Silent Witness

by Richard North Patterson

  Tony felt the moral ambiguity of his position; he knew from Sam himself that his friend had slept with Marcie—or, in Sam’s telling, that Marcie had tried to seduce him. Cautiously, he asked, “Did Marcie seem attracted to him?”

  Nancy Calder’s eyes clouded with bitterness. “From what he told the police,” she said, “Marcie had a crush on him. But I never saw any sign of that.” She turned to her husband. “Did she talk about him any more than about Mr. Nixon?”

  Frank Calder’s gaze focused on the carpet. “No,” he said.

  Nancy Calder nodded in affirmation. “She may have been looking for a parent figure—someone who wasn’t us. But she wasn’t looking for an affair.”

  Her husband would not look at her. Replaying the phrase “parent figure,” Tony heard the word “father”; he sensed that Marcie and her parents had been more divided than the Calders said. “Were there any difficulties?” he asked. “Disagreements?”

  Nancy Calder glanced at her husband. “One,” he said tersely. “I wanted her to go to a Catholic women’s school. With all the drugs and sex—” He cut himself off. “She didn’t want to, and Nancy didn’t want to push it. So that was my fault, I suppose.”

  This sounded closer to the mark; Frank Calder seemed like a man with rules, better at proscribing than at listening. Gently, Nancy Calder said, “You wouldn’t have made her go, Frank. Marcie knew that.”

  The sadness of this struck Tony hard: a limited man, regretting what he had said to a daughter to whom, suddenly, inexplicably, he could now say nothing; his wife offering him consolation that perhaps she did not believe. “Were you worried about emotional problems?” Tony asked.

  “No.” Frank Calder stared at him now. “There was nothing like that. Our daughter certainly didn’t need a psychiatrist.”

  Nancy Calder compressed her lips. “There’s no question of suicide here, if that’s what you’re asking. Marcie was much too stable—a little quiet, that was all. And a believing Catholic, too devout to ever think of taking her own life.” Her voice hardened. “Over her track coach, or anyone else.”

  Tony decided to shift ground. “You mentioned a Mr. Nixon.”

  Still lost within her anger, Nancy Calder gave a brief nod. “Ernie Nixon,” she said. “He’s the town recreation director here. A black man.”

  Tony covered his surprise. “Yes. I know him. Or did, once.”

  “He was the first person to encourage Marcie about her running. Before his divorce, Marcie would watch his kids from time to time.” Her eyes misted abruptly. “Marcie loved children, and children loved her. Starting with her own sisters…”

  Suddenly Tony sensed something beneath the surface of this meeting, more volatile than grief. Softly, he asked, “What do you think happened to her?”

  Nancy Calder raised her head. “Sam Robb murdered her,” she said quietly. “To keep from being found out. Sooner or later, you’ll have to face that too.”

  All at once, Tony felt certain that the Calders knew that Sam and their daughter had been having sex. But there was no way to confront this. With equal quiet, he said, “It could have been an accident, Mrs. Calder. Or someone else.”

  Nancy Calder flushed. “There wasn’t anyone else,” her husband said tightly. “Marcie wasn’t a slut.…”

  “Please, I wasn’t suggesting that. My ‘someone else’ could be a stranger.”

  They both fell silent; from their fixed expressions, they were mollified—if at all—not by the possibility of a stranger but by Tony’s concession. The sense of something left unsaid bedeviled him.

  “Who was Marcie close to?” he asked.

  Nancy Calder’s eyes flew open, as if the question were an accusation that she had failed her daughter. Then she answered tersely. “Janice D’Abruzzi. Her best friend.”

  She spoke the words like a curse. Frank Calder stood abruptly. “Go home,” he said to Tony. “Leave us with our daughter’s memory, and at least some hope of justice. For him, if not for her.” He left the room.

  Nancy Calder gazed after him. “We’re very tired,” she said simply, and Tony knew that his time was up.

  She saw him to the doorway, composed again. Her eyes met his. “Please,” she said with hushed urgency, “don’t defend Sam Robb. Not if you’re a decent man…”

  EIGHT

  The article was on page three of the Steelton Press. Next to a photograph of Tony and Stacey, the headline read: “Robb Lawyer Linked to Prior Slaying.” In the photograph, Tony was grinning broadly.

