Ed McBain_Matthew Hope 12 (12 page)

Patricia wanted to know what I’d meant by my remark about God.

“I was making a joke. We didn’t really talk about sex.”

“What
did
you talk about?”

“He wanted to know how I’d like my steak done.”

Patricia ignored this.

“It seems to me,” she said, “that raising the topic of sex in Susan’s presence was tantamount to leading a witness.”

“I didn’t raise the topic. Andrea Lang did.”

“You were the one who first mentioned sex.”

“Andrea Lang was the one who asked if people in coma thought about sex.”

“Chain of custody,” Patricia said. “Tinkers to Evers to Chance. An opening that allowed Susan to testify as an expert. And
what’s with you and the Cross-Eyed Cooze?”

“She’s a client,” I said. “You know that. Talking about her is out of bounds.”

The professional arrangement Patricia and I have made—as opposed to our personal arrangement, such as it’s been since my recovery,
but who’s griping?—is that we simply do not discuss any criminal case I’m working, this to avoid even the slightest appearance
of impropriety between the law firm of Summerville and Hope and the State Attorney’s Office. Since Patricia is one of the
brightest stars on the prosecution team headed by Skye Bannister—the unfortunate name with which our eminent state attorney
was anointed—and since my office handles a great many
non
criminal legal matters, we normally have plenty to talk about when it comes to sharing shoptalk.

But this wasn’t shoptalk tonight.

“She really
should
stop wearing her skirts so short, by the way.”

“Lainie?”

“
Susan.
And she should also stop using your goddamn name.”

“It’s
her
goddamn name, too.”

“Doesn’t she have a maiden name?”

“Not anymore. She hasn’t been a maiden for many moons now.”

“Didn’t she
once
have a maiden name?”

“Yes, Susan Fitch,” I said.

“So why doesn’t she go back to it? Why does she have to keep
clinging
to you?”

“I wasn’t aware that she was clinging to me.”

“She came to the hospital every goddamn day.”

“I wasn’t aware of that.”

“Even
after
you woke up.
Especially
after you woke up. So tonight you give her an opening she could drive a locomotive through.”

“
Andrea
gave her the opening.”

“You were the one who started it. I’m surprised she didn’t just unzip your fly.”

“Andrea? She hardly knows me.”

“Or maybe you’d have enjoyed that.”

“Would’ve given me something to tell God about, anyway,” I said, and was immediately sorry.

“What does
that
mean?” Patricia asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go to bed.”

We were in the second-story bedroom of her house on Fatback Key, where first we’d consummated our then-burgeoning romance,
moonlight shining through the skylight in the cathedral ceiling as it had been on that autumn night that now seemed so very
long ago. Together, we had found each other again and again and again and were surprised and delighted and grateful each and
every time. Tonight Patricia was wearing a lacy white teddy, and I was wearing pajama bottoms, which bedtime attire seemed
to predict a replay of that passionate night we shared under a waxing September moon too long ago. If tonight had been a movie,
this scene would not have been titled “Are You Getting Enough Lately?”

I started to explain to Patricia that ever since the day she drove me home from the hospital—

And, oh dear God, how small and sad and forlorn I’d felt on that sunny day last May, how pitiably insufficient, how weak and
dependent and utterly incapable of coping I’d felt on that bright hopeless day, no pun intended, but oh dear God it
did
seem a Hope-less day because the pallid figure sitting beside Patricia was definitely not Matthew Hope but an impostor who
had taken his place.

She could not have known that lying beside her in bed that night four months ago, I had wept silently and secretly, despairing
that I would ever regain full strength, cursing God for having allowed me to step into the path of two speeding bullets faster
than I was, knowing I would forever be an invalid, a man who’d survived a coma perhaps, but a man who would never be quite
himself again, a person to be pitied instead, perhaps despised instead, a person not quite whole.

“Ever since that day,” I started to say, and she said, “Yes?” and I said, “Ever since that day…” and she waited, and I said,
“I’ve been hoping…” and she waited, and I said, “I’m very tired, Patricia, do you think we could talk about this some other
time?”

