Extenuating Circumstances

by Jonathan Valin

  This was a working-class neighborhood. Peeling frame houses, fields full of auto parts and flat tires, little squares of yard going bald or to weeds. It was a far cry from Riverside Drive, and the cops at the barricade didn’t give much of a damn who came and went as long as they looked semiofficial. I managed to get past them by flashing my ersatz special deputy’s badge.

  I went up a cracked walkway to the porch and found Jack O’Brien leaning heavily on the railing, head down, tie loosened, shirt unbuttoned at the neck. It was hot in the setting sun that poured over the gray slat veranda, but it wasn’t hot enough to make a man look like O’Brien looked. He’d obviously been sick, but then he wasn’t used to violence. He was used to probates and wills.

  “It’s a horrible mess inside,” he said, swallowing hard.

  I stared at him coldly. “Was it Chard?”

  “No one knows. They’re questioning Kent’s aunt, Naomi Trimble, right now.”

  “She’s inside?”

  “The cops picked her up after I phoned Station X.”

  “You found the bodies?”

  He nodded grimly. “After I talked to you I had an attack of conscience and drove over here looking for Kitty. I thought maybe she could talk Terry out of pleading guilty.” He stared ominously at the door, lit up by the sunset. “I don’t know how I’m going to break the news to him.”

  I stared at the door too. It opened on a narrow, unfurnished hall.

  “You going in?” O’Brien said.

  “I think I better.”

  I stepped through the door into the hallway. There was a stairway to the left and a living room to the right. The living room was where the trouble had been. It was where the cops were now—a half dozen of them sifting through the broken furniture and the blood.

  I didn’t go into the room itself. I could see all I wanted to see from where I was standing.

  The two bodies were still lying where they’d fallen. The girl was collapsed on a threadbare floral-print couch, head thrown back, her red hair streaming down over the cushions. She’d been shot in the mouth. The concussion had broken her front teeth and burned her tongue almost black. There was a great deal of dark clotted blood in her hair, on her lips, and down her pale neck. She held a rusted Colt .38 in her right hand.

  The boy was facedown on the floor, directly across the room from Kitty Guinn. He’d been shot several times in the body. Judging by the bullet holes in a spindle-legged coffee table and the blood smears on the hardwood floor, Kent had tried to hide from the bullets. At the end he’d apparently grabbed a heavy glass ashtray and held it over his head—like a shield. He was still holding it to the crown of his head in death, like a glass coronet. It lent an absurd edge to the frightening carnage inside the room.

  I went back out onto the porch, feeling stunned. The kid had been all redneck, so had the girl. Neither one of them had had much use for me—or for each other—but they’d both shown courage and street smarts when it counted. At least they had up until that afternoon.

  O’Brien stared at me searchingly. “What do you think? I mean about . . . in there?”

  I glanced at the street, squinting into the sun and all those other fixed faces staring back at me. “I don’t know, Jack. It looks like a murder-suicide. Of course it could have been made to look that way.” I turned to him. “I know she didn’t like Naomi or Holliday, but did she hate him enough to kill him?”

  O’Brien ducked his head. “Yesterday I told her what you told me,” he said in a guilty voice. “About Naomi coming to see you, about a witness who could implicate Chard.”

  I thought about that for a second. “So let’s say Kitty figured my witness was Kent. That’s certainly no reason to kill him and then kill herself.”

  “She’s been pretty crazy the last few days, Harry. The phone threats and the pressure of testifying at the trial—they’d unhinged her. I told you that—I told you she was right on the edge. Paranoid as hell and swallowing every drug she could find.”

  “That was normal, wasn’t it? The drugs?”

  “What I mean is she was at the end of her rope mentally. I knew it last night when I talked to her—I could hear it in her voice. I guess I shouldn’t have told her about Naomi Trimble. I knew the girl didn’t like her or Kent. But I was getting near the end of my rope too.” He slapped his right hand against the side of his leg. “Christ, I might have caused this thing.”

