Sweet as Sin

by Felix Baron

  Thirty-one

  Andrew paid the cab off a hundred yards from the new home he’d only ever seen in photographs. His coming home for the mid-term break was to be a surprise. That’d been Trixie’s idea. She might be a ditz and a bit of a drinker, but she was so sweet. No sooner had the three of them moved into the Sag Harbor house than she’d mailed him a door key. ‘You should have a key to your own home, even if you can’t use it for a while.’

  When he’d been worried that the letters Penny sent him were a bit impersonal, it’d been Trixie who’d explained that her daughter was so fervently in love with him that she had to keep a lid on her emotions or break down. When he got there, face-to-face, he’d soon discover just how strong Penny’s passion for him was.

  The silly woman had even mailed him travelling money, in cash no less! As if he didn’t have money of his own, and credit cards. Crazy, huh? Crazy-nice.

  He crunched up the circular white-gravel path and paused to admire his Dad’s and Trixie’s home, that he’d be sharing with them from after university until he and Penny married and got their own place. It was certainly big enough for four adults to live in. Andrew approved of there being so many trees, especially an enormous weeping willow that would provide ample shade even on the hottest day. A man and a girl would be invisible, under there. It was a tree that had grown specifically for romantic interludes.

  The key fitted perfectly. He eased the door open, slipped in and set his carry-all down in the hall, making sure that his camera, its case’s strap looped into the handle of his bag, didn’t make a clunk on the random-pine floor.

  It was getting close to noon. Chances were, there’d be someone in the kitchen and that someone would most likely be his Penny. Trixie’d bragged to him about how Penny did most of the cooking. Where would the kitchen be? His nose told him which direction the aromas of bacon and coffee were coming from. A late breakfast, it being Sunday? Andrew eased his feet out of his sneakers and tip-toed to the kitchen door.

  Penny wasn’t in there. Nobody was. What was in there was a shirt of Penny’s, that he recognised from a picture she’d sent him, and the shirt was torn. On the floor there was a pair of panties, also ripped, with dark blood staining the crotch.

  Women bled down there, and accidents could happen, but Penny’d never dump her soiled underwear on the kitchen floor. Something bad was up!

  There was a strangled cry from somewhere upstairs. It sounded like a stretched-out, ‘Nooooo!’ The distorted voice could be Penny’s. Andrew rushed back into the hall and bounded up the stairs. There was a door partly open, opposite him, when he got to the landing. Penny’s anguished moans were coming from behind it. He barged through the door and stopped, stunned. His brain froze as it frantically tried to process what his eyes were showing him.

  His Dad was naked and kneeling up on the bed. His loins were thrusting at Andrew’s beloved Penny, who was on her knees before him. Her arms were bound behind her by straps, rendering her completely helpless. There was another strap in his Dad’s fist, a strap that was tight around Penny’s throat. It looked as if her bulging eyes were trying to tell him something.

  His father was either fucking or buggering his fiancée and at the same time he was strangling her!

  Whatever it meant, he had to stop this nightmare! There, almost at his eye-level, on top of a chest of drawers, was a revolver with its grip towards him. A revolver makes people do things, or stop doing them. Andrew snatched the gun up and pointed it at his Dad’s shock-blanked face. His finger curled onto the trigger, though he hadn’t decided whether he was going to shoot or not, or what he was going to do.

  The revolver went off. His father was thrown against the wall behind the bed by his shoulder. Andrew dropped the gun and blurted, ‘Dad?’

  Thirty-two

  Naked except for elbow-length latex gloves, Trixie followed Andrew up the stairs. By the time she got into the bedroom Andrew had fired the revolver and dropped it. He was standing frozen in shock. Rolf was slumped against the wall behind the bed, also in shock, clutching his shoulder. Penny was rolling off the other side of the bed, away from any blood that might splatter.

  Trixie took the bronze David from on top of the chest of drawers and brought it down on the back of Andrew’s head, hard. He fell. She set the statuette aside and bent to pick up the revolver. There was a desperate question on Rolf’s stunned face. Trixie held the gun a foot higher than was natural for her and fired twice, rapidly, one round hitting high on Rolf’s gut, the second higher again, into his chest, between his ribs. She paused and took a more careful aim. Her third shot, the fourth to hit Rolf, went through the fleshy part of the arm of the hand Rolf had clamped over his first wound, and into his heart.

