A Killer's Kiss (5 page)

MONDAY

I was half blind and bleary with weariness when I arrived at the courthouse the next morning. There wasn’t much on my docket, a young man’s future was all. His name was Derek Moats, and Derek was in trouble.

“Where you been, bo?” he said when he spotted me outside the Criminal Justice Building. “You told me to get here a half hour ago, and here you are, stumbling up with your tie all awry.”

“I knew I’d show, Derek,” I said as I adjusted my knot. “It was you I was worried about.”

“I was here from when you said, and I’m the one looking sweet, not like I just stepped out the crapper. Late night with the ladies, bo?”

“Let’s call it a late night and leave it at that.” I gave him a quick inspection. “Nice hair.”

“Combed it out just for the judge. And I wore what you told me to.”

“You look fine. Are you ready?”

“I was born ready.”

“You were born, we know that for sure, the rest we’ll figure on the run. Remember what I said, how to play it?”

“Course I do.”

“Good. Now go on in there and sit where I told you. I have someone I have to meet first.”

Commonwealth v. Derek Moats.
It wasn’t much of a case, one of a long series of short trials arising from a simple roundup at a crowded drug corner in North Philly. After a number of undercover buys, the uniforms had swarmed in from all sides, forming a ring and herding a group of suspects into the center. The undercover cops then identified the young men who had been doing the selling. It was an effective way to clean out a corner, but a scattershot form of justice. Derek was caught in the hoop and pointed out by one of the undercovers, but he claimed he wasn’t doing the selling.

“So what were you doing there?” I had asked him.

“Hanging,” was his answer.

“Hanging?”

“There’s girls on that corner you would not believe,” he had said, “and every one of them just waiting for a little bit of Derek.”

The little-bit-of-Derek argument wasn’t much of a closing, but it was about all I had, unless I could discredit the identification. Because of the ID, I had opted for a bench trial. Juries are always taken in by clear identifications—he’s the one, yes, him—but judges know that the simple identification is often the most unreliable part of a criminal case. That was the knowledge I was banking on.

Half an hour later, I was sitting at the counsel table, leaning back with a quiet little smirk on my face as A.D.A. Johnstone, a
fierce young prosecutor, came to the crucial part of her direct examination.

“What time was it,” she asked, “when you made the purchase?”

“About two o’clock in the morning,” said Detective Pritzker, a burly man with a long, shaggy beard, looking quite awkward in his suit and tie. He obviously would have been more at home in the motorcycle leathers he was wearing the night of the arrest.

“Was it dark?”

“The sun wasn’t out, if that’s what you’re asking, ma’am. But at that location there are plenty of streetlamps, and with all the headlights from the traffic, it was more than bright enough for me to see who I was dealing with.”

“And so you had a clear view of the man who sold you the heroin in People’s Exhibit One.”

“Objection,” I said. “There is no testimony yet as to the actual contents within that glassine envelope.”

“Are you contesting the contents, Mr. Carl?” said the judge.

“I’m contesting everything, Your Honor.”

“I’ll sustain the objection for the time being,” said the judge. “Let’s get on with it.”

“And so, Officer Pritzker,” said A.D.A. Johnstone with annoyance now in her voice, “you had a clear view of the man who sold you the alleged heroin in People’s Exhibit One.”

“Yes, I did,” he said.

“And do you see him in the courtroom today?”

“Yes, I do,” said Officer Pritzker, staring now straight at me as if he were preparing to steal my lunch money.

“Can you point him out, please?”

He reached out his arm and pointed his finger at the man sitting next to me at the counsel table, the man in the usual defendant’s seat, and then he swiveled his arm until his finger was aimed at a different man in a suit and tie sitting in the last row of the courtroom.

“He’s right there,” said Pritzker. “Sitting in the back row, in the gray. That’s him.”

A murmur went though the courtroom. I swiveled in my seat, seemingly stunned at the revelation.

“Officer Pritzker,” said A.D.A. Johnstone, “are you sure?”

“The lawyer is trying to trick me, is all,” said the witness. “I heard that’s the way he works. He’s got a reputation. But I’m a step ahead. The guy I bought from is him in the back.”

The judge leaned forward on the bench and hissed down at me. “Mr. Carl, are you playing games in my courtroom?”

“Would I do something like that, Judge?”

“Unfortunately, yes, you would. But not without consequences. Who is the man sitting next to you at counsel table?”

I looked at the young man next to me, hands clasped before him, eyes staring down. “Your Honor,” I said, “the young man sitting next to me at counsel table is the defendant, my client, Derek Moats.”

Officer Pritzker, on the stand, snarled at me and then said to the A.D.A. in a harsh whisper loud enough for the whole courtroom to hear, “He’s lying.”

