Natural Suspect (2001) (5 page)

And Devin didn't make any difference, not to anybody. She wanted acceptance here so badly she could taste it. She wanted all these folks to like her. If she could just get their mother off. . .

Well, she reminded herself, it shouldn't be all that hard. After all, what she'd said today in her opening statement wasn't all false. There was almost no physical evidence tying Julia to the crime--certainly the prosecution (Trent Ballard!) couldn't convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that there was. Plus, Devin hadn't even mentioned her client's alibi for November second. She wanted to give Trent Ballard a long enough rope to hang himself on the exact time of Arthur Hightowers death--then, if she had to, Devin would trot out the alibi.

By the front door, she stood in a foyer as large as her apartment. High over her head, a huge chandelier glowed with a bright elegance. A majestic staircase curled around behind her, leading to the upper floor. Here on ground level, she pushed the door nearest her and it opened into a dark-paneled library--floor-to-ceiling books with one of those great, old-fashioned sliding ladders to get to the top shelf, a large working desk, a four-foot globe, a fireplace. It was the perfect room, Devin decided. But she dared not stay in it for long.

Across the way, off the opposite side of the foyer, the hardwood floors in the living room made her steps echo deliciously. There seemed to be three or four separate sitting areas, a grand piano, more books in built-in bookshelves . . .

A noise.

She froze, completely still, and listened.

Upstairs.

Male and female voices. Whoever it was, it sounded as if they were having a serious fight. She imagined she could hear punches being thrown, garbled human sounds.

She had to move. If someone were getting hurt, she couldn't let it go on. Out in the foyer, she waited again, heard more commotion, and began climbing the stairs as fast as she could, two at a time.

When she reached the upper landing, she heard a heavy slamming sound coming from one of the rooms off the long hallway. "Hey!" she yelled, poking into the first room. "What's going on?" She was back out in the hallway, going to the next room.

The noises had stopped.

"Stay back!" A woman's voice, ringing with authority. "Stay where you are. Who's out there?"

"It's me. Devin McGee." Her voice seemed to have swallowed her as--too late!--she realized what she had interrupted.

An instant later, the truth was borne out. Marilyn Hightower, disheveled but regally gorgeous in a pale blue silken peignoir appeared. "What the hell are you doing here?" she asked.

"I, uh, I drove your mother ..."

"I see. And now she's done her passing out routine and you're snooping, aren't you?"

"No,
I ...
I heard noises. I thought somebody might be getting hurt."

Marilyn's expression indicated that on the evolutionary scale she considered Devin about equal to, and certainly no higher than, a cockroach. "Well, dear," she said bitingly, "it may be outside the realm of your experience, but sometimes when people make love they also make, well, noise."

Back at the door, a short, gray-haired man appeared in the hallway. Over his black socks, he sported a potbelly and nothing else. He waved sheepishly to Devin, who raised a hand awkwardly, returning the greeting. Marilyn turned, saw the man, looked back at Devin, and smiled icily. "That phenomenal male specimen is Georges Franco, our gardener. Georges, this is Mummy's lawyer, Devin McGee. Now be a dear and go back into the bedroom, would you?"

Marilyn waited until he'd disappeared, then gave her full attention to Devin. "I'm going way out on a limb here and guessing that you're not inclined to join us. No? Well, then, drive carefully and be sure to close the door on your way out."

And
I
thought
I was depressed before, Devin mused. Here it is, nine-thirty, I'm stuck in traffic with twenty more miles to drive, they haven't plowed the road yet, I've got to go to the bathroom, and I need to be up by six in the morning to prep for the trial. How could things get any worse?

At that moment, her right front tire hit a brick that had fallen off a truck directly in front of her. The tire blew with a sound like a gunshot and Devin's old trusty Toyota began a slow pirouette that ended in a shallow ditch just off the Long Island Expressway. The car turned a full hundred and eighty degrees around before coming to a stop.

Devin cried. The snow fell and the wind howled and she waited and waited, watching the miles of headlights creep past her, not one of her famously sympathetic New York neighbors giving even a moment's thought to the disabled wreck on the side of the road.

