Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests

by Inc. Mystery Writers of America

  Herrera allowed a silence of several seconds before asking, “Is this type of erroneous identification—that is, of persons who have been seen in other contexts—always of someone who has been seen in person?”

  “Not at all. It may also result from a television or newspaper sighting, or from having been shown a photograph by the police.”

  “From having been shown a photograph by the police,” Herrera echoed.

  “Yes. Especially if no one else whose picture the witness was shown is included in the lineup.” Herrera nodded.

  “Please keep in mind,” Smithers continued, “that such witnesses are not deliberately lying. They firmly believe that they are recalling what they actually saw.”

  Herrera impaled a juror in the back row with his eyes. “They firmly believe what is not in fact true. That is just what makes this especially dangerous and frightening.”

  “Objection!”

  “Sustained. Please don’t editorialize, Mr. Herrera.”

  “Sorry.”

  Vekt smirked.

  ____

  “HAS THE JURY reached a verdict?”

  The foreman’s long, narrow body, in jeans and a green sweater, seemed to uncoil rather than just stand up. “Yes, Your Honor, we have.”

  Vekt’s left leg began to tremble. The judge instructed him to rise; Herrera rose with him.

  “Read your verdict, please.”

  The foreman, not smiling, said, “On every count, we find the defendant not guilty.”

  “WHEEE-OOOO!” Harold took great gulps of breath and seized his lawyer by the upper arms. “Great job, Herrera. Great job!” The attorney remained expressionless.

  “The defendant is free to go,” Judge Quinn announced. Harold snorted with pleasure as he saw the prosecutor and his assistant looking at each other disgustedly. Morris Jagoda sat with his head in his hands.

  Vekt reached out to shake Herrera’s hand, but the attorney was bending down to retrieve his briefcase from under the table. He removed a small manila envelope.

  “I was instructed to give you this in the event you were acquitted. I have no idea what’s in it, or from whom it originated. I don’t want to know.” Herrera swept his papers off the table into the briefcase, clicked shut its combination lock, and stalked out of the courtroom. Harold stared after him briefly, then shrugged and turned his attention to the envelope.

  It was 6 x 8; nothing was printed or written on the outside. Its metal tab closing was reinforced with two strips of transparent tape.

  “What’s that?” Theresa Vekt had come up behind her son.

  “I don’t know—something from the lawyer.”

  “Not a bill?”

  “Nah—the court’s paying him. I’ll look at it later.” His implication that it was none of her business was accepted matter-offactly. “How about celebrating at Dinky Jones’s?”

  The dimly lit wood-paneled tavern had survived through all the years of change in Harold’s childhood neighborhood. They sat on stools at the far end of the bar and had a couple of beers each, talking little except for toasts to each other and Herrera and Smithers and the jury. Then Harold took his mother to the Yonkers bus, promising to come for dinner in a couple of days.

  ____

  BACK IN HIS flat, he put the thick envelope on the coffee table and studied it, pressing it between his palms. Fetching a steak knife from the kitchen, he cautiously slit the seal and peered in, then eased out the contents: two tape-bound stacks of currency and a folded sheet of white paper. He flipped his thumb through the bills; they appeared to be all twenties. Then he unfolded the paper.

  Mr. Vekt—

  I have need of a person with your skills and stamina to do a job of work for me. Of several people considered, you appear to be the best qualified.

  The job is a one-time errand, whose nature you will learn at the appropriate time. It is essential, and in your best interests, that you say nothing to anyone about this, starting right now.

  If you wish to accept, please come to 774 West 32nd Street at 9:30 on Friday night. The building has several entrances; use the door at the far end, closest to the river. It will be unlocked from 9:25 to 9:35. You will be met and given further instructions. Please do not bring your own weapon.

  Enclosed is an advance payment of one-tenth of your fee. The rest, if you earn it, will also come in small bills. Should you decide against taking the job, you may keep this money. The only thing that will be expected in return is silence.

