Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 03 - THE SPRING -- a Legal Thriller (14 page)

“Yes, I do,” Dennis said. “I think you don’t commit a mercy killing on someone you don’t know. You believed these people were the Lovells—old and dear friends of the Hendersons—because the dog you found answered the description of a dog the Lovells may have owned. But now you know from the dental X-rays that it wasn’t the Lovells who died up there at Pearl Pass. So who did you find? Who was it that might have been euthanized? Logic suggests that they would have to be people who were terminally ill with something like cancer or AIDS. So far there’s no sign of disease. If you still intend to link these deaths in some way with the Hendersons, you’d better identify the victims and their supposed source of suffering before you start seeking to name the perpetrators. Doesn’t that make sense?”

Dennis waited until Josh nodded slightly, then went on: “Have you established any connection between Beatrice Henderson and the victims? No. Can you? No, because you don’t know the identity of the victims.”

He turned on Ray Bond. “And let me tell you this, Ray. Without that connection, you take this one step further—to a jury, or even a grand jury—and you’re going to be involved in reckless prosecution. I don’t think that’s what you want. I’m sure it’s not what the Sheriff’s Office wants. So let’s just back off and stop pointing fingers and making empty threats. It would be unwise.”

“Bravo,” said the sheriff, rising from his creaky swivel chair and clapping Dennis on the shoulder. “I sure as hell would like you to be my lawyer if I ever get caught doing anything illegal. But until that day, let me ask you a tough question. How do we account for the presence of the Lovells’ dog in a grave less than a hundred yards from the grave of the two victims? And don’t give me that bullshit that it was
probably
the Lovells’ dog. Coincidence don’t count in the real world. It
was
the Lovells’ dog.”

“Try this scenario,” Dennis said calmly. “The victims, the Does, found the dog. They took it camping with them. Or found it up there near the pass, after it ran away.” He turned to Queenie. “Are there any people missing from the town of Springhill? Any people who might fit the description of the victims?”

“Not that we know of so far,” Queenie said. “But we’ll look into it.”

“What’s your theory,” the sheriff inquired of Dennis, “as to how the silver pillbox walked up to the dog’s grave and fell in there?”

“I have no theory yet,” Dennis said.

“Maybe you’ll find one. You’re good at that. Meanwhile, we’ve pulled latents off the pillbox and off a Remington rifle we found up there. We can’t track the rifle down to any owner—it’s pretty old, and it’s a common enough model. You mind if I ask your client and her husband to come in here and give us a set of their fingerprints?”

“What if I did mind?” Dennis said.

“It would piss me off because I’d have to go to the trouble of getting a court order. Which I’d sure as hell get.”

The courts had determined that fingerprints and handwriting samples were not deemed private in nature or protected by the Fifth Amendment. For even the flimsiest of reasons, the sheriff had the right to ask for them.

“My client,” Dennis said, “will be thrilled to come in and help you out with a set of her fingerprints. I don’t represent Scott Henderson, my father-in-law, but I can’t imagine that he’d object either.”

The sheriff beamed. “See? I told you that if we all cooperated, we’d get somewhere.”

And where is that? Dennis wondered, but didn’t ask the question.

“One more thing,” Queenie O’Hare said. “I’d like to open up Susan and Henry Lovell’s graves in Springhill. Ray, I need permission in writing to do that. You might have to call the DA in Gunnison County.”

“Glad to do it,” Ray Bond said.

“What do you expect to find in their graves?” Dennis asked.

“I don’t really know,” Queenie admitted. “Want to come along with me and see?”

Chapter 12
The Cemetery

IN ANY CRISIS, Bibsy Henderson cooked. For Queenie O’Hare’s visit the previous day, she baked chocolate chip cookies. For dinner with her husband, daughter, and son-in-law she went straight to her shelves of cookbooks above the cast-iron stove and with no hesitation brought down
The Food Lover’s Guide to France.
Three hours later she delivered to the table a lamb-and-black-olive stew in red wine, a potato gratin, and finally a multilayered lemon-and-chocolate tart with a recipe from La Bonne Etape, an inn in Alpes-Maritimes where she said she and Scott had once stayed.

“This is not for dieters or fat-free fanatics,” she announced, ladling out large, un-French portions of stew and potatoes.

“Bless your cotton socks, woman,” Scott said, “I’m glad you told us that. Otherwise, who could have guessed?”

