“With my eyes closed.” Her father smiled, but Mary didn’t.
“You stay downstairs at night and watch TV. It’s not because you like TV, it’s because you can’t sleep. Isn’t that right?”
Her father eased into his chair, leaning on one of his hands. His expression didn’t change, a sly smile still traced his lips, but he didn’t say anything. They sat at the table and regarded each other over the chipped china.
“Your back hurts,” Mary said. “Tell me the truth.”
“Why you gotta know that?”
“I don’t know. I just want you to tell me.”
Her father sighed deeply. “Okay. My back, it hurts.”
“At night?”
“Yes.”
“When else?”
Her father didn’t answer except to purse soft lips. The coffee began to perk in the background, a single eruption like a stray burp.
“All the time?”
“Yes.”
“But mostly at night?”
“Only ’cause I got nothing to think about then.” His voice was quiet. The coffee burped again, behind him.
“I’m sorry about that. Is there anything I can do?”
“No.”
“Maybe we should try new doctors. I could take you back to Penn. They have great doctors there.”
“You made me go last year. S’enough already.” Her father waved his hand. “Is that why you came here? To talk about the pain in my back?”
“In a way, yes.”
“Well, you’re givin’ me a pain in my ass.” He laughed, and so did Mary. She felt oddly better that he had told her the truth, even though it wasn’t good news. She would have to hatch a new plan to get him back to the doctor’s.
The coffeepot perked in the background, with better manners now, and she caught the first whiff of fresh brew. It was fun to drink coffee late at night, as settled a DiNunzio tradition as fish on Fridays. When her husband Mike had been alive, he used to join them for night coffee. He’d talk baseball with her father and even choked once on a cigar. He’d fit in so well with her family, better at times than she did, and then he was gone. She felt her neck warm with blood, her grief suddenly fresh. She hadn’t felt that way for so long, but the Newlin case was dredging up memories.
“Honey, what’sa matter?” her father said, reaching across the table and covering her hand with his. It felt dry and warm. “I was only kidding. You’re not a pain, baby.”
“I know.” Mary blinked wetness from her eyes. “I’m okay.”
“You’re about to cry, how can you be okay?” He reached for the napkin holder but there were none left, so he started to get up.
Mary grabbed his hand as it left hers. “No, sit. I’m fine. I know I’m not a pain in the ass. Actually, I am, but that’s not what I’m upset about.” She smiled shakily to convince him. “I was thinking about Mike. You know.”
His face fell, his eyebrows sloping suddenly. “Oh. Michael.”
“I’m okay, though.”
“Me, too.”
“Good. How’s your back? No complaints?” she asked, and they both laughed. The coffee perked madly in the background, filling the small kitchen with steam and sound. Mary noticed it at the same time as her father did, but beat him to the stove. “I got it,” she said, with a final sniffle. She lowered the heat but the gas went out, so she had to start over and relight the burner. “I hate this pilot light, Pop.”
“I told you, they can’t fix it.”
“I’ll sue them.” She leaned sideways to light the thing, almost singeing her eyelashes with the floom. “I can’t do anything about your back but I can do something about the fucking stove.”
“Your language,” her father said, but she could tell without looking that his heart wasn’t in it. She turned around to find him still looking sad. Thanks to her, he was thinking about Mike, and suddenly she regretted coming home. Her father was better off with his TV and his back pain.
“Pop, let me ask you something. I got this case, at work. It’s a tough one, a murder case.”
Her father’s round eyes went rounder. “Mare, you said you wouldn’t take no more murder cases.”
“I know but this is different. This guy is a father, and I think he’s innocent. So don’t start on me like Mom. It’s my job, okay?”
“Okay, okay.” Her father put up his hands. “Don’t shoot.”
“Sorry.” She sat down while the kitchen warmed with the aroma of brewing coffee. “Here’s the question. If I committed a murder, would you tell the police that you did it, to protect me?”
“If you did a murder?” His forehead wrinkled with alarm. “You would never do no murder.”
