“I believe I said go away quietly. Not being able to speak up because there’s a knife in your chest doesn’t qualify.”
“Do you think there’s a chance Guie and Crawford are wrong, and that Joe did kill him?”
“No. Joe wouldn’t have used that knife even if Walsh were coming at him with it. He would have used his fists. And, he wouldn’t have killed him. He would have left him just barely alive enough to suffer through a lecture on how much worse it would be for him if he ever came near Amber again.”
“Then, why the hesitation, if it’s true what Guie says that Joe only has to tell the truth and everybody wins?”
“Everybody but Amber. I got a lecture, myself, yesterday on the importance of keeping a clean record to ensure the kind of golden future a University of Chicago degree opens. You’ve got to figure it’s not a bad trade. Joe’s giving up sitting behind a desk in an apartment building lobby for the next twenty years in order to give Amber that. Besides, I don’t feel right convincing Joe of anything until I’m convinced of everything. I told you last night some things just don’t add up, and they still don’t.”
She waited for more, and when he offered nothing, she left him to work through his thoughts, the thoughts that still were causing the knot in his gut that the two fingers of bourbon had not been able to loosen, that were telling him he had already guessed the worst, that if any one person was responsible for the way this mess had turned out, it was himself.
Guie was right that he couldn’t argue with the timing of it. Something had set Walsh off. The chance of the cop being spotted for what he was, was slim; even slimmer was the idea Joe would have let slip the umbrella service to Amber. Connie? That was more a maybe, but doubtful. No, most likely was that somehow it had been Kubiak tiptoeing around those perimeters. But how would word of that have gotten to Walsh in a matter of under six hours, especially when everyone Kubiak had talked to claimed they barely knew Walsh? It would have had to have been through Amber. But Amber had been in class right up until the time she was seen leaving the campus with Walsh. And, even if her old high-school friend or one of her college friends had phoned or texted her to tell of Kubiak’s visits just hours earlier, why would she mention it to Walsh except to maybe warn him that her father was bringing other people in to deal with the situation, a fact guaranteed to anger him?
It all took Kubiak right back to the question he’d had last night: If Amber were dating Walsh, her friends had a choice of either covering for him or indicting him. Claiming to hardly know him, as they were doing, was a likely option only if Walsh really was just some strange kid coming up to stalk Amber. But, if that were true, what was she doing walking off campus to have a pizza with him? And, why wouldn’t she have phoned the cops herself, the minute he laid a hand on her?
And, then, strangest of all was how it all had turned out in that kitchen, two men who were accustomed to approaching a confrontation with their fists raised, neither of which having had a chance to take a shot at the other. No sign of a struggle, Crawford had said. Not a single blow exchanged. Kubiak had to wonder if, upon entering that kitchen, during that split second before it registered that his daughter had killed Walsh, Joe actually was disappointed that the man had died before he had a chance to knock a few of his teeth loose.
Not a single blow exchanged. That wasn’t how Crawford had put it, though. What had he said? Unscathed. No sign of a struggle. That couldn’t be entirely true, could it? Then, why had Crawford said it?
Kubiak imagined a few scenarios where it might be possible, though each one seemed farther out in left field than the next. Still, he thought each out, worked each back until a contradiction gave him a reason to dismiss it. There was one idea, though, he was unable to dismiss right off, so he worked it harder, tougher, searching for any reason to prove it impossible. And, when he had exhausted it, he was left with nothing but the feeling he was an idiot for not thinking of it before.
He reached for the phone, called out to Denise for the number Crawford had given her.
“You’re having him send that car?” she called back.
“Car, hell. I’m getting him back here right now. I want a look at those police photos.”
In the past, when Kubiak needed every person of interest in a homicide investigation together in order to thrash through the details fast, usually before Crawford could put the kibosh on it, he had found the act of gathering them all in one place to be a long process involving tricks, threats, and bartering. This time the roundup was a cinch, probably because the only two current persons of interest already were in custody.
