Heartstone

by Phillip Margolin

  “Oh, no. She probably meant her offices, you dumb…”

  Gary held up his hand for silence.

  “Don’t get excited, Eddie. This ain’t no big thing. I got this place all cased. I know where they keep a pry bar. It’ll just mean some extra work, is all. Just wait here.”

  Eddie started to say something, but Gary was gone, down the hall and up a flight of stairs by the sound of the echoes. Eddie knew he should get out now. The vibes were bad. He thought he heard a noise in the darkness and turned out the flashlight and tried to squeeze into a corner near the door.

  “Turn on the goddamn flash, Eddie, it’s me,” Gary whispered. He had returned with his arms loaded with tools. He dumped them in front of the door and selected a pry bar. Eddie sat on the floor with his back to the wall and told himself “I told you so” over and over while Gary worked on the door. There was grunting and puffing for a few minutes, then Gary signaled him and the door swung open. Gary crouched down and Eddie followed him in.

  He straightened up for a second, then realized the reason for Gary’s crouch. The inside of the pharmacy was as bright as day and the front of the pharmacy was all glass. If they straightened up, anyone outside could see them easily.

  Gary moved behind some couches to a door in the side of a small room. The lower half of the room was opaque, but the top half was glass. The walls of the room were lined with shelves stocked with drugs. There was a refrigerator in the back.

  “Let’s start movin’,” Gary said as he straightened up and began shoving drugs into one of the pillow cases.

  “Wait a minute,” Eddie said. “What is this stuff? This stuff ain’t worth anything.”

  “Sure it is,” Gary said, moving to the next shelf.

  While Gary rummaged through the shelves, Eddie picked up a few boxes and bottles and looked at them. They were pain killers, tranquilizers, cough syrups. No narcotics.

  “This guy is gonna pay you for this shit?” Eddie asked unbelievingly.

  “Yeah. Sure. Look, Eddie, stop talkin’ and get movin’.”

  “Jesus, Gary. This is worthless.”

  Gary threw down the pillow case he was holding in a rage.

  “Shut up, shut up,” he yelled. “You done nothin’ but complain since we left tonight. I asked you along because of all that talk in the joint on how you are this big-time burglar. You ain’t shit, Eddie. Now get these fuckin’ pillow cases full or…”

  Gary froze and his eyes bugged out. Eddie whirled around and heard Gary make for the rear door. He headed after him. There were two cops staring at them through the front window.

  Eddie could only think of the car. He dashed around a corner and realized that he had lost Gary. Well, fuck him. He wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for that dumb…

  He skidded to a halt at a dead end. Damn. He couldn’t remember where the back corridor was. He raced around another corner and spotted the rear door. He could hear footsteps behind him. The cops were in the building. He dashed for the door and there was a policeman suddenly framed in it, gun pointed at him in a classic pistol range pose. The footsteps behind were gaining. “Freeze, you fucker,” the policeman said through the glass. Eddie sank to the floor and clasped his hands behind his head.

  Norman Walters watched his office door remove Shindler from view and wished that the man could be made to vanish that easily.

  “Hold my calls,” he said into his intercom. He felt very old and very tired. He wanted to close his eyes and go to sleep for a long time, but he knew that, instead, he would have to call on emotional reserves, which had grown smaller and smaller since his son’s death and go home to tell Carla.

  Carla. To tell her. He felt drained by the thought of it. In the six months following Richie’s death he had watched her grow old. The spark that seemed to keep her eternally youthful had been extinguished by Shindler’s visit. She had recovered, of course. Time heals, etc. But never fully recovered. She was quieter now. More tired.

  He had changed too. A lot of the self-confidence had gone out of his grip. The things he used to care about so much, his law practice, his cars, his golf game, didn’t interest him as much. There was a dimension missing from both their lives.

