“You’re a gem,” I told Paula.
“Awww . . .”
We disconnected the call just as I was parking three houses down from Louise Refsnyder. Ben and I got out of the car and started back toward Louise’s front door.
“Paula would make a good detective,” Ben said.
“Don’t tell her that. I could never replace her.”
Louise opened the door wearing an impatient expression that changed when she saw Ben standing to my right. The look she gave him paired with the idea that Ben and I might be dating and were at least sharing a hotel room at the moment roused some competitive feelings in me, which I pushed back down where they belonged. This was business.
But Ben was noticing Louise. I’d never been on this kind of visit with him before, so I wondered whether he gave that look to every woman he might want to get information from. Another feeling to ignore for the moment.
“What is it this time?” That was Louise, directed to me. “You want to know about the time I got put in the corner in first grade?”
“I’m here to ask about Michelle Testaverde’s murder,” I said. “I didn’t know if you were aware of that.”
By now I’d learned to watch for the reaction, and Louise presented us with a whopper. Her face paled, and her mouth dropped open; she actually took a step backward that seemed instinctual and not planned. Her hand let go of the doorknob, and she made some noises that weren’t exactly meant to be coherent, in my opinion. It took her a good long moment to compose herself.
“Michelle was murdered?” Louise said. More gargling noises. “When?”
That seemed an odd first question, but what’s the logical one? “About five years ago,” Ben told her. “Right around the time she and Damien Mosley supposedly moved into his apartment in New Jersey.” Then he gestured toward the doorway. “Can we come in?”
I was grateful when Louise nodded and opened the door wider, so I didn’t even mention to Ben that the question should have been, “May we come in?” It seemed a secondary issue at the time.
We sat in her kitchen again, Michelle pouring herself a gin and offering us nothing. I didn’t care, and Ben didn’t say anything about it. “What happened?” Louise finally managed.
Ben told her what we knew, leaving out the part where Duffy was arrested and awaiting arraignment, probably because that might prejudice her take on the subject but also because neither Ben nor I wanted to consider that reality at the moment. When he had finished with his recap, Louise refilled her glass and took a healthy swig.
“Who would have done that?” she rasped.
“That’s kind of what we’re trying to figure out,” I said. “We started off knowing that Damien had vanished from town, and that led us to Michelle, and the next thing we know, Michelle was shot and there’s a good chance Damien was, too, at the bottom of a ridge in a park in New Jersey. It doesn’t seem to make any sense.”
Ben didn’t want to wallow in that idea. He was used to the idea of moving forward on an investigation, and he wasn’t going to stop now. “We’re told that before they both disappeared, Damien sort of proposed to Michelle at the bowling alley during a league match, and she turned him down,” he said. “Were you there?”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and nodded. “Yeah, but they ended up getting married anyway,” she said.
“Were you at the wedding?” I asked.
Louise laughed without any joy. “Me? No. I didn’t get invited.”
Ben’s eyes got more intense. “Do you know anybody who was?” he asked.
Louise sat forward looking annoyed, like her word was being challenged. “Sure!” Her eyes went up and to the right—her left—indicating she was trying to remember something. “Um . . .” She didn’t add to that.
“What’s wrong?” Ben asked. It was his good-cop voice, oozing kindness and understanding. Now I knew he was just playing it up to get Louise to talk.
Louise looked at him as if surprised he’d spoken. “Fact is, I can’t remember anybody telling me they went to the wedding,” she said. “I just heard they were married, from Walt, maybe. But it never came up. I didn’t expect to get invited to their wedding; I mean, we weren’t tight friends or anything, so when they got married and I didn’t go, that didn’t seem strange at all. But now that you ask, I don’t know anybody who went to that wedding.”
I tried to duplicate Ben’s tone, but it was difficult for me because I’d decided I didn’t like Louise, and covering up my feelings is not a strong suit. Assume the effort was there. “The last time I was here, you said you and Damien had been having . . . a relationship before he disappeared. And there was some talk that Michelle was cheating, too. Do you know how they reacted to that? Did either of them find out about the other?”
Louise looked away, and I knew what that meant. “Yeah, see, here’s the thing about that,” she said. “I was lying.”
“About which part?” The fake kindness was probably out of my voice.
“About me and Damien. I didn’t like the way you were looking at me, and I figured maybe you were an old friend or a girlfriend of his or something, so I made up that story about me and him. That never actually happened.”
I opened my mouth, but Ben wisely beat me to the punch. “You never slept with Damien Mosley,” he said calmly.
“No. As far as I know, Damien was with Michelle and only Michelle.”
“What about the other part, where Michelle was supposedly having at least one affair behind Damien’s back?” Ben asked.
Louise resumed eye contact. With Ben. “As far as I know, that part is true.”
“Who was she cheating with?” I asked. It probably should have been, “With whom was she cheating?” but who says that, really?
“I don’t know,” Louise said. “There was talk at the time, but I wasn’t really seeing them. Damien was still working at the club once in a while, but he never complained about Michelle. I don’t know if he heard anything about what she was doing.”
Every time we learned something new, it made the whole situation more confusing.
