“Did she travel alone, or in company?” Abramowitz asked.
“She went alone. She met a friend there, a Mrs. Gloria Epstein, of 935 Park Avenue, in Manhattan. They did some shopping together, and also went to the opera.”
“Thank you, Detective Petty.”
“You’re welcome.” He folded the notebook and stuck it back in his pocket.
“I have tried to contact Mrs. Epstein, Your Honor,” Abramowitz said to Grant, “but she is out of the country for the summer and has not returned my calls. I do have these receipts to place into evidence, however, to support Mr. Petty’s testimony.”
As she reached for a file Wyatt got to his feet. “This is totally improper, Your Honor,” he said, his face thick with anger. “Under the rules of discovery we must be notified of any evidence presented here—before the fact, not during or after;”
“We were going to, Your Honor,” Abramowitz immediately responded, “but when you allowed the defense a postponement in presenting the rest of their case—over the prosecution’s opposition, I must point out—there was no time to do so. I tried to get to Mr. Matthews earlier this morning, but he was unavailable. He was in conference with you—to which I was not invited—and then with his own detective, a meeting which I was also not privileged to attend. We tried to get this material to defense counsel, Your Honor, but he simply was not available.”
Grant ran a hand through his thinning hair. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to overrule your objection,” he said. “Under these special circumstances, I do believe that prosecution should be allowed to present their case.”
Wyatt sunk into his chair.
Abramowitz opened her file. “I would like to introduce the following items into evidence,” she stated. “One Visa receipt for an airplane ticket, round-trip to New York City. One copy of the tickets, which we obtained from USAir.” As she handed each item to the clerk a second copy was passed across the aisle to Wyatt by one of her gloating aides. “An itemized receipt from the St. Regis Hotel, room number twenty-eight twelve, for the nights of August eighteenth and nineteenth.” She droned on, listing the restaurants, stores, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall. As each duplicate was passed across the aisle Wyatt sat ramrod straight in his chair; his world was collapsing, but he wasn’t going to let the jury see that.
A WOMAN SCORNED. THE oldest syndrome in the book, and he’d let it happen to him. Agnes Carpenter had wanted to help Marvin, all right; but more importantly, she’d wanted to fuck her husband over, for the fucking-over he’d been giving her for years.
He’d had two alibi witnesses. Now one was dead, the other totally destroyed. And the slim hope Violet had presented him with the guy she’d seen in the bar had been nothing more—a hope, not a reality.
Yesterday, he’d been riding high, the summit in sight. At the end of the day he had felt—known—that he was going to win this case.
Now he was dead. And so was Marvin.
The signs had been there, but he’d been too blinded by his own light to see them. When Pagano and Abramowitz so casually and easily let the mistrial opportunity go by he should have smelled the rottenness of his own case. But he was so fucking sure of himself.
Hadn’t he always been a winner? Why should this case have been any different?
Hubris—if he looked in a dictionary his photograph would accompany the definition. He had been soaring, handling difficulties left and right (so he thought) with the blithe assurance of an Olympian god. Now the reality had come home with a thunderous crash.
Darryl had been right after all. He wasn’t equipped to do this, no matter how talented and smart he was in his own field. Talent could only take you so far; then experience took over. This was a seasoned, battle-scarred criminal-defense lawyer’s job, someone who had been there before and could see three moves ahead, who wouldn’t have taken the word of a spurned woman without checking her out independently. The knowing defense lawyer would operate like a great chess master, seeing the entire match unfolding from the opening move and planning accordingly; or in a more popular analogy, doing his job the way a Magic Johnson operated on the basketball court or a Wayne Gretzky did the same on the ice.
He hadn’t done that. And now he would pay the price.
Blake’s computer. That was all he had left. He had to get his hands on it, and hope for a miracle.
Grant had given them the rest of the week to put some kind of alternate case together. A decent thing to do, but would it make any difference?
