Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests (34 page)

I walk three blocks to Erika’s street. Number 5206 is set back behind a low coral rock wall. A porch light is on. Crickets
are chirping, and something rustles through the bushes. A small gray lizard darts across the sidewalk.

Her Mercedes is parked under the portico to my right. A light shines through a window at the other end of the house. I should
drop the envelope on her porch and go, but I wonder whether she’s working late or entertaining someone. Erika is divorced,
but she’s over fifty, and the idea of her in bed naked with a lover, pounding the headboard against the wall—I stifle a laugh
and move silently forward across the yard. Her windows are closed against the summer heat. The curtains are drawn. I can’t
see past them.

The light goes out at the same moment I hear a crash.

Then nothing. No sound at all. What to do? Maybe she’s having a heart attack, a stroke. I could save her. Not that she’d be
grateful. Even so, I can’t just leave her, can I?

Looking for a way in, I run around the house. I leap over a fallen palm frond and shove my way through a hedge. In the backyard,
the light from the swimming pool paints the trees pale turquoise. I stop at the edge of the terrace. The sliding door is open.
I can make out the kitchen, a dim light from a stainless-steel range hood, a hallway beyond.

An instant later a black silhouette appears in the doorway. He looks around and moves silently across the terrace toward the
portico. He dodges around an umbrella table, rounds the corner, and disappears.

I shrink farther into the shadows, nearly trip when I collide with a tree. My breath claws at my throat. I can’t go into her
house. There aren’t any pay phones here. I feel sick. The envelope has fallen to the terrace. I pick it up and run.

When I reach the law school parking lot, I notice that the Porsche is gone.

____

A
T THE FIRM
the next day, people gather in the break room, in the corridors, the library, talking about the murder of Erika Mulloy. She
was strangled, no signs of a break-in. Detectives from the Miami Beach police have set up shop in two of the conference rooms.
The phone lines buzz with inquiries from clients. Denise is crying. Mike and the other clerks jam into our office and discuss
what will happen now. They are more interested in their jobs than in Erika Mulloy’s demise. None of them is sorry she’s gone,
which I find appalling. Show some sympathy, or at least pretend to, so other people in the office don’t see you for the assholes
you are.

My thoughts keep going down the hall to Jack Porter’s office. My legs twitch. I have to get up. I leave the Pits and walk
around the corner, past his open door, glancing quickly inside. I turn and come back the other way. He is writing notes in
a file, working as if nothing had happened. He wears a white shirt, and the sun through the window makes a blaze of light.
It shines on his hair and dances on his gold pen. I am so tense my vision blurs. I lean against the wall outside his office.

My mind is a spinning compass needle. Jack Porter is guilty. No, he isn’t. I have no evidence. I didn’t see him. But I saw
his car. Can you prove you saw his car? If I point them toward Jack Porter, why should they believe me? Jack will hire Frank
Delgado, and he’ll get away with it, just like Frank’s other clients get away with it. Jack Porter will come for me next.

“Warren? Is that you out there?”

My mouth is dry. I can’t speak. I slide over and look around the doorjamb.

Jack Porter puts down his pen. “What do you want?”

“Nothing. The police are here.”

“And?”

“And nothing. They’re talking to everyone… about Erika Mulloy. What happened to her.”

“Okay. So?”

“Just thought I’d tell you.”

“Fine. You told me.” He keeps staring at me, through me. He
knows
. He knows that I saw him. He will come after me if I tell. We are
friends, goddamn it,
and I am afraid he will kill me. I will be his third victim. The law firm has hired a psycho, and there’s no one I can tell.

“Warren? Shut the door, will you?”

____

T
HE POLICE WORK
in three teams on the main floor. Lunch is ordered in, and only those with previous appointments are permitted to leave.
They get to the clerks in the afternoon, and they call for me at 3:55 p.m.

A detective introduces himself as Sergeant Dennis Ryan and gives me his card, which has a gold shield on it. They ask the
usual questions. I answer them. Name, address. “I live with my mother. Actually, it’s her apartment. She’s ill and I came
down from Ohio to take care of her. I was in law school at the time. Mr. Penniman hired me to work here.”

“And you knew Ms. Mulloy?”

“Of course. Everyone did.”

