Extenuating Circumstances (22 page)

I'll bet, I said to myself. To Millie I said, "Did you tell Len all of this this morning?"

She nodded.

"He never asked about it before today?"

"Nope. Why should he? He didn't have nothing to do with that kid."

He didn't then, I said to myself. But he did now.

I thanked Millie for her help, got up, and went to the door. "Tell Len I need to talk to him, Millie. Tell him it's important."

She promised she would.
 
 

31

It took me about ten minutes to get to Sunset Avenue, driving due west through the fringes of Covington, where the city dies off in blocks of Quonset liquor stores and the concrete plazas of used-car lots. I took Devou Park Road up into Highland Heights, winding through sun-streaked, rolling acres of parkland to the bluffs that ring the city.

Sunset Avenue was on the very top of the tallest bluff an exclusive street with a spectacular view of the river and downtown Cincinnati. Unlike the upwardly mobile French Quarter houses of Riverside Drive, the homes on Sunset were older, more typically suburban, less fashionably modern ranch and splitlevel, fed by cement curlicues of driveway and surrounded by great green swatches of well-tended lawn. These were homes meant for family living -kids, dogs, pool parties, outdoor barbecues with the neighbors. The good life, circa 1960. Riverside was strictly eighties -self-contained, glitzy, easy to keep.

The differences struck me as significant, but then I was thinking about the difference between Meg Lessing's world and that of her son -a difference she'd seemingly discovered months before his death. There was no other way to account for the series of twohundred-dollar checks she'd authorized to Tom T. Chard -in Lessing's name. They might have been blackmail payoffs; they might have been hush money. But I had trouble believing that it was just good oldfashioned generosity that had impelled a woman like Meg Lessing to fork out two hundred bucks a week to a kid like Tommy T.

The fact that she'd paid the boy off with Lessing's funds, rather than using her own checkbook, was also interesting. It could have been that she'd wanted to disguise the extortion plausibly as charitable contributions -to protect herself and her son as well.

The woman's home was midway down the block, a split-level with a redwood deck in back, sprung above the cliff face like a diving board. The house proper was sided in cedar shingles that had weathered to a powdery pewter gray. A long driveway ran up to the front door, cutting across a bluegrass lawn whipped by the lazy loops of sprinklers. A plaster Negro jockey nestled in the grass near the front door, stiff and wild-eyed as a jackrabbit.

I parked the Pinto in the shade of a carport and walked up to the stoop.

I knocked, and a moment later Meg Lessing opened the door. Behind her a short hall opened onto a stark, sunlit living room, furnished gravely in ladder-back and linen. The room ended in a fieldstone wall with a fireplace built into it. Above the fireplace was a large painting of the woman standing with her hand on the shoulder of a burly silver-haired man -Meg Lessing and what I took to be her husband, Tom. The man in the portrait was smiling flaccidly, like a well-oiled drunk.

"I need to talk to you, Mrs. Lessing," I said to the woman.

She stared at me defiantly with those cold, stony eyes. Her fingers played nervously with the gold cross around her neck.

The past few months had clearly taken their toll on Meg Lessing, just as they had on her daughter-in-law. She'd lost a good deal of weight, enough for it to show in her face and figure. But she hadn't lost her bearings, as Janey had. She looked every bit as tough as she had on the night I'd first met her -the night that her son's bloody car had been found in the Terminal lot. It gave me pause to think that she'd known about Chard at that very moment -and hadn't said a word to me or to the police. In fact, she'd wanted me out of the case wanted to "keep it in the family."

"You have a lot of nerve coming here," the woman finally said in a clipped, angry voice. "I thought Don made it clear that your services weren't needed."

"You mean regarding Tom Chard?"

She didn't even blink when I mentioned the name. "Yes. If that's the boy you told Don about."

I shook my head. "C'mon, Mrs. Lessing. You didn't need me to tell you who Tommy Chard is."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do. And if you don't want the police crawling all over your son's life again, you'll quit lying about it."

"I'll call the police myself," the woman snapped. "And have them arrest you for trespassing."

"Do that, Mrs. Lessing, and you'll give me no choice. I'll have to go to the newspapers about the twohundred-dollar checks you gave Chard back in May."

For a split second the woman looked shocked, but she recovered immediately. "You wouldn't dare do that. You have no proof that I signed anything."

"You told Ira's secretary, Millie, to sign checks made out to Chard. I have Millie's testimony to that effect."

"The girl's mistaken," she said flatly.

I stared at her in amazement. "What is it that Chard's holding over you? It must be pretty terrible."
"I have no idea what you mean."

And suddenly I knew, just by looking at her -her sportive face, her iron-stiff posture, her country-club clothes, her spartan house, her husband's portrait on the wall, her world on Sunset Avenue- that Chard didn't need anything special to intimidate and manipulate Meg Lessing. All he'd needed was the truth about Ira.

I said, "When did Chard come to you, Mrs. Lessing? When did he tell you that your son was a homosexual?"

The woman's face turned beet-red and her mouth her whole face- started to tremble. "You bastard," she said in a deeply wounded voice. "You insufferable bastard. How dare you stand there -in front of my house- and make those kinds of accusations about me and my family? What do you know about me? What do you know about my life? You have no right to be here at all, you son-of-a-bitch!"

It was pointless to say that I hadn't blamed her for Ira's problem, because that was obviously the way she read it, as if her son's guilt were also her own guilt. And maybe it was so. Maybe she'd been living with a burden of guilt since Lessing was a boy. If Ira actually had been abused by his father, if Meg had known or suspected and done nothing about it . . . to keep face, to avoid scandal, to keep the marriage intact. It was a commonplace scenario, but it made me feel bad for the woman, standing there red-faced and biting back tears of rage. It made me feel bad for her in the same way I'd felt bad for Trumaine when he'd failed to rescue Janey.