All of them, she was sure, hated her. And she didn't blame them.

"Come on, Buck
, come on."

Trent Ballard was trudging in the wind and snow with his boss, District Attorney Aaron McCandliss. Trent had his pet, a twenty-pound giant rabbit named Buck, on a leash, and the two humans waited impatiently for the animal to "do its business."

"Come on, Buck," Trent repeated. "There's a good boy."

McCandliss spoke through gritted, chattering teeth. "I cannot
believe
this. I cannot believe it."

Trent looked over at him. "Normally, he's much better--"

"Damn it, Ballard. Why don't you keep your rabbit in a cage like everybody else?"

"Well, Aaron, in the first place I don't think everybody else has a rabbit." Trent pulled Buck along to a new space a few hops away. "That's why I got Buck. I didn't want to be like everyone else. Besides, it took me months to get him house-trained, and now if I let him go in the house, even in his cage, he'd get confused and revert to bad habits."

"I'm not sure that
confused
is a word that applies to rabbits, Ballard."

"Oh, they're a lot smarter than people give them credit for, sir. Sometimes I think Buck has thoughts, I swear."

"Don't go there, Ballard."

"It's true. And I've taught him some great tricks."

A fresh gust of wind hit them. McCandliss hunched down into his greatcoat. He didn't want to give Ballard any opportunity to describe
Bucks fascinating tricks. "I don't care if you've taught him to fly. I care that now were out in a blizzard in the middle of the night, two grow
n m
en, walking a
rabbit
, for God's sake. If anyone from a newspaper sees
us . . .

"It won't happen, sir. Reporters don't like to go out on nights like this."

"Who does? Why are we--oh, never mind."

Trent Ballard shrugged. "Anyway, Buck's almost--ah, there you go. Good boy."

"Is that it? We came out here for that?"

"Well, he is only a rabbit, sir. And usually we do make a couple of stops."

"How about if we don't tonight, okay? How about instead if we go back inside and discuss what seems to be the weakening case against Julia Hightower."

"It's not weakening, sir."

McCandliss shook his head. "Well, it sure as perdition isn't getting any stronger, Ballard. This Devin McGee woman gave a powerful opening statement. And you know we've got some evidence problems she didn't even mention, although she knows about them. I think she's setting a trap, and frankly, I'm worried that you might step into it."

Trent frowned at the criticism, then tugged gently on the specially made leash that he'd attached to Buck's front legs and around his neck. But the rabbit obstinately huddled down into the snow, unmoving.

For an instant, McCandliss considered that Ballard might have been correct--maybe the rabbit did have some intelligence. Certainly, Buck was now regarding his master with an almost human malevolence--and more intelligence than he ever expected to see in a rodent.

"Okay, you bad boy, no treats for you tonight." Trent gave up pulling on the leash and turned back to McCandliss. "Don't you worry about Devin McGee, sir. That situation is completely under control. Totally."

He gave another smallish tug on the leash, and must have been standing on a patch of ice over snow, because the movement caused him to slip, and suddenly he was on the ground, moaning. Sometime during his fall, he let go of the leash, and Buck--an immovable statue up unti
l t
hen--jumped up and covered twenty feet of snow-covered sidewalk in three leaps.

Through his pain, Trent called out, "Buck! Here, boy. Come on back."

"Ballard!" McCandliss employed his sternest tone. The rabbit could wait, damn it. "Why shouldn't I worry about Devin McGee?"

Trent had pulled himself to his feet and was wiping snow from his coat, all the while using a cajoling voice, his attention focused upon his pet. "Just stay there, Buck. Don't move. Easy, boy." At last he remembered his boss. "Devin McGee? Because I can handle her, sir. Personally." A conspiratorial wink. "A little charm, a little of the old--you know. Piece of cake. I own Devin McGee."

The rabbit hopped again, trailing his leash. "Buck!"

District Attorney Aaron McCandliss watched Trent Ballard--the man he'd chosen for the year's most high-profile murder case--as he attempted to stalk and capture his huge, house-trained rabbit in a snowstorm on a busy Manhattan street. Trent Ballard was confident that he could handle Devin McGee, was he? He owned her?

