Time moved very slowly, as drunk as he was. Half an hour passed as Griff pondered whether to get out of the car. Why was he here, if not to barge in and win his wife back? He ought to stop stalling. But if Griff went over there, would Kate agree to come home with him, or would she hold to Saxman tighter, out of some rebellious sense of pride? He might be sending her further into Saxman’s arms.
Eventually nature called. The cold air woke Griff up as soon as he opened the car door. He stepped behind the Dumpster to take a piss, and while he was back there, he made a decision. He zipped up and hurried back around the Dumpster, then marched across the blacktop, heading for room 21, to take his wife back from that asshole Saxman.
At the yellow door, Griff paused. Ethan was speaking—rapidly, urgently, roughly. Griff couldn’t make out the words, but the tone alone was enough to piss him off. How dare that creep Saxman speak to Kate that way? Griff raised his fist and pounded on the door.
“Who is it?” Ethan said, in an annoyed tone.
“Manager,” Griff said, putting on some vague foreign accent. “We had noise complaint. Open door, or I call the police.”
Saxman opened the door. As he caught sight of Griff, his expression morphed from irritation to shock. He moved to slam the door a second too late. Griff threw his weight against it, and they went tumbling into the room in a tangle of limbs. Kate screamed. Griff leapt to his feet, kicking away Saxman’s grasping hands, and started toward her.
“Did he hurt you?” Griff cried.
“Did you follow me, Griff?” Kate demanded. She sat on the bed fully clothed, her face red from crying, which only incensed Griff further.
“Did I hurt her? You’re the lunatic causing a scene,” Ethan said, as he got to his feet, his face flushed with anger.
“Stay out of this! Kate is my wife, and she’s coming home with me right now,” Griff said.
“No, I’m not,” Kate said.
“Yes, you are.”
Griff grabbed Kate’s arms and yanked her to her feet, dragging her toward the door. She dug her heels into the ugly carpet.
“Let … go … you crazy stalker!” she cried, twisting from his grasp, flailing at him.
Griff felt the sting as Kate’s fingernails gouged his arms and his hands. Saxman grabbed Griff by the back of his shirt, and pulled him off Kate, shoving him across the room. Griff’s head cracked against the wall. He fell sideways and crashed into a lamp, which toppled over beside him, its lightbulb exploding in a blue flash. Griff staggered to his feet, breathing heavily, just in time to see Saxman rushing him. They grappled, in a clinch, neither of them able to land a punch. Saxman was taller and had a longer reach, but Griff was heavier and stronger. Griff mustered the strength to push the guy off him. Ethan staggered backward, recovered instantly, and came back at Griff. Griff threw a poorly aimed punch that glanced off the side of Saxman’s face. Saxman swung at Griff hard and connected with his jaw. Momentarily stunned, Griff took a step back and put a hand to his lip. It came away bright red.
“Get out now,” Kate said, her voice thick with rage. “If you don’t leave right this minute, I swear to God, I’ll get a restraining order.”
She looked at him with such disgust that it took his breath away. The manager stood in the open doorway. He was a Sikh man in a turban, tall and dignified, and informed them gravely that the police were on the way.
Griff stared at the blood on his fingers. He knew he was blind drunk and reeked of alcohol. He was the one who forced his way into the room. With Griff’s luck, when the cops showed up, he’d probably be the one they arrested, no matter how unfair that was.
“You’ll regret this,” he said bitterly, though he didn’t know if he was speaking to Kate or her lover. All he knew was, he’d made it more likely Kate would leave him for Saxman, not less.
Griff forgot that he had the car. Next thing he remembered, he was running down the road, blind with rage and pain. He wound up in a bar, where they refused to serve him, and called a taxi for him instead. He went home and stripped, stuffing his shirt into the laundry hamper. He noticed the blood on it, but he didn’t think twice about it. Ethan was the one who slugged him, so why would he worry? Griff fell into bed and passed out. He never imagined that shirt would be seized by the police and become the centerpiece of a murder case against him. But then, he never thought any of this would come to pass—Kate dead, him sitting in a jail cell charged with her murder.
