Mom Among the Liars

by James Yaffe

  “Oh, come now, Ann,” Ed said, “you don’t seriously believe you could prove any of your innuendoes against—”

  “Who cares? I’ll present my theories to the media—less than a week before election day—and we’ll see what the public makes of them. My offhand guess is that our office’s reputation for integrity will persuade a lot of voters not to pull down Marvin’s lever. And incidentally, I’ll also have something to say about attempted bribery and intimidation—”

  The mayor stood up, pushing away from the card table. “I’m getting out of here,” he said. “I was never here in the first place. I don’t know anything about anything anybody said. I was twenty miles away, and my wife and kids will swear to it.” Then he stamped across the room and practically hurled himself through the door.

  In the long silence that followed, Ed gazed at the door thoughtfully, then at the floor and the ceiling, and finally focused once more on Ann. He produced a brief but heartfelt sigh. “I am sorry our talk couldn’t have been more productive. So few people nowadays—even the most intelligent people—understand the art of negotiation. Confrontation, confrontation, confrontation, that’s all anybody seems to be interested in. Ah well. Thank you so much for coming anyway.

  “No, no, don’t wait for me. I’ll be staying here for a bit, it would be a shame to let these lovely cinnamon rolls go to waste.”

  He was reaching out for one as Ann and I left the room.

  TWELVE

  It was nearly one o’clock when Ann and I got back to the office. My stomach was letting me know I hadn’t eaten lunch yet, but I ignored it and holed up behind my desk so I could think about the case. I didn’t get very far. I was interrupted by my phone ringing. It was Mom.

  “I been calling regular the last two hours,” she said. “You were eating a long lunch?”

  “As a matter of fact, I haven’t had my lunch yet.”

  “You don’t eat lunch till one o’clock? You’ll ruin your digestion!”

  “If you’ve been calling me regularly for the last two hours, then you haven’t had your lunch yet either. Did you get home so late from your date last night that you just woke up?”

  Mom ignored the nose I was poking into her private life—just as I always ignored hers. “At my age who’s got a digestion to ruin?” she said. “Now the reason I’m calling you—” I’m sitting around here with nothing to do for the next hour, so I thought maybe, so it shouldn’t be a total loss, I could pass the time using my brains. If you tell me the latest developments, what you and Roger are doing with your murder case all morning, this could give me something to use my brains on.”

  I told her what I had been doing this morning—my meetings with Harry Stubbins and Doris Dryden and Ed Brock (and the things Roger had dug up so far about Ron Pulaski’s alibi).

  “I think that’s all of it,” I ended up. “Does any of it mean anything to you? Any great new revelations to give us?”

  “Revelations don’t come until you work for them. If you’re not willing to work, you take the consequences.”

  “Are you saying I’m not willing to work? My God, I’ve been knocking myself out—”

  “If this is so, tell me please about this question I keep telling you to ask the dead woman’s ex-husband. About the news broadcast, you remember? You didn’t say yet what he answered.”

  I found myself picking at my desk blotter. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t get around to seeing him today. It’s been one thing after another—”

  “You didn’t get around?” I could imagine Mom shutting her eyes and lifting her face, as if she was making some communication to God.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. It was just an oversight.”

  “An oversight yet! You know what can happen from such oversights? Adam didn’t notice that Eve had a taste for fruit. Richard Nixon didn’t notice that he made a lot of tapes that gave away his shady dealings. My cousin Oscar didn’t notice that he put his girlfriend’s brassiere in his wife’s laundry hamper.”

  “All right, all right—even though Pulaski has an airtight alibi, and there’s no way he could have any connection to this murder, I’ll call him up and ask him that question.”

  I put down the phone, and for a second or two I asked myself why I was giving her such a hard time on this one point. After all, I had answered all her other questions, done everything else she had told me to do. Was it necessary for me somehow to have one little battlefield on which I held out against her, refused to follow her orders, clung to the illusion of independence?

