“Okay, but—”
“Let me finish. I figured we had a great test case under a footnote in Kater. You see, can a criminal defendant be kept off the stand, be incompetent as a witness, to tell his side of an event which would be revealed only after he’d been hypnotized?”
“That’s what made the case seem interesting at first?”
“Right.”
“So what’s spoiled it?”
“This,” he said, sliding the typed pages over to me.
They were a transcription of notes taken by Rothenberg at an interview he had with Daniels a week earlier at the Middlesex County detention facility in the courthouse building in Cambridge. Rothenberg talked as I read. “There are so many of us sharing a secretary here, it takes a week to get anything that isn’t a life or death emergency.”
I finished the transcription. If it was accurate, Daniels himself corroborated virtually every detail in the police version.
I looked up. Rothenberg said, “See?”
“I think so. Even if the trial judge would let Daniels testify after hypnosis, Daniels would just crucify himself.”
“Exactly,” said Rothenberg, lacing his fingers behind his head and leaning back in his chair. He smiled at his apt pupil. “Putting Daniels on the stand would be suicide.”
“And there goes the test-case part of it.”
“Uh-huh.”
I pushed the interview report back to him. “So now what?”
Rothenberg stopped smiling, looked resigned. “We plead him to a reduced charge. If we can.”
“ ‘If we can’?”
“Put yourself in the DA’s place. Better, in the assistant’s place. The guy who’ll try the case. This is worth at least eight, nine days of jury trial. Great media exposure for the trial counsel, including two minutes easy on the six o’clock news each night. Say we go with insanity, or diminished capacity. That means we’re putting the kid’s mental condition in issue, and that waives the patient-psychotherapist privilege. That means the jurors definitely get to hear Marek—that’s his shrink—telling about the séance with the gun. Oh, the judge has to instruct the jury to consider the testimony only on the issue of Daniels’ mental condition, and not on his doing the shooting, but no jury alive can keep those things separate. Also, the trial then becomes a forum for everybody to rail about the insanity defense, John Hinckley, the safety of our streets, et cetera, et cetera. I think the court-ordered report’ll stand up. I’ve talked to this Marek, and briefly to his former shrink, some U Mass staffer.”
“Dr. Lopez?”
“Yes, that’s her.” Rothenberg went from resigned to gloomy. “No, we all think he was and is legally sane, so to speak.”
“Does that mean that if you don’t plead insanity, you can keep out his confession at the ‘séance’?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Daniels’ story itself was after hypnosis, so that ought to stay out. But does the patient-psychotherapist privilege include the therapy group members, does it include his physical agitation, his taking the murder weapon out of his pocket? No, with the circumstantial stuff this strong, not to mention the black boy/white girl angle, nineteen juries out of twenty will convict. In an hour. They’ll stay out three to make it look good, like they really wrestled with the case. But they’ll convict.”
“Any chance of bail?”
“No. Oh, the arraignment judge set bail at three-hundred-thousand surety, thirty-thousand cash alternative. But Mrs. Daniels can’t swing either. I’d bet my retainer, which was half what I should have taken, nearly tapped her out as it is.” He looked down at his watch. “I’ve got to run. Anything else?”
“Yeah. Can you get me in to see Daniels at Middlesex?”
“I guess,” Rothenberg said—wondering, no doubt, how big a favor I must be repaying.
Five
ROTHENBERG AND I rattled to the Lechmere stop on the Green Line subway/trolley and walked the three blocks to the tall, modern court-house facility. Rothenberg flashed his Board of Bar Overseers card at the Middlesex County Police security team on the first floor. I had to go through the metal detector.
We rode the first elevator to the seventeenth floor. Rothenberg vouched for me with the Sheriff’s Department correctional officer inside the thick-windowed control center, then left for his court appearance downstairs. I completed a “Request to Visit Inmate” form and fed it with my photo ID to the officer through a Diebold tray like a drive-up bank’s. He returned a blue and white visitor’s pass, which I clipped onto my lapel.
