Perfectly Criminal

by Celeste Marsella

  “She wants to see me,” Beth continued. “I shouldn't go, right?”

  “Virginia Booth called you and wants to meet with you?”

  “Lolly called her and told her that you and I were there asking questions about her and Muffie. Doogie freaked when she heard you were with me.”

  “Okay, so let's go see her.”

  Beth shook her head. “Alone. Doogie wants to see me alone.”

  “You call her and tell her you're on your way. Don't worry about the rest. I'll figure it out during the ride.”

  “Are you going to have me wired?”

  “No, Beth. I'm going to call up the folks from Mission Impossible and have a mask of your face made, and I'm going to wear it to fool Doogie into thinking she's talking to you, when in fact she'll be spilling her guts to me.”

  “Stop making fun of me.”

  “It breaks my heart to say this, but if you're going to work in this office as anything other than someone's assistant, you'd better grow up and learn how to bend the truth.”

  Beth lifted a yellow legal pad from the table. “You're on the motion calendar tomorrow in the Rollins case, Shannon. His lawyer filed a ten-page motion to dismiss. I'm preparing your answer now while you run around simultaneously playing detective and footsies with Scott Boardman. So which of us is acting like the real prosecutor? You or me?”

  “You're acting like a paralegal. And law school is just going to teach you more of that book stuff that you already know. I'm going to teach you how to be a hard-ass prosecutor. I'll wing the motion tomorrow morning whether you write a brilliant answer or not. Now leave your flowered tote bag behind and let's go.”

  “Just like you ‘winged’ the Cohen case?” Beth held her legal pad in midair, like if she showed me concrete proof of my negligent behavior it might shock me into letting her go to Virginia Booth's alone. I took the pad from her hand, ripped off the pages she'd written, and folded them up in my back pocket. “I'll read while you drive. Call Doogie. Tell her you're on your way.”

  She rose slowly from her seat.

  “And the next time you want to insult me or hurt my feelings,” I said, “don't bother. It's been tried by the best, and the only person who ever came close was a rookie Providence cop when he kicked me across a room while I was handcuffed.”

  On our way past the girls' bathroom, we bumped into Andy coming out. “Hey, Vincent is looking for you,” he said to me. I looked at Beth for verification. She shrugged. Andy continued. “Well, it's something about a trust fund and Virginia Booth. She was suing her daughter to get the trust fund control back. He just found out that the day the court ruled against her is the day the murders took place. Motive,” Andy sang.

  “Ridiculous,” Beth said as she walked ahead to the elevator and punched the down button. “Doogie would never… Mothers don't kill their children. At least not where I come from.”

  “The same day the decision came down?” I confirmed with Andy.

  “You betcha, sweet-cakes. M-O-T-I-V-E,” he spelled.

  The elevator doors swung open and I joined Beth, who was mumbling something under her breath about absurdity and the lack of understanding we had of someone like Virginia Booth. I let Beth mutter away because time would answer the question of what Virginia Booth was capable of. If I had my way, it would be sooner rather than later, because with each minute that passed, emotions cooled, fears subsided, and the edges of truth softened and blurred. I recalled my first encounter with Virginia Booth four days after the murders. She'd vacillated between gracious and jumpy, sharp-tongued and coolly dismissive. The second time we talked, at the coffee shop, she was calmer, more sure of herself. She had found her footing and had tried to knock me off mine-make me another victim of Scott Boardman.

  How would this third visit find her? I was hoping the third time would be the charm.

  IN HER RED SAAB, BETH DROVE US TO NEWPORT. I pulled Beth's motion response from my pocket, and while she drove, I read it in five minutes.

  “Is it okay?” she asked.

  “Perfect,” I said. “It's a sure win.” I tucked the pages back into my pocket and made a mental note to myself to make a real note to myself that I had to be in court at 8:00 a.m. the next morning. My biggest obstacle to winning the motion wasn't the state of the law, or how well Beth had presented it, but whether or not I could make it to court on time.