  Still, they had coped and the intervening years had helped to dull the memory of the healthy, loving boy who had been his son. Until now. Until Shindler had made him feel the pain again, just as strongly as he had felt it that first time. And soon-when he could muster the courage-he would have to go home and make Carla feel that same pain.

  Detective Avritt slammed the car door on the driver’s side and Shindler glanced over at the marked patrol car that had followed them from the courthouse. Heider had called him as soon as the Grand Jury had returned the indictments and he had rushed to the courthouse to get a judge to sign the warrants. On the way he had remembered the shame and frustration he had felt when he was relieved of the case. No one in the department knew about his weekly visits to Dr. Hollander. His investigation had been carried out on his own time. When he had the evidence he needed, he had taken it to the captain. He still savored the apology the captain had made when he returned the case to him.

  After securing the warrants, he had driven to Norman Walters’s office. He had expected more of a reaction from Richie’s father, yet he could understand the emotions the man must have experienced when he received the news that his son was finally to be avenged. Walters had been cool to him in recent years, but Shindler felt that this was a reaction to his failure to solve the case. All that would change now.

  Shindler absent-mindedly touched the arrest warrant in his left inside jacket pocket and looked up at the third-floor apartment where Sarah Rhodes lived. His watch showed eleven-thirty. It was a warm, sunny day. The beginning of spring. In a half hour, police detectives carrying a similar warrant would arrive at the State Penitentiary.

  The uniformed policemen were out of their car now and Shindler, followed by Avritt, entered the apartment building. The calm was still inside him. It was the feeling of victory, of satisfaction. He had known all along, from the first moment he had seen Billy Coolidge. He thought of the long years when the case had floated in limbo. How often he had despaired of ever proving what he knew in his heart to be the truth.

  Shindler paused in front of the apartment door and waited for the others. When they caught up, he rang the bell. A girl answered the door.

  “Miss Rhodes?”

  “Yes.”

  He showed her his badge. The girl looked confused. A man’s voice called out from the other room and Shindler’s pulse began to race.

  “Is Bobby Coolidge here?” Shindler asked.

  “Yes. Is anything wrong?”

  Shindler smiled. He was the fisherman, the hunter. The prey was close, the line was taut.

  “We have a matter to discuss with Mr. Coolidge. I wonder if you could ask him to step in here for a moment.”

  “Of course,” she said, hesitantly. She disappeared into another room and the officers filled up the entry way.

  Sarah returned. Shindler studied Bobby as he came down the hall. The D.A. haircut was gone and so was the arrogance. He had put on a little weight, but he was the same person Shindler had seen on the night in ’61 when they had interrogated the brothers at the station house.

  “Robert Coolidge?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a warrant for your arrest. You will have to accompany us to the station house.”

  Bobby smiled and looked back and forth between Shindler and the other policemen.

  “Is this a joke?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Shindler said, handing Coolidge a copy of the warrant. Bobby did not look at it.

  “Well, what’s the charge?”

  “Mr. Coolidge, I am here to arrest you for the murders of Elaine Murray and Richie Walters.”

  PART FOUR. SHADOWS AND WHISPERS

  1

  Bobby was in the village again and he was afraid. There were no stars and, like a Hollywood backd
rop, the solid black sky seemed to have no dimensions. Mist snaked its way around the circular, grass-thatched huts and shrouded the bodies, creating the eerie illusion that their moans and screams were emitted by the fog.

  Bobby looked for the rest of his company, but he saw no one. There was a sound like a spider scuttling in the dark. Another, like Witch’s Wind rustling the trees. Bobby clutched his carbine to his khaki-clad chest. He crept forward, bent at the waist, his eyes darting into the ebony mist.

  The toe of his boot struck an object and he jumped back, startled. The fog cleared around a patch of ground. There was an old man lying in the dust. He was obviously dead, yet undead. His eyes pleaded with Coolidge and Bobby was seized by an unreasoning terror. He leaped on the old man, stabbing, screaming. His knife struck repeatedly and there was blood everywhere. Fountains of blood, spraying in red streams high into the night sky, as the ancient, sorrow-filled eyes pleaded with him and he listened to the cacophony of his own screams.