Dennis waited a few minutes and said, “We have got to talk about this situation, Bibsy. I hope it won’t spoil the dinner.”

“Nothing could spoil my food,” Bibsy said.

“Good. So tell me what happened at Pearl Pass.” He added in his most affable, lawyerly manner: “If you know.”

“Well, it’s just plain silly that they think I have anything to do with something like that. Don’t you agree?”

“I’d like to agree. But for the moment, consider me your lawyer, not your son-in-law. Convince me.”

Bibsy’s face suddenly looked dry and hot, and a small nervous pulse beat in the hollow of her throat. Before she could begin to speak, Scott held up a quieting hand and moved forward on his chair.

“Dennis,” he said, “isn’t it a fact that the authorities down in Aspen don’t know beans about who the victims are? They could be from anywhere. Could be vagrants. How can they connect Bibsy with strangers found fifty miles from here in the back of beyond? Let’s face it, that ox won’t plow.”

Keeping his promise, Dennis had called Sophie from Aspen and told her most of what he had learned from Josh Gamble and from Jeff Waters, the coroner: about the injections of Pentothal and Versed, followed by potassium chloride administered to the so-called male and female Does. He had also mentioned the longevity of the nitroglycerin pills. “You might pass all this along to your parents before dinner,” he said.

He repeated these details to his in-laws.

Scott Henderson frowned; in the past day, Dennis realized, there seemed to be new lines scored into the brown oak of his cheeks. “I understand all that,” Scott said. “But I think in court it’d be like throwing a saddle on a dead mule. Might look right, but where can you go with it? Don’t they see that there’s no
proof?”

Dennis evaluated that response and didn’t like it. It was accurate, but it had a taint of what some people called lawyerly evasion.

“Josh Gamble’s theory,” he said, “not to put too fine a point on it, is that Bibsy—probably with some help from you, Scott—committed euthanasia. Assisted suicide, if you care to stretch the language. As a former nurse she’d be able to procure the drugs, or she might even have had them on hand. And she’d be physically capable of administering them properly.”

Scott stood up, amazed. “On people she didn’t even know?”

Dennis looked at Bibsy. “Have you ever been up to Pearl Pass?”

“Many years ago,” Bibsy said quietly.

This was a new experience for Dennis. He had never had a relative as a client and he had never discussed the details of a case in front of his in-laws and his wife. Not that his wife was involved in the discussion. Sophie maintained a rigid silence and looked pale, almost chalk white in the lamplight. She was not eating.

Dennis was hungry, and the lamb was perfectly cooked; nevertheless he only picked at his food. “How many years ago?” he asked Bibsy.

“Many,” she said. “We were camping. Long, long ago. I don’t remember exactly.”

It was not the time or place to start an argument. Dennis turned back to Scott. “What’s your theory as to what happened?”

This was a question that Dennis often asked his clients when he felt they might be guilty and when he didn’t dare ask,
“Did you do it?”
Experienced lawyers rarely asked that last question of clients for fear of receiving a truthful answer. If they told you they had done it, whatever
it
was, you still had a right in court to force the prosecution to its proof. Putting your client on the witness stand, however, to elicit a false narrative of innocence violated the canons of legal ethics. For that a lawyer could be disbarred; in some instances, indicted—although half the criminal defense lawyers practicing in the United States, Dennis knew, would be out of work or behind bars if that canon were rigorously enforced. Therefore a lawyer, to save his skin as well as his soul, asked his accused client, “What’s your theory?”

“My theory,” Scott Henderson replied—after he had taken a swallow of St. Emilion—”is that if we don’t let these law-enforcement galoots get their claws into us, things will quiet down. It will take time, that’s all. One of these days the industrious and well-meaning Sheriff Gamble and the damnfool officious Mr. Bond—there’s a man who doesn’t know ‘Sic ‘em’ from ‘Come here’—together will figure out that they don’t have a legal brick to stand on. They’re hollering down a rain barrel. In more proper language, so you don’t think I’m just a hick from the backcountry, the evidence presented today fails to rise to the level required for an indictment. They don’t have a case with the likes of a stolen or lost silver pillbox. No probable cause.” He smiled at Sophie.
“Probable cause,
my dear, is a legal term, and all you really have to know about it is that the powers-that-be need to have it in order to arrest you. They need facts that point the finger. And they don’t have them. No sir. Judge Florian is a smart old bird and he’ll need a heck of a lot more convincing than these yokels can come up with.”

