Key Witness (54 page)

The shift ended. Hundreds of workers came out of the plant. They all exited the same main gate, heading for the block-square parking lot across the street. She would have to pass by him.

He waited a long time. People went by him to their cars, singly and in small groups, talking or not. In the wind the residue of their occupation drifted to him. It burned his nostrils, a dark pungent tang. What a way to make a living, he thought.

Finally, after twenty minutes, she emerged from the front door, came out the main gate, and headed for the parking lot. She was alone, and her hair, uncovered, was damp, glistening in the late-afternoon sun. She wore a simple T-shirt, baggy shorts to the knees, thongs. Seeing her again, in this unadorned outfit, her full figure unself-consciously presented to the world, reminded him of how she had turned him on when they’d first met.

She’s showered, he realized, watching her approach him. So she wouldn’t carry the smell into her car and home.

She was coming closer, but she hadn’t recognized him. He was hiding in plain sight, a man on the street. When she was three paces from him, about to pass by, he stepped out and approached her.

“Excuse me. Miss Waleska?”

She turned to him, squinting for a moment, her hand in a salute over her eyes to shield herself from the sun, which was shining in her face. Then she brightened in recognition. “Mr. Matthews?”

“Yes. I have to ask you some important questions,” he said without preamble.

She knew there was something wrong—she saw it in his face. “My place isn’t far from here.”

Her apartment was on the second floor, up a flight of stairs. He followed her, his eyes drawn to her behind and her calves. He had the feeling she knew he was watching her in this way. If that either annoyed her or made her self-conscious, she didn’t show it.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked, dumping her day pack, which was what she used for a purse, on the pine table in the small dining alcove. She had stopped downstairs to take her mail out of the box; she flipped through the stack, set a couple of pieces aside. The rest got tossed into the trash. “I’m going to have a glass of white wine, if you don’t mind.” She stepped into the small kitchen, temporarily out of his line of sight.

“Not right now, thanks.” He felt like a cop about to confront a suspect. A cop wouldn’t have a drink with a suspect, would he? Especially while he was on duty.

“Anything else? I’ve got beer, soft drinks. I think there’s a bottle of Scotch around somewhere.” He heard the popping of a cork, the pouring of a glass of wine.

He drifted into the living room and sat on a white canvas-covered couch. A nice couch, the kind you buy from an Eddie Bauer mail-order catalog. The apartment was small, clean—when he had looked into the kitchen he’d seen that she’d done the dishes before she went to work. Made her bed, too, he’d bet, and neatly folded the towels, in the bathroom. The apartment was specifically furnished, meaning everything had been picked out with a purpose—a special vase, with fresh flowers in it, detailed picture frames with photos in them of friends, mostly women. She was in some of the pictures. He noticed the murder victim in one of them, along with this woman, Violet Waleska, and another woman. There weren’t any children in any of the pictures, and no older people who might be parents. No brothers, and the women weren’t sisters—there was no resemblance. She had no family, none she was close to. Her life was her friends.

“On second thought, if you can find that bottle of Scotch, I’ll have a taste. A small one.” What the hell—he wasn’t a cop, and this visit wasn’t official. Pagano would have a hemorrhage if found out about it. That didn’t matter now. It was something he had to do; as soon as he’d seen her name on that visitation list he knew he had to confront her directly.

“I found the Scotch,” she called out. “Why don’t you come in here and pour the amount you want.”

She handed him the bottle—Cutty Sark—and a glass. He poured a conservative two fingers. “Do you want ice?” she asked.

“One, thanks.”

She opened the freezer, took out a single ice cube between thumb and forefinger, and daintily dropped it into his glass. Then she led him back into the living room. He sat down on the couch again, in the same indentation he’d made earlier. She sat across from him in an easy chair that was covered in the same white canvas material. Slipping her feet out of her thongs, she curled her legs under her. He noticed she was wearing blue toenail polish—an offbeat touch that, for reasons he didn’t understand, pleased him. Except that who she was—her aura, her vibe—pleased him.

