Degree of Guilt

by Unknown

  ‘Mary Carelli.’

  ‘I’ve seen you on TV.’ He hesitated. ‘And his name was Ransom?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was flat. ‘Mark O’Malley Ransom.’

  He paused, perhaps in recognition of Ransom’s name, perhaps wondering how much he could ask without giving her Miranda warnings. He seemed to be feeling some new hesitancy, a concern about mistakes.

  ‘Whose handgun is that?’ he finally asked.

  ‘Mine.’

  Her interrogator looked briefly at the second cop. ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said.

  She nodded.

  He glanced back at the body. ‘We’ll need to keep you here for a while.’

  The second cop went to the door and stationed himself outside. The first went to the phone.

  The next hour was a jumble that Mary struggled to understand. Several men in plainclothes arrived. They videotaped the body, took pictures. Blinking at the flashbulbs, she watched as a slight blond woman she took to be from the coroner’s office glanced quickly at her and then bent over Ransom.

  The woman flexed Ransom’s arms, felt his forehead and beneath his armpits. Then she examined the surface of his shirt where the bullet entered; inspected his hands; slid an instrument under his fingernails; applied some type of swab to his penis. The woman’s cool meticulousness made Mary feel sick. Her throat was dry.

  Two more men arrived, one white, one black. The black man had short grizzled hair, a shambling frame that half concealed a paunch, gold wire-rimmed glasses, and an impassive face that seemed never to change. He took in Ransom, then the room.

  The woman had turned Ransom on his stomach, examining his back. ‘It didn’t go through,’ she said to the black man.

  She sounded faintly disappointed, as if that were a problem. The black man nodded, and she resumed her inspection of the corpse.

  She paused at Ransom’s buttocks, eyes narrowing. She traced the scratches with her fingertip.

  The black man was speaking to Mary. ‘Inspector Monk,’ he said. ‘Homicide.’

  She looked up at him, startled. He nodded toward the woman. ‘There are some things we’ll need to do.’ Like everything else around them, his rich baritone seemed too methodical to be human.

  How long must I stay here? Mary almost asked, and then caught herself. Much better that she stayed, she realized. She asked simply, ‘Can I have some water?’

  Monk went to the bathroom and returned with a glass of water. As he placed it in her hand, the woman appeared next to him. ‘This is Dr Shelton,’ Monk said. ‘The medical examiner.’

  The woman had level blue eyes and wore no makeup. ‘Elizabeth Shelton,’ she amended. We’re sisters, the clear voice conveyed; I recognize you. As the woman knelt by the couch, Mary felt a moment’s gratitude.

  ‘He didn’t penetrate you?’ her new friend asked.

  ‘No.’

  Shelton nodded. ‘Do you care to see a doctor?’

  ‘No. I don’t want to be touched.’

  Shelton paused. ‘Can I look at your neck?’ she asked.

  Her expression seemed as sympathetic as her voice. Silent, Mary leaned forward.

  Gently, the woman raised Mary’s chin with her fingertips. ‘How did this happen?’ she asked.

  Mary swallowed. ‘He did it.’ She hesitated, and then added, ‘When he was on top of me.’

  ‘Are you hurt anywhere else?’

  Mary touched her cheek. ‘Here.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He slapped me.’

  Shelton looked at her. ‘With his palm open?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mary’s voice fell. ‘He just kept hitting me.’

  ‘How many times?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  Shelton hesitated. ‘Are there other places?’ she asked.

  Mary looked down at her legs. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘My thigh.’

  Shelton nodded. ‘Can you show me?’

  Mary said nothing. Shelton glanced up at Monk. Wordless, he retreated to the other side of the room.

  Gently, Shelton said, ‘It will help us.’

  Mary glanced around her. Monk was pulling up the closed blinds. Monk’s partner – a pale, balding man who reminded Mary of a priest – was stooped over her black gun. The first uniformed cop watched him with an expression of infinite melancholy.

  Slowly, Mary pulled up her dress.

