Caper (25 page)

The widow said,” How dare you!”

“All right, Mr. Hastings,” ADA Reynolds said. “That's enough.”

“How about it?” I persisted. “Ever see them?”

“I … I can't remember,” the doorman said.

“Interesting. He doesn't say yes, he doesn't say no. He says he can't recall. I like that. Okay, you two step back. Oh, you didn't step forward. Never mind.” I turned to the jock's wife. “Number five, step forward.”

I didn't wait for her to comply, but went right on. “Now look at number three and say, ‘Get away from my husband, you bitch!'”

Her nostrils flared, her eyes blazed. “The hell I will!”

I pointed at her. “There! Did you see that? Look at her and tell me if this is the woman you saw going out through the lobby on the day of the murder.”

The jock wheeled on me. “You son of a bitch!”

“Don't be stupid,” I told him. “Look at your wife.”

He turned, looked.

Her mouth was trembling, but no sound was coming out.

In the silence that followed, the doorman's puzzled voice came crackling over the microphone.

“You know, I think I
did
see her going out.”

54

S
HE CAVED.

It didn't take much. The doorman's ID freaked her out. Which wasn't much of an ID. Hardly any, when you came right down to it. Any good defense attorney could rip it to shreds. But his simple, sincere “I think I did see her,” had a chilling effect on the woman, and if her husband hadn't stepped in to hold her up, I think she might have collapsed. The jock was, to all intents and purposes, a good husband, who wasn't having an affair with the congressman's wife. They were just good friends, the two families, better friends than the jerky Weldons whose daughter the congressman's son was seeing. It was too bad his son didn't like their daughter. But that wasn't going to happen, at least not then, with the gawky caterpillar as yet unraised to butterfly status. Not that it was a huge problem, the one daughter more popular than the other, the one with the boyfriend, star of the cheerleading team, much like the TV movie about the murdering cheerleader mother, if there really was such a thing. I only remember it vaguely.

That was the key.

The jock's wife was having an affair with the congressman. Which was fine, while they were just two big, happy families. But after the congressman became congressman, and decided to cool it with the jock's wife, before he became the butt of every standup monologue, things went straight downhill. His son picking Sharon and passing up their darling daughter was the last straw. The jock's wife snapped with the fury of woman twice scorned, as a lover and as a mother.

The jock's wife swore to get even.

And here I have to apologize for my entire sex, having been totally duped by a wig and a Victoria's Secret Miracle Bra. If you think that can't happen, I didn't either. I looked right at the woman, and I didn't know. She presented without tits, hair, and makeup, as a plain woman of no particular notice. Feel free here to hang me up by my sexist scrotum. But I remember when I was kid a ten-year-old girl I met in camp about as pretty as your average sack of potatoes turned up in high school—va va voom!—an absolute knockout driving all the guys crazy.

Just like the jock's wife. A little war paint, fake hair, and her tits pushed up to the limit, and I didn't have a clue. It worked on me, and her setup should have worked on the congressman. After all, I was perfectly programmed to blow the whole deal. There was no way I was getting the girl away from him without making a scene. No way the story didn't wind up on the local if not the national news. So embarrassing for him, so embarrassing for her, two birds with one stone.

Ah, but she figured without the white knight on the steed, rescuing the damsel in distress. Granted, my chance of succeeding was a long shot. Still, it should have been
no
shot. No PI in his right mind would have attempted what I did. But I countered her caper, foiled her nefarious scheme, and sent her back to the drawing board, angry, enraged, ready to take things into her own hands.

So, she calls the congressman, tries a little good old-fashioned extortion.
You don't want to see me anymore, fine, I'll go to the papers
. He pleads with her to reconsider, she agrees to talk it over. He picks her up in his car, drives her to his building. Pulls into the garage, just as they used to do. With her in the passenger seat, the doorman won't see.

They go upstairs. She pours out her heart. She wants him back.

