The Deadline (15 page)

Morgan parked behind the restaurant, where the rain had collected in muddy lagoons and beaded up on the grease-coated back sidewalk beside the dumpsters.  But even the acrid smell of rotting food and coagulating grease in 55-gallon drums outside the kitchen door couldn’t dampen his appetite.

Simeon Fenwick sat alone in an oversized corner booth, a small man made smaller by the space he occupied.  The booth itself was built into the angle of two windows, one looking onto the cafe’s muddy driveway, the other onto the street.

Fenwick was pinched into the back of the enormous red Naugahyde seat.  He was inspecting his spoon and wiping it with his napkin when Morgan approached the big table that almost hid him.

“Mr. Fenwick?” he inquired.

“Yes,” the little man said.  He scrupulously replaced the spoon beside his knife, careful to align their handles exactly.  Only then did he offer a flaccid handshake to his lunch companion.  “You must be Jefferson Morgan.  I’m so pleased to meet you.  Please sit down.”

Morgan slid around the table so he could face the old lawyer, but not so close that it was uncomfortable for either of them.  Fenwick wore a tweed jacket over a white Oxford shirt, with a crisply knotted red bow tie tucked beneath his receding chin.  His round, tortoise-shell spectacles, drooping shoulders and smooth, bald head made him look more like a priggish college professor than an attorney.  His meticulous manner made him seem nervous.

“I’m sorry to be late, Mr. Fenwick,” Morgan apologized.  It was only a few minutes past noon, but Fenwick had a punctilious air about him.  “I tried to call this morning, but you were apparently out.”

“No matter,” Fenwick said in his pinched little voice.  “Perhaps I was a little early in arriving.  An old habit from my courtroom days, I’m afraid.”

“We’ve never met, but I knew you from when I was a kid here.  I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I recall seeing you at basketball games.”

“Oh my, yes,” Fenwick said.  “I love basketball.  Such a beautiful sport.  You seem vaguely familiar to me.  You played on the varsity here, did you?”

“Yeah, back in ‘Seventy-five.  I was a guard.  We did okay that year.  I played on the same team as Trey Kerrigan.”

“Yes indeed, young Kelton was a magnificent player.  He always seemed to be where the ball was.  A beautiful jump shot, as I recall.  He had the touch.  All-State, was he not?  And a fine sheriff he’s been, as well.”

It wasn’t like that at all, Morgan wanted to say.  It was the other way around:  He’d always made sure the ball was always where Trey Kerrigan was.  But it wasn’t meant as an insult and he let it go, hiding behind The Griddle’s familiar menu instead.

“Anything look good today?” Morgan asked politely while he scanned its gravy-stained pages, eager to change the subject.

“Oh, I’m afraid I wouldn’t know.  I always order the club sandwich.  I don’t believe I’ve ever had anything else here.  They build a club quite nicely here, and they always let me order just half.  I’m not a big eater, and the whole sandwich is so large, I can’t possibly eat it all.”

Fenwick sipped his tea timidly, his pinky extended, then refolded his napkin neatly across his lap as Suzie, the waitress, arrived at the table.  Morgan noticed her hair was slightly redder since last week, as were her tired eyes beneath all that dark makeup.

“Long day?” Morgan asked her.

“Long enough,” she said.  She stood close enough that Morgan could smell her peach fragrance, mixed with the aroma of maple syrup, cigarette smoke and coffee.  “I’m the only girl on the floor today.  The other one called in sick.  But I’m near done with this shift.  Been too busy to notice.  The rain really packs ‘em in.  You ready to order?”

Morgan gestured to Fenwick to order first.

“I’ll have the usual,” he said.  “Light on the mayonnaise, please.  Tomato on the side, no pickle.  Remember, dear, whole wheat.  Oh, and another Earl Grey, please, with hot water, but not boiling.”

Suzie turned to Morgan, rolling her eyes so only he could see.  She made no effort to be polite to the fussy old lawyer.  In fact, Morgan noticed she never spoke directly to him.

“I’ll have the special today, Suzie,” he said.  “Medium rare and an iced tea.”

She gathered their menus and left.  Fenwick brushed a few tiny crumbs into a folded napkin, which he pushed an arm’s length to the far edge of the table for the waitress to take away, as if it were low-level hazardous waste. 

“So, Mr. Morgan, you wished to talk to me about a case I handled a long time ago.  Mr. Gilmartin’s, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right.  I just had a few questions you might be able to answer.  You might know that Mr. Gilmartin recently was released from prison.”

“I’d heard that, yes.”

“Well, Mr. Gilmartin has asked me to look into his case.  He’s dying.  To make a long story short, he says he didn’t do it and he wants to die with a free conscience.”

