Darkness, Sing Me a Song--A Holland Taylor Mystery

by David Housewright

  “Still, it’s what, seventy-five, eighty yards between here and there?”

  “I wasn’t close enough to see the color of the woman’s eyes, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “That’s what I’m asking.”

  “Is there anything else, Mr. Taylor?”

  “The vehicle that the killer drove…”

  “I have no knowledge of cars. All I can tell you is what I told the other investigators—it was black, a very shiny black the way the light reflected off of it. And small. A coupe, I believe they call it. It had two doors.”

  I went at her a little more after that, soliciting specific details, repeating questions, challenging her memory of the events. There was nothing even remotely spurious in her responses or defensive in her manner. I expected that Helin would be considerably rougher in his questioning than I had been; yet I doubted he’d have any more success in jarring her testimony. No doubt he’d invite a judge to dismiss Professor Campbell’s statements on their merits, because that’s what criminal lawyers do. I also knew the motion would be flatly denied.

  It made me angry to think about it. Unlike Helin, I wasn’t entirely sure Mrs. Barrington was innocent, but I was working for her, and I hate it when my team gets its ass kicked.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  North Oaks is nothing like the city where you live. For one thing, it owns no property. There isn’t even a city hall; the mayor and city council meet once a month in the community room of a local bank. Police, fire, building inspections, trash and recycling, even legal services, are all provided by people and organizations that reside outside the city limits. A homeowners’ association operates the parks. The streets are privately owned and maintained by the city’s seventeen hundred residents and reserved solely for themselves and their guests. Believe me, they can afford it. The place can trace its origins directly to railroad tycoon James J. Hill and from his time till now North Oaks residents have always had one of the highest per capita incomes in the country. It used to have a gate manned by security guards, but that was abandoned some time ago. After all, it is Minnesota.

  Mrs. Barrington’s mansion, manor, plantation, estate, castle, palace—you decide what to call it—was located on Pleasant Lake. There was a long driveway leading up to it. I found what I had hoped I wouldn’t find even before I stopped my car—a black, two-door BMW 640i coupe parked in front of a four-car garage. What’s more, I was forced to agree with Professor Campbell. The way the sun glistened off the paint, it was a “very shiny black.”

  I went to the front door and rang the bell. I couldn’t hear what it sounded like through the thick door. I waited long enough to wonder if it was even working when the door opened. An African American woman dressed in a maid’s uniform stood on the other side; the kind of girl that Freddie used to chase, with a big chest and narrow hips. She seemed surprised to see me standing there, but it wasn’t personal. I doubt even Girl Scouts were allowed to go door-to-door in North Oaks.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  I introduced myself and added, “I’d like to speak to Mr. Barrington.”

  “I’ll see if he’s available to visitors.”

  “Is there a reason why he wouldn’t be?”

  “Hey, man—I only work here.”

  She closed the door, and I waited some more. I spent the time looking out over the grounds. It would have made a nice golf course if there hadn’t been so many trees.

  The door opened again, and the maid waved me inside. I stepped into a well-appointed foyer with a stone floor. To my right was an arched doorway that led to … I wanted to say a living room except it was so brilliant and well furnished, I didn’t think anyone actually lived there. To my left was an identical archway that led to a dining room with a table large enough to skate on. In front of me was a spiraling staircase. There was a table next to the staircase. A silver plate rested on top of it, and I was reminded that there was a time when gentlemen callers would drop their cards on a tray to be delivered by servants to the lady of the house, who would then either grant or refuse admittance. Or maybe that only happened in the movies. Still, I would have paid money to open the drawer of the table to see how many cards were in there.

  “Mr. Barrington will see you in the library,” the woman said.

  How cool is that, I thought. I decided the next time anyone came to visit me I was going to tell them I’ll see you in the library, too. ’Course in my case, the library was also my living room, dining room, TV room, music room, rabbit pen, and computer hutch.

  To reach the library, the maid led me past the staircase to a short corridor. Joel Barrington was standing in the center of the room when I entered. He said nothing until the maid announced, “Mr. Taylor,” and left the room, carefully closing the door behind her. Afterward, the words came out in a flurry.

  “What the fuck do you want, you sonuvabitch?”

  Given what I now do for a living and did before that as a cop, you’d think I’d be used to obscenities. Believe me, I heard them all in countless variations. Yet in that room, surrounded by several thousand hardcover books and comfy reading chairs and lamps, I was taken aback to the point where I actually took a step back. Joel must have taken that as a sign of weakness because he strode toward me, his fists clenched, his nostrils flaring.

  “Why are you here, asshole?”

  “Your mother—”

  “Fuck my mother.”

  As soon as I was in range, he threw a punch.

  I was shocked, yet not so shocked that I didn’t get my left forearm up to block it. I was talking to myself—This is crazy—even as I slid my left hand up and grabbed Joel by the sleeve. I stepped inside, seized his right shoulder, and pivoted counterclockwise. There’s no reason for any of this. At the same time, I set the inside of my right knee against his right leg, pulled with my left hand, pushed with my right, and lifted him off the floor. Yet I did not throw him as I was taught. Be careful. He’s the son of your client. Instead, I pulled him over my leg and rested him gently on the floor without causing any of the bodily harm he so richly deserved. My sensei at Dragons, the dojo in Minneapolis where I work out at least a few times a month, would have been proud.