  At a point between the Jamestown and Newport bridges, my cell phone rang. Marianna had tracked us down. She and Laurie were going to the Red Fez after work and wanted company.

  “Maybe,” I said into the phone. “We're on our way to Newport and I'll fill you in later.”

  I clicked my phone, ending the conversation. Beth tried to look at me as she drove, sneaking peeks out of the corner of her eye. “Did Mari scream at you?” she asked.

  “For what?”

  “Doing what we're doing, of course.”

  “As a matter of fact, Beth, not only did she not scream, but she said she wished she were coming with us. Marianna and Laurie both realize that in this case, sitting around the office waiting for evidence to blow in through an open window isn't going to work, so we got to go out and reel it in.”

  “But it's not normal. Prosecutors aren't supposed to act like detectives. The police should be doing this stuff, not us.”

  “Beth, remember the two police officers—Kent and the other one—who arrested me the day Leo Safer was murdered? The two who would have beat the shit out of the three of us if Lucky hadn't been there?”

  She snuck me another side-glance, afraid to answer, knowing that my memory of that day and night was still as raw as an open wound.

  “Well, police officers like those two, and others like them, are the ones who investigate these cases. Would you trust that kind of investigating if your mother were under suspicion of murder? Or your sister? Or your brother?”

  Beth didn't have a brother, but she dared not correct me. Silent, her eyes remained steady on the road ahead.

  “This case is special to me because of Scott Boardman. And when I became a suspect in Leo Safer's murder, the case became personal. So I'm not leaving anything up to police officers like Kent and his redneck cronies.”

  “I thought you liked cops… I mean, you date them all the time.”

  “I fuck them, Beth. That's different than dating. And they're not all like Kent. Some of them are okay. The ones who shouldn't have been cops to begin with.”

  “Like the chief?”

  Good question. But my answer didn't take long. “Yeah, like the chief. He's a good guy, that's why he made it to the top. The ones like Kent will eventually be weeded out, but not before they've done a heap of bad shit like beat up a few suspects, plant bogus evidence, and skim drugs from a bust and then resell it to select private customers.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “Pillow talk with the chief of police for the past five years.”

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER BETH AND I PULLED UP to Virginia Booth's castle on the cliffs. As before, a gray-uniformed maid admitted us to the sun-filled “morning room” (as Beth called it). We had waited for the mistress of the manse for about fifteen minutes when the maid returned and said that Mrs. Booth was indisposed and couldn't make the meeting after all.

  “Give her a couple of aspirin and tell her we'll wait,” I said.

  The lady in gray stalled a minute before finally spinning on her heels and exiting the room.

  In the stuffed chintz chair, Beth sat primly with her hands folded in her lap. She directed her statements to the room at large, as if she were delivering protocol to a roomful of guests awaiting a sitting queen. “She'll make us wait another fifteen minutes and then she'll send the maid down again to inform us that she still isn't receiving guests. We can sit here for an eternity, and if she doesn't want to see us, she won't. And after some extended period of time, if we refuse to leave, she'll call the police to have us removed. I just want you to know that,” she said confidently “Virg
inia Booth will win this particular round.”

  “I'm guessing she won't try to win this one. Because I'm guessing she doesn't want any more cops showing up here. So we'll just give her the fifteen more minutes she requires and see what happens.”

  During our wait, I'd perused a coffee-table book on orchid forcing (imagine that kind of arrogance?) and Beth walked around the room surveying the furnishings as if she were a buyer from Christie's pricing the goods for auction. Beth was fondling a Chinese jade vase, turning it over to look for a signature, I assumed, when Virginia Booth appeared in the doorway, studying us from a safe distance as if we were bacteria on a slide.

  Beth saw her first and gently replaced the vase. “I'm sorry, Doogie. That was unconscionable of me…”

  Virginia Booth ignored her apology and turned her head slowly to me. “And you? Why are you here?”

  “You left so abruptly from the coffee shop that day… and I thought we were just starting to bond.”

