Blameless (25 page)

“Does he need more than one?”

“No,” Mitch said. “But a thwarted lover, a difficult patient, perhaps a threat to professional security—these possibilities wouldn’t hurt him a bit.”

Diana twisted her wedding ring.

“Number two,” Mitch solemnly held up a second finger, “there’s opportunity. Unfortunately, Diana, you haven’t been able to come up with an alibi for the afternoon of the murder.”

“How can I come up with an alibi I don’t have? I was working at home all afternoon—alone. Before that I wandered around Copley Place—alone.” Diana shrugged. “End of story.”

“Think about the day for me one more time,” Mitch pressed, scribbling on his pad. “Relive it in your mind. Did you talk to anyone on the phone? Buy anything at Copley Place? Charge anything to a credit card?”

Diana did as Mitch asked, then shook her head in frustration. “I’ve replayed that afternoon over and over again. And the answer to all your questions is still no.”

Mitch pushed his legal pad away from him and just looked at Diana.

“So this is worse than I thought?”

“Maybe yes,” he said slowly. “Maybe no.”

“Maybe no?” Diana asked, hearing the desperation in her own voice.

“We can’t forget there are two other suspects with qualifications almost as good as yours.”

“Except that Detective Levine seemed to imply that Jill has come up with an alibi,” Diana said glumly. “And that Ethan might have one too.”

“That’s something I can check on for you,” Mitch offered.

Diana nodded vigorously. “Please.”

“But my guess is,” he continued, “unless their alibis are airtight, those two are our answer.”

“Our answer?”

“Look, all we have to prove is that someone else
might
have done it. That’s the way the law works. You and I figure out a way to show that either one of these other jokers had equal motive and opportunity …” Mitch paused and looked Diana straight in the eye. “And you’re off the hook.”

“It’s that simple?”

“And that difficult.”

It turned out that Mitch was every bit as good a detective as Valerie had reported. By the following Monday he called Diana with the news that the police still hadn’t found Ethan, but that Jill Hutchins’s aunt, a Molly Arell of Norwich, Connecticut, had signed an affidavit that she had been visiting with Jill on the afternoon of James’s murder.

“She’s lying,” Diana told Mitch, explaining that James had told her right before his death that neither he nor Jill had seen their aunts for at least five years.

“You really could use a private detective more than a lawyer,” Mitch told her. “But as long as Valerie’s cooked up this deal—and in case the worst does materialize and we end up in court—here’s my suggestion.” He outlined a plan in which he, Valerie, and a private detective he often used, worked together. He proposed a three-pronged strategy: researching both Ethan and Jill’s backgrounds using his police contacts and access to various national databases; tracking down Ethan; and visiting Jill and James’s hometown to investigate Molly Arell’s story and just plain snoop around. “I’ve got a feeling about this last piece,” he said. “I’m no detective, but there’s something to be found in Norwich. I just know it.”

As Diana listened to his reasoned plan, her hopes soared, but when Mitch told her the estimated cost, she was crushed. Although the price was a fifth of his retainer, it was still far too high. “It all sounds wonderful,” she said softly, “but we can’t afford it.” She couldn’t tell Craig they had to spend ten thousand dollars to get her out of this debacle of her own making. Ten thousand dollars that they didn’t have. Ten thousand dollars that would put him years behind in his plans for Frey and Associates. “We just can’t afford it,” she repeated.

“What can you afford?” Mitch asked, undeterred.

When Diana told him, he paused, and she could hear the tapping of computer keys. “My hourly rate is higher than Valerie’s … As long as we don’t tell Bogdanow, we could move some of my hours over to her column and save you a few more bucks. And, if I gave you a courtesy discount for a proportion of my time …”

“I couldn’t ask you—”

“Would you be willing to be the detective?” he interrupted.

“You mean, I would work for you?”

His chuckle was warm. “In a convoluted, incestuous sense.”

After she hung up, Diana stared at the phone. The final price she and Mitch had negotiated was still far more than they could afford. But she had almost two thousand dollars in her business account, and they would just have to make up the difference by borrowing from her parents.