Jennifer Tucker and her mother had been aching to come to Amber’s aid since they had gotten the news of what had happened; apparently all it took to get two old high-school friends back together was a beating followed by a homicide. Once Kubiak phoned them, they made it to the Oak Park Police station in about the time it had taken Joe Torasella to get to Harold Walsh’s kitchen. They were accompanied by Mr. Tucker, Jennifer’s father, a large man who spent most of his time nodding and listening, but who never left the sides of his wife and daughter.
Bridgot Patterson, David Fleming, and Chad Sloan weren’t too many minutes behind them. Kubiak had given them basically the same line he had gotten from Guie, that it was in everyone’s best interest, including golden-futured U of C students, to get this business wrapped up quietly and within a twenty-four hour news cycle.
The Oak Park P.D. had offered their Chicago brothers the use of a meeting room off of the chief’s office. Whether they were humble enough to realize any investigation could use all the help it could get, or if it was the result of another of Guie’s connections, Kubiak didn’t know, didn’t ask. The room was windowless, with a counter along one wall, and an oblong oak table in its center, around which were a dozen chairs on casters. In one corner, high and nestled between a set of emergency lights, a very discreet video camera monitored the room’s proceedings for the protection of everyone involved.
If any of the attendees had noticed the camera’s presence, they hadn’t let on. Jennifer and her mother sat on one side of the table, the father between them. On the other side, facing them, were Bridgot, who sat hunched forward with her hands folded on the table and her thumbs doing a nervous little dance; Robert, more casual, sitting with his hands in the pockets of his jacket and his body as far back in the chair as a body can sit; and Chad, showing nothing but defiance, with his arms folded squarely across his chest and a glare fixed on Kubiak. Kubiak sat at the head of the table, across from Crawford. Guie stood back against the wall, next to the Oak Park chief of police who was monitoring the room’s proceedings not quite as unobtrusively as his video camera.
“When do we get to see Amber?” Jennifer asked.
“That depends,” Kubiak told her. “I’d like to say as early as tomorrow morning, though it might be some time down the road, subject to visiting hours at Dwight Correctional Center.”
“But, I thought . . . You said you wanted us here so we could clear things up and get her out of jail.”
“I said I needed you here in order to clear up some points before we proceed to release her from jail. How quickly we manage that is up to all of you.”
Mr. Tucker’s meaty hand on his daughter’s arm couldn’t keep Jennifer from continuing. “Well, let’s get to clearing them up, then,” she demanded. “I’m sure everyone here would like to do what they can.” Her upturned chin gave a slow, disdainful sweep of the three on the other side of the table, lingering on Bridgot, whose patriotism at least, according to her, was already in question.
“All right,” Kubiak said. “Let’s start with you. You were at Robert and Chad’s apartment last Fourth of July weekend.”
Jennifer swiveled back to him, her eyes wide. “How did you know that?”
“It was a summer porch party. You poured your beer in Bridgot’s lap.”
“What does that have to do—”
“You met Harold Walsh there?”
; “Yes.”
“Had you met him there before?”
“No.”
“Since?”
“I haven’t been back there since. That was the last I saw of any of those people.”
“Yet you assumed Harold Walsh was a part of their group. Might he not have assumed the same of you?”
Bridgot interrupted. She kept her hands intertwined on the table, though from the look on her face she would have preferred them around Jennifer’s neck. “What’s the point of going over this again?” she asked Kubiak. “It’s just what we told you yesterday.”
“Yesterday Harold Walsh wasn’t dead.”
Robert let out a breath, addressed Crawford. “That sounds very dramatic, but what I think Bridgot means is that this is the second time we’ve been willing to cooperate with Mr. Kubiak, and he doesn’t seem to appreciate that. He doesn’t believe us when we tell him that Harold Walsh was just a casual acquaintance, someone we hardly knew.”