“You were doing some work for her?”

“That’s correct.”

“We understand that Ms. Mulloy wasn’t happy with your work, and she got on your case about it.”

“Who told you that?”

“Is it true?”

“No. Not at all. She was demanding with everyone. I wasn’t special.”

“Are you nervous, Mr. Kemble? You’re sweating.”

“It’s warm in here.”

They ask me where I was last night.

“Home. I was home.”

“Security guard says you were here until two a.m.”

“Yes, working, then I went home. My mother can vouch for me.”

“We might need to talk to her.”

“Sure. No problem.”

Ryan gestures toward my hands, which are loosely clasped on the table. “How’d you get the injury there, Mr. Kemble?”

I stare at my right hand. There is a red scrape across the knuckles. I hadn’t noticed until now, but I remember. Last night
at Erika Mulloy’s house, moving back when I saw Porter come out, bumping into the tree—

The detectives are waiting. There is no choice. I have to tell them everything.

When I finish, they look at each other. Ryan’s partner picks up a list, scans it. “Porter. I don’t see that name.”

“He’s new. Jack Porter.”

“Not here.”

“Yes, he is. He’s on Fourteen. He was just hired. He worked for Erika Mulloy.”

“You want to show us?”

“He’s going to deny everything. He’s very convincing. If you don’t arrest him, he’ll come after me.”

“Don’t worry about that. Just show us where he is.”

They follow me downstairs, past the library, around a turn past the Pits, then into another corridor, a row of closed doors.
My legs are weak, and my lungs feel cold. “I saw his car. I’m sorry, I didn’t write down the license tag. But it was him.
What if he comes after me? Can you offer protection?”

“Which office is his, Mr. Kemble?”

I stop and point at Jack Porter’s door. They knock. Porter doesn’t say to come in. Ryan turns the knob. No one is inside.
There’s no computer on the desk, no phone, nothing.

I stare. “No, this isn’t right. Where did he go?”

“Doesn’t look like anybody was ever here.”

“He’s here. He has to be here.” I push past them into the hall and open one door after another, a long row of offices. They
are all empty. I am screaming, “Porter! Jack Porter! Where are you?”

____

T
HE TWO DETECTIVES
and a uniformed officer escort me home, and Mrs. Perlstein stares as our parade passes by. I tell her everything is fine.
Detective Ryan orders me to open the door. Technically he needs a warrant to enter, but I unlock it. I ask them to wait in
the living room until I speak to my mother about this, but Ryan goes to her bedroom door and knocks. “Mrs. Kemble? It’s the
police. We need to talk to you, ma’am.”

He rudely goes inside. A couple of seconds later I hear him cursing. He comes out with a handkerchief over his nose and mouth.
He looks at me strangely as he speaks to his partner. “She’s dead. She’s
been
dead. Nothing left but a husk. Call it in. Get forensics over here.”

“Ma!” I rush toward her door. “Let me in! I want to see her!”

“Sit down and shut up.” They shove me onto the sofa. The uniformed cop speaks into the radio on his shoulder.

Ryan pulls a chair over. “What happened here, Warren?”

“I don’t know. I don’t understand this. She was fine this morning.” I fold my arms across my body and rock back and forth,
trying to figure it out, but I’m stuck in a nightmare. “I would like to call my sister.”

“In a minute, soon as you tell me what you did last night.”

I remember what Frank Delgado said: Don’t open your mouth to the police. Tears burn their way down my cheeks, drip off my
chin.

“Talk to me, Warren.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t. My mother just passed away. I can’t talk to you now. I can’t talk to you at all. I’m sorry, I would like
to, I would, but on advice of counsel, I can’t. I’m sorry.”

BY TWIST PHELAN

L
auren Winslow swept into my office a half hour after my secretary left, twenty minutes before Security came on duty downstairs.
As slim as a fading hope, she wore a long sapphire sheath that was sexy but modest at the same time. She hung her wet umbrella
on the coat tree next to the door and collapsed into her favorite chair, the one closest to my desk.

I turned over the spreadsheet I’d been reviewing and put on a welcoming smile. “You’re looking lovely this evening, Madame
Prosecutor. What’s the occasion?”

