The Undertaker's Widow

by Phillip Margolin

  "I'll never believe that. I know that bitch is behind this. She wanted him dead and she got her wish."

  Chapter 2.

  The honorable Richard Quinn, judge of the Multnomah County Circuit Court, was almost six foot three, but he walked slightly stooped as if he were shy about his height. Despite his size and position, the thirty-nine-year-old judge was not intimidating. He smiled easily and seemed a bit distracted at times. His blue eyes were friendly and his thick black hair tended to fall across his forehead, giving him a boyish look.

  Quinn's workday usually ended between five and six, but he had stayed in his chambers until seven working on the Gideon case. Then his normal twenty-minute commute stretched to fifty minutes because of an accident on the Sunset Highway that had been caused by the rain. When Quinn arrived at Hereford Farms, he was famished and exhausted.

  Homes in the Farms started at half a million. Quinn and Laura could easily afford the place when they moved in five years ago. Quinn was making a six-figure salary at Price, Winward, Lexington, Rice and Quinn, and Laura, an associate at the firm on the fast track to a partnership, was pulling down high five figures with the promise of more to come. Still, Quinn loved the old colonial in Portland Heights where he was living when he proposed to Laura, and he had fought the move to the suburbs.

  Quinn could trace the strains in the marriage to the arguments over the house in Portland Heights. Laura felt it was too small for the parties she wanted to throw and too far from the country club she wanted to join. In the blush of new love it had been easy for Quinn to give in, but he had never felt comfortable in this house that seemed more like a display model than a real home. There was a vaulted ceiling in the dining room and living room and no walls to separate the areas. A chandelier hung high above the stone floor in the entryway. Walls of glass let light flood in everywhere during the day. A circular stairway led up to the second floor. Quinn had to admit the house was impressive, but Hereford Farms and all the houses inside its walled perimeter were sterile and Quinn doubted that he would ever feel at home in this suburban encampment.

  Quinn opened his front door. He started to call out to Laura, then he remembered that she was competing in the club tennis tournament tonight. He hung up his saturated raincoat in the hall closet and fixed himself dinner in the kitchen. There were assorted salads from yesterday's meal and soup he could reheat. Meals for both of them were catch-as-catch-can and they usually ate out or grabbed prepared dinners from a local supermarket because of the hours Laura kept. None of the lawyers at Price; Winward worked a normal, eight-hour day. Many of them worked so hard that they developed health problems, burned out or drank excessively. Laura was one of the firm's hardest workers, but she was in excellent health and rarely touched liquor. The work exhilarated her.

  Quinn was reading in bed when he heard the front door open. He checked the clock. It was a little before ten. Quinn listened to Laura as she rustled around in the kitchen. He heard the refrigerator door swing shut. There were small impacts as a glass or plate touched down on the counter where Laura liked to snack. Later, there were muffled footfalls as Quinn's wife climbed the spiral staircase to the second floor.

  Laura entered the bedroom in her warm-ups. She was thirty-three, six years younger than the judge. Her skin was pale, her hair was caramel and her eyes deep blue. Even without makeup and with her hair in disarray, Laura was attractive. She was also one of the smartest women Quinn had ever met. Her rapid rise to partner was a testament to her intelligence and to the single-minded determination she brought to everything she did. But single-minded determination could also cause problems when there were conflicts in a marriage. Laura rarely gave in on something she wanted. She had prevailed on the house and she refused to consider children while her career was on the rise. The only issue of importance on which Quinn had not yielded to Laura's wishes was his judgeship.

  "How did you do?" Quinn asked as Laura pulled off her sweats and unzipped her tennis whites.

  "I beat Patsy Tang two sets to love," Laura answered matter-of-factly. "That puts me in the quarterfinals."

  "Great. Did you have any problem driving?"

  "No. They cleared that mud slide on Quail Terrace."

  Laura stepped out of her clothes and took off her bra and panties. Quinn had seen his wife naked almost every day for seven years and she still aroused him.

  "When did you get home?" Laura asked.

  "About eight."

  "What kept you so late?"

