When we disconnected I called my brother, Todd.
“I’m in town,” I said.
“Cool,” Todd said. Pause, then, “Listen, about that thing with Gemma-Kate.”
That was as close to an apology as I was ever going to get, for the phone conversation where he called me the slang term for part of the female anatomy. Not even in our family is that what you’d call a term of endearment. I said, “There’s no problem with that thing. We were both—”
After the events of a few months before, there had been plenty of more reasonable conversations about Todd’s daughter, who had come to stay with us, and I’m sure Todd talked about it with Mom and Dad, so it wasn’t totally creepy that we didn’t discuss it now. We were both nuts at the time, but now I felt a little regret at the way Gemma-Kate was pushed into the shadow. Another story, another time.
“That’s right” was all Todd would say. Rather than say Oh, we must get together he asked, “How long will you be here?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe a week.”
“Have you seen the folks?”
“I stopped there first. Dad looks really sick. You need to go see him. Mom is asking.”
“I will.”
“Todd, what do we do if he dies?”
“Bury him, probably,” Todd said.
I felt a little click in my heart. “That’s not funny, even for a Quinn.”
“Not meant to be. You know I hate the old bastard.”
“We’re going to have to talk about this at some point, and don’t think you’ll be able to just shove the surviving parent at your big sister.”
“Isn’t that why you’re here?” he asked.
“Mostly.” I explained the other reason for my presence. He got more engaged in the conversation then, other people’s murders being so much easier to talk about than familial responsibility. He was aware of the Creighton case, though he hadn’t worked it. He knew the guy up in Vero Beach who did.
“Solid?” I asked.
“Solid.” Todd cleared a minor frog from his throat. “Well, not directly, a friend of mine knows him.”
So when did Quinns start having friends? The throat frog told me that the friend was female, and likely more than a friend. I was curious. “When I get back from seeing Creighton’s attorney and Dad, do you want to have lunch or something? With your friend? Once I get more information I might have some questions.”
Being needed was even one step better than murder shop talk. He quickly agreed.
I turned on my iPad to read a little more of the court transcripts so I wouldn’t look too ignorant the next day if I went to see William Hench. Tracy Mack would be a waste of bullshit. I wanted to see what Shayna Murry, the other damning piece of testimony, had to say.
TESTIMONY OF SHAYNA MURRY
Shayna Murry, having been duly sworn, was examined and testified as follows:
By Attorney Lancer:
Q: Ms. Murry, would you please tell the court why you’re giving testimony today?
A: I was Mr. Creighton’s mistress.
Q: Would you please point to the person in the courtroom to whom you’re referring?
A: (Points to Marcus Creighton.)
Q: Thank you. How did you meet?
A: The Creightons were decorating a house in Vero Beach, and happened to see my studio up the road in Sebastian.
Q: Did they buy anything?
A: No. Not that day. But Marcus, Mr. Creighton, stopped by a week later and said he wanted to commission a gift for his wife’s birthday. Nothing I had in the studio, but something different, and would I work with him on it.
Q: Please tell the court about your collaboration with Mr. Creighton.
A: At first he came by the studio. Then he started taking me out for lunch, wonderful lunches up in Melbourne in restaurants that had private rooms and the waiter knew his name and discussed the wine with him. I grew up dirt poor and he made me feel like Cinderella. He was so kind and handsome, older than me, but in a Sean Connery kind of way. It wasn’t sleazy, and he was no more of a flirt than any other guy. At first we talked about art. Then he started asking me personal questions about my life. What did I do for fun? And then, I must have a boyfriend, what was my boyfriend like, was he an artist, too? After a while we stopped pretending to talk about art.
Q: Please be more specific.
A: I became his lover.
Q: Thank you. How long did your affair go on?
A: About a year. But the pattern, having lunch and then going back to my place for sex, it began to feel like a dead end. I only saw him once a week and it wasn’t enough. Once I told him I wanted to wake up beside him, and he got this look on his face like someone had stabbed him. I should have been smart enough to stop it then. What happened after was as much my fault as his.
Q: Would you please describe the last time you saw Marcus Creighton before today?
A: Marcus showed up around two in the morning and pounded on my door. It was raining, and he was soaked. I let him in and gave him a towel to dry off. After he wiped his face I could see the water wasn’t just from the rain. He was crying.
Q: Then what happened?
A: I asked him what was wrong. He … he said he loved me. He had never said that word before. He went down on his knees. Seeing him cry, and on his knees, he was always so strong.
Q: What did you answer?
A: (no response)
Q: Please, Ms. Murry, you’re doing fine and you’re almost finished. What did you answer?
A: I told him I … loved him, but he was married. I said we should never have started. I started to cry, too.
Q: How did he react?
A: Then he said, I can get a divorce and we can start again like everything was new. And I said, Marcus, you’ve got three kids. And he said, I can still keep a relationship with them, you’ll like them. And I said, they’ll hate me. I started out as Cinderella and I’d end up like the wicked stepmother.
Q: And what did he say? The words as precisely as you can recall them, please.
A: He said … oh God. I thought I could do this part. I’m not sure I can.
