I was in the bucks now so I called the mean old woman who ran the place and asked to rent the apartment being vacated.
If I had asked to ravage her daughter I’m sure she wouldn’t have been half as nasty. She tried to work me for more than the usual rent, but I held firm. Finally, reluctantly, she agreed to let me have the place. But she let me know the apartment company wasn’t going to waste any money on new paint, not for me, not at those prices.
I didn’t have much furniture, so moving everything a few yards down wouldn’t be much of a job. I would need to buy a few more things. It wouldn’t be a big change, the view would be the same, but I thought having a larger place might be good for my morale.
I thought about getting rid of my old Ford for the same reason, but a new car could wait. The make and model I might buy could be upgraded considerably if the Harwell case went well. If it didn’t, the Ford would have to do.
I had been sober now for a very long stretch. But after all that time the end of the day was still the worst. I even found myself nostalgic about it, remembering how it felt then to go home to the wife or girlfriend of the moment, kick off the Gucci shoes, and sip icy martinis or margaritas.
But I had to content myself with diet soda. I poured some into a plastic kitchen glass over ice, stuck a frozen dinner in the oven, and flipped on the television to catch the news.
The Harwell case wasn’t mentioned. A minor movie star had killed himself. Clips of his old movies and a shot of a morgue wagon driving away from the crowd gathered in front of his Hollywood home had apparently replaced any need for an update on the People versus Angel Harwell. Oddly, I felt a tinge of disappointment.
The phone rang while I was dipping the cardboardlike veal patty into the cottonlike mashed potatoes. Everything was hot on the outside, but still frozen in places on the inside. I had not yet mastered the mysteries of the microwave.
I swallowed as best I could, sipped the soda to wash it down, and answered the phone.
“Hey, Charley, it’s Sidney Sherman. Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“I’m here in bed with a beautiful naked woman who was about to demonstrate how remarkably imaginative her lips could be. Thank God you called, Sid. What’s up?”
He chuckled, but he was only being polite. “Nothing dramatic, but I thought you should know what we’ve come up with so far. I tried your office but all I got was the machine.”
“So?”
“Little Angel’s no dummy. We got her grades from the time she was in kindergarten up through high school. Thirteen years of school and almost nothing but straight A’s. At least until her last year in high school. She transferred from a tony private place to a local Florida school for that last year. She dropped down to a few B grades. She started missing classes then. Maybe she got too interested in the beach and boys. Who knows?”
“How about college?”
“Never went, as far as we can find out. The records show she applied and was accepted by a number of colleges, good ones, but she must have changed her mind.”
“How about behavior problems in school?”
He paused. “There were some, I think.”
“You think?”
“Charley, I do a lot of this stuff, and I know from school records. We search them for a number of reasons. Something is very screwy with your Angel. All the records are straight arrow until she hits high school. Then, after a year or so, pages turn up missing. Her grades are okay, except for missed tests, but I think someone got rid of the records of something they considered detrimental.”
“Are you sure?”
His sigh carried an offended tone, as if I had just insulted his competence. “Nothing’s ever sure, Charley. But it looks that way to me. People do that sometimes, you know. Edit school records.”
“Why?”
“Mostly to clear something that might cause a college to turn someone down, or the army. Or maybe an incident that could screw up employment later. You know, like being caught smoking dope in the john, things like that.”
“Did your people find anything of that kind?”
“No. Just the missing places where the pages used to be. We tried to cross-check to see if any copies existed. They don’t.”
“It could be something trivial, Sid.”
“If it was, why do it? But whoever did it did a good job,” he said. “On another front, my people down in Florida are getting everything concerning that divorce that was supposed to be in the works.”
“And?”
“I’ll have more for you, but it does look like everything was about to be filed. We’ll find out, but we have to sort of work around the lawyer down there. I don’t think you need to know how, okay?”
“Try to stay out of jail, Sid.”
“Always,” he laughed. “By the way, I think the Harwells may have entered into a prenuptial agreement?”
“In Michigan?”
“As far as I can find out so far, no. The damn things are nearly worthless in Michigan, as we both know. Apparently, Harwell had the new bride sign one in Florida, where it’s done daily. They’re enforceable there. Those old folks down in the Sunshine State want to keep everything for their own kids before they climb into the sack with another surviving ancient.”
“So, what’s in this agreement?”
“I don’t know. We can find out, eventually, but it’ll cost. Why don’t you just ask the widow for a copy of the thing, if there is one? It might be her most treasured possession.”
I thought about it for a moment. “I’ll ask, Sid, but to be safe, see if your people can get a copy.”
“Don’t you trust her?”
“This is going to trial, Sid. Everyone always tries to present his best side. I’ve learned you can’t trust anyone completely in these circumstances. Some have even been known to lie.”
“Even private investigators?”
“Especially them.”
*
IT had been a typical evening at home for me. First, I watched a little television. I like flicking around the cable channels with the remote control. It’s like fishing: occasionally you hook into something good. But I found nothing to my liking.
