Every Reasonable Doubt

by Pamela Samuels Young

  This was my first police interrogation. The room looked nothing like the ones on Law & Order. The lighting was elementary-school bright, not dark and ominous, and the furniture was in decent shape, though a bit dated. The only sign that criminals may have inhabited the place was a faint musty smell. Body odor masked by Pine-Sol.

  I turned to examine all four walls. “So where’s the two-way mirror,” I asked, though I realized my question sounded as if I were trying to crack a joke.

  “This isn’t TV,” David said, as if he were talking to a child.

  Before I could think up something cruel to fire back at him, the door opened. Two men walked in with identical swaggers. Detective Mark Wilson was thin, white and probably in his mid-thirties. He looked like your average, nonthreatening high school history teacher. He was wearing a cheap tie and sports jacket, which he probably wore for months before dry cleaning. He definitely didn’t own an iron. His partner, Detective Phillip Graham, was a chubby black man with bad razor bumps along his jaw line. He was older, probably by about ten years. A toothpick dangled loosely from the corner of his mouth. By the way he scowled at us, I figured Graham would be playing the bad cop.

  “We just have a few questions,” Detective Wilson began, “so this shouldn’t take too long.” He sat down across from Neddy, David and me. Detective Graham leaned against the wall with his arms folded.

  Before they could ask their first question, Julie pranced in.

  “Why is she here?” Neddy said angrily.

  “For moral support,” Julie answered snottily.

  “Girls, girls,” Detective Graham injected. “Can’t we all just get along?”

  Neddy stared harshly at Julie as if her predicament were all Julie’s fault. Julie sat down in a wobbly chair near the door and crossed her long legs.

  “First, can you tell us where you were at the time your husband was murdered?” Detective Wilson asked.

  “When was he murdered?” Neddy said with attitude.

  “Don’t you know?” Detective Wilson seemed prepared to spar. Maybe I was wrong and he was the bad cop.

  Neddy folded her arms. “Should I?”

  “Well, I figured you might’ve read it in the papers,” Wilson said.

  “I don’t recall any of the articles I read listing the time of death,” Neddy said, even more sarcastically than before.

  I didn’t think it was wise for Neddy to act like such a bitch. She knew the routine and she also knew that it was a mistake to antagonize the police.

  Detective Wilson definitely didn’t care for Neddy’s attitude. “Based on the time he was last seen alive, the neighbors’ reports of gunshots and the autopsy report, we believe your husband was killed on the fourteenth, sometime between 10:15 and 10:30 P.M. So where were you?”

  “I was home reading a book.”

  “What book?” Detective Wilson asked.

  “James Patterson’s First to Die.”

  I placed my hand on Neddy’s forearm and whispered into her ear. “You’re not going to gain anything by pissing them off. Just answer their questions so we can leave.”

  She stared back at me with a look that said she knew what she was doing.

  It surprised me that Detective Wilson looked as if he was straining to hear what I had just said to Neddy.

  “What time did you leave the office on the fourteenth?” he asked.

  Neddy thought for a moment. “I don’t know. Probably around nine or 9:15,” she said. “You already asked me these questions when you came to my house the other night,” Neddy sneered. “Why’d you drag me down here to go through this again?”

  Julie huffed impatiently. “Because we—”

  “This is our interrogation,” Wilson said cutting her off. Julie slumped back into her chair. Having to sit on the sidelines was killing her.

  Detective Graham, still leaning against the wall, decided to jump into the fray. “When we first spoke to you, we didn’t know how much you hated your husband,” he said, pulling up a chair and sitting down directly in front of Neddy. “Seems you were pretty upset about that spousal support order.”

  “Yes, I was upset about it. But not upset enough to kill him.”

  “Did you know he was killed with a gun that was registered to you?” Graham asked.

  Neddy’s eyes widened for just a few seconds, demonstrating an absolute lack of knowledge. “No—no, I didn’t,” she said, her first words spoken without hostility.

