She looked at him with a quizzical expression. “I’ll never forget that case but the tapes should be in the files. Why are you asking me?”
“Because there’s been some information I’ve received that there was a tape that I can’t find in the file. I thought maybe you might remember enough of that case to tell me what you heard or didn’t hear. I need to know if maybe you transcribed a tape. Probably you didn’t because I can’t find any record of it but I thought I’d take a shot.”
“If there’s no tape in the file, then there wasn’t a tape that had anything on it worth hearing.” Margaret said it quietly, but it was clear that there was a darker meaning behind the statement. She waited for O’Hara to be more explicit, before continuing. “It was a long time ago, Willie. I remember listening to those tapes, but I couldn’t be sure how well I remember. A lot of years have passed. Besides, you and I both know that sometimes things didn’t get recorded.”
O’Hara understood. Detectives recorded statements and sometimes they waited until they were sure that there would be no ambiguities on the tape, especially ambiguities about reluctance to make a statement. Margaret’s face didn’t conceal that she intuited there was a reason O’Hara was there that he wasn’t revealing. “I read in the paper that Harker’s dead. He was an evil man. I remember listening to that little girl’s tape, Mr. Gage asking her questions before she identified Harker. But she was just a little girl. I felt so bad listening to those tapes.” Margaret smoothed out her dress and looked intently at O’Hara. “Willie, why’re you really here? What is it you really want to know?”
The question made O’Hara uncomfortable because he didn’t like people seeing through him and it was obvious that she did. She always had opinions for the detectives after she transcribed the tapes, little details that revealed lies the detective didn’t pick up in the questioning. Most of the time her insights were right, almost like a mother who could read her child like a book. He debated with himself and decided to be honest. “Margaret, I need to know if maybe there was a transcription that was removed from the file. There was a witness, a Clarence Foster, who was interrogated by Mike Jensen and Bill Gage. I have information that there was another tape, a tape in which Foster claimed he didn’t know who killed that woman. I also believe there’s maybe other tapes of the little girl. There’s no record of tapes like that.”
“Maybe there were no tapes like that.” The way she framed her words telegraphed that she was guarded.
O’Hara looked directly at her. “Maybe there wasn’t—and maybe there was. I have to know.”
Margaret stood up and slowly walked toward the kitchen, motioning for O’Hara to follow her. They walked into the garage where she unlocked a door opening onto a storage area covering the back wall, and pulled on a chain that went to an overhead light. “Sometimes I pick one and listen.” She seemed embarrassed.
O’Hara looked at the shelves lined with plastic boxes holding tape cassettes. It was impossible to count them all but O’Hara could see that the front of the boxes had numbers neatly typed onto a card taped to the front of each box—case numbers—hundreds of case numbers. She waved her hand around the room. “I made copies of the tapes I transcribed so I could go home and type. I only kept the important ones, the ones that interested me. We didn’t have a lot of the fancy computers they use now, at least not then. I couldn’t finish them at work and I didn’t want to remove the original tapes, so I would make a copy and take it home. That way I wouldn’t lose the original. And I kept them. I didn’t at first but sometimes something would get lost or there was a question about the transcription and I always knew I had a copy. I know copies of the tapes in the Harker case are here.”
O’Hara stared in amazement. “How do you know they’re here?”
“Because when the case was in the paper I went back and listened. I don’t have much to do anymore.” She laughed. “Except to make cookies and tend to my yard. Nobody’s visited me in a long time.” O’Hara felt a twinge of guilt. She went straight to a box sitting near a tape recorder. “These are the tapes. I don’t know if what you want is there but this is everything I was given. If it’s on there, then I transcribed it.” She wrapped a rubber band around a collection of tapes and handed them to him. “He was a bad man, Willie. Don’t do anything that you’ll be sorry for. He wasn’t worth it.” O’Hara took the tapes. Margaret had always seen right through him.
Chapter 41
The smoldering cigar nested in the ashtray on O’Hara’s coffee table. For a bachelor, the home was surprisingly neat except for the heavy smell of cigar smoke that clung to the walls like a layer of paint. It didn’t bother him, and he didn’t care if it bothered his few guests. The occasional woman who spent time with him either accepted his lifestyle at face value or didn’t return. And he’d grown resigned to the fact that eventually none of them returned. He wasn’t going to be changed by any woman, at least any he’d met so far. Two wives had tried and failed. Maybe they had high hopes but it didn’t take them long to realize O’Hara was what he was.
He knew women regarded his unwillingness to change as a flaw, but he’d long ago accepted it and rejected that it was a defect in his character. He did have one regret, the daughter who wasn’t part of his life. With her he had tried—and failed. She ignored all of his overtures, and she didn’t know he kept tabs on her from a distance.
Condensation dripped from a glass of bourbon with a single large melting cube of ice. O’Hara was basically old-school in his approach to drinking, no soda or juice in his drinks, only water from the slow melt of a single cube to soften the edge. He only drank single-barrel sour mash bourbon, and one of O’Hara’s measures of a man was whether he knew the difference between whiskey and bourbon. He picked up the heavy glass and took a sip while he listened to the tape again.
