Falls the Shadow

by William Lashner

  Gad.

  60

  Beth was waiting for me at the bar of Chaucer’s, a bottle of Bud in front of her.

  I had called her from the seat of the La-Z-Boy and asked her to meet me here, and now I slipped in beside her and ordered another beer for her and a Sea Breeze for me.

  When the bartender spotted me, he gave me a look. “No trouble tonight, right?”

  “No trouble,” I said.

  “It was bad enough cleaning up the blood from the last time you were here. Who was that creep anyway?”

  “My dentist.”

  “Really? Is he any good? Because I’ve been having this trouble with my…”

  As the bartender described his dental issues, pulling down his lower lip to show a jumble of stained Chiclets, Beth stared at me as if I had grown a second head.

  “Have you ever noticed the teeth in this city?” I said after the bartender, mercifully, had cut off his demonstration and left to get our drinks. “It’s like we’re living in England.”

  “How was your trip?” she said.

  “Instructive.”

  “Anything I should know?”

  “Just that our client didn’t do it.”

  “I already knew that,” she said, and then she realized what I might have said. “You found proof in Chicago?”

  “I found a strange coincidence that might be seen as proof,” I said, “if I can figure out one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “Why would my dentist murder Leesa Dubé?”

  I told her about my trip to the Peppers’, about what I had discovered, about the coincidence of the photograph clutched in the dead woman’s hand. Beth gave me a hug when I was finished, like I had discovered a cure for cancer.

  In the midst of her celebrations, the bartender brought our drinks. I lifted my glass. “Cheers,” I said.

  We clinked, we drank, I drank fast. I felt suddenly better and gestured for another. Anything to get the sight of that video screen out of my head.

  Beth suddenly grew pensive. “Is the coincidence enough?” she said.

  “No, but it’s a start. We still have to figure out the why. But there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. Whitney Robinson dropped in to see me the other day and he said something that troubled me.”

  “I know Whit’s your friend, Victor, but I don’t trust him. He’s a little too tweedy, don’t you think?”

  “Never trust a man in tweeds, is that it?”

  “Yes, actually. A hard-and-fast rule that has held me in good stead over the years. And bow ties trouble me, too.”

  “What about George Will?”

  “Proves the point on both counts. But there’s something else about Whit, at least as it relates to François. He seems—how do I put this?—a little too interested.”

  She might have been right, but just then I didn’t care. “During Whit’s visit,” I barreled on, “he told me something intriguing about François that I thought I ought to pass along.”

  “I’m not sure I want to hear it.”

  “He said that François, for all his charming surface, is hollow inside.”

  “He doesn’t know him.”

  “Maybe not. But he said there existed some physical evidence to prove his point. Our client lied about his stuff. It wasn’t all gone. It was in a storage locker. And this afternoon I found it.”

  “Oh, I bet you did.”

  “Beth, you need to listen—”

  “No, I don’t, Victor. I don’t need to listen to anything that Whitney Robinson has to say about François. Or you either, for that matter. You said you wouldn’t give me a lecture.”

  “Maybe I care for you too much to stay quiet.”

  “Well, try, Victor. Tell me, how’s your friend Carol?”

  “She’s fine,” I said.

  “I love the enthusiasm in your voice whenever you mention her name.”

  “She’s beautiful, well dressed, well mannered, and she doesn’t have cats. In short, she’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a woman.”

  “But still, something’s not right.”

  “We’re not talking about my love life now.”

  “Maybe we should. You think you have the right to lecture me, you with your never-ending line of women, whom you complain about even as you sleep with them, women like your Carol. I might be confused, but at least I feel something. You should try it sometime.”

  “And what is it exactly that you’re feeling?”

  She took a swig of her beer, thought about it a bit. “Do you know that fizzy sensation you get when you first fall in love, like your brain is floating in champagne?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it’s not like that. It’s not romantic. It’s something different, deeper in a way. It’s as if the reason I went to law school was to someday help François.”

  “Beth.”

  “As if everything in my life has been leading me to him. I don’t understand it, and I’m not going to act on it now, because I’m a lawyer and he’s our client and he needs us in a different way, but I’m not going to stop feeling it. And, Victor, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “You sure about that?” I reached down into my briefcase, pulled out one of the videocassettes with French scrawled across the stained label, slid it across the bar until it was in front of her.

  She looked down at it for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t want it,” she said.

  “You know what I discovered today? I discovered that you can learn a lot about a man from the pornography he creates. And I’m talking about more than the size of his cock. I’m talking about the cruelty, the pent-up violence, the way the world exists solely to satisfy his depraved needs.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “You ought to take a gander. This one has quite the cast.”

  “People change. He’s not the same person he was before. He’s been in prison now for three years. He hasn’t seen his daughter in three years. That does something to a man. It has to.”

  “One viewing.”

  She shoved it back at me. “Put it away, Victor. Burn it if you want. I don’t need it.”

