High Country Fall

by Margaret Maron

  “Did you ascertain who Carla was?”

  “His girlfriend—Dr. Ledwig’s daughter.”

  “What else did you observe?”

  “We had to restrain him from trying to climb down the side of the cliff. He didn’t want us to wait for the fire truck. He said he thought there were ropes in Dr. Ledwig’s garage and he wanted us to lower one of the ambulance team down to try and save the doctor’s life.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “From the way the decedent was lying, they could tell that he didn’t survive the fall. There was really nothing they could do for him at that point, even if they could’ve climbed down.”

  “Did the defendant say anything else?”

  “He said he knew Dr. Ledwig was replacing some of the decking and the railings and that he’d come up from Howards Ford to help.”

  “Did he say how long he was there before he saw Dr. Ledwig’s body?”

  “He said it was only a few minutes. That he rang the bell, and when no one answered he walked around to the deck to see what was being done, looked over the railing and there he was. He said he knelt down and called to the doctor, then ran in the house and called us.”

  “No further questions.”

  Ms. Delorey looked over the small wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of her nose. “Officer McKinley, you said that Mr. Freeman came onto the deck with you to show you where Dr. Ledwig had fallen?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Does this mean you did not originally consider this a crime scene?”

  “I didn’t know what it was, ma’am.”

  “So you did not rope off the deck and keep everyone out except yourself and the rescue team?”

  “Well, Mr. Freeman had already been there, but I didn’t let nobody else come on that part of the deck, no, ma’am.”

  “No further questions,” said Ms. Delorey.

  I recessed for lunch at that point and, feeling in the mood for a quick order of chicken fingers, asked Mary Kay for directions to the nearest Hardee’s or Chick-fil-A.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “There aren’t any fast-food chains in Cedar Gap. Not allowed. Nearest one’s down in Howards Ford.”

  “Not allowed? How can you not allow McDonald’s or Burger King?”

  She laughed. “There used to be a Tastee-Freez, but it went bust and the town council voted not to allow any more chains in. Generates too much trash and they tend to drive out local cafés. They’re not real happy with the Trading Post or Roxie’s either because their customers aren’t as careful as they ought to be about where they drop their napkins.”

  “So where do people go for a quick lunch?”

  “Well, there’s a new place next to the Trading Post. The Three Sisters Tea Room.”

  “A Russian tea room?” I asked, amused.

  She smiled. “No, it’s American and it’s really good—salads and sandwiches made from bread baked right there in the kitchen every morning, but it’s only open from twelve to four and there’s always a line, so you might be better off at the High Country Café. It’s just on the other side of the monument, about two doors off Main. Their chicken salad’s not as good as the Tea Room, but it’s not bad and you can usually get a seat.”

  Her assessment of the chicken salad was an understatement. It was delicious. If that other place was better, I was going to have to check it out before I left Cedar Gap, long line or not.

  I was back in the courtroom at one o’clock sharp.

  “Call Detective Glenn Fletcher to the stand,” said Burke.

  As I watched Detective Fletcher come forward and once more take the oath to tell only the truth, I reminded myself to keep an open mind and not to let my earlier speculations about his willingness to bend the facts color my opinion of his testimony in this case.

  What he had to say was fairly straightforward. As is routine in cases of violent or accidental death, he and members of the sheriff’s department crime scene team had proceeded to Dr. Ledwig’s residence, arriving there shortly after five.

  “Mrs. Tina Ledwig and her daughter drove in right behind us.”

  “Miss Carla Ledwig?”

  “No, sir, this was the younger sister, Patricia Ledwig.”

  Carla Ledwig? The quarter finally dropped. The same Carla that had left a message for the twins to call her?

  “What did you do when you arrived?” asked Burke.

  “We immediately secured the scene. Mrs. Ledwig was upset and wanted to go over to see what the recovery team was doing.”

  “You did not let them onto the deck?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But Mr. Freeman continued to be there?”