“I know. But if I did, would you go to jail for me?”
Her father didn’t hesitate. “Sure, I don’t want you in jail. If you did a murder, it would be for a good reason.”
Mary thought about it. What could Paige’s reason be? “What’s a good reason?”
“If you were gonna die and you had to save yourself.”
“Self-defense.”
“Yeh.” He cocked his head. “Or like tonight, I saw on the TV, this lady who killed her husband. He used to beat her up, you know, when he got drunk. Night after night. Then one night he came home after he went fishing and he stuck a fish down her throat. A fish, in her throat. Almost choked her with it. What a cavone.” He shuddered. “And finally she got so sick of him doing things like that that she shot him.”
“So, if somebody did that to me and I shot him, that would be a good reason.”
“If somebody did that to you, I would shoot him.”
Mary smiled. Her father was such a peaceable man she couldn’t imagine it, but the way he said it, maybe she could. He’d been a laborer, not an altar boy. “Now, here’s the hard part. What if I told you that the person I killed was my mother?”
“Your mother?” Her father’s sparse eyebrows flew up. “Your mother?”
“Uh-huh.”
“If you killed your own mother?” He ran a dry hand over his smooth head. “Holy God. Well, then I would say your mother musta been doing bad things to you.”
“Would you go to jail for me, even then?”
“Sure, in a minute.” He buckled his lower lip in thought. “Especially then.”
“Why?”
“Because if your mother was doing bad things to you, it would be my fault.”
“How so?”
“I woulda let it happen.” He pushed the plate with the roll toward her, as the coffee started to bubble madly. “Now, eat, baby.”
11
“I attended the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Yale, and Girard before that.”
It was just after two o’clock in the morning but Dwight Davis would be working all night. He was arraigning Newlin at nine and he was watching the videotape for the umpteenth time. His care wasn’t only because of what Brinkley had said last night; he was always scrupulous in case preparation. He had written down everything Newlin had said on a pad in front of him. The D.A.’s office didn’t have the resources to order a same-day transcript, which any civil law firm could have done, although in criminal cases, it was justice, not money, that hung in the balance. Davis would never accept it.
“Don’t believe everything you read. Reporters have to sell newspapers.”
He sat alone at one end of the table in the dim light of a small conference room in the D.A.’s offices. Boxes of case files sat stacked against the far wall, a set of trial exhibits on foamcore, and on top rested an open bag of stale Chips Ahoy. Davis didn’t mind the mess. He liked having the whole office to himself. He had grown up an only child in a happy family and he coveted quiet time to think, plan, and work. As a prosecutor, time without ringing phones became even rarer, and the Newlin case would demand it. He’d already devoured the lab results, spread out in front of him like a fan.
“I don’t mean to be impolite, but is there a reason for this small talk?”
The bloo
dy prints on the knife matched Newlin’s. The serology was his, too, and fibers of the wife’s silk blouse were found on his jacket, as if from a struggle. The techs had even managed to lift his prints off her blouse and hands. And the photos of Newlin showed a small cut on his right hand, from the knife. The physical evidence was there. But watching Newlin on videotape, Davis’s canny eye told him that something was wrong with Newlin’s confession. Something about Newlin had betrayed him. His nervousness, or something Davis couldn’t put his finger on. The man was lying.
“I guess I should tell you, my marriage hadn’t been going very well lately.”
Davis had to find his lie. Figure out what it was. Instinct and experience told him it was there. But where? He sat at one end of the table and Newlin, on video, sat at the other, squaring off in the dark. Or almost dark. A four-panel window faced Arch Street and the last blind was cinched up unevenly, like an Oriental fan on its side. The blinds would never be repaired; they were as permanent as the leftover Chips Ahoy.
“For a year, actually. Honor wasn’t very happy with me.”
The image on the screen was grayish, the focus poor, and the lighting gloomy. Under Newlin’s face was a line of changing white numbers, a time clock that ran into split seconds. The numbers were fuzzy. When the hell would they get decent equipment? The same time the blinds got repaired. Money, money, money. Frustrated, Davis picked up the remote, hit STOP, then replayed the sentence. Where was the lie? What was wrong with this confession?
