In Self-Defense

by A. W. Gray

  Suddenly the uniformed cop broke in: “It was working two weeks earlier, because somebody turned an alarm in. It’s on the Highland Park police records.” The City of Highland Park had its own force, but had an arrangement whereby the Dallas Police could step into investigations when the HP cops felt they didn’t have the manpower. Linda Rathermore’s original call had gone to the Downtown Dallas Main Headquarters, and Sharon suspected that with the publicity potential of the case, the Dallas Police had simply muscled the HP boys out of the way.

  Black coughed, and Sharon thought that the cough was to cover up the older lawyer’s grin. He said, “There was an earlier break-in?”

  The man in uniform was around twenty-five, with short hair and no sideburns. “Yes, sir,” he said proudly. “I can give you a copy of the report if you’d like.” He looked at Green as if to say, I guess I’m telling them, huh?

  Green looked as though he’d like to muzzle the uniformed guy. Black said, “Yeah, I’d like.”

  “Anything you give them,” Green snapped, “clear it with me.”

  “He can clear it with you,” Black said, standing away from the security panel, “or he can clear it with the judge. Gettin’ a court order’s a pain, but if we have to we have to.”

  “It’s in here,” Sharon broke in, bending over the bathroom door lock, “that she hid out from the boys, isn’t it? Ran inside while they were beating her husband to death.”

  “That’s what she said,” Green said stiffly.

  “Well, it occurs to me,” Sharon said, “that those kids must be awfully weak if they couldn’t break in to get to her. Either that, or they weren’t trying very hard.” She looked up and smiled. “What do you think, Detective?”

  31

  Sharon was never going to be able to concentrate on her phone conversation as long as Russell Black paced back and forth in front of her desk, mumbling under his breath, so she firmed her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “You’re not helping any, boss. We’re all on pins and needles, but stalking around glaring at me is counterproductive.”

  Black sank glumly into a chair in front of Sharon’s desk. “Where the hell is he?” he said.

  Sharon gave the older lawyer a tight but patient smile, then said into the phone, “Please tell him it’s urgent.” She hung up. “His beeper service has the message. So does his wife. I don’t know anybody else to leave the message with, but if you’ve got any suggestions I’m open.” She folded her arms.

  Black snorted. “If you could buy these private detectives for what they’re worth and sell ’em for what they think they’re worth …”

  “Stop flying off the handle. He got us Leslie Schlee, didn’t he?” Sharon wondered how Black’s wife had ever put up with his mood swings. She had the patience of Job, Sharon thought.

  “Yep. And is gettin’ all the mileage he can out of it. Now he’s screwin’ around.”

  The phone jangled. As Sharon reached to answer, Black jerked up the receiver and jammed it against his ear. “Yeah, lawyer’s office,” he said. Sharon sank resolutely back against her chair cushions and drummed her fingers. Russell Black on a tear was something else.

  Black listened, scowling, then said, “Well, where in hell are you?” He rolled his eyes. “Dudn’t sound to me like you’re wanting to …” then listened some more and finally said, “Don’t move a muscle. We’re on our way.” He hung up. “Some detective you got, Sharon.”

  She sighed. “He must not be doing very well. When he got us Leslie Schlee, he was your detective.”

  “Whoever’s detective he is,” Black said, “he’s jerkin’ around out at some greasy motel. Come on. If Mr. Gear dudn’t give a pretty good explanation for what he’s doin’, he’s liable to get fired.”

  To say that the Windjammer Motel was off the beaten path was putting it mildly. The highway running in front of the place was riddled with asphalt-repaired cracks, and more crevices which no one had bothered to fix, through which browning grass grew. If a movie director needed a sleazy motel setting, Sharon thought, he need look no further. As Bogart told the German in Casablanca, she thought as she gazed over the dismal landscape, there are parts of East Dallas County you wouldn’t want to invade, General. Across the highway was an auto graveyard, rusted hulks piled one on top of the other with one ancient winch against the skyline like a dinosaur skeleton.