  “Shut up, goddamn it!”

  “What?”

  There were several voices yelling for quiet. Bobby’s eyes were wide open and he was in his cell and not in the jungle.

  “I said, ‘Shut up or I’ll shut you up,’” someone yelled down the stone corridor.

  Bobby mumbled an apology. He was soaking wet. He ran a hand across his face. His heartbeat was rapid. At least he was not in the jungle. He realized that the blanket was clutched around his throat. He released it. He swung his legs over the side of the bunk and let his head fall heavily into the palms of his hands. He could not relax. Deep breathing did not help. Inside was a vacuum. When they had read him the charge, everything that he had been or dreamed had evaporated.

  He had been in isolation since his arrest yesterday afternoon. There had been no visitors, except the detectives, and he had refused to talk to them. He wondered why Sarah had not come to see him.

  The jail cell was small. There was a bunk bed and a toilet, nothing else. He had enough room to pace, but he had no desire to move. For the last eighteen hours he had been like a rag doll. Every movement was an effort. It was as if his bones had become fluid and his heart a fluttering bird, afraid of the slightest whisper. When they had turned out the lights last evening, he had cried, not out of anger, but in desperation. He was lost.

  He wanted someone to hold him and assure him that it was not all going to end. He wanted to bury his head in Sarah’s lap and let her stroke his hair and talk about their future together. He wanted to believe.

  After he sat on the edge of his bed for some time, his breathing became more regular and he felt very tired. He let himself fall back onto the bed and he covered himself with the blanket and shut his eyes. As soon as he did, a great fear gripped him. It was Vietnam again and even before that. To sleep was to dream. Oh, God, let me rest. Please! But there was a roaring in his head. Wakefulness was the dam that blocked the flood of dreams, sleep the lever that released it. There was no liquor here and no Sarah. Slowly he opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. He could hear movement in the darkness. The scratching of rat claws on the dry cement floors.

  There was an attractive young woman and a man who looked vaguely familiar seated in his waiting room when Mark Shaeffer arrived at his office.

  “I don’t know if you remember me,” the man said. “I’m George Rasmussen. You helped me out of a scrape a few months ago.”

  The name brought back the event. This was the college student who had been arrested for drunk driving. He wondered if the girl was Rasmussen’s wife. He had trouble taking his eyes off her. She was very tense and so was George. He ushered them into his private office.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked when they were seated. His eyes strayed again to the girl. She was wearing slacks and a tight sweater that showed off her figure. There was a disturbing quality about the girl that struck a sexual chord. She seemed soft and lost and her nearness awakened a desire to protect and to touch. His relations with Cindy had been sporadic lately and he found that he was becoming aroused.

  “My boyfriend was arrested yesterday,” she said. Her voice quivered when she spoke. Mark took out a yellow note pad and a pen.

  “Is he in jail now?”

  “Yes. They won’t let us see him. I called George and he said that we should see you.”

  “Have you tried to bail him out?”

  “There isn’t any bail. We asked.”

  “There has to be bail. Who did you talk to?”

  “I don’t remember the name. He was a sergeant.”

  “Where? At the county jail?”

  “Yes.”

  “He should know better than that.”

  Mark swiveled his chair and picked up the phone.

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Bobby. Bobby Coolidge. It would be under Robert, I guess.”

  “They said there isn’t any bail on a murder charge,” George added.

  Mark put down the phone. There was a tingling at the base of his scalp.

  “Your friend is charged with murder?”

  The girl looked nervously at George.

  “That’s what they told Sarah when they arrested him and that’s what they told me when I called.”

  “I know he couldn’t have done anything like that. We’ve been together almost constantly for the last few months. When could he have done it? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Who do they say he killed.”

  “Two people. A man and a woman. I don’t remember the names.”

