Blind Fall

by Christopher Rice

  “I didn’t realize you had this much influence around here,” John said.

  “They brought me in for questioning. Of course, they didn’t tell me what you told them. But I could tell from the nature of their questions it was quite a yarn.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  She smiled thinly, then looked down the length of her shirt, as if she were checking it for a stain. “There are two things you need to know before we go any further.”

  “Open your eyes, Mrs. Martin. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Indeed. First thing. My husband changed his will without my knowledge. I had no idea he was leaving Alex the place in Owensville, and I never would have allowed it if I had known. Not because I am driven by a desire to punish my son, mind you, but because I never would have allowed my son to get that close to Ray.”

  “Right. ’Cause you kept it away from the house.”

  “Second.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “There’s a tape recorder taped to my waist and a microphone hidden in the lapel of this jacket. It’s not a wire, mind you. No one’s listening in right now. Apparently it would have taken a day or two to get that kind of technology. So it’s just a plain old tape, and when we’re done here, Detectives Barkin and Lewis are expecting to listen to it and discover that I have somehow led you to admit that your confession is bogus.”

  He just stared at her, wondering if his exhaustion was causing auditory hallucinations. When she said nothing to refute what she had just told him, he leaned forward to get a better look at her. “Are you kidding me?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re telling me this?”

  “I just told you. Yes.”

  “So there’s no chance of that happening now, is there, Charlotte?”

  “No. There isn’t.”

  He was about to suggest that she leave, when she broke the silence with “I’m a very competitive woman, John. And as much as I am loath to admit it, you impressed me last night. But you’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to let you take the fall for this.”

  “You don’t want me to show you up?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Good. Then tell the detectives about your relationship with Ray Duncan.”

  “I won’t need to,” she said with a smile. “Ray will be here soon enough.”

  John waited for her to elaborate. When she did no such thing, he opened his mouth, but she cut him off with, “And soon, I assume the affair will be public knowledge, given the enormous number of reporters your false confession has drawn to this building. If she lives long enough, my mother-in-law will gladly cut me out of her will altogether, and I—”

  “What do you mean Ray will be here soon enough?”

  She smiled broadly at the sound of fearful anticipation in his voice. “John, you could say I have been inspired by your hatred of me. After you left in handcuffs last night, I took a good, hard look at myself. At my accomplishments.” Her eyes glazed over at this word, as if she knew it wasn’t quite adequate but couldn’t find a suitable replacement. “I wasn’t proud.”

  “You knew,” John said quietly. “You knew what he was going to do.”

  “I most certainly did not!” Her anger was clear and unguarded. She took a minute to catch her breath. Then in a cooler tone she said, “I thought he kept asking me to marry him because he felt some kind of duty. I thought he believed that because I was a woman, I couldn’t just keep going to bed with him the way I had for years. I thought by putting him off again and again, that I was doing him a favor. Freeing him from what he saw as an obligation—an obligation to my sanctity as a woman. That’s a favorite word of yours, isn’t it, John? Obligation?”

  “Charlotte, what did you mean when you said Ray would be here soon enough?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she whispered, rocking back in her seat, smoothing invisible pieces of lint from her thighs. “He was practically throwing himself against the door to the interrogation room the entire time they were questioning me. I thought he was going to try to come in through a vent. It’s just a matter of time before he figures out they’ve brought me in here. With you.”

  “All right. And just what the hell are you doing in here? Now that you’ve blown your own cover.”

  “Explaining myself, John. What does it sound like I’m doing?”

  “Explain yourself to Barkin and Lewis.”

  “How is that even possible, John, now that you’ve poisoned the waters with all of your lies? Those poor men can’t tell heads from tails in there. Don’t you see you haven’t left me with many choices when it comes to redeeming myself? Believe me, you’ve made it very clear that I am in desperate need of redemption. So what other choice do I have?”

  Slowly she slid her right hand backward across the table, revealing the sharp point of a wooden stick the diameter of a human finger. She had taken the handle of a wooden spoon and sharpened it into a slender stake. He figured she had taped it to the inside of her leg to get it through security. “I’m told that a man like you knows a thousand different ways to kill. Teach me one of them, John. Teach me quick.”

  “This is insane,” he whispered.

  “You’re sitting in jail right now because you confessed to a crime you didn’t commit, to protect a man you don’t love. I’m not sure of many things right now, but I am sure that you have not been asked to determine the true definition of the word sanity.”

  “If you tell them the truth, I’ll change my story. I’ll tell them what happened last night.”

  “So I’ll be in league with a liar as my life is destroyed in the public eye. No, thank you, Mr. Houck. I have decided how this should be taken care of. You’re either going to help me or you won’t.”

  At the top of the staircase on his side of the metal wall, John saw the guard move away from the glass window in the door. He listened, trying to recognize the voices shouting at each other on the other side. He couldn’t make out the words or who was delivering them.

  “He’s coming in, John,” Charlotte whispered. “One way or another, he’s coming into this room. You can help me make sure he never leaves.”