  “I can’t buy that,” I said, maybe because I was feeling guilty too. Because if O’Brien had had a hand in it, so had I.

  “I don’t know, Harry,” Jack said, shaking his head. “If Chard was planning to kill Kitty, why did he go to see Terry this morning? I mean, why did he bother to threaten Terry if he was planning to carry out the threat?”

  “Maybe Chard wasn’t planning to carry out his threat. Maybe something happened to change his mind this afternoon.”

  “Anything’s possible,” Jack said without conviction.

  It was obvious that he didn’t buy my theory. Maybe I didn’t buy it, either. But I sure as hell was going to check it out.

  28

  I WAITED on the porch with O’Brien for the cops to finish with Naomi Trimble. If Kitty had had a murderous grudge against Kent Holliday, the older woman would have known. And I wasn’t about to accept the murder-suicide scenario until I’d heard her confirm it. Even then I didn’t know if I could buy in. I just had too many other reasons to blame Chard.

  The sun set while we waited—one of those spectacular purple and orange parfaits, half the work of Indian summer, half smog alert. As night came on the crowd of onlookers melted away into their homes. Lights popped on in curtained windows; the crickets started up in the surrounding woods. It would have been a typical September evening in South Fairmount if it wasn’t for the two bodies lying on the floor inside Kitty Guinn’s rented rooms.

  The neighbors must have heard what had happened by then because a hush had literally fallen over the street. There were no whoops from kids playing night games, no racket of lawn mowers or chatter of televisions on front stoops. Just the crickets and the cops and the cop radios.

  Around nine Naomi Trimble came out the front door. By then we’d heard from one of the investigating officers that the time of death had been set at around 4 P.M. We’d also heard that the police had tentatively decided to treat the case as a murder-suicide.

  Naomi had obviously played a part in their decision, and I wanted to hear what she’d told them. But it was plain from the blasted look on her face that I wasn’t going to get the whole story. What became even plainer as we talked was that she was scared almost witless. By the murders, obviously. But also by Chard.

  “Can’t talk no more,” she said when I pulled her aside. “I can’t.”

  “Just a few questions, Naomi.”

  She put a trembling hand to her cheek and stared at me with something like horror. She was no longer the same woman who’d come to my office—the heart had gone out of her. “Shouldn’t have never come to talk to you, Mr. Stoner,” she said. “Shouldn’t have never done it.”

  “Did Chard do this?” I asked.

  “I ain’t talking about him,” she said in a fierce whisper, as if she didn’t want the cops to overhear. “This all come down ‘cause I talked too much, trying to save that no-good son-of-a-bitch Terry. Now Kent is dead.” A sob racked her, but she choked it down immediately, swallowing it like medicine.

  “Why is Kent dead?” I said to her.

  “‘Cause you shot your mouth off about him and me to that bitch Kitty,” she whispered bitterly. “That crazy bitch. I warned Kent last night to steer clear of her. He had damn good reason to steer clear of her.”

  “What reason?” O’Brien said.

  “Didn’t she threaten to kill me yesterday?” the woman said, outraged. “And Kent, too, if he didn’t go down to the courtroom and testify. She knew damn well we couldn’t do that. She was just as scared as we were of testifying.”

  “Because of Chard?”r />
  “It don’t matter because of what. Kent’s dead and I did it to him.” She backed away, shuddering up and down and tossing her hands at us as if we’d been holding her back physically. “I’m getting out of here. I gotta go.”

  She walked quickly off the porch and down to the street. I watched her get in a beat-up Plymouth Sebring and drive off.

  ******

  I had the sure feeling that Naomi Trimble was running from Chard as well as from the burden of Kent’s death. She was terrified by what she’d seen in that living room and by what she thought might be in store for her. I felt partly responsible for that—I felt responsible for Chard.

  She hadn’t even mentioned him to the cops. Which, in itself, was telling. She’d kept Tommy T. out of it, according to a young detective named Forrest, whom I spoke to after Naomi left. O’Brien and I spent the better part of an hour trying to talk him into picking Chard up. But Forrest was a rookie who wasn’t prepared to make a decision on his own—not without evidence, which neither of us could supply.

