“Oh, I bet you are,” I said, wiping my eyes with the heels of my palms. “Where’s Julia?”
“She’s being taken care of. She’s with her lawyer right now, as a matter of fact, a nice gentleman named Clarence Swift. He’s been quite helpful, I must say, more helpful than his client. But we’re close to getting this thing wrapped up without her cooperation, except for a few minor details which we hoped you could help us with.”
“I doubt I could help you with anything.”
“Don’t be so sure, Victor. We think your help can be enormous.”
“Like the fat lady at the circus,” said Hanratty.
“Are we talking about your mother again, Hanratty?” I said.
“Let’s start with tonight, shall we?” said Sims. “When did you meet up with Mrs. Denniston, and where?”
I closed my eyes, tried to figure out what I should do, failed, and decided instead to punt. “You haven’t read me my rights.”
“You’re not a suspect, Victor. We don’t need to read you your rights, which you, anyway, know better than we do. But we would very much appreciate your full assistance.”
“And I would appreciate a full body massage.”
“And a happy ending, too, I assume.”
“Are you volunteering?”
He shook his head wearily. “You’re not going to help.”
I glanced at the mirror. “Not tonight I won’t.”
“Maybe Hanratty here can persuade you,” said Sims. “My wife once asked him over to help rearrange our furniture. He made a mess of it, of course, smashed china, battered walls. Like a bull in the bridal section of Macy’s. I wouldn’t want that to happen to your face, not that it couldn’t use some rearranging.”
I rubbed my jaw.
“Make it easy on yourself, Victor.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “One of those rights you failed to read to me is the right to remain silent. I don’t exercise much, but I’m exercising that.”
“We could subpoena you and drop you in front of a grand jury.”
“And I could plead the Fifth unless you give me immunity.” I turned to the mirror and grinned. “Are you ready to give me immunity, right here and right now?”
“What did I tell you?” said Hanratty.
“Victor, Victor, Victor,” said Sims, each recitation of my name accompanied by a shake of the head. “Why are you making this so hard? You’re only going to hurt yourself. There is no use trying to protect her.”
“I’m not trying to protect anyone,” I said, “but myself.”
“Siding with her is not the way to do it. This is what we’ve got so far, and you can figure out for yourself what it adds up to. Dr. Denniston was shot once, straight on. There was no apparent forced entry, no apparent robbery, no evidence of a struggle. The live-in housekeeper, a woman named Gwen McGrath—who makes a fabulous pecan pie, or so we’ve been told by Mr. Swift—said there was a loud argument between the Dennistons while she was still at the house. Not, she informed us, an unusual occurrence. In the middle of the argument, Mrs. Denniston told Gwen she could go on out for the evening. Gwen, who has a standing date for Sunday dinner with a man named Norman, locked up behind herself and set the alarm, leaving only the doctor and the wife in the house. When she came back a few hours later, about nine o’clock, she found the alarm activated and the house empty, except for Dr. Denniston dead in the library.”
“With the candlestick?” I said.
Sims smiled vaguely at the comment. I tried not to show how shaken I was.
“A single bullet in the forehead,” said Sims. “No weapon has yet been found, but Mr. Swift kindly informed us that Dr. Denniston did have a revolver, a quite shiny one, he told us. He kept the gun in the safe.”
“Is it still there?”
“We don’t know, we haven’t been able to open it yet, though a representative from the safe company will be at the house tomorrow. According to Mr. Swift, the combination was apparently known only by Dr. Denniston and his wife.”
“It’s nice that Mr. Swift has been so helpful.”
“Isn’t it, though?” said Sims. “And he is very interested in you, our Mr. Swift. Wanted to know your relationship with Mrs. Denniston. Wanted to see everything we had with your name on it.”
“Curious fellow.”
“That’s an understatement. So what we need to know from you are the answers to three small questions. As soon as you help us with our questions, we can arrange for you to be taken home. How does that sound?”
“I sure could use a shower.”
“You don’t have to tell us,” said Hanratty.
“And if you cooperate now, we’ll keep you out of it for as long as we can. We won’t call you before the grand jury, we won’t disclose your name to the papers.”
“And that helps me how?”
“Do you really want all the papers harping on your relationship to the dead man’s wife?”
“As long as they spell my name right,” I said.
“Victor, Victor, Victor. Can we begin?”
I thought about it for a long moment. Sims smiled easily and waited. Hanratty looked like he was struggling to keep from banging on the table with my head.
The whole factual recitation by Detective Sims was solely designed to convince me they had the goods on Julia Denniston, and I must say it had worked quite well. If everything he was telling me were true, who else could have committed the murder? And if she had committed the murder, then all my lowest paranoid suspicions were also true. I had made her a promise, and I owed her something, I figured, our past required it, but what did I owe her, really, other than the truth? And it’s not like she didn’t already have a lawyer on her side.
“She called me about ten from outside my apartment,” I said finally. “I invited her in. She was there when you guys showed up.”
“Showering,” said Hanratty.
“She asked if she could. I said it was okay.”
“I bet you did,” said Sims. “Do you mind if we run forensics tests on your apartment?”
