Key Witness (42 page)

Wyatt sniffed. “I remember that smell.”

Dusting his hands on his cutoffs, Bollinger squatted down. He scooped up a handful of thick, red-brown dirt.

“Lot of clay in this ground,” he said. “Not too good for some crops, but damn good for marijuana.”

“How much are you growing?” Wyatt asked without thinking.

“Who says I’m growing this?” Bollinger asked quickly. Bollinger was a lawyer. He had his alibi planned. “This isn’t my property,” he said, grinning slyly. “This piece of heaven belongs to Uncle Sam, all seventy-five thousand acres, God bless his law-abiding heart. Federally mandated national wilderness.” He indicated the young guard, who had retreated to his place in the shade. “He works for one of our local cottage-industry syndicates. Pays better than carving Ozark-style trinkets for tourists. Most of that stuff comes from Taiwan now, anyways. I lawyer for these boys. That’s as close as I care to get to the operation. I wouldn’t want to lose my license over this stuff.” He gave Wyatt a conspiratorial wink. “You aren’t going to bust us, are you?”

“I haven’t seen anything. Aren’t you … aren’t your clients … afraid of flyovers by the DEA or ATF?”

“This is too out of the way, and you can’t see the ground from the air. The growers checked that out up front. Some of these hillbillies do have brains in their heads, L’il Abner notwithstanding.” He dug a bag of sunflower seeds out of his back pocket, tossed a handful in his mouth. “I was talking about hypocrisy.” He clapped a dirty, callused hand on Wyatt’s shoulder, leaving a smudge mark. “You asked me why I quit the prosecutor’s office, where I was the star, the one-hundred-percent-conviction poster boy. “Simple reason, although not everyone thinks so. It’s because I had to use people like Dwayne Thompson. Dwayne Thompson helped me put a man away for twenty-five years.” He paused. “Not that the man wasn’t guilty; he was. But if I have to make a right out of two wrongs, what kind of man does that make me in the eyes of my Creator?”

Wyatt didn’t answer. He didn’t know. Instead, he asked, “What did Dwayne get out of it?”

“We let him out. He had six more years to go, minimum, on an armed robbery charge. He walked out that prison door a totally free man. No probation, no halfway house, nothing. Free as a bird.”

“How long ago was that?” Wyatt asked.

“Almost six years ago.”

Wyatt whistled. “He’s been in Durban almost that long,” he exclaimed in surprise.

“That’s ’cause he’s an old dog. New tricks aren’t in his repertoire. He moves to your state, he sees an opportunity, some place he thinks is a bird’s nest on the ground, he knocks it off. Being a career criminal, he gets caught, he’s doing six to ten. Then this Malone guy comes along, confesses to him quote unquote, they cut him way down. But then they make him for an old unsolved manslaughter deal, he’s going up for that when he’s done with this stretch. You have a three-strikes law in your state. That’s his third strike, he’s out. So Dwayne Thompson can look forward to spending the rest of his life in prison, unless he can get someone else in whatever jail he happens to be to confess to him.”

They walked back to the house. A girl about ten and a boy, eight, were riding their bicycles in the yard, chasing each other in a big circle. They called out to their dad without slowing down. He called back to them by name and led Wyatt into the house.

“My wife, Annabelle. This is Wyatt Matthews, the famous lawyer who’s working on that big murder case I told you about.”

The woman, a pretty blonde, was fixing dinner, dredging pounded steak in flour for frying. She wiped her hands on her apron and shook with Wyatt.

“I’ve been showing Wyatt the north forty,” Bollinger joked. “Local commerce.”

“How’s it looking?” she asked.

“Somebody’s going to have a real good cash crop.” He turned to Wyatt. “You’ll stay to dinner.”

They sat on the porch again. The boy and girl were playing catch with a Frisbee. This time Wyatt had a beer to match Bollinger.

“You were there,” Wyatt said. “Was Dwayne Thompson fed information? By the police or …” He didn’t finish—the implication was obvious.

“My office?” The former prosecutor shook his head. “It isn’t that simple, and the bottom line is no, not exactly.” He took a pull from his beer. “The man confessed to Dwayne. Sort of. Like yeah, well, he did it, but there wasn’t much in the details, and maybe it wasn’t an absolute, rock-solid confession, guys in jail like to brag, be the big man, you know that. So ol’ Dwayneso comes to us and tells us this and it’s a start, but it isn’t a case. Not a lock. Prosecutors like sure things.”