  "Gideon. He had two supreme court justices, four circuit court judges, a mayor and several clergymen testifying on his behalf. We ran over."

  Frederick Gideon was a Lane County Circuit Court judge who sat in Eugene, Oregon, a small city one hundred miles south of Portland that was best known for being the home of the University of Oregon. Gideon was a popular, conscientious jurist who had made several bad investments. The losses had left him unable to pay for his daughters' schooling. Gideon was severely depressed when the owner of a construction company, the defendant in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, approached him with the offer of a bribe. In a moment of weakness, Gideon accepted the money and granted the defense a directed verdict in its favor.

  The attorneys for the plaintiffs had been stunned by the ruling, which had no logical basis. A private investigator working for the plaintiffs unearthed evidence of the bribe. Judge Gideon, the owner of the construction firm and two other men were arrested. Gideon struck a bargain with the prosecution. He resigned from the bench, testified against the other defendants and was allowed to plead to a single felony that carried a maximum of five years in prison. Quinn was hearing the case because all of the Lane County judges had disqualified themselves. He had spent the day listening to witness after witness extol Gideon's virtues and plead for leniency. Tomorrow morning the attorneys would sum up and he would be expected to impose a sentence.

  "What are you going to do?" Laura asked.

  "I'm still undecided."

  Laura bundled up her dirty clothes and sat beside Quinn on the bed.

  "Did the D. A. bring up some new evidence against him?"

  "No. Jane even let it drop that she wouldn't be upset if I gave him probation. Still ..."

  Quinn stopped, frustrated by the conflicting emotions that had been battling inside him ever since he had been assigned the Gideon case.

  "I don't understand why this case is so hard for you," Laura said.

  "He's a judge. Different rules apply when a judge breaks the law."

  "A judge is also a human being."

  "That's true, but he has to set his standards higher. When you put on the robe you separate yourself from the rest of humanity."

  "Nonsense. You don't become some kind of god as soon as you're sworn in. Gideon was under a lot of pressure. You might have done the same thing if you were in his place."

  "No, never," Quinn answered firmly.

  "How can you say that if you haven't been faced with Gideon's predicament?"

  "Being a judge is more than just performing a job. Americans are brought up to respect the rule of law and they expect judges to administer the law fairly. When a judge takes a bribe, he undermines that faith."

  "I think you're getting a little dramatic. We're talking about one judge in Lane County, Oregon. I don't think the country is going to self-destruct because Fred Gideon took some money so he could pay his kids' college tuition."

  "So you'd go easy on Gideon?"

  "I'd give him probation."

  "Why?"

  "For Christ's sake, Dick," Laura snapped, "he's a father. Send him to jail and you're destroying a family. And for what? Some theory you learned in high school civics?"

  Quinn looked amazed. "How can you say that? You're a lawyer. Don't you respect the system you work in?"

  "I work in the real world, not some ivory tower. Fred Gideon is a poor overworked and underpaid bastard who became desperate when he thought that his kids might have to drop out of college."

  "Gideon
s kids could have gone to the U. of O.," Quinn answered angrily. "They don't have to go to Ivy League schools. You worked your way through. Lots of kids do."

  Laura's features tightened and Quinn was sorry the moment the words were out of his mouth. Until Laura was ten, she had lived in an upper-class suburb on the North Shore of Long Island, New York. Then her father had lost his job as an engineer. After a year of unemployment he became depressed. The family dropped the country club and beach club memberships, Laura's private tennis and piano lessons stopped and her mother started saving coupons and shopping for clothes at discount stores. Laura's father was forced to take a temporary job as a salesclerk, but he refused to let his wife work. His depression deepened and Laura's parents started fighting. By the time Laura was thirteen, her father had taken up with another woman, her parents were divorced and she was living with her mother in a tiny apartment in Queens.

  Laura coped with her new situation by spending all of her time doing schoolwork and playing tennis. Although she had a partial athletic scholarship, she still had to work her way through college. She viewed her father's failure to contribute to her college education as more evidence of his betrayal.