“Oh, I believe that now.”
Chad argued, “Maybe if you had believed us yesterday, Harold Walsh wouldn’t be dead today.”
“On the contrary,” Kubiak told him, “if I had been smart enough to see through your lies, I might have been able to save that kid’s life. That’s the part of this that makes me the sickest.”
Chad’s hands were now kneading the sides of the chair, his defiance turning to anger. “What’s sick is that we have to sit here and take this when we haven’t been charged with anything.”
“Oh, you will be,” Kubiak said, getting to his feet. “The reason I was surprised yesterday when you told me you hardly knew Walsh was because what I couldn’t figure from the get-go was why Amber would stay silent about the abuse she had been taking from him if he wasn’t her boyfriend, which, from what you all said, he didn’t appear to be. In fact, it seems Amber was telling her father the truth when she said Walsh was just a guy she met at a porch party, a kid so smitten with her he was still coming upstate on weekends in a vain attempt to try and steal her away from the young man she was seeing.”
As Kubiak rounded the table toward the three college students, Jennifer argued, “But, if he wasn’t her boyfriend, why didn’t she call the police the first time he hit her?”
“That was my question,” Kubiak said. “And her silence was the only reason I believed him to be her boyfriend. So, supposing he wasn’t, the only explanation that finally made any sense was that he never did hit her. The person who was taking out his anger on her arms, on her back, and finally on her face, had to be another young man, one she was close to, one she would stay silent for, and one her college friends would feel the need to cover for.” He stopped behind Robert’s chair. “Mr. Fleming, you’re the only one here whose hands I haven’t yet seen tonight. Would you mind taking them out of your pockets?”
Robert again looked to Crawford, received nothing in return but a cold stare, addressed Kubiak without bothering to turn and look at him. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would you want to see my hands?”
“Because the other thing I couldn’t figure out was how Walsh couldn’t have a mark on him except for that knife wound. Lieutenant Crawford told me there was no sign of a struggle, and I suppose there wasn’t between you and him because he wasn’t expecting you to shove that knife in his chest. But, how could we all have believed that he had just finished savagely beating Amber Torasella in that same kitchen, and not been left with so much as a scratch from her fingernails or a bruised knuckle from the bones of her face? Of course, it was possible, but doubtful. And I’m sure the officers involved in the investigation would have come up with the question themselves, in time, but we all agree that time is of the essence here, so would you please waste no more of it and simply show me your hands?”
Robert hesitated a moment more, then smiled, and with a self-deprecating chuckle pulled his hands from his pockets and held them up, swiveling from side to side in his chair and displaying the backs of his red, swollen fingers to the room. “All right,” he said. “I suppose it would be ridiculous at this point to claim this happened from punching a wall, so, I’ll tell you the truth. I did hit Amber. I’m not proud of it, and I’m willing to face the consequences for it. But that doesn’t mean I killed Harold Walsh, and if you had a shred of evidence I did, you and I would be sitting alone in an interrogation room right now, wouldn’t we?”
“Evidence, right now, I don’t need. There will be time and resources enough to come up with that. You have to understand, we’re only gathered here in the first place because the police have reason to believe that Joe Torasella did not kill Walsh; in fact, it’s pretty clear, at least to the detectives in this room, that all he’s guilty of is doing a sloppy job of corrupting a crime scene. That’s why Amber is in custody, because they, like her father, believed that she murdered Walsh in self-defense while he was in the act of beating her. But now that you’ve confessed to the fact you were the one beating her, they know she had no reason to kill Walsh, no motive at all. So she’ll be released, even if her father isn’t. Right now, she doesn’t trust the police enough to tell them anything; she can’t even admit that Walsh wasn’t the one who hit her because she thinks things might go even worse for her father if he were to get nailed for the murder of a completely innocent man. But once the investigation focuses on you, and with you already under arrest for the beating, it won’t take much to convince her that the quickest way to get her father sprung is to tell the truth.