  “Later you might,” I said.

  “Remember years ago, right after your cross-examination of Councilman Moore in the Concannon case, when you told me it was never going to happen between us?”

  “I remember.”

  “That was your choice.”

  “I know.”

  “So from now on, butt out.”

  “This has worked out quite nicely, don’t you think?” I said. “A pleasant drink with a friend.”

  She drained her beer, slapped the bottle on the bar, dropped off her stool. “You’ll cover these,” she said, waving her finger at the empty bottles.

  I raised my glass in assent.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Don’t worry about me, Victor. Worry about figuring out why your dentist killed Leesa Dubé so we can get François out of jail.”

  “That’s what I’m not getting paid anymore to do.”

  She stood beside me for a moment and then reached over and tapped the tape. “This doesn’t change anything for you, does it? You’re not going to suddenly take a dive at the trial to protect me, are you?”

  I took a long swallow. It was tempting, letting François rot, yes it was. But I had few enough lodestars to cling to in my life, and my obligation to my clients was about the only one I could trust utterly.

  “No,” I said. “Once you have me on your side I’m like a leech. I might suck out all the blood I can, sure, but I’m hell to get rid of.”

  “Good,” she said. “You may be an asshole, Victor, but you’re a hell of a lawyer.”

  Then she leaned down and kissed me on my head before leaving the bar. I didn’t turn to watch her go. Instead I snatched down the rest of my drink and ordered another.

  I was just bringing the newly filled glass to my lips when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I swiveled around. Beth was standing
there, her head tilted to the side.

  “Just out of curiosity…”

  I laughed, she joined in, and for a moment it almost felt all right between us.

  When she left for good, I tried to think it through again. I was failing to make some obvious step. That night with Bob in this very bar seemed to hold an answer for me. What had he said after all the violence and the blood? Whom did you help today? Yes, right, as if I were the hapless, selfish failure, all of which I admit to, and he was the saint. And then something else. Accidents happen, Victor, remember that. Sometimes even the best of intentions go awry. That’s right. And he said something similar earlier, when I was in the chair. Most murders are accidents of blind happenstance, had said Dr. Bob. Another absurd event in an absurd world. But even Camus knew that the absurdity of the universe could only explain so much. Even if the murder itself was an accident, why was Dr. Bob in Leesa Dubé’s apartment on the night of the murder? What was their connection, other than doctor-patient? What was going on? Why?

  In frustration I tapped the black plastic of the videotape with my fingertips. Then I stopped the tapping and looked at the vile thing in front of me. I lifted it up and examined it closely. The black plastic, the French scrawled on the white label, the stains that spotted the paper. The spots. The stains.

  And suddenly, strangely, the thing grew hot in my hands.

  61

  Defense attorneys like weakness. We are always on the prowl for some small flaw we can relentlessly attack, a crack to pound and pry until the whole facade of personality crumbles into dust. That’s why we’re such fun at parties. But Detective Torricelli, lunkhead though he might be, was a surprisingly uninviting target. Not that there weren’t flaws. The man was as ugly as a pig’s foot and had the surly manner of the guy who cleans your sewers. But though he might not have been a stellar detective in the street, he had learned to play one on the stand.

  Dalton had called Torricelli to go through his entire work on the case as a review for the jury. But he wasn’t only there for backup, he was also there to add a little kicker at the end, because it was Torricelli who had performed the initial interrogation of François Dubé.

  “Did you inform the defendant of his constitutional rights?” said Mia Dalton.

  “Sure I did,” replied Torricelli from the stand. “And he signed a form that said his rights had been read to him and that he had understood them.”

  “I’d like to show you People’s Exhibit Forty-eight. Do you recognize that exhibit, Detective?”

  “Yeah, that’s the form that the defendant signed while he was with me.”

  “I move People’s Exhibit Forty-eight into evidence.”

  “Any objection, Mr. Carl?” said the judge.

  “Only to the detective’s sport coat,” I said, “not to the form.”

  “You don’t like plaid?” said the judge.

  “I haven’t seen a plaid that blue, Your Honor, since my prom tux.”

  Torricelli turned his baleful glare upon me as the jury laughed. I was hoping they’d laugh long enough to miss the rest of his testimony. No such luck.

  The statement François gave to Torricelli was very similar to the story François gave me. He had worked late the night before. He was exhausted the night of the murder. He had left the restaurant early and gone home alone to get some sleep. It was a no-alibi alibi, it couldn’t be directly disputed, but because there was no corroboration, it didn’t do much good either. If you believed François, you thought he was asleep in his bed at the time of the murder; if you thought him a lying, murderous son of a dog, then he had no alibi. Torricelli shook his noggin enough during his recitation of the statement to let the jury know exactly on which side of that line he stood.

  “Did the defendant say anything to you about the pending divorce from his wife during his interrogation?” said Dalton.

  “He told me it wasn’t going smoothly,” said Torricelli.