  Trixie tugged the top drawer of the chest open, took the chamois bag and tucked it into Andrew’s jacket pocket. She set the revolver back on the floor, peeled the glove from her right arm and hand, took another firm grip on David’s bronze legs to leave fingerprints and set him down on his side. Penny turned her back towards her mother. Trixie released the belt that confined her daughter’s arms and took it, plus the one from around her throat, and swiftly went downstairs.

  Penny ran to her bedroom and took a four-minute hot shower. She couldn’t see where any blood had got on her but it wouldn’t have to be visible to be detectable to a forensic scientist. A quart of bleach followed the draining water. She dried off and dressed in a soiled top, shorts and sneakers that she’d worn out running the day before. There was a burr stuck to the back of her top. Both her shorts and her sneakers had grass stains.

  By the time Penny got down to the kitchen her mother had already fed her bloody panties, torn shirt and both of Rolf’s belts to the garburator. While Penny wiped the floor with a bleach-soaked rag, ‘just in case’, her Mom put her latex gloves into the garburator and followed them with a quart of bleach. So that the mechanism wouldn’t seem too clean, Trixie took a plastic bag with coffee grounds, potato peels and the bones from three T-bone steaks from under the sink and put those down the garburator.

  The women nodded to each other. Penny took off out the back door to sprint into the forest and run on the spot there, to work up a good sweat. Trixie went into the hall and opened the case to Andrew’s camera. She changed its lens, took out its memory card and put another one in. There were some photos of Penny hidden in the hall closet, along with a gun-cleaning kit and oil, wrapped in a rag. All of those went into Andrew’s bag, under his underwear.

  Satisfied, Trixie went back into the kitchen, picked up the phone and dialled 911. When the operator answered, Trixie’s breathless voice babbled, ‘He’s gone mad! He’s shot my husband! Help me!’

  The operator said, ‘Please calm down and take your time. First, tell me where you are calling from.’

  Forty minutes later, a paramedic slammed the door of the first ambulance. It pulled away. Penny came running out of the trees, dripping sweat, and demanded, ‘What’s going on?’

  Two more paramedics came out of the front door of the house, pushing a covered gurney towards the second ambulance. Before she could be stopped, Penny rushed to it and uncovered Rolf’s head.

  She clutched at her mouth, gasped, ‘Oh my God!’ and fell to her knees.

  Two uniformed policemen helped Andrew, dazed and in handcuffs, from the house and towards a police cruiser.

  Thirty-three

  The defence attorney, Arthur Rimbold Porteaux, was short and stocky and in his sixties. He wore black three-piece suits with subtle pinstripes. A heavy silver fob chain decorated his paunch but no one had ever seen him consult any watch but the Rolex Oyster he wore on his plump left wrist. His mellifluous voice suggested that he finished each meal with a wedge of crumbly Stilton, a bottle of crusted port and a Churchillian cigar. In fact, he’d never smoked and he hadn’t touched alcohol in eleven years and four months. He was charging Trixie Carmichael eight hundred and fifty dollars an hour, plus expenses.

  No one was ever going to be able to claim th
at Andrew Carmichael hadn’t received an adequate defence.

  Despite Arthur Porteaux’s best efforts and his use of every peremptory challenge the law allowed, four of the jurors were male, over forty-five, and had probably quarrelled at least once with their own sons.

  The prosecuting attorney, Denis Flaherty, was of medium height, thin, forty, and moved incessantly, as if his batteries had been overcharged and he needed to expend energy before he exploded. He wore tan slacks and oatmeal jackets. When he paced – and if he was on his feet, he was pacing – his eyes were fixed on a point on the floor some ten feet ahead, as if the gravity of his thoughts weighed his head down. Even so, from time to time he threw quick glances at individual members of the jury. Those looks were so meaningful, so intimate, that their recipients felt that they and they alone defended the legal system of the State of New York, if not that of the entire country.