Books, thank God for them. I read a little, but my concentration wandered. I was working on three at once, a mystery, a thriller, and a biography. I sampled them all, but none provided the usual magic.
Finally I went to bed.
The call came at a few minutes after one.
In the old days I would never have had a listed home phone number. I was above that then. But not now. Now I welcomed the business, no matter what the hour. Mostly, I got the drunk drivers who had been locked up after turning the wrong way into a one-way street or doing one of the other erratic things drunks do with their vehicles, sometimes fatally.
Something in his voice blew sleep away. I guessed him to be fifty or sixty from the sound. Speaking as if he was on the lip of anger, he said he was Dominick Farley, a foreman in the Harwell plant, a man of substance. He said he associated my name with the defense of murder.
Sounding barely under control, he told me his daughter, Mary Zelda, a married woman of twenty-nine, had just killed her two children, a boy and girl, ages six and three. Her husband had come home from work — he worked the afternoon shift at a small local factory — and discovered the bodies. The woman was being held by police. Her father asked me to do what I could for her.
I drove over to the home where the killings had occurred. It was a typical Pickeral Point house, a small one-storey frame ranch, a little seedy, with some junk lying around the garage and a snowmobile propped up and covered.
The outside lights were on so I could see everything. Numerous police cars, both city and sheriff, were parked at angles in front of the small house. One car, a sheriff’s patrol car, was empty but its rotating overhead lights were on, painting the night with pulsating slashes of strobe-light red.
Neighbors, some in pajamas, stood in little groups, silently watching the h
ouse. Every light in the house was on.
I walked up. A squat man in running pants and a sports jacket was sitting on the porch smoking a cigarette. He watched my approach.
I recognized him as I got closer. He was Stash Olesky, Evola’s number-one murder prosecutor. The outside lights cast shadows on his wide cheekbones and deep-set eyes, making him look like a sinister actor in an old Russian movie.
“What’s up, Sloan?”
“The woman’s father called me,” I said.
He nodded slowly, as if I had just told him the true meaning of life.
He stood up and flicked the cigarette away. It made a red arc against the night sky. “C’mon.”
Inside, the place was awash with cops.
“They just took the bodies away,” he said. He led me past a tiny kitchen. It looked as if someone had dropped a can of red paint, but, of course, it wasn’t paint. Someone had chalked the outline of a small body on the linoleum.
“She chased the little boy in here,” he said quietly. “Slashed and stabbed the kid. Ugly stuff.”
Then he led me to a bathroom. Here, it looked like red spray paint.
“The little girl, the baby, got it here. It wasn’t quick.” He nodded toward one small red hand print on the wall. I felt my stomach churn.
“We got the husband in the back bedroom. His brother is on the way from Lansing.”
“Any chance that the husband was in on it?” I asked.
He shook his head. “None.”
The husband was small, thin, with worn hands. He clearly earned his bread with those hands. He looked at me as if he was embarrassed, as if the house needed straightening, or the yard. He talked as if he had been in an accident, lucid but stunned. His wife had wanted him to get a different job, he said. She wanted to move. She was afraid of being alone at night, and she had become increasingly nervous. But, there had been no warning ...
I walked out of the place with Olesky.
“We have the woman at Buckingham Hospital. They’ll move her to the Port Huron psychiatric unit in the morning. I talked to her, she’s crazy as hell.”
“I assume you won’t prosecute.”
Stash smiled wryly. “We have to, Sloan. The doctors will pump the poor creature full of narcotics, say she’s better, and let her go. We have to go through the charade of a formal charge just to keep her in custody.”
“But ...”
He sighed and lit another cigarette. “Hey, this is one you can’t lose. She is absolutely insane. All we want to do is make sure she doesn’t get out until she really recovers. If such a thing is possible.”
“It was terrible in there,” I said.
He grunted. “You should have seen the bodies.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“It won’t do much good. She’s living in some other world, but I’ll call over there and clear the way if you like.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“You know, I wish I hadn’t come out here tonight,” he said. “Sometimes you see things no human was ever meant to see.”
*
BUCKINGHAM Hospital had almost completely shut down for the night, but they let me in and led me to the floor and the room where my new client was being held.
A young uniformed sheriff’s deputy nodded as I went in.
She wasn’t alone. A nurse sat next to the bed in the half-darkened room. I stood close by.
“She has enough stuff in her to knock down an elephant,” the nurse whispered. “But she’s as bright as a penny.”
The rails of her bed had been raised and her wrists had been tied to the rails with bandage. She half-smiled up at me. Only one word is needed to describe her condition: madness.
She was twenty-nine but she looked fifteen. Like her husband, she was thin and small. She seemed almost lost in the hospital gown they had tied around her. Her face was almost beautiful, with large eyes and a wide, full-lipped mouth. In the dim light I thought her hair was either light brown or blonde. She wore it short and it was disheveled.
“Mrs. Zekia,” I said, speaking softly, “My name is Charley Sloan. I’m a lawyer. Your father asked me to represent you. Do you know why you’re here?”