Griff heard the clanging of metal doors.
“Rothenberg,” the guard said, unlocking Griff’s cell. “Lawyer here to see you. Let’s go.”
Griff was escorted to a small, windowless interview room. He recognized the man who waited for him, because he was famous. Leonard Walters, an aggressive New York criminal lawyer with a national profile, a shock of white hair that set off his perpetual tan, and a fondness for trying cases in the press.
“Mr. Rothenberg, good to meet you,” Walters said. “I’m here to represent you at your father-in-law’s behest. No need to go through the formalities about retainer and such. He took care of all that.”
“I’m very grateful,” Griff said. “Keniston knows I would never hurt his daughter. I loved Kate—”
Walters held up a hand. “Let’s skip that and cut to the chase. It doesn’t matter how you felt or even what you did. What matters is what the police can prove, and how effectively we can undermine their case against you.”
“I want you to know, I’m innocent.”
“Glad to hear it. If you’re guilty that’s fine, too. Everybody deserves a defense. Only I’d advise you not to confess to me, because that makes my job harder, avoiding perjury and so forth.” Walters glanced at the gold Rolex on his wrist. “No time to waste. Here’s my plan.”
As Walters explained it, he intended to demolish the case against Griff by painting Chief Rizzo in the media as a trigger-happy rube who’d missed important pieces of evidence and manipulated others. Griff would come off as the martyr—a falsely accused, grief-stricken husband, dragged from the graveside of his beloved wife by an overzealous cop. It was a think-outside-the-box approach, and Griff liked it. They spent the rest of the visit going over the details of Kate’s affair, and the confrontation at the motel, so Walters’s investigator could start collecting evidence to back up Griff’s version of events.
“The blood on the shirt that this cop made such a stink about, you’re saying that’s your own blood? From when your wife’s boyfriend slugged you?” Walters asked, scribbling notes.
“Yes.”
“Oh, that’s good, that’s very good. And you left your wife alive, in the love nest with the other man?”
“At the motel, yes.”
“I love it. She’s pressuring him to leave his wife and kids. He doesn’t want to do it. And he’s the last one who saw her alive, not you.”
“And that’s not all. I don’t know if this helps or hurts us, but you should know. It’s my belief that Kate was pregnant with Saxman’s baby.”
Walters raised his eyebrows. “Really.”
“Yes. Now I have no proof of that. She never told me directly. But I lived in the same house as her, and I’m fairly certain.”
“A rich doctor with a wife and three kids at home. A pregnant mistress who’s starting to make demands. It’s classic. One thing, though. This was Thursday night, you say?”
“Uh-huh.”
Walters paused, a thoughtful look on his face. “But she filed for divorce Friday morning.”
“Yes.”
“So presumably she got out of the motel in one piece and made it to the courthouse. That’s a wrinkle, but we can finesse it.”
“A wrinkle in what? Where are you going with this?”
“The fastest way to convince the world you’re innocent is to make somebody else look guilty,” Walters said. “This doctor is gonna be our alternative suspect. We hold a press conference, and divert attention onto him.”
Griff frowned. “But what if he’s innocent?”
“What do you care? He screwed your wife, punched you in the face so you bled all over your shirt, made you look guilty when you’re not, and now you’re rotting in a jail cell and he’s walking around free. This is your chance to fight back, my friend.”
“It would serve him right,” Griff said.
“There you go, that’s the attitude.”
“Is my father-in-law on board with this plan? He says he wants to end the media circus, and this strategy will only make the story bigger.”
“Keniston hired me to clear your name, and I have to do that the best way I know how. The press’ll fall all over themselves crucifying this other guy. Trust me, it’s the way to go.”
Griff nodded. “All right, I’m in.”
“This will take a few days to pull together. I’m going to agree to postpone your bail hearing so you don’t have to go to court. It’s more important to negotiate with the prosecutor and persuade her not to file charges. But you’ll have to spend a few nights in jail.”