We climbed into bed, and we lay there beside each other in the silent dark, well not
quite
dark since moonlight was splashing through the skylight. I was naked from the waist up, and Patricia was naked and long and
supple from the waist down, and I thought If I try to make love to her, she’ll back away yet another time because she’s afraid
I’ll break into a million pieces.

I wanted to tell her I would not break into a million pieces.

I wanted to tell her I was all right again.

Really.

We lay still and silent under the moon.

And at last Patricia sighed and said, “I hate that bitch,” and in a little while we both fell asleep.

A
side from Etta Toland’s,” I said, “do you recognize any of the other names on that list?”

We were sitting in the garden behind Lainie’s house. It was ten o’clock on Saturday morning, and I had just handed her the
witness list that Pete Folger had hand-delivered to my office at nine. I had not slept well the night before. Neither had
Patricia. Folger was all smiles when he suggested that I ask my client to plead to Murder Two and thirty years, rather than
risking the electric chair on the Murder One indictment. He wanted to move this along fast, he said. I wondered why.

Lainie wasn’t wearing glasses this morning.

Her hair sleep-tousled, no makeup on her face, wearing a red and black, floral-print, knee-length kimono sashed at the waist,
she sat sipping black coffee under the shade of a pepper tree, squinting at the document I’d just handed her. She was wearing
the heart-shaped ring on her pinky; I wondered if she slept with it on. Her legs were crossed. A short baby-doll nightgown
in the same floral print showed where the kimono ended high on her thigh. She kept jiggling her foot.

“I don’t know any of these people,” she said. “Who are these people?”

“The witnesses who testified to the grand jury.”

“What’d they say?”

“Well, we don’t know yet. Enough to get an indictment, that’s for sure.”

“Does he have other witnesses, too?”

“If not now, then he certainly will by the time we go to trial. But he’ll supply their names when I make demand for discovery.”

“When will that be?”

“Within two to three months.”

“When will you talk to the people on this list?”

“I’ll start making phone calls today. If I’m lucky, I can begin seeing them on Monday.”

“To take depositions?”

“No. Just informally.
If
they’re willing to talk to me. Otherwise, yes, I’ll have to subpoena them and question them under oath. You see…”

Lainie glanced up from the typewritten list. A spot of sunlight escaped the snare of leaves above her head, shifted uncertainly
in her golden hair. She looked at me expectantly. The wandering eye gave her the forlorn appearance of an abandoned child.

“You see, Folger’s still hoping we’ll plead.”

“Why would we?”

“He’s hoping that after I talk to these people, whoever they are…”

“Well,
who
are they, that’s what
I’d
like to know, too.”

“I have no idea. But he’s hoping we’ll recognize the strength of his case and accept his offer.”

“Second-degree murder.”

“Yes. Second degree means without any premeditated design.”

“I just shot Brett on the spur of the moment, right?”

“Well, yes. For second-degree murder, that’s what it would have to be.”

“Heat of passion, right?”

“Well, no. That’s a term used in the section on excusable homicide. That wouldn’t apply here.”

“Especially since I didn’t kill him.”

“I know that.”

“So why would I settle for thirty years in jail?”

“Well, not to
exceed
thirty.”

“For something I didn’t do.”

“I’m not recommending it.”

“More coffee?” she asked.

“Please.”

She leaned over to pour. I watched her.

“Was your girlfriend angry?”

“What?” I said.

“Last night. She seemed angry.”

“Well…no. Angry about what?”

“You and I talking together,” she said, and shrugged. The kimono slid slightly off her shoulder, revealing the narrow strap
of her nightgown. She adjusted it at once, put down the coffeepot, and looked across the table at me. “Was she?” she asked.
“Angry?”

“No.”

“Someone told me she’s a state attorney.”

“That’s right. A very good one.”

“Do you talk to her about me?”

“Absolutely not.”

“I hope not. Milk?”

“Please.”

She poured. I kept watching her.

“Sugar?”

“One.”

She slid the bowl across the table to me.

“Why was she angry?”

“It had nothing to do with you.”

“Then who?”

“I’d rather not discuss it.”

