Alibi

by Sydney Bauer

  “Jesus, that’s all we need.”

  “How’s Sara?” asked Joe after a pause.

  “Great,” answered David with enthusiasm. “She’s working on setting up a pro bono arm of the firm. Her background at AACSAM means she has a lot of experience with clients who might not necessarily be able to afford private representation. In fact, she already has her first client—a young waitress being sexually harassed by her restaurant owner boss.”

  Before Sara joined their firm last year, she had been employed by AACSAM, the African-American Community Service Agency of Massachusetts. While working at the respected community service agency, Sara spent her days helping African-Americans and other minority groups negotiate everything from legal aid and insurance payouts to health benefits and educational assistance.

  “She’ll kick ass,” said Joe. “She has the heart for it.”

  “That she does,” said David.

  They sat in silence for a moment, settling for two more beers from the tap—the new stronger, harsher lager somewhat jarring after the light imported brew—before David sensed Joe was still unsure as to whether or not he would share what he had intended to when he called David and asked him to this little get-together earlier that afternoon.

  More often than not, Joe’s inclination to clam up was due to his desire to protect David, his professional obligations and the possible repercussions of brainstorming with a cop. David was a defense attorney after all, and Mannix, despite his abhorrence for ADA Katz, was meant to be an extension of the prosecutor’s team.

  But whatever was bugging Joe tonight, David was sure there could be no conflict of interest. David’s only current case was a health insurance dispute, and Sara was working on the pro bono thing so . . .

  He knew his detective friend had been working on the high-profile Nagoshi case, but he also knew there had been no arrest, and according to his other friend and sometime drinking buddy, Boston Tribune deputy editor Marc Rigotti, no new public release of information. But maybe that was the problem, David thought. Maybe Joe was jammed up because there was nothing to report. Which also meant he was probably . . .

  “I’m feeling some heat,” said Joe, interrupting David’s reverie and finishing his thought all at the same time.

  “The Nagoshi case?” asked David, just as Elvis Presley’s “A Fool Such as I” hit the jukebox turntable.

  Joe said nothing, just nodded.

  “So what’s the problem?” prompted David.

  When Joe put down his drink and turned to face his friend, David noticed how tired he was looking. His normally olive Italian-American skin was a sallow shade of gray, and his dark brown eyes ringed with the telltale signs of exhaustion.

  “I can’t get a read on this one, David. The case is so . . . clean.” Joe shook his head before going on. “The girl was about to start her third year at Deane, she was aiming to go to law school, so all her subjects are pre-law—except for art history, which she studied independently at some fancy art school in Fenway.

  “She was smart, friendly and popular in an upbeat sort of way. Her family are strangely calm but extremely cooperative, her friends are forthcoming about the girl’s genuineness and her teachers do nothing but rave about her.”

  “Boyfriends?”

  “None as far as anyone knows—and Frank and I must have interviewed over a hundred people on this one. Besides, her father is the controlling type so I doubt any kind of illicit tryst would get past him—nor the older brother for that matter, who, as far as I can tell, is twenty-six going on fifty—a chip off the old block.”

  “Last twenty-four hours?” David asked, his brain now snapping into investigatory mode.

  “Nothing extraordinary. It was the last Friday before classes resumed so she went shopping on her own for school stuff in the morning, then to some French art film with two girlfriends in the afternoon—and out that night with same said female friends.”

  “Underaged drinker?”

  “Most are, but not in this case,” said Mannix. “She went to the Lincoln Club and met up with some college friends, but from what the bartender says, she was drinking sodas. The Lincoln is considered a family club so underage entry is allowed as long as they are not consuming alcohol.”

  “You mean it turns a blind eye to the robust drinking habits of the Ivy League offspring of wealthy member parents.”

  Joe shrugged again.

  “Come on, Joe. These kids are probably covering half of the Lincoln’s exorbitant Beacon Hill rent. I’ve heard about that place on a Friday night. My guess is half the clientele is underage and most of them are chugging back imported beers and expensive wine coolers at seven dollars a pop.”