“Your Honor,” said the A.D.A., “this is highly irregular.”

“Yes it is,” said the judge. “Mr. Carl, if I may ask, who is the man in the suit whom the officer identified?”

“I believe the man in the suit,” I said, “is an intern with the public defender’s office.”

“What is he doing in my courtroom?”

“I invited him, Judge. He’s trying to learn about the criminal justice system, I told him this could be an instructive case.”

“You invited him, did you? And it’s just a coincidence, I’m sure, that the intern you invited into the courtroom and your client both look quite alike.”

“They do? I hadn’t noticed.”

“They were talking outside the courtroom,” said Officer
Pritzker. “The lawyer had his arm around his shoulders, giving him orders. I saw it.”

“I was advising a young man who is seeking a career in the law,” I said.

“I bet that’s what you were doing,” said the judge. “And doing it right smack in the view of the witness. Okay, this is what we’re going to do. Ms. Johnstone, I want you to take custody of both these men right now and figure out who is who. Match fingerprints if you have to. How long will that take?”

“Give us an hour, Your Honor.”

“Fine.” He checked his watch. “Come back in an hour. If the man in the suit is the defendant, Mr. Carl, there will be hell to pay, both in the sentencing of your client and for you personally after I hold you in contempt and make my report to the bar association.”

“That sounds a little harsh, Judge.”

“Be glad it’s not the old days, Mr. Carl, where I would have pulled your ticket and had you flogged. But if it truly was, as Mr. Carl claims”—he paused, looked down at the docket on the bench before him—“Derek Moats, the defendant, sitting next to Mr. Carl this whole time, then, Ms. Johnstone, your witness blew the identification, your case is dead, and I expect it to be dismissed forthwith. Do you understand?”

“We could still make the argument that—”

“I don’t want to hear arguments. It will be dismissed, is that clear?”

“Yes, Judge.”

“Any questions?”

“No, Judge.”

“And, Mr. Carl, don’t you dare leave this courtroom until Ms. Johnstone makes her report.”

“What about lunch?”

“Eat the desk, I don’t care, but you stay right here.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Okay then,” he said with a bang of his hammer, “we’re in recess. I need to take a pill.”

I signaled to Derek not to say a word to anyone and watched as A.D.A. Johnstone and two police officers escorted the two young men from the courtroom. Then I sat down and leaned back to wait.

Just at that moment, a massive weight fell onto my shoulder and almost sent me reeling backward to the floor. I angrily jerked around and spied a huge man, with broad shoulders, an expanding stomach, and a face like a boxer who had bobbed when he should have weaved. Detective McDeiss of the Homicide Division. And he was shaking his big old head at me.

“That was cute,” he said.

“You think so?”

“Which is which?”

“I am an officer of the court, Detective.”

“You’re also incapable of telling the truth.”

“Not this time.”

“So he identified the wrong one?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Then I assume that you are quite proud of yourself for tricking a servant of the people.”

“Quite. But I didn’t have to trick him, he tricked himself. You heard what he said. I have a reputation. But my client wasn’t selling anyway. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Just like you,” he said as he dropped something onto the table.

I looked down, felt my nerves fizzle.

It was the
Daily News,
the chronicle of high crimes and low misdemeanors of the residents of our fair town. And spread across the front page was the picture of a fine stone house and the headline mansion of death.

I hadn’t had time to check the papers that morning, so I paged through it quickly, stopping at the article. It gave a few details of the Denniston murder and mentioned that the doctor’s wife was still in police custody. A statement about the investigation was made by Detective Augustus Sims, who simply confirmed that the wife of the deceased was being held for questioning. And the paper also quoted Julia Denniston’s attorney, Clarence Swift, as forcibly denying that Julia had anything to do with the tragedy and urging the public to come forward with any information about the crime. “In my modest opinion,” he was quoted as saying, “as the investigation continues, the evidence will completely exonerate Mrs. Denniston.” My name was conspicuously absent. I must say I was a bit surprised to find that Sims had honored his word and kept me out of it. Maybe he was more trustworthy than I supposed?

Nah.

I closed the tabloid, tapped the cover. “Nice house.”

“Did you have anything to do with it?” said McDeiss.

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Stop it. Of course I didn’t.”

“That’s what I thought. Guns aren’t your style.”

“Still, you sent Sims and Hanratty over to my place in the middle of the night.”

“I remembered your connection to the dead man’s wife. I brought it up to the captain, tried to use it to get assigned the case.”

“Really? To protect me?”

“To ensure justice and promote domestic tranquillity.”

“You wanted to nail me personally, huh?”

“Like a toothache. But the captain didn’t let me anywhere near the case and gave it to Sims.”

