A Very Simple Crime (7 page)

Leo looked at Adam, waiting for the man to look up, but he didn’t.

“Is there anything else, Mr. Lee?”

Adam stared at the floor and shook his head. “No, no.”

“Are you sure?”

Adam didn’t respond.

“I understand you were away when . . . the incident occurred.”

“Yes, I went away for the weekend.”

Leo rubbed his hand lightly over his bald head, again surprised at its smoothness.

“With a friend?”

Adam finally looked up, stared into Leo’s eyes, and suddenly Leo could feel the syndrome and everything changed. The syndrome where they try to tell you with their eyes. Where they try to get their eyes to convey what their mouths will not. But what could this guy need to get off his chest?

“Yes. With a friend.”

And it hit him. A cheater. The guy was a cheater. And now the poor schmuck thought this was his punishment for cheating on his wife.

“Maybe you should tell me her name.”

And the eyes told him he was right. The eyes said
Thank you
even as the mouth turned defensive.

“Violet Perkins. Does it matter?”

“Probably not. Here, I don’t have any cards, but let me give you my number.” He scribbled on a scrap of paper and handed it to Adam. “Look, why don’t you have Ms. Perkins call me. She can confirm your story and we can put it to rest, just between us.”

“I would appreciate that. I loved my wife.”

“I know. I know you did, Mr. Lee.”

The coolness was the first thing that hit him when Leo walked into the basement of the coroner’s office. That and the death smell. A lump rose in his throat even before the smell registered. He knew it was just his imagination, but Leo believed that he could actually taste the decay in the air. He walked through several swinging doors deeper and deeper into the morgue, until he found Vedder in the last autopsy room. Vedder stood hunched over the body of an elderly man. Leo couldn’t help but notice that the cadaver suffered from the same male-pattern baldness as he did, only the top of the cadaver’s bald skull was separated from the rest of him. He watched as Vedder pulled a dripping organ from the gaping hole in the cadaver’s chest and plopped it into the grooved scale that hung over the examining table. Leo felt the lump in his throat move up an inch or two. The scale always bothered him. It reminded him of the one in the butcher shop his mother used to drag him to when she did her Saturday shopping. In the butcher’s case, Leo would stare horrified at the tripe and cow’s tongue offered for sale. Occasionally, the butcher would have pig brains for sale behind the cold glass. And speaking of brains, it looked like that was what was going on Vedder’s scale next. Leo had to massage his throat to keep the gorge down.

“Hey, Travis, anything unusual on the Lee woman?”

Vedder put down his scalpel and picked up a foam cup with his bloody, gloved hand. He peeked out at Leo over the rims of his glasses and spat into the cup.

“Unusual? No.”

“What were your findings.”

“You can’t read?”

“Yes, despite the rumors, I can read. But I like hearing it from your smiling face.”

“It must really suck.”

“How’s that, Travis?”

“To have been the big man. And now you’re the little man. They won’t even let you read the autopsy reports. That must really suck.”

“Yeah, you know what, Travis? It does suck. It sucks like you wouldn’t believe. Thanks for reminding me. Oh, and by the way, fuck you.”

Leo turned to leave, his nausea momentarily eclipsed by his anger.

“Wait.”

Leo turned back to Vedder and followed the stoop-shouldered man to a wall of cadaver drawers. Vedder pulled out one of the drawers and unzipped the plastic body bag that held Rachel Lee’s corpse.

“So whadda ya wanna know?”

Leo looked down at the body. He could feel the coldness radiating off it. The absence of life.

“I want to know what happened.”

“She got hit on the head.”

“No kidding. I thought maybe she had a heart attack.”

Vedder spit into his cup and wiped a spidery thread of tobacco juice from his chin. Leo thought,
I wonder if it’ll fuck up my image if I faint?

“Nope, impact to skull resulting in depressed fracture. Traumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage.”

Vedder pulled a huge magnifying glass from his pocket and positioned it over the wound in Rachel Lee’s head.

“See this?”

Leo worked to steady his voice. “Yeah. It’s a great big gash in her head. So?”