  Another shrug. “What can I tell you?” asked Joe. “It’s not like we never . . .”

  “Fair enough,” said David, realizing this was the second time in the past couple of months that he suddenly felt old.

  “So what did the autopsy tell you?” David went on, getting them back on track.

  “That she hadn’t been drinking, for starters,” said Joe, instinctively draining his own glass until all that was left was froth. “As far as the cause of death goes, Gus was spot on. Jessica Nagoshi died from manual strangulation, but not before someone clobbered her on the head with both ends of a garden hoe.”

  “Both ends?”

  “Yeah.” Mannix shrugged. “Go figure. The girl got it wham, wham—top and bottom ends—one blow from the right and a second from the left.”

  “Two perps?”

  “Unlikely, but Gus says the blows applied equal pressure so maybe someone ambidextrous.”

  David paused. He could tell this ambiguity annoyed Joe, and it puzzled him as well.

  “What about physical evidence?”

  “The Nagoshis run a tight ship. Their staff are all from Tokyo and have been with them for years, including the gardener who is straight up. There were only four sets of clean regular prints in the greenhouse: the three family members—the mother died seven years ago—and the gardener. There were however two separate unidentifiable prints, the first one on the rock the perp used as her death pillow, and the second on the glass near the greenhouse door. Both are smudged and the one on the rock is pretty much unreadable.”

  “I know your CSR guys are the best, Joe, but have you thought of getting the FBI to . . .”

  “The two prints are down at Quantico as we speak. I called Susan Leigh and she is gonna make sure they get the full treatment. Our guys lifted them with the latest technology—glue fuming, photometric stereo imaging and so on—so in the very least, the FBI lab guys have the best raw materials available.”

  David knew of these two techniques. Glue, or cyanoacrylate, fuming was a process whereby the fumes from heated glue are directed onto a surface using a fuming chamber and a small fan. Fingerprint powder is then applied to make the prints visible. The technique worked on most smooth surfaces, including human skin and glass.

  The photometric stereo imaging would have been used on the rock because it was a superior method for lifting prints off rough surfaces. From what David could remember, it used different angles of light to enhance the recovery of the print by reducing the variations in the background surface.

  “Anything else?” David went on.

  “A partial shoe print, which appears to be a size eleven and have the Nike logo in its tread. It doesn’t match any of the family member’s or gardener’s shoes but it’s a basic trainer print, most likely from an average sized man, which narrows my search down to roughly one quarter of the male population in Boston.”

  “You holding anything back?” asked David, referring to an old homicide cop’s trick of keeping some small detail from the press in an effort to flush out perps who accidentally “flip” on said detail, not realizing it had been kept under wraps.

  “Two things, actually,” said Joe. “The first is, well, we haven’t even told the family, so . . .”

  “I understand,” said David, knowing when not to
push.

  “As for the second,” Joe continued, “the perp took her shoes.”

  “Hmmm,” said David. He had heard of “trophy” killings where murderers took some of the victim’s possessions as mementos, but in cases such as these, the stealth of clothing usually went hand in hand with some kind of sexual assault. But according to what David had read, the Nagoshi girl had not been raped. He turned to Joe.

  “There was no evidence of sexual assault, right?”

  “None.”

  “Then the shoe thing is kind of . . .”

  “Weird, I know,” said Joe, signaling for two more lagers. “I rang Simba and asked if we could put a profiler on it. See if it means anything.”

  “Simba” was the nickname of the FBI’s Boston Field Office Special Agent in Charge, Leo King—a brown-haired, wide-eyed investigative genius and, better still, a good and trusted friend.

  David nodded as he accepted the fresh drink from the now satisfied bartender and took a long sip. He noticed the brew was softening with practice, or maybe they were just getting a little drunk.

  “That it?” he asked after a while.