Fenwick’s small eyes followed the fingers of his right hand as they re-adjusted the position of his silverware precisely on the paper placemat in front of him.

“Do you believe him?”

Morgan turned his palms upward and shrugged.

“I didn’t at first, but I’m beginning to wonder about a few things.”

“I’m certain you understand that the attorney-client privilege never expires, so I’m not quite clear on how I may help you.  Besides, I wasn’t on the case very long before Mr. Gilmartin confessed and pleaded guilty.  A terrible crime.”

Morgan leaned forward, his elbows spread wide on the table.  Fenwick straightened slightly and maneuvered his tea cup between them like a breastwork.

“I guess the main thing I’d like to know from you is whether there was ever any evidence that would have helped him prove his innocence.  Something that never came out.  Anything.”

Fenwick shook his head.

“The physical evidence linking him to the murder was non-existent and purely circumstantial, to be sure.  But Mr. Gilmartin had no alibi and the prosecution had at least two witnesses who’d testify he had the motive and intent to harm the father of that little girl.  We had nothing.”

“In your mind, were there any other possible suspects?”

“Mr. Morgan, the law is about proof.  And, I might add, we have some very fine slander laws in this state, so I am reluctant to suggest that some surviving suspect — other than Mr. Gilmartin — killed that little girl.  Good Christian manners prevent me from suggesting that someone long-dead might have done it.  It would be highly inappropriate and I suggest you show some decorum in such matters.  I am aware that the press has a vital job, but too often you run rough-shod over good people’s reputations.”

Odd, coming from a lawyer, Morgan thought, but he had little doubt that the finicky Fenwick had no stomach for asking — nor answering — indelicate questions. 

“What about the parents?  The father beat her, didn’t he?  Could he have killed her, then conspired with or intimidated the mother to cover it up?  That’s not a far-fetched scenario, given what we now know about domestic violence.”

“Many things are possible, Mr. Morgan, but not all things are probable,” Fenwick said.  He counted off defense arguments on his thin, delicate fingers:  “The parents were away from the house when she disappeared.  Their truck was parked at the Madigan ranch house all day.  The body was found ten miles in the other direction.  And in the Crow culture, murder is a far greater sin with far more dreadful consequences than under the white man’s law.  For the parents to have conspired in this killing, they would have had to plan it carefully, and child-beatings aren’t premeditated.”

“Unless it happened the night before,” Morgan thought out loud.  “Then they might conspire to protect themselves.  They might have lied about the disappearance.  Instead of riding fences, they might have gone back that day to dispose of Aimee’s body.”

Simeon Fenwick shook his small head.

“My, you’ve an active imagination.”

“I was a cop reporter in Chicago long enough to know my imagination will never rival a desperate criminal’s.  The body was a problem and the killer was desperate to get rid of it.”

“If the parents did it, why not bury her in a shallow grave somewhere out in that vast emptiness that surrounded them, then disappear?” Fenwick countered.  “The body never would have been found, and who would care if an Indian family just disappeared?  That was the killer’s only real error, dumping the little girl where she’d be found.  Maybe he wanted her to be found, or maybe he just panicked.”

Morgan said nothing, but Fenwick continued.

“No, Mr. Morgan, if the circumstantial case against Neeley Gilmartin was thin, your hypothesis about the parents is even thinner.  I’m sorry, but while it’s possible, it seems highly improbable.”

Morgan already knew his best alternative theory was full of holes.  But as a reporter, he’d covered the murders of too many children who died at the hands of their parents to dismiss it too quickly.  And it wasn’t beyond reason:  At least once, Aimee had been beaten by her father.  Maybe, on a hot summer night in 1948, filled with anger and liquor, he’d beaten her again, with fatal consequences.

“So, in your mind, the parents are unlikely suspects?” Morgan asked.

“That’s correct.  To me, under the circumstances, they would have been implausible and improbable suspects.”

“Was there anybody more plausible or probable in your mind?”

The corners of Fenwick’s thin lips drooped as he rotated the handle of his tea cup neatly to three o’clock, but didn’t pick it up.  He spoke without looking at Morgan.

“In a case like this, where one has no direct physical evidence, no witnesses, no apparent motive, no single person with a clear opportunity, you may suspect anyone and no one.  Mr. Gilmartin was as good a suspect as any, if I do say so myself.”

“Did you ever ask him if he did it?”

“We’re starting to get into privileged conversations now, Mr. Morgan, and that makes me terribly uncomfortable.  But I can tell you I rarely asked my criminal clients if they were, in fact, guilty of their appointed crimes.”

“Why?” Morgan asked.

