shook their heads as the man who had seen the judge in private pushed once more through the separating rail and walked unevenly to the stand. The man gave his name on oath as Edwin Pullinger and identified himself as a counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had been made aware of evidence that had been produced in court concerning an Air France flight that had been the subject of an inconclusive terrorism investigation both in the United States and France. The FBI, in conjunction with the Office of Homeland Security, were responsible for investigations into terrorism, and he was making formal application for the death of Ms Rebecca Lang to be officially transferred by the court from Metro DC police to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.