“It’s worth it if it means I don’t get charged with murdering my wife.”
Walters smiled reassuringly. “That’s the plan, my friend, and I think we can pull it off.”
They shook hands, and Griff was escorted back to his cell. He felt euphoric for a good five minutes or so after the meeting ended at the thought of getting out of jail, and of taking that smug asshole Owen Rizzo down a notch. He was elated, as well, that his father-in-law believed in him enough to pay the freight for someone like Leonard Walters. But then Griff remembered that Kate was dead, and the good feeling began to fade. He thought about the fact that Kate’s body had been lowered into the cold, hard ground without him there to say a last good-bye. She was under there now, as she would always be, with six feet of dirt between them. Griff lay down on his bunk and stared at the ceiling, too miserable to move.
32
Keisha barged into Owen’s office and told him to pull up CNN on his computer.
“Is it about the kid?” he asked.
The lead story on the front page of the Register had Owen’s stomach in knots. The star forward of the high school soccer team had been clipped by a TV truck yesterday. The kid would be fine, but he had a fractured tibia and would be out for the season, just as the playoffs were starting.
“No, it’s about Rothenberg, about the murder. You need to see this,” Keisha said.
Owen went to CNN, turning the monitor so Keisha could see. They were livestreaming a press conference straight from the steps of the Belle County Courthouse. Leonard Walters, the big-shot lawyer from New York, was speaking to the press about the Rothenberg case.
“I know that guy,” Rizzo said. “He represented the kingpin on my biggest drug cartel case. What’s he doing in this town?”
“You’re not gonna like it, Chief.”
Leonard Walters sported the standard lawyer’s winter uniform of dark wool overcoat with a sober gray scarf tucked under the collar. It made an impressive contrast to his snow-white hair as he spoke into a bank of microphones.
They had come into it in midsentence.
“—pregnant with another man’s child. Ask Chief Rizzo whether the autopsy found evidence of that! What are the police hiding? Naturally when Mr. Rothenberg found out about his wife’s affair, he became extremely angry, but he did not take his anger out on his defenseless, pregnant wife. No, he went after her seducer, a married man, a father of three, a doctor at the hospital in this very town, by the name of Ethan Saxman. The two of them got into a fistfight at the Pinetree Inn on Thursday night. Mr. Rothenberg was merely defending his wife’s honor. The gentleman standing beside me is the night manager at the Pinetree Inn, Mr. Rajit Singh. He was an eyewitness to that fight, and will speak to you momentarily to corroborate everything Mr. Rothenberg says. He’ll tell you Mr. Rothenberg was bleeding from a cut on his lip—which explains the blood on his Brooks Brothers shirt. He’ll also tell you that when Mr. Rothenberg left the premises, Mrs. Rothenberg was safe and sound, left alone in this other man’s company. I discovered this evidence with one phone call. Why didn’t Chief Rizzo find it? Or did he, and decided not to tell you because it’s bad for his case? Ask the chief whether a DNA test was already conducted on the bloody shirt. It was, but he won’t tell you the results, because they undermine his attempt to frame an innocent man.”
Keisha grabbed the mouse and clicked pause. “Is that true, Chief? It’s Rothenberg’s own blood on the shirt?”
“So what? Killing someone is a violent business. Rothenberg could’ve hurt himself going after his wife.”
“If you knew it was his blood and not hers, why didn’t you tell me that?”
“It doesn’t make him innocent.”
“You’ve been saying she was pregnant, but did you know it was this other guy’s baby?”
“We don’t know that yet. The ME sent samples to the FBI lab for fetal DNA testing, but it takes weeks to get the results.”
“What if it is, though?”
“Why is that a problem for the case? If Rothenberg’s wife was pregnant by another man, his motive to kill her was even stronger.”
“But you knew Dr. Saxman was in the picture, and you didn’t say anything to anybody?”
“He shows up in her phone records, that’s all I know,” Rizzo said, with a defensive shrug.