  Denis Flaherty summed up. ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the accused, Andrew James Carmichael, has freely confessed to the heinous crime of shooting his own father to death. However, he offers a smorgasbord of mitigating defences for us to choose from, none of which are remotely viable.

  ‘He shot his father by accident. There just happened to be a revolver in his hand and it just went off, all by itself.

  ‘A revolver, as I’m sure you all know from the movies and television, has a safety catch. It also has to be cocked before it will fire. This particular weapon, Andrew Carmichael would have us believe, took its own safety off, cocked itself, and fired, all through some mysterious agency that wasn’t Andrew Carmichael. Further, that unlikely series of events occurred not once, not twice, not three times, but four times, in succession.’

  Denis Flaherty paused and looked up to pierce the eyes of juror number four, an attractive Filipino woman in her late twenties, with a confiding look that suggested that she was far too intelligent to be taken in by Andrew’s bizarre story.

  Denis’s eyes dropped. He resumed pacing and continued, ‘But then he assures us that while the revolver was in his hand, it only fired once.’ Denis pointed his forefinger and crooked his thumb above it, to demonstrate one shot being fired.

  ‘I remind you, ladies and gentlemen, that at the time of the murder there were only three people in the house – the victim, who certainly didn’t put four .38 calibre bullets into his own body from ten feet away – the victim’s wife, who heard the first shot and rushed to the scene too late to save her husband, and who felled Andrew Carmichael from behind – and Andrew Carmichael, who admits firing one shot but in one of his various defences, denies firing the other three.’

  Denis spun on his heel and spread his arms in the direction of Trixie and Penny. Both of them had eyes that sparkled with unshed tears.

  ‘As a matter of routine, the police forensic laboratory tested Andrew Carmichael, Trixie Carmichael and Penelope Sanders for G.S.R.’ He turned back to the jury with an apologetic smile. ‘That’s Gun Shot Residue. When people fire guns, burnt powder gets on their hands. Penelope Sanders tested negative for G.S.R. Trixie Carmichael tested negative for G.S.R. Andrew Carmichael, however, tested positive. He had fired a gun on that fateful day.’

  Denis spread his hands on the ledge of the jury box and gave juror eleven, a plumber who wanted all this over with so that he could get back to work, a look that spoke of his sympathy for all the time that was being wasted.

  ‘Now we must consider the matter of premeditation. Was the murder an act of impulse or was it coldly and carefully planned? If the former, then the accused is guilty of murder in the second degree. If the latter, then he is guilty of murder in the first degree. That boils down to two questions. Did Andrew Carmichael just happen to stumble across a firearm at the very moment that he was engaged in a bitter quarrel with his father? Or, did he take that revolver to his father’s home with the intent of slaying him? In other words, we must ask, how did the revolver get into Rolf Carmichael’s bedroom?

  ‘The last previously known location of the revolver in question, Rolf Carmichael’s own weapon, was in a locked drawer in Rolf Carmichael’s Manhattan office. Andrew Carmichael was a frequent visitor to that office and doubtless knew where to find the revolver he planned to kill his father with. Neither Trixie Carmichael nor Penelope Sanders had ever entered that office. No one, not even the accused, has tried to say that they had.

  ‘It might seem superfluous, considering all the other evidence, but there is another link to the chain that carries the fatal revolver from a locked drawer in Manhattan to a bedroom in Sag Harbor. That is the simple chamois pouch that the police found concealed on Andrew Carmichael’s person. That pouch was stained with gun oil, ladies and gentlemen. That oil was identical in composition to the oil that had been recently used to clean that revolver. A can of that very same oil was found in the accused’s bag, along with a gun-cleaning kit, all wrapped up in a rag that has been scientifically identified as a part of one of his own shirts. It had his DNA on it.

  ‘He stole his father’s revolver. He cleaned and oiled it. He put it in a chamois bag. He carried it to his father’s home with the express purpose of committing parricide.

  ‘There is no doubt that that leather bag is the very one that Andrew Carmichael used to carry the revolver in.’ Denis gave the jury a sad smile. ‘I’m sure that the accused used the bag to protect the pockets of the extremely expensive cashmere jacket his doting father had bought for him.

