Moment of Truth (20 page)

Hamburg nodded again. “True, but there’s a fair amount of swelling in the toe. I’d say it’s a recent injury.”

“How recent?” Davis asked, hugging his pad to a pinstriped suit.

“Yesterday or the day before.”

“You don’t put shoes like that on a hurt toe,” Brinkley said, but Davis snorted.

“You don’t know that. You can’t assume that. She seems like a vain woman to me.”

“How you get that from a body?” Brinkley asked, defensively. It seemed disrespectful.

“From the clothes. They’re expensive. And she’s thin, she stays in shape.”

Brinkley paused. Davis was smart but he was still an asshole. “Look, it’s a lot more likely that she kicked something hard enough to break her toe and her shoe. What do you say, Aaron?”

“Not my bailiwick, but it seems likely. You think she was kicking whoever was attacking her?”

“No.” Brinkley was puzzled. “A defensive wound, to the foot? How often you see that?”

“From time to time,” Hamburg answered thoughtfully. “In women, you see it. They do it out of desperation.”

“Sure,” Kovich agreed. “We’ve seen it in the rape cases. Remember Ottavio, Mick?”

Brinkley remembered. “But this isn’t a rape case. In a rape case, the victim’s on the ground and she kicks up. Tries to catch the guy in the groin or whatever. Here the lady is standing up, getting stabbed. If she kicks to defend herself, she destabilizes herself.” He demonstrated and almost toppled over. “See?”

“She could have kicked up, being stabbed on the ground,” Kovich offered, but Hamburg looked dubious.

“I can’t say no, but I can’t say yes. With this wound pattern, I can’t make an exact determination about which is the fatal wound. But remember, she had been drinking heavily. Her blood alcohol was high, so any fighting she did wasn’t that vigorous. If she was kicking from the ground, she didn’t hit much. Not enough to break a toe.”

Kovich said, “Unless she kicked Newlin before he started stabbing.”

“If it’s Newlin,” Brinkley corrected, then caught Kovich’s annoyance. Davis, standing beside them both, said nothing and looked at the corpse. “Newlin didn’t say anything to us about her kicking him.”

“We didn’t ask him, Mick.”

“But it doesn’t jive with his story. The way Newlin tells it, all she did was yell. She provoked him verbally and he got aggressive. Yelled back. Threw the glass at her.”

“The toe’s not that big a deal,” Kovich shot back. “He overpowered her and she struggled. Anytime there’s a struggle, things get broke.”

“I’m with Stan on this,” Davis said, speaking finally. His tone suggested a judge’s ruling at the end of a case. “The broken toe is not significant. She was drunk, she flailed out at Newlin, it’s some sort of defensive wound.”

Brinkley eyed Davis. “You’re acting like you got your mind made up.”

“I do.” Davis nodded, almost cheerfully. “I saw the tape, over and over, and I know how this went down.”

“You know?” Brinkley frowned. “From a video?”

Hamburg waved them all into silence. “Separate, you two,” he said, flicking on the overhead microphone.

After the autopsy, which ended routinely, Brinkley caught up with Davis outside the building. A squat edifice of tan brick with only a few slitted windows, the Joseph W. Spelman Medical Examiner’s Building was situated on a busy corner, bordered by the Schuylkill Expressway and a complex of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, Children’s Hospital, and the Veteran’s Hospitals. Wind swirled in unpredictable currents around the buildings and the traffic made a constant whooshing. “Davis,” Brinkley shouted, knowing the D.A. was avoiding him. “Got a minute?”

“For you, sure.” Davis turned, pad in hand, though he didn’t break stride as he hurried across the parking lot to his car, a new white pool Ford. “What can I do for you, champ?”

“You said you saw the tape of the confession.” Brinkley buttoned his jacket quickly in the cold air. Cars were parked willy-nilly in the lot, which was being repainted, and Davis was parked in a space with a sign that read
PARKING FOR BEREAVED FAMILIES ONLY
. “Did you see what I meant about—”

“Yeah, matter of fact I did. I think Newlin’s lying, too. But I think he’s the doer.”

Brinkley didn’t get it. “What do you think he’s lying about?”

“The story he didn’t plan it is bullshit. He’s gonna plead out.” Davis’s determined chin cut the chill air. “Or so he thinks.”

“Big mistake, Davis. I’m not sure he’s the doer.”

“You got anything to back that up?”

“Not yet. I’m just starting—”

“Lemme know you find anything, okay, my man? Keep me up to speed. I gotta roll.” Davis opened the door of his car, but Brinkley held the door so it couldn’t be closed.

“Listen, we talked to the daughter this morning, and I’m working on the theory that the father didn’t do it. That he was protecting her, or somebody else.”

“There’s nothing to support that. Not a thing.”

“I’ll find it.”

“You do that.” Davis gave him a dismissive wave, closed the Ford’s door, and disappeared inside. The car’s engine started quickly, and Davis took off, leaving Brinkley standing there.

When he turned back, he spotted Kovich waiting at the front of the coroner’s building, a distant silhouette.

Mary glanced around the cavernous warehouse, as large a space as she had ever been in, especially in the city. It was near the Delaware River, bordering New Jersey. In Philadelphia you had to go to Camden to get any room. Afternoon sunlight streamed through the floor-high windows, their security cages casting a diamond-mesh pattern on the rough concrete floor. In Camden even empty space needed protection. You couldn’t win on the East Coast, in general.

Mary stood there with her briefcase and said “yo” to hear whether it echoed, but it didn’t. The sound vanished into four tall stories of exposed brick. It was the shell of a furniture warehouse, completely empty except for the far corner, in which a little world had been created. She walked over, marveling as she approached. There were three distinct rooms of drywall, except that it looked as if the contractor had forgotten their ceilings and fourth walls. The first room on the left was an open dressing room, and young girls were changing clothes in front of everyone. Mary knew instantly that none of them was Catholic.