  “Pretty much,” said Joe. “We’ve been through the girl’s room and college locker and found nothing untoward. She was a straight-A student, on the university lacrosse team and pretty good at the art stuff. She liked to draw—sketch things. In fact . . .”

  Joe bent down to his worn leather briefcase and pulled out what appeared to be a large sketch pad in a plastic evidence bag from one of the many inside flaps. He reached into his pocket and retrieved a pair of plastic evidence gloves, slipping them on in seconds—a practice he no doubt could do in his sleep, considering his daily dealings with death.

  “What did she draw?” asked David, pulling his stool a little closer to get a look at Jessica Nagoshi’s work.

  “Portraits, nature scenes, stuff like that. She was studying French Impressionism and from what her art teacher told us, had a thing for . . . um . . .” Joe dove back into his briefcase to fish out his equally weathered notebook. “Pierre Auguste Renoir—the famous French guy who lived in the late eighteen hundreds. She copied a lot of his artwork in sketches, and I may be no art expert, but they look pretty good to me.”

  David watched as Joe leafed through the book and was seriously impressed. Jessica Nagoshi was one talented kid. He saw page after page of Jessica’s delicate handiwork with the original portrait’s name, and date of the artwork’s completion, at the base of the page: Little Miss Romaine Lacaux—1864, In the Summer—1868, The Dancer—1874, Girl with a Watering-Can—1876.

  There were large works and smaller ones, each capturing the subject matter, mood and lighting of nineteenth-century France. Jessica’s attention to detail was striking. She had the knack of complementing an expert’s work as opposed to making it look like a practiced imitation or tracing, almost as if she had seen these scenes through Renoir’s eyes, just as he did, almost a century and a half ago.

  Joe then flipped the page again, revealing a sketch with a different subject matter. This one was not a portrait and had no title or date at the base. It was also a less structured, gentler interpretation, as if her pencil had taken a route of its own, freed from the boundaries set by a previous Impressionist master.

  “What’s that?” asked David, gesturing toward the sketch of a striking, dark-petaled flower.

  “Black orchid. This is one of her own. The flower grows in the family greenhouse, not far from where we found her.”

  “I thought black orchids were a myth,” said David, remembering reading some article about a couple of not-so-savvy plant smugglers who dyed orchid leaves with black ink, trying to pass off the pale-colored versions as their darker counterparts.

  “Not a myth,” countered Joe. “But rare as hen’s teeth. The Nagoshis’ gardener told me this particular bloom is worth thousands of bucks. In fact, at first we thought Jessica might have walked in on a thief trying to bag the plant, but the orchid was left untouched.”

  “Might be worth checking it for prints,” said David, who could tell by Joe’s expression that the thought may not have occurred to him.

  “I told the CSR guys to lift everything but I didn’t specify the plant life. Maybe they forgot the flower. It’s not exactly an obvious place to . . .” said Joe.

  “No,” said David. “But it’s doable. In fact, a lab tech from Philly once told me petals are the perfect surface for latent print lifting because they are smooth and soft and slightly moist. He also says they have little hairlike things on their surface that compress with contact and can sometimes provide a perfect print re-creation.”

  David watched as Joe made a note. It was worth a try.

  Joe took another drink before flicking quickly through the rest of the book, and David glimpsed page after page of what looked to be some amazing reproductions. He stole a quick glance at Mannix, and saw how close the normally detached investigator was getting to this one. The sketchbook’s corners were crinkled with signs of repeated turning and David guessed Joe had spent many an hour doing exactly what he was doing now—looking for some sort of clue, or hidden message, from the hand of the girl whose life it was his job to avenge. This one has got to him, thought David, feeling more than a tinge of concern for his dedicated friend.

  And then something caught his eye. A quick flick of a sketch that showed traces of the same fluidity expressed in the drawing of the rare black orchid.

  “Wait,” said David, grabbing Joe’s arm. “Go back,” he said. “Further, before the one of the girl combing her hair.”