I remembered what Paula had said and decided there was no reason not to go all in with Louise. “Do you know anybody in the police department?” I asked her.
Immediately, her expression showed suspicion. “Why?”
“There’s some evidence in the case of Michelle’s murder that is questionable,” Ben said, moving Louise’s focus away from me, which was probably wise. “One of the things we’re trying to determine is how it might have gotten into the evidence room if it wasn’t real.”
“So you figure that hey, Louise gets around, she must have been with somebody in the department?” She wasn’t even cutting Ben any slack now. “You figure I just have a thing with every guy in town?”
To be fair, that was kind of what I had been thinking, but Ben had been involved in these things before and knew how to handle them. It would be very instructive for a future Duffy book.
“That’s not what we’re saying,” he said soothingly. “We figure you know this town a lot better than either of us, and you might have some insight into the police department. You might have heard things about cops who might not be completely perfect on the job. You know, like a guy who used to give a nice-looking girl a break on a speeding ticket and now maybe is a detective or has access to high-profile cases. Something like that. We were just relying on your knowledge because we don’t have the insight we need here.”
It was so convincing, I made a mental note never to believe anything Ben said to me again. But it did seem to work on Louise, who tilted her head to one side as she was listening and nodded a little.
“I actually did date a cop for a little while about a year ago,” she said. “I’m not giving you his name because maybe he’ll call me again sometime, but he did talk about some of the other guys in the department, the ones who were standing in his way of being promoted, you know? And it’s possible there is someone there who cuts the occasional cor
ner. I don’t know anything about evidence or anything, but I know he said not to let this guy decide you were a problem because he’d find a way to get rid of you. Legal, you know? Or at least it would look legal. And he wouldn’t shoot you or anything—there was no violence I knew about. Just a little rule-bending.”
“Thank you,” Ben said. “That’s very helpful.” It was? “What was his name?”
Louise blinked. “I told you I wasn’t going to say his name. I might want to see him again, and I can’t be seen as a snitch.”
“The crooked cop,” I jumped in. “Not the one you were dating.”
“Oh!” Louise waved a hand. “Sorry. All I remember is that my cop, the one I was seeing, told me to watch out for the sergeant they called Phil.”
It took a moment. My brain sifted through its invisible Rolodex, and then my head must have snapped straight up. I stared a little.
“What?” Ben asked.
“Dougherty. Sgt. Phillip Dougherty.” Duffy and I had met him at our first stop in Poughkeepsie. He had met us and found Duffy annoying. Would that be enough to have him falsify evidence against Duffy in Michelle’s murder?
“Yeah, that’s it,” Louise said. “Phil Dougherty. That’s the guy.”
Chapter 27
Ben and I sat in my car, but I hadn’t turned on the engine yet. Not that you could necessarily tell; hybrid cars in the electric battery mode are pretty much silent. But before we went anywhere else—especially back to the municipal building to see Duffy get arraigned, because Sanders had texted that would happen within the hour—I needed to get straight what we’d do if we ran into Sgt. Phillip Dougherty.
“He put fingerprints on the gun five years after it was used?” I said. “He got hold of Duffy’s prints when we went to see him, and he found a way to move them to the gun, right?”
“It’s actually not all that possible to do that, no matter what you’ve seen in the movies,” Ben said. “Fingerprints are way too fragile. Doing it with Scotch tape or something would probably smear them to the point that they would no longer be usable.”
“So how did the prints get on the gun?” I asked. “Do you think Duffy really shot Michelle Testaverde and left the gun in the ceiling five years ago?”
“No. I’m coming around to the idea that there was no Duffy before five years ago.” I gave him a look. “I’m kidding. But there’s no reason to think Duffy and Michelle ever met each other. Nobody else on the bowling team or anywhere else up here seems to have seen Duffy before. What motivation would he have to randomly shoot a stranger in the back of the head? And does that mean he shot Damien Mosley in North Bergen later on? It doesn’t make sense.”
“So how do we explain the fingerprints on the gun?”
“We don’t. I need better information.” Ben pointed at the ignition button. “Let’s go. Duffy’s getting arraigned in ten minutes, and we need to be there. If someone has to speak on his behalf, I want it to be you or me. Preferably me.”
I turned the car on and started making a K-turn to get us in the proper direction for the municipal building. “Oh yeah? What makes you better to testify than me?”
“If it’s you, they’re going to ask how you know Duffy, and you’re going to have to say you’re the author of a series of books that aren’t about him but are and that he thinks you created him on your computer. That’s what.”
“Okay, you have a decent point. What do I do if we run into Phil Dougherty?”
Ben considered a moment. “Walk the other way,” he said.
“That doesn’t help.”
He shrugged. “I never met the guy.”
We walked into the building, which houses both the police headquarters and the municipal court and offices. Sanders had alerted us to be in the courtroom and not to seek out him or Duffy on the police side because they wouldn’t be accessible. In fact, his text to me had been clear: Just sit and watch.
I could do that.
