Passion, Betrayal and Killer Highlights (33 page)

An uneasy silence fell over the room, Leah turned to me and Anatoly. “Do you think he’s come to tell me that I’m no longer a suspect?”

Anatoly stood up, his expression serious. “There’s only one way to find out.”

Leah pressed the button to release the door, and in the blink of an eye Lorenzo was standing in my doorway, a uniformed officer at his side.

“Ms. Leah Miller—” his tone was cool with disdain “—you’re under arrest for the murder of Bob Miller.”

“W-what?” Leah stammered. “But I don’t understand…”

The other officer took a pair of handcuffs out and started reading her her rights.

“Wait a minute.” I stepped forward and looked desperately from Leah to Lorenzo. “You can’t arrest her, she didn’t do anything!”

“She killed her husband,” Lorenzo said blandly.

I glanced at Leah. She had lost so much color, she could have passed as white. “Listen, don’t worry about this,” I said lamely. “There’s obviously been some kind of mistake. I’ll call a lawyer and we’ll work this whole thing out.”

Jerome stepped up behind me as Leah lowered her head so that her hair hid her face. “This ain’t gonna hold, Leah,” Jerome said. “These cops are desperate for an arrest and they probably dug up some circumstantial shit to get one. It’ll be thrown out of court in no time.”

“But the hair,” Leah whispered to Jerome in a voice I barely recognized as hers. “You said it was Cheryl’s hair.”

Anatoly stepped forward Don’t say anything, Leah. We’ll go over everything when we have an attorney present.”

Leah looked up, and Jerome smiled at her. “Girl, you’re gonna be fine. You just keep a stiff upper lip and these cops will be unlocking those cuffs in no time.”

Leah tried to smile back but she clearly couldn’t manage it.

Lorenzo nodded at the other officer, who had finished with the rights. “Time to go.”

I stood there, immobilized, as I watched them take my sister away. The sound of the front door to my building opening and then slamming shut jarred me out of my shock.

“I have to follow them,” I said, reaching for my purse. “She can’t be alone.”

I was halfway out the door when Anatoly grabbed me by the arm and stopped me. “You’re forgetting something.”

“I’ll call a lawyer from my cell on the drive over.” I tried to pull my arm free but Anatoly’s grip was iron.

“I’m not talking about the lawyer.”

The sound of a cry came from down the hallway. My eyes widened and I looked at Anatoly in horror.

Anatoly nodded without breaking eye contact. “That’s right, you have a child to think about now.”

CHAPTER 16

If God only gives us what we can handle, why are there so many suicides?

—Words To Die By

T
o say that the next hour was chaotic would be an understatement. I called the police station and found out where I would need to go to see Leah. Then I did the most difficult thing of all. I called Mama. Calming her down was a major challenge because I was far from calm myself. But she did have the presence of mind to recommend a lawyer that she knew from her synagogue. Anatoly held my hand and reminded me to breathe as I relayed the whole saga to the attorney over the phone.

Surprisingly, the person who kept Jack under control through it all was Jerome. He simply took him into the guest room with some wooden spoons, pots and pans and taught him how to be his own one-man band. Normally I wouldn’t have been thrilled with this noisy child-care technique but at that moment I was just thankful not to have my nephew underfoot.

By the time I was off the phone, Mama was at my door. It took a little effort but I convinced her to stay at my place with Jack rather than accompany Anatoly and me to the jail. Her arguments that Leah might be feeling the need for a little maternal love were not completely unfounded, but it was also unrealistic to assume Leah would be able to deal with Mama’s hysterics while she was barely keeping it together herself, and a jail was certainly no place for Jack.

In the end I decided to let Jerome stay with Mama and help her with Jack, and Anatoly and I left to try to see Leah. Without argument, I let Anatoly drive my car.

Thankfully he wasn’t overly conservative about the speed issue. “We’re going to figure this out,” he assured me as he weaved in and out of traffic.

“But this doesn’t make sense!” I said as I searched my purse for Advil. “They didn’t arrest her before because they wanted time to build their case, so why arrest her now? Why would they risk losing in court just so they could rush the arrest of a woman for what is being described as a crime of passion? She’s not a flight risk and she’s obviously not a danger to others.”