DORIS BLAKE HAD NOT shown up for work, calling in sick. There was no answer at the door to her rented condo when the marshal, armed with Judge Grant’s court order, knocked. It was late afternoon, a few minutes before five, and the scorching midday heat was still lingering. The small patch of front lawn was withering brown; it didn’t look like it had been watered for some time.
Her door fronted the walkway. It faced west, in a direct line with the afternoon sun. There was no shade. The front blinds were drawn shut; the marshal couldn’t see inside. The sun beat down on his back, raising sweat through his white dress shirt. After waiting impatiently for five minutes, and knocking at regular intervals, he left. Whether her car was in the underground garage or not, he didn’t know; he didn’t look, and he wouldn’t have known which car was hers, anyway.
WYATT WENT HOME. HE wanted to run, really blow it out, and the hot tarry streets of the city weren’t the place to do that. And he was sick, all of a sudden, of living in a rented room. He wanted to be in his own space, sleep in his own bed.
It was late in the day and it was still hot as hell out and humid; everything was wilting. He ran along the road from his house to the highway and back, his road run, seeing again the For Sale sign posted in front of the Spragues’ house. That house was empty—they had gone to Maine to escape the heat. The timer to their sprinkler system was set to a solenoid that activated when the sun went down—water spiraled in graceful pirouettes from rainbirds situated on the corners of the front lawn, a light moist blanket on the dark green hybrid bluegrass.
Turning into his own driveway, he skirted his house, running around the back and taking off onto the trail that led into the woods. Normally he didn’t do this run if he’d done the other, but he hadn’t had a run on his own territory for some time, and he wanted to feel as much of it as he could. And he wasn’t tired enough yet; he needed to run himself into exhaustion, he realized. Run until it hurt and then push past that. For punishment, for some kind of earthbound penance. Which wouldn’t solve any of his problems, but might, in some dim, immature way, make him feel like he was paying his dues. A small down payment.
He didn’t know where he was going with his case. The marshal had reported his inability to serve the order; Blake must have been tipped off that it was coming, and had vamoosed from work. Maybe from the city entirely, even the state. If she was gone and had taken her computer with her, he’d be screwed. By the time they found her and brought her back it would be too late.
He ran for an hour and forty-five minutes. His longest run in months. He skinny-dipped half a dozen laps in the pool to cool down, went inside, threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and made himself a margarita in the blender.
He hadn’t talked to Moira and Michaela for several days—he felt guilty about that, too. He felt guilty about everything, all the guilt in the world was on his shoulders, he wanted it there. He wanted to crumble under the weight of guilt. To be buried under it.
“Hi there,” he said to Moira, who had picked up on the first ring. They were in; that was good.
“Hi, Daddy!” Michaela sang. She was on the extension. “How are you? I miss you, Dad, when are you going to be finished so you can come be with us?”
“I don’t know. Not much longer, I don’t think. Let me talk to Mom for a minute, sweetheart, then I’ll talk with you.”
“Okay.” She hung up.
“I didn’t know if I’d catch you in,” he said to Moira. “You’ve been out a lot. I never know when t
o call.”
“I’m expecting a call from Cissy,” she said. “There’s a problem with the store.”
“Oh. Nothing terrible, I hope.” Instant deflation. She wasn’t waiting by the phone in case he called, or hoping he would. She didn’t care one way or the other.
“Who knows? I’m not there. How was your day?” she asked dutifully, with the same inflection she would use to remind him to have the gardener cut back the ivy before it burned.
He told her. Leticia Pope, Agnes Carpenter, the suspect who hadn’t panned out, Blake’s disappearance.
“That’s too bad,” she said.
Too bad? Leticia Pope was dead and Marvin White was going to be sent to the executioner and her reaction was that it was “too bad”?
“But you’ve done your best,” she went on. “Look at it this way—maybe he didn’t do what they’ve accused him of here—”
“He didn’t,” he answered sharply.
“Whatever. But he did try to kill another man. So it balances out in the end, doesn’t it?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to.