“Annual judges’ dinner at the Downtown Club. If I’d known the weather was going to be this bad, I would have rented a tux.”
She brushed off the raindrops that spangled her hem, revealing a pair of satin slingbacks with vicious heels. “They’re roasting
Galletti, so I have to be there. Would you please just kill me now?”

Lauren going to an event for Glamour Boy Galletti?
“An evening of lawyers in white ties telling white lies—you’ll be in your element, Counselor.”

She chuckled, a low sound of genuine mirth. She had deep-set brown eyes, wavy chestnut hair, and a dusting of freckles so
fine I often wondered if I’d imagined them. “I think you’d hold your own, Tommy.”

Lauren headed up the Complex Crimes Unit for the regional office of the Department of Justice. A dozen attorneys under Galletti
were on a crusade against “sophisticated” criminals—corporate fraudsters, identity thieves, computer hackers, pay-for-play
politicos, big-time polluters. “We’re not interested in ordinary crooks,” Lauren had told me when we first met. “We go after
the smart people who’ve gone bad, the ones who screw over widows and orphans.”

I held up an almost-empty tumbler of whiskey. “Care to get a head start on the festivities?”

She declined, as she always did during her impromptu visits. Instead, she stood up and walked to the window, all fine-boned
elegance and height. What began as an afternoon shower had turned into leaden rain. It was an ugly day, exactly as forecast.

I wondered why Lauren was here. Usually she dropped by to regale me with some courtroom triumph—the defeat of a defendant’s
motion to suppress evidence, a unanimous guilty verdict, a plea that sent somebody away for twenty-five years. Her stories
hinted at rules she had to bend, witnesses she had to bully into fatal admissions.

Tonight, though, she was different. There was something about her I hadn’t seen before; she was wired, so electric she nearly
set the air vibrating. I swallowed a mouthful of scotch, felt the warmth spread through my belly, and waited.

“Have I ever told you what brought me to Seattle?” she asked, gazing out at the city. Her skin was pale against the darkness
on the other side of the glass.

“No.” Although Lauren was familiar with my background, she had always been closemouthed about hers. I took another sip of
my drink. In less than a week, I’d be downing mojitos instead of single malt.

She turned, and her dress pulled tight against her thigh. I glimpsed the outline of lace through the thin fabric and sucked
in my breath. Lauren was the only woman I knew who wore a garter belt. Her legs were great, and outside the courtroom she
preferred short skirts to pants. During our first meeting she had leaned across a table to hand a document to Nick, exposing
a thin strip of smooth flesh at the top of her stocking. Nearly a minute had passed before I’d been able to focus on her questions
again.

“It was four years ago,” she said, turning away from the window to reclaim her chair. I could smell her perfume. She always
wore the same scent—subtle but crisp, not too flowery. I imagined her touching the glass stopper to the hollow of her neck,
dabbing it between her breasts…

I felt the heft of my new watch as I lifted the whiskey bottle from the desk drawer and replenished my tumbler. Audemars Piguet—the
only brand Arnold Schwarzenegger wore. With its gold face and thirty-two diamonds rimming the bezel, the thing weighed almost
a pound. The black rubber wristband made it popular among the yachties in Boca.

Lauren noticed my new hardware. “Check out the bling. I could hire another paralegal for what that cost.”

More like two
, I didn’t say. Eighty thousand dollars, no discount for cash.

“What happened to the Rolex?” she asked. “Or was that a Patek Philippe in your briefcase?”

I put the bottle back into the drawer, next to the mini digital recorder. I touched the square red button and left the drawer
open. “I still can’t believe you snooped.”

“Your driver shouldn’t have left the backseat door open. And briefcases come with locks for a reason.”

I was tempted to ask what part of
no unreasonable searches and seizures
she didn’t understand. “Next you’ll be telling me, if I carry cash, I deserve to have my pocket picked. You’re lucky I didn’t
think you were a carjacker.”

Lauren looked at me through her eyelashes. “What if you had, Tommy? Would you have shot me?”

“Jesus, how can you—”

“I never figured you for one of those big-watch guys,” she interrupted. “Bonus from a grateful client?”

“If you’re gonna keep asking questions, Madame Prosecutor, I want my lawyer.” I said it automatically.
Not a big-watch guy
. I turned my wrist so the diamonds wouldn’t show so much.