Becky’s place was a small single-story house set well back from the street. It looked a bit better kept, even in the dark. There was a small porch in the front. A single light was on inside, but nothing else showed. I eased the Chrysler into the rutted driveway.
A battered old car, older than the one I used to drive, was parked on one side of the porch. I could see it reflected in lights from a nearby house.
On the other side of the porch, parked in close, as if trying to hide, was the stern of a big, new Mercedes. My headlights caught it, and the gleaming gray steel seemed somehow obscene and out of place. I quickly killed my headlights.
Up until I saw the Mercedes I had been relaxed. Relaxation vanished as quickly as my headlights.
I walked up on the old porch. The wood creaked with every step. I tapped lightly on the screen door. The main door was already open.
“Mr. Sloan?” Her voice was just above a whisper.
“Yes,” I whispered back, and felt ridiculous for doing it.
She appeared, but the inside light was behind her so I really couldn’t see her face very well. She was nicely dressed, dark slacks and a fashionably baggy sweater.
She opened the door and I stepped in.
She grabbed me and hung on as if she would drown if she let me go. Her entire body trembled with small, continuous spasms.
“There,” I said, trying to soothe her. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
I looked over her shoulder into the small living room. It was tiny, just a couch and a chair separated by a worn coffee table. Nothing matched. A small color television was set on the coffee table.
But I could see that everything was not going to be all right.
Howard Wordley sat in the old overstuffed chair. He looked like he might have sat there often. The old chair held him like a glove. He was slouched a bit so that his head was supported by his rather large stomach. He was looking directly at me. He was fully clothed. Expensive stuff, from his sports jacket to his tasseled polished loafers.
His small round hands were perched along the top of his belly.
I didn’t say hello. There wasn’t much point. He was dead.
He had a small caliber bullet hole the size of a thin pencil just above his right eyebrow, and another just below it. There was little blood at either wound. His dark jacket looked a trifle too dark in several spots, and I presumed bullets had entered there too.
If he was a suicide, he had been extremely clumsy about it.
“Help me.” Her voice was like an echo from somewhere inside my chest. The shaking was getting worse.
I guided her past the awful sight in her living room into a small kitchen and sat her down on a kitchen chair.
“Listen to me,” I said sharply. “I can’t tell you what to say, and I can’t build a story for you to tell the police. Do you understand that?”
She nodded.
“If you shot him,” I said, speaking slowly so she would understand me, “there are several defenses. One, self-defense. If he was trying to kill you, or you thought he was, and based on past experience with him that doesn’t seem too unlikely. If that was the way it was and you shot him to save your own life, that’s called self-defense.
“Another defense is mistake. If you mistook him for a burglar, probably not too plausible seeing how well you knew him, but if it was a mistake and you did think he was a burglar, that is a legitimate defense. I can’t tell you what to say, but I can tell you your legal rights.” I was telling her what to say, but it was called the lecture and a protection against an obstruction of justice charge.
“Mr. Sloan,” she interrupted me.
“Becky, I’m a lawyer, not an accomplice. I have to report this and I have to do it now. There’s a record of when you made that call to me. They’ll check everything. I can’t do you much good if I’m in jail too.”
“Mr. Sloan. This is a nightmare. I didn’t mean to do it.”
“Okay, let’s make this very quick. Tell me exactly what happened. If it was self-defense maybe there is something I can do.”
She tried to light a cigarette but her hands were shaking too badly.
“Lately, Howard’s been coming over here to”—she looked away—“to see me. It’s been, well, fine. You know, comfortable.
“But his visits started getting less and less.” She looked at me again. “He said it was business.” The word business was spoken with sharp bitterness.
“Tonight he came over unannounced. Usually he tells me if he’s coming and I get in some wine and cold cuts, that sort of thing.”
“Go on,” I said, conscious of the passage of time.
“Tonight he came over. He sat down”—she nodded toward the living room—“and told me everything was over between us.”
“Because of his wife?”
She shook her head slowly. A sob preceded her next word. “His sales manager. A woman, a young woman, who looks like a cheap whore. He said he had started seeing her.”
She looked at me, tears flowing like little rivers. “He said he wanted a younger woman.”
“And suddenly you don’t remember anything after that,” I prompted.
She shook her head. “I remember everything. I went to my night table, got my gun, it’s a small pistol I keep for protection. This can be a dangerous neighborhood. I came out and shot him. First in the face and then in the stomach.”
“How many times?”
“Six, I think. The gun has a six-round clip. I fired until it was empty.”
“Did he say anything when he saw you with the gun? Was there a struggle?”
“No. He didn’t have a chance, really. I just started shooting.”
“How long after that did you call me?”
She paused, thinking. “Minutes, I guess. I was so upset. I loved him. I didn’t mean to kill him, or even hurt him. It was just so . . .” She started to cry again.
“Where’s the gun now?”
She reached into her slacks.
I shook my head. “No. Keep it there. Give it to the police when they come.”
“Mr. Sloan, what will I do?”