  The word “murder” has mystical qualities for those who practice criminal law. The sound of it causes a subtle change in the atmosphere. The level of electricity in the air rises. Mark forgot about the girl, for the moment, and dialed the county jail.

  “My name is Mark Schaeffer. I understand you have a prisoner named Robert Coolidge in custody.”

  Sarah watched Mark as he spoke, looking for any sign. He seemed too young to entrust with Bobby’s safety, yet George had spoken highly of him and he seemed intelligent and concerned. She heard him repeat a date, 1960, and saw a look of puzzlement cross Mark’s face.

  “Yes, I’ll be out to see him at once. Can you arrange for me to use one of the private interview rooms, instead of the general attorney’s room. Thanks, I appreciate that.”

  Mark hung up and swiveled around to face Sarah.

  “Miss Rhodes, do the names Elaine Murray and Richie Walters mean anything to you?”

  Sarah could sense a change in Mark. He was tense now too. She began to feel uncomfortable.

  “I think those are the names of the people that the police say Bobby killed.”

  “Yes, but do you know who they are and when they were killed?”

  Sarah looked at George. George looked puzzled, as if the names meant something to him, but he could not recall what they meant.

  “I…No, they don’t sound familiar.”

  “Do you live in Portsmouth? Are you from here?”

  “No. I live in Canada-Toronto.”

  Mark took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. He was thinking very fast. This could be the case that could make his reputation. In Portsmouth, the Murray-Walters case was like Lizzy Borden and Leopold and Loeb combined. It would mean TV and headlines and enough free advertising to maybe make his business go.

  “Miss Rhodes, approximately seven years ago a young man named Richie Walters was murdered in Lookout Park. Several weeks later, his girlfriend, Elaine Murray, was found dead out on the coast highway. Bobby is charged with committing those murders in 1960.”

  Mark watched the girl’s reaction. She turned ashen and appeared unable to speak. George leaned forward.

  “That’s ridiculous. Why, Bob’s almost a pacifist. He won’t even talk about his war experiences. I don’t believe it.”

  “I’m not saying that he is guilty, George. I’m telling you what Mr. Coolidge is charged with.

  “Miss Rhodes, I hate to bring this up, but I’ll have to at some time an
d, with a case this serious, I think we had better be frank with each other. There is no such thing as a simple murder case. Even the least complicated ones take an incredible amount of an attorney’s time.

  “From what I know about this case, I think I can safely say that it is going to be very complicated. We are dealing with a crime committed seven years ago. I am going to have to spend an enormous amount of time in investigation and preparation. I may have to obtain the services of expert witnesses. I may have to hire a private investigator to assist me. I will probably have to turn some cases down because I will not have the time to handle them.

  “What I’m leading up to is this. Does Bobby have the money to hire an attorney? This will probably cost him several thousand dollars at a minimum.”

  She spoke haltingly. Mark could see that she was torn. He had seen that look before on the faces of people close to people charged with crime. The look signified the beginning of doubt. The beginning of questioning. She was asking herself who Bobby Coolidge really was. She was having her first look at a dark side that she may not have suspected. When the charge was murder, the questions were harder to answer.

  “Bobby doesn’t have any money…Or not enough to pay that.”

  “I’m talking about a sum in the area of ten thousand dollars.”

  Sarah did not answer immediately. She took a good hard look at Mark. What did she really know about Bobby? Ten thousand dollars! To give that sum to this stranger to defend a man who…Who what? She was assuming that he was guilty. Why should that be her first reaction? Now it was she who felt guilty and ashamed. Her family had money and she had substantial savings.

  “I’m pretty sure I can raise the money. My family is…well off. I would need some time to talk to my parents.”

  “All right. I’m going to go to the jail and talk to Bobby now. I’ll call you this evening. Will you know by then?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Mark rose and George and Sarah followed him to the door. Sarah turned and held out her hand to him. She looked stunned, but under control. He took her hand and held it.