by Jay Brandon
‘Little? Dad? Helping someone go free after committing a murder isn’t a little thing. You know that. Talk sensibly, please.’
‘“Committing?” So now you think she did it too? Your own sister? You think she killed her husband?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I think. From their point of view that’s what they think you’re asking, to let her out from under a capital murder charge because they owe you a favor. It’s not going to work that way, Dad.’
‘I’m not asking that. I’m just asking them to look into it further, because they’ve obviously got it wrong so far. I’m just asking them to make the system work for Amy. I’ve got to do something, don’t I?’
For the first time, Edward saw his father’s distress and that he did understand. He just didn’t like what he understood and he felt helpless. A feeling Dr Hall would hate, because he was the closest thing to a god on this earth. He had ‘wrested life back from death many times,’ as he’d said. His trembling hands showed his agony at not being able to do it again for his own daughter.
Edward sat down. ‘You can,’ he said gently. ‘You can help. Everybody can. Cops came up with the answer they did because they didn’t know anybody else involved. Amy’s just a suspect to them. They’ve investigated a lot of murders and they know the spouse or some other family member is always a good bet. Amy is just a peg they fit into a slot. Partly that’s because this murder looks very personal. So suggest some possibilities to me, Dad. You knew Paul his whole adult life. First he worked for you, then he was your son-in-law. Tell me why someone would want to kill him.’
Dr Hall shook his head. ‘He could be abrasive. He could be abrupt. I saw that with the staff. But to the point of making someone want to kill him? No. And I don’t know anything about his personal life since he and Amy separated. I’d barely seen him. Do you think he got involved in something unsavory? Lots of men go crazy when they’re getting divorced. I’ve seen it many times.’
Edward began. ‘There are three reasons to commit murder, Dad. Know what they are? I had another prosecutor who taught me this.’
‘Hate?’
‘Yes. On the list. “I hate this bastard, he’s fucked me over one too many times, this bitch doesn’t deserve to live, this asshole cut me off in traffic.” That’s one. Maybe not the first, but one. Next is expediency.’ Edward didn’t wait for his father to guess. ‘“I want this guy’s money, if I kill him I can have his job, his wife, his car.” Not personal, just someone in your way. And the third, and possibly most popular?’
His father shook his head, unwilling to play this game with him.
‘Love. Maybe the number one reason people are in prison for murder. If I can’t have you—’
‘Nobody will.’ Now his father did nod along.
‘Yes,’ Edward said. ‘If it’s not the significant other it’s children. “I can’t make it in this world, but I can’t leave you behind to suffer my absence, so I’m going to drown all four of you in the bathtub before I go.” And the rest of us are left behind wondering what’s wrong with these crazy fucks. So, Dad, given that, and everything you know. Who killed Paul?’
‘I have no idea.’
Edward sat and looked at his father. His father stared back at him gravely, with his bushy gray eyebrows, his prominent forehead, his slightly bulging blue eyes. He looked sincere as Robert Frost, and maybe as deep. Edward wondered, was this the first time he’d ever known his father was lying to him?
‘Dad? Seriously? If you don’t have any idea, who does?’
‘I think it was a stranger,’ his father said.
‘Who came in to …?’
‘Sell him drugs, maybe, and decided to rob him instead. Didn’t the autopsy show cocaine in his system?’
‘A drug dealer wouldn’t want to kill a good customer for a one-time score.’
Edward changed tactics. ‘This award he’d just won. What was it for?’
‘He’d had some success in a clinical trial for a new kind of cancer treatment. Or at least a variation on a treatment. Paul promoted it like it was the next to last step to the universal cure everyone’s looking for.’
‘Was it?’
Dr Hall said with some disgust, ‘Paul was better at talking up his projects than he was at the research itself. I read his findings. It wasn’t much of a breakthrough and I don’t even know that he could reproduce the result.’
Edward was watching his father curiously. ‘How do you know so much about it?’