We waited through three other pieces of court business, a speeding ticket and two eviction notices, before Duffy was led in. He was not wearing prison orange but the clothes he’d been in when he was brought from North Bergen to Poughkeepsie. His wrists and ankles were not chained. He strode in behind Nelson Sanders looking around the room with intense interest, filing away every detail of the place in the event anything that happened to him here—like being charged with murder—might become important. He didn’t even notice Ben and me when he came in. I mean, it’s not like I expected a happy wave or anything, but he was so engrossed in the surroundings that we might as well not have been there.
I never should have written the guy to be that observant. In fact, I never should have written him. That was the lesson to take away from this. From now on, I’d stick to science fiction and only write about people who lived on Jupiter or something. By the time they got to my front door to confront me, I’d have been dead for a couple of centuries. Win-win, if you choose to look at it that way.
Sanders nodded in our direction, anyway.
Duffy sat next to Sanders at the table to the judge’s right and our left. I felt impelled to move to that side, as if I were supporting the groom at a wedding, but Ben didn’t seem to think that was important, so I figured it might be a faux pas and stayed where I was.
As soon as the shuffling cleared and the prosecutor (with his assistant) was seated at the opposite table, the judge, a woman of Hispanic descent in her midfifties by my estimate, got right to business. The court clerk read the case number and announced loudly that the matter would be the people of the state of New York versus Duffy Madison. That seemed a pretty serious mismatch. New York has almost twenty million people. I wasn’t even sure Duffy counted as one.
Not that he seemed the least bit daunted by the odds. He was sitting with his usual great posture, spine straight, head moving from side to side as if he’d never seen a courtroom before. The man had surely testified at trials related to cases he’d investigated. But I guess being the center of attention had its novelty. He knew he hadn’t killed Michelle Testaverde, so what could possibly go wrong?
“This is a case relating to a murder committed five years ago.” The judge, whose nameplate identified her as Julia Menendez, was reading documents in front of her using half-glasses. She looked over the top at the prosecutor. “Is that correct, Mr. Reilly?”
“Yes, Your Honor.” Reilly was also reading and didn’t look up, which I thought should mean Duffy would be set free immediately. No such luck.
Sanders stood up. “Judge, the defense moves for immediate dismissal of these charges given the almost total lack of evidence compiled by the prosecution and the amount of time that has elapsed since the crime.”
“There is no statute of limitations on murder in this state,” the judge reminded him.
“We are aware of that, Your Honor, but even if this crime had been committed yesterday, the prosecution has no witness, nothing placing my client at the scene, and no motive for the murder. I believe this to be a desperation play by the prosecutor to close a cold case using the one shred of evidence he has in his possession, which I will argue has been tainted by five years spent isolated in a place where any number of people could have tampered with it. Honestly, Judge, there is absolutely nothing here that justifies charging my client at this time.”
Judge Menendez turned her attention to the opposite side of the room. “Mr. Reilly?” she said.
“Your Honor, we have more than enough evidence to convict Mr. Madison of this crime.” Reilly actually stood up and faced the judge, but even so, he looked tired. His shoulders drooped. His expression was one of incredible fatigue. How many murders did they get around here that this guy could be so blasé about it? “We have the murder weapon with his fingerprints clearly on it, and we have his recent behavior, which prompted our reopening this case to begin with.”
“Once again, Judge, the defense questions any piece of physical evidence that has been sitting out of the control of the police for that long.
This is not enough to even consider sending a man to prison for life.”
Duffy seemed fascinated by the proceedings and didn’t even flinch at the idea of a life sentence without parole, which can be given in New York. Maybe he wasn’t really absorbing the fact that he was the defendant.
“It is pretty thin, Mr. Reilly,” Judge Menendez said.
“We are not asking the court to decide the case today,” the prosecutor said. “We’re simply making the charges in preparation for the trial. We believe the defendant is a flight risk and ask the court to take that into consideration.”
“A flight risk?” Sanders replied, still on his feet. “What leads to that conclusion?”
“A good question, Mr. Reilly,” the judge said, once again consulting the file before her. “Mr. Madison is a consultant in law enforcement and has been living at the same address for five years.”
“Precisely the amount of time since the murder,” Reilly pointed out. “And in another state.”
The judge looked down at Sanders. “I’ll grant you it’s circumstantial, Mr. Sanders, but the coincidence is compelling.”
“But it is just that, Judge—a coincidence. Will the prosecution also charge everyone else who moved out of Poughkeepsie five years ago?”
Judge Menendez’s eyes took on an annoyed gleam, which I did not think was a good sign for Duffy. “How many of them will have fingerprints on the murder weapon, Counselor?” she asked.
Sanders didn’t look all that perturbed by the judge’s tone. “There’s no way for us to know, Your Honor. I suspect it will be as many as the prosecutor’s office wants there to be.”
“Objection,” Reilly said. Sure, insult me, but I’m not going to get mad. I’ll just object.
“Sustained. Careful, Mr. Sanders, or you could be getting too close to contempt for me to ignore.” Judge Menendez pointed a finger warningly at Sanders, who still did not appear worried. I’d have fallen to my knees and begged for forgiveness, which is why I never went to law school.
“My apologies, Your Honor.”
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