The officer waved me to the entrance trap. A red heavy-metal door slid open, unsealing one end of the trap. I entered and cleared another metal detector. Then, and only after the first door chunked closed, the officer opened the second door, admitting me to the visitors’ area. I sat in a glassed-in room on an old, but surprisingly comfortable, green leatherette chair.
Ten minutes later, a husky guard escorted to me a slim black man I recognized from the television tapes to be William Daniels. Dressed in a medium-green inmate’s shirt and faded green trousers, Daniels had the graceful gait and fine-featured face of a young Arthur Ashe. He eyed me warily as I stood to shake his hand, the guard closing the door as he left but moving back to a position from which he could watch over us.
“My name is John Cuddy. I’m a private investigator. I told your mother I would look into your case.”
Daniels ignored my outstretched hand. Taking the seat across from me, he squinted and sneered. “You choose your words real careful, don’t you?”
“I try to,” I said, dropping my hand and sitting back down.
“What you didn’t say was that my mama’s pig friend asked you to check me out so you could tell her I’m guilty.”
“You’re smart enough to know that the more help you get, the better off you are.”
Daniels laughed. “Yeah, right. Well, let me save you a lot of your freely given time. I did it. I remember doing it. And I’m glad I did it.” He didn’t look glad.
“Look, I—”
“So just leave it, huh? Just leave it and me be!”
His voice rose enough at the end for the guard to come forward two steps. I shook my head, and the guard withdrew cautiously.
Daniels’ expression was sullen, pouty. “Would it hurt anything,” I said, “for you to tell me what happened?”
“You know, I don’t have to talk with you at all. I can just stand up and walk, anytime.”
“I know. You can walk over to the officer there, who’ll take you back to protective custody or general population or wherever it is they stack you. Then you’ll wait for Rothenberg to try to grovel a reduction in charge. Maybe he can even parlay it into a sentence that’ll get you a shot at parole, like around the turn of the century.”
“The fuck do you know about it?”
“Not much. That’s why I’m here.”
Daniels turned his face down a notch. “Look, you’re wastin’ your time. They got me. Every which way. My girl, my gun, fuckin’ roomful of witnesses. Shit, they put this one on TV, the show’d be canceled. No drama.”
“I don’t think you’ve gotten the idea,” I said gently. “See, you’re supposed to tell me your side of it, then I dig around and—”
“Aw, man, what kinda shit you slingin’? My side is their side. I done it, man. They got me and they know it. And no smilin’ Irish face gonna change that.”
“William …” I started, but he had already stood and turned away from me, motioning to the guard that he was finished.
As I rode the subway back into Boston, I tried to make up my mind about what I should do. Easiest was to call Murphy, tell him I had confirmed William’s guilt, then break the news of my exit to Mrs. Daniels. The more I thought about it, the less easy that path appeared. All I had done was read a few reports, talk with a disappointed defense attorney, and bungle a client interview. Not exactly a thorough, professional effort.
On the other hand, I could spend three or four days chasing after the
names in the report. Then I could check each one off as he or she substantiated what everybody but Mrs. Daniels believed. That her son shot Jennifer Creasey.
While our train was stopped inexplicably in a tunnel, I decided to call Murphy and tell him the kid wouldn’t talk to me. Then Murphy could try to get Mrs. Daniels to persuade William again. If that failed, I’d be off the hook.
I felt better and looked at my watch. Eleven-twenty. Plenty of time to pick up the car and visit before calling Murphy.
“I don’t know if I like the green paper as well.” The roses were yellow, small but open flowers, sharp but widely spaced thorns. I bent over and laid them lengthwise to her.
“Mrs. Feeney says the company that manufactured the white tissue went bust, and the new outfit would charge her fifty percent more for the white.”
I smoothed the paper down. It crinkled. The old paper, the white, sort of whispered.
Don’t worry about it, said Beth. What do you think you’re doing, working a toilet paper commercial?
