Extenuating Circumstances

by Jonathan Valin

“You have a lot of nerve coming here,” the woman finally said in a clipped, angry voice. “I thought Don made it clear that your services weren’t needed.”

  “You mean regarding Tom Chard?”

  She didn’t even blink when I mentioned the name. “Yes. If that’s the boy you told Don about.”

  I shook my head. “C’mon, Mrs. Lessing. You didn’t need me to tell you who Tommy Chard is.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. And if you don’t want the police crawling all over your son’s life again, you’ll quit lying about it.”

  “I’ll call the police myself,” the woman snapped. “And have them arrest you for trespassing.”

  “Do that, Mrs. Lessing, and you’ll give me no choice. I’ll have to go to the newspapers about the two-hundred-dollar checks you gave Chard back in May.”

  For a split second the woman looked shocked, but she recovered immediately. “You wouldn’t dare do that. You have no proof that I signed anything.”

  “You told Ira’s secretary, Millie, to sign checks made out to Chard. I have Millie’s testimony to that effect.”

  “The girl’s mistaken,” she said flatly.

  I stared at her in amazement. “What is it that Chard’s holding over you? It must be pretty terrible.”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  And suddenly I knew, just by looking at her—her sportive face, her iron-stiff posture, her country-club clothes, her spartan house, her husband’s portrait on the wall, her world on Sunset Avenue—that Chard didn’t need anything special to intimidate and manipulate Meg Lessing. All he’d needed was the truth about Ira.

  I said, “When did Chard come to you, Mrs. Lessing? When did he tell you that your son was a homosexual?”

  The woman’s face turned beet-red and her mouth—her whole face—started to tremble. “You bastard,” she said in a deeply wounded voice. “You insufferable bastard. How dare you stand there—in front of my house—and make those kinds of accusations about me and my family? What do you know about me? What do you know about my life? You have no right to be here at all, you son-of-a-bitch!”

  It was pointless to say that I hadn’t blamed her for Ira’s problem, because that was obviously the way she read it, as if her son’s guilt were also her own guilt. And maybe it was so. Maybe she’d been living with a burden of guilt since Lessing was a boy. If Ira actually had been abused by his father, if Meg had known or suspected and done nothing about it . . . to keep face, to avoid scandal, to keep the marriage intact. It was a commonplace scenario, but it made me feel bad for the woman, standing there red-faced and biting back tears of rage. It made me feel bad for her in the same way I’d felt bad for Trumaine—when he’d failed to rescue Janey.

  “Mrs. Lessing,” I said in a conciliatory voice, “I have no desire to hurt you or your family.”

  “Then why don’t you leave us alone?” she said bitterly.

  “You know why,” I said. “You’ve been paying extortion to Chard. This spring. Perhaps this summer. And you’re about to do it again.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Mrs. Lessing, I saw Len meet with Tom Chard in Lytle Park last night. I know that Chard is expecting a lot of money.”

  She clapped a hand to her mouth so violently that it made her wince. “You saw?”

  I nodded. “If you’re planning to pay him off, Mrs. Lessing, it’s not going to do any good. Chard will keep coming back. Hasn’t he done that already? And sooner or later someone else is going to get hurt. Do you want Len’s death on your conscience?”

  She winced again, but I didn’t let up.

  “Don’t you understand that Chard may have killed your son? He may have killed Ira?”

  She shook her head until she almost went cross-eyed. “No, no, no, no. He didn’t do that. There is no evidence like that.”

  “Then why shield him?” I said. “Why pay him extortion?”

  The woman slumped a little, leaning back heavily against the doorjamb. “Because of the other one,” she whispered. “So he won’t testify for the other one.”

  “For Carnova?” I said, confused. “What could Chard say in Carnova’s defense?”

  But I knew the answer before I’d finished asking the question. I knew it without looking at the woman’s flushed, shame-filled face.

  “About the beat-freak business.” I said it for her, feeling it fully, feeling her terror and embarrassment and disgust.