“It matters very little,” Fenwick replied in his supercilious manner.  “My job was to provide the best defense, no matter whether my client was Jesus Christ or the Devil incarnate.  I was always a bit frightened about knowing, to be quite frank.  I never wanted it to influence what I might say in the courtroom.  That’s why, when I got a little more experience, I eschewed criminal cases and pursued a more sedate civil practice.”

“So can I assume you didn’t ask Gilmartin?”

Fenwick paused.

“I suppose that would be a safe assumption.”

“Did he ever tell you he didn’t kill Aimee?”

“Yes, he did.  Repeatedly.  I wanted to believe it, but he couldn’t provide me with any evidence on his own behalf.  He was a frightening man to me, with an alien lifestyle.  I was quite young and inexperienced, and I certainly had very little contact with his ilk.  Anyway, it was all over before I could conceive a proper defense.”

“In the end, did you believe him when he said he didn’t do it?”

“That’s irrelevant.”

Morgan scratched his chin.  Lawyers never made interviews easy.  Every conversation was a word game.

“Did you advise him to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty?”

“Once again, with all due respect, my advice to a client is none of your affair,” Fenwick bristled in his finicky fashion, like a mouse shooed into a corner.  “But it seems reasonable, does it not, that a man would do anything to save his own life?  Wouldn’t you?”

Suzie delivered their meals and slipped a greasy ticket under Morgan’s saucer.  Sim Fenwick tucked his napkin in his collar, smoothing it in a wrinkled diamond across his chest before dividing his half-sandwich into smaller, dainty pieces.  He never touched it with his slender fingers, although it would have been much easier to eat it that way. 

The steak on Morgan’s open-faced sandwich was tough and overcooked, so he slathered it in steak sauce to cover its flaws.

“When did you retire, Mr. Fenwick?” he asked as he chewed a gristly morsel of steak.

“Nineteen eighty-five,” Fenwick said, cutting tidbits of his club sandwich with a knife and fork.  “I’ll be seventy-nine in December.  Forty-three years at the bar.  It was a fine career, for the most part.  I still do a few minor things, wills, land deals and the like.”

“Any regrets?”

“Very few, really,” Fenwick said.  Then, as an afterthought, he added:  “Maybe one.”

Fenwick unconsciously fingered the frilly end of one of the giant cocktail toothpicks that had pinned his triple-decker sandwich together.  He spoke without looking up.

“As long as I can remember, I always wanted to become a judge.  My grandmother always said I would be a good judge, but I never got the chance.  I suppose she planted the idea in my mind long before I had any conscious memory of it.”

“Your grandmother was probably just as proud that you became a lawyer, wasn’t she?” Morgan asked.

“I suppose so,” Fenwick said.  “She raised me.  She was a full-blooded Crow, a housemaid in Miles City, Montana, when she met a white drover from Texas.  They never married, but she bore a child.  Their half-breed daughter was my mother, who died when I was very young.  I never knew my father, who I’ve been told was the son of an upstanding banker in Miles City and, of course, could never be allowed to marry a half-breed squaw.  So my grandmother raised me and, as you can clearly see, dreamed for me.”

Morgan was mildly surprised.  Sim Fenwick had none of the noble, dark features of a Native American.  His pale features were tender, his manner almost effeminate.  The blood in his veins was at least one-quarter Crow Indian, but it was thin and blue, perhaps more like his promiscuous grandfather’s. 

“She did well,” Morgan said.  “Dreaming for you, that is.  Did she put you through law school?”

“Yes, indeed.  She worked all her life as a housemaid.  She earned ten dollars a week, most of which she saved religiously to that very purpose.  She gave me what she had never had, an education and freedom.”

“That must have pleased her,” Morgan said.

“Her father, my great-grandfather, had been a scout for General Phil Sheridan himself during the Indian Wars.  There’s a family story that he once watched white soldiers torture, then hang, some Lakota renegades.  The experience crystallized, for him, what was happening to his people:  The Indians were losing justice.  Many years later, he told his daughter of a dream he’d had, in which a Crow brave carefully held a small, beating heart in his hand.  When he lifts the pulsing organ to the sky, as if to seek the advice of the Great Spirit, it swiftly transforms into a hawk and flies away into the clouds.  It sounds terribly grisly, unless you accept it as merely a symbol.”

“How so?”

“The Indian man could have eaten the heart, or thrown it to the dogs.  After what he saw, I suppose my great-grandfather believed that a white man would have done that.  Perhaps he believed there was more conscience in an Indian.”

“So what happened?  To you, I mean.  Why didn’t you become a judge in the end?”

“I cannot say, Mr. Morgan.  Perhaps my politics weren’t right.  And I suspect my involvement with the Gilmartin case did not improve my stature with my colleagues in the bar.  I applied for all the court openings, but the governor always had a different notion.  Nine governors, to be exact.”