Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
Kindle Edition, 2012 © Penny Publication
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Crowd Pleaser
LINDA LANDRIGAN, EDITOR | 120 words
This month’s issue is packed with reader favorites. Steven Gore, Shelley Costa, Bob Tippee, and Kenneth Wishnia all return with stand-alone stories of justice, betrayal, ambition, and suspense. (It is a pleasure to welcome back Mr. Tippee after many years.) Moreover, some of our most popular series check in with new installments. We are delighted to present new tales featuring I. J. Parker’s medieval Japan sleuth Akitada; John C. Boland’s Cold War–era spy Charles Marley; Loren Estleman’s World War II–era squad the Four Horseman (a series unique to AHMM!); and John H. Dirckx’s Detective Inspector Cyrus Auburn who reaches a professional milestone in this outing.
For readers picky about their murder and mayhem, this issue is sure to please.
Linda Landrigan, Editor
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DEFENDER OF JUSTICE
STEVEN GORE | 3873 words
Art by Hank Blaustein
Stuart Levine looked through two layers of glass at Maurice Hicks sitting cross-armed in a metal chair anchored to the jail floor. The nearest was bifurcated into rimless lenses; the farthest, a shatterproof pane that protected San Francisco public defenders from their clients.
“Did you choose me?” Maurice asked in a familiar lisp. “Or was it just chance?”
During his twelve years in the office, no other client had asked Levine those questions. They’d merely accepted the wool-suited person who sat across from them as their lawyer, just as they’d accepted the doctor at the county hospital and their parole officer and their mother’s live-in boyfriend, and considered none of them any more trustworthy than the housing project elevator that wrenched them upward each night toward an uncertain welcome.
Levine stared at Maurice’s broad forehead, imagining it an internal theater screen showing a vintage cartoon: Levine racing to the office early that morning, tearing into a stack of new files, then holding up Maurice’s and sniffing it like a freshly picked rose. The caricature, as Levine acknowledged to himself, was merely his own projection, for he doubted that even as a child playing with crayons at his kitchen table, Maurice had ever imagined himself in bloom.
While Maurice waited to learn whether it was choice or chance that had once again brought them together in this interview room, Levine grasped for the first time what the office’s case assignment system really was: an inverted lottery in which the winners were paid to participate, and the prizes, in ascending order, were the harebrained, the wicked, the insane—
Levine stumbled at the end of the analogy, but regained his rhetorical feet when he realized he’d won the grand prize: Maurice, a hybrid containing strains of each.
“It was just luck of the draw,” Levine finally said, shrugging his shoulders and keeping not only his musings, but also his memories to himself, including the one of them sharing the defense table three years earlier.
Because Maurice had claimed back then that he’d been hearing voices when he killed the woman, Levine requisitioned six thousand dollars of the county’s money to purchase the only available psychiatric defense: command hallucinations. It was a condition so improbable many experts in the field—even those who trafficked in repressed memories and in satanic cults that sacrificed lambs and toddlers—doubted it existed. But Levine wasn’t troubled by its improbability, for his hometown juries rivaled LA’s in their dexterity in overcoming the implausible, the fanciful, and the far-fetched in order to deliver on their idiosyncratic notions of justice.
Against Levine’s advice, Maurice had refused to set foot on the diagnostic path toward the psych ward, for he believed beyond a reasonable doubt the meds would silence the voices, the shrinks would toss him back to court, a jury would convict him, and a judge would imprison him for the rest of his life. So even while his inner voices screamed at each other like feuding neighbors, Maurice resolved he’d go home, as he always had, to his mother, or his auntie, or his grandmother, or whoever it was that day who pitied him too much or was too terrified to shut the door in his face.
A month after Maurice’s arrest, and without psychotropic intervention, the voices ceased commanding. Instead, they began chanting Who can we pin it on? Who can we pin it on? It was a plea Maurice had adopted from his cellmate who’d whispered it each night in prayer before drifting off to sleep, and then again each morning when he awoke in the jail’s sunless dawn.
The mantra soon insinuated itself into Levine’s life as a choral accompaniment to his pre-trial night sweats. But it wasn’t until the eve of jury selection that his legal muse stepped into the footlights and announced on whom the murder could be pinned.
Fortunately, like everyone else in San Francisco except Stuart Levine, it hadn’t crossed the mind of the victim’s ex-husband that he needed an alibi.
Two months later, Who can we pin it on? was laser-etched into an oak plank and presented to Levine at the office’s annual Defenders of Justice dinner.
A not-guilty verdict in a first-degree murder case was a rare thing.
Finding someone else to pin it on, even rarer.
And justice, Levine knew, was rarest of all.
Through the assault-proof glass, Levine surveyed Maurice’s upper body just as he would a crime scene, for concealed under biceps draped by an ill-fitting orange jumpsuit lay the hands accused of fatally stabbing O. G. Leonard thirty-six hours earlier.
“Let me see them,” Levine said, pointing back and forth between their hiding places.
Maurice held them out like a child showing his mother he’d washed before dinner. They were bruised and scabbed.
“It doesn’t look like a whodunit,” Levine said.
