Heartstone

by Phillip Margolin

  Esther was certain that she was being watched. First, the lawyer had come to her apartment. Then, a few days later, he had called her. She told him again that she would not talk to him and she threatened to call the police.

  That evening, she thought she heard someone moving about in her apartment, but there was no one there when she turned on the lights. At times there was a peculiar echo on the phone and she was certain that a blue and white Ford had passed by at least four times since the lawyer’s phone call.

  She had told all this to Roy and he had told her that it was her imagination. She said that it would all be okay if he would just stay with her. When she was with him, she felt so safe. She didn’t want to tell him that she had been thinking about Bobby. How he might feel sitting in jail because of her. In a cell for the rest of his life. That was the sentence Roy had said he would get when she asked.

  She thought she saw a movement in a doorway, but there was no one on the street. She must be wrong. Still, she couldn’t sleep. She was too upset. She tried to imagine Dr. Hollander’s fingers on her wrist, but she could not concentrate long enough to make that work. She kept thinking about Bobby and what it would be like to look at him from the witness stand and say the same things to him that she had told Roy and the doctor in the privacy of the doctor’s office.

  If Roy was with her-if he would hold her while she talked-she could do it. But she knew, because he had told her, that he would not be allowed in the courtroom. She would have to face Bobby alone. She felt frightened again. She wished Roy would come by again. He was always so kind to her. So gentle. He could make her forget the bad thoughts.

  A man rose from his seat at the window of the apartment house across the street. He was an old man dressed in a sleeveless undershirt. A floor lamp situated behind his chair bathed his pale skin in light as he walked away from the window. Esther could see patches of gray hair on his arms. They revolted her. She imagined the old man moving about her apartment in the dark. She could feel the clammy touch of his hand on her cheek. She shuddered.

  Why did she feel this way? Wasn’t she telling the truth? Dr. Hollander had said so. It was amnesia that had kept her from remembering before. That’s why she only remembered now. She knew it was the truth. Bobby would know when he heard her. He couldn’t hate her for telling the truth.

  She could see the telephone sitting on the end table by the sofa. Maybe she should call Roy. She wanted to. Only he seemed so annoyed the last time she had called. She wanted to hear his voice. Even if he was angry. She got up and stood over the phone. Why shouldn’t she call? Weren’t they lovers? Hadn’t he whispered things to her? Told her about how important she was. If she was important, she could call him.

  She touched the cold, black plastic of the receiver. She tried to lift it, but she couldn’t. She put her hands to her face and rocked back and forth in front of the phone. She wanted to call so bad. Please, Roy, let me call. Don’t be mad. She couldn’t stand it if he was mad, ’cause if he was mad he might leave her and she loved him, needed him, so much.

  She thought she heard a movement in the bedroom. She was going to look, but she was suddenly afraid. She had to call Roy. If there was a prowler, he couldn’t be mad. She sat down on the sofa and dialed his number. Her eyes never left the bedroom door.

  4

  Mark knocked on the door a second time and wondered if Sarah was home. He was beginning to worry about her. She had broken appointments twice this week and she was evasive on the phone. Cindy had been complaining about the hours he had been putting into the Coolidge case and, every day, she asked him about the rest of the money.

  The money worried Mark too, but it was more than that. He wanted to see Sarah. He thought about her constantly. He could picture her pale features and her long blond hair and wanted more and more to touch her.

  She was as beautiful as he remembered, but he could not miss the look she gave him. It was a mixture of surprise and embarrassment, as if he had caught her in the middle of doing something she was ashamed of.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked nervously.

  The question surprised him.

  “Nothing’s wrong. I…I wanted to see you. About the case,” he said.

  “Come in.”

  She sounded distracted and she brushed at her hair as she led him into the living room.

  “I expected to see you at the office on Friday,” he said when they were seated on the sofa.

  “I couldn’t make it. I…I’m sorry I didn’t call. Something…An emergency came up.”

  “That’s okay,” he said quickly, not wanting her to think he was criticizing and trying to hide his disappointment in her obvious lie.

  “How is the…Bobby’s case coming? You said you had something to tell me.”

  “It’s coming along just fine,” he answered, grateful for a chance to avoid confronting her. “I’ve uncovered a witness who can help us.”

  He told her about Roger Hessey, talking quickly, afraid of losing her attention. She pretended to listen, but glanced around the room nervously, hearing only part of what he said. She wished he would leave. She knew he would ask about the money and she wasn’t sure how she should handle that.

  “That sounds hopeful,” she said with what she hoped sounded like enthusiasm.

  “Well, I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I’m beginning to think I’ve got something.”

  They sat in silence for a second. Sarah didn’t know what to say. She was getting a headache and she wanted him to leave.

  “I…Uh, before I forget,” Mark started, “did you talk to your parents about the, uh…the retainer?”

  “About the money, Mark. I never called my parents.”

  He said nothing, stunned, letting what she said sink in. He looked into her eyes. She was seated so close that he could see the smoothness of her skin and his desire for her made it difficult for him to accept what she had just said.

  “But you said you would…”

  She touched his arm and it was like an electric shock.

