Heartstone

by Phillip Margolin

  “I asked if you was glad to see me.”

  The girl croaked an answer that sounded like yes.

  Willie chuckled and released the girl’s chin.

  “I knew you was. I knew you was. ’Cause you know what’s behind these shorts, don’t you? You know what good stuff’s there.”

  The girl bit her lip to try to hold back her tears, but the effort was useless. The sight of the girl’s helplessness seemed to fuel Heartstone’s sadism. He snapped the belt lazily across the girl’s hips. Eddie was certain that he had not used enough force to hurt her, yet the girl’s buttocks jumped as if she had been struck with great force.

  “This here’s my friend Eddie, darlin’. I want you to show him what you got.”

  Eddie wanted to stop it, right here, but he knew that one false move on his part and he would be dead. Knew it for certain.

  The girl was removing her slacks with fast, jerky movements. Each effort seemed to cause her pain. When the slacks were to her ankles, Heartsone pulled them off. Underneath, she was naked.

  “Now the blouse,” Willie said in a husky whisper. “Show this man those fine, fine tits.”

  The girl obeyed weakly, then lay back on the mattress with her legs spread. Heartstone drew the belt down her stomach, letting the leather touch one of her nipples. The tip of the belt stopped where her curled brown pubic hair began. Willie grinned back at Eddie.

  “See how well she learned her lessons. It took some doin’ to get her to lie back and spread those legs. Many a interestin’ hour.” He shook his head and closed his eyes, savoring the memories. “But she’s smart and she learns good. We even gonna feed you tomorra if you treat my friend Eddie okay.”

  Despite his revulsion, Eddie could not keep his eyes off the girl’s body. He noticed how emaciated she looked. Her ribs could be seen easily and there were dark shadows under her eyes.

  Eddie was certain that Willie would mount her first while he watched, but all of a sudden, Heartstone seemed to lose interest. He zipped up his pants and stepped back.

  “I’m gonna pee. You have fun. If she don’t do something you want, you tell me.”

  Eddie heard Heartstone’s footsteps climbing the stairs and the sound of the door closing and locking. The girl shuddered visibly with relief. For a moment Eddie was afraid that he too might be a prisoner and he started to walk toward the stairs.

  “No,” the girl mumbled feebly. “Don’t go, please.”

  She was begging. He turned back to her.

  “Look miss, I…I don’t know what’s going on here, but I won’t hurt you. I promise.”

  He was whispering. As afraid as she that Heartstone might hear them. All he wanted to do was to get away.

  “Don’t talk,” she begged in a whisper. “If he hears me talking, he’ll…”

  She began to sob.

  “You don’t have to worry. I won’t force myself on you,” he whispered in an attempt to comfort her. She became terrified when he backed away.

  “No. You have to. It will be worse for me if they find out you…I didn’t do what they said.” She turned her head away. “Just be quick.”

  Toller’s voice had gotten lower and lower as he wound toward the end of his tale. As he talked, Caproni began to feel the same fear and revulsion that Toller seemed to be reexperiencing. When the prisoner stopped talking, there was a strained silence in the interview room.

  “Did you have intercourse with her?” Caproni asked in a choked voice. Toller shook his head.

  “I was too scared to get it up. I done some bad things in my life, but I ain’t never done anything like that to no person.”

  “What did you do when Heartstone came back?”

  “He didn’t come back. I had to bang on the basement door. He asked me how it was and I made up some story. Then he drove me to town after chargin’ me five more dollars for gas. I was scared all the way, but Willie didn’t do nothin’.

  “The next morning, I packed up and moved out of town. A few days later I read how they found this girl’s body in a ditch by the highway. I could see it was her from the picture in the paper.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the police?”

  “Look, I wasn’t goin’ to no police. Not with my record and not after not reporting it first. I was scared and, besides, the cops never did anything for me. She was dead anyway.”

