Second Hand Smoke: Blood on Wolfe's Words
Page 15
Then his live in girlfriend of six years, Margo Rohan, was murdered in his house. Johnson was out of town, on a two day ski trip in Flagstaff two hundred miles to the north. He rented a townhouse in the San Francisco Mountains, a building sized for groups of six to ten. He could afford it, but that read like another crime. He skied, he ate, he slept, and sometime during the first night Margo died.
The result of the investigation was that Don Johnson had no other girlfriend; that he and Margo were a happy couple; and, but for studying for her bar exams, would have been together. But the knife was found under the seat of his car which was seen outside his house. So he had means and opportunity; and Margo had a half stake in the development, and he was the sole beneficiary of her will; ergo, motive, greed. Even worse, a greedy businessman who raped the environment.
It took six months for the case to get to court, but the trial took only nine days, and the verdict less than an hour. Guilty. The article mentioned that Johnson turned down a plea bargain; he was given the death penalty.
Robin found a later story that Johnson was free pending appeal; and there was an uproar that the rich criminal had, for the moment, beat the system. But the fact was the police were not forthcoming with the evidence. A witness, a maid who spoke no English, was found by one of Johnson’s lawyer. She saw someone park a car on the street, then unlock and drive Johnson’s car away; and the police knew it.
There but for the grace of God go I. Detective McMartin.
Tell Judy. Tell Judy. Tell Judy. Tell Judy. Listen to Canby. You’re not qualified to be your own investigator. Ask Bob Sunday to do it. You can’t leave the state. It’s too absurd to think both women were killed by the same man. Tell the police. No, they’d laugh you out of the station. Check it yourself. No harm, no foul.
He couldn’t find Johnson’s number on the internet, but he found the lawyer, John Costas. He got the lawyer at home. They talked for ten minutes and Robin caught a cab.
~ ~ ~
Maureen tapped her fingers nervously against the steering wheel. It was embarrassing whenever she picked her daughter up from friends or relatives. It was like, oh no, I’ve got to go home!
When did it happen? How did I lose her? It must be my fault. I’m the adult, I can’t be the victim. But I feel like the victim.
She pulled the raincoat tight around her as she made her way up the concrete steps. Before she got there the door was yanked open by Megan, her backpack swinging from her right shoulder.
She turned to wave to her girlfriend. “Bye Nancy, I’ll call you tomorrow,” and, oblivious to the rain, spun her mom and hustled her to the car.
With some incredulousness, Maureen asked, “Glad to see me?”
Meg smiled, sort of. “Sure, Mom.” She crossed her left leg and put it under her. She sat expectantly.
“And?”
She reached into the backpack and pulled out a rolled up newspaper which she flattened in on the console between them. “So, Mom,” her smile wavered, “Why do you let the newspaper print this stuff about Robin Morgan?”
Yes, she’s glad to see me, so she can rag on me. “It’s a free country, Meg.”
Meg wasn’t understanding. “Someone should stop the lies. Can’t you tell them it’s not true?”
“There’s nothing I can do.” It didn’t seem like enough.
Meg pleaded, “But they’re destroying him.”
“What if it’s true?”
Denial filled the young girl’s face. “It’s not true. This isn’t the man Miss Robbins told me about.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know him well enough.”
Meg persisted; “She’s known him eight years. She moved up here with the company from San Francisco.”
Maureen said, “Meg, if the media decide to ruin a man, there’s nothing anyone can do.” The detective had read it, and it was vicious. In the vacuum of hard data, reporters built a Robin Morgan from a whole cloth of misinformation built on the previous days’ misinformation. It was like a rumor loosely passed from friend to friend. The media’s only confirmed sources seemed to be themselves. Maureen finished lamely, “Meg, these things happen.”
A single thick tear rolled down her daughter’s cheek and hung from her chin. “I know that, but it seems so wrong.”