“It’s possible they found something new or…”

“Or what?” I gave up on the Advil and threw my purse on the floor of the Audi. “Are Lorenzo and his fellow officers just trying to make all our lives miserable? Does he get off on seeing newly widowed mothers in handcuffs? What?”

“Maybe they think she
is
a danger to others.”

“Who would she be a threat to? It’s not like she has other husbands around town cheating on her, and she’s kept her distance from Bianca.”

“Sophie, just because the hair didn’t match Leah’s doesn’t mean that they didn’t find something else in Erika’s house that linked Leah to the crime scene. A fingerprint, maybe a broken nail—there are lots of things a forensics team could have turned up.”

A fresh wave of panic washed over me. “She broke a nail while we were there. She said so and I totally forgot about it.”

I turned to Anatoly, hoping that he would tell me my oversight wasn’t as earth-shatteringly awful as I suspected. His expression offered no such assurances.

I brought my fingers to my temples and tried to stave off the migraine that was forming. Right now Leah was being treated like a violent criminal. They would put her in a cell with the other violent criminals. I fought back a sob as I thought about the body search that she would have to endure. How could any of this be happening? And then there was Jack to think about! I couldn’t deal with him on a good day—how was I supposed to manage him full-time while sorting through all this?

Anatoly glanced over at me. “Don’t overthink the situation. We need to take this one step at a time.”

“You know when the guys in AA came up with that slogan they were thinking of beating alcohol and drug addictions, not murder raps.”

“Did that lawyer say whether or not he was coming down to the station?”

“Posthaste.” I sighed.

“Can I ask why you didn’t bring an attorney on board before this?”

I looked out at the cars in the lane next to us. “I don’t know—I guess I wanted to take my time researching people to make sure I retained the best guy for the job.” That was another lie. I had postponed hiring a lawyer because I didn’t want to acknowledge the possibility that Leah would need one. Here I had been yelling at Leah for not facing the realities of her situation, while I hadn’t been willing to face them myself.

Anatoly pulled into a garage and parked his car on the second floor. Next to us a tan Mercedes pulled in. The driver was a man with a pudgy face, a high forehead and wire-rimmed glasses. “That’s Timothy Weis, Leah’s lawyer.” I offered him a halfhearted smile and wave.

Anatoly blinked. “That was fast.”

“His wife is the woman who performed Jack’s bris and she loves my mom. She’d expect Timothy to go out of his way to help her daughter.”

“So you think his wife’s expectations are enough to motivate him to get here less than forty minutes from the time you called to retain him?”

I gave Anatoly a withering look. “If your wife was trained in the art of slicing up penises and she asked you to do something, would you do it?”

Anatoly paused, then nodded. “Yes. Yes, I believe I would do it very quickly.”

We got out of the car and greeted Timothy. I had met him on three or four occasions and he had never struck me as a force to be reckoned with, but his track record was phenomenal. Mama had even told me that he was considered to be one of the top twenty criminal attorneys in the country.

The three of us slowly walked together to the Civic Center jailhouse and went over the important facts about the case once again.

“The evidence is circumstantial but there’s a lot of it,” Timothy said as we approached the front steps. “The one thing she has going for her is Cheryl.”

“You mean the hair they found,” I said, looking around to make sure no one could overhear us.

“We don’t even know that the hair exists.” Timothy stopped and pulled from his pocket a small black cloth, which he used to clean his glasses. “We can’t base a case on the unnamed source of a severely biased reporter.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Then how is Cheryl a help?”

“The comments she made on television. In two minutes of airtime Cheryl changed Leah’s status from villainess to victim. Leah couldn’t have gotten better results if she had retained a private publicist.”

“But you’re talking about public opinion,” I said. “That won’t help Leah in a courtroom.”

“Public opinion can always help, or hurt, as the case may be. If this Jerome fellow really wants to put out pro-Leah propaganda, then I say we give him as much ammunition as possible.” He adjusted his glasses again. “I’m going to talk to the police and see what they’ve got.”

