Key Witness (34 page)

The infirmary closed down for the day. The male nurse locked all the cabinets and signed out. What that mincing little shit didn’t know was that Dwayne had found the duplicate keys, taped to the bottom of a desk drawer. Anybody stupid enough to hide a key that poorly deserved to get his goodies ripped off.

He wouldn’t take drugs; not yet. The drugs were counted carefully, and if his keepers found anything missing that would be the end of his ride on this gravy train. For now the grain alcohol would do the trick nicely. He’d make himself a couple of potent highballs and take a trip inside his head.

The captain of the guard, whose name tag ID’d him as Walt Michaelson, opened the door. Michaelson was a certified no-neck, a former NFL offensive guard. It was common knowledge that beating the shit out of recalcitrant inmates was his idea of a good time. There weren’t many like him in the system anymore, but one or two were tolerated, even encouraged. He looked behind him, to someone who was standing in the corridor outside. “He’s in here, all right,” Michaelson said.

Alex Pagano walked into the infirmary. “Thank you, Captain,” he said politely. “Now if you’d leave us, please. I have things to discuss with Mr. Thompson that are private.”

“I’ll be outside the door if you need me, sir.”

“Good. Thank you.”

Captain Michaelson left, shutting the door behind him. Dwayne, who had been surprised and slightly unnerved by the sudden and unexpected intrusion—no one ever came down here after hours unless there was an emergency, and he would be forewarned in that case—eyeballed the DA carefully.

Pagano walked to Dwayne. “That’s good work you’ve done in the courtroom,” he said, offering his hand. “Congratulations.”

They shook. “Thanks,” Dwayne responded. He didn’t go any further; Pagano hadn’t come down here to tell him he’d done okay. DAs don’t jawbone with prisoners. This one was here for some other reason.

“This is your duty station?” Pagano asked, looking around. “I’ve never been in the jail infirmary. Nice setup,” he continued, strolling about.

Dwayne nodded. You know fucking aye well it’s where I work. You think you know everything about me; but you don’t.

“I understand you’re bunking here, too?” Pagano sat on the edge of a counter.

“Yes sir.”

“How did that come about? Allowing a prisoner to inhabit an unsupervised area?”

“It was the sheriff’s decision, sir.”

“Oh?”

He should have thought before he spoke. The DA might check that. On the other hand, what else could he have said? That a certain female deputy, whom he happened to be fucking, had set it up for him?

“Putting me in the general population … that could cause problems for me. Word gets around. I’m a marked man in certain quarters in here. There are people who don’t like what I do.”

Pagano looked puzzled. “I can understand that. But we have facilities for isolating inmates who need protection.” He looked around the room some more. “Leaving an inmate unsupervised in an area that has large amounts of medicines and so forth could be construed as letting the fox guard the henhouse, don’t you think?”

Dwayne threw up his hands. “I don’t mess with that stuff. I’m not going to do something stupid and jeopardize my future.”

Pagano nodded his agreement. “Yes, that would be stupid, and you’re not stupid. Still, it makes for a bad appearance. And appearances are important.”

“Absolutely, sir.” He didn’t know where this was leading exactly, but his cocktail hours were definitely about to end.

Pagano stood up. “Let me talk to the sheriff about arranging more suitable sleeping arrangements for you, Thompson. I’d hate for this Marvin White case to get befuddled in some public relations snafu. If the press or his lawyers knew about this, it could be ticklish.”

“Sure,” Dwayne said. “I understand you have to keep up appearances.”

Pagano opened the infirmary door. “It’s too late to do anything tonight. I’ll post a guard outside the door, to prevent anyone coming in here and finding you. We’ll set up a permanent solution tomorrow.”

He left, closing the door behind him. Dwayne heard the key turn in the lock. Through the small safety-glass window he saw the captain and Pagano holding a conversation. Then they were gone.

A minute later, a jail deputy took up his post in the hallway outside the infirmary. No one was coming in or out of this place without the officials knowing it.

Dwayne wasn’t all that pissed off; he’d known this would happen sooner or later. He wondered who’d ratted him out. That dipshit nurse, most likely. The little prick thought the infirmary was his own private domain.

Well, there was going to be one positive thing to come out of this. Doris Blake wouldn’t be paying him any more nocturnal visits. Her cock-scoring days were over.