  By half-past ten Forrest had gone, too, leaving O’Brien and me alone on that dark, depressing street.

  “What the hell are we going to do?” Jack said as we walked to our cars.

  “You’re going to call Art Finch.”

  “Hell, he’s part of that damn Lessing mob. He won’t do anything—certainly not for me.”

  “Call him anyway. These murders don’t jeopardize his case against Carnova. He might play ball.”

  O’Brien thought about it for a second, then nodded.

  “All right, I’ll call him. What about you? What are you going to do?”

  “I think it’s time I met Tommy T.”

  ******

  It was almost midnight when I dropped back into the Ramrod bar, down the single flight of steps off Walnut Street, through the padded leather door into that noisy, flashing, desperate bit of hell. If Raymond the bartender recognized me, he didn’t show it. I ordered a double scotch, straight up. He poured it from a flute-nosed bottle and smacked it down on a paper coaster.

  “Two bucks,” he said in his world-weary voice.

  I gave him a five. “Seen Tommy T. in here tonight?”

  “Not yet,” Raymond said as he strolled away.

  I took the drink to an empty table in a dark corner of the room, away from the dance floor and the laser lights. A few of the well-dressed older men gave me vaguely sinister looks, as if they thought I might be competition. A couple of the younger ones sauntered past, strutting their stuff. Whatever they read on my face, nobody sat down. And after a while nobody came near.

  I sat there for almost two hours, drinking scotch and waiting. I thought about crossing the street to the Deco and leaning on Coates again. And then, around two, just as Raymond made the last call, Tommy Chard came through the door.

  It was something to see—how they made way for him. The old guys and the young ones too. As if he were some kind of demonic royalty. The prince of this darkness. He made a triumphant progress down the bar, getting openly stared at, occasionally talked to, never touched. He stopped in the center and raised two fingers to Raymond, who poured him a double vodka. He tossed it down like tap water and turned to face the room, parking his elbows on the bar.

  If he had a guilty conscience over the two dead kids on Baltimore Avenue, it certainly didn’t show in his face or his manner. And I knew that he wasn’t worried about being picked up by the cops or he wouldn’t have come to the bar. Either he hadn’t heard about the deaths or he hadn’t been directly involved. Or he just didn’t care—any more than he’d cared about Lessing’s murder.

  I studied Tommy T. for a few minutes. He didn’t look any different than he had in the mug shot I’d seen—a tall, muscular, menacing kid with a dirty angel’s face, like something mean and vain and pretty stamped on a bronze coin. He couldn’t see me from where he was standing. But then he wasn’t looking around. He knew where his audience was—the ranks of frail, frightened, preening men in the leather booths, the shoe clerks and the bank managers. The Ira Lessings.

  The pickings must have been lean at that hour of the night because the kid looked away, almost disgustedly. He had a thin, ivory knife scar on his right cheek—an old wound that hadn’t shown up in the mug shot. He ran a finger down it twice, tracing it as if it were something he wanted to remember, to remind himself of, to remind the room of. He dug a wad of money out of the back of his jeans and peeled off a ten.

  He had quite a lot of money, and he flashed it openly, as if it, too, was something he wanted the world to see. Raymond made change for him, and the kid stuck it in his pocket.

  Pushing away from the bar, he gave the older men one long, haughty look, then started back up the bar for the door. After a moment I got to my feet and followed him out.

  He was half a block south on Walnut when I reached the street. I gave him another few seconds before I started after him. He went straight down Walnut, in and out of the glare of the arc lights and the neon of storefronts, disappearing into the thick shadow of a tall office building arcade, then reappearing in the spotlight of an all-night garage. He walked deliberately, at a leisurely pace, without looking left or right, as if he knew exactly where he was headed.