She used her palm to smear her daughter’s tear. “That’s because it is wrong, Meg. Remember this the next time you see someone in their cross hairs, probably a cop, maybe even me. In the department, we call it journalistic brutality.”
Meg protested again, “But he’s innocent. I know it.”
Maureen’s smile hardened a little. “I don’t think so, Meg. I mean, he can be slandered, and yet be guilty.”
Meg didn’t argue the point. “Are you going to send him to prison?”
The cop’s voice dropped an octave; “Meg, you know I don’t send people to prison. I collect the evidence. If he’s found guilty by a jury, he’ll go to prison.”
Both eyes overflowed. “You should quit the police then.”
“What!”
Meg sniffed back a sob. “It’s not right to persecute a man like that.”
She put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders and waited for their eyes to meet. “I’m not persecuting Robin Morgan.” She reddened with a sudden doubt; she rationalized, “The evidence led us to him.”
The detective paused. Say it, say it out loud. “But the more I look at the evidence, the more I have doubts.”
Hope springs eternal, especially for the young. “You mean like he was framed.”
Caution; “Let’s not go that far yet, but there are some questions, and contradictions, not the least of which is the man himself.”
A noisy snuffle. “What do you mean?”
Her words were as much of a revelation to herself as to her daughter; “It’s not easy to explain, but he’s so damn convincing he makes me doubt the evidence.” She wore her confusion on her face. “I mean, here he is conducting his own investigation, and he’s found some interesting things. It could be a smokescreen, but …”
Meg filled the pause; “But what?”
“But maybe I was too quick to judgment.” That admission out of the way, she cupped Meg’s chin. “So what makes you so sure he’s innocent?”
The unwavering green eyes smiled. “Because he’s a good man, a really good man, the kind you see on television, a fictional good man. You know, someone who does the right thing for the right reasons.” She spoke through the distress on Maureen’s face. “The kind of dad everyone wants.”
Dads, husbands, good men; for Maureen, never in the same package. “What if you’re wrong? What if he murdered his wife?”
Her words mirrored Maureen’s doubts; “Mom, if he murdered his wife, he had a reason, like stamping out evil, or saving someone else.”
“So it’s super hero status now, eh?”
Meg couldn’t meet her mother’s eyes. “No. I’m saying if he did kill her, it was for a good reason. But he didn’t kill her.”
Maureen steepled her fingers in front of her mouth; “I can’t afford to think like that. Do you understand that?”
The girl nodded.
“But I’ll try being a little more skeptical. Okay?”
The teenager grinned. “I know, you’re a cop; collecting evidence and getting the bad guys off the street.” She followed it with an understanding chuckle.
“Yeah, like that.”
They both burst out laughing.
Chapter 12 - Sunday, June 25 - 4:00 pm
Robin spread the listing, double checking the marks next to each name. The columns were labeled; Town for anyone who’d been in the townhouse, Gun for those who knew he kept the pistol in the truck, Mona for those who knew about his marriage problems, and Keys for anyone who with access to his house and car keys, no matter how fleeting.
The verdict was in, he was too accessible. There were thirty-five people who met the four criteria, twenty others who might have, and another twenty who had three marks; not muc
h narrowing there.
He recalled Carla’s question. Yes, all four marathoners were solidly in the running, as were three others who ran with them on an irregular basis. Maybe he should be less talkative, but to what end? And they were helping. And looking for a killer among his friends was too painful. He closed his eyes and let the hum of the jet engines flood his brain.
The Tucson hot air hit him like a blast furnace. The flight attendant announced the temperature as 107 – it was a dry heat = but it felt like 120.
He opened the door to the lead cab which was filthy. The second cab was new, the driver a forty year-old woman with a man’s haircut and the complexion of an ex-drug user. He gave her the address and settled back as the air conditioning kicked in.
He’d taken a cab in Portland to Saks, wandered, checked for tails and caught another cab to a barber shop where he got a buzz cut and had the beard shaved off. A third cab took him to the airport.