“Just my luck. What can you tell me about him? Nice guy?”

“Watch yourself.”

“Why?”

“Just be careful.”

“I’m more concerned about Hanratty.”

“Hanratty’s okay.”

“He thinks I’m somehow involved.”

“Of course he does. Any cop worth his salt would. But he’ll find out what really happened one way or the other. That’s all he cares about. With Sims you never know. He plays to his own agenda. Sims is more politician than cop.”

“And we all know how well politics mixes with truth.”

“Hey, did you really not have sex with her?”

“Word gets around, I guess.”

“We all got a laugh out of it. And it’s too bad, since she’s quite nice-looking for a killer.”

“You sure she killed him?”

“Sims seems to be sure. You still have feelings for her?”

“We have a past,” I said.

“I understand. But the reason I came over is to give you some friendly advice. Sims is a bulldog. He’ll sniff here, sniff there, take his time in figuring out who he wants to charge with the murder, but once he’s got his teeth into your leg, he’s impossible to shake off. And funny thing about his cases, when they start getting shaky, evidence starts popping up as if from nowhere.”

“You don’t say.”

“So here is my advice. Don’t let your unresolved feelings from the past betray you into doing something stupid. Stay the hell away from this case, Victor, at least until Sims decides who to charge. Right now he’s focusing on the wife. But if he starts focusing on you, then, boy, you might think you know what trouble is, but you’ll find out you were underestimating it all along.”

Generally I am disinclined to follow the advice of those in authority. I think it comes from the difficult relationship I have with my father. Either that or I am simply a dope. When I am told, repeatedly, to stay the hell out of a thorny situation, I find myself somehow compelled to get involved.

But not here, not now.

Both Sims and McDeiss had advised me to stay away from the Wren Denniston murder case, and I was fully disposed to follow their advice. It wasn’t because they had badges—I don’t heed no stinking badges—it was because something inside me was screaming the exact same thing. The suspicion that had gripped me as soon as two hard homicide dicks trooped into my apartment and gave me the third degree had only grown thicker as I learned the details of the crime. Reclaimed love had turned to outright paranoia in the flash of a gunshot.

So I would not be visiting, not be investigating, not be aiding
in her defense. Despite our promises one to the other to maintain silence, I had already told the police everything I knew. And now, going forward, I would not be a valued support in Julia Denniston’s time of utter need as Sims worked like a bulldog to build a case against her. She had betrayed me in the past; I was going to abandon her in the present. It seemed a fair enough trade to me. But she had a right to know.

I could visit her in the prison, tell her the way I was feeling, advise her that she was on her own, but that would require an actual modicum of bravery and class. So I decided instead to write her a letter.

Dear Julia,

Or should it have been “Dearest Julia”? Or “My Dearest, Dearest Julia”? Or “You Murderous Skank”? It was hard to get a grip on the proper address for a former fiancée who was soon to be indicted for murder. Where is Emily Post when you need her?

I want you to know how important these last few weeks have been to me.

I liked the tone of that, a sharp, clinical detachment, like we were working out the details of a business transaction rather than performing our little tango.

In a way we were able to recapture something that was lost so long ago, when you betrayed me and married that urologist asshole whom you have most recently murdered.

So much for detachment. And was it oxymoronic to call a urologist an asshole? I crossed out everything after “so long ago.”

I know that this is a most difficult time, and I very much would like to be by your side as you pass through it.

Did that sound a little bitter, as if I would enjoy the spectacle of her disintegration?

But the exigencies of the situation make that impossible. As a material witness, I have been repeatedly ordered by the authorities to stay away from you and your defense. I believe it is imperative for both our benefits that I do so.

That was actually pretty good, precise and filled with legal nomenclature while still making my cowardice appallingly apparent. I considered it sort of a noble gesture on my part, my spinelessness undoubtedly making the whole abandonment thing less painful for her. Sometimes I’m so noble I can’t stand myself.

I’m sure you are in excellent legal hands and that your attorney will do everything possible to ensure a just result.

This was actually a lie. I was pretty sure that Clarence Swift, whom I had never yet met, was in over his head, but there was nothing I was willing to do about that. And the “just result” thing was a double-edged sword, wasn’t it? If you are innocent, I hope you get off, and if you are guilty, may you rot in jail.

Look me up if you beat the rap, and maybe we can resume precisely where we left off.

The sentiment was true, absolutely, I could still feel her warm flesh, but I’d have to rewrite that a bit, don’t you think?

Sincerely,

As opposed to “Sardonically,” or “Cynically,” or “With All Due Self-Preservation.”

Victor

At least that part I got right. The rest needed some work.

I opened my desk drawer, pulled out another sheet of paper so as to give it a second go. When I pushed the drawer closed, it caught on something.

