Extenuating Circumstances (16 page)

22

The late summer heat woke me early the next morning. I hadn't slept well anyway, wondering what to do about Chard. I thought about going to Finch. But without a piece of solid evidence to back my story, I knew that Art would let the thing slide, just as he had months before when O'Brien had first approached him with Kitty Guinn's story. Without proof my suspicions were nothing more than hearsay speculation, and no D.A. in his right mind would jeopardize an ironclad case to follow up on something like that.

On the other hand, Jack O'Brien would be more than happy to use my information, whether I had proof or not. In fact, with a few subpoenas and a little luck, he might be able to parlay it into a scandal. All he needed to do was establish a reasonable doubt that Carnova had done the killing. If a jury could be made to believe that there might have been a second suspect whom the cops hadn't bothered to pick up, Carnova's doctored confession would be worthless and Carnova himself might walk. I didn't want to see that happen any more than I wanted to see Chard go scot-free- not until I knew what really took place on that July night.

That left the Lessing family. I was sure they'd be eager to see justice done to Ira's killer. The trouble was that Chard was a homosexual sadist, specializing in beat freaks, and I was just as sure that the Lessings would be far from eager to hear that.

From talking to O'Brien and DeVries, I already knew how hard Len and the family had worked to keep the homosexual gossip out of the spotlight. In fact, up until the night before, I'd conspired at the same thing. If Chard was indicted, all that work would go down the drain. Lessing's homosexuality would become the pivotal point of the case, and the Lessings would once again be caught up in personal and public nightmares.

Any way I looked at it, someone was going to suffer because of what I'd come across the night before. Like Naomi Trimble, I'd faced the truth and asked the hard questions. No one had said I'd like the answers. And I didn't.
 
 

It was too early in the morning to try to pick up Chard's trail again, even if I'd had a taste for it, which I didn't. Instead I decided to try to drum up a little support from a neutral corner -someone who cared enough about Lessing to want to find the truth and who was close enough to the family to argue the case against Chard for me, if I could make the case stick. There was only one person I could think of who fit that bill, Commissioner Don Geneva, the Lessing family spokesman. After breakfast I drove over to Kentucky to see him.

It was just a little past ten when I parked in front of the battlements of the Covington Court House. I snaked my way through the crowd of lawyers and litigants in the lobby, past the tubby, sullen security guard, up to the second floor. There was a black wreath on the door to Ira Lessing's office. I'd never been inside that office. And that was something else Geneva could help me with. I found the sleek-looking Mr. Geneva two doors up, talking earnestly to an attractive blond woman who was sitting on a corner of his desk. They both stared at me when I tapped on the doorjamb.

"Can't talk to you right now, fella," Geneva said brusquely. "If you need to see me, make an appointment with the secretary down the hall."

"I can't wait for an appointment," I said. "It's about Ira Lessing."

The woman looked mildly shocked, as if I'd used a rude word. But Geneva sat back slowly in his chair.

"You're the detective, aren't you? Stoner?"

"I'm surprised you remember the name."

. Geneva smiled a slick smile. "It's a trick you learn as a politician. Mnemonic devices. You got a hard-looking face -a little knicked up. So I think of stone."

He glanced at the blond woman, who was taking a second, more appreciative look at my stone-like face.

"Gloria, you think we could postpone this for a while?" he said to her.

She glanced back at him and nodded. After collecting some papers from the desk, the woman walked out of the room. She smiled openly at me as she went by, shutting the door behind her.

"I think she likes you," Geneva said with a grin.

"I'm flattered."

"You should be. Gloria's considered a major catch around these parts." He gestured to the chair across the desk from him and I sat down. "Now what about Ira?"

"I need your help."

"Doing what?"

"Finding his killer."

Geneva looked as shocked as I'd wanted him to be.

"They arrested his killer months ago. That little creep Carnova."

"A second kid may have been involved. A boy named Tommy Chard."

"I haven't read anything about a second suspect in the papers or heard anything about it from Meg or Len."

"That's because I haven't told the papers or the Lessings yet. I'm telling you."

"I don't understand. What do you have to do with it?"

"It's a long story."

He leaned back in the chair and locked his hands behind his neck. "Let's hear it."

I went through the whole thing for him: Jack O'Brien, Kitty Guinn, Naomi Trimble, Kent Holliday, Vinnie, Raymond the bartender, and Lester Coates. The only thing I held back was the fact that I'd witnessed Carnova's first confession, the one with the homosexual accusations in it. He was a lawyer, so he grasped some of the problems without having to be told. What he didn't understand was why I hadn't gone directly to the family.

"I'm sure they'd like to know there's another suspect. Jesus, the last thing they'd want is to let Ira's killer go free."

"You understand that Chard is an ugly character -a homosexual prostitute specializing in masochists."

"Carnova was hardly an angel."

"This is different. This is something the family and the D.A. won't be able to sidestep."

For the second time since I'd met him I watched Don Geneva's jaw slowly drop as he came to grips with what I was saying. Momentarily, he was at a loss for words. "You believe it, then," he finally said in a shocked voice. "You believe the Carnova kid's accusations?"

"I don't know if Lessing was a beat freak. But, yes, I think he was homosexual."

Geneva shook his head. "You're wrong. I knew Ira well, and he was as straight as they come."

"Look, Geneva, you don't have to believe Lessing was gay to help me. But if I don't get your cooperation, I'm going to have to pursue this in some other way that may end up hurting the family or jeopardizing the case against Carnova."

"You could just let it go," he said with a lawyer-like edge in his voice. "You could do that."

"Yeah. But then Chard walks and Carnova fries for something he might not have done."