“So the other prisoner was set up?”

“Not exactly.” He laughed. “I’m starting to sound like that Hertz commercial, aren’t I? The guy was guilty, of that there was no question, none. But our case was weak, until Dwayne came along.”

“How did you bridge it?” Wyatt asked. Now he was getting down to the nitty-gritty of what he needed. “From a start to a lock.”

“Okay,” Bollinger said. “It works like this. We say to Dwayne, ‘This guy could be bullshitting us. We’ve got to test him, find out if he’s really the one.’ This was a series of rapes, so it ties into your deal. ‘Ask him if the victim was wearing stockings or panty hose,’ we say for example. ‘Tell him that you heard she was wearing panty hose, but no underpants. See what he says. If he gets suspicious, like how come you know this shit, tell him it’s a jailhouse rumor.’ There’s always a million jailhouse rumors, so that always works. You start with some sex stuff, kinky if possible. Their sexual fantasies are about the best things some of these habitual old cons have going for them. So Dwayne pops the question, and sure and behold, the guy goes for that bait like a starving trout goes for your best fly. ‘It wasn’t panty hose, it was stockings, and they had a black seam down the back, with clocks at the ankles.’ Etc., etc. And of course, that’s what the victim was in fact wearing, and we can put Dwayne on the stand and ask, ‘Did the accused tell you what kind of legwear the victim was wearing, in detail?’ and Dwayne can honestly say, ‘Yes, stockings, seams,’ the whole shebang. And that’s how it works. At least in our situation it did. We knew Dwayne, we knew what he was capable of. It took us a month to set up, and it paid off. We got our conviction.”

“And that’s why you quit?”

“Actually, no. I could live with that, because the guy really was guilty, and his crime was truly awful. What did it for me was, I sent another guy up, on a stoolie’s testimony—not Dwayne in this particular case. It was a murder case and we pulled the switch on the fellow and a year later found out the stoolie had been lying from the ground up. It wasn’t like the man confessed and we helped fill in the details, like we did with Dwayne and some others. This man actually was innocent. Which to my mind made me an accomplice.” He spat out a mouthful of sunflower husks. “Stoolies are the lowest. You make your bed with them, you’re going to be scratching the fleas off your back. So I quit.”

He finished his beer, set it down gently on the wooden porch floor. “I’m switching to tequila,” he said. “Want a margarita?”

Dinner was early and delicious. Chicken-fried steak and vegetables from Annabelle’s garden. Wyatt limited his alcohol intake to one tequila sunrise.

The sun was edge-painting the western sky as the former prosecutor walked Wyatt to his car. The dogs scampered around them, the growler nipping at Wyatt’s heels. Bollinger gave him a swift kick to discourage his antisocial behavior.

“I hope I helped you some,” Bollinger said. They were standing at the car.

“You did.” Wyatt paused. “Although in my particular case, I don’t think the same situation applies.”

“No?”

“Dwayne had just gotten down to our city jail from Durban, to testify in this Malone case. His first day working in the infirmary they bring in Marvin White, who’d been shot up. Three days later Marvin has confessed in detail to seven different murders, Dwayne has gone to the DA with his information, and the DA gets his indictment. It happened too fast, there’s too much information, and Dwayne just got there, he hasn’t networked with any jail personnel who could set him up. Unless there’s someone there who was working with him at Durban, which seems far-fetched, since he’s been at Durban over four years this stretch.”

Bollinger thought for a moment, nodding in agreement. “Yes, I’d say you’re right. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Dwayne did it all on his own,” he pointed out.

“No,” Wyatt agreed. “Anyway, I did get something out of this trip, besides meeting you, which I’m glad I did.” He wouldn’t be moving in this world if he was still practicing corporate law, he thought with satisfaction. This world was way more interesting. Dangerous and alive. He had never seen a large patch of marijuana before, only plants in a friend’s basement, under a Gro-Lite.

“So am I,” Bollinger agreed. They shook hands for the last time. “What do you think you’ve learned?”

“I know that Dwayne was dirty in the past, and that his miraculous jailhouse confessions weren’t solely his own doing. If he was dirty with you he’s probably dirty this time, too. How he did it, or who did it with him—that’s my dilemma.”