“Cheers.” She lifted her glass in salute, took a sip. He nodded and raised his own, but didn’t drink. First he’d ask her why; then he’d drink.

He set his glass down on the coffee table in front of him. She leaned forward and moved it onto a coaster. Then she leaned back in her chair again, staring at him over the rim of her glass.

“Why did you visit Dwayne Thompson in the jail?” She stared at him, her mouth open in a silent O.

“Unless this is all a setup.”

She shook her head.

“Dwayne Thompson is the state’s case against my client. Without him, they have nothing. Your testimony, about seeing Marvin White outside the club that night, is incidental. They think it can help them, buttress their client. I don’t know, you can look at it both ways, helpful or hurtful, I plan to try and use it against them, but who knows? That’s not the point. Why were two witnesses brought together, Miss Waleska? What did Alex Pagano tell you the reason was for bringing you and Dwayne together? He’s not supposed to do that; it could screw him up, pardon my French. Unless,” he said, leaning forward, elbows on knees, “he wanted to make sure your stories checked out, that you don’t contradict each other.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head.

“Or is it all a plant? Your testimony, Dwayne’s. A story made up in the back room of the DA’s office and given to two people who have their own reasons to see my client put away. You, because your friend was murdered and you want someone to pay for it; Dwayne, because he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison unless he gives them something so juicy, so important, that letting him out is the lesser of two evils.”

She looked up at him. “There is no evil greater than Dwayne Thompson. I know that better than anyone.” She nodded at his glass. “I think you’d better have that drink. There’s more where that came from. Which you may want, after you hear what I’m going to tell you.”

She went back into the kitchen, came back with her wine bottle and his of Scotch, and set them on the coffee table, side by side. She didn’t bother putting coasters under them. “This will take a while.”

“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

She squirmed in her chair, trying to get comfortable. Unable to do so, she sat back, collapsing into herself. She took a deep, preparatory breath.

“I wasn’t always a butcher in a slaughterhouse,” she began. “I was a professional, a college graduate. I was a nurse, a good one.” She paused momentarily. “I was the first member of my family to graduate from college,” she said with pride in her voice. “I was looking forward to marriage, children, the life I’d always dreamed of.”

In her previous career as a nurse, many years before, when she had started working in the hospital, especially when she had passed her exams and become an operating-room nurse, and then the head of her section, a prestigious, high-paying job, she had thought she would marry a doctor, one of the surgeons she worked with. Other nurses had. It was a reasonable expectation.

It hadn’t happened. She wasn’t what they wanted, those stars of the operating theater. She was attractive—she had a full, voluptuous figure and a pretty (if unrefined, she had admitted to herself long ago) face; she was smart, funny, nice. What man—a doctor particularly, doctors always went for lookers—wouldn’t be interested?

The answer, as it turned out, was that few were. Not seriously, as in getting married, having their babies. Oh, they would sleep with her; happily, eagerly, with great hunger and desire. She had done that for years before she wised up and realized that sleeping with men you worked with was a bad idea, a dead end. You lost stature, became a topic for seedy gossip.

But that was bullshit, a lame excuse. There was a major reason none of these doctors had ever gotten serious about her. She had a past—a man in her life, a sick, violent bastard who thought he owned her. He had been part of her life forever, and she had never been able to shake him. An upwardly mobile doctor doesn’t bring a woman with that kind of man in her background home to mother, even if she is smart, pretty, and charming, and has excellent manners and a master’s in clinical/surgical nursing.

Many years earlier she’d had her one big romance. A resident, a surgeon, of course, a nice man, quiet, very shy, even a little dull—an atypical surgeon—but sweet, and he cared for her like she’d hung the moon.

Despite all her efforts to keep that part of her life a secret, the man from her past found out about her relationship with the sweet doctor. He stalked them for weeks, without them ever knowing it. Then he made his move. Out of sheer evil and possessive sickness he waited outside her apartment building one evening while her shy doctor lover kissed her good night and came outside, heading for his car. She lived in a decent, quiet neighborhood; her lover had no reason to expect trouble.