“Then she
was
angry, right?”

“As I said…”

“You’d rather not discuss it.”

“Right.”

She was jiggling her foot again. Smiling. Jiggling the foot.

“I’d hate to go to the electric chair, you see. Just because…”

“Well, I’ll try to make sure…”

“
Just
because my attorney’s
sleeping
with someone,” she said, overriding my voice. “Giving away my secrets to some woman in bed,” she said. Single eyebrow raised
over the crooked right eye. Faint smile still on her mouth.

“I don’t know any of your secrets,” I said.

“
If
you knew them,” she said.

“I don’t care to know them.”

“But you
are
sleeping with her.”

“Lainie…”

“Aren’t you?”

“Lainie, if my personal relationship with Patricia Demming intrudes in any way upon my performance as your attorney, I’ll
immediately withdraw from the case.”

“Your performance as my attorney,” she repeated.

Still smiling.

“Yes. In fact, if you think I’m
not
representing you properly…”

“But I think you are,” she said.

“Good. I’m happy to hear that.”

“Besides,” she said, “anything between us is privileged, isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” I said.

What secrets? I wondered.

“Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

The security guard’s name was Bartholomew Harrod.

If a jury had been present, anything old Bart said would have been instantly and automatically believed. That’s because anyone
named after one of the Twelve Apostles could not possibly be lying. Well, Judas Iscariot, maybe. Nowadays, there are women
on juries, but back when you and I were young, Maggie, a jury consisted of men only. Put on that jury an Andrew, Bartholomew,
James (two of them, no less), John, Thaddeus, Matthias, Philip, Peter, Simon, Thomas, or—well yes, he said modestly—even
Matthew,
and what you had, folks, was a jury of “twelve good men and true.” Not to mention Paul, who said he’d seen Christ after the
resurrection, and was therefore elevated to Apostlehood and later to sainthood.

There was no jury listening to what Bartholomew Harrod was saying at two o’clock on what was still a bright sunny Saturday,
the sixteenth day of September. Sitting outdoors around a circular coffee table with a plastic top and wrought-iron legs painted
green were Harrod, and me, and Andrew Holmes, the man in my office who would most likely be trying the Commins case if I myself
declined that singular ordeal. That made
three
good men and true, but who was counting Apostles’ names?

I had called Harrod immediately after leaving Lainie’s house. I’d told him I was defending Ms. Commins and had been offered
his name by the state attorney, Peter Folger, whom I was sure he knew and who had suggested that I might want to talk to him
as soon as possible. I told Harrod that if he agreed to come to my office, or to meet with me wherever he preferred, we could
talk informally about what he’d said to the grand jury, and this might save the trouble of my having to cross-examine him
later, a blatant lie, but one that sometimes swayed a reluctant witness.

What worked best, however, was the “America the Beautiful” approach, which basically sketched in the premise that everyone
in the United States was entitled to a fair trial. In the interests of justice, then—which certainly Mr. Harrod would want
for himself if ever, God forbid, he found himself in a similar situation—in the interests of freedom and justice for all,
then, I felt certain he would want the defense to know how the grand jury had arrived at its finding, toward which end a knowledge
of his testimony would be enormously helpful, in the spirit of justice and fairness.

I told him that he wouldn’t be under oath while we talked, it would all be very informal, although I would appreciate being
able to record what he said, just for reference later on. This was another lie, though a smaller one, but neither was anyone
under oath while we were talking on the phone. I needed the recording for backup in case we asked him, on the stand
and
under oath, to repeat anything he might say in our informal discussion. That was why I’d asked Andrew Holmes, no relation,
the new partner in the firm of Summerville and Hope, to join me when I spoke to Harrod.

I would have preferred sending either of my two investigators, Warren Chambers or Toots Kiley, to interview and record Harrod.
But calls to Warren’s office and home garnered identical messages saying he’d be out of town for the next week or so, and
Toots’s machine said only that she was “away from the phone just now” and asked that a message be left at the beep. Which
meant that I could not send them independently to do the donkey work and then later testify to the authenticity and genesis
of the tape. Which further meant I needed a witness to the taping.