It hadn’t taken long for O’Hara to find what he hoped he wouldn’t find. He’d listened several times to Foster’s voice over the tape, a tape that wasn’t in the reports, for reasons that when he heard it needed no explanation. Put in sequence, it didn’t take years wearing a badge to understand that Foster had given Jensen and Gage what they wanted only after repeatedly telling them he was high on drugs and alcohol and didn’t remember any of it.
O’Hara punched the Play button again. The whining voice of a younger Foster was cut through with interruptions by Detective Jensen and Bill Gage squeezing him like a boil. They clearly didn’t like what they were hearing, and they were pushing him relentlessly to identify Harker. When he was ready to do what they wanted, that’s where the other tapes came in. If the listener didn’t know there was a tape that warmed Foster up the others simply sounded like good interrogation that broke a reluctant suspect. But O’Hara knew what broke Foster was fear that he would be charged with a murder he didn’t even remember, that and the fear of the gas chamber, even though they actually used lethal injection. But the mopes didn’t know that. O’Hara recognized the mind game. He had played it himself many times.
And then there were the tapes of Christine in which it was clear she was confused about which Rick had hurt her mother. Gage had kept pushing Rick Harker’s picture in front of her and asking her if that was the man. Finally, she said yes. Children liked to please adults and once they told them something, the more they repeated it, the more they believed it. The tape of Christine revealed that her identification of Harker was not reliable. Both the damning tapes of Foster and Christine had been removed from the file. The tapes that were left presented a much different picture.
Last but not least, there was the tape in the back of the patrol car of Harker demanding Foster tell him why he lied and Foster telling Harker that he did what he had to do.
Now the question burrowed into his mind. What was he going to say to Jamison? If he told him that there really were tapes, he knew exactly what Jamison would do. It had taken a while to file the sharp edges off of Jamison’s black-and-white view of the world, but O’Hara knew the younger man was hardwired in hi
s basic notions of right and wrong. If he told Jamison about the tapes, he would start digging and slowly but surely he would dig a hole for himself too deep to climb out of.
Besides, even if Foster was telling the truth that he didn’t know if Harker did it, that didn’t mean Harker didn’t do it. It just meant that there would be a complete obliteration of Foster’s credibility, which would only leave the child and the fingerprints. And the tape of Christine being pushed to identify Harker would completely undermine her identification at the trial. Harker would get a new trial. At least he would have if he wasn’t dead. And Gage’s and Cleary’s careers would be destroyed for concealing evidence. Mike Jensen would be charged with perjury. Jamison’s career would be trashed even though he was just the messenger. Doing the right thing as far as O’Hara was concerned generally had better be its own reward because it wasn’t appreciated that much or remembered that long. And in the end, it would all be for nothing. Harker was dead and there wasn’t a lot of logic, as far as O’Hara was concerned, in burying everyone else with him.
O’Hara thought about the young prosecutor. He had allowed Jamison inside the hard shell he carefully cultivated. It wasn’t quite like the younger man was the son he never had. He wasn’t even sure what that bond would feel like, but he did feel an emotional connection that went deeper than mere friendship and loyalty. And he also owed Jamison, though they never talked about it or why. Even if Jamison did what he thought was the right thing it wouldn’t change a damn thing except destroy lives, including Jamison’s.
O’Hara relit the cigar that had gone cold. All that bullshit about never inhaling was lost on him as he drew the warm taste deep into his lungs and exhaled a stream of blue smoke. O’Hara sipped on his glass of bourbon and felt the liquid amber slide down his throat. Sometimes what was past was better left to the past. If doing the right thing wasn’t going to accomplish anything but create wreckage, then what was the point?
He finished the bourbon and snuffed the cigar. He wasn’t a philosopher. There was nothing philosophical about it. He popped the tape out of the recorder and slid it into a manila folder with the rest of the tapes. He would save Jamison from himself. What was past would best remain past.
Chapter 42
One Week Later
Jamison watched his mother move rapidly around the kitchen, gathering food that seemed to flow endlessly from whatever nook and cranny she reached into. At the same time, she asked a stream of not so subtle questions about his personal life in order to expand on the limited direct answers he’d already given. No, he didn’t have a girlfriend. No, he wasn’t dating anyone special or otherwise. No, he didn’t have anyone in mind to ask for a date. He didn’t mention that he had been thinking more and more about asking Alton Grady’s daughter, Lorie, for a date, but that was all he had done—thinking. He didn’t have any problem standing in front of a jury or asking a female lawyer to plead her client guilty, but he seemed to wilt if he was asking a woman for a date. All things considered, it took him a while to get moving in the dating department and it helped if he got a signal, preferably not subtle. Lorie seemed to send that signal.
Drifting back from thoughts of Lorie Grady to his mother’s endless flow of questions, he sometimes wondered if his skill at cross-examination had been inherited from his mother instead of his father. Finally, the questions stopped for a minute before she brightened and mentioned a young lady she had seen at church that she thought would be perfect for him. That was when he stopped listening again and just nodded. He jumped slightly when he heard the name Harker.