  She didn’t say anything. I don’t think she could have spoken if she’d wanted to.

  “You found out this spring?”

  She nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  “Chard came to you?”

  She nodded again. “He had pictures,” she said in a nauseated voice. “Polaroids.”

  “Christ,” I said.

  “What was I supposed to do?” the woman said, staring at me with naked bewilderment. “You can’t . . . believe such a thing. But the pictures . . . I paid him. I didn’t tell Ira. How could I tell Ira?” Her face contracted with pain and tears began to roll down her cheeks.

  “Ira found out?”

  “That stupid girl,” the woman said, brushing savagely at her tears. “That Millie—she told him. Ira came to me one afternoon. I didn’t . . . the subject wasn’t mentioned. At the end of the afternoon Ira told me that I needn’t worry about Mr. Chard any longer. And I understood that he didn’t want me to authorize any more checks. That was the only time he ever alluded to this thing.”

  I could tell that she was parsing the conversation, that whatever else had passed between her son and her—whatever guilt or recrimination—was being left out of the account. But in spite of the omissions I couldn’t help thinking that that conversation with Mom must have stayed on Ira’s mind: those checks, that painful afternoon—maybe the day he’d torn out of his calendar—spent talking to his mother, talking around the terrible truth.

  “You didn’t pay any more money to the boy after the meeting?”

  “No, Ira . . . handled it on his own,” she said stiffly. “That was how he wanted it. I respected his wishes.” The woman’s mouth curled into an angry frown. “Of course if he’d had someone else to share this with, a helpmate who was strong enough to lean on . . . ”

  Her voice died out and she glared at me.

  It was obvious that Janey had been right—that Mrs. Lessing did blame her for what had happened to Ira.

  “You didn’t make out two more checks to the Lighthouse Clinic early in June?”

  “No,” the woman said firmly. “I didn’t see Chard again until long after Ira’s death. He swore that he had nothing to do with the murder.”

  “You believed him?” I said incredulously.

  “Why would he kill Ira when Ira had been giving him all that money?”

  She had a point, although Lessing had given money to Terry Carnova too. “Did Chard say why Carnova had done it?”

  “He said that the other one was angry with him—because of his relationship with Ira. He said that Carnova felt . . . jilted.”

  32

  BEFORE I left I asked Meg Lessing how long Len Trumaine had known about the extortion.

  “I told him yesterday,” the woman said. “Before that he didn’t know a thing.”

  “Why did you decide to tell him?”

  “Because of you, I think,” the woman said with some bitterness. “The boy, Chard, was getting nervous. He thought someone was following him, trying to entrap him. He wanted to leave town. Yesterday morning he called me. He asked for a great deal of money—thousands of dollars. I couldn’t . . . I needed Len to get that kind of money. Naturally, Len was suspicious, especially since you’d just talked to him that afternoon about the boy. I felt I had no choice but to tell him the truth.”

  There was a falsity in her voice—not in what she said, but in the way she said it, as if confiding in Trumaine wasn’t a matter of circumstance but of design, as if she’d turned to him be
cause she knew she could manipulate him with guilt and make him do just about anything. Len the errand boy.

  I said, “Len paid him the money last night?”

  She shook her head, no. “He wanted to talk to the boy first—to confirm what I had told him. You see it wasn’t any easier for him to believe than it was for me.”

  I could imagine Trumaine’s dismay. And I could also see him volunteering to do the dirty work. He would have seen it as his lot.

  “When is the payoff to be made?” I asked.

  “Sometime tonight, I think. Len didn’t tell me all of it.”

  I backed away from the door. “I’ve got to find him.”

  “Mr. Stoner,” the woman called out.

  I looked over my shoulder at her. I thought maybe she was going to ask me to look after Trumaine. Instead, she said, “What I’ve told you . . . it will remain confidential?”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Lessing,” I said, trying to mask my disgust. “It will.”

