Proof of Intent

by William J. Coughlin

  Denkerberg looked around the room with obvious interest. She was a good four inches taller than Miles, I noticed. “Quite a collection,” she said.

  “Yeah, I had all this stuff appraised last year. Well over a hundred grand, you believe that?” Miles said loftily. “That’s why I keep the door locked.”

  I suddenly felt a prickling on the back of my neck. It wasn’t just the weapons. Something seemed to have changed in Miles’s countenance the second Denkerberg had entered the room. It was as though a mask had dropped over his face: Suddenly he seemed a harder, tougher man than the one who had led me to his dead wife. Miles had a reputation—in the press, at least—for belligerence. And friction was the last thing this interview needed.

  I cleared my throat. “Shall we get started?”

  Miles and I sat on the couch, but Denkerberg continued to circle the room, hands behind her back, examining every item carefully. Each weapon was perched on its own small pair of wooden hooks—each hook, from the look of it, custom-made from mahogany to fit the individual weapon and to match the room’s wooden paneling. Under each rack was a small brass plate detailing the weapon’s particulars.

  Denkerberg finally sat down, crossing her long legs primly. She took a pack of Tiparillos out of her purse, stuck one in her mouth, clamping the plastic holder between her teeth. She reminded me of a hateful nun from back in my parochial school days, Sister Herman Marie, who was always whacking me in the back of the head with her prayer book when I fumbled in catechism practice. You stumbled over a couple words, then KA-WHACK!

  “I’m deeply sorry about your wife, Mr. Dane,” the detective said, lighting the Tiparillo. “And I know this is a difficult time for you. But if we’re going to find the person who committed this horrible thing, I’ll need to speak with you while your impressions are still fresh.” She examined Miles Dane’s face with frank curiosity. The writer might as well have been wearing a kabuki mask for all the expression he showed. The vulnerability he’d shown just minutes earlier seemed to have entirely evaporated. “First, Mr. Dane, if you’d tell me what happened tonight. Everything you saw, everything you heard. When you’re done I’ll ask you some more questions.”

  Miles looked at me and blinked. “I’m not being thin-skinned, am I? I mean, this is my house. Isn’t it customary these days to ask before you fire up tobacco products in other people’s houses?”

  “I’m sorry,” Denkerberg said, not sounding sorry at all. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  Miles’s eyes widened. “Oh, no. I don’t mind in the slightest. I just was a little surprised you didn’t ask.” He smiled without warmth as he fixed his cold gray eyes on the detective.

  I rested two fingers gently on the back of his forearm. “I’m sure the detective didn’t mean anything by it. She’s got a lot on her mind.”

  “Not a problem,” Denkerberg said, drawing on the Tiparillo. “Mr. Dane?”

  “Some people describe the writing process as being something like entering a fugue state,” Miles said. “If you’re not a writer, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about. But at a certain point the characters on the page seem to get up and start walking around on their own. Once that happens the writer’s job is almost like taking dictation. But that doesn’t mean a writer just sits on his ass. Ever learn shorthand, Ms. Denkerberg? Taking dictation requires a great, great deal of concentration.”

  “I can imagine,” Denkerberg murmured.

  “I write at night.” Miles’s face had changed subtly once he started speaking, taking on a pugnacious look, like a drunk who was hoping to get in a fight with somebody. “I require complete and utter quiet, so I located this office at the far end of the house.”

  This caught me by surprise. Why had he told me he was blasting Beethoven when his wife died? Denkerberg must have caught me frowning because she said, “Something to add, Counselor?”

  “Pardon?” I said vaguely. “What? Oh, no, sorry I was just . . . I sort of drifted off for a moment there.” I smiled pleasantly. Over the years I’ve perfected the art of acting marginally competent. It’s an act that fits with my rumpled clothes and scuffed wing tips, my forgettable face, my cheap haircut. But it is an act.