  Against his will, his eyes went to the barely concealed weapon resting under her fingers. With so pathetic a weapon, her best option would be a downward strike to the area just above Duncan’s collarbone, aiming for the subclavian artery. Immediate internal bleeding would result if the tip went deep enough, and death would follow quickly. But there were too many variables. The tip would probably break on impact, screwing her aim. Three inches off and the stake would snap against his collarbone. It infuriated him that he would even entertain these thoughts, but they were reflexive.

  “I’m disappointed, John. You had such passion. Such convictions. But you’re too young for them. You get frightened when the concepts you toss about with such abandon actually take root and become reality. And that’s exactly what’s about to happen, John. I’m about to show you what you believe in. You’ll have to decide how it looks once I’m done.”

  “I asked you to do something to take care of your son. To honor the fact that you’re his mother. You do this, and it’s about your ego. It’s not about a damn thing I said last night.”

  “Honor is a word that teenage boys use to make their vanity and their ego sound like things they shouldn’t live in fear of.”

  “They’ll gun you down before you can even make a flesh wound.”

  On her side of the metal wall, the door atop the staircase flew open and the guard whirled around just as Ray Duncan stepped onto the landing, one hand raised to hold the guard back. At first John thought Duncan was holding a weapon, but then he saw it was a key ring. There was also someone behind him. The older man had silver hair and patrician features and wore a Sheriff’s Department uniform that matched the one Duncan was currently sweating bullets in. John recognized him from the photo that was hanging on the wall at the entrance to the station. He was the sheriff of Hanrock Count
y.

  Duncan turned and looked down at them. “This is exactly what I told you!” he shouted. “I told you they were up to something. You want to tell me what the hell these two are doing in here together, and why the room had to be shut down for them to do it?”

  Dumbfounded, the sheriff stared down at them as Duncan descended the steps two at a time. “John,” Charlotte whispered.

  He met her eyes but kept his mouth shut.

  “Will you ever believe that I did this for my son?” she asked him.

  “No. I won’t.”

  “Fair enough. Then you should probably warn him now.”

  Duncan’s voice boomed, amplified by the metal-clad walls, which were clearly intended to make conversations between prisoners and visitors more audible to the guards above. “Mrs. Martin, if you could come with me. The sheriff and I are going to try to straighten this whole thing out. Clearly something highly unorthodox has been—”

  As soon as his hand touched her right shoulder, Charlotte was on her feet. It happened so fast that the stake she held in her right hand was in the air and covered in blood before John realized she had struck the first blow. Duncan let out a series of yelps, both hands pressed to his eyes, blood pouring from between his fingers. Shouts rang out from overhead. The sheriff had drawn his revolver, was shouting warnings for Charlotte to stop where she was. Instead, Charlotte took another step forward, her lips pursed in concentration, and went for the second most obvious target: she drove the stake into the side of Duncan’s neck just before he collapsed against the far wall.

  Then Charlotte’s right shoulder exploded, shooting tufts of fine fabric, and the Plexiglas panel in front of John splintered and he went to the floor. He hit the floor as the metal walls amplified the second and third gunshots, turning them into a single unearthly roar. But he wasn’t there anymore. Acrid black smoke had swallowed him, and his skin was aflame from tiny pieces of shrapnel, and for the first time he could hear the words Mike Bowers had whispered into his ear in that moment. Easy, brotha. Easy easy easy.

  When the hands of the living finally pulled him from the cement floor of the visitation room, he tried to take solace in the fact that the horrors of war could sometimes protect him from the agony of the present.

  18

  The attorney introduced himself as Eric Reynard, but John recognized him from the news, defending celebrity clients who had been accused of various murders. He had a lantern jaw and a long, almost lipless mouth that gave him a blank and unreadable expression as he listened to John’s story. Patsy sat next to John, holding his uninjured left hand in both of her own. She had probably taken out mortgages on her home and her bar to afford the lawyer sitting across from them.

  When John was finished, Patsy let out a long sigh, held his hand against her stomach as she blinked at the floor. As if silence of any kind made him uncomfortable, Reynard flipped pages on his legal pad. “Ray Duncan died of blood loss at the scene. Charlotte Martin just got out of about nine hours of surgery and is still in critical condition.”

  In a timid voice, Patsy said, “Earlier, you said he had options—”

  “All of this depends on who they decide to make an example out of. You or Ray Duncan. They’ve already turned up some interesting things on Duncan, and someone in the department is leaking them to the media, which tells me that someone at Hanrock County Sheriff’s Department wants to be done with the guy. And that’s good news for you, because if they hit you with anything hard, and I fight them, then Ray Duncan goes on trial, too. And embarrassment doesn’t even begin to describe what this has already brought to the department. Detectives Barkin and Lewis have already been suspended for the stunt they pulled with you and Charlotte Martin, and that’s just the beginning. My guess is their careers are over. The public-information officer is already grumbling things to the press about how they weren’t used to conducting investigations under that kind of media pressure.”