  “No, sir. We moved him outside our tape barrier, too, and our photographer took pictures of the entire scene before recovery began.”

  “Permission to approach?” asked Burke.

  I nodded.

  He handed a packet of four-by-six color photographs to Fletcher. “Are these the pictures that were taken on the deck?”

  Fletcher did a pro forma flip-through. “Yes, sir.”

  Burke then handed copies to Ms. Delorey and to me.

  Long framing shots captured the whole deck, from a handful of mailers carelessly heaped on a table beside the French doors that opened into the stone house to pots of bronze-colored chrysanthemums ranged along the steps. I saw exposed joists where the old decking had been removed, as well as a section of the railing. New planks were stacked next to a pair of sawhorses, and a circular power saw lay on a piece of wood across the sawhorses. From another angle and well behind the yellow police tape, Freeman stood near an older woman and an adolescent girl—the same older woman who now sat on the front row behind Lucius Burke.

  I glanced across the aisle. The two young women seated there in support of Freeman were probably Patricia Ledwig and her sister, Carla. I wasn’t sure which was which, though, because they were very similar in looks—same long brown hair, same thin faces.

  Two pictures were of a body crumpled on a rocky ledge amid vivid orange and red underbrush. The close-up of Ledwig showed the head at an unnatural angle.

  “Explain the photographs numbered five, six, and seven, please.”

  These were close-ups of the foundation joists, which seemed to run perpendicularly from the house out to the edge of the deck where part of the railing was missing.

  “As you see, there is a large patch of blood here on the edge of the joist.”

  “Did you form a hypothesis as to how the doctor died?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Looking up at me, Fletcher pointed to the line of new planks that had been nailed to the joists. “It would appear that he had been working near the edge here, probably on his hands and knees. See this can of nails?”

  I nodded.

  “We think he was struck from the front and fell backward, hitting his head on this first joist and opening the wound that was subsequently found in the autopsy.”

  The next picture was a close-up of the joist. “This is where we found hair from the doctor’s head. Whoever did it then pulled him to the edge and shoved him over, getting smears of blood on the edge of the planks.”

  Burke directed our attention to photograph number ten. “You are speaking of these smears here on the joist and at the edge of the deck?”

  “Yes, sir. If you’ll notice, there’s also a fingerprint.”

  “Has the source of that blood been identified?”

  “It was the decedent’s.”

  “What about the fingerprint?”

  “It was from the defendant’s right middle finger.”

  “Photograph twelve?”

  “Those are fibers caught in some splinters at the edge of the deck.”

  “Did you subsequently identify the source of those fibers?”

  “Yes, sir. They came from the decedent’s trousers.”

  “Were these photographs taken before or after Dr. Ledwi
g’s body was retrieved?”

  “Before.”

  “You’re quite clear on that?”

  “Yes, sir. As you can see, the photographs are time-dated. I believe you have photographs taken when the body was being lifted up and you can see that the time is several minutes later. The fibers and blood were photographed before we brought the body up.”

  “Describe photograph eighteen, if you would. What are we looking at there?”

  Fletcher dutifully shuffled through the pile while Ms. Delorey and I did the same. It showed the reddish brown imprint of a diamond and two indistinct lines on the decking. I’d looked at enough shoe tracks in the last month to realize these were the tread marks of someone’s sneaker. And guess who was the only one on that deck wearing sneakers with those marks?

  You got it.

  Further questioning revealed that it was the blood on the joist that made them question whether the doctor had fallen accidentally. Dr. Ledwig had spoken by phone to a colleague at the clinic at 2:15. Freeman’s 911 call was logged at 4:37. The autopsy confirmed that Ledwig had indeed died during that time period, but when the autopsy also showed that the fatal head wound had probably been administered with a hammer, deputies had gone back to the ravine and searched until they found it. Blood and hair from the doctor’s head were still on the hammer.