J
OSEPHINE FOUND THE WOMAN
Marvin had spent the night with. It hadn’t taken her very long. She took Livonius’s list—which, to Wyatt’s surprise, had come through their fax machine the following morning—and started knocking on doors. She knew that trying to accomplish this delicate task over the phone would be a waste of time, and counterproductive—you had to get in your object’s face, up close and personal. Part of her training, which she had initiated herself because she wanted to do a better job, had been to ride around with some of the detectives who worked cases for the department. Face-to-face, she learned from them, worked about a hundred times better than anything else. It’s a lot harder for somebody to close a door on your face than to hang up the phone.

She called Wyatt at home, at night again. Dinner was over. Moira wasn’t in a chatty mood and his head had been somewhere else. Casual in T-shirt and sweatpants, he was sitting in his study, reading over his notes.

Moira stood in the doorway to the study, the cordless phone from the kitchen in her hand. “It’s for you,” she said curtly. As he got up to take it, she asked, “What is it with you and this woman you’re working with? Is there something going on?”

He took the phone from her. “You know better than that, Moira.”

“She seems eager to call you at all hours. Maybe she’s hoping I won’t be here.” She paused a moment as if to say something more, then turned and left the room, pointedly shutting the door behind her.

He sighed. “Hi,” he said into the phone.

“Bad time to call?” Josephine sounded concerned.

“No, we’re just … never mind. What’s up?”

She told him.

“Where are you now?” he asked.

“In her house. We’re drinking sherry.”

She gave him instructions. “It’ll take you awhile to get here from where you live. I don’t want to be pushy, but don’t take your time, okay? This lady likes her sherry, if you get my drift.”

He threw on a sports shirt, khakis, an old blazer—he had to look presentable. Moira was reading in bed, propped up with pillows, the bulk of
The Recognitions
opened to the middle. She watched him change clothes without comment.

“I have to go out,” he told her. “There’s a potential witness I have to see.”

“Who doesn’t keep nine-to-five hours.”

“Give me a break, okay? This may take some time,” he added, to his ears sounding apologetic and not wanting to.

“Please make sure all the doors are locked,” she requested. On his nod she added, “Michaela and I will have gone to sleep, I’m sure. I’ll have the alarm on, so don’t forget to check it when you come back.”

Ever since the robbery next door, she had been religious about using the alarm, something they’d been lax about before. He wasn’t crazy about always having to turn it on and off; it bred insecurity, anxiety. But it made her feel protected, so he did it.

“Will do.” He leaned across the wide expanse of mattress to her side and kissed her lightly on the lips. Her lips were cool to the touch.

He double-checked that all the doors were locked before he left. All he needed was for Moira to come downstairs and find one unlocked.

The Jaguar hummed along the freeway. Traffic had thinned, and he kicked back and enjoyed the drive, his windows open to the night. Frank Morgan sang a ballad through his alto sax on the car’s CD, and he played along with it in his head.

Josephine was waiting for him outside the house, fidgeting by the bottom of the front steps, a small cut-crystal glass of sherry in her hand. He parked at the curb and walked over to her, the remote chirping as he locked the car.

“Dry Sack,” she informed him, sticking her tongue out. “Want a taste?”

He shook his head. She dumped the contents into a bush. “This stuff gives me a headache, I drink more than a glass,” she said. “Bad mojo.” She cocked her head toward the house. Lights were burning in all the downstairs windows. “I told her I wanted to wait outside so you wouldn’t miss the address, but I really needed to get out of there for a while. She’s got an elbow problem and I didn’t want to play keep-up.”

This was no proletarian neighborhood. The homes were substantial dwellings on half an acre or more, with two-car garages in the back. An older neighborhood, but you needed to have good money to afford to live here. The residents were prosperous small-business owners and professionals. There was also a concentration, two blocks over, of mob-connected families who lived quietly behind curtains that were always drawn. It was considered one of the safest neighborhoods in the city because of those families.

“Her name is Agnes Carpenter,” Josephine said. “Her husband’s a doctor, ob-gyn. Has a private practice and privileges at St. Johnny’s.” St. John the Baptist was one of the better hospitals in the city. “He isn’t home tonight, she was glad for the company. I’ve got the feeling he isn’t home a lot of nights.”