  ******

  I drove back down the hill to the city, straight to the plastics factory. Trumaine’s Volvo was gone, and that worried me.

  I parked on the street and went in the front door. Millie didn’t smile at me this time, and that worried me too.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  She bit her lip. “Mr. T.’s on the warpath. Guess I shouldn’ta opened my big mouth.”

  “You told him that you’d talked to me about the checks made out to Chard?”

  She nodded. “I thought you said you was gonna try to help him.”

  “I am, Millie.”

  “Well, he sure didn’t act that way. He cussed me like a Marine and went piling on out of here.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know.” Millie gave me a wounded look. “What the heck’s going on, Mr. Stoner? Why is everybody so riled up?”

  “It’s a long story, Millie. But if it’s any consolation, you did the right thing telling me.”

  “I sure hope I did,” she said uncertainly. “But I ain’t sure. I ain’t sure what none of this means.”

  ******

  I drove from the plastics plant to Riverside Drive on the off chance that Trumaine had gone back to Janey’s house. But I didn’t see his Volvo on the street, and when I got up to the terrace I found Janey all alone, sitting in a cane chair, sipping a glass of whiskey and staring out at the river. She was wearing a blue silk dress and her face was carefully made up, but the expression on it was sullen and abstracted. She didn’t look drunk yet, but she was obviously working on it.

  “Mr. Detective,” she said in her flat voice. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking for Len? Is he here?”

  “Was. This morning.” She took another sip of whiskey. “We had some business to transact at the bank. He needed my signature, I guess, to withdraw money from Ira’s account. I can’t think of why else I was invited.” She looked off in the distance. “He must be having some trouble with the business. I don’t begrudge him the money. He’s been very good to me—all my life. I was more than happy to pay him off.”

  It was an odd thing to say, and she said it oddly, as if she had nothing other than money with which to repay Trumaine’s devotion.

  “You don’t know where he is now, do you?”

  “I think he went to the Court House—to have some documents notarized.”

  “All right,” I said. “If you see him later this afternoon, tell him to call me.”

  I started to go.

  “Mr. Stoner?” the girl said.

  I looked back at her.

  “Something’s going on, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I said, “I just need to talk to Len.”

  Janey laughed disgustedly. “You’re lying. So was Len. It’s all lies now. Lies and excuses and looking the other way.”

  “Did Len say something to upset you, Janey?”

  She laughed again. “Oh, Len would never do anything like that. He loves me too much to upset me.”

  I ducked my head embarrassedly. “He does love you, Janey.”

  “Yes?” she said defiantly. “And what am I supposed to do about it? Love him back? I can’t. I never could. He knows that, but he won’t . . . ” She tossed her head, looking away from me. “What are you supposed to do with a love that you have no use for, Mr. Stoner?”

  I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.

  She turned back to me with a tragic look on her face. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to him. I just don’t want him to . . . I tried to tell him today, but he didn’t hear me. He didn’t understand. He thinks I’m holding a grudge against him for the past. He doesn’t understand, Mr. Stoner, that I never held the past against him. It never was that. I just don’t feel about him the way he feels about me.”

  I’d been there myself, God knew. Where Trumaine was with Janey. And I could feel for him. For her too.

  “And now I’m afraid he’s going to do something stupid,” she said, sinking back into her chair with a fearful look. “Something dangerous.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The way he was acting. The way he was talking about . . . about the past and about Ira.” The girl’s face lit up weirdly and her voice rose, as if she wanted to scream. “Something is happening! And he won’t tell me, and neither will you.”

  “He doesn’t want to hurt you.”

  “What could hurt me more than not knowing?” she asked. “Please, Mr. Stoner. Tell me what’s happening.”

  I didn’t know what to answer. Like everyone else in the Lessing case, I’d lost my taste for the truth.