Robin defensively discounted the trip as a wild goose chase; but he didn’t let his doubts restrain him on the phone with the Johnson’s lawyer. He’d said there were striking similarities in the murders. He told the lawyer he was jumping bail to meet with him.
The lawyer’s only comment was, “I didn’t hear that.”
The cab stopped at the entrance of the gated community. The guard ran down a list of names; he used a cellular phone; “He’s here.”
Robin asked the driver to wait with the meter running.
At the door he was greeted by the lawyer, John Costas, a short balding Hispanic dressed in a shirt and tie. He was about sixty. The lawyer ushered him through a great room with a view of the city to a twelve by twelve den with windows facing a small flower garden and the driveway. Two walls of shelves were stocked with an eclectic array of titles. There was a red leather recliner in the corner with a reading lamp; Chandler’s The Long Goodbye rested on the arm, a gold bookmark glinted about half way in.
There were two people on a couch. The man stood and introduced himself as Dan Johnson. He was almost as tall as Robin, and wore a beard much like the one Robin had shaved off. From a hundred feet they could have been brothers; up close, only the black eyes looked like a familial trait.
Johnson turned to the woman on the couch. She was in her mid forties, well kept, good looking in a navy blue silk dress. “This is my ex-wife, Jean Miller. She’s helping John with my defense.”
She leaned forward and shook his hand.
“Jean and John are partners.” Johnson kept his serious black eyes on Robin. “You need someone you can trust when you’re in the fix I’m in.”
Robin took a chair and Costas poured a glass of water. He leaned forward with his hands on his knees. “How much do you know about my problems, Mr. Johnson?”
Johnson deferred with a nod to Jean Miller. “When you called, we didn’t know a thing, Mr. Morgan. Since then we’ve been on the Internet.” She riffled the corner of a hundred printed pages. “Through the wonder of modern technology, we know as much as anyone who lives in Portland.”
She turned to Costas who continued for her, “We think there are some parallels, the crime itself, the investigation, the evidence. You were lucky with the palm print.”
“I got a squeaky clean cop.”
Miller said, “Now we know what everyone else knows, tell us what you know, the good and bad. Then Don will go through his tale of woe.”
Robin got on with the story; Miller made notes in shorthand without looking at the pad on her knee. The entire process took thirty minutes.
She nodded. “That’s good. “ She turned to her ex. “Okay, Dan.”
Johnson took the lead; “More like deja vu all over again, variations on a theme.” He looked to his ex-wife, then back to Robin. “Different than you, I had lots of people who hated me enough to kill Marguerita and leave me in the soup. Let’s think of them for the time being as a complicating factor. I’ll describe what happened to me as if I had no enemies.”
He paused and thought; Robin saw his brain working on his face. “I’ve never thought about it that way before.” Another pause; “That was probably a mistake on my part.”
Costas interjected, “We spent a lot of time looking at those enemies.”
Johnson nodded; to Robin, “Let me make one thing clear. I did not kill Margo. I don’t know if you killed your wife, but I hope not, else I’m wasting my time. I don’t think I am.”
“Thanks.”
Johnson leaned forward, one elbow on a high table next to his chair, his chin on his hand. “Margo and I were business partners when Jean and I divorced, nothing like the bullshit that was all over the papers. About three years later it grew into more. That was three years ago. She had her own money and bought in on the land.” He described what Robin had learned from the papers, but stripped of the innuendo. Then, “Jean found the witness.”
Johnson stopped, sipped his water, thought again. “No, let me regress for a moment. You have to understand, I was a marked man. There are people who, in the name of ecology, or the animals, or even community service, would kill me tomorrow if they could get away with it. Many of the people who hate my guts are in the media. So I was blessed with a situation where the police withholding of evidence neatly fit into the world view of fourth estate. It sounds paranoid, but that’s the way it was.”
Robin moved him forward. “But you’re free now.”
