Extenuating Circumstances

by Jonathan Valin

  It occurred to me that Trumaine had simply stopped there to mourn his friend. The blow that Meg Lessing had delivered had to have hurt him deeply. And the night with Chard couldn’t have been any better. The thing that frightened me was that he’d apparently personalized the situation beyond any debt he owed to Lessing. From what Janey had said, Len was viewing Chard not only as a threat to the family but as a threat to his own manhood. By confronting Chard he was going to redeem himself in the eyes of the girl, redeem the past. It was sad craziness, but it seemed to be real enough to him.

  It got a lot more real to me when I opened the side drawer and found the chrome-plated revolver missing from its plush box.

  I stood up and went down the hall—to 226. The girl read the troubled look on my face—I wasn’t trying to disguise it.

  “What’s wrong?” she said with concern.

  “We’ve got a situation here,” I said nervously. I started to tell her about the gun, then realized there was no way to explain it without explaining the whole thing. And there wasn’t time enough to do that.

  “Is it Mr. Trumaine?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” I took out one of my cards and put in on her desk. “If you see him, or if you talk to Geneva and he’s seen him, please give me a call. I’ve got an answering service and I’ll check in on the hour.”

  “It sounds serious,” the girl said, paling.

  “Believe me. It is.”

  34

  I SPENT the rest of that afternoon searching for Len. I went back to Sunset Avenue, to Meg Lessing’s house, but the woman took one look at me and slammed the door in my face. I guess I couldn’t blame her. I’d forced the truth out of her, and I doubted if she’d ever forgive that—no matter who ended up in jeopardy.

  From Sunset I drove back to Riverside Drive again, but Janey had either passed out or gone somewhere else, because no one answered the door. After that I tried the plastics factory—without any luck. And the Court House. I even tried the bar at Mike Fink’s riverboat, but Trumaine wasn’t there.

  Every hour I called the office for messages, but there weren’t any. Two or three times I thought about calling the CPD. But each time I balked at turning Len over to the cops, especially since I knew he was carrying a gun and was in the mood to use it.

  As the day wore on the heat and my lack of sleep began to take its toll. By four o’clock I was almost stuporous with fatigue and soaked with nervous sweat. If I hadn’t been so concerned about finding Trumaine, I would have gone back to the office and caught a few hours sleep. But I didn’t trust myself to sleep. Not without knowing where and when that meeting with Chard was scheduled to take place.

  So instead of sleep I stopped at a Frisch’s along the riverfront and drank coffee until I was so wired I couldn’t hold another cup. The fatigue was still there, but my head buzzed above it. I was suddenly full of hot ideas—foolish, dangerous ideas. The kind of things I wouldn’t even have considered in a normal state. I could stake out Lytle Park, which is where the last meeting had been, And when Chard showed up I could take him before Len had the chance to do something stupid.

  I wasn’t thinking about how dangerous trying to take Chard on my own could be when I was in a worn-out funk, with my reflexes out of commission and my mind half asleep. I just wanted to settle it before someone else was killed.

  And then a phone rang somewhere in the back of the noisy restaurant, sharp and clear as a cymbal strike, and I thought, The hell with it—I’m calling the cops.

  I got up and went to a phone booth in the lobby off the dining room, sat down on the little metal seat, and started thumbing through the book, looking for the CPD’s homicide number. I went through it twice before I realized it was a Kentucky directory. I was about to let the book drop on its chain when it occurred to me that there was one other obvious place where I hadn’t looked for Len Trumaine. I’d never been to that place, but it was certainly worth a shot. I paged through the directory again until I found what I wanted, then left the restaurant and drove to East Fifth Street in Covington.

  ******

  According to the phone book, that was where Trumaine lived—at 717 East Fifth. I knew I was on the right track as soon as I turned onto the block. Trumaine’s red Volvo was parked on the street at the foot of a long, sun-drenched flight of stairs leading to an apartment complex.