  “Did he mention that he had been accused of physical abuse?”

  “No, he did not.”

  “Did he mention anything about his daughter?”

  “He said that she was what they had been fighting over, more than the money. He said that his wife was seeking full custody and intended to move away. And then he said something I thought a little strange, considering the circumstances.”

  “Objection,” I said.

  “No editorializing, Detective,” said the judge. “Just answer the questions.”

  “What did the defendant, François Dubé, say, Detective?”

  “He said, and I wrote this down exactly, because it seemed of interest. He said”—and then the detective recited in monotone—“ ‘I could never let her take my daughter away, don’t you see? She is my life, she is everything to me. Take my daughter and you might as well kill me dead.’ And then he looked at me and said, ‘And I know that Leesa felt the same way.’ ”

  “Did you ask him what he meant by that?”

  “I did, yes. He simply shrugged and looked away. That was the end of the interview.”

  “What do you mean, that was the end? You had no more questions?”

  “No, ma’am. I had more questions. But after that he refused to give me any more answers. He said he wanted a lawyer. Mr. Robinson was hired to represent him,” said Torricelli, nodding at Whitney Robinson in his customary seat in the front row behind our table. “After Mr. Robinson came on board, there were no more interviews.”

  “Thank you, Detective,” said Dalton, heading back to her seat. “I pass the witness.”

  “I didn’t know he was being graded,” I said, to some titters, as I rose, pulled my jacket straight, buttoned it over my yellow tie.

  I stood at the podium for a moment, thought about what I was going to do, what I was getting myself into. Torricelli stared at me, at first with wariness and then with a slight smile as he saw my hesitation and mistook it for fear of his undoubted gifts on the stand. But it wasn’t Torricelli I was afraid of just then.

  I felt a cold wind flit across the back of my neck. I spun around. A reporter, out for a smoke, had slipped back inside, letting in a draft. He started at my sudden movement, as if he had been caught at something. My gaze slipped over to Whitney Robinson, who stared at me with his forehead creased in concern, as if somehow he could read my exact dilemma.

  “Mr. Carl,” said the judge.

  I turned around again. “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you have questions for this witness?”

  I thought about it for a moment more, slipped my tongue into the gap that still existed in my teeth, pressed its tip into the hole in my gum. I felt a clip of pain just then, and somehow that decided it. I pounded the podium lightly.

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  62

  “Detective Torricelli,” I began, “you were the lead investigator on the Leesa Dubé murder, isn’t that right?”

  “I took the lead on this case, yeah,” he said from the stand. “It was my ups when the call came in.”

  “And as part of your investigation, you spoke to Mrs. Dubé’s friends and family, isn’t that right?”

  “When we are investigating a murder, we try to learn as much about the victim as we can.”

  “How did you find the names of all these people you interviewed?”

  “We spoke to the victim’s family, and they gave us names of friends. The friends gave us more names. That’s how it’s done.”

  “You didn’t use a little black book?”

  “During our initial and subsequent searches of the victim’s apartment, we couldn’t locate an address book or a PDA. Without that, we were forced to build a chain of contacts from our interviews.”

  “Was that unusual, not finding an address book or a PDA?”

  “Not really, though in this case it was a little surprising. Mrs. Dubé seemed to be a very organized woman.”

  “Could the address book have been stolen during the time of the murder?”

  “There was no other e
vidence of a robbery. It’s unlikely that a robber would leave the jewels and cash and yet take the address book.”

  “Unless the murderer’s name was in the book and he wanted to remain nameless. Now, Detective, without the address book, were you able to talk to Leesa Dubé’s doctors?”

  “We found some names and made some calls, sure, but such inquiries are often not effective, and these calls were similarly not helpful. There is the matter of doctor-patient confidentiality, which often makes getting information difficult, and the prior doctor visits can happen months, sometimes years, before the crime. In specific cases, where the medical status of the victim becomes more relevant, we have ways to get more specific help.”

  “Was this one of those cases?”

  “No. The report of the medical examiner gave us no indication of a medical problem. We did find the name of the victim’s gynecologist, and we asked if she had noticed anything unusual going on with the victim in the year or so before her murder. The answer she gave, without violating doctor-patient privilege, was no.”

  “What other doctors did you call?”

  “The pediatrician for her daughter. Mrs. Cullen, the victim’s mother, had the pediatrician’s name. Again, there was nothing noted by the doctor which might have had an impact on the investigation.”

  “None of the abuse invented by Mr. Gullicksen for the divorce pleadings?”

  “Objection to the term invented,” said Mia Dalton.

  “I’ll rephrase. Did the child’s doctor see any signs of abuse?”

  “There was nothing noted by the pediatrician, no.”

  I turned, smiled at François like an uncle who had just received comforting news. These are the things you resort to in a murder case. “Did you contact any other doctors in the course of your investigation, Detective?”

  “Not that I recall.”