She knew her parents would be more than happy to help out; relieved even, that she was finally letting them do something for her. She also knew that Craig wouldn’t like it at all—but that he would agree with her decision. Hiring Mitch had been his idea in the first place, and, of course, he would have no qualms about trying to stick it to the
Inquirer
. The truth was, as they were all too aware, there was little choice.

Diana told herself there was no way she was going to be arrested for murdering James—let alone convicted. They were just being cautious; it was better to spend a few dollars to ensure the worst didn’t happen. But no matter how hard she tried, the images wouldn’t go away. The baby being born in prison. Her daughter growing up with the stigma of an incarcerated mother—a mother she only saw wearing the coarse red uniform of a murderer.

Diana blinked back tears. To lose her family. To be separated from Craig. From their child. To never know her. To never drink in the sweetness of her baby smell, to never feel her chubby arms pressed tightly around her neck. To see them both only on monthly visiting days.

Diana saw the sterile vastness of the visitor’s room at Middlesex, the long table running the width of the space, clear plastic rising from its surface to the ceiling, separating the free from the unfree. She remembered the sheriff explaining that although there were bathrooms off the visitor’s room, no one was allowed to use them. Visitors had to go back out through the metal detectors to the facilities off the main entrance. This was to keep contraband from being hidden in the toilets for prisoners to retrieve later. “Yes,” he had responded in answer to a question. “Even the elderly and small children.”

21

I
T WAS THE TUESDAY BEFORE
T
HANKSGIVING AND THE
roads were busy, but traffic was flowing smoothly. Diana figured that with a little luck, she could make it to Norwich by ten-thirty, thereby giving herself half an hour to get lost before Molly Arell expected her.

When Mitch had advised her to call ahead to arrange to meet with Molly, Diana had balked. But to her surprise, Molly had been very pleasant. Diana hadn’t even had to use her half-baked explanations for the trip—her meeting in the area and her need to get a few final bits of information on James to close out her files—for Molly had immediately invited her to stop by anytime.

“People love to talk about themselves,” Mitch had said. “Always have, always will.” As Diana’s class was canceled due to the Thanksgiving recess, she had proposed to Molly that she come down the next day. James’s aunt had graciously offered to fit her in between her nine-o’clock tennis game and her noon literature class. Diana had been forced to shuffle her afternoon patients around, but it had all been accomplished with surprising ease, and now she was flying down the Mass Pike toward a meeting she anticipated with both excitement and dread.

Mitch had spent almost an hour on the phone coaching her. “Remember,” he had advised, “the one and only purpose of this visit is to see if you can get the aunt to slip up and reveal that Jill’s alibi is a lie. So do everything you can to make her feel comfortable. Never be antagonistic. Never threaten or intimidate. Only if she trusts you will her guard drop.”

He was a good teacher, and Diana felt much more confident than she would have expected under the circumstances. She also had found his optimism contagious. “I can just feel it in these old bones,” he had told her. “You’re coming back with something.”

Diana’s heart beat faster at the idea of actually finding some evidence that would implicate Jill, of coming home exonerated and triumphant. Stop it, she warned herself as she turned off the highway. Raising her expectations for what promised to be a difficult encounter—to say the least—was not a good idea. But she also knew that she needed every possible ounce of confidence she could muster to walk up to the door of 52 Pine Street.

Consulting Molly Arell’s directions and the map Mitch had suggested she buy, Diana drove through downtown Norwich—“downtown” being a rather long stretch of the term. The place had that depressed-fifties look that indicated it had never seen better times, Diana thought as she took a left turn around a jewelry store with a huge banner declaring that they had lost their lease, and a right two stores beyond a closed-down moviehouse. She was relieved as she headed away from the drab narrow streets toward the more suburban part of town.

She rode for a couple of miles past unpretentious houses and strip shopping centers—one named Marcus Plaza—and found the corner of Warren and Pine just a little after ten-thirty. She returned to Marcus Plaza and sat in the small parking lot, revving up her confidence and reviewing Mitch’s instructions, until just before eleven.