"Mrs. Lessing," I said in a conciliatory voice, "I have no desire to hurt you or your family."

"Then why don't you leave us alone?" she said bitterly.

"You know why," I said. "You've been paying extortion to Chard. This spring. Perhaps this summer. And you're about to do it again."

"No," she said, shaking her head.

"Mrs. Lessing, I saw Len meet with Tom Chard in Lytle Park last night. I know that Chard is expecting a lot of money."

She clapped a hand to her mouth so violently that it made her wince. "You saw?"

I nodded. "If you're planning to pay him off, Mrs. Lessing, it's not going to do any good. Chard will keep coming back. Hasn't he done that already? And sooner or later someone else is going to get hurt. Do you want Len's death on your conscience?"

She winced again, but I didn't let up.

"Don't you understand that Chard may have killed your son? He may have killed Ira?"

She shook her head until she almost went cross-eyed. "No, no, no, no. He didn't do that. There is no evidence like that."

"Then why shield him?" I said. "Why pay him extortion?"

The woman slumped a little, leaning back heavily against the doorjamb. "Because of the -other one," she whispered. "So he won't testify for the other one."

"For Carnova?" I said, confused. "What could Chard say in Carnova's defense?"

But I knew the answer before I'd finished asking the question. I knew it without looking at the woman's flushed, shame-filled face.

"About the beat-freak business." I said it for her, feeling it fully, feeling her terror and embarrassment and disgust.

She didn't say anything. I don't think she could have spoken if she'd wanted to.

"You found out this spring?"

She nodded, almost imperceptibly.

"Chard came to you?"

She nodded again. "He had pictures," she said in a nauseated voice. "Polaroids."

"Christ," I said.

"What was I supposed to do?" the woman said, staring at me with naked bewilderment. "You can't ... believe such a thing. But the pictures . . . I paid him. I didn't tell Ira. How could I tell Ira?" Her face contracted with pain and tears began to roll down her cheeks.

"Ira found out?"

"That stupid girl," the woman said, brushing savagely at her tears. "That Millie -she told him. Ira came to me one afternoon. I didn't . . . the subject wasn't mentioned. At the end of the afternoon Ira told me that I needn't worry about Mr. Chard any longer. And I understood that he didn't want me to authorize any more checks. That was the only time he ever alluded to this thing."

I could tell that she was parsing the conversation, that whatever else had passed between her son and her -whatever guilt or recrimination- was being left out of the account. But in spite of the omissions I couldn't help thinking that that conversation with Mom must have stayed on Ira's mind: those checks, that painful afternoon -maybe the day he'd torn out of his calendar- spent talking to his mother, talking around the terrible truth.

"You didn't pay any more money to the boy after the meeting?"

"No, Ira . . . handled it on his own," she said stiffly. "That was how he wanted it. I respected his wishes." The woman's mouth curled into an angry frown. "Of course if he'd had someone else to share this with, a helpmate who was strong enough to lean on . . ."

Her voice died out and she glared at me.

It was obvious that Janey had been right -that Mrs. Lessing did blame her for what had happened to Ira.

"You didn't make out two more checks to the Lighthouse Clinic early in June?"

"No," the woman said firmly. "I didn't see Chard again until long after Ira's death. He swore that he had nothing to do with the murder."

"You believed him?" I said incredulously.

"Why would he kill Ira when Ira had been giving him all that money?"

She had a point, although Lessing had given money to Terry Carnova too. "Did Chard say why Carnova had done it?"

"He said that the other one was angry with him because of his relationship with Ira. He said that Carnova felt . . . jilted."
 
 

32

Before I left I asked Meg Lessing how long Len Trumaine had known about the extortion.

"I told him yesterday," the woman said. "Before that he didn't know a thing."

"Why did you decide to tell him?"

"Because of you, I think," the woman said with some bitterness. "The boy, Chard, was getting nervous. He thought someone was following him, trying to entrap him. He wanted to leave town. Yesterday morning he called me. He asked for a great deal of money -thousands of dollars. I couldn't . . . I needed Len to get that kind of money. Naturally, Len was suspicious, especially since you'd just talked to him that afternoon about the boy. I felt I had no choice but to tell him the truth."

There was a falsity in her voice -not in what she said, but in the way she said it, as if confiding in Trumaine wasn't a matter of circumstance but of design, as if she'd turned to him because she knew she could manipulate him with guilt and make him do just about anything. Len the errand boy.
I said, "Len paid him the money last night?"

She shook her head, no. "He wanted to talk to the boy first -to confirm what I had told him. You see it wasn't any easier for him to believe than it was for me.

I could imagine Trumaine's dismay. And I could also see him volunteering to do the dirty work. He would have seen it as his lot.

"When is the payoff to be made?" I asked.

"Sometime tonight, I think. Len didn't tell me all of it."

I backed away from the door. "I've got to find him."

"Mr. Stoner," the woman called out.

I looked over my shoulder at her. I thought maybe she was going to ask me to look after Trumaine. Instead, she said, "What I've told you . . . it will remain confidential?"

"Don't worry, Mrs. Lessing," I said, trying to mask my disgust. "It will."
 
 

I drove back down the hill to the city, straight to the plastics factory. Trumaine's Volvo was gone, and that worried me.

I parked on the street and went in the front door. Millie didn't smile at me this time, and that worried me too.

"What's wrong?" I said.

She bit her lip. "Mr. T.'s on the warpath. Guess I shouldn'ta opened my big mouth."

"You told him that you'd talked to me about the checks made out to Chard?"

She nodded. "I thought you said you was gonna try to help him."