  THIRTEEN

  Just as I was picking up the phone to call Pulaski there was a knock on my door. I yelled come in, and Roger did.

  “Anything to report on that McBride kid?” I said.

  “I was just coming in to tell you,” he said. “It’s really a big surprise. At least it is to me. I tracked down the drama teacher at General Wagner High. He says there was a rehearsal of Peter Pan on Saturday night, and Laurel McBride was there, but it didn’t break up nearly as late as she said. It broke up around eleven, this drama teacher never keeps the kids later than that. You know, I never would’ve picked that kid to be a liar!”

  “It’s a talent,” I said, “that’s distributed equally among all ages, sexes, races, and religious preferences. Did this teacher have any idea where Laurel went when she left the rehearsal?”

  “He assumed she was going home. She doesn’t have a car, she usually gets a lift from one of the kids who does. By the time this teacher left the school himself, they were all gone. He gave me some names, other kids who were at the rehearsal. I’ll try to track them down, find out if anybody saw Laurel leave, and when and who with.”

  “Sounds promising,” I said. “Did you have your lunch yet?”

  “No, I didn’t. I wanted to be sure I was in when this drama teacher called back.”

  “All right, I’ll order something for you. Get on the phone to that school and see if you can talk to any of those kids. Mabel!” I yelled into the outer office. “Call up the deli, will you, ask them to send me up two hamburgers, rare, and two Cokes. No, wait a second, we’ve got a growing boy here. Make that three hamburgers.”

  Mabel Gibson, muttering about the case of ulcers Roger and I were giving ourselves—“and she’s just as bad, she didn’t have a decent hot lunch today either!”—nevertheless called the deli for me. And I went to my desk to catch up on work I should have done days ago. Harry Stubbins, after all, wasn’t the only alleged criminal our office was defending that week.

  A few hamburgers later, around two-thirty, Roger came in to report the latest dope on Laurel McBride. He looked even more puzzled and disturbed than ever.

  “I managed to dig up one of the kids who was at that rehearsal with Laurel McBride Saturday night,” he said. “According to him, she usually gets a lift home with one of the other kids—sometimes he drives her himself. But when he offered to on Saturday night, she said no, she had other plans. She didn’t tell him what they were, but she was still standing in front of the school when he drove away. That was around a quarter after eleven, he says. Oh, and he also says the same thing had happened before—three or four times in the last few months she’s turned down a lift at eleven or so, saying she had other plans.”

  I had no idea what this meant, if anything. But I had no time to digest the matter, because just then my phone rang, and one of my back cases took me out of the office. Out to the zoo, in fact, to look at a giraffe up close—but that’s definitely a different story.

  Kicking around in the back of my mind was the thought that I still hadn’t called Ron Pulaski and asked him Mom’s question. Okay, okay, I’d get around to it as soon as I had a free moment.

  When I got back in half an hour, everybody was gone except Mabel Gibson. She told me that Ann was in court and that Roger had left about fifteen minutes ago, without saying where he was going. “He moved pretty fast though,” she added.

  Then my phone rang. It was Roger, and his voice was high; it always
lifted half an octave when he was really agitated about something.

  “Dave, you have to get here right away! It’s urgent!”

  “Where are you?”

  “Down here—Capricorn Street—Ron Pulaski’s house.”

  I said I’d get there as fast as I could, and hung up the phone without asking him what he was doing there. I had a pretty good idea what the answer was.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later I pulled up to the sidewalk, where Roger was standing and waiting for me. His face was sludge-gray, fitting in nicely with the surroundings.

  “Come on in quick,” he said, grabbing me by the arm as I stepped out of the car. “Before somebody sees us.”

  Looking to right and left, he drew me up the porch and through the open front door, then quickly shut the door behind him. We were in the small narrow living room, with its threadbare furniture and its even more threadbare carpet.