  The welt seemed more raised now, a red jagged line beneath her panty hose. Shelton tilted her head. ‘What happened here?’

  ‘He was trying to pull down my panty hose.’

  Shelton contemplated the welt. ‘You had them on, then.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  Almost solicitously, Shelton pulled down Mary’s dress. Only after a moment did Mary realize that she was examining the fabric.

  ‘May I look at your hands?’

  When Mary nodded, Shelton took each hand in hers. Once more her tone was cool, gentle. ‘I’d like to take samples,’ she said. ‘From your fingernails.’

  She went quickly to a black bag and reached inside. Then she returned and knelt again, holding a slim metal instrument and a small white envelope. ‘May I? she asked.

  After a moment, Mary nodded. Shelton slid the instrument under the forefinger of Mary’s right hand. As she did, Mary noticed her gold hoop earings.

  Mary still said nothing. Finger by finger, the woman took samples. Suddenly, oddly, Mary felt naked.

  ‘I’m tired,’ she murmured.

  ‘Just three more.’ The woman sounded like a pediatrician now, talking to a child. ‘I’m almost done.’

  Mary just sat there. She seemed unable to do anything.

  ‘Thank you,’ Shelton said.

  She paused, glancing at the tape player, an unspoken question forming in her eyes. Mary imagined Shelton’s surprise when she listened to the tape. Then Shelton rose, breaking her thought, and went to Monk.

  Standing beside Ransom’s body, they spoke too quietly to be heard. Mary felt utterly alone.

  Monk nodded to Shelton and came back. ‘We’ll need to take you down to Homicide, go though what happened.’

  Mary felt herself stiffen. ‘How long will it be?’ she asked.

  ‘A few hours. You’ll have to wait while we clean up here.’

  He never apologized, she noticed, as if she were the grist for some impersonal machine. ‘He abused me,’ she said.

  ‘You can tell us that.’ His voice was neither indifferent nor impressed. ‘You can tell us all about that.’

  Something in his tone bespoke hour after endlesss hour. When Mary stood, her legs felt shaky. She was all right, she told herself. It was just that she had been sitting too long.

  ‘Officer DiStefano will take you,’ Monk was saying.

  The sad-faced policeman took her arm. Haltingly, she let him steer her toward the door. How many hours, she wondered, had it been since she had first entered, taken the glass of champagne from his hand? Listened to the woman’s voice on tape, telling her what Ransom wanted?

  Turning, she half hoped to see an empty room.

  The tape recorder still rested on the coffee table.

  The second cop was putting the two wineglasses in a bag. To his left, Shelton had turned Ransom on his back again. Ransom stared emptily at the ceiling as Shelton examined his shirt, then his fingers. She slid two glassine bags over Ransom’s hands.

  Suddenly, irrationally, Mary felt that she could not leave them alone with Ransom.

  ‘Come on, Miss Carelli.’

  The door closed behind them.

  Downstairs, the lobby felt strange. A concierge, a few tourists, a middle-aged man with his arm around someone who looked like an expensive prostitute. No one else. Some watchful part of Mary’s mind registered that the media did not yet know.

  Outside, it was cool. As they walked to the patrol car, she was only half aware of the city surrounding Nob Hill. Then a car door slammed behind her, and it was cramped and dark.<
br />
  In the back seat, Mary found herself staring at the metal grille between herself and DiStefano. He started the engine.

  ‘Just stay here for a moment,’ she said. ‘And open the windows. Please.’

  The Hall of Justice was a featureless monolith, longer than a football field. The lobby was as bleak as the emergency room of a city hospital: dim light; bare walls; green vinyl tile worn by countless footsteps. A few refugees from the urban underclass drifted through the hallways on their way to some business with police. Mary had the surreal feeling of having passed into another life.

  They took her to the sixth floor, through a door marked HOMICIDE in forties-style black letters, and put her in an eight-by-eleven room without windows. Someone brought her coffee with powdered cream and a stir stick. She examined the room: a long table, hard wooden chairs, yellow walls, green carpeting. The coffee tasted thin and bitter.