‘It was research we started together, actually. Two or three years ago, before he and Amy separated. I decided it was a dead end, but Paul went off on his own and kept at it.’
‘Successfully, apparently.’
Dr Hall looked at him with his features turning sardonic, a look familiar to his son.
‘One award from a local medical society doesn’t make one Jonas Salk. The award was more encouragement, I’d say. “Keep at it,” that sort of thing.’
Things kept shifting for Edward. It had all been personal a few minutes ago, trying to think about Paul the person. Now it had turned again into a case, like so many he’d worked on over the years. The dead man had made a success of research he’d taken from this man across the desk. Had his father resented that? It was a motive. Hate, as his father had guessed first, also maybe expediency. If Paul died, could Dr Hall take back the project, become the doctor who cured cancer?
‘What?’ his father said.
‘Nothing. Was he working with anyone else after he left you?’
Dr Hall shrugged. ‘He had a team, I think. I’ll get you their names.’
The murder’s happening on the night of the awards dinner seemed to suggest professional jealousy as a motive. Could his father have gone to argue with his estranged son-in-law and former colleague, then gotten mad enough to shoot him?
Meeting with his father had been unsettling. He couldn’t get Dr Hall to admit to understanding the situation and Edward had felt no connection coming back the other way. No confidence in him, no approval.
He drove around the city, something he used to fantasize about when he was in prison. He had only spent two years in confinement, but it had felt like the way the rest of his life would be. The system – the criminal justice system he knew so well – could just pluck him out of his life and give people with no more moral superiority than he, the equivalent of high school principals, the power to put him behind a locked door and tell him he couldn’t come out again until they decided. Like a three-year-old placed in time out, but a time out with iron bars and ugly institutional smells, occasionally interrupted by screams of the obviously insane. It had been beyond horrible, it had been humiliating too, that he had fucked up so badly that he gave these people the power to take over his life and tell him what to do every minute of every day. Edward had spent hours on his bunk, sitting up, knees raised, head down between them, hands covering his ears – basically in an upright fetal position – trying to imagine his way out of there. Picturing neighborhoods in Houston, which way he would turn to get to a randomly chosen destination. What the hamburger had tasted like at One’s-A-Meal, how the music soared off the walls at Rockefeller’s. Some rare people apparently had the ability to deny the prison system authority over their souls, imagining themselves away, but Edward couldn’t do it. The wall close to his arm was too real, insisting its way into his consciousness even while his imagination worked its hardest.
So now that he was out he drove for real, wanting to revel in living the fantasy that had been most precious to him. But he kept feeling that wall close beside him, those bars behind his eyelids.
Edward found himself in a familiar neighborhood before he knew it was his destination. He parked in front of the little white frame house with the yellow trim, trying to picture it as home. Trying to imagine this as a routine homecoming at the end of an ordinary day. Honey, I’m home! Couldn’t quite bring it off. He knocked then opened the door, as Linda had always told him he should do.
Lind
a was coming into the living room from the kitchen, walking quickly. When she caught sight of him her pace slowed. Her face lit up. Her eyes literally glowed, her cheeks rose and expanded, she even colored a little.
Edward went to meet her and they kissed. He held her longer than she expected. Her lips were soft and yielding, a little cool. After a moment she drew back.
‘What brought that on?’
He smiled in turn. ‘Love, I’d say.’ Her blush deepened. Edward widened his eyes and said, ‘Say, I’ve got an idea.’
‘What?’ Both anticipation and suspicion in her voice.
‘How’d you like to meet my family this weekend?’
The suspicious part of her reaction overtook her face. ‘Why? What’s changed your mind?’
He shrugged. She was still in his arms, so her arms moved up and down atop his.
Edward said, ‘I’ve been telling you how they are. Now I’d like your opinion.’
‘Really?’
He sensed her beginning of regret. Be careful what you wish for. ‘I could cancel.’
‘No. We’re going. But I have no idea what to wear.’