I laughed. I looked past her stone to the Daugherty plot. His monument was granite, not marble, and some of the blood from last March was still dried dark on it. I stopped smiling and repressed a shudder.
Have you heard from Nancy?
“No. I thought about calling her, but …”
You’re probably right not to push it.
“I know.”
She needs time, John.
“I know that, too.”
There was nothing more to say on that subject. The sky was overcast, the air still. No sailboats in our part of the harbor. Two Boston Whalers raced on a near-collision course, both heading toward an anchored third, already bucking, its fishing rods bending.
“New case, Beth. Son of a friend of the police lieutenant who covered for me last time. They say the son shot his girlfriend.”
Who says?
“That’s the problem. Everybody. The son included.”
What do you say?
“I don’t know. He isn’t helping me very much.”
How old is he?
“Only twenty, but a smart kid. Goreham College.”
Is that where he met the girlfriend?
“I think so.”
Why would a rich Goreham boy want to kill a rich girl?
“Well, to start with, he’s not rich. He’s a black, scholarship student. Her family, a white family, seems pretty well off, though.”
Did he love her?
“He didn’t say.” I thought for a minute. “No question that he caught a lot of flak from his neighborhood kids—black kids—about her, and he seems pretty intense, so yeah, I’d say he must have loved her to put up with it.”
You said he wasn’t helping you much.
“That’s right.”
If you had lost me when you were twenty, and everybody said you were at fault, would you be much help to you?
I swallowed. “I lost you when I was a lot older than twenty, and I knew the cancer wasn’t my fault, and I still wasn’t much help to anybody.”
Beth waited a moment. See?
I saw. “Her name was Jennifer Creasey,” I said.
I’ll watch for her.
Six
WHEN YOU NEED information, talk to someone who gathers it for a living. The Boston Herald’s newsroom was noisy, in a muted sort of way. The screaming of editors and clattering of standard typewriters had yielded to the squawking of intercoms and the burping of computer terminals. I preferred the old atmosphere myself, and I know Mo Katzen did too.
He was in his office, as always, in the ill-fitting vest and trousers of a three-piece suit, as always.
“Mo, how can you be a reporter, yet never be out on a story?”
“Hah, tell me about it,” he said, teeth clamped on a comatose cigar. He gestured toward the aged Remington that he still insisted on using. “You know what I’m writing about?”
“No, Mo. I—”
“A desk.” The top of his own desk looked like the step-off point of a ticker-tape parade. He took the cigar from his mouth. “A fifty-year-old desk that Mayor Curley supposedly had—there’s no supposed about it; I saw him perched on it often enough with these.” He pointed the index and middle fingers of his free hand at his eyes. “But no, the lawyers say we got to say ‘supposedly.’ Anyway, I’m writing about this desk that Curley supposedly had, that through the regimes Mayor White supposedly received, and that Mayor Flynn now wants to sit behind—no supposing there. Flynn really wants the desk. And guess what?”
“Nobody can find it?”
“On the button, John,” he said, inhaling as he futilely tried to get a throwaway lighter to fire his stogie. “Nobody can find a carved wood desk that’s got maybe thirty pounds on the Andrea Doria.”
“Mo, I—”
“Goddamn thing,” said Mo, pitching the lighter toward his wastebasket but missing. “You’re supposed to write with their pens, and shave with their razors, and you can’t get their goddamned lighters to spark enough to fry a moth.”
“Mo—”
“Getting back to the desk, though. There’s got to be five hundred—no, call it five thousand desks in City Hall. Every brother-in-law who’s on the payroll eventually gets a promotion into some created slot to free up his spot for the next brother-in-law. And if you promote the guy, you’ve gotta give him a desk, right?”
“Right.”
“Of course, right. I mean, the raise in pay, the change in title, those aren’t enough. The expansion of duties and responsibilities sure can’t carry it. What’s two times zero? Zero, am I right?”