  “Nice picture,” Sam Robb remarked. “Your very best killer smile.”

  Tony stared at him across Sam’s breakfast table, annoyed by his friend’s insouciance, troubled by Stella Marz, the Taylors, Marcie’s parents. “If I were you,” he said, “I wouldn’t be that happy, either.”

  Sam looked up. “I’m not, Tony. I still remember how much you wanted to leave all this behind.” He paused and then placed his hand on Tony’s forearm. “What I’m trying to say is that I’m grateful for your help, that I’m proud you’re still my friend, and that I’m bothered by this bullshit because it bothers you. Maybe this time out I’ll learn to tell you what I mean.”

  To his surprise, Tony felt touched. “It’s not the press, Sam. It’s that I can’t seem to go an hour without my own feelings about Alison bubbling to the top. That’s not what you want in a lawyer.”

  Sam nodded. “Seeing the Calders was hard, I guess.”

  “Yes. And the Taylors.”

  “You saw them?”

  “I felt as if I had to.”

  “Jesus.” Sam’s eyes met Tony’s again. “Look, I brought this mess on myself, because my judgment took a hike. You never deserved any of it—then or now.”

  Tony shrugged. “Life is unfair, Saul once told me.”

  Sam got up abruptly. Without asking, he poured Tony more coffee, then some for himself. “I think I was wrong, Tony. Letting you come here.”

  The remark unsettled Tony. “Why ‘wrong’?”

  “Not wrong, maybe. Selfish.” Sitting, Sam looked at Tony over the rim of his cup. “If you stay here, this article won’t be the last. You’ll make the fucking cover of Vanity Fair—we even get that in Lake City, you know.” Sam turned, staring out the window. “I’ve spent one week living in a town where a lot of people probably think I killed her, and I already know my life here will never be the same, unless I can somehow prove I didn’t do it. You’re famous, Tony—Alison’s murder will follow you everywhere. And from the way you look this morning, you’ll be taking it with you anyhow.” He turned to Tony, finishing softly. “Go back to San Francisco, pal. I didn’t kill her, so at least they can’t prove I did. And there’s nothing I can do to save my job but lie.”

  Somewhere in the last two days, Sam seemed to have achieved a certain calm. “Have you just found God?” Tony inquired.

  Sam smiled a little. “Actually, I was remembering when we were seventeen. You were able to go on because you had a core—you knew the ‘murderer’ people hated wasn’t you.” His smiled faded. “Well, it’s not me, either. It’s just not me.”

  Tony waited for a moment, torn between the role of lawyer and that of friend. Quietly, he asked, “Sue’s not here, I guess.”

  “She’s at the gym.” Sam’s eyes grew keener. “Why? Is something wrong?”

  “The cops lifted some blood off your steering wheel. You don’t happen to be type AB, do you?”

  Sam sat down. “No,” he said slowly. “Sue is.”

  “So was Marcie Calder.”

  Sam sat back; his face went slack with surprise, and then his eyelids lowered. “They can tell the difference, can’t they? DNA.”

  Tony nodded. “Is there a reason why Marcie’s blood would be in your car, if that’s whose it is? One I can take to Stella Marz?”

  Sam shook his head. “Not unless someone else put it there,” he said at last.

  Tony’s voice was soft. “The ‘real killer,’ Sam? Or the cops, like with O. J. Simpson?”
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  Sam looked pale now. “I’ll have to think, Tony. I’ll have to think real hard.”

  Tony watched his face. “While you’re thinking, maybe you can come up with a reason that Marcie’s parents seem certain—not just guessing, but sure—that you and Marcie had sex.”

  Sam bit his lip. “Not unless someone told them,” he said at last. “What did they say?”

  “Nothing much. It’s more what I divined.”

  Sam was quiet for a moment. “They hate me, I guess.”

  “It’s a little more specific. They think you killed her. To cover up your seduction of their very shy oldest daughter—who, at most, was looking for a father figure.”

  Sam looked up sharply. “What exactly are you driving at?”

  “Whether the Calders know something I should know. Something you don’t have to think real hard about.”

  Sam folded his arms. “Go home, pal. This is bad enough without watching you wrestle with your own doubts.”