  “Anyway,” Miles said, apparently irritated at the interruption in his narrative, “I started working at around midnight. I only work at night. I don’t see how writers get anything done during the day. I’m suspicious of these sanctimonious jerks who always go on about how much they accomplish bright and early in the morning. Seems like some kind of character flaw to me.

  “Anyway. Me, I’m lucky. I never have writer’s block. My view, writer’s block is an excuse for chumps and dilettantes who don’t like working. You don’t want to be a writer, hell, go dig ditches, be a secretary, whatever. But don’t whine to me about writer’s block.” He glared at the detective as though expecting some kind of objection. When Denkerberg continued to sit silently, pulling on her Tiparillo, Miles continued.

  “So I’d written about eight pages by around three-thirty. Goddamn good work, too, if I may say so myself. The juices were really flowing. Then I heard something.”

  The room was silent for a while. I noticed that Denkerberg wasn’t looking at Miles. Her gaze was fixed on the wall. I followed the direction her Tiparillo was pointing, saw that one of the weapon racks was empty. There was a brass plate next to the two mahogany hooks, but nothing rested on them. I wondered if she found any significance in that.

  “What did you hear?” Denkerberg said finally.

  “A noise,” Miles snapped.

  “A noise.” She didn’t say it with any particular inflection, but still there was that vaguely accusatory Sister Herman Marie quality about the way she said it.

  “What.” Miles didn’t seem to like her tone. “A noise. A noise, that’s all.”

  Denkerberg raised her eyebrows slightly. “As an accomplished author, I’m sure you appreciate the need for precise description. ‘Noise’ is a rather vague term.”

  “How should I know? I’m in the middle of a gripping scene, characters stomping around in my brain, then suddenly something reaches in, some kind of goddamn noise, and yanks me out of what I’m doing.”

  “But you don’t know what kind of noise?”

  “What did I just tell you?” The room was silent for a long time. “A sharp noise, maybe? Somewhere between a crack and a bang? I don’t know! But it was inside the house. That’s about all I can say for certain. So I got up to see what the noise was. My wife is usually asleep this time of night, so I wanted to make sure she was okay.”

  “Any reason to think, based on this noise, that she wouldn’t be okay?” Denkerberg said.

  Miles glared at her. “Are you questioning my story?”

  “I’m just trying to establish the whys and wherefores, Mr. Dane.”

  Miles looked at me, raised his eyebrows sarcastically. “Ah! The whys and wherefores! Now I understand.”

  “Miles,” I said softly, “let’s not get off track. I know you’ve received a terrible shock here, that you’re angry and distraught. But let’s just focus on helping Detective Denkerberg do her job.”

  Miles shrugged. “Yeah, well, what it was, the noise made me nervous. I don’t know. Like something wasn’t right. Hell, it could have been a million things. I just wanted to make sure she was safe.”

  “Were you concerned it might have been an intruder?”

  “Well, yeah, I mean, it crossed my mind. You hear a funny noise in the middle of the night, it could be a lot of things.”

  “So what happened next?”

  “I went down the hall toward the living room. Then I heard it again.”

  “The noise.”

  “Yeah. Like a crack. Or a bump. Only this time it sounded more, I don’t know, like splintering wood or something.”

  I felt a tingle running under my skin. I didn’t like this at all, didn’t like the way this was going, not one bit.

  “Where was it coming from?” Denkerberg said. �
��This noise.”

  “Upstairs.” He stopped, and his face went blank.

  The room was silent again. I didn’t watch my client’s face. Instead I watched Denkerberg. I noticed her gaze had drifted up to the empty weapon rack again.

  Miles continued. “That’s when I saw him.”

  I nodded slightly, as though I’d heard this all before. I hoped Denkerberg didn’t pick up on my consternation. Or my sudden urge to strangle my client. I was about three seconds away from terminating the interview. Which one was the lie—the story he’d told me earlier or the one he was telling now? I could feel a cool sweat sprouting on my forehead.

  “Saw who?” the detective said.

  “The man in the hallway.”