She swears she never meant to kill him. She threw herself at him. He pushed her away. Assaulted her. She was defending herself when she picked up the andiron. So she says, and so her lawyer will undoubtedly plead. Whether a jury will buy it or not is another matter. At any rate, she is suddenly faced with the unpleasant realization that the congressman is dead. She pulls herself together and gets the hell out of there.

She does it by walking right through the lobby. It's no big deal. She's done it before. She figures the doorman won't notice. She figures right. The guy's job is to screen people going into the building, not to monitor people going out. In the normal course of events, there's no reason for him to notice her. Even once the murder is discovered, the police are only concerned with who went in. If not for my little stunt, the guy might not have remembered her at all. His identification, tentative as it was, and coming so late, was shaky at best. A good defense attorney could have ripped him to shreds.

If she hadn't confessed.

Which left self-defense. Self-defense was the icing on the cake. It was hard to argue with that. It might well have been self-defense.

But not Leslie Hanson. That was another story altogether. If I were a prosecutor, that's the case I would pick. There's only one way that plays out. And I hate it like hell, because it comes back to me. And it's going to be awhile before I can forgive myself. Because I told Hanson's attorney. And Hanson's attorney told Hanson. And Hanson went looking for the jock. Only the jock was in Cleveland. So Hanson didn't find the jock. He found the jock's wife.

He told her what he knew. He was wrong, of course, like I was, but it was close enough to scare the living daylights out of her. So she strung him along. Fed him some bullshit story, got him to take her back to his apartment. The same way she got me to follow the girl, by using sex and charm, and reminding me constantly that she had the necessary working-girl parts to fulfill my adolescent dreams. Her husband was innocent, but she couldn't stand to see him unfairly smeared. He had no alibi, might even be convicted, and she'd do anything to see that wouldn't happen.

The anything in question was the type that would require retiring to his apartment.

His show of good faith was to write, not a promise not to accuse her husband—that would be worthless, he could go back on his word at any time with no consequences to him whatsoever—but an apology to the widow for causing a scene at her memorial service, saying it was entirely his fault, and the guy who tackled him was not to blame, the theory being that having written such a letter, it would be hard to subsequently accuse the guy of the murder.

I'm not sure that made total sense, but give a guy a chance to get laid, and total sense is not necessarily a prerequisite. Hanson went for it. She went back to his apartment, sat him down, and dictated a letter to the congressman's widow. At her direction, he wrote:
I'm sorry I interrupted your memorial service
.

Or, he would have, if she hadn't coshed a sap down on the back of his head right after he wrote the word
sorry
, creating the impression he was writing a suicide note, beginning:
I'm sorry I killed your husband. I can't live with myself anymore
, et cetera, et cetera. Which the police bought, hook, line, and sinker.

She dragged him into the bathroom, tied a rope around his neck, threw it over the shower rod, and hauled him up. She tied it off to the faucet, brought a straight chair into the bathroom, and maneuvered him up on it. Tightened and retied the rope so he was standing on his tiptoes.

And then took the chair away.

His feet dangled down just shy of the bathroom floor, hanging him by the neck until dead.

She removed the chair from the bathroom, and placed the note underneath the dangling body, giving credulous fools the impression that the gentleman had written a suicide note, climbed on the edge the tub, and hung himself in a fit of remorse.

All of this, she insisted, was done without the help of her husband, who really was in Cleveland, and whom she really loved, her dalliance with the congressman not withstanding.

She confessed, in large part, for the purpose of saving him.

Her confession satisfied the police. It didn't satisfy me. Oh, I believed it, it was just rather unsatisfactory, as far as I was concerned, that the attractive young damsel in distress who had come to me for help would wind up convicted of murder. It was not the feel-good outcome I had hoped for. Add in my guilt over Leslie Hanson, and I wasn't exactly dancing on the clouds.