Q: That’s all right, Ms. Murry. You take all the time you need.
A: He said, he said, I don’t care about anything but you. I’ll do whatever it takes to have you. He got up off his knees and patted my arm like I was one of his children needing reassurance. Then he repeated those words. Then he left.
The Court: Ms. Murry.
Murry: I’m sorry. (unintelligible)
The Court: Ms. Murry, would you please repeat for the record?
Murry: I can’t get those words out of my head.
By Attorney Lancer:
Q: One more question, Ms. Murry. Would you please tell the court on what date you had this meeting with Mr. Creighton?
A: It was April twenty-third.
Q: Please let the record show that this meeting was seven days before the murder of the Creighton family. Ms. Murry, was there any other contact with Mr. Creighton within the seven days after your meeting?
A: (crying) One. He called me the night of the murders and said, No matter what you hear, tell them I was with you.
If the Marcus Creighton that Murry described was really who he was, I didn’t like him much. This transcript made me more concerned about Laura falling for another unobtainable jerk. Yet there it was, Creighton’s Get Out of Jail Free card. If they found the phone records, and the records showed he didn’t call her at all, but instead called his home number from her place, she was lying. I started to have some what-if thoughts that were very unappealing.
Seven
Walking down the hall to Dad’s room the next morning, I passed a sign that cautioned me to be quiet because rest was healing. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case with Dad. I could hear voices coming from his room when I was still about three doors away. When I got there, the nurse was yell-talking to him the way people often do with the elderly. He was yelling back as well as he could, given the condition o
f his lungs. Apparently he was much more alert than the night before, and I had hope.
“Mr. Quinn, all you have to do is hold this in front of your face, put your mouth on the stem, and blow as hard as you can.”
“You blow it,” he said. “I want my breakfast.”
“Fergus, stop acting like a baby and do what the nurse tells you to do,” Mom said. She was standing next to the bed, leaning over him like she was about to take the blower from him and do it herself. I wondered what time she had arrived. Had she spent the night there?
Did I really grow up with this? “Hi, ya’ll,” I said.
The women turned to me without having time to drop the same glares they had used on Dad. He looked relieved to see me. And spent from the yelling. “Brigid. Tell these two I don’t need to blow in a goddamn tube.”
“You sound terrible. Blow in the goddamn tube, Dad.”
He wheezed. “Make me.”
What a child would say. There was something about this two-year-old in an eighty-three-year-old body that set me off, Quinn-style. I took the device from the nurse and shoved it at my father. He grabbed it out of my hand and swung it against the opposite wall, missing Mom’s face by about six inches. She reared back with the long practice of avoiding projectiles.
Things stopped. I had one of those flashbulb memories, other swings, other ducks, loud fights while Ariel and I played Drug Bust Barbie and Todd whimpered in his playpen.
Then another flash of my last routine mammogram and how the technicians had started asking routinely: Is anyone at home hurting you?
Did they ever ask Mom this? What did she say? Of course not, she would say, because he never actually connected, he only threw things. When I was growing up, this wasn’t considered abusive. Very little that went on with married people was considered abusive.
Time started up again, and I happened to connect with the nurse’s eyes. She frowned. Times had changed. I felt ashamed of my family.
As if she noticed my shame, which made it worse, the nurse said, “Sometimes this happens with what he’s on. How about you both go get a snack or something.” She lowered her voice as if Dad couldn’t hear. “It may be better if there’s no audience.”
Mom set her mouth in that way she could and followed me out into the hall. I leaned against the wall, but she stood rigidly at attention. She was one of those elderly women who never sagged in any way.
“Did you have a nice evening with your friends?” she asked. The woman could have written Passive Aggression for Dummies.
After translating her question, I ignored it, as I did most often. “How is he doing today?”
“The doctor said he’s got about a quarter use of his lungs,” she said. “Pneumonia on top of emphysema on top of all those years of smoking. It’s a wonder he still has that much fight left in him.”
I thought about him throwing the breathing thing across the room. All the throwing I had seen. I asked, “Does he still throw things?”
I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but she stood straighter. “Throw?”
“Like the time, I guess I was about eleven, the Thanksgiving turkey burned and he hurled that metal chair at the wall so hard the legs stuck in the wallboard.”
“I don’t remember that.”
I doubted that was true. “Honestly, sometimes he acts like a cartoon character.”
“Mmm.” The way her head was turned I could tell she was only half paying attention, one of her ears fixed on the open door behind us, waiting for the shriek of the nurse. I wanted to distract her.
Anybody else grow up comparing people to Warner Brothers cartoon characters?
“Yosemite Sam, or maybe the Tazmanian Devil. We used to be scared of him even though he never did anything to us, just blustered. You were never scared of him, though. Like in the room just now.”
“I learned how to stay out of his way,” she said, looking toward the room so it seemed she was partly talking to herself.
It occurred to me that I couldn’t remember the last time I was alone with my mother, talking. There were always other people in the room. Dad was always there. That and the hospital setting made me say things I never had before. I had visited many women in a setting like this, trying to get them to speak to me through opiates and split lips. The way Mom put things made habit kick in.