The first blows hit the doctor like a pallet of bricks falling off a roof. The sick bastard had jumped him—blindsiding him—and for ten minutes solid he proceeded to beat the poor man, who’d never raised a hand in anger, within an inch of his life.

“You’re fucking Violet? I’ll fuck you up, shithead, I’ll fuck you up so you’ll never fuck anyone again.” Fists raining down, long after her lover had collapsed into unconsciousness in a flood-pool of his own blood.

The damage had been extensive. Recovery was slow—it took months. The doctor’s hands had been broken so badly, especially his thumbs (the son of a bitch knew exactly where to cause the greatest damage), that he couldn’t use them in his work, and had to quit practicing surgery. He moved all the way across the country, as far away from her as possible, and became a teacher of doctors. And from that same night, when she’d gone rushing into his intensive-care room, out of her mind with fear and grief, and had been told in a firm voice by the nurse on duty that he’d given instructions that she was not to see him, she had never laid eyes on or heard from him again.

Not once.

More than a decade later she still thought about him sometimes; mostly when she was lonely, but occasionally out of the blue, for no conscious reason.

She would have made him a great wife.

That was life.

The word about her spread like an out-of-control brushfire. For months afterward, people passing her in the hospital’s corridors would look at her the way you look at a train wreck. No one blamed her—not to her face, anyway—and her lover’s assailant went to prison. But that was it for the possibility of snagging one of the hospital’s doctors for a husband.

She never saw the attacker again, except to testify against him at his trial. The few letters he sent her from prison, early into his sentence, she threw unopened into the trash, and she obtained a permanent restraining order against him.

After a while he figured it out and stopped writing. She hadn’t heard from him in years. If she never heard from him for the rest of her life, she’d be happy.

But she’d had to give up nursing. The burden was too much to carry. All those years of studying at night, the giving up of having fun to stay in and hit the books, because she was going to rise above her station—gone.

She went to trade school and learned how to be a butcher. The work was bone-tiringly hard in the huge slaughterhouse where she’d been employed the last seven years, but it paid well. It was a union job, she made over twenty dollars an hour, plus good health benefits and a pension plan. A single woman needed to plan for her medical and retirement.

Now and again she dated men she met at parties, at church, social functions. Nothing serious came of any of these encounters; the men weren’t up to the standards she’d worked so hard to set.

She never dated men from work. The image of the smell from the floor, on them and her both, had no romance to it. And besides, she had a college degree.

Wyatt poured himself some more Scotch. A generous amount this time. He freshened up Violet’s drink, too.

“The man who attacked your doctor … friend—that was Dwayne Thompson.”

She nodded her head.

“Dwayne Thompson had been your lover, before you and the doctor met up,” Wyatt continued. “Dwayne couldn’t stand the thought of losing you to another man. So he made sure he didn’t.” He felt sick to his stomach as he thought of the ramifications of such a vile action; even worse was knowing that she had been romantically involved, regardless of the circumstances, with Thompson.

She looked up at him. “Not my lover,” she said. She drank down her glass, poured herself another, drank it. Then she started crying: loud, gut-wrenching sobs.

If I’m being set up, he thought, it’s a masterpiece. Setting his drink down, he went around the table and put a consoling hand on her shoulder.

She rose up and fell against him, wrapping her arms tight against him, pressing her body against his, head to toe. She was shaking, her fingers digging into his back, holding on as hard as she could. He could feel her tears on his neck.

He shouldn’t be holding her. He shouldn’t be here at all. He could get thrown off the case, disbarred, his career ruined, his marriage as well.

He held her tight to him, his hand on the back of her head, caressing the still-damp hair.

They stood there like that for minutes, until she stopped shaking. Then she looked up at him, her eyes raw.

“Not my lover,” she said again. She buried her head in his chest. “My brother.”