  Finally, in addition to the traces on the soles of his sneakers and his fingerprint on the edge of the deck, a smear of the doctor’s blood was also found on the young man’s jeans.

  Each separate thing could be explained away by a skillful attorney, and when it was her turn, Ms. Delorey proved to be just that. She suggested that the young man’s actions were the natural actions of a close friend of the family. Of course there was blood on the soles of his shoes. He had come to help his girlfriend’s father work on the deck. When the doctor didn’t answer the door, he’d walked around to the back, and yes, he’d crossed the deck to see how the repairs were coming. He hadn’t noticed the blood on the edge of the planks and walked right through it. And when he saw the body and knelt down to call to the doctor, he’d knelt in blood and accidentally got some on his fingers.

  “Couldn’t all that be true, Detective Fletcher?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he agreed.

  “The blood on my client’s pantleg. Was it a smear or a spatter?”

  “It appeared to be a smear.”

  “But if he’d hit the doctor with a hammer, wouldn’t he have been spattered with some of the blood?”

  “Not necessarily, ma’am.”

  “When the hammer was found, was it tested for fingerprints?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Were any found?”

  “Only the decedent’s, ma’am.”

  “He hit himself?”

  “No, ma’am. The handle is made of a spongy black rubber with so many tiny holes that it didn’t yield fingerprints. The prints we found were on the shaft and head.”

  “So no fingerprints of my client on the hammer, no spatters on my client’s clothes, which would have happened if he’d been the one to use that hammer—”

  “Objection,” said Burke. “Is counsel asserting that she’s an expert in blood spatters?”

  “Withdrawn,” said Delorey.

  She had made a plausible explanation for the blood, but what couldn’t be explained away was the rest of Fletcher’s testimony. The statements he had taken from the various participants that evening and the next morning made it quite clear that Daniel Freeman had not gone to the Ledwig home to help repair the deck. He had gone to try and change the ultimatum the doctor had laid down to Freeman and his daughter when they told him she was pregnant and that they wanted to marry immediately.

  Over his dead body, Ledwig had reportedly said. He told them he would arrange for an abortion and ordered her never to see the baby’s father again. If she refused to comply, he would see to it that Freeman’s scholarship at Fletcher-MacLeod was revoked. He would also cut her allowance immediately, stop paying her tuition, and would forbid her to come to the house or to see her younger sister for so long as the younger daughter expected his support.

  Now, young women have been getting pregnant without benefit of clergy for as long as the world has been turning, and fathers have been angry and threatened to kill the man or kick out the daughter for just as long, but in this day and age? When illegitimacy carries few social stigmas in most circles beyond a shrug and a sheepish smile? It puzzled me that a man of Dr. Ledwig’s presumed intelligence and education would try to employ heavy-handed patriarchal power instead of psychology and common sense.

  All of the statements Fletcher had taken were evasive about the reasons for the doctor’s opposition to Freeman until he read aloud Freeman’s statement taken Friday afternoon. “‘I told Dr. Ledwig that if my racial designation bothered him so much, I’d change it to white and the baby could go down as white, too, and he said that there’d never been a drop of nigger blood in his family and he’d be damned if it was going to start with his first grandchild.’”

  I wasn’t the only one whose eyes automatically swung to Daniel Freeman in fresh appraisal of his brown hair, his hazel eyes, his summer tan as Fletcher continued reading from the young man’s statement.

  “‘Yes, it made me mad, and yes, I wanted to punch him out, but I didn’t. And I didn’t go out there yesterday to pick a fight. I thought maybe if he’d had time to calm down, I could make him see how stupid this whole race thing is. But when I got there, he was already down on the rocks, and no, I did not hit him with the hammer or push him off the deck.’”

  I understood now why Burke had decided to go for voluntary manslaughter instead of murder. Murder, especially murder in the first degree, requires strong elements of hatred and premeditation—the classic “malice aforethought” so dear to television cop shows. Voluntary manslaughter places partial blame on the victim, who inflames the passions of his killer, who then kills in the heat of the moment.