  “I don’t want you to hate me, Mark, but I couldn’t. I was going to. I didn’t lie to you about that. When Bobby was first arrested, I couldn’t believe it. Then I saw him at the jail.”

  She let go of him and stared into her lap. He wanted to hold her. To comfort her. It hurt him to see her distress.

  “Mark, I don’t know what to think. If he did kill that girl…I don’t want you to continue on this case if you don’t want to. I don’t have the money. I…I lied to you. Not at first, but I couldn’t ask my parents. What could I say?”

  She trembled and tears welled up in her eyes.

  “Don’t you see? Could I say please help this man who raped and strangled a young girl who could have been me.”

  She broke down. He moved to her and held her, trying to comfort her while inside his own emotions were in chaos.

  He could see the city stretching below through the picture window. A silver plane floated in the blue summer sky. Tears like tiny pearls were flowing over the soft curve of her cheek. He kissed them away and suddenly he was kissing her lips and they embraced with an intensity that left him breathless. What was he doing? He broke away, frightened by the depth of his passion for her.

  “Mark,” she said.

  He got up and walked away.

  “I’m sorry. I…”

  “Don’t blame yourself. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

  He turned toward her hopefully. She saw the look in his eyes.

  “Mark, I can’t. Not now. Please understand. It’s all too confusing for me. Everything happened so fast. Keep the money I gave you. Tell Bobby to get another lawyer.”

  “I can’t do that,” he said. “And I…It will be okay about the money. If you just…”

  She turned away from him. It would have been easier if he had gotten angry at her. She could see how crushed he was and she could no longer bear to be near him. He took a step toward her, then thought better of it.

  When th
e door closed, she sank down on the couch. She looked toward the window and caught sight of herself in the mirror. She looked away. The apartment was suddenly very dark and very lonely. She felt unclean.

  Shindler walked past the reception desk toward Phil Heider’s office. He was exhausted, because he had spent half the night trying to calm down Esther. He was worried about her. If she cracked up, so did the case and she was beginning to come apart.

  So far he had not told Heider about her midnight calls and the scenes he had witnessed at her apartment. He had gotten Hollander to prescribe some sedatives and he hoped those would get her through the two weeks left before the trial.

  The trial. He shook his head. There would be no one there to help her when she testified. What if she cracked up on the stand? He had considered moving in with her, but had rejected the idea as too risky. The problem was that she had already tried suicide once. On the other hand, if it ever came out that the chief investigator in the case was screwing the star witness, Heider would never get a conviction.

  “Roy.”

  Shindler stopped and looked around. Al Caproni was hailing him from his office door.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I wondered if you’d found out anything about Toller.”

  “Who?” Shindler asked.

  “Eddie Toller. The prisoner who said he saw the Murray girl alive in mid-January.”

  Shindler’s face clouded.

  “That’s closed, Al. Forget it.”

  “Did you check it out?”

  “There was nothing there.”

  “I don’t know. He sounded so sincere. Maybe we should tell the lawyers for the Coolidges about him. We have a duty to tell the defense about any exculpatory evidence we know about and…”

  “Listen,” Shindler said in a low, angry voice, “there is nothing exculpatory in a wild, unsubstantiated story that some con has made up in order to get his ass out of jail. Those two bastards raped and strangled a defenseless girl and butchered a young man worth ten of them. Have you seen those pictures? Did you see that boy’s face? Do you still want to tell the defense attorneys. Because, if you do, we’re going to lose this case and you’ll be responsible for setting that scum free.”

  Caproni was stunned by Shindler’s outburst. The detective had always seemed so controlled.

  “I didn’t mean to go tell them now, Roy. Only if there was something to Toller’s story.”

  “I’m sorry I blew up like that,” Shindler apologized as soon as he realized what he had done. “I had a rough night last night. Look, I talked with Toller. There’s nothing to his story. I questioned him pretty hard and he backed down on a lot of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Details,” Shindler said evasively. “I can’t remember any specific examples right now. Look, forget it, huh? I’ve got to see Heider now.”

  Shindler walked away and Caproni returned to his office. He did not believe Shindler. Something was wrong here. The question was what to do about it. He didn’t want to run off half-cocked to Heider without more proof and he certainly didn’t want to tell the defense about Toller if the prisoner’s story was a fabrication. Then there was the problem of the time of death. If the coroner was right, Toller had to be mistaken or lying.

  Caproni sorted through a stack of papers and picked up Dr. Beauchamp’s autopsy report on Elaine Murray. Something in the report had bothered him when he had read it the first time, but he had not thought much of it, because he had not heard of Eddie Toller yet. He found the section and reread it. He didn’t know enough about biology to know if he was right or not, but he knew someone who could help him. He picked up the phone and dialed the University Medical School.

  The next day, at eleven in the morning, Caproni’s intercom buzzed.

  “There is a call for you from a Dr. Rohmer. Do you want to take it?”

  “Yes,” Caproni said, trying to contain his excitement. Kyle Rohmer was a young gynecologist who worked at the Medical School. Caproni had met him at a party approximately a year before and had seen him socially on occasion since then.