  Graham smiled, as he closely studied her reaction. “So, when did you buy the gun?”

  “You just said it was registered to me. Don’t you know?”

  “We know the date you registered it. We don’t know when you bought it.”

  Neddy stopped to think again. “I’m not sure. I’ve had it a while. At least nine or ten years.”

  “Did you have a particular reason for buying it?”

  “Protection.”

  “From what?”

  “Criminals. I used to be a P.D. Sometimes my clients weren’t happy about being convicted and they blamed me rather than their criminal activity.”

  Graham seemed dissatisfied with her answer. “Any client ever threaten you?”

  Neddy smiled. “Sure.”

  “Ever file a police report?”

  “No,” she spat. “I don’t like cops.”

  I heard Julie grunt from her corner of the room. I had almost forgotten she was there. Detective Graham was getting annoyed. He cracked his knuckles. “So when was the last time you saw the gun?”

  Neddy looked down at her hands. “About ten months ago. I left it at the house when I moved out.”

  “When you lived there, where’d you keep the gun?” he asked.

  “In the bedroom closet.” She looked up at him. “Locked in a cabinet.”

  Wilson leaned across the table. “Did Lawton have a key to that cabinet?”

  “No,” Neddy said.

  “So no one had access to that cabinet but you?”

  “That’s right,” she said boldly.

  What the hell was Neddy doing? She’d just admitted that she was the only one who had access to the weapon that killed her husband. She might as well stand up and confess to murdering him right now. I pushed my chair back from the table and got up. “I need a few minutes alone with my client,” I declared.

  “I told you, we don’t need to talk,” Neddy snapped.

  I stayed put. “Yes, we do.”

  David stood up, too, but said nothing to help me get Neddy outside.

  “Sit back down,” Neddy said, grabbing my forearm and pulling me back into my seat. “I’m answering the questions posed to me and nothing more,” she said. “Yes, I was the only one who had the key to that cabinet.” She turned back to Detective Graham and continued. There was a condescending edge to her voice. “This expert interrogator here asked me where I kept the gun when I lived there and that’s the question I answered. Before I moved out, that’s where it was kept. Locked in a cabinet.”

  Detective Graham twisted his lips sideways and his toothpick seemed poised to fall, but somehow hung on. “Okay, then, what happened to the gun after you moved out?”

  “I left it with Lawton.”

  “And why’d you do that?”

  Her hands were balled into fists. “Because I was no longer a P.D. and he wanted it.”

  Graham could tell he was getting to her and he was enjoying it. “Did you give Lawton a key to the cabinet?”

  “No. I took the cabinet. He kept the gun.”

  “Do you know where he kept it?”

  “No, but I know he didn’t keep it locked up.” Neddy suddenly looked exhausted, as if the Q & A had taken the wind out of her.

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Because we fought about it. He didn’t think it made sense to keep it locked up because you couldn’t get to it if you needed it in an emergency. And since we no longer—” She stopped and took in a breath. “Since we didn’t have kids in the house, he said there wa
s no reason to lock it up. I insisted on locking it up anyway and we had a big fight about it.”

  “It seems you two fought about a lot of things,” Graham taunted.

  Neddy’s bottom lip began to tremble. “I’m here to answer questions, not to respond to your sarcastic comments.”

  Graham passed the baton back to Wilson. “Why did Lawton need a gun?” Wilson asked. “He hadn’t freed any criminals who could turn on him?”

  Neddy let Wilson’s remark roll off her back. “He grew up with guns. He liked the idea of having one around for protection.”

  “Protection from what?” Wilson asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  The two detectives stared at Neddy for a good long while, and she stared right back. Julie, still uncharacteristically mute, obviously liked seeing Neddy in the hot seat. She took out a small note pad and wrote something down.

  “Look, I don’t have time for this nonsense,” Neddy said finally. “There’s no way you have any evidence that links me to my husband’s murder because I didn’t kill him. Let’s just finish the rest of your questions so I can go home.”