  Ms. Delorey did not put her client on the stand, but in her closing argument to me, she insisted that Dr. Ledwig’s words were not enough to goad her client into killing.

  Mr. Burke made a more convincing argument that they were.

  “The State is not insisting that Mr. Freeman is a cold-blooded murderer, Your Honor. He’s a good student, has never before been arrested, never even had a speeding ticket, but when Dr. Ledwig demanded that his daughter abort their child, effectively murdering their baby, when Dr. Ledwig taunted him and called him a nigger, the worst insult a white man can hurl at a man of African descent, Mr. Freeman lost it. He grabbed up that hammer and he struck his tormentor down; then, no doubt appalled by what he’d done, he pushed Dr. Ledwig over the edge of the deck, hoping that the fall would cover up the wound.”

  I found that there was indeed probable cause to bind Mr. Freeman over for trial in superior court and continued his bail at the twenty-five thousand Judge Rawlings had thought sufficient.

  It was almost four o’clock, but with ADA William Deeck back at the prosecutor’s table, we got through all the rest of the items on the calendar before I adjourned for the day.

  CHAPTER 7

  The twins had left me a note—Back between 11 and 12 and we’ll bring supper. XXX I guess they thought a greasy late-night snack would make up for the dirty coffee mugs and sticky smears I found on the dining table when I let myself into the condo and eased the strap of my laptop off my weary shoulder onto the only clean corner of the table.

  As a Luddite friend keeps reminding me, a pad and pencil only weigh about six ounces; my laptop weighs seven pounds and felt like seventy that last flight of steps. Yeah, yeah, I could have left it locked in Rawlings’s office at the courthouse, but I wanted to check my e-mail, something I hadn’t had a chance to do all day and something that can’t be done with a pad and pencil.

  I put the dirty mugs and sugar-encrusted spoons in the dishwasher, wiped down the table, and plugged my modem cord into the kitchen phone jack. One of th
ese days I’m going to look into wireless communication, but for now, I keep a twenty-five-foot phone cord in my laptop case.

  Along with offers of Viagra, penile implants, breast enlargement, pornographic photographs, free septic tank inspections, and the opportunity to help a general’s son fleece the Nigerian government of several million dollars, I found messages from Portland, my sole attendant if the wedding actually came off (“The way this baby’s kicking I don’t think I’m going to last till December. What about Halloween?”), from my cousin Beverly (“Forgot to tell you that there’s no garbage pickup. You’ll have to use the county’s waste site on Ridge Road.”), and a one-liner from Dwight (“You get there okay?”).

  I had my finger poised over the delete button for a message entitled “Want to party?” when I noticed that the unfamiliar sender had an NC.rr.com in the server tag. It was a woman Will had brought to one of the weekly family music sessions we hold at a cousin’s barbecue house out near the farm. So many of us play the fiddle, guitar, banjo, or harmonica that even though none of us go every single week, there’re usually at least six or eight who show up after Wednesday night choir practice or prayer meeting to eat barbecue, play and sing the old songs, or, as Haywood puts it, just fellowship together.

  Your brother Will says you’re up here alone this week? I know this isn’t much notice, but we’re having a party tonight and would love to have you join us. You probably don’t remember us, but Will invited us to sit in with y’all when we were down in the Raleigh area last winter. (My husband Bobby has a big walrus mustache and plays guitar and harmonica. I don’t have a mustache, but I do play the fiddle.)

  Joyce Ashe

  As soon as I read her description of her husband, I remembered who they were—early fifties, pleasant. They laughed at our jokes and slid right into the music with no fuss. I did notice that they were better dressed than we were, though. Nothing flashy. Their jeans and loafers were almost as worn as ours, but theirs had come with designer names and upscale brands; and their instruments were quality models, not the pawnshop finds that most of ours were. Will said they were down for one of his estate sales in Raleigh and I’d wondered at the time what his motive was in bringing them out to the country.