“Have you been by the store lately?” she asked him, shifting gears as if they hadn’t been talking about his case at all.
The question threw him for a loop. “No,” he said.
There was a pause from her end. “Have you been by at all, even once?” She was clearly angry.
“I’ve been busy, Moira,” he reminded her.
“Not even on a Sunday, not once? This is important to me, Wyatt. It’s as important as your work is to you.”
Then why aren’t you here, taking care of it, if it’s that important?
“I want you to do me a favor, Wyatt. I want you to go down there. You can wait until Sunday if that’s the only time you can go”—her tone clearly implying that she didn’t believe he couldn’t go earlier—“and have Cissy explain to you what the problem is, so you can relay it to me. Will you do that?” She paused. “Or is even that too much to ask?”
He didn’t know why he said it, but he did. “I’ll try.”
“Try hard, okay? Now do you want to talk to Michaela? Don’t take long, please; Cissy should be calling any minute and I don’t want to miss it.”
Michaela came on. He told her about the drive-by shooting.
“Oh, Dad!” He could feel her sagging. “Oh, that’s so horrible. That poor girl. And your friend. Dexter, was that his name? And she was so important to your case.”
Which of them was the girl and which the mature woman?
“How are you doing, sweetheart?” he asked her.
“Better, much better.” She lowered her voice. “I wish you were here, Dad. Mom’s really difficult these days.”
“Like how?” He could imagine.
“Everything. Guilt, blame, mad at me because I can’t run around with her like she wants me to, angry at you for still being in this case. Just angry.”
Shit. He felt so impotent. “Hang in there, kiddo. It won’t be too much longer.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she told him. “I don’t want to guilt-trip you. You have so many problems already. I’ll be fine, don’t worry about me.”
“I do; I can’t help it.”
“I love you, Dad. I wish I was there.”
“I love you, too.”
He sat on the back deck, nursing a second margarita. It was dark now; crickets and bullfrogs sang their calls and responses, vibrating and booming out of the night.
A girl had been murdered, Dexter almost. Marvin was facing the gallows. Lives by the dozen were being brutalized, and Moira was angry at him because he hadn’t been out to her little vanity shop.
Had they once been closer in how they saw the world, and over the years suffered an erosion, a slow, imperceptibly widening chasm? Or had the differences always been there, papered over by the comfort of their circumstances?
That cover wasn’t there anymore.
HE SAT IN HIS STUDY, going over his paperwork yet again. Was there anything in this mountain of print he could use, or were his entire case and Marvin White’s life going to come down to whether or not Lieutenant Doris Blake had helped Dwayne Thompson invent the goods on Marvin? The odds seemed astronomically long, especially since the good lieutenant seemed to have flown the coop; but it was the only play he had left. Those two incidents involving computer misuse stood out like neon signs in Vegas: the records showing that Marlow had downloaded the Alley Slasher files onto his computer, which Marlow had flatly denied, which meant that unless it was a clerical mistake, someone else had, under his name; and Blake’s bar exam score being altered, almost certainly via phone-line computer contact.
That Burnside character, the one Violet had spotted. He would have been perfect, except for that one indispensable detail of being in jail during one of the murders. Maybe they had gotten the dates confused, or something. Anything.
He scrounged through his files until he found Burnside’s jail record of when he’d been in. The dates were there, in irrefutable black and white—booked in on date X, released on date Y. Forty-five days, like Angelo had said. Murder number four had occurred on day twenty-eight after Burnside entered the facility.
He mulled over Burnside’s sheet again. This man, this serial rapist, would have been a perfect fit, except for that jail time.
Was there something missing?
The notation, written in ballpoint and smudged from handling so it was almost illegible, was under the section headed “Work Detail: See attached.”
There was nothing attached.
The deputy sheriff clerking at the jail’s record desk knew Wyatt so well by now he didn’t even have him go through the formal process of showing ID. “This is a copy,” he told Wyatt. “Let me go find the original.”