  The message was unsigned, but the stiff formality of its wording had a certain familiarity. Vekt wondered if Herrera himself had written it.

  One hundred and twenty-five twenty-dollar bills. Times two. Five thousand dollars. One-tenth. He didn’t care who. His career as a mugger, supplemented by occasional legitimate odd jobs when he was up against it, would scarcely produce that much in two years. It was creepy, but he could take care of himself. He knew it, and the guy, whoever he was, that wanted to hire him knew it too.

  ____

  LIGHT RAIN FILMED Vekt’s face as he walked west. Unexpectedly, the wait for the downtown bus had been only three or four minutes, and he reached his destination at 9:15. On the designated door the numbers 774 were formed out of bright blue plastic tape.

  Vekt tugged on the unyielding vertical door handle, then knocked, futilely. The appointed time, apparently, was firm. Shivering from the dampness, he hugged himself and stamped his feet, glancing at his watch with increasing frequency.

  Just as 9:25 popped in, Vekt heard a metallic scrape. He tried the handle again; this time only the door’s great weight held it back. Slowly, he was able to pull it open.

  Inside, there was total darkness. “Hey! You there?” Though he’d spoken softly, his voice reverberated. Suddenly there was blinding light, as multiple fluorescent bars fluttered on. He squeezed his eyes shut, then blinked several times before adjusting to the brightness.

  He was facing a long, narrow corridor with whitewashed concrete walls. Blue tape arrows pointed down the center of the white floor. Vekt could not see where they ended.

  “Anyone here?” He was louder this time, and so was the responding silence. Harold felt his scalp clench. His palm itched for a gun, but his only choices now were to accept the circumstances or forgo any possibility of earning a quick $45,000.

  He proceeded warily about sixty feet along the blue trail, which made a left turn and an almost immediate right. A strip of blue disappeared under a battleship-gray door, which pushed open easily into a small bare rectangular room. The arrows continued at a diagonal. The head of the last one was angled toward a doorway in the corner.

  “Son-of-a-bitch! What kind of stupid game is this?” Vekt aimed a punching shove at the narrow door, but it gave so easily that he lost his balance and stumbled through it into an unlit area. The lights in the room he’d just left cut off. With a loud clang, the door closed behind him.

  “What the fuck is this?” He groped at the door, could not budge it, could find no knob or handle. “Turn the goddamn lights on!” He pounded on the door with both fists.

  Suddenly the darkness was a bit less than total. He turned to see a small pool of light coming from a naked 25-watt bulb hanging by its wire about six feet above the floor. Directly beneath it was a small square table, and on the table was a sheet of paper. He crossed the murky space and gingerly picked up the page, printed in the same typeface as the letter that had directed him here.

  Dear Mr. Vekt,

  Welcome to the rest of your life.

  I own this property. It has been disused for several years. No one ever comes here. The walls, inside and out, are eighteen inches thick.

  Behind this table is a door leading to another room, the only other place you will ever be.

  In that room are a refrigerator, a sink (cold water only), and a toilet; also a rolled-up mattress with a blanket and two spare lightbulbs.

  In the refrigerator is a small supply of food. Use it sparingly; it will be replenished, but w
ho knows when?

  The door to the room is on an automatic time lock set to open twice a day, at 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m., and stay open for twenty minutes each time. (This will help you to know the approximate time of day after your watch battery runs out. That is, if you manage to keep track of day and night—there are no windows in your new environment.) During those intervals, do whatever you need to do and get out. The room has no outside air supply. If you need urgently to urinate at any other time, use the storm drain in the center of this room.

  You have no hope of deliverance, even if you’ve broken the rules and told someone where you were going. All the blue tape will soon be gone, including the numerals on the door. (There is no 774; the highest number on this street is in the five hundreds.)

  You will live, at most, as long as I do—or perhaps a few days longer if there’s food left when I die. My own life expectancy is problematic—my heart was torn out by my wife’s death, and when I’ve finished with you, I’ll have nothing left to do.