A beaming Molly Arell greeted Diana at her front door. “Please, please do come in, dear,” she said, leading Diana through her unassuming living room into a bright homey kitchen that flashed Diana back to childhood afternoons of Oreos and milk. “I’m so glad you’re here,” Molly continued. “This whole thing has just been so difficult for all of us—for the family.” She touched Diana’s arm and her smile faded. “And I’m sure it has been equally difficult for you.”

Even though she had come to this woman’s house to get proof she was a liar, Diana couldn’t help warming to James’s aunt. The aunts hadn’t technically done anything wrong, after all; they had been only guilty of disinterest and silence. According to both James and Jill, their mother and her three sisters had known when Hank Hutchins first moved to Norwich that he was up to no good, although it wasn’t clear exactly what that “no good” was. And although Hank was from James’s father’s side of the family, he spread his money around James’s mother’s family—helping pay off Gertie’s mortgage, “loaning” Molly what she needed for a new refrigerator, paying a year’s college tuition for Hallie’s oldest—so it was convenient for everyone to keep their eyes averted. And after Uncle Hank got caught and sent to prison, the sisters were so humiliated they continued to act as if nothing untoward had occurred. On second thought, Diana realized that an act of omission was still a wrong.

Diana accepted the older woman’s offer of coffee and sat down at the large and comfortably worn table. She watched Molly, who must have been in her early sixties but moved as if she were half that age, as she poured from a coffee maker standing on the immaculate counter.

“Decaf, I presume?” Molly asked, smiling at Diana’s stomach. “My daughter just had her second, so I know all the rules.”

“Thank you,” Diana said again, pressing her damp palms to the skirt of her jumper. She felt as she did on the first day of class: nervous and hyped-up, full of both excited anticipation and an almost uncontrollable desire to bolt from the room.

Mitch had instructed Diana to take her lead from Molly, to sit quietly and politely and just let the woman jabber. And Molly was doing exactly as he had predicted. “I felt just terrible when Jilly was so hard on you at James’s funeral,” she was saying. “But you have to understand that the poor girl was beside herself. James meant the world to her. Everything, perhaps.” She stared into the depths of her coffee mug and sighed. “I don’t think she ever really accepted how truly disturbed that boy was.” She shook her head and looked up at Diana. “You’re not by any chance related to any of the Norwich Marcus girls, are you? I went to school with Beatrice, but there was Bertha and Rose and Doris and Sandra—and a son too, I think. One of their husbands—Sandra or Doris’s, I can’t remember which—built a shopping center just around the corner from here.” She nodded as if she didn’t expect Diana to believe her words. “Named it after them.”

“No,” Diana said politely, although she was worried that the older woman’s tangents might whittle away her short hour. “My father was an only child.”

“Too bad,” Molly said, playing with the handle on her mug. “I understand Jilly was also quite rude to you when you went to visit her at her apartment.”

Diana took a sip of coffee in an attempt to cover her surprise.

“Oh, yes,” the aunt said, nodding sagely. “Jilly and I are very close now. And I know she felt quite badly about the incident.”

“She did?” Diana asked, not bothering to conceal her incredulity.

“And that’s why you’re here, right?” Molly tilted her head and smiled at Diana. “You want my help getting back that journal or whatever it is.”

Speechless, Diana resisted the urge to shake her head. Mitch had cautioned her to watch her body language, to modulate her voice, to play to Molly’s lead. So Diana tried to control her movements. She swallowed her words and nodded encouragingly.

Diana’s reaction must have been acceptable, because Molly continued, “You have to forgive Jilly’s rudeness. You must,” she pleaded. “We—the whole family, that is—knew right from the start, when we thought it was suicide, that you couldn’t be held responsible for what James had done.” She raised her eyebrows. “Let’s just say that no one was overly shocked. And now, well …” She looked meaningfully at Diana’s stomach. “Well, it’s obvious that you had nothing to do with this either.”

Diana nodded and sipped her coffee, trying to figure out how to take control of the conversation. According to Mitch, she shouldn’t interrupt Molly’s prattle, but her time was running out, and she had to get the woman to the subject of Jill’s alibi. “Bite your tongue if you have to,” Mitch had advised. “But keep yourself quiet.” So, against her better judgment, she did. And once again Mitch’s recommendation was right on the mark.