  Yes, I suppose she was, Caproni thought. Dead long before they killed her. He tried to imagine what it must have been like for the girl, lying in the cold, damp basement, afraid to even speak.

  “Did you ever see Heartstone or Ralph again?”

  “No, sir. And if I had I woulda gone the other way. Like I said, I done some bad shit in my time, but nothin’ like that. I knew what they was capable of.”

  “Do you know Ralph’s last name?”

  “He just called him Ralph and I didn’t ask.”

  Caproni made some final notes. Then, he put his pad in his attaché case and stood up.

  “What you’ve told me could be of great importance, Mr. Toller. I’m going to talk to Mr. Heider. If he feels as I do, then we may be able to arrange something for you. Now I’m not promising anything, but I want you to know that I appreciate your coming forward with this information.”

  Toller seemed flattered and embarrassed by Caproni’s sincerity and, for a second, he forgot the real reason he had contacted the authorities. They shook hands and Caproni left. The session with Toller had drained him and he was grateful to be, once again, in the light of day.

  3

  Shindler was in Heider’s office, as he had been each afternoon for the past week, helping Heider sort through the evidence that had been amassed during the years of investigation, when Caproni returned. Heider could see that he was excited and he motioned him into a chair.

  “What happened at the jail?” Heider asked.

  “Something we should look into. The Coolidges may not be guilty.”

  Heider cast a quick glance at Shindler. The detective had not moved, but there was a subtle change in his bearing.

  “Let’s have it, Al. Don’t keep us in suspense,” Heider said lightly. Inside, wheels were spinning. Tapes preparing to recalculate. The district attorney’s office had committed itself publicly and in the press to the theory that the Coolidges had killed Murray and Walters. Heider had been spokesman for the office and it was his credibility and his political future that would be jeopardized if the Coolidges were innocent.

  “I spoke to that man at the jail, Eddie Toller. He told me that he was in Portsmouth in 1961, in mid-January. He was in a bar and he met a man named Willie Heartstone. Toller mentioned that he wanted to get laid and Heartstone said he could fix him up for a price.”

  “Heartstone drove him somewhere in the country, not too far from town, to a house where someone named Ralph was living. Toller thinks Heartstone lived there too, but he is not certain.

  “Ralph and Heartstone were keeping a girl locked in the basement. She had a padlocked chain around her ankle. Toller said it looked as if they were beating and starving her. He says that a day or so later, he saw Elaine Murray’s picture when her body was found and recognized her as the girl. He said he is certain she was the one. He didn’t come forward then, because he had been in trouble with the law before and didn’t like the police and because he was scared of Ralph and Heartstone and didn’t want to get involved with them again.”

  “I see,” Heider said skeptically. “And what evidence did Mr. Toller offer you to substantiate his story?”

  “None, except…Just his word. But I believe him. It was the way the man talked. He was upset when he described the girl. His fear communicated. I don’t think he could have faked the way he was talking.”

  Shindler laughed.

  “Al, I’m surprised at you. You’ve been a cop. I suppose you’ve never been conned before.”

  Al blushed.

  “A million times. I just don’t think this guy is conning me.”

  “Maybe not. Mayb
e he is telling the truth as he sees it. But it could have been another girl,” Heider said.

  “No. He was positive. He saw her picture only a day or two later and his description matches the description of the clothes Murray was wearing when she was found and her hair color.”

  “You have to admit that brown hair, slacks and a blouse is not exactly unusual. Besides, he could have gotten that out of the papers. They’re rehashing this whole thing all over the front pages every day,” Shindler said.

  “And you’re forgetting one very important point,” Heider said smugly.

  “What’s that?”

  “When was it that Toller is supposed to have seen this girl alive?”

  “The second week in January, a few days before her body was found.”

  “Al, according to Dr. Beauchamp’s autopsy report, Elaine Murray was killed four to six weeks before she was found. How could she be alive during the second week in January?”