  “When hand go out, withdraw anger,” he liked to say. “When anger go out, withdraw hand.”

  Still …

  “Do that again and I’ll break your back,” I said.

  I stared down at him. Joel’s face was twisted in pain as if I actually had thrown him across the room. His eyes were bloodshot, his face unshaved, and his hair was in need of a wash and comb. He shook his head back and forth as he spoke.

  “You killed her, you killed Emily.”

  “No.”

  “You and my mother. You killed her.”

  “It’s not true.”

  “It is. The paper said…”

  The paper said what the CA wanted it to say, and I silently cursed Haukass for her irresponsible leaks. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it, though, except perhaps give Joel something else to think about.

  “Emily was hiding from someone,” I said. “That’s why she changed her name. She was hiding, and as soon as we learn who she was and who she was hiding from, we’ll know who really killed her.”

  He stopped shaking his head and looked up at me as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him before. Truth was, it hadn’t occurred to me, either. I had been so intent on evaluating the mounting evidence against Mrs. Barrington that I had ignored until that moment what many lawyers call Plan B—blame someone else.

  “No, it was my mother,” Joel said. Yet the words weren’t hurled with the same velocity.

  I offered him my hand. He slapped it away, rolled to all fours, and stood on unsteady feet. He moved to a stuffed chair and sat; an old man at age twenty-four.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “I know that you loved her. Emily wasn’t the woman she claimed to be, though. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “She was kind. She loved me as
much as I loved her. That’s all I can see.”

  “Did she ever tell you her real name?”

  “Emily was her real name. I don’t care what you say.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “How’d we meet, how’d we meet—you sound like my fucking mother. Where does she come from? Who are her people? Where did she go to school? She went to the fucking University of Iowa, goddammit.”

  What is with this family and its swearing, I wondered.

  “No one by the name Emily Denys has ever been enrolled at Iowa,” I said. “I checked.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Mr. Barrington—”

  “My mother killed her, and you helped.”

  “You say that as if you want it to be true.”

  “It is true. My mother knew I loved Em and that I wanted to marry her. Only she couldn’t stand to see me happy with another woman. She couldn’t stand to see me leave her house, leave her bed.”

  “Her bed?”

  “Didn’t my mother tell you? We’ve been sleeping together for six years.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “It started nearly a year after my father was killed in a plane crash with his mistress. My mother came to my bedroom—it was the night of my eighteenth birthday party. She came to my bedroom and said she needed the comfort of a man’s arms. That’s what she told me—a man’s arms. So I comforted her. It was my first time and I was happy to comfort her, comfort my mother. Only it didn’t end there. My mother asked me to comfort her again the next night and the night after that. It became a regular occurrence. She’d come to me and say I was the only real man she knew and that she couldn’t bear to spend the night without a real man and we’d comfort each other. Except that wasn’t enough for her. Oh, no. She deliberately sabotaged every relationship I’ve ever had, chased away every girl I cared about because she needed her comfort. Because she didn’t want me to leave her. That’s why she killed Emily—to keep me to herself. I loved her so much. She was kind. She was good…”

  Shock and anger and revulsion jolted me like well-aimed body blows. I tried not to let it show, but probably I did. Mrs. Barrington engaging in such a terrible thing—it felt worse than murder, somehow. I could have forgiven her for that. As for Joel—at what point during six long years of having sex with your mother do you stop being a victim and start becoming a co-conspirator? He certainly didn’t sound as if he had been defenseless, unable to resist. Not at his age. The thought of them together, mother and child …

  I fought the shock, though. I fought the anger and revulsion. I had spent a lot of years working for the cops, four of them in homicide. You’re taught from the get-go to suppress your feelings, to take what comes. Otherwise your judgment becomes clouded; you make decisions based on emotion instead of facts. You can blow a case doing that. You can lose your life doing that. And if you suffered feelings of anxiety and stress later, along with unsettling memories and disturbing dreams, well, that was part of the job, too.

  “Did you look for the gun, your mother’s nine-millimeter Ruger, like we asked?” I said.

  I didn’t really care about the gun. I just wanted to think about something else for a moment.

  “Yes, we looked,” Joel said. “We couldn’t find it because my mother ditched it after she killed Em.”

  There were a lot of other people who thought that, too, I reminded myself.

  “The BMW in your driveway,” I said. “Is that yours?”

  “It belongs to my mother. She said it made her look young. Do you fucking believe that? She never wanted to be my mother. She wanted to be my fucking girlfriend. No more. No fucking more.”

  “Joel—”

  “Do you hear me?”

  “What you just told me, about you and your mother—did you tell the police?”

  “Yes, I told them. I told them everything. Why wouldn’t I? It’s the truth. I hope the bitch goes to prison forever.”