Maurice tapped his ear. “I was hearing voices.”
“What were they saying?”
“Get money.”
Levine bit his lower lip and stared up at the ceiling, a performance for his client, for there was no exculpatory evidentiary slot in which he could jam that fact. After a few moments, he shook his head and looked back at Maurice.
“That sounds more like greed than like a command hallucination,” Levine said.
“But I thought O. G. was my dad.” Maurice’s voice rose, then plateaued. “My father molested me when I was six, and I just wanted some cash like all them Catholic kids got.”
For a half second, Levine wasn’t sure which of Maurice’s strains had taken the lead: the harebrained or the insane; then he realized his answer would be the same in either case.
“That’s a different kind of father,” Levine said.
Maurice cocked his head and furrowed his brows. “I been wondering about that.”
Levine grasped at the thread of mitigation. “Did your father really molest you when you were six?”
“A shrink sorta hypnotized me once,” Maurice said, his lisp washing the words. “That’s what came out. He said it was some kinda depressed memory.”
“Repressed . . . repressed memory.”
Maurice grinned. “Not anymore.”
Levine smiled to himself. Maurice had once again shown he could be an amusing and engaging human being, at least when he wasn’t out killing other ones.
And intelligent. Maybe too intelligent.
Levine wondered whether Maurice wouldn’t be so crazy if he weren’t so clever.
“What do you say we ask the court to send you under 1368 for a competency evaluation?” Levine said.
Levine was comfortable speaking in penal code sections because Maurice had proven the last time around that his mastery of the mental health provisions of California criminal
law equaled that of most of the attorneys in the office.
“Maybe we can use it to set up an insanity defense.”
Maurice’s eyes went vacant as he considered the suggestion. He bit his lower lip and rubbed his right thumb against his left palm.
Levine gave him a push. “At least we can use it to buy some time.”
Maurice’s eyes refocused and his face brightened. “You mean until we can find somebody to pin it on?”
“That may take awhile.” Levine made a show of looking around the jail. “Lots of bad people in here. There are better places for you to hang out until we decide on a defense.”
“Then I’ll give it some thought. I probably can do a little time inna psych hospital. They got all kinds of new meds.” Maurice raised his eyebrows and offered a conspiratorial grin. ”Lots of new stuff you can’t get on the outside.”
Levine joined the conspiracy with a wink, and then said, “I’ll ask an investigator to go out to the scene to see where we stand before we decide for sure.”
Maurice shrugged his understanding, then pointed a lacerated finger at the soiled manila folder on which Levine’s hands rested.
“That my old file?”
Levine nodded. “In case history was repeating itself.”
“I know that one.” Maurice’s face became as earnest as a third grader on show-and-tell day. “It’s from Groucho Marx. It was in Bartlett’s Family Quotations. We had a raggedy old one in the library at the youth authority. He said things happen the first time as comedy and the second time as farce.”
“Actually, it’s Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. It was Karl Marx. And it’s the first time as tragedy.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Maurice’s dreadlocks jiggled as he giggled. “That’s what happens when you hear voices.”
Maurice quieted, then jutted his jaw toward the file. “It got the shrink’s report?”
“We’ll need a new one.”
“If history is repeating itself, maybe we can just change the date.”
“They don’t let us do that. It’s the rules.”
Maurice frowned as if unsure whose side Levine was on. “I thought D.A.’s were the ones who believed in rules.”
“Both sides believe in them,” Levine said. “P.D.’s are just people who can’t be D.A.’s because they feel guilty all the time about things they’re not responsible for.”
Maurice squinted with one eye, then scanned the riveted sheet metal framing the glass partition. After a few seconds, he looked back at Levine.
“If I go 1368, maybe you better come along too. We can play volleyball and do group therapy and try out some new meds.” Maurice grinned again. “Well, me anyway.”
Levine enjoyed tagging along with the office’s investigators, especially when they voyaged into neighborhoods where Starbucks and Trader Joe’s still feared to drop anchor, but he tried to stay in the background. He recognized that too many years spent cross-examining witnesses had atrophied his ability to solicit information from those whose escape wasn’t blocked by a court bailiff.
He also liked working with Paul Washington, a retired SFPD homicide detective now double-dipping in the public defender’s office. Levine found comfort in working with the ex-cop because he never seemed to feel the need to believe in anything. It was, in Levine’s mind, a mature counterweight to his own juvenile need to believe in something, no matter how transitory.
Levine had once believed in his clients’ innocence, but that only made trials unbearable. Even worse, a few weeks after the cloud of defeat had lifted, or the rare afterglow of victory had faded, a thought would plague him, even nauseate him. It accused him of having spent his entire career in a sandbox, embracing the illusion that the fictional defenses he argued in court were actual, not merely real in their consequences.
More recently, Levine had convinced himself that justice was in the process, not in the verdict: that legally pursued means really did justify the ends. That way, pinning Maurice’s last murder on an innocent ex-husband was actually justice, maybe even Justice. And Levine knew he either had to believe that or else sign up for volleyball and group therapy and, perhaps, some meds he couldn’t get on the outside.