“I can guess how she’ll tell it. Of course, the first part I know: I set you off when I showed up yesterday. You saw me as yet another threat from her old man and, as usual, you blamed her. She was with Walsh, having pizza, just blocks from your apartment when I left you. You contacted her, and the fact she was with Walsh maybe made you even angrier. At some point in the night, Walsh went home, and you wound up alone with her, probably at your apartment. Amber will fill in those details. She’ll also tell us whether, after you beat her, she went to Walsh’s home knowing she couldn’t go to her own home looking like she did, or if she just phoned him from her car because she had no one else she could talk to. I’m guessing, just from the time line, that she went to Oak Park. But one way or the other Walsh found out and he contacted you. Phone records will prove that. He either threatened you directly or threatened to call the police, and you told him in that smooth, logical voice of yours to slow down, wait until you talked to him face to face, man to man. He would have shooed Amber home just before you got there in order to keep things from escalating, leaving a twenty-five–minute window before her father arrived. During that window, things did escalate anyway when he still wouldn’t listen to your arguments. There went that golden future of yours, entirely tied up to your degree at U of C. He wouldn’t listen to reason, so you reached for a knife because you’re the kind of man who reserves his bare fists for women.
“Go ahead, Robert. Tell me the details I’ve got right and the ones I’ve got wrong. Either way, the gist of it is that it was you who had every reason to kill Walsh, and that’s what you did. I don’t know how you thought you could manage to get away with it, though I imagine a fellow like you thinks he can manage anything, especially when you have girls like Amber covering for you. I’m pretty sure she’s done with that now, what with you planning to sit back and let her father take the rap for the murder. In fact, judging from the looks on your friends’ faces, I think everyone is done covering for you at this point.”
With his glare fixed on Kubiak, Robert didn’t see the looks on Bridgot’s and Chad’s faces. He also did not see that Danny Guie had moved up on the other side of him in the event he should leap to his feet and lunge at Kubiak, which it looked like he might do, and was precisely what he did.
Guie’s tackle stopped him short. Still, Kubiak followed through with a blow to Robert’s jaw from a defensive swing already in motion. He supposed he could have checked it, had he really tried. It was a moment he would both regret and savor over the next few days each time he rubbe
d his bruised knuckles.
Copyright © 2010 Steve Lindley
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FICTION
LITTLE BROTHER
ANN WOODWARD
Art by Linda Weatherly
It was a time when summer lingered beyond its season, distilled into pleasant warm days of sun and nightly rains. The gardens surrounding the house of the princess were still green and full of the white blooms she preferred, and the morning glory vines in the small private courtyard of the Lady Aoi were a wall of blue along the veranda. Lady Aoi was not one of those who loved the mists and decay of autumn. To her they meant dying. Warmth and light were what opened her spirit; even the glowing maples of the Ninth Month were not compensation for the shriveling of the leaves, the sopping rains, the frost on the gravel paths, and the doleful honking of departing geese. She was grateful for the delay of all that. Typically, the princess did not agree with her but fretted and fanned. They sat together beside a slightly raised blind, sewing autumn robes for her husband. The cloth across their laps was indeed hot, Aoi thought, but she did not complain. She was feeling sad for the princess, so concentrated on her stitches. Because even russet silk and brocade will not bring the prince here just now, she thought. He was known to be visiting these days a young widow who lived in a house in the Third Ward of the city. It was said he was so often there that his relatives feared he would bring her into his quarters at the palace as a third wife. He was always throwing up to them a quotation from Taoist medicine that advised frequent and varied sexual activity. Aoi wondered where he had found this passage; she would never have let him see it in her scrolls on Chinese medicine. She thought that Taoists were not good models for a man like the prince.
O-hana, Aoi’s maid, opened the sliding door a bit and announced a visitor. It was a woman Aoi knew well and she told O-hana that she would see her in her own quarters.
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 Page 5