“How much were they calling each other? Enough to know he wasn’t treating her bunions?”
“Look, I haven’t even gotten all the phone records I subpoenaed yet, all right? I didn’t know anything specific. And what’s your point, anyway?” Owen asked.
“My point is, there’s another viable suspect here, one we should’ve been investigating all along.”
“Keisha, do you know what the leading cause of death for pregnant women is in the United States? It’s homicide by husbands and boyfriends. I kid you not. Go look it up.”
“Yeah, but Saxman was her boyfriend, so why are you fixated on the husband? Hold on a second. Saxman. That name’s ringing a bell.”
“We interviewed his wife. He’s married to the yoga teacher,” Rizzo said.
“Not because of that. Wait here.”
Keisha got up and ran out of the room.
“Shit,” Owen muttered, and kicked his desk.
If he lost Keisha, if she went over to the other side and started working against him, that would make his life harder. But it wouldn’t change Owen’s mind. He was sorry to learn that Kate had become involved with this other man, but he wasn’t surprised. Her marriage had been miserable. Owen remembered the rage in Rothenberg’s face as he pounded on the plate-glass window the night of the storm. Rothenberg was the classic jealous husband, willing to murder his wife rather than let her go. He killed her, Owen knew it in his gut. If Keisha couldn’t see it, he’d work the case on his own.
Keisha was back, with a pink message slip in her hand. “Chief, we had a call to the tip line yesterday on this Dr. Saxman. This is no coincidence.”
“What does it say?”
“The caller was a female, chose to remain anonymous, and was using caller ID block,” Keisha said, reading from the slip of paper. “She advised us to search a vehicle belonging to a Dr. Ethan Saxman, and we’d find evidence of the murder. She gave the make and plate number of the car. We’ve had hundreds of calls to the tip line, and haven’t had time to follow this one up yet. Do you want me to get started working on a warrant?”
“You’re accusing me of jumping to conclusions, yet you’re ready to go after the doctor just because Rothenberg’s lawyer says so. That tip could’ve been called in by Leonard Walters’ secretary, for all we know.”
“I’m simply suggesting that it’s our job to investigate all leads,” Keisha said, drawing herself up huffily.
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but with our limited resources, we don’t have that luxury.”
“Don’t we owe it to the town to try?” Keisha asked.
“This town wouldn’t know a murder investigation if it jum
ped up and bit it in the ass. We owe the victim justice. That’s what we owe. The town has been nothing but an obstacle to achieving that. Did you know Rob Womack is passing information to the mayor behind my back?”
Keisha shook her head. “Last time I checked, Chief, the mayor was on our team.”
“Come on, Keisha. Tell me you don’t see it. These people are conspiring against me. They’d rather see me lose my job than catch her killer.”
“Small towns are rough. You have to go that extra mile before people accept you. And no offense, Chief, but you’ve made some decisions that rubbed people the wrong way.”
“They can’t stomach an outsider telling them how to run things, that’s the problem.”
“Yeah, well you could make more of an effort to get along. I read the paper this morning. People are pissed about the traffic accident, and they’re starting to question the investigation. Why not make a show of good faith? Tell them you’re reassessing your case and looking at other suspects.”
“My case is fine, thank you very much,” Owen said, his mouth setting in a grim line.
The nerve of this kid, after he got her the job. Did she have some kind of problem with him? She’d complained about how he asked her to take the notes in the interviews. Was it that? He was only trying to train her. Kids these days, they wanted to run the show from day one, whether they were ready or not.
“What do you have to lose, Chief? Bring Rothenberg and his lawyer in for an interview. Ask them to provide us with a rundown on all the evidence that they claim exonerates him. Then we check it out and see if he’s telling the truth. Meantime, I’ll look into this doctor, and his relationship to the victim. I’ll get a warrant on the car. I know it seems far-fetched, but it does happen sometimes that you get the wrong guy. Maybe we rushed to judgment on this one.”
It's Always the Husband Page 29