  At Fourth Street he turned east. The sidewalk was darker, there, canopied by storefront arcades and the board-and-pipe tunnels of fresh construction work. The city was building a new tower on the block—a naked concrete-and-steel superstructure, strung on the unfinished floors with bulbs and plank fencing. They were hard at work at that hour—the riveters—high above Fourth. Their din hit the street like a bag full of chains—a jangling, metallic crash, like the end of the world.

  Chard kept going, through the roar, still heading east. The noise from the construction work faded away as we got to Broadway. It was a part of town that would never be torn down for reconstruction—the part with the men’s clubs and the old-money apartment houses with Greek Revival facades. Chard had no business in that neighborhood, but by then I knew he wasn’t there to stay. In fact, I thought I knew exactly where he was heading.

  And sure enough, he turned south past the University Club into Lytle Park.

  It wasn’t really a park at all. Just a posh gaslit lawn, with a statue of Lincoln at the west end and the Taft Museum at the east. In the daytime it was a picturesque spot, surrounded by those genteel apartments and fancy clubs. Late at night the bums came up from the riverfront to sleep on the benches. And the hustlers came out to be cruised.

  It wasn’t Chard’s territory—Fourth and Plum was. But maybe he’d gotten tired of the downtown trade. Maybe he was looking to move up in his world.

  Chard walked over to a bench beneath a gas lamp and sat down. I hung back in the shadow of an apartment house and watched him. He might have killed two kids that afternoon. He had probably killed Lessing two months before—or watched his pal Terry do it. And now he was waiting for someone else to hurt.

  It didn’t do anymore to tell myself that pain was Tommy T.’s business—that Lessing had wanted, perhaps invited, what he’d gotten. It didn’t do to tell myself that I had no solid proof—with Kent and Kitty dead, no proof at all. Trumaine, poor Janey Lessing, they didn’t enter into it, either. This was between me and that kid.

  I stepped out of the shadows and started across the street. I’d just entered the west end of the park when a car came up Fourth and stopped in front of the boy on the bench. The kid stood up, walked over to the driver’s door, opened it, and got in.

  The car idled for a moment, in a cloud of exhaust, then began to move west. I ducked behind the statue just as it passed.

  I couldn’t get a good view of the man who was sitting in the passenger seat. But it was sure as hell a red Volvo with Kentucky plates—the same car that Len Trumaine drove.

  29

  IF I’D had a car of my own, I would have followed them.

  But I didn’t have a car, so all I could do was stand there in the shadow of the statue, in the feeb
le moonlight, and feel the dread start in the pit of my stomach. There was no doubt that what I had witnessed had either been a casual pickup or a prearranged rendezvous. I knew Len Trumaine well enough to rule out a pickup. So if it had been his red Volvo, that meant Len had deliberately sought Tom Chard out. Worse, it meant he’d known where and how to find the kid. I didn’t want to think about what that might imply—not until I was sure it was Len in that car, not until I’d confronted him with what I’d seen. But if it was Trumaine hunkered down in the front seat, then something was very wrong with the Lessing case—something had likely been wrong for a long time.

  I tried to swallow the feeling of dread as I walked back uptown. But it stayed with me, deep in my gut—a feeling that it was out of control, that it had been out of control from the start, that I’d been playing in the dark all along.

  It took me about fifteen minutes to get back to Walnut Street and the Deco apartment house. I couldn’t think of anyplace else to go—anyplace else where I’d have half a chance of finding Chard before the night was out. The Ramrod was closed at that hour of the morning, so were all the other bars, gay and straight.

  But a light was on in Coates’s fourth-floor-front window. I could see it plainly from the street. Either Lester was already entertaining or he was expecting company—and that gave me some hope.

  I settled in the shadow of the doorway of a jewelry store, catercorner to the Deco, and waited.

  ******

  An hour passed, very slowly. I stamped my feet to ward off fatigue. I chain-smoked until I’d made a tepee of butts between my feet. I read the prices off the items in the jewelry-store window. I read a brochure on term life insurance I’d found lying on the pavement. I studied the Deco itself until I knew every line of its facade, from the crenels on its rooftop to the fire escape zigzagging down its south wall.