  Lying face up near the sofa was Ron Pulaski. One glance told me he was dead. He was wearing jeans and a sleeveless striped shirt. His legs were crumpled under him, his eyes were bulging up at the ceiling. His thick-lipped mouth was wide open, and his tongue was sticking out. His hands clutched at his own throat, his red hair was a mess.

  I took a look at his neck. He had been strangled all right, and whatever had strangled him had left ugly red bruises, but once again the murderer had removed it. There was no evidence that Pulaski had put up much of a fight. It looked as if somebody had come up behind him, maybe while he was sitting in a chair, whipped out the weapon, and applied enough pressure to knock him out in the first few seconds.

  “Did you call the cops yet?” I said to Roger.

  He shook his head. “I thought you’d better take a look first. There’s another room, a little bedroom, I used the phone from there.”

  “How did you get into the house?” I said.

  “I rang the bell, there was no answer. So I tried the door, and it was open, just a crack. I thought I ought to see what was up.”

  “Okay, call the cops now, will you,” I said.

  He hurried off to the bedroom. While he was gone, I moved around the room, peering at the floor, looking for anything that might mean something to me. I didn’t find a thing.

  Then I knelt down by the body and touched my finger quickly to one wrist. It felt cool but still fairly flexible. Rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet, though it would pretty soon. My guess was that he’d been dead for an hour or two, probably not much longer. I noticed a smell, so I took a big sniff just to make sure. Pulaski’s face was reeking of alcohol.

  Could he have knocked himself out with drinking, I wondered, before his murderer got to him? If he was more or less dead to the world already, then anybody, even somebody who didn’t have much strength, might have been able to finish the job. Roger came back into the room. “They’ll be here in ten minutes, maybe sooner.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So tell me quick—what brought you down here?”

  “I—” Roger had the guilty look and the confused manner of a kid caught in the bathroom with his father’s copy of Playboy. “I finished my work. It was still only three o’clock, and I was thinking—about that question your mother said we ought to ask Pulaski. I was thinking, since I had nothing else to do, maybe I’d go down to see him, and ask him—” His voice got louder. “I’m sorry, Dave. I know you told me not to. But it seemed to me, if your mother thought it was important—”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. “You did the right thing. It’s too bad you got here too late.”

  As soon as these words were out of me I felt the dull sour ache in my stomach. If I had asked Ron Pulaski Mom’s question, maybe he wouldn’t be lying on the floor with his tongue sticking out. Maybe the dead man could’ve told us something, and we’d know who killed Edna Pulaski. And maybe, because of my stupid obstinacy—because I’d been so hung up on asserting my independence from Mom—we’d never find out the truth now.

  I gave my head a hard shake. This was no time for a guilt trip, I had to get out of there before the cops came.

  “What’re you doing here? Where’s Ronnie?”

  * * *

  Standing in the front doorway was Pulaski’s girlfriend, that chunky little blonde who called herself Brigitte Martine. She was holding a paper grocery bag in her arms. I was sure I had closed the door behind me. She must have had a key.

  I started toward her, but suddenly she saw the body. A scream broke out of her, and she was running across the room, dropping the bag of groceries without even knowing she was doing it. A couple of soup cans and a pineapple went rolling across the carpet.

  “Ronnie! Oh, God, Ronnie!”

  She fell to her knees, reaching for him. I went up behind her and pulled her back. “The police are on their way,” I said. “They wouldn’t want you to touch anything.”

  “Oh, God, oh, God!” Her screaming voice had turned into a wailing voice. Then she looked up at us, and her eyes got wide. “Don’t hurt me, please don’t—”

  I tried to reassure her, as fast as I could. The fear faded from her eyes as she recognized us, and tears took over. They started down her face, while she sobbed out “Ronnie! Ronnie!” over and over again.

  No use in my going away now that she’d seen me there, I thought. So I might as well get a head start on the cops.

  “When did you see him alive last?” I asked her, very sharp and authoritative. It always works with people who are in a state of shock. Make them think you have a right to ask questions, and they’ll automatically answer you.