Not a surprise, really. While that drawer is not normally an exemplar of neatness, it was now an unholy mess. The contents had been rifled, as had the contents of my bureau and clothes closet, my kitchen, my linen closet and bathroom. They had taken the sheets off the bed, the towels off the rack, had swabbed the shower, had taken apart the drain of my bathroom sink and pulled out all the gunk in the elbow. It wasn’t hard to figure out what they had been looking for: They had been looking for blood, Wren Denniston’s blood.

And with all that rifling, they had obviously pushed something
in the way of my drawer slide. I reached in, felt nothing that would stop the drawer from closing, tried shutting it again, and failed. I could either work on the letter or solve this mystery once and for all, and working on the letter was proving more difficult than I expected. So I slid the drawer all the way out of the desk and reached inside, and that’s when I felt it. Something, yes. Something smooth and soft.

I grabbed hold and pulled it out.

A little purse, zippered shut. Red. Leather. Coach. About the size of a small hand, Julia’s hand, zippered shut to hide everything inside.

When I realized what I had found, I dropped it onto the desktop as if it were burning my fingers. It sat there, red, on my desk, like a warning fire.

Dear Julia, you sly little minx,

She learns her husband has been murdered. She collapses to the floor in anguish. After a few moments of dazed reminiscence, she goes into the bedroom to prepare for her rendezvous with the police, and what does she do? She dresses, and packs, and stuffs her red Coach purse behind a desk drawer, stuffs it in so cleverly that a team of Crime Scene Search technicians executing a search warrant don’t find it. That told me all I really needed to know about the guilt of Julia Denniston.

I should give it to the cops, without delay, turn it over like a good and honest citizen, an officer of the court. Yes, I should. Except that Julia wanted desperately to keep it from their prying eyes. It was one thing to answer questions truthfully and then wash my hands of her, it was quite another to voluntarily turn over evidence to those trying to imprison her for the rest of her life. I am a defense attorney as much by instinct as by choice.

I picked up the purse, felt its weight, a few ounces maybe. I rubbed my thumb across the leather and felt something underneath, something hard and cylindrical, like a fancy pen. But what pen was worth hiding from the police? Montblanc? It would be
nothing to unzip the purse, peek inside. It would be nothing to uncover the secret she was trying to maintain.

I drew my hand away, shook my head. I should give it to her lawyer, Clarence Swift. She wanted to keep it from the cops, and by giving it to Swift I would be facilitating that choice. Then it would be up to Swift to decide what to do with it. He could examine it closely, learn its secret, decide what to turn over, what to keep hidden. With him it would have protections of the attorney-client privilege that it could never have with me. Except that if Julia wanted Swift to have it, he would already have come knocking. She had hidden it from him, too.

I reached my hand once again toward it, gently rubbed the tips of my fingers over its supple red finish. It was worn and soft, like flesh. Like Julia’s flesh in those few rare moments before the cops came knocking, warm and yielding, hungry, ecstatic.

Stop, I told myself. Toss it, burn it, chop it with an ax and drown it in the Schuylkill River. If I did it right, no one would be the wiser. Whatever was inside, whatever evidence, whatever clues to the murder of Julia’s husband or the state of Julia’s soul, would disappear right along with the supple leather.

Yet even as I plotted on how to rid myself of its dangers, I could feel it drawing me toward it. I leaned close and smelled its scent, an aphrodisiacal combination of leather and expensive French perfume. For a moment I lost myself in the erotic promise of the bouquet. Hints of fine oil, champagne, the French Riviera, balsamic and vanilla, musk and passion. And as I breathed it in, as deep as my lungs would allow, I knew, quite simply, that I wouldn’t give it to the cops, or give it to Clarence Swift, or render it unto ash. I had thought our old-lovers’ tango had reached its sordid conclusion, but of course, as usual I was dead wrong.

Whether I liked it or not, I was in the middle of Wren Denniston’s murder. My neck was on the line, and the more I knew, the more I found out, the safer I would be. I wasn’t the type to let evidence disappear, to let secrets lie fallow, to let the soul of an old
lover remain hidden from my view when there were clues right in front of me. No, I wasn’t the type. But it wasn’t only that.

Did I still have feelings for her? had asked McDeiss. Of course I did. Old love doesn’t disappear; it is too potent an elixir for that. Instead it burrows deep into bone, like a parasite, waiting until just the right moment to reassert itself and sabotage your life. It arises like an ache in the middle of the night. It crawls up your throat with the taste of bile when you kiss someone new. It grips your soul and shakes you senseless.

It turns you stupid.

I picked up the small Coach purse, gently grasped the red leather pull of the zipper, yanked it open, and in that one sudden movement I was suddenly all in.