“Look closer. Around the edges of the wound.”

Leo, very much against his better judgment, leaned in closer, and then, under the magnifying glass, he thought he could see faint threads of what could only be tiny shards of glass. “It’s glass. So?”

“Not glass, crystal. Very expensive crystal.”

“The kid hit her with a crystal ashtray. I know that already.”

“How am I supposed to know what you know and what you don’t know?”

“Well, what else can you tell me? Is there anything unusual? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“Generally speaking, I would say that being killed by a crystal ashtray is out of the ordinary.”

“Well, surely to God there’s more you can tell me than that.”

“Actually, there is. Stand back a little. Look at the wound as a whole.”

Leo did just that, but all he got for his efforts was a little sicker to his stomach. “What?”

“The angle, the degree, the location. What does it tell you?”

“That she got hit hard.”

“That whoever hit her, hit her from behind, was taller than she was, and was probably left-handed.”

“That’s not exactly a bloody glove.”

Vedder shrugged and spit into his cup. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

Leo stood outside the door for a minute. The lettering on the door read
PAULA MANNING, ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY
. Three years ago, he remembered, it had been his name on the door. Three years ago Paula Manning had been a deputy prosecutor working under Leo Hewitt’s supervision. Three years ago things had been a lot different. Three years ago he had been the assistant district attorney and a likely candidate for becoming the youngest district attorney in the county’s history. But that was three years ago. That was before the Guaraldi case.

Leo knocked on the door.

“Open!”

He stuck his head into the office and saw Paula Manning reclining in her desk chair, her stockinged feet kicked up on her desk, a hamburger and fries resting in her lap.

“Hey, got a minute?”

“Leo, my loyal and trusty servant, come in.”

Just as he was often shocked at his own sudden hair loss, Leo found himself taken aback at the changes the last few years had wrought on Paula. She had once been very pretty, and he supposed she still was, but now Paula’s features had an angular sharpness to them that hadn’t been there even a year ago. She was the same old Paula, maybe fifteen pounds lighter and with lines setting in around her tight mouth and open brown eyes. The weight loss and stress lines had given her a hardness that had never been there before. At least on the surface.

“So, Paula, how they hangin’?”

Paula pretended to adjust her crotch. “A little to the left, actually. What can I do for you, Leo?”

“Well, actually, I was wondering what the status is on that Lee thing.”

“Lee . . . Lee . . . Lee. Oh, yeah, the retard did it. Did the same thing five years ago. The family doesn’t want formal charges, neither do we. Right now he’s on the locked floor at the Hendrix Institute pending a judge’s order for placement at the state forensic facility. Maximum security. Seems pretty cut-and-dried.”

“Yeah, it seems pretty cut-and-dried, but according to the coroner’s report—”

“The coroner’s report? Since when do you have access to my files?”

“I don’t. I just talked to the guy. I mean, I was there that night, so I’m interested. That’s all.”

“Yeah, well you know, I still don’t know what the hell you thought you were doing by going out there. Your job is to prosecute delinquent traffic violations. If Bob found out—”

“How would Bob find out? Are you gonna tell him? What? You think I enjoy hanging out in traffic court? I mean, goddamn it, Paula, gimme a break. You used to work for me. How do you think that makes me feel?”

“Well, now you work for me. I would think that you’d be used to it by now. What do you expect from me? Should I resign because your feelings are hurt?” He was making her feel uncomfortable. Didn’t the fucker know who got him his lousy job in traffic court? She was sure it was humiliating, but, goddamn it, it also paid the bills. And wasn’t that what he wanted when he came to her begging for a job? And she had wanted to help out. She felt sorry for him and had gone to Bob to see what he would let her throw his way. And really, she and Bob had shared the same concern about the situation. It wasn’t that they held a grudge, it was that something like this might happen. That Leo might start bringing up the past. He might try to remind her of the way things used to be. He might make her feel uncomfortable.

Paula took a bite from her burger and asked, “What is it you want from me?”

“Just a chance. To do something besides speeding tickets.”