“What?”
“I said, I read in the paper that you won the Harker case. I remember when that case was tried. It was a long time ago. You were a little boy when that happened. It seems like these murder cases never end.”
Jamison took the opportunity to find out if his mother might know something. “Did you know that dad was involved in that case?”
His mother became uncharacteristically quiet and turned away, speaking with her back to him. “He didn’t talk much about his cases. What did he have to do with it?” Jamison had the odd feeling that his mother already knew the answer to her question and was being deliberately oblique.
“Apparently, he represented one of the witnesses in the case. It seemed kind of weird hearing his name come up in a case I was now trying.”
“What was the name of the witness?” The question seemed to be more than idle curiosity. She was probing in a subtler way. Jamison recognized it from the number of times she had pulled information out of him as a teenager.
“Clarence Foster, a small-time criminal who apparently was in the wrong place with the wrong person at the wrong time. Why?”
“Was anybody else mentioned?
Jamison sensed that he had stepped into something he didn’t understand. “Like who?”
She hesitated before answering. “Did the name Sample come up?”
He was startled that from so many years past his mother would dredge up the name of someone who wasn’t a central figure in the case. “Yeah, there was a Richard Sample who was a suspect at first, but he had an alibi, and then Foster and the victim’s daughter identified Harker as the murderer.” Jamison now realized that whatever the reason was that she was asking questions, it involved more than the Harker case. “You said Dad didn’t talk much about his cases but you seem to remember a lot about that case.”
“It was a big case at the time and I didn’t like your father’s involvement. He said it was his job but I didn’t like it.” From her expression, Jamison could tell she was cutting off the conversation.
“Mom, is there something about that case that bothers you? There were a lot of unanswered questions that didn’t make any sense. But it was a long time ago. I finally let it go. Harker’s dead and my investigator convinced me that it didn’t make any difference at this point.”
“That would be your Mr. O’Hara? Maybe you should listen to him.” The way his mother said it raised Jamison’s antenna.
“Did Dad tell you something about that case?” He knew there was more to his father’s involvement than he’d been able to discover, particularly with Foster’s statement to him that he had supposedly told his father about the additional interrogations. Husbands and wives told each other a lot of things that were supposed to be secret, and that included privileged information.
“Your father didn’t talk about his cases and he didn’t ask me for my opinions. He did what he did and I spent my time raising you.” His mother was using the same voice now that she used on him as a child when the conversations was over as far as she was concerned.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Well it’s my answer.” His mother’s voice was unusually sharp.
“Why did you ask about Sample?” Jamison could see his mother twisting her apron and he could also see the tears at the edges of her eyes.
Finally, she said, “Dolores.”
“Dolores? Who’s Dolores?”
“Richard Sample’s mother. Your father knew his mother, Dolores.”
“I don’t understand what that means.”
“Yes, you do. Leave it be. I did.”
A silence lingered, filling the gap before Jamison said goodbye. There was nothing more either was willing to say. Both retreated to their private explanations. They were entitled to that and each dealt in their own way with the personal rationalizations that alter the truth so that life can go forward.
Jamison left his mother’s home and drove with the aimlessness of subconscious direction. The reality of his father’s involvement in the Harker case was clawing at him. O’Hara was wrong. He couldn’t let it go but at the same time he was unable to undo the tangle of threads that seemed to dangle limitlessly. He thought he was driving toward his apartment when he passed the street that led to Lorie Grady’s home.
All of a sudden, he made a quick right and found himself parked in front of her house. He wasn’t sure why he was there. Well, he was sure why he
was there, but it reminded him of something he might have done in high school. It also reminded him that now that Harker was dead Lorie might let him look at Harker’s file. Another thread. What was there to protect?
She answered the door before he had a chance to ring the doorbell. He was immediately struck by how vividly the reality of her appearance and his memory of her appearance matched. Somehow, she had etched herself in his mind and he acknowledged to himself that he’d been thinking about her more frequently than he’d admitted consciously to himself. She didn’t wait for him to say anything. “I saw you coming up the walkway. You lost or found?” She seemed amused by her question.
“Found, I guess. May I come in?”
Lorie gestured for him to follow her into a sun porch where she had her easel set up. A large canvas balanced on the wooden structure, paint smears decorating it as well as the floor around it. She noticed him looking at the drops on the tile floor and shrugged. “It adds something, don’t you think?” She pulled a few empty canvases off a couch that had seen better days, the cushions holding the permanent impression of years of use. “Have a seat.” She still hadn’t asked why he was there and he was still trying to think of the answer to that question if she asked. He had the feeling she already knew the answer even if he didn’t.
“Ms. Grady—Lorie—last time I was here you said your father’s files were in the basement, including the Harker file. Is that still there?”
Lorie looked at him with the same amused expression she wore when she answered the door. “I wondered how long it would take you to ask. I read that Harker’s dead. That right? So, you think there’s no need to maintain the attorney-client privilege. That right?”
Shades of Truth Page 27