“Knock yourselves out. Just be sure your guys screw the drain cover back into the shower floor.”
“How long had you been seeing her?”
“After she ran off with the now-dead doctor, we lost contact until a couple of weeks ago. She had been getting some strange letters. She called to ask if they were from me. I said they weren’t. But the renewed contact allowed us to work out some unresolved issues.”
“What kind of issues?”
“Personal issues, Detective.”
“Were you screwing her, Victor?”
“It all comes down to that, doesn’t it?”
“It usually does.”
“The details are none of your damn business.”
“But they are, you see. With a husband dead and the wife in your apartment shortly after the murder, it is definitely our business. Were you screwing her?”
“No.”
“Really? That’s strange, especially with her soaping up in your shower like that.”
“I’m more disappointed than you are.”
“What happened?”
“I was unbuttoning her pants and unhooking her bra the very moment you boys knocked.”
“Oh, that’s good,” said Sims. “That’s ripe.”
“‘Ripe’ is not quite the word I’d use.”
“And you’ll sign an affidavit as to all this?”
“Type it up.”
“Okay,” said Sims. “That wasn’t so hard, now, was it? I’ll leave you in the good graces of my partner while I rustle up a CSI team and have the affidavit prepared.”
As soon as Sims left the room to talk to the assistant district attorney standing behind the mirror, Hanratty walked to the table and leaned over me. I could feel his hulking presence, smell the bad cop coffee on his breath. He placed his hand on the back of my head and pressed gently.
“I think Sims is missing half the story here.”
&nb
sp; “Maybe,” I said without turning around, “but I’m not the half he’s missing.”
“I think you been slipping it to her for a good long time. I think, drunk on love, you both decided the easiest way to keep the fireworks going was to kill the husband. I think you and she hatched the whole damn thing.”
“Don’t think so much, Detective, you might strain something.”
“Anything you want to tell me right now? Anything you want to get off your chest?”
“I have nothing else to say.”
“Oh, you’ve got plenty to say, baby. And you’re going to spill it, all of it, before this is over. I’m not going to rest until I get the whole truth from you.”
“Then you’re going to be very tired,” I said.
A few minutes later, when Sims came back into the room, I was wiping off a thin line of blood from my brow. My head had accidentally rammed into the tabletop, imagine that. I guess Detective Hanratty didn’t like the crack about his mother.
“Had an accident?” said Sims as he placed the affidavit before me.
I read it carefully, made a few minor changes, signed it. And with that, I believed I had signed my way out of the whole damn thing. Julia now was on her own.
“Very good,” said Sims. “By the way, you ever hear of a guy named Cave?”
“Cave?”
“That’s it. Miles Cave?”
“No.”
“You sure, Victor?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay, fine. Wait here just a moment, and then we’ll take you back to your apartment and conduct the search. And, Victor, take my advice, why don’t you. From here on in, stay the hell away from old girlfriends. Nothing but trouble. It’s like my grandmother always said.”
“What’s that, Detective?”
“Old flames burn deadly.”
6
MONDAY
I was half blind and bleary with weariness when I arrived at the courthouse the next morning. There wasn’t much on my docket, a young man’s future was all. His name was Derek Moats, and Derek was in trouble.
“Where you been, bo?” he said when he spotted me outside the Criminal Justice Building. “You told me to get here a half hour ago, and here you are, stumbling up with your tie all awry.”
“I knew I’d show, Derek,” I said as I adjusted my knot. “It was you I was worried about.”
“I was here from when you said, and I’m the one looking sweet, not like I just stepped out the crapper. Late night with the ladies, bo?”
“Let’s call it a late night and leave it at that.” I gave him a quick inspection. “Nice hair.”
“Combed it out just for the judge. And I wore what you told me to.”
“You look fine. Are you ready?”
“I was born ready.”
“You were born, we know that for sure, the rest we’ll figure on the run. Remember what I said, how to play it?”
“Course I do.”
“Good. Now go on in there and sit where I told you. I have someone I have to meet first.”
Commonwealth v. Derek Moats. It wasn’t much of a case, one of a long series of short trials arising from a simple roundup at a crowded drug corner in North Philly. After a number of undercover buys, the uniforms had swarmed in from all sides, forming a ring and herding a group of suspects into the center. The undercover cops then identified the young men who had been doing the selling. It was an effective way to clean out a corner, but a scattershot form of justice. Derek was caught in the hoop and pointed out by one of the undercovers, but he claimed he wasn’t doing the selling.
“So what were you doing there?” I had asked him.
“Hanging,” was his answer.
“Hanging?”
“There’s girls on that corner you would not believe,” he had said, “and every one of them just waiting for a little bit of Derek.”
The little-bit-of-Derek argument wasn’t much of a closing, but it was about all I had, unless I could discredit the identification. Because of the ID, I had opted for a bench trial. Juries are always taken in by clear identifications—he’s the one, yes, him—but judges know that the simple identification is often the most unreliable part of a criminal case. That was the knowledge I was banking on.
Half an hour later, I was sitting at the counsel table, leaning back with a quiet little smirk on my face as A.D.A. Johnstone, a fierce young prosecutor, came to the crucial part of her direct examination.
