by Sandra Brown
Hammond checked the number on the LED. “I’ll use my cell, thanks.”
Excusing himself, he stepped out of the office and moved into the hall, which offered a modicum of privacy. “Loretta, what’s up?”
“We ended on a sour note last night.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were so disappointed when you left.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“But I did. I wanted to do something for you, so I went over to county records this morning and caught Harvey buying a honey bun out of a vending machine.”
“I’ve only got a minute, Loretta.”
“I’m getting there. I asked him if anyone else had leaned on him for information related to the Pettijohn case.”
“Specifically Alex Ladd?”
“No, I just laid it out there to see if he would bite.”
“And?”
“He broke a cold sweat. I could practically hear his knees knocking.”
“Who approached him for information?”
“The little nerd wouldn’t say.”
“Loretta—”
“I tried everything, Hammond. Believe me. Threats of exposure, torture, physical harm. I wheedled, dealed, cajoled. I offered him unlimited booze, drugs, sex with the professional of his choice. Nothing worked. Whoever approached him, scared him. Speechless. He’s not talking.”
“Okay, thanks.” Hearing motion behind him, he glanced over his shoulder. Frank Perkins was ushering Alex around the corner.
“Anything else you want me to do?” Loretta asked.
“Not for now. Thanks. Got to go.”
He clicked off and turned just as Perkins and Alex reached the door to Smilow’s office. When the solicitor saw Hammond, his eyes widened. “What happened to you?”
“I got mugged.”
“Jeez. Looks like more than the average mugging.”
“I’ll be all right.” He dropped his gaze to Alex. “I was well taken care of.”
They had no longer than a millisecond of eye engagement. Hammond tried to telegraph a warning, but her lawyer nudged her forward into the office. “Well, what now, Detective?”
“We’ve got a recording we want your client to hear.”
“A recording of what?”
“Of an interrogation we conducted early this morning with a man in our own jail. Believe me, his statements are relevant to the Pettijohn case.”
Perkins held out the only chair for Alex. The others took up standing positions around the small room. Smilow offered to have a chair brought in for Hammond, but he declined. As Alex sat down, she managed a covert inquisitive glance at him, but he had no way of preparing her for what was in store.
Smilow summarized Ellen Rogers’s experience for Alex and her lawyer. “Fortunately for us, Ms. Rogers turned out to be no shrinking violet. She tracked the man down herself and reported him to the police.”
“I fail to see—”
“His name is Bobby Trimble.”
Hammond had been closely watching Alex’s face. As soon as Smilow began, she had realized what was coming. Her eyes closed briefly, and she took a deep, fortifying breath. But when he said Trimble’s name, she revealed no reaction at all.
Smilow said, “You’re acquainted with Mr. Trimble, aren’t you, Dr. Ladd?”
Frank Perkins said, “I would like a word with my client.”
“It’s all right, Frank,” she said softly. “Unfortunately, I can’t deny knowing Bobby Trimble.”
Before Perkins could say anything more, Smilow said, “The tape is self-explanatory, Frank.” He depressed the play button on the machine.
In Smilow’s voice, the people present during the interrogation were identified. The time, place, and date were noted, along with the conditions under which Trimble was giving the statement. He had confessed to seducing Miss Ellen Rogers for the purpose of robbing her, and, although he wasn’t guaranteed clemency, he was assured by Stefanie Mundell that the County Solicitor’s Office would deal favorably with anyone who voluntarily provided information pertinent to Lute Pettijohn’s murder case.
That said, Smilow asked his first question. “Bobby—may I call you Bobby?”
“I’m not ashamed of my name.”
“Bobby, do you know Dr. Ladd?”
“Alex is my half-sister. Same mother. Different fathers. Never knew either one of them, though.”
“Trimble was your mother’s name?”
“Right.”
“You and your half-sister were reared together, in the same home?”
“If you want to call it that. It was hardly a home. Our mother wasn’t a Martha Stewart, although she did a lot of entertaining.”