  It was a four-unit hillside apartment house built in terraces so that each apartment was set back from and above the one beneath it, like the tiers of a stadium. According to the mailboxes, Trumaine’s apartment was the third in the row. I dragged myself up the steps to the third tier. A wooden gate opened off the stairway, leading to a fenced cut-stone patio. I walked across the patio to the front door and knocked.

  A moment passed and, to my relief, Trumaine answered.

  I could tell from the pink, puckered look of his eyes that he’d been crying. I could also see that he’d been drinking heavily.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” he said, trying to shut the door.

  “I don’t give a shit what you want, Len.” I pushed him out of the doorway into the hall.

  Between the booze and everything else that had happened that day, Trumaine was in no mood to be shoved. He took a swing at me—a roundhouse right. Drunk as he was, it didn’t connect with anything but air. I pinned his right arm and shoved him into the wall, twisting his left arm behind him.

  “Quit it!” I said fiercely. “I didn’t come here to hurt you, but I damn well will if you don’t start acting like a man.”

  I could feel him stiffen up.

  “Let go of me,” he said in a drum-tight voice.

  I released his arms. He stood there for a moment, face to the wall, then slowly turned around. His fat cheeks were red, his eyes wet with embarrassment. He passed a hand through his short brown hair and pursed his lips savagely.

  I said, “Are you going to throw another punch?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  I shook my head. “Jesus Christ, Len. I could take you apart, do you know that?”

  He glared at me. “So?”

  “So how the hell do you think you’re going to handle a kid like Chard—all by yourself?”

  Trumaine dropped his eyes. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The hell you don’t,” I said, jabbing his chest with my hand.

  He winced and jerked his head up, staring at me angrily.

  “You’re going to sober up on coffee,” I said to him. “And then we’re going to talk.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about. I’m going to handle this thing on my own. I don’t want your help.”

  “Len, if you pull a gun on that son-of-a-bitch, he’ll kill you. And don’t bother to tell me that you don’t have a gun, because I’ve been to Lessing’s office.”

  “You followed me?” he said, looking outraged.

  “Yeah, I followed you, you dumb bastard. I’ve been trying to find you all afternoon—before you got yourself killed.”

  He leaned back against the wall. “I . . . I haven’t decided what I’m going to do.”

  “Then let’s talk about it.”

  ******

  I followed him down a short hall to a living room of buff leather and oiled walnut. There was a conversation pit in front of a mantel, with a framed FSA photograph of a dust-bowl Oklahoma shanty hung above it. There were other photographs on the walls—some of them familiar, some of them obviously taken by Trumaine himself. He’d never mentioned photography as a hobby, but judging by his pictures, he had a good eye, a sad eye. All the photos were of abandoned places—tract houses with “For Sale” signs in their yards, long rows of decaying tenements in the west end.

  There was a picture of Janey above a desk—the only picture of a person I saw in the room. But it was Janey as a child. Before Lessing had happened to her. Perhaps before her own tragedy had happened. A golden-haired little girl of twelve or thirteen. Heartbreakingly pretty, and smiling with a life that I’d never seen in her.


  When Trumaine saw me looking at the photo, his face flushed. He picked a tumbler full of scotch up off a coffee table and drank it, then sat down heavily on an armchair, as if the whiskey had knocked his legs out from under him. He sat there for a long time, staring off into space.

  “I don’t have anything to say to you, Harry,” he finally said. “There’s nothing left to say.”

  “Why? Because your friend wasn’t the man you thought he was?”

  Len’s lip curled in disgust. “He wasn’t a man at all,” he said with such bitterness that it shook me. “He was all an act—a trick done with mirrors. The last ten years of my life . . . they don’t mean anything. And Janey . . . ”

  His mouth trembled and he put both hands to his eyes.

  I didn’t say anything.

  After a while he dropped his hands.

  “I’ve got to put an end to this nightmare,” he said in a heartbroken voice. “Or I’ll lose her too. I’ll lose it all—everything that matters to me.”

  “You think killing Chard will stop it?”

  “He’s evil,” Len said through his teeth. “He’s an evil person. He’s going to destroy us if I don’t act. He’s going to destroy Janey.”