  In the movies lawyers are always storming into rooms and demanding that detectives terminate interviews. Sometimes that has to be done, of course; but in real life getting pushy with detectives is pretty much an invitation to get your client charged with something.

  I began coughing. Miles and Denkerberg looked at me, both seemingly annoyed at the interruption. My coughing segued into a sort of choking, hacking croak.

  “Water,” I gasped.

  Denkerberg looked understandably skeptical.

  I kept hacking away, putting my hands over my throat.

  “Here.” Miles stood. “I’ll get you some water.”

  I shook my head sharply, pointed at Denkerberg. “Her. Don’t want . . . you disturbing . . . the scene . . .” I gasped and spluttered some more.

  Denkerberg didn’t move.

  “Please.” I pointed at her. “Get . . .”

  She scowled. “Glasses in the kitchen, Mr. Dane?”

  He nodded.

  As soon as she was out of the room, I hopped up, closed the door, and cranked the massive bolt, locking the door.

  “What in the world do you think you’re doing, Miles?” I said.

  He looked at me blankly, all innocence.

  “Let’s put aside the fact that you’ve been needlessly and childishly antagonizing that woman from the word go,” I said. “More importantly, Miles, I asked you very specifically if you knew what happened.” My voice was low but hard. “You said no. I asked if you heard anything. No, you were blasting Beethoven’s seventeenth piano sonata on your stereo. I asked if you saw anybody. No, you were working. Now all of a sudden, there’s thumping and bumping and some mysterious figure in the hallway. Don’t tell me you were confused, distraught, whatever. That won’t wash.”

  Miles didn’t say anything, just stared straight up in the air.

  “So which is it, Miles? Was there a guy or not?”

  “There was a guy.”

  “You saw the man who killed your wife.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Then why did you lie to me earlier?”

  He looked at the floor, sighed. “When you hear the whole story, the way it really happened? It’s going to sound improbable, stupid. I almost wasn’t going to tell the truth at all. I hadn’t decided at that point.”

  I studied his face, but I couldn’t get a sense of whether he was lying or not. “If I get a whiff of stink here,” I said finally, “if I get even a hint that you’re lying, I will stand up and I will walk out of this room, and that will be the last time you see me. Do you understand me?”

  Miles nodded.

  “Everything you’ve done so far looks self-incriminating. Just the fact that I had to interrupt this interrogation in such an obvious and silly way looks extremely, extremely, extremely bad. But I wouldn’t have done it if I weren’t concerned that you were about to do something wildly stupid. Are we on the same page here?”

  “Now hold on just a—” Miles stood up and jabbed his finger in my face.

  I grabbed his finger and twisted. He sat down hard. “No, you look here, Miles. You need to think very hard about what you’re going to do next. You need to be certain that what you’re going to say is absolutely truthful. Okay? If you say it was quiet but your neighbor says he couldn’t sleep because Horowitz’s Steinway is blasting out your window at two thousand decibels, that’s a problem. If you tell Denkerberg you were writing, but your computer says that you haven’t saved a new file in three days, that’s a problem. If you say you didn’t touch your wife’s body, and they find a bloody glove stuffed in the back of your sock drawer, that’s a problem. Understood?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Shut up! I’m not interested in yeah but. Sit down in that chair, and think. Silently. For precisely two minutes. If at the end of those two minutes you have even a shadow of a doubt about whether each and every event that you are about to describe might be controvertible by other facts in even the smallest detail, then I’m going to tell Detective Denkerberg that you are very distraught and emotional and that you need medical care and that this interview is hereby terminated.”

  “Now Charley—” He started to rise out of the chair.

  “Sit!”

  We stayed there, eyes locked for a few seconds. When the fire cooled a little in his eyes, I stepped back. He blew out a long breath, then stared up at the ceiling.

  Denkerberg knocked sharply on the door. I didn’t open it. She knocked again.

  “You ready?” I said.

  “Go ahead,” he said softly.