“Ever since what happened, you’ve been looking for that big break. A way to prove yourself again. I know that. I respect that. But, Leo, you might as well face it, no one’s ever gonna forget what happened.” She felt bad. That was a low blow, but Christ, he was asking for it. What did he expect from her?

Leo nodded his head. “Yeah, I know. No one’s ever gonna forget. Least of all you.” He turned to leave. And the shrug of defeat that passed through his shoulders was too much for her. She wasn’t fucking heartless, was she? She had, after all, once worked for this man. This pathetic excuse for a man who made her decidedly uncomfortable. She wasn’t a shrew, after all. For God’s sake, the man only wanted to feel like a man again. Who would it hurt if he asked a few questions?

“Hold on.”

“What?”

“So what did he say?”

“Who?”

“The coroner. Vedder. What did he say?”

“He, uh, he said the wound, the wound was caused by a blow to the head with a blunt instrument inflicted by a left-handed individual.”

“So?”

“So the kid’s right-handed. I called the hospital.”

“So?”

“So he’s retarded, not ambidextrous.”

“Ambi-what?”

“Ask me about the husband.”

“What about the husband?”

“He’s a lefty.”

“So are about fifty million other people—including me. Do you think I killed her?”

“I don’t know, did you?”

“Leo, you are a kind and faithful servant. Some day you’re gonna make it big. Maybe even sit here again. In the big chair. I feel it. I really do. What’s your point?”

“If nothing else, what was the son doing home alone with the mother? Feels a little bit like a setup. I wanna talk to the husband some more.”

Paula picked up a French fry. Swabbed it in a pool of ketchup. “So, who’s stopping you?”

It had been three years since his fall from grace, but it had been two years before that when Leo had first heard the name Frank Guaraldi.

Prosecuting bad guys was all he’d ever wanted to do. When he was a boy, countless television programs had instilled in him the ideal of fighting for justice as a worthy pursuit, but it wasn’t until after his mother had been taken in by a scam artist that he knew for sure he wanted to be a prosecutor. A man had come by the house one day shortly after Leo’s father had been taken out by a massive heart attack while cutting the lawn. The man who came to the door that day had been smartly dressed and neatly groomed. He introduced himself as Samuel Abdul, investment counselor. Mr. Abdul had ended up talking Mrs. Hewitt into investing her dead husband’s insurance money in an overseas petroleum company. Mr. Abdul had shown her conclusively, using charts and projected fuel prices, that she could easily triple her money, or more. Dorothy Hewitt had vivid memories of the 1970s oil crisis. She could remember a time when the idea of gasoline selling for as much as a dollar a gallon was laughable. But it had happened. And then some. But what had ultimately swayed Leo’s usually levelheaded mother was Samuel Abdul’s insistence that this was her golden opportunity to secure for her son’s future, for his education. She had signed over the entire insurance premium and was given a piece of paper entitling her to a thousand shares of an oil company that had never existed. Abdul, who apparently couldn’t leave well enough alone, kept pulling the same scam all over town, always targeting recent widows. Once he was caught, Leo’s mother had promptly filed charges along with eighteen other people the man had cheated. Using the money he had scammed from his mostly poor victims (who besides the poor would believe in such easy money?), Abdul had hired the best lawyer dirty money could buy. It was at this time that Leo, only twelve and wanting revenge for his mother, had decided that he wanted to be a prosecutor. To defend the defenseless. The prosecutor who handled the case had been a dedicated, intelligent, resourceful man who systematically dismantled every defense strategy the scam artist’s well-paid lawyer tried to mount. Leo sat with his mother in the courtroom every day of the trial, completely entranced with the legal battle that was waged there on his mother’s behalf. Even after the trial, Leo would sometimes skip school and spend his days in the county courthouse watching small legal dramas played out. Abdul’s trial lasted less than a week, and although others might have given up or simply gone through the motions, this public prosecutor had persevered and ultimately won back his mother’s money and sent Samuel Abdul to jail for eight years. The prosecutor had even helped Mrs. Hewitt figure out a more conservative way to invest her inheritance, and seven months before she died, Leo’s mother saw him graduate cum laude from law school.