I asked, “How long did it take you to learn?”
Mom looked down the hall again, and I couldn’t tell if she was thinking of my question or just ignoring me. So I didn’t ask the other questions, and maybe never would.
The nurse came out of Dad’s room. She looked fatigued. “You can go back in now. If you want.”
Eight
I talked to the respiratory therapist and got the usual runaround. Primary care physician? Yes, but not the one looking after Dad now. A specialist? A pulmonologist, maybe? Infectious disease? On call, she said, but who I really wanted was the hospitalist.
What the hell is a hospitalist?
I finally got what I was assured was the right information, and gave my name and number to the person at the nurses’ station, explaining I was the one he or she should talk to. I made sure my parents weren’t in fighting mode and told Mom I’d be back in just a little bit. I made her write down my cell phone number in case she needed me, and asked for hers. She said she didn’t have one, but Dad had a phone in his room.
After calling Laura to tell her I was definitely available, I picked her up. She lived in a condo, a two-story boxy thing in west Pompano Beach, close to I-95 so she could get to work easily. I had volunteered to drive to put the miles on the rental but also because I wanted to see where she lived.
She was brushing her teeth with one hand, gesturing me to come in with the other so she could go finish up. When I asked her if she had figured out what was up with Will Hench, she shook her head and walked into her bathroom, still brushing.
While I waited I checked out her living room, which included an elliptical trainer, a set of free weights, and a ten-pound medicine ball.
Like in her house in Tucson, the other furnishings were spare to the point of nonexistence. Most of it was too shabby for her to have bought new. It looked like a college kid’s apartment. The only thing I recognized was her desk, a big heavy pale oak thing. She must have been particularly fond of her desk, because she brought that with her. I remembered working at that desk when I used her house in Tucson to hide out in. The surface was bare except for a Charles Dickens novel. I just knew if I opened the top right drawer I would find her pens and pencils lying side by side in order of their length, and her list of twenty or so unique random numeric passwords taped under it.
Rigidity is maybe not such a good quality to have when you’re dealing with people on death row. Not that I’d say Laura was rigid. Okay, maybe I’m saying that. Just a little.
I opened the next drawer down. Her office supplies in this one included a semiautomatic, a can of pepper spray, a stun gun, several rape whistles, and brass knuckles. Jesus, even I didn’t have brass knuckles. I looked over my shoulder to make sure she hadn’t seen me snooping, and shut the drawer.
There was something different about the top of the desk, though. An ugly gash in the wood peeked out from the side of the blotter. I lifted the blotter with my index finger and saw that the gash extended across the top of the desk a good ten inches.
“I’m ready,” she said behind me, as I let the blotter drop. She picked up the copy of Our Mutual Friend and took it with her.
* * *
William Hench’s office was on the fourth floor of a modest building in immodest Palm Beach. We got to the suite he shared with a couple of other attorneys, and Laura gave our names to the receptionist, who took us straight to his office. He wasn’t in it, so I took the opportunity to look out his big clean windows onto Olive Avenue. Then Hench walked in, introduced himself, and showed me a chair in front of his desk. Laura stayed standing behind the other chair with her arms crossed, coiled in preparation for what he migh
t say.
Will was technically a whippersnapper in my view, early forties, which meant young enough to still have the passion that brought him into this field, whether for the money or the justice. Nice enough suit, and what actually looked like a piece of Chihuly art glass on his bookshelf, so the justice must have been profitable enough. He gave me the fake smile. I didn’t have to wait long to hear why.
After the accepted offer of a coffee, which he fixed for me himself—it felt more like a delaying tactic than hospitality—he sat down behind his desk and looked at Laura with a bad-news look, the kind where you try to telegraph it without having to actually say the words.
While I was noting this, he was already at the back end of a sentence. “… new law the governor signed, the Timely Justice Act. The name puts a positive spin on it, but essentially it’s bada boom bada bing, and you’re dead, all right? The law sets a deadline for appeals so we don’t have enough time to get reversals in cases where egregious mistakes were made. Plus, it gives a maximum of thirty days to execution once the death warrant has been signed.” Hench sighed, and apparently knew he couldn’t keep the information from us any longer. “Laura, I got the call late yesterday that it’s been signed.”
“When?” Laura asked, as loudly as a ghost.
“Five days.”
Laura’s arms quickly unfolded and her hands shot down to the back of the chair so you kind of got the feeling the support of the chair was necessary. I wanted to help her sit down, but I thought if I tried she’d smack me. She managed to say, “I’ve … never … heard of—”
Hench raised his hands, palms facing us as if he were surrendering, and said, “I know. I never have either. It feels like someone is expediting his execution just because we’re going to leverage the fingerprint examiner’s fraud. They’re afraid if this works it will start a domino effect with other cases. Man, I don’t want to be responsible for Marcus Creighton’s death.”
“Has he been told?” she asked him.
“I’m sure.”
While he had been saying all this, Hench’s expression slowly fell in sync with his words until by the end I could see his weariness making the lines already in his face a little deeper, even gravity turning against him.
A Twist of the Knife Page 5