  Now, of course, you know who I am. Have you figured out yet that it was I who paid for your defense? Attorneys such as Wilson Herrera do not ordinarily serve in “routine” cases, even by court appointment. Dr. Smithers doesn’t come cheap either. Neither knows the origin of their fees.

  Why have I done this? I prefer—for myself, at any rate— personal vendetta to “criminal justice.” I want to control the exact specifications of your punishment, so that I may savor it.

  When you’ve digested the contents of this letter, put it in the other room. It is the price of your next supply of food.

  There was no signature.

  Harold Vekt commenced his accommodation to his fate by vomiting into the storm drain.

  FOLLOW UP

  BY JO DERESKE

  Jeff squinted through the snow and saw her—almost too late—standing beside the butt end of her car waving both arms. The nose was so deep in the ditch the rear wheels kissed air. Hopeless.

  He hadn’t passed another car in an hour. She’d freeze to death before any snowplows came by.

  He eased the Cavalier to the side of the road, pumping the brakes. It fishtailed anyway. He turned into the skid and saw her running after him, arms frantic now.

  She pounded on his window while he was cranking it down. Snow blew in and stung his cheeks, sucking at the warm air in his car. Her head was uncovered, hands bare, hair whipping with snow and ice. Her cheeks had passed from red to white.

  “I need…,” she said. “I need…” He thought she was going to pass out.

  “Get in the back.” He reached behind him and pulled up the lock.

  “My purse.”

  “Get in,” he told her.

  “Have to get it.” And he’d be damned if she didn’t turn around and start stumbling back toward her car.

  “Get in,” he shouted again, this time leaning back and feeling for the rear door handle. “I’ll get it.”

  She fell into his car. “On… front seat.” She spoke through clumsy lips. Shaking and unsteady. It was impossible to tell how old she was, what she actually looked like, even though, after all these years, he was good at that.

  Jeff threw his jacket over the milk crate of files on the front seat and took the car keys with him. “I will be right back,” he told her, saying it loud and slow like she was stupid. She didn’t answer, but in the dim snowy light, he saw her nod.

  It was hellish outside. He came prepared when he held hearings in the Upper Peninsula: extra clothes, boots, flares, water, blankets. He ran to her car first, his head bent against the wind. The snow was filling in the path she’d made around the driver’s door. He jerked it open and grabbed a black plastic purse off the seat. It was an old car, and he’d bet the tires were bald as snot.

  Last, he checked the backseat in case she’d forgotten a kid or a dog. He’d seen it happen.

  Nothing. Back to his car. He opened his trunk, pulling out the red plaid blanket he kept in a plastic zip bag. His eyelashes were heavy with snow, his sweater layered with white. He brushed off as much as he could before he got back in the driver’s seat and started the engine, switching the heater and blower to high.

  In the backseat she rocked herself, and he pulled out the blanket, unfolding it before he passed it back. She grunted and jerked it from his hands.

  “We’ll sit here a minute until the windows clear,” he told her. He wiped the inside fog from the windshield with a bar rag he kept beneath his seat, next to a sawed-off baseball bat.

  Be prepared.

  The snow had started at two that morning. Jeff knew because he’d been sitting at the pitted desk in his motel room, paging through the Danny Hartman file.

  He’d felt it, even inside, with the wall heater going like sixty. That weird softening and slowing down, like falling slow motion into a pile of cushions. He’d risen and parted the dusty venetian blinds, big old-fashioned blades like those his mother had wiped down every week with vinegar water. Flakes as big as bird wings drifted through the yellow lights in the parking lot, dusting the cars. As innocent as a glass-bubble Christmas scene.

  But that was then. This was six hours later.

  “You doing okay?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Better” came her muffled voice. And then, “Thanks.”

  She didn’t say any more, and when the defrosters had done their work, he pulled back onto what he hoped was the highway, hunched over the steering wheel, trying to see through a windshield that kept slabbing up with the damn stuff, weighing down the wipers until he had to pull over, get out, and shake them loose.