  Mary waited for two hours.

  What were they doing? she wondered. Staring at the bare walls, she reviewed what Shelton had done: her inch-by-inch examination of the body, her fingers tracing the scratches on Ransom’s buttocks, her stillness as she studied Ransom’s wound. What had she seen?

  Reflexively, Mary touched the bruise beneath her eye.

  It felt puffy, hurt to the touch. The scratch on her neck made it painful to turn.

  Fingernails. Shelton had looked at them. Looked at Ransom’s. Looked at the wound again. Sent Mary away.

  Monk appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Are you comfortable?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Feel up to talking?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mary felt new energy. ‘I want to get this over with.’

  Monk left, and then he returned holding a tape recorder. He placed it on the table between them.

  Mary stared at it. ‘What’s on that tape?’ she finally asked.

  Monk appraised her. ‘It’s a blank tape,’ he said. ‘We record all interviews.’

  Somehow she had not expected that. Eyes fixed on the tape recorder, she nodded.

  He pressed the button. Mary watched the tape begin slowly turning.

  ‘This is an initial homicide investigation.’ Speaking into the tape, Monk’s voice was deliberate, uninflected. ‘It is January 13 at 4:45 P.M. The victim is Mark Ransom. The interviewee is Mary Carelli. I am Inspector Charles Monk.’

  Monk took a small white card from the inside pocket of his suit coat. ‘Miss Carelli, we are obligated to advise you of your rights. I am going to read your rights from this card. Please respond in a clear voice.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You have the right to remain silent. That means you do not have to answer any questions I ask. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand that?’

  Mary watched the tape turn one rotation, then another.

  ‘Miss Carelli?’

  ‘Yes. I understand that.’

  ‘You have the right to have an attorney present. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘Do you want an attorney present?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you wish to answer my questions?’

  ‘Yes.’ Raising her eyes from the tape, Mary sat straighter. ‘He tried to rape me. Does anyone care about that?’

  A moment’s hesitation, and then Monk’s impassivity returned. ‘Did you know Mark Ransom?’ he asked.

  ‘Only in the way that everyone knows Mark Ransom.’ She caught herself. ‘Mark Ransom courted celebrity. But I’d never met him before today.’

  ‘How did you come to be in his hotel suite?’

  ‘It was work.’ She paused, and then asked, ‘How much about myself do I explain?’

  Monk regarded her a moment. ‘I recognize you,’ he answered. ‘But the tape doesn’t, and this is your story.’

  ‘All right.’ Mary shrugged. ‘I’m a television journalist, for ABC. Since last fall, I’ve been doing interview segments for Deadline.’ Suddenly Mary wanted Monk to confirm her existence outside this room. ‘You’ve seen it – on Tuesday nights?’

  Monk considered the question, as if it would change the dynamic between them. ‘My wife watches,’ he said at last. ‘Go on.’

  ‘That was why I was meeting with him. To discuss a possible interview.’

  ‘Who arranged the meeting?’

  ‘It was his idea.’ Mary could hear her own bitterness. ‘He called me.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘He left a message at my office. In Manhattan.’ She paused. ‘I called him back from home.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That he thought I’d be interested in the book he’d just finished.’

  ‘Did he tell you what the book was about?’

  ‘Laura Chase.’ Monk did not ask who she was; presumably, Mary thought, the tape recorder was more familiar with dead movie goddesses who had put revolvers in their mouths and pulled the trigger. ‘Ransom claimed to have new information about her suicide.’

  Monk looked slightly puzzled. ‘How long has Laura Chase been dead?’

  ‘Almost twenty years.’

  ‘What kind of information did Ransom have?’

  Mary paused, keeping her tone level. ‘About her affair with Senator James Colt.’

  ‘James Colt?’ Monk said the words softly, as if to himself, For a moment, he seemed to lose the thread of his question.