  “Just answer my question, dammit.”

  Sam took a moment, a man who would not be pushed. Quietly, he said, “I’m no more guilty than you were, Tony. And I hope you can believe that more than I did. By now I’ve said it enough.”

  * * *

  The group of girls milled at the fifty-yard line, practicing cheers. Standing near the fence, Tony guessed at which might be Janice D’Abruzzi—the captain, he decided, a dark-haired girl who, in her athleticism, reminded Tony of Sue. When the practice broke up, and the girl was first off the field, Tony took a chance.

  “Janice?” he asked.

  She stopped, looking at him warily. She was dark and quite pretty and, to Tony, there was something Florentine about her: olive skin, full figure, a certain vibrancy that, even in her stillness, suggested movement and a sense of life. It reminded him, uncomfortably, of how attractive a girl of seventeen can be.

  “Are you Johnny’s daughter?” he asked.

  She nodded, silent, not moving.

  “I’m not a reporter,” Tony told her. “Your dad and I played football together, a thousand years ago. I’m a lawyer now—Tony Lord.”

  Janice pulled her cheerleader jacket close around her. “I know who you are.”

  She had a low, husky voice; there was something sexual about it, a womanly quality. “How is your dad?” Tony asked.

  She was quiet for a moment. “He died, six months ago. Of a heart attack.”

  It startled Tony; it was, he supposed, a harbinger of more such surprises, the first tragedies of middle age. “God,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”

  She cocked her head slightly, her only acknowledgment. Quietly, she asked, “What do you want?”

  Tony paused a moment. “I was hoping to talk about Marcie. You were her closest friend, I know.”

  Her dark eyes became quite still. “Who told you that?”

  Again, Tony hesitated. “Her mother.”

  Janice flushed, then looked down. Watching her, Tony thought of Christopher and his friends. It was often better, he reflected, to talk to them like the adults they wished to be and, on good days, almost were—the way Saul Ravin had talked to another seventeen-year-old, all those years ago. “Janice, I know there’s some problem between you and Marcie’s parents. But I don’t have a clue what it is. I’m not trying to make this worse for you.”

  She looked up at him again. “Then what are you trying to do?”

  The tremulous note in her voice surprised him. “To understand what happened to Marcie. And why.”

  She glanced over her shoulder, watching the other girls as they headed for the locker room, and then she turned to face him. “This has been really bad, okay? I’ve already told the police about that.”

  “About what?”

  “About Marcie,” she said bluntly. “How I helped get her killed.”

  Tony tilted his head. “How could you have done that?”

  There was something new in her eyes—intense, emotional. “Marcie’s mother called that night, looking for her. I told her we’d been working on a paper and that she’d gone to the library.” Her voice grew husky. “You know, to look something up.”

  Tony remembered the small acts of defiance, often ill-advised, through which he and Sam had defined themselves as different from their parents. And then, like a delayed shock, he remembered planning with Alison that she leave her parents’ house that night. “I guess Marcie asked you to say that.”

  “Yeah.” Her voice was bitter now. “I was her best friend, remember?”

  “Then she must have told you why.”

  Janice watched him a moment, as if deciding whether to stay or go. Then she walked to the fence surrounding the football field and leaned back against it, the sun on her face. “Some of it,” she said finally. “There was a guy. But she wouldn’t say who he was.”

  Tony forced himself to hold back, ask just enough to serve as a mirror for her thoughts. “Do you know why she wouldn’t?”

  “Because he’d get in trouble, Marcie said. He’d made her promise him.”

  This was said in the literal tone of a girl immersed in the drama of another teenage life. But what Tony heard was how lethal this would sound at a murder trial. “Did she give any reason for protecting him?”

  Janice looked at him directly. “Only that he was older. And married.”

  Tony held her gaze. Softly, he asked, “Why did Marcie get involved with him, then?”

  Janice frowned. “Marcie was a great friend—smart and loyal, easy to talk to. But about guys she was the most naive girl in Lake City, especially when it came to sex. I’m sure this guy was her only one.” She folded her arms. “Her dad yelled at her all the time, like he wanted her to be some kind of nun. This guy believed in her, she said. So, yeah, I could see her falling in love with an older man who didn’t yell at her.”