“What kind of entertaining?”
“Men, Detective Smilow. She had men in the house all the time. When she did, Alex and I were sent out. If it was hot outside, tough. Cold weather, tough. If we were hungry, too bad. Sometimes we could talk a hamburger out of the old black lady who worked at the Dairy Queen. She didn’t like me much, but she had a soft spot for Alex. But if her boss was around, forget it. We went hungry.”
“Is your mother still alive?”
“Who knows? Who cares? She left when I was about… hmm, fourteen. Making Alex twelve, I guess. She had fallen hard for a guy, and when he left for Reno, she followed him out there. I don’t know if she ever caught him or not. That’s the last we ever saw or heard of her.”
“Didn’t Child Protection Services see to your needs after that?”
“I’d just as soon be in jail as to have a bunch of busybody bureaucrats breathing down my neck. So I told Alex not to tell anybody that our mother had left. We faked it. We went to school, pretending everything was normal. And”—he chuckled—“everything was. I don’t think our mother ever darkened the door of the schoolhouse. As far as she was concerned, PTA stood for pussy, tits, and ass.”
“There’s no call for that,” Smilow said sharply.
“Sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean any disrespect.”
Hammond assumed Bobby had apologized to Steffi. His apology sounded insincere. Alex must have thought so, too. She was staring at the recorder with repugnance.
Smilow asked, “Didn’t neighbors notice that your mother was no longer around?”
“Alex and I had been fending for ourselves for so long, it wasn’t unusual for them to see her toting clothes to the Laundromat or me asking for odd jobs.”
“You did odd jobs to support yourself and your sister?”
He cleared his throat. “For a while.” A pause. “Before I continue… just so we understand one another… I already paid my debt to society for what happened. This isn’t going to come back on me, is it? This all happened way back when. In Tennessee. This is South Carolina. I’m free and clear in this state.”
“Tell us what you know about Lute Pettijohn’s murder, Bobby, and you walk out of here.”
“Sounds good.”
Up to this point Alex hadn’t moved. Now she turned to Perkins. “Is it necessary for us to listen to this?”
The lawyer asked Smilow to stop the tape so he could confer with Alex. Smilow courteously complied. Perkins whispered a question to her. She answered quietly. They consulted in undertones for about sixty seconds.
Then Perkins said, “You can’t seriously validate this man’s statements. He’s bargaining for a dismissal of charges against him. Obviously he told you what you wanted to hear.”
Smilow said, “If he’s lying, then it doesn’t matter to Dr. Ladd what he said, does it?”
“It matters in that it could prove embarrassing for her.”
“I’m sorry for any embarrassment. But I would think Dr. Ladd would want to hear what’s being alleged about her. She’s free to jump in and refute anything he says at any time.”
Perkins turned to her. “It’s up to you.”
She gave the attorney a curt nod.
“All right, Smilow,” he said. “But this is cheap theatrics and you know it.”
The rebuke bounced off Smilow, who restarted the tape at the point where he repeated his question about how Trimble had supported himself and his sister.
“We got by for a time, with me doing this and that,” he replied. “But I was busting my ass trying to keep food on the table and Alex in clothes. She was growing, you know, like teenage girls do. Blossoming.”
Trimble’s tone dropped to a confidential pitch. “It was seeing how she was filling out that first gave me the idea.”
“What idea?”
“I’m getting to it,” he said, nettled by Smilow’s impatience. “I started noticing how my buddies looked at my baby sister. In a whole new light, you might say. I overheard a few remarks. And that’s when the idea first occurred to me.”
Hammond propped his left elbow on the fist of the arm in the sling and covered his mouth with his hand. He wanted to stop up his ears. He wanted to throw the tape recorder against the wall. He wanted to slap the shit out of Steffi, who was smiling smugly at Alex. He was helpless to do anything except to listen, just as she was being forced to do.
The difference in Trimble’s diction and syntax was noticeable. Talking about his past had caused him to lapse into the speech patterns of his youth. He sounded more crass. More uncouth. More lewd.