  ‘James Colt,’ Mary repeated. ‘It’s part of the whole mystique about her suicide: “Who Killed Laura Chase?” and all that folklore about the mysterious woman who called the police to say Laura had killed herself. It never seems to stop: just last month, someone insisted to me at a cocktail party that the Colt family had murdered Laura Chase to save his chances to be President, and that the unknown caller was the senator’s wife.’ Mary’s voice turned bitter. ‘But Ransom said he had something new that no one knew but him. Something he would share with me.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Ransom claimed that James Colt met her in Palm Springs about a week before she died. She got drunk, took pills.’ Mary paused. ‘After Senator Colt got through with her, Ransom told me, he passed her on to two friends.’

  Monk’s impassivity seemed now to take an effort. ‘Passed her on?’ he repeated quietly.

  ‘Supposedly, Colt watched them do it to her.’ Mary looked at her lap. ‘Laura Chase remembered him through some sort of semi-alcoholic haze, sitting in a chair by the bed and sipping a martini while his friends took turns.’

  Monk was quiet for a time. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said finally. ‘How does a dead woman “remember” anything?’

  Mary found herself staring at the tape recorder. ‘Ransom had a tape of Laura Chase. Talking to her psychiatrist.’ She paused again. ‘That was what Mark Ransom called to tell me.’

  For the first time, Monk’s inflection changed. ‘When you said she remembered . . .’

  ‘It’s on the tape.’ Mary hesitated. ‘The one on the coffee table.’

  Monk studied the tape recorder, as if newly fascinated by its workings. Mary could see him imagining the tape: the husky voice of a famous actress, describing her abuse by a senator from California – a man who millions wished had become President and whose death in a plane crash was still widely mourned. A man whose son was now poised to become governor.

  ‘You could hurt people,’ Monk said softly, ‘with a tape like that.’

  The words held the resonance of feeling, reminding Mary that Monk lived a life outside this room and that some image of James Colt was surely part of that. Mary had images of her own: James Colt marching with migrant workers; speaking with passion on the Senate floor against the tragedy and waste of Vietnam, yet demanding of college students that they give up their deferments to ‘fight against a war the less advantaged are fighting in your place.’ Lookin
g now at Monk, Mary reflected that James Colt occupied a special place for blacks: he had been the last potential President to speak for social justice without apology. The people Ransom’s tape would ‘hurt,’ as Monk had put it, were not just James Colt’s family.

  ‘Yes.’ Her eyes rose from the tape recorder. ‘Tapes like that could hurt people.’

  Monk seemed to settle in his chair; something about him, Mary thought, seemed more tired than before. ‘Did Ransom say how he got the tape?’ he asked finally.

  ‘He bought it.’ Mary felt the edge in her voice. ‘From Dr Steinhardt’s daughter. She wanted to keep the house in Beverly Hills.’

  ‘Dr Steinhardt.’

  ‘The psychiatrist. He’s dead.’

  ‘But aren’t there rules about that? In this state, we have a psychiatrist-patient privilege.’

  Mary shrugged again. ‘Laura Chase and Steinhardt are both dead. Who’s left? Only Steinhardt’s daughter and . . .’ And Ransom, she had been about to say.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mary realized that she had touched her eyes with the fingertips of one hand. ‘It’s just that I saw him for a moment.’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Ransom. When he died, he was staring at me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Monk said. ‘We’ll get to that.’

  Beneath his voice, she heard the faint whirring of the tape recorder. ‘Let’s do that now,’ she said. ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘We just need to cover things.’

  She opened her eyes. ‘May I have some water?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He got up, went out, returned with a styrofoam cup of cold water. The tape kept spinning.

  Monk leaned against the wall. ‘You’ve mentioned conversations – he called you at work, you called him at home. Before the interview, were there any more?’

  ‘He called again. To tell me where and when he could see me.’

  ‘He chose San Francisco.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was that convenient for you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  Mary flushed. ‘He said he might play the tape for me,’ She said finally. ‘If I came alone.’