I sighed. “First, you refuse to make any statements to the police unless I’m there with you. This is important. Do you understand?”
She nodded.
“They will have you seen by doctors. You will refuse to discuss any aspect of what happened here unless I’m right there with you.”
“But—”
“Please, Becky. I don’t know what I can do for you under these circumstances, but whatever I can do legally, I will.”
“Thank you.”
“And don’t talk to any fellow prisoners in the jail about what happened here. That’s a favorite device, a sweet, kind cellmate, full of sympathy, who later turns out to be a cop.”
She nodded, then paused. “Mr. Sloan, I don’t have much money. The most valuable thing I have is the diamond ring Howard gave me.”
I figured, given Howard’s reputation for honesty, that the ring was probably glass, not even cubic zirconia.
“We’ll work it out,” I said.
I walked out to the living room. Wordley was just as relaxed as before. I gingerly picked up the telephone and dialed the police.
12
They came quickly enough, at least the first scout car did, arriving in only a matter of minutes. Then came the detectives covering the night shift, who seemed annoyed. Not that a murder had been committed, but that someone had been so inconsiderate as to do it on their shift.
The Kerry County medical examiner, Dr. Ernesto Rey, was at a convention, so the police had to borrow a pathologist from Oakland County, a man I knew well, a good doctor, careful, intelligent, and, unfortunately for defense lawyers like me, an excellent and skilled witness.
Finally, Stash Olesky made his appearance. His deep-set eyes were swollen with sleep, his blond hair uncombed, making him look more like an overage paperboy than Kerry County’s leading murder prosecutor. When fully awake, Ol
esky’s wide cheekbones gave those eyes a certain quiet menace, like a Polish aristocrat thinking about killing the czar. Now he looked like he was thinking nothing more sinister than going back to bed.
Olesky was good, the best trial man on the prosecutor’s staff. He had a reputation of being absolutely fair. Plus, he was a hell of a workman. He would have made an excellent judge, or just about anything else connected with the law, but he liked criminal trial work, and he particularly liked trying murders.
I liked him a lot, and if that wasn’t entirely mutual, I think he did respect me. It was always a little hard to tell what Stash might be thinking behind those expressionless but penetrating Polish eyes.
We did the expected legal dance. He tried to wheedle me into allowing them to take a statement from my client. “Just to clear up a few small things,” he said.
I said since there was no proof that my client had done anything illegal, she should be released in my custody.
It was like two roosters in the henhouse, flapping their wings at each other. It was meaningless, but expected.
They took poor Becky away, first to have nitrate tests done to show if she had fired a weapon, then fingerprints, and then to the county hospital to discover any injuries, or lack thereof, that might later influence the case.
Stash assured me Becky would be inviolate from questioning unless I was present. His word, I knew, was good.
The medical examiner didn’t spend much time on the body. He didn’t have to.
He pulled off his latex gloves and smiled at me.
“You’re getting faster, Charley. You didn’t used to beat the cops to the scene in the old days.”
“New management techniques. Computers. They work wonders.”
He chuckled, then looked at Stash. “Is there someplace we can talk?”
Stash smiled, or what passed for a smile. “Go ahead. Charley probably knows more than we do anyway.”
The doctor shrugged. “Six shots, six hits. At a carnival she would have won a prize.”
“When you say ‘she’ I presume you’re just picking a convenient pronoun out of the air?” I asked.
“C’mon, Charley, this isn’t a courtroom. I looked at the weapon. It’s an old purse gun, .25 caliber, six shot clip. The old ladies’ gun, as they used to call it. Hardly better than a BB gun.”
“It did the trick, though,” Stash said.
The doctor nodded. “Yeah. I won’t know for certain until I cut him up but I think that one of those shots just over the right eye probably did the killing. Based on the angle, I think that puny little slug just flew right past the occipital cavity and blew out his brain stem. That’s just a guess, but I’ll find out.”
“The other five shots were for insurance,” Stash said, taking out a cigarette.
“Whatever. In any event, he’s dead. I’ll do the autopsy in the morning and fax a copy. The lab work will take longer. Any hurry on this one?”
“Not on my part,” Stash said, looking at me.
I shook my head. The doctor waved good-bye.
The detectives and the evidence men continued working as Stash guided me into the small kitchen.
He finally lit the cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “What’s the background here, Charley? There’s no reason to hold back. I’ll know everything by morning.”
He was right. I pulled out a chair and sat down.
“Did you recognize her, Stash?”
“Sure. She’s a waitress up at the inn. Lovely person.” He grinned. “And a hell of a good shot, too.”
“Howard Wordley, you obviously know.”
He nodded. “He’s a fixture. I should say, was. I haven’t gone to a benefit or a public party since I got up here that he wasn’t glad-handing the people. He sold a lot of cars that way.”
“Did you like him?”
Olesky shrugged. “Hey, he immediately knew I couldn’t afford a Mercedes or any of his other fancy wagons so I became a nonperson. That’s probably why I didn’t burst into tears when I first saw him there dead in the chair.”