  “How, destroy Janey?”

  “If I don’t pay, he’s going to tell her about Ira!” he said in an agonized voice.

  “She’s already guessed some of it, hasn’t she?”

  “She doesn’t really know,” Len said. “She feels guilty, because of the newspaper articles, because of the rumors. But she hasn’t seen the Polaroids—she hasn’t seen the truth.”

  “Where are the Polaroids?”

  He pointed toward the desk, then turned his head away as if he couldn’t bear to look. “In the top drawer of the desk. Chard gave them to Meg four months ago.”

  I went over to the desk and opened the top drawer. And there on the pen dish was one of Tommy T.’s Polaroids of Ira Lessing—one of the vilest photographs I’d ever seen.

  Lessing was crouching on a bed, naked. There was a studded belt around his neck, pulled so tight that Lessing’s agonized face had turned purple and his eyes had rolled back in his head. Tommy Chard was kneeling on the bed behind him. In one hand he was holding the free end of the belt, jerking it taut. His other hand was buried inside Lessing—up to the elbow. The ferocious pleasure in Chard’s eyes had to be seen to be believed.

  Involuntarily, I slammed the drawer shut. For a moment I couldn’t look at Trumaine. And when I turned around he couldn’t look at me.

  “Chard told Meg that he wants money—a lot of money,” Trumaine said, staring at an empty corner of the room. “If he doesn’t get the money, he’ll show those pictures to Janey—to the press. I met with him last night to arrange it.”

  I didn’t tell him that I already knew about his meeting with Chard—I didn’t want to make him any more upset than he already was.

  “I withdrew the money this morning, out of Ira’s account. But after talking to Janey . . . I can’t go through with it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Chard will keep coming back, threatening her, holding Ira over her like a sword, until he’s bled us dry. And then he’ll probably tell her anyway—just for the sheer, vicious thrill of it.”

  “Maybe if you told Janey the truth . . . ” I said softly.

  Trumaine stared at me, horrified. “Are you crazy? God, you saw that picture. It would destroy her.”

  “She may be stronger than you think.”

  “She’s not,” Trumaine said firmly, almost angrily. “She needs to be protected. She always has.”

  But I knew better. I knew that Janey’s dependency was the only bond left between them. The girl had tried to tell him so herself that very afternoon. But he’d heard it as a challenge—to do a better job this time, to take better care of her and win back her love. A love he’d never really possessed.

  For a moment I felt so bad for the man that I didn’t know what to say: He was willing to die so that he could keep pouring Janey’s drinks, holding her hand, and counting her pills.

  “When are you going to meet with Chard?”

  “Late tonight. I’m going to meet him up in Lytle Park. And then . . . ” He stared at me—his schoolboy face frightened but determined.

  “You’re going to kill him.”

  He nodded grimly.

  “No, you’re not,” I said to him.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” Trumaine said.

  “Because I am.”

  35

  I MADE Trumaine coffee in the small kitchen off the living room. After drinking a few cups he’d sobered up enough to think clearly about what I’d said.

  “Why would you do this thing, Harry?” he asked with genuine confusion. “Why would you risk your life for me?”

  “The bastard’s had a hand in two deaths. Three if you count Lessing.”

  “He says not,” Len said, sipping at the coffee. “He claims he wasn’t involved in Ira’s murder.”

  “He talked to you about it?”

  “I asked him. He said he saw Ira earlier that night—at a bar called the Ramrod. Apparently Ira . . . he didn’t normally go into those bars. But that night he was so upset, he went into the place, looking for Chard.”

  Lessing had told Janey that there was going to be trouble before he’d left on the night of the Fourth. “Did Lessing tell Chard what had upset him?”

  Len nodded. “Those two checks to the clinic—the ones you found on Ira’s desk. Ira was very angry about them and wanted to know where Chard had gotten them.”

  That was a piece of information I’d spent a lot of time trying to find—unsuccessfully.

  “And where had he gotten them?” I asked.

  Trumaine looked down at the floor. “Chard says from Janey.”