  “Where are we?” she finally asked. The car was warm enough, so he slipped off his gloves. He smelled alcohol.

  Jeff glanced at the odometer. “Seven miles along the Seney stretch of Highway Twenty-eight.”

  The Seney was a twenty-five-mile straight ribbon of nothing. Pines lined both sides, leading off into swamps and more pines. No towns, no houses. Deer or bear might wander onto the pavement, but that was it. Garner, before Jeff, had fallen asleep on this road and been so busted up he had to leave the board.

  “When’s the next town?”

  “Shingleton, in about twenty miles. You can probably get a wrecker there. A phone, too, if you need to call somebody.”

  She didn’t answer at first, then she asked, “Where are you going?”

  He said it casual, like it was the truth. “Just past Shingleton. But I’ll make sure you get there okay.”

  “I’m going to Marquette,” she said, as if he’d asked. “How far are we from Marquette?”

  He glanced again at the odometer, knowing he was exactly 71.7 miles from Marquette. “Seventy miles or so,” he told her.

  In his rearview mirror he saw her rocking again. Back and forth like his brother, who’d been a real mental case. She was between forty and fifty, a big woman with hair plastered to her head. She wasn’t wearing any makeup.

  “Shit,” he said aloud, pulling the wheel to the left to avoid a pine branch the size of a Christmas tree. The Cavalier slid a little, and he easily corrected. He’d driven in this stuff all his life, not in the UP, but in lower Michigan, where they were more likely to plow when it snowed.

  He heard her whimper from the backseat, and he said without thinking, “Everything’s okay, just a little slippery,” reassuring her as he would a passenger he’d invited into his car: a friend, one of the other board members, his sister.

  “I know, I’m sorry. I’m just nervous,” she said, matching his unintended warmth. “I have to get there by ten.”

  He was supposed to be there by ten, too, but his eighteen cases weren’t going anywhere. They’d been waiting for years. His arrival carried all the expectations of the Coming. A few extra hours meant zilch.

  “Do you think I can get a ride from that town… Shingleton, to Marquette?” she continued. “If I don’t get there by ten…”

  He didn’t want to know where she had to get, or why, what tragedies her story held. He wanted a de
adly dull drive, not this. During the long, boring rides he did his final run-through of the cases, thumbing out files from the old plastic milk crate on the passenger seat, one hand on the wheel, glancing between pavement and reports. Easy decisions dropped in the front of the crate, tough ones slid to the rear for later, in a coffee shop or a motel room. Like the Danny Hartman case the night before.

  Danny Hartman’s parole hearing was today, just like the other seventeen men waiting for Jeff. Chuck and Paula, the two other board members on Jeff’s panel, had apologetically but firmly deferred the decision to him. Cop-outs. “You’ve dealt with him. Whatever you decide, we’ll back you up.” It had happened before, and those were the cases he hated the most. Danny’s was the only one that was all his on this trip. In six years Jeff himself had never begged off making a decision. That’s why Chuck and Paula thought they could. The price you pay for dependability.

  He represented the great State of Michigan, the man with the power. Yay or Nay. Yup or Nope. The Roman with the thumb: up and you got a chance in the real world, at least until your next fuckup; down and you’re back inside until your number rolls around again.

  “My son’s parole hearing is today,” she said.

  “Shit,” he said again.

  “Yeah, I know,” she misinterpreted. “That’s where I’m going.”

  “Can family members attend parole hearings?” he asked. He knew the answer, natch. They couldn’t.

  “No. But I have letters.” She held up her purse so he could see it, patted it. “An envelope full of them. I was sick, so I didn’t mail it to the parole board in time. I’m taking it. In person. That’s why I have to get there by ten. Before the hearings start. They said they’d take it.”

  He wondered who’d told her that.

  “I had my gallbladder taken out,” she went on, her voice relentless from behind him. “The doctor said it was one of the worst cases he’d ever seen. And then I thought his hearing was coming up next month, not this month. It got away from me, you know.” She sighed.