  Detective Graham got up and sat on the edge of the table. His stomach rested in his lap in two overlapping folds of fat. His cotton shirt was stretched so tight around his belly that the buttons seemed poised to pop off at any minute and put somebody’s eye out. I moved my seat to the right, out of the line of fire.

  “When was the last time you talked to your husband?” Detective Graham asked, leaning in. He was coming dangerously close to invading her personal space. Mine, too.

  Neddy opened her purse and pulled out her date book and began flipping pages. “The thirteenth.”

  “That’s the day before he was killed,” Graham said.

  Neddy stared blankly back, challenging him with her eyes. “And your point is what?”

  Graham didn’t answer her question. “Where’d you talk to him?”

  Neddy folded her arms, then unfolded them again. “At his attorney’s office.”

  “What did you two talk about?”

  “How much of an asshole he was.”

  Graham chuckled. “Your words or his?”

  “Mine.”

  “So did you two always argue a lot?” Graham continued, his sidekick now relegated to an inferior role.

  “You might say that. I don’t think we’ve had a conversation that wasn’t an argument since I moved out of the house.”

  “Your husband took five bullets in the chest, you know.”

  “And once again, your point is what?”

  “My point is, whoever killed him wanted to make it personal. Whoever was holding that gun had a lot of hatred for the man.”

  “A lot of people hated him.”

  “So you say.” Graham leaned against the wall. “Now when did you say you last saw the gun?”

  Neddy clasped her hands together, her frustration obvious. “I told you that already. Before I moved out of the house ten months ago.”

  “The gun was wiped clean except for one partial print. You mind submitting to a fingerprint check?”

  Neddy laughed. “Of course my prints are going to be on the gun. I owned it. You can take my prints when you arrest me. Not before.”

  David interrupted. “Neddy, are you sure you don’t want to step outside to talk for a moment?”

  She turned to him and rolled her eyes. “I’m quite sure.”

  I felt like I should be doing something, but I didn’t know what. I agreed with David, though. We needed to get Neddy outside so we could tell her to cool it.

  The detectives asked a few more questions to which they already knew the answers and then let us go. I was convinced that they had only ordered Neddy down to the station to make her sweat. While she had a motive to kill Lawton, there was nothing else that tied her to his murder except her gun. Since she owned it, it only made sense that it would have her fingerprints on it. They would need much more than that to arrest her for killing him.

  Once we were safely outside, David was the first to berate her. “You didn’t do yourself any favors by pissing off the cops like that. And you know that. I’ve heard you tell clients the same thing a thousand times.” He was really mad.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Neddy said.

  “I don’t think you do. I would advise you to be a little less hostile the next time the police come calling.”

  Neddy knew David was right, but she was stuck on evil. “Like I said, I know what I’m doing.”

  David shrugged, then walked off toward his car.

  Neddy and I began walking toward the opposite end of the parking lot. I had something to say along the same lines as David’s comments, but decided to save my speech for another time—after Neddy had cooled off. We reached Neddy’s car before we got to mine.

  “He’s dead and he’s still fucking with me,” she said, her voice quivering.

  “It won’t be that way forever.”

  “Easy for you to say. You have the perfect husband.”

  That comment hit me like a bowling ball in the gut. “Not exactly. There’s a one hundred percent chance that when I walk through the door tonight my husband will be angry, drunk, or out someplace doing God knows what.”

  Neddy looked at me with concerned eyes. “What’s going on?”

  “You know how much Jefferson wanted a son?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, we just found out that one of us is sterile and it’s not me.”

  “Oh my God! I’m so sorry. How is he handling it?”

  “He’s not,” I said, digging into my purse for my keys. “He’s drinking so much now it’s beginning to scare me.”

  “Are you going to be okay? Does he get violent when he drinks?”