  I stared at him with surprise. “She knew?”

  Len shook his head. “Chard claims she didn’t. He claims he got the checks by accident.”

  “Accident?”

  “He was supposed to meet Ira at the Court House that afternoon—to get some money.” Trumaine gave me an embarrassed look. “Apparently he’d been extorting money from Ira for some time—from Ira and from Meg, God help her. But that afternoon Ira stood him up. He canceled his appointments for the day. Chard got so pissed off that he went to the house on Riverside Drive. He didn’t actually tell me this, but I had the feeling that he went there hoping to find Janey—hoping to throw a scare into Ira by showing up at his doorstep when his wife was around. But Ira wasn’t home, just Janey. As an excuse Chard told her that Ira had promised to give him the usual handouts for the clinic, and Janey apparently wrote two checks in Ira’s name.”

  “Janey told me she didn’t write the checks—that she didn’t know Chard.”

  “Why would she remember his name?” Len said. “Christ, the kid was there for two seconds. And the last few months haven’t exactly been kind to Janey.”

  “If it was all so innocent, then why did Lessing get upset?”

  “Don’t you see?” Len said with a gruesome smile. “Ira thought Janey knew. I mean he couldn’t ask her outright—that would have been impossible. But when he discovered she’d signed those checks, he couldn’t be sure that she hadn’t found out about . . . about the pictures. He couldn’t be sure that Chard wasn’t extorting money from Janey in the same way he’d been extorting money from Meg.”

  It did make a horrible kind of sense.

  Ira had had his meeting with Meg on the third of June—that meeting where his secret was laid bare before his mother. And then the very next day Marty Levine had called him from the clinic with the news that Chard had showed up with two more checks that Ira knew nothing about. He must have called Meg immediately, and when Meg told him that she knew nothing about the checks, some fear or premonition must have prompted him to call Janey. When his wife told him that she had signed the checks, it had shaken the poor bastard to the core. He could have spent the whole month brooding about it, wondering if Ja
ney knew but afraid to ask her, afraid to broach the topic. Hell, even if Ira hadn’t believed that Janey’d heard the truth from Chard, he couldn’t ignore the fact that Chard had gone to her in the first place, that the kid had demonstrated that he could bring Lessing’s world down around his ears anytime he wanted to.

  Here was the source of the violent change in Lessing’s behavior—the change that Carnova had told Jack O’Brien about. Maybe the man had just stopped caring what happened to him at that point. Or maybe, after a month of brooding, he’d decided to end it on that hot July night rather than go on living with the frightening uncertainty that Tom T. Chard had brought into his life.

  I said, “Did Chard tell Ira how he’d actually gotten the two Lighthouse checks?”

  “He says he tried to. But he claims that Ira was so worked up that he wouldn’t listen to him. Eventually, Ira stormed out of the bar. Later that night Terry Carnova picked Chard up in Ira’s car and . . . well, you know what Carnova said happened.”

  I stared at Trumaine. “You believe Chard?”

  “I don’t know,” Len said after a moment. “I don’t know what I believe anymore. The kid’s obviously a liar. He could be playing games with me—protecting himself. But why would he kill a man he had wrapped around his finger—a meal ticket?”

  “Maybe he saw Ira getting away from him,” I said. “Maybe he realized that Lessing had had it with extortion, that he wasn’t going to sit for it anymore.”

  “I’d like to believe that.” Trumaine dropped his head heavily. “I loved that guy, Harry. I guess I still do. I mean the part of him that was good and sane and compassionate. But when I think about the other half—the tormented, soulless creature in that photograph—I’m almost glad he’s dead.”

  “Give it some time, Len.”

  Trumaine laughed dully. “I don’t have time. Chard isn’t going to give me any time. Something’s got to be done tonight. One way or another, it’s got to be done.”

  “When is the meeting set for?”

  “Three-thirty this morning.”

  I thought it over for a moment.

  “You meet him at the park—with the money,” I told Len. “Don’t bring a gun. Don’t do anything stupid. Just give Chard the payoff and let him go. I’ll handle it after that.”