He came back five minutes later, a three-by-five card in his hand. There was both typing and handwriting on the card, some signatures. “You want me to make you a copy?”
“I’d appreciate it.”
THE WRECKING YARD WAS an entire city block square, bounded on one side by the river. Thousands of old cars, flattened like metal pancakes, were stacked on top of each other, a dozen or more in a pile. Trucks rumbled in with old scrap, barges tied up alongside the long dock, buttressed up against the pilings, unloading and loading cargo.
Wyatt stood in the small, cramped manager’s shack, talking to the foreman, their heads huddled together. He had the copy of the three-by-five card in his hand. The foreman pointed to something on the card and nodded. Wyatt pumped his hand vigorously, ran out of the shack, jumped into his Jaguar, and left rubber leaving the yard.
RICHARD AND LOUIS PARKED Richard’s dilapidated old Honda Accord down the block from the Four Deuces. They got out and stood on the sidewalk, surveying the scene. Although it was night, almost eleven, the street was teeming with pedestrian traffic: people getting out of their hot, stuffy apartments, people going to bars where it was air-conditioned. Standing there next to Richard’s banged-up wheels, they felt a keen sense of estrangement, danger, excitement, and pure fear-energy. This was 44th St. Gang territory, and they were most definitely persona non grata.
“You sure this is the only way to do it?” Louis asked, eyes darting about apprehensively, dragging heavily on a cigarette.
“Ain’t the best idea in the. world,” Richard agreed, “but it is a sure thing.”
“Sure thing gettin’ the shit kicked outa us.”
“We got to get arrested, man. A split lip ain’t no big thing.”
Striding down the block, they pushed through the swinging doors into the Four Deuces, and were spotted before they reached the bar, which wasn’t far from the door. “What the fuck you doin’ in here?” called out an angry voice from somewhere back in the room. “This 44th Street territory, mo’fuckers. Get the fuck outa here.”
They ignored the voice and leaned into the bartender, a tough-looking older woman. “Couple of Miller Lites,” Louis growled.
“I ain’t serving you,” the woma
n answered him in an ugly voice. “Get your black asses outa here. I don’t need the kind of trouble you’re bringing.”
“Give us our beers and we won’t be no trouble,” Louis answered. He was talking to the woman, but he was keeping an eye on his back through the full-length back-bar mirror. Richard was standing with his own back to the bar, checking things out.
Louis took a deep breath, “Who in here can give me a good ass-rimming?” He asked the bartender in a voice loud enough to carry the length of the room. “I heard all these 44th Street dudes like it that way.”
It happened immediately—fists, knives, chairs. Richard and Louis were ready; they stood shoulder to shoulder and stoically took the enemy on. The woman bartender was dialing 911 before the first bottle broke, and the cops were there in less than two minutes.
The damage wasn’t that bad, considering the hatred between the warring parties and Louis’s bow-shot. Dexter’s men were beat up, and some of the 44th St. guys were, too. No serious injuries—no guns had been drawn. A few chairs broken, glass bottles smashed behind the bar, the usual dust-up residue.
The two were arrested for disorderly conduct. After spending the night in a holding cell, they were brought before a magistrate in the morning. Although their bail was set low, since it was a relatively minor offense, they chose not to post. They were remanded to the custody of the sheriff to await trial. By one-thirty in the afternoon they had gone through the formal bookkeeping process and were assigned to a cellblock.
It was hot inside the jail—every inmate who wasn’t considered a threat to the population was allowed out. Marvin White and Dwayne Thompson weren’t among those afforded this privilege, of course (for very different reasons), but almost all the other prisoners were.
How the fight got started, no one knew. Most likely an argument over hogging time in the weight area. All of a sudden Richard and another prisoner, a white guy, got into it big-time. Richard was banged up pretty good, but the white dude got the worst of it. By the time some of the trustees and guards were able to pull them off each other he had several teeth knocked out, possibly some broken ribs, and numerous bruises and contusions.
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