  "I'm sure you'll make the right decision," Laura told Quinn coldly. She went into the bathroom without another word. Quinn knew that he had hurt Laura and he felt bad, but his wife's lack of respect for his work depressed and upset him.

  Quinn tried to read, but his book no longer held his interest. A little while later, the bathroom door opened. Laura walked over to her dresser and slipped into her nightgown. She still looked upset. Quinn did not want Laura to go to bed mad. When she was under the covers Quinn remembered that he had some good news.

  "I'm going to be speaking at that judicial conference at the Bay Reef Resort on St. Jerome. The organizers confirmed late this afternoon."

  Quinn's reading light was still on and he could see little interest on Laura's face.

  "I thought maybe you'd come with me. We can go a few days early and make it a vacation. The only day I'm speaking is Thursday. We'd have the rest of the week free."

  "I'm busy, Dick," she answered coldly. "There's the Media Corp. litigation and the Hunter Air contract."

  "The conference is the last week in February. You have plenty of time to rearrange your work. Come on, Laura. It will be good for us. We haven't had a real vacation in two years."

  Quinn waited.

  "I'd really like you to come with me," Quinn said when he could stand the silence no more. "I can use the break, too. We'd have a great time on St. Jerome. I checked around and the island is supposed to be beautiful. Sand, sun. We'd lie out by the pool and sip banana daiquiris until we were blotto. What do you say?"

  Laura began to thaw. "I can't promise right now," she told Quinn.

  "It won't be anything but work if you're not with me."

  "I'll talk to Mort Camden."

  Quinn brightened and that made Laura smile. Quinn moved against her.

  "I'll be miserable if you're not there."

  Laura touched Quinn's cheek. "You're like such a little boy sometimes."

  Quinn slid his hand under Laura's nightgown. She tensed for a moment, then relaxed and kissed him. Quinn made the kiss last. Laura stroked his neck. They had not made love for a week and a half. Her touch was like a live wire on his nerve endings and he was instantly erect. Quinn stroked down Laura's spine until he was cupping her backside. He enjoyed the tension in her muscles. Quinn felt Laura unsnapping his pajama bottoms. His mouth was dry with excitement. He longed to play with Laura so he could draw out their pleasure. His fingers found her nipples and he began stroking them to make them hard. Before he could finish, Laura was drawing him inside her and he was trapped in the rapid pull and push of her rhythm until, moments later, he exploded and collapsed, spent but not satisfied because of the rapidity of their intercourse.

  Quinn felt the bed move as Laura left it for the bathroom. He replayed the quick sexual encounter in his mind and it occurred to him that sex with Laura had been less and less satisfying in the past year. Quinn stared at the ceiling and tried to remember when making love to Laura had stopped being fun. He knew he enjoyed sex with her tremendously before they were married and he was certain that the sex was still good when they lived in the old house in Portland Heights, but somewhere along the way he started suspecting that Laura was only going through the paces and he began to feel alone and lonely when they coupled.

  Quinn was still excited by Laura and she never denied him sex. On the other hand, Laura rarely initiated the act the way she had when they were dating and she seemed to work hard at finishing quickly, as if sex was another chore, like dish washing, that she wanted to complete so she could move on to more important things.

  Quinn wondered what would happen if he stopped having sex with Laura for a while, but he was afraid that her lack of interest was only in his imagination and that withdrawing from her would hurt her. Quinn could never do that to Laura. He was even more afraid that she would say nothing and that theirs would become a marriage of convenience.

  The toilet flushed and Quinn heard the water running in the sink. He got out of bed and walked by Laura. It would have been so nice if she had touched him as they passed just to show that she was thinking of him. Quinn closed the bathroom door. All of a sudden he felt sad and defeated. He longed desperately to recapture the early days of their relationship when her passion matched his, sex left them both exhausted and fulfilled and he would drift off to sleep with a mind unclouded by doubt.

  Chapter 3.

  Lou Anthony went straight from the Hoyt estate to the Justice Center to dictate his initial report. The last section recounted the incident with Lamar Hoyt, Jr., whose behavior was partially explained by the alcohol he had been drinking and partially by his intense hatred of Ellen Crease.