“The first time it happened by accident. I mean, I didn’t plan it. Alex and I were with this friend of mine. He had stolen a six-pack of beer and we met in this abandoned garage to drink it. He started teasing Alex and…” A squeak of a chair as he shifted his weight. “Eventually he dared her to raise her shirt and give him a look at her top.
“Alex told him no way, José. But she didn’t mean it. She was giggling, playing along, you know. And damned if she didn’t finally do it. I told him that in exchange for seeing my little sister’s tits—sorry, breasts—he had to give me the extra beer. He said no way in hell because all he had really seen was her brassiere. But the next time—”
Hammond’s left hand shot out and stopped the recorder. “We all get the drift, Smilow. Dr. Ladd’s half-brother exploited her. It’s disputable whether or not she went along willingly. But in any case, it’s ancient history.”
“Not that ancient.”
“Twenty, twenty-five years! What in God’s name does this have to do with Lute Pettijohn?”
“We’re coming to that,” Steffi said. “It all ties in together.”
“The rest of you can sit in here and listen to this tripe,” Frank Perkins said, also coming to his feet. “But I will not allow my client to be subjected to listening to it.”
“I’m afraid I can’t allow Dr. Ladd to leave,” Smilow said.
“Do you plan to formally charge her with a crime?” Sarcastically Perkins added, “One allegedly committed this decade?”
Smilow evaded giving him a direct answer. “If you don’t want to hear the remainder of the tape, I must ask you to wait in the other room until Mr. Cross has heard all of it.”
“Fine.”
“No.” Alex spoke quietly but with resolve. All eyes moved to her. “Bobby Trimble is trash. Over the last twenty years, he’s acquired some polish, but he’s still a lowlife. I want to hear everything he says. I have a right to know what he’s saying about me. As horrible as it is for me even to hear his voice, I need to listen to this, Frank.”
Steffi said, “Do you deny anything he’s said so far?”
“You don’t have to answer that, Alex.”
Ignoring her solicitor’s advice, she met Steffi’s eager eyes head-on. “It all happened a long time ago, Ms. Mundell. I was a child.”
“You were beyond the age of accountability.”
“I made some bad choices when my only option was to make worse ones. The memories are ugly. Years ago, I expunged them from my mind and got on with my life. I made a new life.”
“Very good answer, Dr. Ladd,” Steffi said. “But in other words, no. You don’t deny anything he’s said so far.”
If Frank Perkins hadn’t intervened at that moment and warned Alex to say nothing more, Hammond would have warned her himself. She heeded her lawyer’s advice. Looking thoroughly disgusted with the whole proceeding, Perkins said, “Let’s get this over with.”
Smilow restarted the tape. Hammond shifted his weight from one leg to the other, ostensibly to work some of the soreness out of his left leg. In reality he was trying to keep himself from doing something very stupid, like grabbing Alex by the hand and dragging her out of there. Last night had proved she needed protection. He would guard her himself. He was almost ready to tell everything, get it out in the open, damn the torpedoes.
Almost. In this instance the adverb was a monumental qualifier.
The worst of the tale was yet to come, and it was that which bore an unsettling similarity to the present. According to Loretta’s report, upon leaving Florida with a theft rap and a loan shark hot on his trail, Bobby Trimble had dropped from sight. That he had resurfaced here in Charleston within days of a murder in which his half-sister was implicated was a damned uncomfortable coincidence.
It was certainly more than enough to increase Steffi’s and Smilow’s suspicions. Even though Hammond knew that it was virtually impossible for Alex to have killed Pettijohn and still arrive at the fair when she had, there were still inconsistencies, unanswered questions, that plagued him. Especially in light of her troublesome past.
Unarguably someone saw her as a threat that must be silenced. But what threat did she pose? As a witness? Or as a conspirator who had got cold feet? Until he knew with certainty that Alex was entirely guilty—or entirely innocent—of any wrongdoing, he was trapped between prosecutor and protector.