  “What have they found on Duncan?”

  “He bought a commercial-grade freezer the day after your little surprise late-night visit to Owensville. It wasn’t in his house when they searched it, but they did find an area in his cellar that has stains that might have come from the freezer’s drain port. He also ran an extra electrical wire to the nearest socket, which gave it about the amps it would need to keep a commercial-grade freezer running. Did a bad job, too. Like he needed to do it himself because he didn’t want anyone to know what was down there.”

  Patsy said, “So they might not charge John with anything.”

  “Oh, no,” the lawyer said. “They’ll absolutely charge him with something. They have to, given the rather spectacular manner in which he turned himself in. The question is, How severe will the charges be? An obstruction of justice conviction sentence can run from a year or more of prison time to several months of confinement—more commonly known as house arrest.”

  A knock at the door startled Patsy so badly she jumped. The guard outside cracked the door, and John saw a well-dressed woman in an expensive suit. Reynard excused himself, rose from his chair, and slipped outside. Patsy got up and followed him to the door, remained standing there after he was gone. She held one hand to her mouth, as if he were a lover who had just told her he was going back to his wife.

  Finally she lowered her hand from her mouth. “Where is he, John?” she whispered. “He could verify everything you’re telling them. Where the hell is he? Duncan’s dead. The least he could have done is send you some goddamn flowers.” He didn’t need her to say it to know that she was talking about Alex.

  Just then, the door opened. Reynard took a step inside and stopped in his tracks, as if he needed sufficient space between himself and the two of them before he spoke. “Charlotte Martin died of a pulmonary embolism about an hour ago.”

  They were struck silent. Reynard left without any discernible change in expression or feeling. Once again, John saw the look of quiet, almost serene concentration that had appeared on the woman’s face as she had stabbed her lover to death, as if all of her real emotions had retreated to a place deep inside of her at the first sign of murderous intent, never to return from the hiding places they found in the last seconds of her life.

  Patsy said, “The cops had surveillance on my bar, but they pulled it after you turned yourself in. He could have called there. He could have tried to reach me, but he didn’t. Anyone with a TV knows you’re in here. He knows better than anyone that you’re in here for him. Maybe it’s time for him to do something for you.”

  “I did this to keep him from killing Duncan. That’s been accomplished.”

  “Do you really believe that, John?”

  He looked up into her eyes, but his instinctive response was lost to him. Maybe it was fatigue or maybe it was the genuine fear in his sister’s eyes, as if his own convictions were about to push him past the reach of the last family member he had left.

  “Why is it so hard for you to believe, Patsy? Why is it so hard for you to believe that I would take that kind of risk for someone else?”

  Her eyes watered and she withdrew from the table and turned her back to him while she steadied herself. “Because I don’t want you to be that good anymore. I want you to come back, John.”

  “From where?”

  “Iraq. Dean’s room. Baton Rouge. Take your pick. But if you’re going to do that, you’re going to have stop being so noble all the time. You’re going to be just another person. Please tell me you’ll consider it.”

  After a while he said, “Let’s see what they charge me with first.”

  “Asshole,” she whispered, but he saw she was hiding a smile with the hand she had been using to hold back tears.

  This time the interrogation room had a giant mirror on one wall. This time both detectives were sitting across from him at once. They had introduced themselves as Benay and Aaronson, and they were younger and less battle-scarred than the two detectives whose stunt had resulted in the death of two deceitful lovers. This time they were j
oined by the district attorney, Sam Colby, a sandy-haired man with beady eyes, and his petite blond ADA with slanted green eyes and a gravelly voice that made it sound like she smoked three packs a day.

  No one played good cop or bad cop. They listened to John recount a truthful and unedited account of the past week with an almost prayerful silence.

  When he was finished, John expected the detective to pepper him with questions, but it was the DA who cleared his throat and sat forward. To the detectives investigating Ray Duncan, John was simply another piece of potential evidence.

  “You maintain that the only reason you gave a false confession was to prevent Alex Martin from making an attempt on Ray Duncan’s life,” Colby said quietly.

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  “So, it was not your intent to deliberately mislead the detectives?”

  Reynard raised a hand, but John spoke anyway. “The opposite. I gave them a story with specific details regarding Alex Martin’s inheritance, details I thought were the basis of Ray Duncan’s motive for killing Mike Bowers.”

  “A story that did not include any mention of Ray Duncan committing this murder?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Why is that? You thought it would be best to get inside before you started to work your magic on this investigation?”

  “Kind of like a suicide bomber,” one of the detectives grumbled.

  John said, “Having seen their work firsthand I would say that title belongs to Ray Duncan, sir.” The detective reddened but nobody said anything, a silent consensus that it was the detective who had spoken out of turn.

  Colby leaned back in his chair and gave Reynard a long stare. “This is sounding an awful lot like obstruction to me, Mr. Reynard.”