“Paul, I need your brain for a couple of hours,” Levine said in a call to Washington as he walked down the front steps of the Hall of Justice. “It’s about Mo Hicks.”
“Who’d he stab?”
“Why do you assume he stabbed somebody?”
“It’s been about three years,” Washington said without inflection. “When I was in the homicide unit I figured out his inner voices were on a timer.”
Levine dodged a homeless drunk staggering past, then asked, “How is it you always seem to discover the quantum of predictability in a universe of chaos?”
“You’ll have to ask my grandmother. It may be the residue left after you distill religion out of a Southern Baptist. Who was it?”
“O. G. Leonard.”
“O. G. . . . O. G.” Washington’s tone suggested he was pursuing a fact that would reveal the meaning of O. G. Leonard in their lives. Finally, he said, “We can’t take it. Conflict of interest. We’d be going against an old client. I’m pretty sure the office was representing O. G. on an aggravated assault.”
“Death resolves all conflicts,” Levine answered with feigned gravity. “Surely you’ve been on this side of the fence long enough to have grasped that little nugget. Anyway, if we conflicted out, it would look like I was afraid to risk my streak as a Defender of Justice.”
“I’m not sure a single not-guilty verdict counts as a streak.”
“Let’s just say . . .” Levine fell silent as he grasped for words to tell himself what he currently believed, but they escaped his reach, so he settled on the self-mockery that was always at hand: “Let’s just say it’s as much of a streak as it was justice.”
Forty-five minutes later, Levine and Washington stood on a trash-strewn Bayview Hunters Point sidewalk and inspected blood spatter left to be washed away by overdue spring rains. Neither looked up, but both knew that eyes surveilled them from the second-story windows of the faded Victorians across the street.
“You get a look at the police report?” Washington asked.
Levine pointed toward an abandoned cargo van that had been reborn as a homeless shelter.
“It claims Maurice was lying in wait down there. He came up behind O. G. and stabbed him in the back. There was a struggle and Maurice kept wailing until O. G. stopped moving. The uniforms rolled up in time to snag Maurice as he was running away with a knife in his hand.”
“He make a statement?”
“Only that he was hearing voices. The police took him for a psych evaluation, and then back to the jail because he refused to talk to the shrink.”
“Keeping his options open?”
“In an insane sort of way.”
Washington inspected scuff marks on the sidewalk. “Why do the detectives think Maurice snuck up and stabbed O. G. from behind?”
“Because it fits their theory.”
Washington looked up. “What theory is that?”
“That Maurice got away with murder three years ago and spending less than a decade in the California Youth Authority for the one he did in his teens wasn’t exactly justice.”
Washington paused for a moment, then squinted over at Levine. “You think the D.A. will charge special circumstances for him lying in wait and try to put him out of action permanently?”
Levine nodded. “But I don’t think he’ll ask for death, just life without parole. Even he understands it wouldn’t be a good use of taxpayers’ money trying to execute a lunatic to avenge the death of a scumbag.”
Washington walked twenty feet down the sidewalk, eyes focused on a trail of maroon droplets. He inspected a bloody handprint on a peeling green picket fence, then knelt and peered under overgrown shrubs. He rose, brushed off his suit pants, then returned and stood close to Levine.
“Looks like the crime scene
people missed a second knife,” Washington said. “There’s one caught in some branches with what looks like dried blood on the blade and handle. It’s probably O. G.’s. I’ll take a photo, then put it in an evidence bag.”
A moldy and sour odor wafted from just upwind of Levine’s left shoulder.
“You guys cops?” a voice asked.
Levine turned to observe three layers of grungy jackets shrouding the body of a skinny, seventy-year-old homeless man. Face lined and reddened by sunburn. More gums than teeth. Scratched and chipped glasses. Overalls stiffened by grime.
“No,” Levine said, “we’re not cops. Public Defender.”
The old man stuck out his palm. “Got some spare change?”
Washington shook his head.
Levine reached into his pocket and handed him a dollar.
“You hear about a guy getting killed here the night before last?” Washington asked.
“O. G. It was O. G.” Each “O” sprayed stale burrito breath toward Washington and Levine. “He got in a guy’s face. Somebody not from around here.”
“What about?” Levine asked.
“Something stupid, probably. I didn’t hear that part.”
“What part did you hear?” Levine winced as he heard his tone of cross-examination propel the question toward its target.
The old man grinned. “Only the fuck-you-you-son-of-a-bitch part.”
“Who said that?”
“O. G.”
“What happened next?”
“O. G. takes a big swing at the other guy.” The old man swung his right arm roundhouse-style. “Like that.”
“Anything in O. G.’s hand?” Washington asked.
Adrenaline surged through Levine’s body. He didn’t care about the answer. Washington had already found the second weapon.
“Too dark,” the old man said.
“Then what happened?”
“A lot of punching and grunting. Then they dropped to the sidewalk. I couldn’t see nothin’ after that. But I heard the new guy say, ‘O. G., you shouldn’t a hadn’t a done that.’ Then there was a bunch more thumping. Then it got quiet.”
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine Page 1