  The coffee shop windows were in the shape of portholes. Sharon thought that the round tinted glass surrounded by anchor chains would have been a jazzy idea in a seaside restaurant, but was simply ridiculous considering the stunning view of the wrecking yard. The anchor chains were dusty, the panes filthy. The adjoining motel building had once been white, but had last been painted sometime around the Battle of the Bulge; what paint was left on the walls clung in crusty gray flakes. Next door to the motel was a beer joint whose sign was missing some letters; it took some imagination on Sharon’s part to translate -US-Y -AIL into “Rusty Nail,” and also considered that the joint might really be called the Dusty Pail. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, Sharon thought. In the barroom parking lot were two ancient pickups and an old Oldsmobile with one fender bashed in. My Volvo would be right at home over there, Sharon thought. The motel parking area was deserted but for two vehicles, one a blue ten-year-old Dodge parked nose on to Room 12. The spotless yellow BMW two spaces down from the Dodge stood out like a nun at a hookers’ convention.

  Sharon and Russell Black sat in a booth across from Anthony Gear. There were two other customers in the restaurant, guys in a corner booth who wore skintight T-shirts, hadn’t shaved, and looked as if they hadn’t bathed in a week. The waitress—who doubled as the motel desk clerk—was easily in her seventies, walked with a limp, and was as stooped over as Rumpelstiltskin. Sort of a female Igor, Sharon thought. Her gaze fell alternately on the filthy wooden floor, on plastic-covered chairs with cotton stuffing poking out, and finally rested on one of the men in the corner booth. He sported two or three days’ growth of mottled beard, and his front teeth were missing. Yolk dripped from his chin as he chowed down on two eggs fried sunny-side up. He grinned at her. She shuddered and looked away.

  Russ Black said to Anthony Gear, “It’s just the way it is. If my client’s goin’ to pay you, you need to keep in touch, and I shouldn’t have to tell you.” He sat between Sharon and the porthole window.

  Sharon wondered if anything could bother Anthony Gear. The detective calmly dipped a doughy biscuit into thin cream gravy. He bit off a chunk and chewed. He wore the same plaid sports coat as always, but had changed to a green broadcloth shirt and light green tie. “When you finish bawling me out,” Gear said, “I’ll give you a report.”

  “Right now we don’t need a report,” Black said, fishing a piece of paper from his coat pocket. “What we need is for you to get on this. Pronto. Been callin’ all over hell and gone lookin’ for you.”

  Gear laid down his biscuit, took the paper, and unfolded it. “Get on what?”

  “That’s the name and phone number of the security company that handles the Rathermores’ alarm system. I want you to meet with whoever’s in charge of the outfit and see if they’ll give us any information. If they won’t, we’ll have to subpoena their business records, and a copy of the subpoena will have to go to Milt Breyer. I’d just as soon he dudn’t know we’re talkin’ to these people.”

  Gear produced a silver ballpoint and writing pad. “What are we trying to find out?”

  Sharon leaned over and butted in in a hushed voice. “There was a disturbance about two weeks before the murder. We want to know what the security company did about it.”

  Gear raised untrimmed eyebrows. “Did pertaining to what?”

  “Pertaining to the security code,” Sharon said. “The usual practice is to change the code anytime someone turns in an alarm. If they changed it … Well, our two young men testified that Midge gave them the code before Christmas vacation. Be
fore the break-in. So how’s come they had the new code, is what we’re asking.”

  Gear scratched underneath his chin. “I’ll be damned. You think Linda Rathermore gave it to them?”

  “We’re hoping,” Sharon said.

  “There’s a problem,” Gear said. “With the trial starting Monday, I can’t do this until …”

  “Sure, while we’re pickin’ the jury,” Black said. “Which wouldn’t be a problem if you’d been keeping in touch like you’re supposed to.”

  Gear’s jaws clenched. He sopped his biscuit in gravy, keeping his head down as he said, “I can only be in one place at a time. You told me to watch Linda Rathermore.”

  “Which is what you’re doin’,” Black said, “sittin’ around eatin’ biscuits and gravy in this fleabag?”

  Gear reached down and pulled up a small Canon camera by its carrying strap. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  Black cocked his head. “Huh?”

  “She’s a restless woman,” Gear said. “Man, is she restless.”

  Black exchanged looks with Sharon.

  “She just can’t stay holed up in that lake house,” Gear said. “Three or four times a day she goes into town, grocery store or whatever, but she didn’t do anything that looks the least bit out of line until this morning.”