  This was the first Beth had heard of a prior meeting between Virginia Booth and me. “What coffee shop?” she asked me.

  I kept my eyes on Virginia Booth as I explained to Beth: “Mrs. Booth invited me for coffee. But then once we got to Starbucks, she decided she wasn't thirsty.” Still watching Virginia Booth, I said to her, “Was it something I said, Mrs. Booth?”

  Virginia Booth seemed to fold in half. She held her stomach and sidled unsteadily to the nearest chair, into which she crumbled. Beth ran to her side. “Doogie?”

  Virginia Booth held her hand up to Beth. Her skin had paled even whiter than its natural porcelain shade. She spoke to me. “Your police friends came back here again. They showed me the same warrant from the last time. They found something upstairs—they wouldn't say what. They removed it from my house and said they'd be returning within the next few days with another warrant. One for my… arrest.” Now she looked at Beth, who was kneeling in front of her. She took Beth's hand that had been resting within reach on the arm of her chair. Ignoring me, she spoke directly to Beth—who was the only one she'd actually invited into her house. “I thought maybe you would understand, Beth… that you would help me understand all this. And that I could explain to you what happened. And that in turn you might understand.”

  I took a few steps closer to the stricken woman. “What's all this gibberish?” I said as Beth looked up at me, horrified. “What happened the night your daughter was murdered? Was it the trust money? You killed your own flesh and blood over a goddamn trust—”

  “Shannon,” Beth said gently. “Let's just let Doogie talk a minute. Okay?” She turned back to Virginia Booth. “You want to tell me something? Go ahead. It'll be all right. I promise.”

  Virginia Booth shook her head slowly. “No, dear,” she said to Beth. “It will never be all right again. Muffie ruined everything, as I knew she would once Pat Boardman got hold of her.”

  “Oh, so now we're blaming Pat Boardman?” I said.

  Beth's eyes shot me a daggered glance. I moved away and sat on the couch Marianna and I had occupied during our first visit. Beth was clearly the director of this scene, so suppressing the urge to even breathe, I let Virginia Booth continue her monologue while I bit my sharp tongue.

  “You know, of course, about the outcome of my lawsuit over the trust. Those policemen told me you all knew. I'd lost the case that day… the day Muffie died. I know how that looks, as if I had something to do with her death.” She breathed deeply, switching scenes. “And upstairs, here, they found something, they said, that implicated me.” She looked closely into Beth's eyes. “Do you know what they found? I can't imagine…”

  Beth turned a sour look at me and I knew what she was thinking. But she disappointed me by actually verbalizing her thoughts. “Did they plant something here, Shannon? Would the cops have planted evidence, or just be lying about it to scare her into confessing something?”

  Although I knew that Beth inspired the trust that Virginia Booth needed to bare her soul to us, she still had no right to be releasing confidential information to her— information I'd told her in the privacy of a legal setting, a prosecutor and a paralegal discussing bad cops. True or not, Beth never should have opened her mouth about it to Virginia Booth.

  “Beth,” I said, and shook my head at her.

  She pursed her lips and nodded, realizing her mistake. “Doogie, did you see anything? What they took out?”

  She shook her head slowly. “They wouldn't say. Didn't tell me. Just told me, very self-assured, that I would be arrested.” She dropped her head to her lap. “I need to explain to you, Beth. To someone who will understand when all this is over, what happened… at least part of it… and why.”

  “What are you talking about?” Beth said. “Start at the beginning.”

  “May I get some water first?” she asked.

  The tide of her attitude had turned full circle. She was now asking us if she could get water in her own house. This is where I liked my witnesses—in the solemn state of scared shitless.

  “No,” I said. “Talk first, and then you can drink.”

  “Come on, Shannon,” Beth pleaded. “Let me get it for her.”

  Virginia Booth grabbed Beth's other hand. “No, stay with me.” She hung her head again. “I don't need it anyway.”

  Beth patted Virginia Booth's hand, and she began to talk again.