“Something snapped inside. I lost control. I threw my glass at her but she just laughed. I couldn’t stand it, her laughing at me like that.”
Liar, liar, liar. Then Davis realized Newlin was lying about the way the murder had gone down. It hadn’t been a crime of passion, fueled by Scotch or threat of divorce. Newlin wasn’t a crime-of-passion kind of guy, all you had to do was look at him to know that. He was an estates lawyer, the kind of man who planned death. Could it be any more obvious? And what kind of pussy threw a glass in anger? Women threw glasses; men threw punches. No, Davis wasn’t buying.
“I realized there was no way I could hide what I’d done. I had no plan, I hadn’t thought it out. I didn’t even have a way to get her body out of the house.”
Classic protesting too much, he had seen it over and over again. Davis had Newlin’s number. Everybody knew the family, one of the wealthiest in town, and it always was her money, Buxton money. So, follow the money. Newlin must have killed her because he wanted her money, pure and simple, and made a plan. Either he had decided to kill her himself or hired someone to do it for him, but something had gone wrong. Newlin was trying to cover that up, trying to sell that it was a fight that went too far. What had happened? Davis would have to find out, but with this much dough floating around, it had to be premeditated.
“I wasn’t thinking logically, I was reacting emotionally. To her shouting, to her insults. To the Scotch. I just did it.”
Davis’s anger momentarily blinded him to the image of Newlin. He kicked himself for not realizing the scam at the crime scene, which had been too perfect to be real. Newlin had come home, stabbed his wife, and staged the scene to look like a fight. Thrown the crystal glass down after she was dead. Drunk Scotch over her body, to congratulate himself on a job well done. Acted real confused when he washed up his hands. Cried crocodile tears when he called nine-one-one.
“Detective, this interview is over. I want to call my attorney.”
Davis couldn’t understand Brinkley’s problem. Maybe the detective hadn’t had the benefit of the lab results, or maybe Brinkley was smelling that Newlin was a liar and mistook what Newlin was lying about. To Davis, Newlin was a selfish, sick, cold-cock murderer. He would have to get to the bottom of Newlin’s scam. Learn how he’d planned to get the wife’s dough.
“I insist on my attorney.”
Davis hated people like Newlin, who were all about money. It was the ultimate perversion of values, and he had witnessed it firsthand. Crack pimps who knifed their more entrepreneurial girls, drug dealers who capped their light-fingered mules, teenage smoke dealers who executed their rivals with one slug from a nine millimeter. Newlin was no different from them; he just dressed better.
“I should have called him in the first place.”
Davis stared at the TV without focusing. There was another thing he didn’t understand. Why would Newlin say even this much to the detectives? Or botch it so completely? He heard Newlin making demands in a cold, impersonal tone, and he knew the answer immediately. Newlin was a big-time estate lawyer with an ego and a brain to match. He was thumbing his nose at them. He thought he could get away with it. Outsmart the legal system, even if they had a head start.
“I want my lawyer, and we’ll take care of notifying Paige.”
Davis looked at the filmed image of the corporate lawyer on the screen and knew instinctively that he was dealing with evil in its most seductive form. A nice guy. A partner in a respected firm. The caring father. Davis wasn’t fooled by the guise, even if Brinkley was.
“I’ll handle the notification through my attorney.”
Davis predicted what Newlin’s next step would be. He’d ask for a deal. He would have realized he’d said too much and the evidence would incriminate him. He wouldn’t want a trial, with the ensuing embarrassment and trauma; he’d want his way greased, as it always had been. Newlin would try to plead down to a voluntary. Figure he’d get twenty and serve eight to ten. Come out a relatively young man with a shitload of his wife’s dough. The murder rap would let him out of the insurance, but he’d have tons of bucks already socked away.
“But I am a lawyer.”