  ‘The murder was premeditated, ladies and gentlemen. It couldn’t be anything else.

  ‘In a yet further defence, the accused asks you, “Acquit me of the charge of murder, because the first shot, the one I freely admit I fired, but by ‘accident’, wouldn’t have been fatal on its own.”

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the medical evidence fully agrees with the accused. The first shot that he fired wouldn’t have been a fatal one if the victim had received immediate medical treatment, which was why Andrew Carmichael calmly and deliberately followed that first shot with three more, carefully aimed, deadly shots.

  ‘Which brings me to yet another of Andrew Carmichael’s assorted defences: “diminished responsibility, or temporary insanity”.

  ‘He says, “I discovered my father in the acts of raping and murdering my beloved fiancée. Perhaps, while I was out of my mind with justifiable rage, I took up the revolver and, not knowing what I was doing, fired and fired and fired.”’

  Denis mimed a crazed gunman, firing rapidly and repeatedly. He ended with a shrug. ‘It happens. People do go crazy with anger and commit acts that they’d never perform when in their right minds. Such people, in these circumstances, might fire one shot, and then be shocked back into their senses. Alternatively, they might point the gun and fire and fire and fire until it was empty, and then slowly come to their senses. Would such a person, in such a frame of mind, fire four times but not six? You have heard the psychiatric evidence. People just don’t do that.

  ‘We know that Andrew Carmichael spaced his shots, showing perfect self control, because his father had time to clutch at the first wound, the one that shattered his right shoulder, before the other three shots killed him. We know that, because there was blood on the palm of his left hand and because one of those subsequent three shots carved a bloody path through the flesh of his forearm before it pierced his heart, the heart of a man who loved his son, who had nurtured him and raised him on his own since his wife’s death – a son whose education he had spent a considerable sum of money on.’

  Denis’s face crumpled, as if he were about to shed the tears the widow and her daughter were so bravely holding back, but he seemed to recover his self control before he embarrassed himself.

  ‘And this was Rolf Carmichael’s reward for his generosity, to be mercilessly gunned down, in his own bed, by the most ungrateful son any father has ever sired.

  ‘In a similar alternative defence, Andrew Carmichael claims that he killed his father to save the life of his beloved fiancée, Penelope Anne Sanders. The young lady her
self has testified that she wasn’t even in the house, let alone in bed with, being brutally raped and murdered by, her stepfather. Her evidence is corroborated by a witness who saw her return from a long run in the woods around the house, approximately an hour after the time of the murder.

  ‘Andrew Carmichael has stated that Penelope Sanders was his beloved fiancée. Let us examine his claim that Miss Sanders was his betrothed.’

  Denis counted on his fingers. ‘There was no ring. A rich young man became engaged to a rich young woman, and yet he didn’t give her an engagement ring?

  ‘No one, not a single soul, knew of this fantasy engagement, not even Miss Sanders herself. In further witness of this, let us consider her letters to Andrew Carmichael. There were about a score of them, written to him at university and saved by him. In them, she gives him – weather reports. She talks about the horses she has ridden. She discusses her mother’s new obsession with collecting scrimshaw.’

  Denis’s expression spoke of the banality of Penny’s letters. ‘Penelope Sanders wrote to her stepfather’s son, who she addressed as if he was a dear brother, on a dozen topics, none of them love, or passion, or wedding plans.

  ‘Penelope is a nice girl, as you all saw when she was in the witness box. She treated her new “brother” with great kindness. She did not at any time encourage any romantic feelings he might have had for her.

  ‘It is not a defence, but it is obvious that Andrew Carmichael developed an unhealthy, perverted even, obsession with Miss Penelope Sanders. He stalked her. We have heard that at first, Penelope Sanders didn’t know who was following her, and she filed a report with the local police. We have heard her testimony, and that of her mother, that when they discovered it was Andrew who was the stalker, the two of them confronted him. He promised to cease and desist, and so they went to the police and withdrew their official complaint against “person or persons unknown”.