  “I’ve been gone two hours,” she said. “He sent me out to the supermarket. He said I shouldn’t come back for two hours.”

  “Do you know who he was expecting to meet here?”

  “I don’t know. He never told me things. He was drinking a lot, he was doing it to celebrate, he said. He started at lunch, he took the day off from his job. He was on the couch when I left.”

  “Did he ever talk to you about his ex-wife’s death? Did he ever say he knew who did it, anything like that?”

  “No, he never— He was there Saturday night, on the street outside her house. But he never went in, he didn’t get there till after she was killed. He was at his bowling match, he told the cops all about it.”

  “He went to the DA’s office around eleven on Sunday, right? After he found out about the murder? Did he hear about it from the radio or the TV?”

  “The TV, what else? We don’t even have a radio.”

  “So what did he do then?”

  “As soon as the news was over, he jumped up and said he was going out to talk to the cops, to that assistant DA that was in charge of the case. I didn’t go with him. I was still in bed. I sleep late on Sundays, it’s my day off.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “At the Neapolitan Grotto, that’s this new Italian place downtown.”

  “Did he tell you why he was going to the police?”

  “He never told me nothing. All I know was, he didn’t get back till after twelve. And he was looking pretty happy. He kept saying the same thing, ‘I saw, baby, I saw.’ That’s what he always called me, he called me baby. ‘Wasn’t supposed to be there,’ he said. ‘I told him, that little prick the assistant DA. Wouldn’t the cops like to know what I saw! Maybe I’ll tell them, maybe I won’t. All depends on that little prick assistant DA. He don’t come through, I know someplace else I can go. There’s big money for what I saw.’”

  “What did he mean by that? Was he trying to sell information to the authorities?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know. He never told me nothing. I asked him what he meant, and he just laughed. ‘It ain’t every day you see what I saw!” he said. And the last couple days, in between talking big, he’s been singing! ‘Philadelphia, here I come!’ He sang that a hundred times today. ‘Right back where I started from!’ He had a lousy singing voice, but he couldn’t hear how he sounded.”

  “Now let me make sure about one of the things
he said to you? If the DA’s office didn’t come through with enough, he’d go someplace else—was that it?”

  “Yeah, that’s what he said. Someplace else.”

  “And you’ve got no idea what place he was talking about?”

  “Like I said, he never told me nothing.”

  She was cut off by the sound of a siren, loud enough so that it couldn’t be more than a block away.

  I went up to Roger quickly and spoke in a low voice. “We came down here together. And the first thing we did was call the cops.”

  Roger gave a nod, asking for no explanations. The kid was learning.

  Then we heard the police car pulling up to the curb, and a few moments later big feet and uniforms were clumping through the front door.

  * * *

  It was nearly five-thirty when Roger and I got back to the office. Ann was at her desk, finished with her afternoon in court. Mabel Gibson was getting ready to leave for the day, piling all sorts of things—knitting, a paperback book, the uneaten half of a sandwich—into the huge tote that she carried with her at all times.

  I went into Ann’s office and told her about Pulaski’s murder. She frowned and shook her head. There was a lot for us to think about. How was the death of Ron Pulaski connected, if it was, with his ex-wife’s, and was there any way to use it to help our client? Where was our client at the time Pulaski got killed? Would he have an alibi for this one?

  First of all, though, Ann had a curse or two for Leland Grantley, because he hadn’t told us all the details of his conversation with Ron Pulaski. In fact, she decided to give him a piece of her mind right away.

  She got on the phone, while I stood right behind her and listened. She tracked him down to his home, and a moment later he was on the line.

  “Leland, you’re a slimy bastard,” Ann began.

  I heard him laughing a little, but Ann plowed right on, confronting him with the information that Ron Pulaski’s girlfriend had given us. “So let’s have a straight answer from you for once. When you questioned Pulaski the day after the murder, did he or didn’t he tell you he had some incriminating information? Did he or didn’t he offer to sell it to you?”