  “Thank God, no. If anything, he’s even nicer when he’s drunk.”

  She reached over and gave me a hug. “I had no idea,” she said. “You must be under a lot of pressure right now. Tomorrow’s prelim, Jefferson, and then I get thrown into the mix.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “It’s you I’m worried about. I’m just glad I could be here for you.” I hugged her back.

  Maybe now was a good time to say what I had to say about her performance in that interrogation room. “I know you don’t want to hear this,” I said, “but David was right. The way you acted in there was a mistake. A big one.”

  She looked down at her hands. “I know, I know. But I couldn’t help it. There’s no reason for them to be subjecting me to this. And I don’t think they would be if I weren’t an ex-P.D. I destroyed a lot of cops on the witness stand during my heyday.” She smiled wryly.

  “Yeah, but they had the upper hand in there, not you. If Tina had acted that way with the police, you would’ve pulled her out of that room by her ear.”

  Neddy’s face tensed. “You’re right. It won’t happen again.” She pressed a button on her key, opening the door to her BMW.

  “Wish me luck at the prelim in the morning,” I said. “I’m going to need it.”

  “No you won’t. You’re going to do great, I know it. I’d love to watch you in action but I’d probably attract more TV cameras than Tina right now.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I know you’ll be there in spirit.” I walked over to my Land Cruiser, only one car away, and unlocked the door. “Why do you think Julie was here tonight?”

  “For intimidation purposes, of course,” Neddy said. “That’s one of the reasons I acted the way I did. I wasn’t about to let her see me sweat.”

  “You think she’s behind them brining you down?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past her.” She was about to climb inside, then stuck her head back out. “Julie can pull all the stunts she wants. The bottom line is I didn’t kill my husband. I may have wanted to, but I didn’t.”

  CHAPTER 33

  By the time I made it home, Jefferson was already asleep.

  I peered into the bedroom and saw him sprawled across our king-size bed. Jefferson kne
w I hated it when he slept on top of our five-hundred-dollar Calvin Klein comforter. I thought about waking him up to fuss about it, but headed into the den instead.

  I gently opened the cabinet underneath the bar, being careful not to make any noise, and scanned the shelves. Yesterday there had been a full bottle of Hennessy sitting on the second shelf. Now it was gone. I walked into the kitchen and gingerly lifted the lid of the trash can. There were four empty beer cans, but no Hennessy bottle.

  From the kitchen, I opened the door to the garage and switched on the light. The cold air sent a chill through my body. Inside one of the city-issued trash cans, buried at the bottom, were not one, but two empty Hennessy bottles, as well as half a dozen beer cans that weren’t there three days ago.

  I went back inside and sat down at the kitchen table. I’d never seen Jefferson consume this much alcohol. His deliberate efforts to hide his drinking from me meant it was even more of a problem than I’d thought it was. We’d had a big argument about his drinking the day before. If I brought it up again, it would be more of the same. He would accuse me of overreacting and storm out of the house. For now, all I could do was pray his binge drinking would pass.

  I tiptoed into the bedroom and tried to undress without waking him.

  “So tomorrow’s your big day, huh?” he said groggily.

  “Yep.”

  “You ready?”

  “I guess so.” I unbuttoned my blouse, tossed it onto the chaise in the corner and stepped out of my skirt.

  “You don’t sound too confident.” He sat up and turned on the lamp on the nightstand. “Anything I can do to help?”

  “Yeah, how about a big hug,” I said, pulling back the comforter, forcing him to crawl underneath the sheet.

  When I fell into his arms, I could smell alcohol on his breath. We lay together for a long while, neither one of us speaking. How long could I ignore this problem and how bad was it going to get?

  “How’re you feeling?” I asked.

  “How do you think I’m feeling?” he said, without any hostility. “Pretty fucked up.”

  “Jefferson, I know you think I don’t know what you’re going through, but—”

  “Don’t,” he said, putting a finger to my lips. “Just don’t.”