The room next to the dressing room was a makeup and hair salon, with two steel folding tables piled with an array of black makeup brushes and a layered box full of compacts and foundation. Models in lacy bras and slips sat on folding chairs, orange crates, and boxes while stylish men and women painted their eyes, contoured their cheeks, and styled their hair. One model was having a French twist combed out, and her head jerked back with each stroke. Mary winced. She was a lawyer, but she couldn’t take that kind of pain.

Beside the makeup room was a final fitting room, with models going from one station to the next like a fashion assembly line, though Mary couldn’t tell the order from all the milling around. In the corner stood a portable steam presser and movable racks of clothes, a quick glance revealing they were Young & Hip. From what Mary could tell, the Young & Hip biz was really thriving.

The operative word being Young. Mary got close enough to see the models and they looked like kids playing dress-up. They were preteens, starting at about age ten, up to fifteen or so. There wasn’t a full breast in the crowd, though the kids appeared to be modeling slips that were supposed to be dresses. One model, a sprout of a blond with large blue eyes, looked barely twelve. She sat in a cloth-back director’s chair while a man in black glued false lashes to her eyelids. Her feet, in strappy black sandals, didn’t touch the ground and she clutched a Totally Hair Barbie, with coincidentally matching sandals. There was no mother in sight.

Suddenly shouting came from the largest room, which was merely a huge sheet of clean white paper hanging from a story-high steel brace. Background for the photographs, it curved onto the concrete floor like a paper carpet. The kids kept tripping on the paper’s edge in their high heels, and a man kept yelling at them “not to rip the seamless.” One of the mothers apologized for her daughter and grabbed her off the paper. Mary didn’t get it. If anybody had spoken to her like that, her mother would have threatened to break his face. But Mary wasn’t here to stop child labor. She had a client to defend.

She approached the closest man in black, a wavy brown ponytail snaking to his waist. He had his back to her and was bent over a large steel trunk of photographic equipment. Lenses, camera bodies, and flash units nestled in gray sponge cushioning, and Mary realized instantly that the cameras were treated better than the kids. “Excuse me,” she said, but the ponytailed man didn’t turn around. “I’m looking for the photographer, Caleb Scott.”

“I’m his assistant, one of the million. He’s over there but don’t bother him. He’s on the warpath for a change.” The assistant glanced over his shoulder, through the smallest glasses Mary had ever seen. “I can tell you right now what he’s going to say, honey. Save you the time.”

“Go ahead,” Mary said, surprised.

“You gotta lose thirty pounds, maybe more. You’re too old for what he does. You need a nose job and you gotta do something with your hair. The color sucks and that cut is so last year.” He turned back to the trunk, and Mary considered giving the finger to his ponytail.

“I’m a lawyer, not a model.”

“Then you’re perfect,” he said, and didn’t look back.

Caleb Scott simmered on the paper carpet, resting his Hasselblad on his slim hip like a gun. He was tall, reed-thin, and wore a black turtleneck, stone-washed jeans, and soft-soled Mephisto shoes. His spray of gray hair and a faux English accent served to distinguish him, in addition to his foul mood. Caleb Scott was angry about a yellow light on a tall steel stem, which kept firing at the wrong time. From the terrified attitude of the assistants struggling to fix the thing, Mary guessed that for Scott, anger was the status quo. But he didn’t express his anger in a way familiar to Mary—shouts, tears, or the decade-long vendetta—he just got wound tighter and tighter.

“Mr. Scott, I have a few questions, but it won’t take long,” Mary said, hovering next to him.

“Take all day. I evidently have it.”

“I represent Jack Newlin and am investigating the murder charge against him. You may have read about it in the paper. I need to know about Paige and her mother, Honor.”

“I don’t have time to read the newspaper. I have to get to work, where I stand and wait.” Scott scowled at an assistant, hurrying by with a new lightbulb. The kids in slips held their position under the lights, and their mothers stood off to the side, watching them sweat.

“You didn’t hear that Honor Newlin was killed?”

“I didn’t say that. Of course I heard it, from one of my assistants. Everybody knows about it. If we waited for the newspaper to get news, we’d wither and die. Like me, right now.” His thin lips pursed in martyrdom, and Mary figured he, at least, was Catholic.

“You photographed the Bonner shoot, didn’t you?”

“I do all of Bonner’s work, in town.”

“I understand that Honor and Paige had a fight at the shoot, in the store dressing room. Did you know that?”

“Of course! Do you think that anything is a secret in this business?” Scott gestured toward his assistants, who swarmed around the offending light. It still wouldn’t fire when they pressed a black button on top of what looked like a car battery. “We’re the biggest group of gossips ever. You could dish all day if you had nothing better to do, but most people have better things to do. I, on the other hand, have to stand around and talk to lawyers. When I’m not baby-sitting.”

“So you knew there was a fight in the dressing room?”

“Honey,” Scott said, turning to Mary for the first time, “they fought wherever they went. That mother was the biggest bitch, and that kid was the biggest princess. When I heard the mother was killed, I thought, ‘you go, girl.’”

Mary couldn’t hide her shock. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I thought the kid killed her.”

“Because of the fight, is that why? What was the fight even about?”

“Not because of the fight, no way. The fight was about what they all fight about.” This time Scott gestured at the mothers, sipping coffee near the paper carpet. Two were on cell phones, and Mary could hear them changing their kids’ bookings now that the light had broken, delaying the shoot. “Look at them. Can you explain this? Mothers who would put their children through this? I can’t.”