  The combination of adult acuity and identification with Marcie’s resentments interested Tony—Janice D’Abruzzi was not a stupid girl, or a simple one. “Weren’t you a little hurt?” he asked. “I mean, that Marcie wouldn’t confide in you.”

  Janice shook her head. “You didn’t know her,” she said. “Marcie had promised him, and Marcie kept her promises. I mean, if I ever asked Marcie to keep a secret for me, I knew she would—absolutely.” She stopped, and then her eyes filled with tears. “That’s a nice thing to know about a best friend. It’s what I was thinking when I lied to Marcie’s mother.”

  Tony watched her, silent; Janice bent forward, and she seemed to compose herself. Suddenly he felt real warmth for Janice D’Abruzzi, and greater sorrow; she seemed a more complex version of the openhearted boy who had become her father. Finally, he ventured, “You must have wondered who it was.”

  She gave a weary shrug. “Oh, yeah.”

  “Did you think it was Sam Robb?”

  Her look was sideways, guarded. “No. I never thought that.”

  Tony nodded. “You thought it was Ernie Nixon, didn’t you? Your dad’s friend.”

  Janice’s guarded look became a stare. She would not answer.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” Tony said. “I know that she was fond of Mr. Nixon.”

  After a moment, Janice’s expression softened. “Marcie was very idealistic,” she said simply.

  To Tony, the phrase said more than Janice perhaps had meant—about Janice, about Marcie, about one friend’s feeling for another. “Did Marcie have any boyfriends?” Tony asked. “I mean, guys in high school.”

  Janice shook her head. “Not really. There’s a bunch of us, boys and girls, who sometimes do stuff as friends—I’m not sure her dad ever quite got that. But the guy she usually went to dances with, Greg Marsh, is gay.” She stopped herself. “Hardly anyone knows that, especially the Taylors—his rich grandparents. But Marcie liked Greg, and she helped cover for him. She was sort of shy with boys, so it worked out okay for both of them.” Pausing, Janice gave a fleeting smile. “But she always made him kiss her good night, she told me, in case he ever had to
get married.”

  It was the first suggestion that Marcie had a sense of humor, and it added a line to his sketch of Marcie—kind and, in her teenage way, principled: Tony could imagine life was not easy for Alison’s nephew, if that’s who this boy was. Then it struck him that Janice D’Abruzzi seemed too earthbound for Marcie, her closest friend, to have been an ethereal dreamer, divorced from reality.

  “Marcie sounds like a good person,” he said at last.

  Janice gazed into some middle distance. “Marcie,” she answered, “was a great person.”

  He put his hands in his pockets, giving her some time with the thought: “Do you think she wanted to marry him?”

  The question disarranged Janice’s features—they showed distraction, then surprise. “The older guy? No way.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because Marcie loved him—she told me that. She wasn’t crazy, and she didn’t want to ruin his life. They had their own world, she said, and it needed to stay that way.” Pausing, Janice shook her head. “I remember her saying she had to keep her dad believing in the Virgin Marcie. No way she’d ruin that make-believe.”

  The remembered gibe—so perfect in its teenage subversiveness—jarred Tony as much as anything he had heard: it was too much at odds with the girl Sam had described to him, intent on her fantasy of marriage. “That night,” he said carefully, “when Marcie asked you to cover for her, what did she say?”

  Janice leaned back, gazing at the sky. For a time, Tony thought he had lost her, and then she began to speak.

  * * *

  As Janice described her, Marcie seemed scared.

  It was almost five-thirty, and the first shadows of late afternoon crept into Janice’s bedroom. They sat cross-legged on Janice’s pink quilt; Marcie was pale, and for once she could not look at her closest friend.

  “I have to see him,” Marcie said. “I have to.”

  “Why tonight?”

  “We need to talk.” Marcie’s throat worked. “As soon as I can, I’ll tell you everything. But I can’t yet.”

  Janice gazed at her friend. She had known Marcie Calder for so long, day after day for years, that Janice could not clearly remember what Marcie had looked like at ten, or twelve, or even fourteen. But tonight Marcie seemed so young that Janice was frightened for her—muted, lost, overwhelmed.