The kicker was, I hadn't even figured it out myself. I didn't have that
aha!
moment of clarity where everything comes together. It had taken Alice making the leap of logic to the Texas Cheerleader Murdering Mom, or whatever the hell that was, that turned out to be at least partially true. So the credit was really hers. Not that I begrudge it to her.

He said, diplomatically.

Of course, I took it from there. That's what I could feel good about. The fact that, armed with Alice's deductions, I had walked into the ADA's office and bluffed myself, alone, unaided, and without benefit of attorney, through one of the most extraordinary witness identification sequences in the history of law enforcement. I had maneuvered the witness who identified me as the man he had seen at the scene of the crime on the day of the murder into identifying a woman instead.

All right,
instead
is a bit of stretch, he identified me first, and only identified her as an afterthought. Still, it worked. I had begun as the most likely suspect.
The man who will be suspected of murder upon walking into the ADA's office is most likely to be
… See? It just doesn't work. I can't think of a name that fits.

Nonetheless, I had turned it on its ear. Bluffed the ADA, buffaloed him to a standstill, forced him to give me the lineup I wanted, and exposed the real killer. So, in the greater scheme of things, when I look at the spectacular mess I had made of the case, there was at least one tiny ray of light.

55

“S
O, YOU GOT EVERYTHING STRAIGHTENED OUT
?” R
ICHARD SAID.

“That's right.”

“And you did it without dragging me into it.”

“I thought you liked murder cases.”

“I murder
trials
,” Richard said. “Murder cases in
court
. This one never got there. It was merely a murder
investigation
. Which are no fun at all.”

“I'm sorry you feel that way.”

“Well, how do you expect me to feel? I'm a trial lawyer. Court is exciting, flashy, fun. The rest is just work.”

“I'm sorry you didn't get to defend me in front of a jury.”

“I'm not. A simple, boring case. Hardly worth the time.”

“I'm sorry if I bored you with it.”

“Not at all. I don't mind
hearing
about the case. I just didn't want to
do
anything. So the woman confessed. How'd you manage that?”

I told him about the shadowbox lineup.

“And they let you get away with it?”

“Just barely.”

“But they did?”

“Yeah.”

“How come?”

“They wanted to get something on me. Once the doorman identified me as going into the building, that bumped me up to prime suspect. They were willing to let me do anything that might end up having me hang myself.”

“Even so. Taking over the lineup. Telling the witnesses what to do. I'm surprised ADA Reynolds went for it.”

“He wasn't thrilled. Actually, ADA Fairfield talked him into it.”

“Oh? She was there?”

“Yeah.”

“And she took your side? Went to bat for you?”

“Actually, she did.”

“And that made a difference?”

“Yeah. I think ADA Reynolds would have crucified me.”

“But he listened to her?”

“Yeah, he did.” I exhaled, bit the bullet. “Richard?”

“Yeah.”

“You seem rather fond of ADA Fairfield. So I think you ought to know. The reason he listened to her is he's her boyfriend.”

Richard raised his eyebrows. “Actually, they're engaged.”

I stared at him. “You knew that?”

“Well, of course. I'm not the type of lawyer to proceed without precedent. When I noticed how attractive this ADA was, I asked around. Found out she was going with another ADA right here in Manhattan. It was a stroke of luck when he got assigned to the congressman killing, what with you taking such an interest in it. When it looked like you were in trouble, I took her out to dinner, explained the situation, and enlisted her help. She did a number on her boyfriend?”

“She sure did.”

“Well, she better. That was an expensive dinner. Not that I begrudge you, you understand. I do have to eat, and dining with an attractive ADA was far more pleasant than bailing you out of whatever scrape you got in.”

So. The crowning blow. Alice was right again, even when she was just kidding, making jokes about billable hours, and Richard dating an ADA to do me a good turn. Alice was right, and I was a schmuck, thinking I'd done it all by myself like a big boy, not realizing I'd had training wheels on my bike.

I started laughing uncontrollably. I couldn't stop myself.