  Caproni looked confused for a moment. Then he remembered something.

  “The body. The girl’s body. It didn’t appear to have deteriorated the way you would expect if it had been outside all that time. That was in one of your reports, Roy. Maybe Beauchamp made a mistake. If I remember, his report theorized that the cold weather had kept the corpse preserved.”

  Heider shook his head.

  “No go, Al. This Toller is just another con trying to make a deal.”

  Al shook his head vigorously.

  “I just don’t believe that. You had to be there. That man was actually scared when he was retelling that story. I think it should be checked out.”

  “Okay, Al. You get back to those transcripts and I’ll have Roy get on it.”

  Caproni seemed mollified by Heider’s assurances. They discussed a few other matters and he left. When the door closed behind him, Heider spoke.

  “What do you think?”

  “Bullshit. Another con with a story.”

  “You better hope so. I’ve got my ass on the line with this one and I can’t afford any screw-ups. Go out to the jail. Talk to Toller. If there are any problems, get back to me. They can be taken care of.”

  Roger Hessey was doing okay. He had married a real sweet girl, fathered two great kids and gotten in on the ground floor when his father-in-law purchased a franchise in a chain that sold fried chicken. No one expected the restaurant to do as well as it had and Roger earned enough money to set his family up in a comfortable suburban tract home a few minutes’ drive from a shopping center, a golf course and a neighborhood school.

  “Some change for me from those high school days,” he said, wagging his head. “We did some crazy things then. Say, can I get you a beer or something?”

  “No thanks, Mr. Hessey,” Mark Shaeffer said. They were seated in lawn chairs on Roger’s patio and his two daughters were running and yelling in the backyard. Roger smiled nostalgically and nodded his head again.

  “I’ll tell you, I was shocked when I read that Billy and Bobby had been arrested, but I wasn’t surprised.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, you’re Bob’s lawyer, so I can tell you, but they were pretty wild kids. I mean we all were in those days. Always fighting. Billy was one of the worst of the lot. He was even into dealing a little narcotics. Pot mostly, but don’t forget this was back in 1960. Everyone thought that stuff was worse than heroin back then.”

  “I notice you didn’t mention Bobby just now.”

  “Well, Bobby was a wild kid, but he wasn’t mean like his brother. I mean I was wild too. We broke into warehouses and had gang fights. Nothing I’m proud of now. But it was, I don’t know how to put it, oh, all in the spirit of good fun, most of the time.

  “I mean, most of us, we’d fight a guy and you’d try to whip him good, but you wouldn’t try to cripple him or really hurt him permanently. It’s hard to explain the line most of us drew, but there was one.

  “Then there were kids like Billy. He didn’t draw any lines. That’s why most of us were a bit afraid of him.”

  “You knew Esther Freemont, too, didn’t you?”

  Roger threw back his head and brayed. The little girls stopped playing, startled by the loud noise. When they saw it was only their father laughing, they went back to their games.

  “What’s so funny?” Mark asked.

  “Oh, nothin’, I guess. It’s just that thinking of Esther brings back some mighty fine memories. She had the biggest set of tits…”

  Roger shook his head in wonder and Mark shifted uneasily on the plastic netting of his aluminum chair. Roger was reclining. He had on an aloha shirt, dark glasses and a pair of checked bermuda shorts. From time to time, he would pat his beer belly with satisfaction or sip from an open can of Coors. The weekend sun was strong and Mark wished that he was swimming instead of working.

  “What can you remember about the night that Elaine and Richie were killed?”

  “Not very much, I’m afraid. I told this to the cops a few times. We went over to Bob’s. That’s a hamburger joint we used to go to. I don’t think it’s even in business anymore. Then Bobby or Billy, one of them got this idea to crash Alice Faye’s party. I knew there was gonna be trouble so I said I wouldn’t go, but I didn’t want to be called chicken so I went along. Then I changed my mind and left the party before the trouble started. I really didn’t see anything.”