  Joe flipped backward and stopped at the portrait of a young man. It was drawn from a diagonal, showing most of the right side of his face and part of his left. The boy’s expression was calm but focused, as if he was listening to something important and absorbed by the wonder of what he heard. His hair was short and dark, his skin shaded to appear tanned, his jaw strong, his eyes pale.

  “God,” said David then.

  “What is it?” said Joe.

  David hesitated. For some reason he felt an odd reluctance to share what he was thinking, which was ridiculous given Joe was a friend and this was a murder investigation, and even if he was right it did not mean that the boy in the sketch had anything to do with Jessica Nagoshi’s death.

  “I know this kid, Joe,” he said at last, grabbing a bar napkin and taking the sketchbook from his friend’s gloved hands. “At least I think it’s him. I met him out one night. He is a friend of Sara’s brother. A law student. He called me up after. We met a couple of times for coffee. I have been helping him with his studies.”

  “What?” asked Joe, clearly walking that fine line detectives often walked—between frustration and breakthrough, between disappointment and hope. “But I showed John Nagoshi the sketchbook and he didn’t recognize anyone . . . Who the hell is this kid, David?”

  While logic reminded David that the simple sketch meant nothing, he also wondered what the consequences of his next utterance could be—for him and for Joe and for the good-looking kid in the skillfully drafted image before him. He was a young man David had come to like, admire even, perhaps even seen traces of himself in—the young man he had been back in his senior year at law school, loaded with idealism and with a world of possibilities at his feet.

  “His name is James,” he said at last. “James Matheson. He is in his last year of law at Deane. The night I first met him he was drinking at a Cambridge bar with his law school buddies—and it was the same night that Jessica Nagoshi was killed.”

  David looked at Joe then, and he could see the newfound interest in his eyes.

  “And later, just before he left, he asked us if we wanted to join them. They were planning to make a night of it, their last big fling before the new semester began.”

  “Jesus,” said Joe then. “He told you where he was going.”

  And David nodded. “He was headed to the Lincoln Club,” he said then, looking down at the drawing once more, now feeling the
highly illogical and yet undeniable twang of guilt. “It’s him, Joe. I am sure of it.”

  11

  It was early. Peter Nagoshi had only slept for four hours—a routine to which his body had now become accustomed given his increasingly senior role in a multinational company. He had been woken at five by a telephone call, and the information that was delivered had not pleased him. In fact, he was quietly seething with fury—at Mr. Kwon and his inability to control those determined to jeopardize the progress of their manufacturing operations in China.

  The Nagoshi heir rose from his bed and retrieved his green silk robe from the antique Japanese oak closet. He put on his matching silk slippers and walked across the plush handwoven rug to the bedroom door. From here he proceeded down the hallway to the stairwell, ignoring the framed Japanese scrolls that hung in chronological order on the corridor walls—scrolls he would often stop to read, admire and draw inspiration from. But not today.

  This morning he slipped down the hall of the exceptionally large two story apartment, taking the marble stairs two at a time before going into the kitchen for his ritual morning coffee. It was his only Western vice—coffee—strong and rich and, dare he admit it, effectively filling him with the energy he needed to face mornings such as these.

  He gazed out the kitchen window. The city was still a sea of lights—the rectangular expanse that was Central Park cutting a dark divide across midtown Manhattan. His father was still asleep and he did not want to disturb him.

  The Chinese. Yes, they were a problem. He had been unwise to underestimate the scope of unrest in Guangdong. Perhaps he should have stopped to read the scrolls this morning after all, for they documented the magnificent victories of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894—of Japan’s mastery in embracing the need for advancement and China’s archaic and self-destructive determination to cling to the world of the ancients. Even then, all those years ago, Japan had been wise enough to drain knowledge from the West and perfect and adapt it to major Japanese advantage, sending hordes of its diplomatic and military officials abroad to evaluate and mimic the strengths of European armies, learning from British, French and German advisors so as to construct their own powerful terrestrial and naval forces.