“Remarkable restraint.”
The meat wagon crew carried out their cargo, and most of the detectives, except a handful of technicians, had gone.
“So, Charley? Tell.”
“A few weeks ago Becky Harris came to my office. She wanted me to check on a complaint she had made to the police against Wordley. She claimed rape.”
Those eyes of his became a little less sleepy.
“You’ll see the pictures, Stash. Wordley goddamn twisted her head off. Came within an inch of killing her. That’s not my opinion, that came directly from your police doctors.”
“Who was the officer in charge?”
“Sue Gillis.”
“Sue’s very good, very competent. What happened?”
I sighed. “Like most cases, there were a few flies in the ointment.”
“Like what?”
“Becky Harris was Wordley’s lover. At first, he was taking her up to Port Huron, buying her dinner, and getting some good old motel passion in exchange for the turf ’n’ surf.”
“Then?”
“Then old Howard decided that doing all that was a waste of time and money, so he insisted on a nice quick economical oral act of love in the inn’s parking lot. No mess. No unnecessary time loss.”
“Ah, I admire an organized man. Then?”
“One night Becky somehow sensed that the romance had gone out of their relationship. She refused the usual service.”
“And that’s when he twisted her head off?”
“Right.”
“She made a formal complaint?”
“She did. Wordley retained the famous Victor Trembly, the Clarence Darrow of Port Huron.”
“Getting him as your lawyer is an admission of guilt right there.” Olesky smiled.
“Anyway, after consulting with Trembly, Wordley said Becky was a prostitute and that he paid her twenty dollars for each service performed. He said, on the night of the injury, she wanted more money and that when he refused she came at him with a knife and that he strangled her to save his own life.”
“Had he been cut?”
“No.”
“No knife produced?”
“None.”
“So?”
“By the way, Becky had been arrested and convicted for accosting and soliciting in Cleveland ten years ago. She said it was a mistake and I believe her.”
He chuckled. “You would.”
“We went to consult with your new boss.”
“That asshole. If he even lasts until election, it’ll be a miracle. What did that master intellect have to say?”
“Despite the photos and the rest of it, he would not issue a warrant, even for assault.”
“How come you didn’t go to the papers, Charley, and take that asshole’s skin right off?”
“I didn’t need to. I painted a picture of every feminist in the county carrying cards and marching, coming down to the office to perform ritual castration.”
“They’d never find anything to cut, but go on.”
“He then agreed to prosecute, at least on assault.”
“So?”
“Wordley, coached by Trembly, sought out Becky and persuaded her—even gave her a ring—that he truly loved only her, and soon, he didn’t say how soon, he would jettison the current Mrs. Wordley and then the two of them could drive through blissful life together in his always-newest model Mercedes.”
“And she believed him?”
“Must have. She dropped all charges.”
“Did you talk to her after that?”
“No.”
Olesky watched the last technicians pack up and leave. We were alone in the small house. Only a scout car and two bored officers sat watch outside. Someone had removed Wordley’s Mercedes. A few people, even though it was late and the action was over, still hung around, watching from porches.
“What do you think happened here tonight, Charley? I mean, off-t
he-record?”
“Just two lawyers schmoozing, or are you trying to see what kind of a defense I might come up with?”
“A little of both.”
There was no harm in it, since I had no defense. Maybe talking might help me think up one.
“We both know that new lovey-dovey relationships, especially those inspired to keep one party out of jail, never work, generally, right?”
He nodded slowly.
“My guess is that things were coming apart and old Howard wanted to go back to the quick blow job routine.”
“So?”
“Tonight she said no, and remembering what happened the last time, she was afraid that this time she would really be killed. As a precaution she stuck the old gun in her pocket, just in case. And, like a nightmare, it did start happening all over again. He spoke the same threatening words to her, and when he started to get out of the chair and come after her, she fired.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“No, as a matter of fact, she was too upset to really tell me what happened. This is strictly what I’m surmising happened.”
He walked into the little living room. There were a few bloodstains in the chair, the usual chalk marks and police tape, but everything else was just as it was. Of course, Wordley was gone, too.
“Let me give you my guess, okay?”
“Go ahead.”
He gestured at the room. “Hey, admit it. No signs of a struggle, no knife or other weapon laying on the floor or anything like that, right?”
He walked to the chair. “Wordley, as fat as Santa, you recall, was wedged into this old overstuffed chair. Except that he was dead, he looked happy as a clam to me. His little feet dangled, they didn’t even quite touch the floor. I’m on the short side myself, so I notice things like that. In other words, Charley, he didn’t exactly look like he was in midattack.”
He sighed, looking down at the chair. “Look, Becky Harris is a nice woman, aging but she still has that big dream, the dream of holding hands in the sunset with someone who loves her and takes care of her. Nothing wrong with that. A lot of women have that dream. Men too. Her problem is she hooks up with Wordley, who’s a world-class user. But even knowing that, she tries to keep the dream alive. It happens all the time, Charley, we both know that.”
Death Penalty Page 15