Dennis regarded his father-in-law with dark-eyed displeasure. But Scott either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He was on a roll.

“In a month or two, you’ll see, it will be a matter of two unknown people, suffering from some incurable and painful disease, who came out here from Denver to the western slope in order to depart this world in a more majestic setting than their own once-beautiful but now frighteningly polluted metropolis could afford them. I take that act as a compliment to the purity of the Elk Range, where we have the extreme good fortune to live. ‘We’ includes you, Dennis. You’re part of us, more than you yet realize. But you will realize it… I promise you. Meanwhile, let’s enjoy this splendid dinner my wife has cooked for us. Just try this tart. Lemon and chocolate are my two favorite flavors. These tarts are so good they’d make you hit your grandmother to get another one.”

The patriarch had spoken in a firm voice larded with countrified certainty and a tone of finality. And that was the end of all nonculinary discussion. Dennis felt a deep distress, but he knew from experience that Bibsy and Sophie would not challenge Scott’s words—at least not now, in public. So he set about to finish and somehow enjoy his meal.

The moon had set. Mist rose from the pines. Getting into bed, Dennis said, “Sophie, your mother is not being realistic about what’s happened. And your father is being evasive. I need help.”

Sophie was silent awhile, and then said quietly, “I don’t think I should get involved in this. It’s between you and my mother. Please, Dennis—that’s the best way.”

“They’re your parents. You
are
involved.”

“You heard my father. He says it won’t come to an indictment or anything like that.”

“He may be wrong.”

“He knows the people up here better than you do, Dennis.”

“The law is not quite as forgiving as he makes it out to be.”

“Don’t you think it’s a good idea to wait and see?” There was the same finality in her voice that he had heard in her father’s, but added to that was a pain whose cause he didn’t understand: a sorrowing. “If you want to help me,” she said even more softly, “keep me out of this. At least for now. Just do your best. I know you will. I have faith in you.”

“Yes, I will,” he said. “And I thank you for your faith. All right, let’s see how it goes. Maybe you’re right and your father knows more about things up here than I do. I hope so.”

The following day the sun stayed behind cloud cover. A breeze in the high country smelled of coming snow. Dennis checked the weather report: it was raining heavily in California, which usually foretold snowstorms in the Rockies. The temperature fell to ten degrees. Bundled in parkas and wearing insulated gloves, Dennis and Sophie—Sophie pale and silent and distant in a way that he had never known her to be—met Queenie O’Hare and two Pitkin County male deputy sheriffs in front of the Springhill post office at the agreed hour of ten o’clock.

Sophie was there as the official representative of the incorporated township. “I’m sorry,” she said to Queenie, “but on behalf of the Town Council I have to ask you if you have a court order.”

“I have a fax from the circuit judge in Gunnison.” Queenie waved a flimsy piece of paper in the cold mountain air.

Sophie looked at Dennis, asking a wordless question.

“It’s not exactly proper,” Dennis said, “but it’s fair to say that if we objected we’d be delaying the proper course of justice. And bear in mind, all they have to do is drive over to the courthouse in Gunnison and get it.”

Sophie turned back to Queenie. “You can open the graves.”

The graves were side by side, with stone markers bearing the names of Henry Lovell and Susan Lovell, the dates of death, and two simple crosses.

There were three shovels. Queenie supervised, and the two male deputies dug. The third shovel had been jammed into a snowbank piled up at the edge of Henry Lovell’s grave. To Dennis’s eyes its lonely and upright presence seemed to grow more and more accusative as the deputies dug and sweated. But he restrained himself. It was not his job to make things easier for the opposition.

Fat snowflakes swirled from a heavy sky. The wind blew more strongly. The diggers began to stamp their feet as they worked.

Dennis’s feet grew cold. More than cold, he was restless and unhappy. Murmuring some words of apology, he detached himself from Sophie and the diggers and began to walk toward the nearby woods, down the row of gravestones and small monuments and markers. It was a tasteful cemetery, a testimonial to modest lives and modest exits. Not many graves. Probably, Dennis decided, in the old days plenty of people were buried in their backyards in brief ceremonies, or maybe no ceremony at all. Maybe still.