  “My lawyer called that morning—the morning the judge said the trust transfer to Muffie was valid. That decision meant that I was under her control financially, just as her father had wished. The trust held everything we own. It might have been all right—I don't think Muffie hated me that much, to put me out of my own house-but Pat Boardman was so strong an influence on her. Muffie changed after Pat. I don't know why Pat Boardman hated me. Maybe because of Scott. Because our families had been so close. Pat always felt the outsider in our group. And Scott made sure Pat was kept in her place, as he was so fond of saying. He was so fond of telling us all how he married down.” She looked over at me with tired eyes. Raising her eyebrows seemed an effort. “Scott prides himself on keeping women in their place. I tried to tell you,” she said to me. “Scott Boardman is not a nice man, and he was a worse husband—”

  “Yeah,” I interjected. “He said you'd say that. He said you'd say he was a lousy husband and a worse father.”

  “Only because it's true,” she said.

  “Go ahead,” Beth said to her, patting her hand again.

  Virginia Booth looked up at Beth, as if renewing her faith that Beth was someone she could trust. She nodded. “Pat wanted to move into this house with Muffie. Her plan was that I would retire to the guesthouse. Imagine? After all these years in my home, to ask me to move to the guesthouse, where the servants used to live.”

  I felt like telling her that her dump of a guesthouse was twice the size of my apartment, but under Beth's warning stare, I kept my trap shut.

  “So I called Muffie—that day I learned the verdict—is that the right term?” She looked at me. “Is it a verdict when a judge decides against you?”

  Beth responded. “No, Doogie. Only juries can render verdicts. The judge made a decision.”

  She nodded. “Well, he decided against me, and I called Muffie that very evening. She was, of course, with Pat. They were staying on our boat at the harbor. In view of all those people, they carried on together.” She shivered. “At that restaurant they've built on the docks there. Forty-one Degrees North, they call it. Silly name. I went there to talk to her—to both of them—I thought we could come to some agreement—the three of us together …”

  “You were on the boat that night?” I said.

  Beth warned me again with a slicing glance.

  “I had been here, drinking alone. To build courage… the courage to beg.”

  She seemed to hiccup. Maybe a tear had lodged in her tight and proud throat.

  “Go get her some water now,” Beth said to me. “The kitchen is back out the way we came in, and then to the far left.”<
br />
  I was reluctant to leave the two of them alone. Would things be said in my absence that Beth wouldn't share? It never occurred to me that I would be the outsider to Beth, or any of the girls. In an implicit and unspoken trust, I never had to share them before. Even Marianna with her close-knit family had always seemed to find a special niche for the four of us that didn't impinge on her family obligations. In short, did I trust Beth as much as I trusted Marianna and Laurie?

  Beth felt my reluctance in the few seconds of my hesitation. “Go, Shannon,” she ordered. “A glass of water, please.” Then she turned slowly back to Virginia Booth. “Do you want something a bit stronger—to calm your nerves?”

  Again Virginia Booth shook her head into her lap, and whispered, “Water will be fine.”

  I rose from the couch and walked slowly from the room, straining to hear whispered words that never came, until I was back at the front door in a large foyer where, as per Beth's directions, I turned left and started down a hall, where a gray-starched maid, a different face this time, met me. She held a basket of fresh-cut flowers to her chest. “May I help you?” she asked.

  “Water,” I answered. “For Mrs. Booth in that… morning room.”

  She nodded and turned back to the kitchen, hugging the basket in her arms.

  Mission completed, I returned to Beth and Virginia Booth, who were silent at my entrance.

  “The maid's bringing it,” I said, and resumed my seat on the couch.

  Beth looked at me with wide eyes and shook her head almost imperceptibly. Something had been divulged in my absence. Eye to eye, I queried Beth, and she turned back to Virginia Booth. “Tell Miss Lynch what you told me, Doogie. Shannon's okay, really. She's a bit rough around the edges, but you can trust her. I trust her with my life. You can trust her.”

  How generous of the two of them, I thought, to trust the shanty Irish broad with the foul mouth and rough edges.