“Right. As I was saying, Jean didn’t let it lie. She hired four private investigators. They retraced the steps of the police. They re-did, re-found and re-interviewed. And they bumped into Juanita Jiminez, a maid at the townhouse complex. She didn’t speak English, in fact, couldn’t read, so she never knew what happened to her testimony.”
“And what was her testimony?”
Johnson’s voice dropped a register; “She saw a person, she couldn’t say man or woman, drive away in my car, but,” another pause for effect, “she was absolutely certain the person did not have a beard and wasn’t nearly as tall as I am.”
“What did the police say to that?” he asked.
For the first time Robin saw emotion on the man’s face; anger. “They said she wasn’t a credible witness. They buried the report.” Jean Miller put a calming hand on his arm. “The judge said there was no justification. He released me from prison.”
Johnson looked to his ex-wife. “Jean thinks we can get the case dismissed based on prosecutorial misconduct, but that’s not enough for me.”
Robin pulled out the list of names. “Mr. Johnson, are any of these people familiar to you?”
He reached out for the papers. “Who are they?”
“They’re my friends, or acquaintances. Those with the checkmarks, they’re the people who meet the minimum criteria to set me up.”
“You got a lot of friends.” Johnson scanned through the list quickly, and then followed his finger more slowly for a second pass.
“No one,” he said. Turning doubting eyes to Robin, he said, “It’s the same MO, but the same man. Why? That’s a tough case to make.”
Robin verbalized the thought, “Yes, if we’re the only ones.”
The question formed first on his face; “Come again?”
Robin was cryptic; “It’s an idea I have, one I’m slowly coming to grips with it myself.”
~ ~ ~
Coming to grips with it. But what was it? The idea of a motiveless murder, or the idea that the same man did both murders; and others?
Why me? Why Johnson? Was it a plan, or coincidence? Was he drawing connections where none existed? What would Judy think? She’d be dismissive. What about the pretty detective? She’d think he was out of his mind. How about her less jaded sidekick? She’d believe him for all the wrong reasons, but maybe that wasn’t so bad. At times you need someone to believe you.
Yes, he saw Diane Simpson had a crush on him. Robin was not unaware of his effect on some women. Dick told him some of the women at work lusted after him. Still, only Kathy Senn persisted openly in chasing him.
Still, there were women who wanted him. Kathy’s desperation forced him to be blunt. Even Carla got familiar with an unexpected bawdiness. Maybe she liked dangerous men. And Diane Simpson was fixated on him, but wary. He wouldn’t take advantage of her because there was no chemistry for him.
But the detective, Maureen McMartin, she was impervious; and he was attracted to her. Cut the fantasy, this is getting you nowhere.
He thumbed through the list. It’s one of you. Are you a standalone killer, or have you done this before?
~ ~ ~
Robin caught a cab to the Hilton and walked to Pioneer Square to buy a triple shot at Starbucks. He flagged down another cab which he took to the townhouse. It was midnight when he unlocked the front door.
The phone rang as soon as the door closed. He answered, “Hello?”
There was a sharp intake of breath at the other end. “This is Detective McMartin. Where the hell have you been?”
A sudden flash of anger loosened his tongue; “Well, hello to you, detective. If you must know, I was exercising my rights under the Constitution.”
Robin walked outside; there was a flash of a lighter in the parking lot.
“Is your guy going to be here all night?” he asked.
In the background, he heard the detective say, “Wave to the good man, Clarence.”
The cop stuck his hand out the window, cigarette smoke rising white in the night.
Then to Robin, “Mr. Morgan, you’re free as long as you follow the rules.”
He said nothing; he let the vacuum grow.
The detective filled it; “I don’t like felons eluding my people. I don’t trust them when I can’t see them.”
A hard edge of anger tinged his voice; “I’m a suspect, alleged.”
He heard a note of apology in her voice; “Yes, you’re right, alleged. So are you going to tell me where you were?”