"Let me make a few calls," Geneva said. "Talk it over with Meg and Len. Personally, I will never believe that Ira Lessing was anything other than a decent, respectable, and very straight man. But if this pervert hijacked him and murdered him for his money, I think they'll want him punished, even if the publicity stinks."

"Fine," I said.

"I'll call you later today, and we'll see what can be done."

"One more favor?" He nodded.

"Can you get me into Lessing's office here at the Court House? I'd like to see if he left anything behind that might connect to this. It would help a lot if I could come up with some physical evidence linking Lessing to Chard."

Geneva fished a key chain from his pocket and tossed it across the desk to me. "The big silver one opens every door on this floor."

"Thanks," I said, pocketing the keys.
 
 

23

I went back up the hall to Lessing's office and slipped the silver key into the lock. The door opened and a wave of heat came flooding out, like the very breath of that murderous summer. I walked over to the far wall, cracked a window, and let the room air out for a second. Then I flipped on an overhead light and went in, closing the door behind me.

It was identical to Geneva's office. Oblong, lined with bookshelves on the two long walls, and tall fan windows opposite the door. A desk stood in the center of the room, as tidily arranged as the desk in Lessing's business office. I sat down behind it and stared at a picture of Janey sitting on one corner. There was a picture of his mother on the opposite corner. Meg Lessing looked as stern as Janey looked careless, like the two poles of the man's life.

I opened the top drawer of the desk and went through it. I could tell from the way the items were neatly arrayed that nobody had searched the desk before. But that didn't surprise me. Once Finch and the D.A. had settled on Carnova as the murderer, every other possibility had been left unexplored. Hell, I'd confirmed that the night before, in Coates's grim little apartment.

I found some pens and pencils in the top drawer, a squared-up ream of stationery with Lessing's name embossed on it, an address book. Nothing important. I opened the side drawer and found another squared-up ream of stationery and a shiny leather Dopp Kit with shaving gear and a manicure set inside -all as neat as a pin. At the bottom of the drawer I found a wooden presentation box with the name Thomas Lessing engraved on a bronze placard. Inside the box, nestled in plush velvet, was a chrome-plated .38-caliber revolver -a presentation piece that had obviously never been used, perhaps never touched. It was the only memento of his father that Lessing had kept in either office -a chrome-plated pistol.

There were a couple of neatly stacked piles of papers on the desk pad. I thumbed through them listlessly. Reports to a committee. Queries about various items. A note from Geneva.

Idly, I reached across the desk and pulled the flip calendar over to me. It was still opened to July 4, like a clock that had stopped at Lessing's death. And right there, on the part of the page ruled for the evening hours, was written in tiny, perfectly formed letters: "Birthday/C."

I stared at the damn thing for so long I lost track of the time. Then I began to go back through the calendar, page by page. There were countless daily appointments with men and woman whose names I didn't know. Appointments and meetings so carefully documented that he'd often broken the hours down into five- and ten-minute segments. When I got to June 15, I found another "C" notation in the 11:00 A.M. slot: "Car Tune-Up/C." I had a feeling that was the day that O'Brien had said the service manager at Riverside BMW had seen Carnova in Lessing's car. I flipped back to June 3, the date of the check I'd discovered in Lessing's other office, and found a missing page. It had been torn off the calendar, omitted from the record as if the day hadn't happened in his life.
I went back farther, but couldn't find any more "C's." Just page after page of minutely detailed appointments. Every hour of every day accounted for. Every obligation, right down to Carnova's birthday. Everything but that one day in his life -June 3.

Lessing's obsession with putting it all down, with keeping it neat, had told me more about his secret life than he'd wanted known. But the very ferocity with which each day was mapped out said something else something that could only be read in the light of what had happened. This was a man trying desperately, through the most minute arrangements of his time, through the piling on of obligation and appointment, to keep each hour of each day under strictest control.

The missing day, the third of June, was the puzzler. I'd found other notations stretching through August, into that hot, cruel month when he was already dead and his homosexuality was being exposed in the press. Only the third of June didn't exist for him.

I'd never followed up the chance meeting with Kingston at the cemetery. Never bothered to find out who had brought in the Lighthouse checks Lessing had pinned to his other calendar -the checks dated the third of June. I'd thought Finch would handle it. Now it seemed worth looking into on my own.

I relocked the office door, dropped the keys off with Geneva, and walked down to the car. It took me ten minutes to drive uptown to the clinic, past the bars that had so upset Ira Lessing-the bars with the teenage prostitutes.

It must have been a special day at the Lighthouse because a number of kids were lined up on the sidewalk outside the door. I parked the Pinto and made my way through the crowd. A couple of strung-out teenagers gave me nasty looks, as if I were breaking line at a theater.

Inside, the nurse stationed at the reception desk was taking down names and directing kids through the swinging doors to the infirmary. It took me a few minutes to catch her eye.

"Yes?" she said, looking harried. She was the same girl I'd met on my first trip to the clinic -the one who'd been upset by the screaming kid.

"My name's Stoner," I said to her. "You might remember me. I worked for the Lessing family."

She nodded. "Yes, I remember you."

"You think I could talk to Dr. Kingston?"

"We're pretty busy."

"It's important," I said.

"All right, I'll see."

She got up from the desk and went into the clinic. The boy at the head of the line -a tall, skinny teenager with the heavily lined, haunted-looking face of a middle-aged drunk- shifted his feet and stared angrily at me, as if I was keeping him from his fix. A moment later the nurse reappeared.

"Go on back," she said to me.

I went through the doors into the infirmary. Kingston was waiting just inside. Behind him, on the far side of the room, another group of kids were lined up in front of the window of a dispensary, where an attendant was handing them paper cups.