Davis scowled. A lawyer, killing for money. It brought shame on all of them. Davis had always been proud of his profession and hated Newlin for his crime. On his own behalf, on Honor Newlin’s behalf, and on behalf of the people of the Commonwealth. There was only justice to protect all of us. It sounded corny, but anything worth believing in ultimately sounded corny. Davis believed in justice; Newlin believed in money.
“No thanks,” the videotaped Newlin answered, and Davis saw the snotty smile that crossed Newlin’s face.
It fueled Davis’s decision. Suddenly he knew what to do in the case, but he’d need approval for it. It would be an extraordinary request, but this case was extraordinary. In fact, in all his years as a prosecutor, he had asked for such a thing only twice, and the Newlin case was worse than those. This would be the case of Davis’s life and Newlin’s. There was only one way to go. On the pad in front of him, he wrote:
NO DEALS.
He underlined it in a strong hand. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania would not offer a plea bargain to Jack Newlin. Newlin would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, like the common killer he was, even in his hundred-dollar tie. He would be tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. Davis would see to it.
He switched off the videotape, closed his pad, and stood up. He stretched, flexing every muscle; he’d been up for hours and hadn’t run in two days, but he felt suddenly fit and strong. Alert and ready. Psyched. Davis was going to win.
Because he always did.
BOOK TWO
12
It was early the next morning when Mary returned to the interview room at the Roundhouse to meet with Jack Newlin before his arraignment. She sat opposite him in the grim room, a bulletproof barrier between them. She wore a navy suit with a high-necked blouse to hide the blotches that would undoubtedly bloom like roses in court. That she felt them growing now, merely in Jack’s presence, was difficult to explain. To herself. She didn’t want to even think about explaining it to her client and was sure it breached several ethical canons, at least two disciplinary rules, and perhaps even a commandment.
Mary cleared her throat. “I wanted to see you to touch base. I have a strategy for our defense and I need to prepare you for the arraignment hearing.”
“Sure, thanks.” Jack seemed tired, too, in his wrink
led jumpsuit, but his good looks shone through fatigue’s veneer. His five o’clock shadow had grown to a rougher stubble, which only emphasized how careless he seemed about his good looks. He raked back his sandy hair with a restless hand. “First tell me how everything’s going.”
“Better than I expected. I’m very encouraged by my research. That’s why I’m here.”
“No, I meant generally. The case is all over the news. How’s Paige taking all of it?”
“Fine,” Mary said, noting that his first question was about his daughter. She decided to test the water. “You know, I’ve been wondering about Paige. Where she was last night, when your wife was killed. Do you know?”
“Home, I suppose. What’s the difference?” Jack’s expression was only mildly curious, and Mary, distracted, couldn’t tell if it was an act. She both wanted and didn’t want to believe him. She resolved to find uglier clients.
“Paige told me she was supposed to come to dinner with you and your wife, but she canceled. Is that right?”
“Yes, it is.”
“She’s telling the truth?”
“Of course she is.” Jack’s blue eyes hardened to ice.
“I ask because I thought teenagers made things up at times.”
“Not Paige.”
“I see.” Mary paused. Was he lying? “You didn’t mention that when we met.”
“I didn’t think it mattered, and it doesn’t.” Jack frowned. “Who cares who else was supposed to come to dinner the night I murdered my wife?”
“I do, it’s my job. I think Paige may have lied to me about something. She told me her boyfriend Trevor wasn’t with her last night, and I think he was.”
“What? How do you know that?”
“I saw him leaving her apartment when I went to meet her.” She checked Jack for a reaction, but he managed to look calm, except for that jaw clenching again. “And you said Paige doesn’t lie.”
“She doesn’t, except when it comes to Trevor. I don’t like him, and Paige knows it. That’s probably why she said what she did. She wouldn’t want me to know he was over there. Paige edits her conversations, like all of us.” He appraised her. “You’re not a liar, Mary, but I bet you don’t tell your father about the men you see, do you?”
Moment of Truth Page 9