“What time was it,” she asked, “when you made the purchase?”
“About two o’clock in the morning,” said Detective Pritzker, a burly man with a long, shaggy beard, looking quite awkward in his suit and tie. He obviously would have been more at home in the motorcycle leathers he was wearing the night of the arrest.
“Was it dark?”
“The sun wasn’t out, if that’s what you’re asking, ma’am. But at that location there are plenty of streetlamps, and with all the headlights from the traffic, it was more than bright enough for me to see who I was dealing with.”
“And so you had a clear view of the man who sold you the heroin in People’s Exhibit One.”
“Objection,” I said. “There is no testimony yet as to the actual contents within that glassine envelope.”
“Are you contesting the contents, Mr. Carl?” said the judge.
“I’m contesting everything, Your Honor.”
“I’ll sustain the objection for the time being,” said the judge. “Let’s get on with it.”
“And so, Officer Pritzker,” said A.D.A. Johnstone with annoyance now in her voice, “you had a clear view of the man who sold you the alleged heroin in People’s Exhibit One.”
“Yes, I did,” he said.
“And do you see him in the courtroom today?”
“Yes, I do,” said Officer Pritzker, staring now straight at me as if he were preparing to steal my lunch money.
“Can you point him out, please?”
He reached out his arm and pointed his finger at the man sitting next to me at the counsel table, the man in the usual defendant’s seat, and then he swiveled his arm until his finger was aimed at a different man in a suit and tie sitting in the last row of the courtroom.
“He’s right there,” said Pritzker. “Sitting in the back row, in the gray. That’s him.”
A murmur went though the courtroom. I swiveled in my seat, seemingly stunned at the revelation.
“Officer Pritzker,” said A.D.A. Johnstone, “are you sure?”
“The lawyer is trying to trick me, is all,” said the witness. “I heard that’s the way he works. He’s got a reputation. But I’m a step ahead. The guy I bought from is him in the back.”
The judge leaned forward on the bench and hissed down at me. “Mr. Carl, are you playing games in my courtroom?”
“Would I do something like that, Judge?”
“Unfortunately, yes, you would. But not without consequences. Who is the man sitting next to you at counsel table?”
I looked at the young man next to me, hands clasped before him, eyes staring down. “Your Honor,” I said, “the young man sitting next to me at counsel table is the defendant, my client, Derek Moats.”
Officer Pritzker, on the stand, snarled at me and then said to the A.D.A. in a harsh whisper loud enough for the whole courtroom to hear, “He’s lying.”
“Your Honor,” said the A.D.A., “this is highly irregular.”
“Yes it is,” said the judge. “Mr. Carl, if I may ask, who is the man in the suit whom the officer identified?”
“I believe the man in the suit,” I said, “is an intern with the public defender’s office.”
“What is he doing in my courtroom?”
“I invited him, Judge. He’s trying to learn about the criminal justice system, I told him this could be an instructive case.”
“You invited him, did you? And it’s just a coincidence, I’m sure, that the intern you invited into the courtroom and your client both look quite alike.�
��
“They do? I hadn’t noticed.”
“They were talking outside the courtroom,” said Officer Pritzker. “The lawyer had his arm around his shoulders, giving him orders. I saw it.”
“I was advising a young man who is seeking a career in the law,” I said.
“I bet that’s what you were doing,” said the judge. “And doing it right smack in the view of the witness. Okay, this is what we’re going to do. Ms. Johnstone, I want you to take custody of both these men right now and figure out who is who. Match fingerprints if you have to. How long will that take?”
“Give us an hour, Your Honor.”
“Fine.” He checked his watch. “Come back in an hour. If the man in the suit is the defendant, Mr. Carl, there will be hell to pay, both in the sentencing of your client and for you personally after I hold you in contempt and make my report to the bar association.”
“That sounds a little harsh, Judge.”
“Be glad it’s not the old days, Mr. Carl, where I would have pulled your ticket and had you flogged. But if it truly was, as Mr. Carl claims”—he paused, looked down at the docket on the bench before him—“Derek Moats, the defendant, sitting next to Mr. Carl this whole time, then, Ms. Johnstone, your witness blew the identification, your case is dead, and I expect it to be dismissed forthwith. Do you understand?”
“We could still make the argument that—”
“I don’t want to hear arguments. It will be dismissed, is that clear?”
“Yes, Judge.”
“Any questions?”
“No, Judge.”
“And, Mr. Carl, don’t you dare leave this courtroom until Ms. Johnstone makes her report.”
“What about lunch?”
“Eat the desk, I don’t care, but you stay right here.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Okay then,” he said with a bang of his hammer, “we’re in recess. I need to take a pill.”
I signaled to Derek not to say a word to anyone and watched as A.D.A. Johnstone and two police officers escorted the two young men from the courtroom. Then I sat down and leaned back to wait.
Just at that moment, a massive weight fell onto my shoulder and almost sent me reeling backward to the floor. I angrily jerked around and spied a huge man, with broad shoulders, an expanding stomach, and a face like a boxer who had bobbed when he should have weaved. Detective McDeiss of the Homicide Division. And he was shaking his big old head at me.
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