W
YATT STOOD AT THE
site where the first murder had been committed, two years earlier. He had flown home the night before—Moira had long been asleep by the time he finally got to the house, so he crashed in the guest room. When he woke in the morning she was already gone, leaving him a note that she had early business with her bookstore location, and to think good thoughts for her. She’d check in with him later.

There should be a plaque here, he thought, as midmorning pedestrian traffic flowed around him. A bouquet of flowers, like they bring to roadside graves in Mexico. A person was murdered here. There should be some recognition of that.

The neighborhood was working-class commercial/residential, apartments over stores. The victim, a teenage prostitute, had been found in a narrow alley between two stores, jammed in behind some large trash cans and covered with sheets of cardboard. Care had been taken to hide the body well enough so that it couldn’t be seen casually. The distance from one brick wall to the other, bordering the alley, was barely wide enough to drive a car through; it was mostly used as a walkway, a shortcut to get to the next block without having to go all the way around. The trash cans that were kept there were lugged out to the sidewalk for pickup twice a week. There had been a pickup the day before, so the cans wouldn’t be moved for two more days. Had the killer known that? It seemed reasonable to assume so.

The street that ran perpendicular to the alley, a medium-sized thoroughfare, had been part of Marvin’s route. Livonius’s laundry had two regular customers on this block, both commercial: a Chinese restaurant and a photo lab. Marvin was at both stores twice a week, one delivery, one return. The killing had occurred the night of his return day. The coroner had determined the time of death to have been between nine and midnight. He had good evidence to go by; the last person to see the victim alive had been another hooker, who’d had a cup of coffee and a slice of pizza with her at a take-out place around the corner. She had last seen her friend at eight-thirty. The decomposed pizza in the murdered woman’s stomach had helped the coroner pinpoint his findings.

The victim had mentioned something to her friend about an appointment later that night with a regular, but the police had discounted that, unless the regular was someone who drove through the neighborhood and had sex with her in his car. There were no hotels to go to nearby, and this prostitute wasn’t of that caliber. She was in the five-minute drive-by category.

Wyatt had the police report of the murder with him. He looked through it again. The body had been found the following day by a homeless transient who had gone into the alley in the wee hours of the morning to get out of the cold and had fallen asleep in an alcoholic stupor. When he had come to and was leaving the alley he picked through the trash cans, looking for bottles and cans he could recycle for money for another bottle. He saw the body buried under the cardboard and ran screaming to the nearest policeman.

The transient had been held briefly and questioned, then released. He was never a serious suspect. He had been seen long after midnight, the coroner’s outside time for the killing, and the blood-alcohol level in his system, even several hours later, was too high for someone who had committed this kind of murder. Besides, with that much alcohol in his system, he wouldn’t have been able to get and maintain an erection. The rape had been vicious. The killer had used his penis like a club.

The people on the street knew Marvin. He came through regularly on his route, although at that time he’d only been on the job about a month. Some of the hookers interviewed by the police knew who he was by sight, but he had never propositioned any of them, and they didn’t know if he and the victim knew each other.

Marvin had finished work that day at 6:45. Livonius still had his old time cards. He kept them for two years, in case he was audited by the INS. Livonius still remembered Lithuania—he did everything by the rules.

Marvin usually went home right after work, but occasionally he would linger in town. Jonnie Rae was sure he had come home that night, but she didn’t remember when—the usual time, about eight, or later. He had to take two buses, with a transfer. It was a long trip if he missed his connection.

No one seemed to know what he did when he didn’t come home straightaway. Just hanging around, seeing what the rest of the world looked like, was what his mother thought. He had been born and raised in the same depressed section of the city, and had never gotten very far from that neighborhood until he got the job with Livonius. It was logical to think that the attractions of the city would appeal to him.

And it was also logical, Wyatt thought, that after a month on the job some of the women he wound up sleeping with had already started him on that routine. That by this time on the job he was spending evenings in the beds of some of his female customers.

One thing Wyatt couldn’t see: Marvin sleeping with a customer and then raping and killing another woman that same night—or worse, killing and then going to a sexual liaison. He wasn’t nearly cold-blooded enough for that. He was too immature, too emotional. These killings had been methodical and brutal. A sociopath’s killings.