  Black stirred coffee the color of river mud. Sharon had taken one look at the half-washed empty cup before her and had told the waitress that she didn’t care for anything. Russ’ stomach, she thought, must be lined with stainless steel. Black set his cup into the saucer with a soft, glassy clink. “What’d she do today that’s so different?”

  Gear jerked a thumb toward the window. “That BMW out there is hers. She’s been inside old unlucky Room 13 since, oh, about eleven.” He checked his watch. “Six hours.”

  Five o’clock already, Sharon thought. Since the trip to the Rathermore mansion, the day had slipped completely away. Another evening for Melanie at Sheila’s house. I’m neglecting my daughter, she thought, and once this frigging trial is over I’m going to change that. The blistering sun was still high over the roof; in July darkness didn’t fall until nearly nine.

  “Christ,” Black said. “Who’s she in there with?”

  Gear washed down the biscuit with a swallow of milk. “Who knows? For all I know, Linda’s in there by herself. But I sort of doubt it. I’m not budging from here until she comes out if it’s a week.” He hefted the camera once more and smiled. “So I do stay on the job, Russ, regardless of what you think.”

  “And we’re goin’ to see that you do,” Black said. “Until Linda comes out of that room, you’re goin’ to have company.”

  Linda didn’t come out in the open until almost eight, and in the interim Sharon was bored practically to tears. They’d left the restaurant around six, and for the past two hours had been seated across the street in Russ’ Buick. Sharon was in the backseat with the two men in front. Her period was about to begin, and she was cramping. Every ten minutes or so, Black started the engine and turned the AC on to cool down the car’s interior; even at eight o’clock it was over ninety degrees. Anthony Gear had a teeth-jarring habit of cracking his knuckles, which he did every quarter hour or so, and Sharon felt that if he cracked them one more time she was going to have a sobbing fit. She was thinking of a subtle way to tell Gear to stop when the door to the Windjammer Motel’s Room 13 opened a crack, hesitated, then swung wide on its hinges.

  “Geronimo,” Gear said, sitting up.

  Black bent over the steering wheel to peer around the detective toward the motel. Sharon draped an arm over the seat back and put her nose a quarter inch from the window.

  It was Linda, all right. She moved cautiously toward the BMW, her head turning right and left in the building’s shadow. She was dressed in snug white pants and a maroon knit blouse, her hair tousled as if she’d been in a wind tunnel. Linda was in one big hurry, and her expression was tense. She reached the BMW’s driver’s side, glanced around her a final time, then beckoned to someone still inside the room. A man came out and moved up to the car from the passenger side. Sharon put up a hand to shade her eyes.

  Correction, Sharon thought, Linda’s sweetie isn’t quite a man. He was more of a boy, a good-looking teenager with thick sandy hair. As the youngster paused beside the car, Sharon had the same feeling she’d experienced when she’d first seen him in the courtroom. Most Likely to Succeed, hands down. The boy was Troy Burdette.

  Gear said in a loud whisper, “Christ on a crutch.”

  Russ Black dug around on the floorboard under his feet, then lifted Gear’s camera. He squinted through the viewfinder. “Where’s the shutter button on this thing, boy?” he said. “Mr. Gear, you better not have forgotten to load the film. If you did, you’re goin’ to have me to answer to.”

  The old woman looked a thousand times more at ease in the motel office than she had in the restaurant. When she’d been wearing her waitress hat, her breathing had been like a cardiac patient’s as she’d grumped from table to table, and she’d seemed in such a strain that Sharon had worried that the poor old thing might drop the coffeepot. In the office, however, the gray-haired lady could relax on a stool behind the counter and sneer with the best of them. A lit unfiltered Camel dangled from one corner of her mouth and her teeth were stained. Her vocal cords were sandpaper and there were big liver spots on the backs of her hands. “If you’re the police, you got no call to come fucking with me,” she said. Just a sweet old grandmama, Sharon thought.

  “We’re just the opposite, ma’am,” Russ Black said. “We’re lawyers defendin’ a criminal client.” He leaned his forearms on the counter in his best buddy-buddy posture while Sharon stood off to one side with her arms folded and her ankles crossed. Anthony Gear had left minutes earlier, following Linda Rathermore’s BMW to wherever it was headed. Sharon thought that Gear’s Land Rover was the most conspicuous surveillance vehicle she’d ever seen, but if Linda had suspected that she had a tail, she hadn’t let on.