Timothy left us with instructions to wait for him in the lobby, so Anatoly and I found a few chairs and took seats. For a long time we sat silently side by side. Anatoly seemed deep in thought. Hopefully he was thinking of a solution to this mess. Personally all my focus was on repressing a panic attack. And if
I
was fighting off a breakdown I could only imagine what Leah’s state of mind must be. I turned to Anatoly.

“What if Leah says or does something to turn the other inmates against her?”

“She’ll be fine. Remember, she’s going to a holding cell, not prison—not yet, anyway.”

I smacked his arm. “Not
ever.
”

Anatoly sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “We need to provide the police with other likely suspects immediately. We need proof that Taylor was sleeping with Bob.”

“What about Erika—do you think they know about her relationship with him?”

“I have no idea. Considering what happened to her it might be better if they don’t. It will just complicate things.”

“Complicate things? Are you kidding?” I let out a hysterical laugh. “How much more complicated can all this get? Bob’s dead, his gun is missing. We’ve been interviewing everyone who’s had any kind of relationship with him, and the only thing we’ve learned is that while alive Bob had the libido of a rabbit in heat. In the meantime there are minority activist groups that are on the brink of rioting, and Jack is on the brink of losing both his parents.”

“Are you familiar with the expression ‘things can only get better’?”

“Of course, I’m familiar with it. Are you saying that things are going to start looking up?”

“No, I was about to say that the expression is a blatant lie. Things can always get worse, and they can always get more complicated.”

“That’s your way of cheering me up?” I shook my head, mystified. “Tell me, Anatoly, have you ever considered writing one of those
Chicken Soup
books?”

“I’m just saying that the police’s case against Leah isn’t as strong as it could be, and if we just dig a little deeper we might be able to dismantle it altogether.”

“God, I hope you’re right,” I whispered.

Anatoly studied me for a beat, then put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me to him. I rested my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes.

“You know, Sophie, if you need to…”

“No, I don’t want to cry.”

“All right, then let’s use the time productively.” He gently stroked my hair. “I’ve been thinking about Cheryl’s apartment.”

“What about it?”

“You made a comment about how she wouldn’t be able to afford it now that she’s unemployed. My question is, how was she able to afford it in the first place?”

“Well, she was working two jobs for a while there—front desk at the Ritz and Gatsby and of course the hotel union wage rates are high.” I tapped my toe against the ground. “On the other hand she was obviously spending a lot of money on knickknacks and her place was pretty nice—it can’t be much smaller than mine.”

“And the neighborhood is just as nice as ours,” Anatoly added. “My apartment is a lot smaller and I pay twenty-five hundred a month.”

“I pay the same, but I’ve been there for almost ten years so I have rent control on my side. But Cheryl just moved into her place, so she must be paying top dollar.”

“So let’s say the rent is around three thousand, and she was only working part-time at the Gatsby, so even when she was working two jobs she couldn’t have been making more than forty-five thousand a year gross.”

I lifted my head from his shoulder. “Anatoly, maybe Bob was giving Cheryl hush money. Maybe he was paying her not to tell people about Taylor. Or maybe
Taylor
was paying her. That would explain why she was so shocked when she learned Taylor had confessed to the affair.”

“Maybe,” Anatoly said slowly. “But Cheryl wasn’t the only one living beyond her means.”

“You’re thinking about Bob. Yeah, he was definitely living large.”

Anatoly nodded. “Fifty thousand dollars is a lot to blow on one bracelet.”

“My ex-husband might have splurged on something like that, but then again, my ex-husband uses the lottery as an alternative to a 401K plan.”

“But then there’s the bracelet he bought for Erika, that was six thousand, and then the necklace he got Leah—how much was that worth?”

“It was in the fifty thousand range.”

“So he spent just under a hundred and ten thousand dollars on jewelry in the course of—what, a month? Two? Was Bob making that kind of money?”

“After he was promoted last year, Leah told me that they were making four hundred thousand a year. But they have a huge mortgage, and then there’s the car payments….”

I looked up to see Timothy approaching, and I jumped to my feet. “What took you so long? It’s been like—” I looked at my watch “—thirty-five years!”