McCandliss watched Buck jump a few more feet, the super-intelligent
bunny rabbit
managing to keep the leash just out of Ballard's grasp.

"Here, Bucky, come on. Be a good boy now. Come to daddy."

The D
. A
. suddenly wished he'd brought his antacids. His ulcer was acting up. He couldn't bear to watch any longer. But the farce held his attention for another few seconds, and in those seconds, his ace trial attorney Trent Ballard slipped and fell a second time and the old Buckster, the Buckaroo, the Buckwheat Bunny, put another five yards between himself and his master.

"Pathetic," McCandliss muttered under his breath. He turned on his heel and didn't look back.

Patrick Roswell knew
that he wasn't going to become a famous reporter if he let opportunities like this one get away.

Love-struck, crossword-challenged Henry from Murray's Bar & Grill might be an impeccable source for great cheeseburgers, but as
a s
ource for hard news, he was as yet unproved. Still, if Patrick could verify Henrys information about Arthur Hightower Sr.'s condition on November 4--that he'd been alive, and at the Sweeney Hotel--it would break the case wide open. And even more important, it would prove to Mr. Whitechapel that his young advertising salesman had what it took to be an investigative reporter.

But first, he had to endure a long, slow afternoon calling on his accounts--Hargrove Printing, DeBrook's Flowers, Dodge's Storm Doors, Cornelius Cups and Trophies, Cantors Custom Accessories, whatever they were. And all the while the wind was picking up and the clouds piled on one another.

He made his last call on Karpfinger's Quality Caskets at seven-fifteen and, since he'd neglected to bring his heavy overcoat to town with him that morning, he decided that he had better go back to his apartment in Little Italy and get on some winter clothes if he didn't want to freeze to death. Somehow, with Hightower Sr. in the news and on his mind, this fate didn't seem as far-fetched as it normally might.

But before he went investigating, he had to get some food inside him. He hadn't eaten since lunch at Murray's, so he stopped in at the pizza place a block from home and ordered a ground beef and cheese calzone. "And, hey, Luigi, you want to throw in some tomatoes and lettuce and onion and maybe a pickle and some ketchup?"

"On a sesame seed bun yet?" Luigi spun his dough in the air, slapped it down on the marble counter, and barked his familiar laugh. "You want, Patrick, I could just make you up a cheeseburger?"

Patrick shook his head. "No, thanks, Luigi. You go to an Italian place, you don't order American. You know what I'm saying? Besides, I had a cheeseburger for lunch. I'm trying to get out of the routine."

"Yeah, sure," Luigi deadpanned. "Well, this ought to do it. You're breakin' new ground here."

Finally, well fed and bundled against the storm, Patrick saw his cab arrive at the entrance to the Sweeney a little after nine o'clock. The hotel, halfway uptown on the West Side, had been recently refurbished, and now seemed to be a relatively friendly place with almost a neighborhood atmosphere. The cab wouldn't turn up the short street to th
e e
ntrance because it hadn't been plowed, so Patrick walked to where he could see a small bar off the lobby. He stopped for a moment, outside in the swirling snow, taking the measure of the patrons. He knew the reputation of the place and guessed that there were some, maybe many, arrangements beyond those that seemed obvious.

That man in the window holding hands over the tiny table with the much younger woman. The two guys at the bar, locked in a muted conversation, apparently unaware of the television or, indeed, anything else besides each other. The matron and, perhaps, her son.

When it was built back in the twenties, the Sweeney had been a female-only dormitory. Midwestern girls with little or no connections would get to the big city and need an inexpensive and safe place from which to begin their forays into the Big Apple. Naturally, then, the Sweeney had been a mecca for hordes of young men. As times changed and the hotel's fortunes and clientele waxed and waned, it never lost its cachet as a place of secret assignation. Now, in its current incarnation, charming and all spruced up, it attracted clandestine couples from throughout the five boroughs and--if Henry's sighting of Arthur Hightower proved accurate--even millionaires from Long Island.