  “Mr. Barrington—”

  “Get out, Taylor. Get out of here before I kill you.”

  For a moment I wanted to see him try, so I could beat his brains in. I wasn’t upset so much at Joel. I just wanted to hit somebody, anybody. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. Or was it my training again?

  I retreated to the library door and yanked it open. A woman was standing behind it, an expression of abject terror etched across her young face. I didn’t know if it was because I caught her eavesdropping or because of what she must have heard.

  I glanced over my shoulder, making sure that Joel didn’t see her, and closed the door gently behind me. The woman was wearing blue jogging shorts and a sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up; the name Harvard was stitched across the chest, although she was clearly too young to be enrolled there. Her hair was strawberry like her mother’s and tied back in a ponytail. Her eyes were the color of blueberries and so clear I thought I could see my reflection in them.

  “Ms.…”

  She wasn’t interested in hearing anything I had to say. Instead, she spun about and half ran across the corridor to the second-floor staircase. She padded up the stairs, reached the halfway point, stopped, turned, and descended slowly. She paused four steps from the bottom and leaned against the railing. I was forced to look up at her.

  “You’re Taylor,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Devon.”

  “I know.”

  “I heard what … what my brother said. It’s not true. Not a word of it. I would know. He’s just … he blames Mom for what happened to Emily. He wants to hurt her for what happened to Emily, punish her. That’s why he’s saying those lies. They are lies, Mr. Taylor. I promise you they are. My mother didn’t, she never … she didn’t shoot Em, either. It’s all … it’s crazy.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen. Almost seventeen.”

  “I wish I could tell you something that would make all this better.”

  “Maybe I can tell you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can tell you about Emily. Joel won’t.”

  I was desperate to hear what she had to say. The fact that she was a minor frightened me, though.

  “Your mother might not approve,” I said.

  “I don’t care.”

  “You should talk to her or to her attorney.”

  “No. I’ll talk to you. In private.”

  “Not in private,” I said. “Not here. Meet me—” For a moment the only places I could think of were bars. “There’s a coffeehouse off Highway 96 between here and the Shoreview Public Library.”

  “Caribou. On Village Center Drive before you get to the sushi place. I’ve been there. I know where it is. In two hours?”

  “It would be better if you didn’t come alone,” I said.

  She didn’t say if she agreed or not, merely turned and climbed the stairs.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Stanislav, Kennedy, Helin, and DuBois was a litigation practice. It provided all the services you’d expect from a serious Top Ten law firm, yet its specialty was kicking ass and taking names. Every one of the fifty-seven attorneys on its roster had trial experience. Helin once told me that class ranking was low on the firm’s list of prerequisites when interviewing potential associates. Mostly what the partners wanted to know was, Can you take a client’s suit and beat someone over the head with it?

  Some people might find such behavior appalling and point at SKH&D as an example of what’s wrong in our sue-happy legal system. Can’t we all just get along, they’d say. On the other hand, it’s been responsible for a third of Freddie’s income and mine over the past five years. Not to mention the best Christmas party of the season.

  Which was one reason why I was always happy to walk the three blocks from my office to the Wells Fargo Center on Sixth and Marquette. The law offices were located on both the forty-first and forty-second floors, but the reception area was on forty-two, so that’s where I stopped the elevator car. The doors slid open and I f
ound Ramsey County Attorney Marianne Haukass glaring at me.

  “Taylor.” She spoke as if she had actually expected to see me there. “Talk to your friend.”

  She pushed past me as I stepped out of the elevator. Martin McGaney was with her. We had to perform a little dance before we could get around each other.

  “Hey, Martin,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  “Same old, same old. You?”

  “Can’t complain. See much of Scalasi these days?”

  “Nah, man. The air she breathin’ since they put stars on her shoulders is way too thin for us mere mortals. You?”

  “Not since she married the architect.”

  “I hear he’s a prick.”

  “McGaney,” Haukass said.

  McGaney stepped into the car.

  “You know, boss, it doesn’t always have to be a thing,” he said.

  The elevator doors closed before I heard her reply.

  * * *

  The receptionist recognized me and pressed a phone to her ear as I approached. She hung up just as I reached the desk and waved toward my right.

  “He said to meet him in his office,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  Helin started talking as I passed through the door.

  “I was just about to call you,” he said. “I’m taking Mrs. Barrington out of the adult detention center. Five o’clock. I’d like to do it later. Midnight. That way we’d miss the six and ten P.M. news cycles. The county deputies running the jail are acting all large and emphatic about it, though, insisting that inmates be released directly to the lobby no later than five P.M., which is bullshit, which makes me think Haukass is up to something. Anyway, I want you to be there. All right?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m trying to keep it secret, so there shouldn’t be any cameras. But you never know.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Good. Now tell me what you’re doing here.”

  I don’t know why I didn’t just come out with it. Instead, I told him about my meeting with Professor Campbell, identifying a coupe similar to the one she described in Mrs. Barrington’s driveway, and the fact her children had been unable to produce the gun.