  “And for godsake do your best not to antagonize her.”

  Miles nodded, looking at the ground like a chastened schoolboy.

  I opened the door, called the detective back in. “Sorry about that, Detective. I’m actually feeling much better now.” I rubbed my throat. “As it happened, once the choking passed, I realized there were a couple of housekeeping issues between me and my client that I’d meant to clear out of the way before our talk, but in all the haste and confusion, I had forgotten to address them. I hope you won’t hold it against me.” I tried out my biggest smile on the detective.

  She ignored me, her eyes fixed on Miles’s face. “There was a man in the hallway,” she said.

  Miles nodded. “That’s right. I don’t know if you looked closely, but it’s a curved stairway. So you sort of come around the corner, then you’re in the upstairs hallway. Anyway, I came around and there he was. I guess I just froze.” He frowned thoughtfully. “No, that’s not right. Actually, I ducked back behind the wall. My first thought was, you know, what if he has a gun? Then I heard him running down the hallway, then I heard this smash. Like glass breaking. After that I guess I just got mad and stopped worrying about my own safety, because I came back out and ran after him. But he was gone. I looked out the smashed window in the back bedroom, and I saw—I guess I’d call him a shadowy figure. And he’s hauling ass off toward the road. Then I started shouting my wife’s name. She didn’t answer, so I ran into my bedroom. And there she—”

  Suddenly Miles broke down, put his face in his hands, and began to weep. By this point I had started feeling skeptical about virtually every word he’d said—but his grief looked entirely convincing to me.

  When Miles finally seemed to have collected himself, Denkerberg said, “This man. What did he look like?”

  Miles’s face hardened. “I wish I could say. It was dark up there.”

  “But it was definitely a man.”

  “Yeah. I could tell by the way he moved. He didn’t move like a woman.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell me? Height? Build? Race? Scars? Tattoos? Eye color?”

  Miles shook his head.

  “Was he carrying a weapon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Denkerberg took some notes, then looked up. “Were you?”

  “Was I what?”

  “Carrying a weapon?”

  Miles seemed to hesitate. “No,” he said finally.

  “You’re sitting in a room full of weapons. You hear a strange noise, something that you suspect might have been an intruder, you rush toward the noise . . .” She squinted curiously at Miles for a moment. “And yet you don’t take a weapon?”

  Miles’s face was
blank for a moment, then his eyes narrowed. “Are you implying something?”

  “Like I said before, whys and wherefores. My job is to tie down every single detail.”

  “Well I wasn’t carrying a weapon. Like I said earlier, my first thought was that my wife might have slipped and fallen.”

  “Didn’t even grab something small? A knife? A stick?”

  Miles shook his head.

  Denkerberg nodded, then pointed her Bic pen at the empty rack on the wall. “What’s usually in that rack?”

  Miles looked up, blinked, then looked slightly confused. “On the wall?”

  “That rack. There’s an empty rack.” Denkerberg stood, walked over to the two wooden hooks, then peered at the label on the small brass plate next to it. “It says it’s a bokken.”

  “It’s pronounced BO-ken, not bock-in. B-O-K-K-E-N. A bokken is a wooden sword used by Japanese swordsmen—kenjutsu practitioners. That one is Gabon ebony, hand-carved by Toshio Nakamitsu, the most famous craftsman of wooden weapons in modern Japan.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “Basically it’s a black stick. A curved piece of wood, shaped roughly like a samurai sword.”

  “What happened to it?”

  Miles shrugged. “Seems like it’s been gone a while.”

  “Did you loan it to somebody? Lose it? Break it?”

  Miles kept staring at the empty space on the wall, a vague expression on his face. “I don’t know where it is.”

  “Stolen?”

  “I don’t know. Hard keeping track of all this stuff.”

  Denkerberg looked skeptical. “You keep the door locked at all times to protect your valuable collection, how could you lose it?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Okay, now that I think about it, I believe it was here yesterday.”