In the event, Linda looked both lovely and not fussed over. She wore a simple green dress that displayed her figure without flaunting it and a thin silver necklace, with understated earrings.
In his parents’ living room was the family tableau he’d expected; his mother and Amy on the white sofa facing them across the room, Dr Hall at an angle to them on the club chair, all with teacups in their hands like American actors in a bad play trying to appear British. Then the cups clattered down as Dr Hall stood – a lady had just entered the room – and Edward said, ‘Mom, Dad, Amy, this is Linda.’
‘Edward’s secret love,’ Dr Hall said heartily, talking over his wife. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, young lady. Miss—?’
‘Benson, Dr Hall. But Linda is fine. Hello, Mrs Hall.’
‘Hello, my dear. Come sit by me. This is such a delight.’
Linda sat beside Mrs Hall, smiling demurely as she turned down an offer of refreshment. Amy sat on her other side. Edward took his seat to the side; offstage, as he thought of it.
Mrs Hall’s gaze looked kindly as she asked Linda, ‘And how did you two meet?’
‘I’m a paralegal. We met in the course of our jobs. I’d met Edward at our office and then he came to a reception we had when we moved to larger offices. That’s when we started talking.’
Dr Hall held out to Linda a silver plate holding tiny cookies. She took one, saying, ‘Thank you, Dr Hall.’
‘Marshall, remember?’
‘I’ll try. It’s just that you’re so distinguished.’
She’d said the secret word, without Edward even prepping her.
Mrs Hall said, ‘Don’t you look nice, Linda. So you and Edward started dating recently? Since he got out?’
‘Yes, it’s been a year,’ Amy said. ‘A secret romance.’
Mrs Hall held Linda’s attention. ‘I hope I’m not prying too much—’
‘No, just enough.’
‘Hush, Edward. It can be a trial having a son who thinks he’s witty.’
‘I know what you mean.’ Linda kept smiling and the gentle interrogation continued.
When they left, Amy followed them out onto the porch, closing the door.
‘Well, that wasn’t too bad,’ she announced brightly.
‘The clan on its best behavior,’ Edward agreed.
Linda looked back and forth between them.
‘You two are so jumpy. They’re perfectly nice people. What were you afraid might happen?’
Amy and her brother exchanged looks and neither had an answer for her.
Later, at home, having relieved themselves of their clothing, Edward said, ‘Go ahead, let me have it: “You were wrong, they’re lovely people” or “Oh my God, you didn’t half warn me.”’
Linda propped herself up on her elbow. ‘No, I could see why you were worried. I mean, your mother, she’s very sweet and all—’
‘Sweet?’
‘Yes. She is. But I felt a little like she suspected I was an enemy spy and was trying to get information out of me, testing my disguise at the same time.
‘But at the same time she really wanted to know about me, because she cares about you so much, Edward. She does, you know.’
He took her in his arms again and stared at her in slight wonderment. Edward didn’t remember this happening to him before, wanting this much to be with a woman after having her. He almost said it then, he was about to, when Linda rolled over and asked, ‘What are we going to do for dinner?’
Later, over pizza, she saw him returning to his thoughts and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’
He laughed. She saw the humor in it too. Linda put her arms around him and made a soothing sound like she would for a baby.
‘It’s just Sunday night,’ she whispered. ‘It makes everything seem overwhelming. In the morning you get up and put one foot in front of the other and you can do whatever you have to do. You know you can.’
And she was right. The next day, in the daylight, he could handle whatever he had to, even when the prosecutor dropped the bomb on him.
TEN
‘We just got this,’ David Galindo said, tossing a DVD onto the desk in front of Edward. ‘Came in the mail, of all things. No return address.’
‘Don’t slay me with suspense, David. What is it?’
The prosecutor smiled. ‘Why don’t we watch it together?’