  “It’s not for me to say, Janey,” I said, knowing the words were wrong as I spoke them, seeing the girl sink beneath them, as if that were her lot—to be betrayed by those she trusted. “But I promise you—no harm will come to Len. Tomorrow he can tell you. And if he won’t, I will.”

  But the girl wasn’t stupid and she wasn’t reassured. She stared at me with that damaged look of betrayal on her face and said, with absolute certainty, “Something’s going to happen. Something awful.”

  33

  WHAT JANEY said was true—something was about to happen, and despite my promise to her, I wasn’t at all sure I could control it. Not without help. I felt concerned enough to stop at a phone booth on my way to the Court House and call Jack O’Brien at his office.

  It was well past noon, and I figured that O’Brien had talked to Art Finch by then—and gotten an answer about Chard.

  As it turned out he had talked to him, but the answer wasn’t what I’d expected.

  “He said no dice, Harry,” O’Brien said unhappily.

  “For chrissake, why not?”

  “He says there’s no evidence to connect Chard to the deaths. But that’s not the real reason. The real reason is that he doesn’t want to pick Chard up as a suspect in an aggravated homicide right before the Carnova trial. It would give me something to use in Terry’s defense—and I would use it, believe me, no matter what Terry says.”

  “Did you tell the kid about Kitty?”

  “Not yet. I was busy all morning with Finch and the D.A.” He laughed bitterly. “They both acted like they’d never heard of Tommy T.”

  “They’ve heard of him, all right,” I said with disgust. “Finch has known for months that Chard was tied to Lessing. Christ, he had the same leads I had. He just didn’t follow up on them.”

  “Can you prove that?” O’Brien said.

  “You mean can I prove a conspiracy to obstruct? Not without the testimony of a whole bunch of people who aren’t willing to appear in court.”

  “Are you including yourself in that group, Harry?”

  I said, “What do you mean?” Although I knew exactly what he meant.

  He said it for me: “You were a witness to Terry’s first confession.”

  “We still aren’t sure what happened on the night of Lessing’s murder, Jack.”

  But it didn’t persuade me an
ymore. And it sure as hell didn’t persuade O’Brien. “You’re going to let Terry fry, aren’t you, Harry? After all this horrible crap, you’re going to let the kid go to the electric chair and let the other one go free.”

  “I’m going to find Chard,” I said to him. “Count on it.”

  “And then what?” O’Brien said. “The cops won’t arrest him. No one’s left to testify against him. We probably couldn’t even get a grand jury interested—not without the sort of proof that only you can supply. It’s up to you, Harry. It’s entirely up to you.”

  “I’ll handle it,” I told him.

  ******

  When I finished with O’Brien I drove over to the Court House. It was lunch hour and the lobby was deserted. I went up to the commission offices on the second floor, looking for Len. The young woman I’d met in Don Geneva’s office—the pretty blonde named Gloria—was standing at the head of the hall thumbing through a manila folder. She smiled at me as I walked by, and I smiled back at her.

  “If you’re looking for Don, he just went out to lunch,” she said.

  “I’m looking for Len Trumaine. Do you know him?”

  The girl nodded. “He was here about twenty minutes ago.”

  “Where?”

  “In Ira Lessing’s office. I gave him my key so he could get in.” The girl combed her blond hair back from her face. “You know Mr. Lessing was a good friend of his.”

  “I know.”

  “I didn’t see Mr. Trumaine leave. Would you like to take a look?”

  I nodded. The girl folded up her legal work and led me down the hall to 210. She took a key ring from her pocket and opened the door.

  Len wasn’t inside.

  “I guess he must have left, after all.”

  “You think I could nose around in here?”

  The girl said, “Sure. If you need me, I’m down the hall in 226.”

  When she left I sat down behind the desk. I didn’t know what I was looking for—or what Len had been looking for. But I examined the desk thoroughly. Nothing appeared to have been moved. The picture of Janey was still on the right-hand side; the picture of Meg on the left. The calendar was still open to July 4. The stuff in the top drawer was untouched.