She rang the doorbell, which played the first two bars of “The Sound of Music.” The door opened almost immediately, as if the woman was waiting there for them, perhaps trying to eavesdrop.

“Agnes, this is my boss, Wyatt Matthews,” Josephine said by way of introduction.

The woman extended a plump hand that had rings on three of the fingers. The other hand held her glass, which had been refreshed moments before, judging from its fullness. The diamond engagement ring on that hand was at least three carats. It looked like the sort of ring Elizabeth Taylor would wear. “How do you do?” she said pleasantly. “Please come in.”

They followed her through the foyer into the living room, which was jam-packed with furniture, a potpourri of old-fashioned overstuffed styles, mostly Queen Anne and Chippendale. “Please,” she said. “Sit down.”

He sat next to Josephine on a couch that sagged under his weight, shifting forward slightly so as not to be trapped in its mushiness. There was a feeling of decadence to the room, as if it were a well-preserved museum rather than a place in which people lived a daily life. Or a funeral home, he thought.

“Would you care for a libation?” she asked him. She had crossed to a small mahogany-colored side table that was set up as a bar, with four or five bottles on it, and several glasses on a shelf underneath. There was an ice bucket and tongs alongside the bottles. She picked up the bottle of Dry Sack. It was three-quarters empty.

“No, thanks,” he declined.

She sipped down half of her own small glass and refilled it. Then she sat in an overstuffed chair that was set at a close angle to his end of the sofa.

He did a quick sizing-up. Early to mid-fifties, with a puffiness around her eyes that was the inevitable residue of decades of steady, unremitting drinking. The rest of her face was tight; she’d had a facelift, maybe more than one. It was a decent job—her husband was a doctor, she would have had someone good do it. And she knew how to put on makeup; she wore a lot of it, skillfully applied. Carefully coiffed hair, dark blond with light blond highlights. Her dark green knee-length wool jersey dress clung snugly to her body, which was firm for a woman her age. She’d had work there, too, he assumed. Her crossed legs, sheathed in dark Donna Karan hose, were sleek, free of cellulite. In soft light, with the right clothes and accessories, she was a reasonably attractive, albeit flashy, woman—a woman who spent a lot of time and money to look as good as she could. She reminded him of one of the Gabor sisters, the one from
Green Acres.

Marvin had fucked her. More than once, Wyatt assumed. He speculated on how much she had paid him.

“Thank you for seeing me at this late hour,” he began.

“I feel I have no choice,” she replied. “Not that I want to get involved in this sordid mess. But …” she hesitated. “I’m not going to let some innocent boy die because it might put me in scandal.
Will
put me in scandal,” she amended.

“I don’t know how to put this delicately. …”

“Don’t,” she interrupted. “Frank talk will be cleaner, and healthier.”

“Yes, I agree. All right, then. Tell me about your … situation with Marvin White, Mrs. Carpenter. Particularly on the night of …”

“Last August eighteenth,” Josephine prompted. “That was the night of the fourth murder,” she told Wyatt, reading from her notepad.

“Please call me Agnes.”

“Agnes.”

“It’s such an old-fashioned name.” Her voice had a built-in world-weary complaint, as if she was shouldering an exceptionally heavy burden. “It was my grandmother’s name, my paternal grandmother. My friends call me Aggie.” She giggled, a quick burp-laugh. “But you’d better call me Agnes. We aren’t friends; yet.” She waited a moment, as if inviting objection. Hearing none, she held up her glass, which had somehow gotten empty. “Do you mind? This is going to be difficult. I need all the support I can get.”

“Not at all.”

She got up and walked over to the little bar in the corner, her hips swaying rhythmically.

“If she starts calling you Marvin, I’m out of here,” Josephine whispered behind their hostess’s back.

“I’ll be right behind you,” he whispered back.

She sat back down, crossing her legs again. “You’ve met Marvin,” she said.

“Of course. He’s my client.”

“He’s handsome, isn’t he? A young black Adonis. Don’t you agree?” she asked Josephine.

Josephine bit her tongue. “Absolutely.” She snuck a glance at Wyatt, who was maintaining a poker face. “A real good-looking kid. Man.”