He walked Edward down the hall to a conference room. Around them Edward felt the thrum of people going about their jobs. There was laughter from one office doorway they passed, two women and a man chatting. Another office door was closed and someone could easily have been crying behind it. Edward remembered it all. It was an office with all the intrigues and romances inherent in an environment with four hundred or more mostly young people. But here they worked actively to send people to prison, in between the flirting and pushing upward.
David had a television with an attached DVD player set up in the conference room. David put the DVD into the player, dropped his lanky frame into a chair and picked up the control, pressing play.
It was Paul. The image of his brother-in-law alive was startling. Edward had gotten so used to Paul being in the past tense. The camera was focused fairly tightly on Paul, so it was hard to see much background. Edward was fixed on Paul’s face, anyway. Paul looked rather distinguished, his receding hairline making his bony forehead look impressively intelligent.
‘My name is Dr Paul Shilling. Today is March fourteenth. Almost the Ides.’
Yes, Paul was one of those who used his title as if it were a given name. But Edward hung on his words.
‘I am making this recording because I’m uneasy. It’s probably nothing, and I’ll just laugh and destroy this in a few months. But right now, I think it’s important to say that, if I am found dead, it will be my wife, Dr Amy Shilling, who murdered me.’
Paul stared into the camera as if willing belief into his listeners.
‘Amy and I have been separated for some time, going through a divorce. Just lately we’ve been seeing each other again to talk about those issues. Amy seems to be under the delusion she and I are going to get back together, romantically. I’ve tried to dampen down those expectations without being rude or mean, but that’s getting harder to do. Amy wants to get – amorous. The thought makes me …’ Paul shook his head. ‘Let’s just say we have completely, uh, conflicting views on that. I just want to get divorced. I just want to get on with my life. I am afraid that very soon I’m going to have to make this absolutely clear to Amy, and when I do, well, she’s subject to fits of anger. More than anger, really. She’s attacked me physically in the past. And this is going to be humiliating for her. She’s attached such importance to being a doctor’s wife – my wife, to put it, um – that I don’t know how she’ll react. Especially if she fin— especially if she thinks of me with another woman. I’m afraid that m
ight push her over the edge.
‘So I thought it would be prudent to make this record and give it to a friend, who will mail it to police if I’m murdered. As I said, I’m probably being melodramatic or overly – what’s the word? – but at any rate, I wanted to do this. Thank you.’
Then Paul just sat there. After several seconds he directed his stare out of camera range, made an impatient hand gesture and the screen went black.
David got up and turned on the break room lights. Edward hadn’t moved from where he’d been standing.
After a moment he said, ‘What utter horseshit.’
David’s eyebrows lifted.
Edward continued. ‘How many murders have you tried, David?’
David shrugged. ‘A few.’
‘A lot, I think. How many has this office tried? And have you ever had one where the victim told you who killed him?’
‘I think I’ve heard of a couple.’
‘Yeah, on TV. “Message from the Grave”? What bullshit.’
‘How?’
Edward was pacing now. ‘How do I know? I’m no IT guy. Have you had this thing checked? Could it have been spliced together? Or just made up entirely? If John Wayne can be making new TV commercials, some bright kid could have cobbled up something looking like Paul accusing Amy. Anyway, you’ll never get it into evidence.’
David shrugged again. ‘Maybe, maybe not. Want to have a pretrial hearing on it?’
Edward absolutely did not. Let this thing go public? No thanks. Forget about trying to pick an impartial jury after that. Every TV station in town – hell, several national television shows – would want to air this footage. Dead Man Accuses Estranged Wife. They’d eat it up.
So Edward ignored the question and blustered on.
‘Anyway, it’s just ridiculous. Who can ever predict his own murder and who the murderer will be?’
‘Well, when you leave here I might tell people to keep an eye out for you if something happens to me.’
‘Ha ha. Seriously, David, this is ridiculous. What you need to look for is where this came from. This is from someone trying to bury Amy because they don’t want any suspicion on themselves.’