  Lamar Hoyt, Sr., had been sixty-two when he was murdered. He was a hard-nosed businessman who had turned his father's funeral parlors into a business empire. Junior was the sole issue of Hoyt's first marriage. He had barely made it through college, where he had paid far more attention to football than academics, and had floundered around, failing at various jobs, until his father put him in charge of his mortuaries. Junior had not exactly thrived in the family business, but he had managed to keep it turning a profit. He had also earned himself a reputation as a drunk, a womanizer and a brawler, and he resented his father's refusal to let him play a bigger part in Hoyt Industries, his father's conglomerate. Anthony had learned all this from Ellen Crease, after Junior was escorted off the estate grounds and driven home by a Portland Police officer. Crease despised Junior for being a drunk and a weakling.

  Anthony lived alone, so there was no one to disturb when he stumbled into the bedroom of his split-level at two-thirty in the morning. Lou's wife of twenty-two years had died of cancer three years before but he had kept the house for visits from their kids. The hostile invader had been discovered during a routine physical; the battle to save Susan's life had been furious but short. She was gone eight months later. Lou's son was a freshman in college at the time and their daughter had just been accepted at Oregon State. He was thankful that Susan had died knowing that they had turned out well. There wasn't much else that he was thankful for except the job, which kept him occupied and distracted him from his grief.

  After a few hours of sleep, Anthony was back at his desk reviewing the draft of his report and waiting for the reports from the crime lab and the results of a house-to-house canvas for witnesses that he had instituted shortly after his arrival at the Hoyt estate. Anthony did not expect much from the canvas. A stolen car had been found near the wall that surrounded the estate. He assumed that it was the burglar's getaway car. The fact that it was still parked at the scene meant that the burglar had probably been working solo, but you never knew. There might have been an accomplice who left on foot, though he could not imagine that happening in the previous night's storm when a nice, dry car was available. The estates on Crestview
Drive were all set so far back from the street that he doubted the neighbors would have seen an accomplice slogging from the scene, anyway. Still, stranger things had happened and some crazy neighbor might have been out jogging or walking a dog. Anthony was not holding his breath.

  "Lou."

  Anthony looked up and saw an excited Leroy Dennis bearing down on him with several sheets of paper in his hand.

  "How do you feel about buying me lunch?" Dennis asked.

  "Why would I buy you lunch, Leroy? The last time I sprung for you, you ate so much I almost had to file for bankruptcy."

  One of life's great mysteries was how Dennis could eat and eat and still not put on a pound.

  "I'm a growing boy, Lou. My body just needs more than the average man. It has something to do with my sexual prowess."

  "Give me a break," snorted Anthony, "or give me a reason why I should assist you in committing suicide by cholesterol overdose."

  Dennis not only ate like a machine, but he had an aversion to any kind of food that was even remotely healthy.

  "This is the reason," Dennis said, shaking the documents he held at Anthony.

  "What is that?"

  "Uh-uh. No food, no facts. Hell, I'm so hungry I might just eat this exceptionally fine, and difficult-to-find, evidence."

  Anthony laughed. "You have to be the biggest asshole in the bureau, Leroy, but I was going to eat soon, anyway."

  Anthony stood up and walked over to the closet to get his raincoat. Dennis followed him.

  "Now, what have you come up with?" he asked.

  "The name of our perp," Dennis answered, his tone suddenly serious. "I ran the burglar's prints through AFIS," Dennis explained, mentioning the Automated Fingerprint Identification System that used computers to compare unknown prints to the prints stored in the computer's data banks. "We got a hit an hour ago."

  "Who do we have?"

  "Martin Jablonski. He's got the rap sheet for the job. Armed robbery, assault, burglary. He was paroled from OSP eight months ago where he was serving time for a pretty brutal home invasion that happened six years ago. Pistol-whipped an elderly couple. I talked to his parole officer. Jablonski's supposed to be living with his wife, Conchita Jablonski, and their two kids in an apartment off Martin Luther King near Burnside. He's been unemployed or working as temporary labor since he got out of prison."