  “Tell me a little about Esther.”

  Roger leaned over and dropped his voice.

  “Not a bad lay, but nothin’ between the ears, if you know what I mean. She was what you’d call a loose girl in those days. ’Course that was before the ‘sex revolution’ and any girl that wasn’t a virgin when she got married…Well, you know what I mean.

  “She used to hang around the Cobras. There was two kinds of girls that did that. Steady girlfriends and girls that just hung around the gang, but didn’t go with one guy in particular. Esther was sort of in between. She was good lookin’ enough to take out more than a few times, but everyone would get tired of her pretty fast.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Ah, she’d want ya to be in love with her. She’d always be askin’ you if you were in love with her. Then there would always be a scene.” Hessey shrugged. “You can see what I mean.”

  Mark made some notes. This was leading nowhere. Mark asked a few more questions, then thanked Hessey and prepared to leave.

  “How come they waited so long to arrest Bob?” Hessey asked as they walked toward the backyard gate.

  “From what the D.A. tells me, Esther had amnesia all this time. Now she claims to remember the killings.”

  “What made them think she was involved in the first place?”

  “They found her glasses at the scene of the Walters murder.”

  “You mean Lookout Park?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “I guess they figure she lost her glasses on the night of the murder.”

  “She didn’t lose them then.”

  “What?”

  “I slapped those glasses off her, up in the park, about a week before those murders.”

  Sarah glanced at her watch and hoped that Bobby had not seen her. In twenty minutes, visiting hour would be over. She felt as if she would never last.

  The visit had been a disaster from the moment the guard had shut the metal door behind them. His kiss had lasted too long and she felt that he was clinging to her the way a drowning man would cling to a piece of driftwood.

  Their conversation began with a dozen variations of “how are you” and deteriorated into an inhibited discussion of generalities, punctuated by long, self-conscious silences. The longer she stayed with him, the clearer it became that the man who sat before her, shoulders bowed, eyes never meeting hers, was not the man who shared her bed for the past few months. Her lover was a man of substance. This was a man of shadow. She felt pity for the prisoner. Uncomfortable in his presence.

  The guard rapped on the
door and yelled, “Five minutes.” It was time to ask the question she had come to ask.

  “Bobby,” she said, interrupting him.

  He looked at her and knew what she was going to say by the way her voice trembled. He had dreaded this moment, anticipating it a thousand times in the solitude of his cell.

  “Did you…? Those two people…I’ve got to know.”

  It took all of his courage to take hold of her hand and look into her eyes.

  “No, Sarah. I never…”

  “Remember the night that we talked? The night before exams when you couldn’t sleep. Why did you tell me that you had blood on your hands? Why wouldn’t you let me ask you any more questions?”

  The question struck him like a blow. He remembered the night very well and he had hoped that she had forgotten. He felt as if he was breaking up inside.

  “I…In Vietnam…That’s where I…killed an old man. An accident…”

  He continued on, telling her about that night, wondering if she believed him. It was getting to be too much for him. If she loved him, why had she asked? Why couldn’t she have just trusted him. He began to cry.

  She reached over and let him cry on her shoulder. She felt embarrassed. That was all. She wanted to get away from him, the closeness of this antiseptic room, the smell of defeat.

  “Sarah, you’re all I’ve got. You have to believe me. I didn’t…You’re all I’ve got.”

  The guard knocked on the door and she helped him to stand and compose himself.

  On the freeway, driving home, she thought about their meeting. Had he told her the truth when he denied killing the boy and the girl? As soon as she asked the question, she realized that the answer really didn’t matter, because she no longer cared about Bobby Coolidge.

  Esther sat in the dark next to the window. She had moved a wooden chair from the kitchen and placed it so that no one looking up from the street could see her. The fingers of her right hand gripped the edge of the window curtain and held it far enough from the window so that she could peek out without attracting notice.