On the tape, Smilow was asking Trimble about the con game he had devised to bilk money out of his friends.
“It worked like this. I’d target somebody and start telling him about Alex, how she was maturing. I’d say she was itching to try out the new equipment, that she was in heat, things like that. I’d feed him little tidbits, get him to thinking about her and speculating on the possibilities. Sometimes it took a few days, other times only a matter of hours before he’d get really worked up.
“I had this knack, this sixth sense, about when the time was right to close the deal. I’d name our price. Know what? I never had one of those suckers try to haggle down the fee,” he said, laughing. “I’d set the time and place. They’d pay me, then it was up to Alex to do her thing.”
“What thing?”
“Whatever she had to do to get them… you know, vulnerable.”
“Aroused?”
“That’s a nice way of putting it. When they were good and aroused, I would rush in and demand all their money, or else.”
“Or else what?”
“I gave them some legal-sounding bullshit about molestation of a minor. If they balked or threatened us with the law, I’d say that it was our word against theirs, and who wouldn’t believe a twelve-year-old virgin? They kept quiet, all right. That’s how we stayed in business so long. None wanted to look like a jackass in front of his friends, so none ever admitted to being taken.”
“Your half-sister willingly participated?”
“What do you think? That I forced her? A woman loves showing off. Meaning no disrespect, Ms. Mundell. But I’ll bet Mr. Smilow here agrees with me, even if he doesn’t own up to it. All women are exhibitionists at heart. They know what they’ve got. They know men are panting after it. They love baiting us with it.”
“Thank you for that psychological insight.”
Steffi Mundell’s sarcasm wasn’t lost on him. “I didn’t write the rules, Ms. Mundell. I’m only telling it like it is, and you know it.”
Smilow resumed the questioning. “You didn’t run out of suckers?”
“We spread into other neighborhoods. Alex looked so fresh and innocent that every mark thought he was the first one. That’s why I knew it would work with the older men, too.”
“Tell me about that.”
“Alex was the perfect lure. She knew how
to reel them in, too. That’s her specialty. She would act innocent and nervous. As a rule, we men can’t resist a woman who’s being coy. Alex can play hard to get better than any woman I’ve ever met before or since.”
Hammond ran his shirtsleeve across his sweating forehead, then rested his head against the wall and closed his eyes.
He heard the click when the button was depressed to stop the recorder. “Are you all right?”
Realizing that Smilow’s question was aimed at him, he opened his eyes. Everyone except Alex was looking at him. Her eyes were downcast, focused on her hands, which lay folded in her lap. “Sure. Why?”
“You’re awfully pale, Hammond. Why don’t you let us bring in an extra chair?”
“I’ll give you mine, Mr. Cross.” Alex stood up and took a step toward him.
“No,” he said brusquely. “I’m fine.”
“Would you like something to drink?”
“Thanks, Steffi. I’m okay.”
Alex was still standing, still looking at him, and he knew that she knew that he was far from okay. In fact, he’d never been more miserable in his entire life.
“How much more?” he asked.
“Not much,” Smilow replied. “Dr. Ladd?”
She resumed her seat and he restarted the recorder. The room was silent except for the soft whir of the machine and Bobby’s ingratiating voice as he described how they expanded to older, more affluent men, which he enticed from hotel lobbies and bars. Basically Bobby pimped for Alex. Business was good.
“Once I got them there with her, I’d relieve them of their wallets, which were fatter than the ones we’d taken off the neighborhood boys. Much fatter.”
“Sounds like you two made quite a team.”
“We did. The best.” Bobby’s voice turned nostalgic. “Then that one guy ruined it for us.”
“You tried to kill him, Bobby.”
“It was self-defense! That son of a bitch came after me with a knife.”
“You were stealing from him. He was protecting his property.”
“And I was protecting myself. It wasn’t my fault that the knife got turned around in the scuffle and wound up in his belly.”
“The judge thought it was your fault.”
“That bastard judge sent me to that hellhole.”