The smile broadened. “I put my dollies to sleep,” she said in a quiet voice.
Her eyes were fixed on mine with a kind of childish interest.
“Mrs. Zekia, are you feeling all right?”
“Oh, yes.”
The bland smile, so coyly innocent, annoyed me. I suppose that’s why I asked the question.
“Mrs. Zekia, you said you put your dollies to sleep. Do you remember exactly what happened?”
At first I thought she hadn’t heard me, then those two eyes grew even larger. It seemed like slow motion. As her eyes widened, her mouth formed into a perfectly round O, enlarging, like her eyes, until her lips were drawn white and her eyeballs seemed like they might pop from her head.
Then the sound began.
It started low and deep, like a rumble of distant thunder, but it increased in sound and scale until it filled the room and then the hospital with a shriek that seemed to come from hell itself.
She strained against the restraints as she continued screaming; her bed was shaking violently when the nurse shoved me out of the room.
A doctor, very young, very self-important, hurried down the hall toward the screaming. I stopped him.
“That’s my client, Mrs. Zekia,” I said.
He scowled at me, his eyes stern and unfriendly.
“You had better take further precautions,” I said. “She killed her children. I’m afraid she might try to kill herself.”
“You mind your business,” he snapped, “we’ll mind ours.”
He pushed past me.
I walked away. The scream followed me down the hall, down the stairs. It seemed to follow me out into the parking lot.
I drove away. I couldn’t get the sound out of my head. And I couldn’t believe Angel Harwell might once have been a patient at such a place.
If there was ever a time I needed a drink, this was it. I slowed as I approached a bar. It was almost closing time but a few cars were still parked in front.
My hands were shaking. I think that’s why I didn’t stop. I didn’t want anyone to see me in that condition. Vanity can sometimes be a virtue.
I didn’t go into my apartment when I got home but sat in the darkened car for a minute. The screams continued to echo in my imagination.
Tomorrow I would go through the formality of filing an appearance as her defense attorney. Olesky was right, handling the case wouldn’t be difficult. Still, I wished her father had called someone else.
I couldn’t help conjuring up what the last minutes had been like for those two children. I tried to push the thought out of my mind and think of something else. I tried imagining the last few minutes of Harrison Harwell’s life. If he had been a suicide, did he think about what might happen when they found him? If his daughter had killed him, what did he think as the sharp blade sliced into him? A child killing a parent. Was that so different from a parent killing a child?
Madness.
*
SLEEP wouldn’t come. Every time I closed my eyes I saw that blood-stained kitchen and bath. I would visualize those widening eyes and hear that terrible never-ending scream.
I got up and watched an old movie on television for a while, but it didn’t calm my restlessness. I tried reading but that too was impossible.
I was tired so I lay down again and tried to occupy my mind with other things. I left the light on. It made me feel less alone.
Even summoning up fond memories didn’t help much. I thought about the beach in Hawaii, alcohol-drenched honeymoon number three, as much of it as I could recall. Sex and booze seemed to have formed the core of my early life. Now, I had sworn off one and saw very little of the other.
The memory of those screams kept creeping back into my consciousness.
So I went back to something I seldom thoug
ht of anymore — past courtroom battles, including triumphs and defeats. I could remember my first jury trial in such detail that the faces of the twelve jurors emerged like characters in a Rembrandt painting, every feature clear, their eyes on me.
Even the sounds of that courtroom came flooding back, the muted coughing, the scrape of chairs, the squeaking of the judge’s chair as he rocked slowly back and forth.
And the waiting for the verdict. You always remember that. I could recall vividly the sound of the courtroom clock. I suppose that’s when I finally fell asleep.
*
I WAS already half awake when the phone rang. I glanced at the clock radio. It was a few minutes before seven.
I rolled over and picked up the phone. “Hello,” I said.
For a moment there was no response. I thought it was just a misdial. Then he spoke.
“This is Dominick Farley,” he said. “I called last night, about my daughter, Mary.”
“Yes, Mr. Farley. I went over to the hospital and talked briefly with your daughter. I talked with the assistant prosecutor who will be in charge of the case. I’ll know more later today.”
“That won’t be necessary,” he said.
I assumed he had reconsidered his choice of attorneys.
“No problem, Mr. Farley,” I said.
“She’s dead.”
“Pardon me?”
“She’s dead,” he repeated in a flat tone, drained of all emotion. “The hospital just called.”
“How did it happen?”
“They say she hung herself.” This time his voice trembled as he spoke the words. “She was left unattended to take a shower, they said. Just for a minute. She made a noose of a hospital gown and hung herself in the shower.” His voice trailed off.
“Do you want me to look into it, Mr. Farley?”
“I don’t understand?”
“If the hospital was negligent, there might be a cause for action. The cases are called wrongful death actions and they —”
“No.” The single word was spoken with a quiet firmness. “No, this has to stop somewhere.” I heard him breathe deeply, then he continued. “You talked to Mary last night?”
“Yes.”
“I called the hospital last night but they said I couldn’t see her.” He paused. “How did she seem to you?”
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