  “Al,” Rohmer said, “I’ve got the information you wanted. Fortunately, Dr. Gottlieb had actually done some research in the area, so I was able to find my sources pretty fast.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Okay. Now you say that the doctor who did the autopsy on the girl said she died four to six weeks before she was found and that morphologically identifiable sperm were found in her vagina. That’s just not possible.

  “Dr. O. J. Pollak’s review of spermatozoa morphological survival time, in an article called ‘Semen and Seminal Stains’ found in the Archives of Pathology, 1943, states that thirty minutes to twenty-four hours is the more usual range. Dr. Bornstein in ‘Investigation of Rape: Medico-Legal Problems,’ Medical Trial Technique Quarterly, 1963, suggests forty-eight hours to be the maximum spermatozoa morphological survival time. Drs. Gonzales, Vance, Helpern, Milton, Charles and Umberger in Legal Medicine, 1954, maintain that spermatozoa can be recovered from the vagina as long as three to four days after their introduction. W. F. Enos, G. T. Mann and W. D. Dolan report finding fragments of spermatozoa on a pap smear four days after an alleged rape in ‘A Laboratory Procedure for the Detection of Semen-A Preliminary Report,’ American Journal of Clinical Pathology, 1950. The longest survival time I was able to find in the literature was fourteen days. Now this was in a living vagina and the report has been discredited by numerous other authorities in the field. Dr. Gottlieb said he thought that seventy-two hours was probably the outside for survival. Does that help?”

  “Yes. Very much. Can you mail me copies of the articles you just referred to?”

  “Sure. Anything else you want me to do?”

  “No. You’ve been a real help.”

  Caproni hung up the phone and closed his eyes. How to proceed? He now had concrete evidence to support Toller’s story. He could go to Heider and tell him what he had discovered, but a feeling about his superior warned him not to. Heider was in this case to get publicity. Caproni had heard enough office scuttlebutt, and he had seen enough while working with Heider, to realize that Heider needed this case to further his political career. The case was unimportant. It served only as a means of getting Heider’s name in the papers every week. He was not going to dismiss a prosecution of this magnitude on the basis of the findings in a few scattered medical journals. Especially when the evidence pointing toward guilt was so strong.

  And that was the crux of Caproni’s problem. He had gone through the evidence and he believed that the Coolidges were guilty. Toller’s story raised a possibility that they were not, but only a possibility and a slim one at that. Even so, under the United States Supreme Court decision in Brady versus Maryland the prosecution was obligated to turn over to the defense any evidence in its possession that would tend to clear a defendant and Toller’s evidence would meet the criteria, if Toller was telling the truth. If the prosecution kept Toller’s story secret and the defense found out, the Coolidges would have grounds for overturning their convictions if they were found guilty. And more important as far as Caproni was concerned, if the prosecution did not reveal Toller’s information to the defense, it would be violating the Canon of Ethics. If Toller was telling the truth!

  Caproni sighed. He was back where he started. He had to have some way of substantiating the facts in Toller’s story. And there was a way that he could do that, he suddenly realized. Find Heartstone. He had an idea. A person like Heartstone would have to have a criminal record. He might have been arrested recently. If he had, there would be a file on his case and, in that file, a police report with the defendant’s address. He hurried down to the file room.

  Caproni was in luck. Eleven months ago, William Lewis Heartstone had been arrested for “Public Intoxication” and “Carrying a Concealed Weapon.” Officer Clark McGivern had responded to a call concerning a disturbance at a skid row bar. Heartstone had been drunk, raving and brandishing a taped broom
handle which McGivern found concealed under Heartstone’s coat at the time of the arrest. Caproni looked for the section of the report that was used to list the defendant’s address. It was blank.

  Caproni returned to his office and dialed police headquarters. Officer McGivern was on patrol, but the officer he spoke to promised to have him called on his car radio. Twenty minutes later McGivern was on the phone. At five-thirty that evening, he was seated in a booth in a coffee shop several blocks from the courthouse sipping coffee while Caproni explained a confidential project he wished him to undertake.

  “I remember this case vaguely,” McGivern said, after studying the copy of the police report that Caproni brought with him. McGivern was young, tall and well built. He had blue eyes, a nice smile that revealed a set of perfect teeth and sandy blond hair that was balding prematurely. “Whatever happened to him? It never went to trial, did it?”

  “No. Heartstone was recoged and never showed for trial.”

  “I’m not surprised he missed his court date. Probably forgot he was arrested by the time the booze wore off.”

  “Do you think you could find him for me?”

  “I can try, but it might take some time. The guy looked like a transient. He might not even be in town.”

  “I realize that, but it’s very important.

  “There’s one more thing. I want this kept confidential. I don’t want you telling anyone what you are doing or who you are doing it for and that includes police officers, district attorneys, anyone.”

  McGivern’s brow furrowed and he looked at Caproni suspiciously.

  “This isn’t something illegal?”

  “No, it’s not illegal, but the work I am doing is very sensitive. If word of this leaked to the wrong people, there could be plenty of trouble,” Caproni said, failing to add that he was the one who would be in trouble.

  Caproni took out his business card and wrote his home phone number and address on the back. He handed the card to McGivern.