  “Well, if you’re a lawyer,” the old lady said, “maybe I should let you talk to mine.” Her black eyes reflected a million miles of bad road; lawyers impressed her zero, the police even less. Sharon thought fleetingly of the Ma Barker gang.

  “I just want to know,” Black said, “about that boy who just left outta Room 13 with the blond woman. He come here in a cab?”

  “I don’t know from nothing about people come here. If you want to know about cabs I’ll call you one. Or you can leave in your car, mister, I don’t give a shit.” The cigarette wagged up and down between dry, wrinkled lips. Loose skin dangled from bony upper arms. “This ain’t exactly no Hyatt Regency we can check out everybody’s credentials. Somebody shows me American Express, I think they’re pulling a fast one.”

  Black’s nostrils flared. “It ain’t exactly a home for runaways, either, lady. Let me ask you. You know what an accessory is?”

  “Like, to a robbery? I ain’t robbed shit.”

  Sharon took a step forward. “Like, to inducing a minor, ma’am. It’s a felony.”

  “I ain’t induced shit, neither.” The lip curled in a sneer. She looked Sharon over with vulture eyes, and she didn’t seem pleased with what she saw. “I just collect the rent.” She coughed up phlegm.

  Sharon wanted to stamp her foot. “Well, do you—”

  “Hold it.” Black’s hand was on Sharon’s arm. He winked at her, then laid a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. “That’s the easy way, ma’am,” he said to the old woman. “The hard way is for us to call the police and give them copies of some pictures we took. Of a fortysomethin’-year-old woman and a sixteen-year-old kid comin’ out of Room 13. I don’t think they’ll find out she’s the boy’s mama, either.”

  The woman fingered one of her liver spots. Her cig had burned down nearly to her lips; she squashed the soggy butt in an ashtray and fished for another. She t
humbed a disposable lighter, lit, blew out smoke, and picked tobacco from between her teeth. Finally she pocketed the twenty and said, “Another kid brings him. The woman takes him home.”

  “They’ve been here before, then,” Sharon said.

  “A year or more they been coming. Used to be, oh, a couple of times a week, but I ain’t seen ’em in a while. I never told you that, right? If anything comes back on me, I’ll swear you two was shacked up here and tried to beat us for the rent.” She showed Black an evil leer. “Old fart like you runnin’ around with this young woman might not look so good, neither.” Her gaze darted from Black to Sharon, then back again. “We got us an understanding, don’t we?” the old woman said.

  32

  Sharon calmed her pretrial butterflies on the Saturday preceding the Fourth of July by taking Melanie shopping again. Actually, the mall excursion the week before had been a scam to take the eleven-year-old’s mind off her father—and to give mommy additional time to make up her mind what to do about him—the result being that mother and daughter had spent a whole lot more time looking than buying, but now they shopped in earnest, knocking serious dents in Sharon’s credit card limits. The buying donnybrook began at Sears Valley View (for hiking shoes, riding jeans, and three pairs of sensible khaki shorts which Sharon practically had to stuff Melanie into bodily, ignoring her daughter’s loud protest that she’d be the only kid in camp wearing anything so dorky), continued on to J. C. Penney’s Northpark (which had advertised knit shirts on sale, but, of course, happened to be out of the lower-priced knits in anything but sizes designed to fit a baby elephant, all of which caused Sharon to leave the store mumbling about false-advertising lawsuits even though she’d blown sixty bucks on shirts which weren’t on sale), detoured to Lady Foot Locker (whose prices were a rip-off, Sharon thought, but which happened to be the only place in town carrying Nike Chug-Alongs, or whatever brand it was that Melanie just had to have to keep from dying from embarrassment), and finally ended at Morgan Boots, where mommy swallowed her Scottish instincts to spring for fifty-dollar western footwear. Three years earlier she had promised Melanie the boots (God, I must have been drunk, she thought as she forked over her MasterCard) if the child should ever make Roughrider in horsemanship at Sky Ranch. Melanie had passed the Roughrider test the previous summer, and the kid had the memory of an elephant when it came to mommy’s promises. How Melanie could recall the boot promise—when the child could never remember where she’d tossed her underpants on the night before wash day—was a mystery to mommy. The shopping trip went on and on, and it was nearly ten before they got home. Day one of pretrial weekend survived.