“Math always was your strong—”
“But with these five thousand desks and five thousand brothers-in-law, the city’s crack investigators can’t find Hizzoner’s desk. You know they’re turning City Hall upside down? Looking at everybody’s desk. Looking inside the things, for God’s sake. Like Curley’s desk was maybe a stolen racehorse, and somebody rubbed on shoe polish to cover the star on its forehead. I tell you, John, it makes me sick.”
“Sick is right, Mo. I—”
“And you’d think, wouldn’t you, you’d think that the new administration would have the sense to do all this hush-hush? I mean, between Proposition Two and a Half wrecking the budget, and busing wrecking the schools, and potholes wrecking anything with wheels, you’d think that the administration wouldn’t want to advertise that it’s got more guys on this desk thing than the city did on the Boston Strangler. But no, they’ve got to let the media in on it, which means TV covered it last night, which means I got to have this ready by … Oh, I’m telling you, John, every time I think about it, I get sick.”
“Mo, before I call for an ambulance—”
“Ambulance?”
“Before I—”
“Who said anything about an ambulance?”
“Nobody did, Mo. It—”
“You better watch yourself, John.” He pointed the cigar at me. “I think your mind’s beginning to wander.”
I asked Mo if I could see the paper’s morgue information on the Creasey case. The Herald’s got the best criminal coverage in the city, but after an hour’s reading, the only new information I found was that the Federal Communications Commission was leaning against renewing the license of the television station run by the dead girl’s father. Some days you get the peanuts, some days you get the shells.
Seven
I STOPPED AT A push-button pay phone and dialed my own home number. I waited for the ringing to stop and the outgoing tape to start. I punched in my code number and heard two messages whir backward in Donald Duck talk. The first message was from Mrs. Daniels, asking me to call her at home that evening. The second was from Murphy, telling me to call him at home that evening.
I pressed a few more buttons to reset the tape machine, then checked in with my answering service. Same two messages.
I hung up and tried Dr. Clifford Marek. I told his receptionist that I had read about his work with hypnosis and hoped he could help
me with “my problem.” She said ordinarily two weeks’ notice would be necessary but reluctantly admitted a fortuitous cancellation for 3:30 P.M. I accepted with what I hoped were sufficient sounds of gratitude.
I had a burger and two beers at a pub around the corner from the Herald. Then I drove out to Calem.
I didn’t know the town well, but Marek’s address was right at the edge of the municipal center and recessed from the road. The building was four stories high, yellow brick. The lobby was simple and empty. The directory listed a group dental practice on the first floor, two podiatrists on the second, three pediatricians on the third, and just Marek on the fourth. Nice suburban professional atmosphere. There was a STAIRS door to the left of the directory. I walked over and tried the knob. The door opened, and I slipped through it onto a concrete staircase with blue metal railing. It appeared to lead up to the offices and down to the basement.
I went down fifteen steps to a second door, also unlocked, but marked BASEMENT—NO ADMISSION. Behind the second door was a hallway with three doors on the left side, spaced equidistantly. An elevator and two other doors occupied the right side. Four of the five doors said STORAGE and were secured. The fifth door said HVAC, short for “Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning.” The “boiler room.” It was ajar and music drifted through the opening. I walked quietly to it.
A man in a brown maintenance worker’s jumpsuit was fiddling at the base of some machinery against one wall. A small and battered transistor radio managed to spew an instrumental piece that was supposed to be “easy listening.” The man clanged a tool against a pipe and cursed.
“This where the girl died?” I said.
The guy jumped, startled. He was maybe fifty, five-six, and one-seventy or so. I started to apologize, but he cut me off.
“What’re you doin’ here? It says ‘No Admittance,’ y’know.”
“My mother’s upstairs. At the dentist’s. The drilling noise drives me nuts. I had to get away from it.”
“Huh,” said the guy, giving a half laugh, wiping his perspiring face with the back of his hand. “Try workin’ here. Cleaning the floor, you can’t get away from it through three closed doors. Fuckin’ bastard built this building, he didn’t care about soundproofing. Down here, it’s solid, quiet. Up there, a madhouse. You’d think the dentists’d complain.”
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