Silent Witness (5 page)

Bernhardt strode to the large window that offered a view of the Saint Stephen village square. The vista evoked a calmer, gentler era: a city hall built of stone, a life-size verdigris statue of Saint Stephen, the town’s namesake. And, yes, there was a muzzle-loading Civil War cannon. The pyramid of cannon balls beside the cannon recalled one of Bernhardt’s earliest frustrations. His grandfather had once rented a house in Bucks County for the summer. On their first trip to the village for groceries, his mother had taken him to the town square. Transfixed, he’d stared at the cannon, which had symbolized, perhaps, his first realization that, yes, might made right, like it or not. He’d turned to the cannon balls stacked beside the cannon, and tried to dislodge the topmost ball, unsuccessfully. He’d never known why the moment of sharp disillusionment had remained in his memory, but he suspected it had to do with an early loss of innocence. His mother had—

He heard an intercom buzzer. Expectantly, he turned, watching the sour-mouthed lady officer lift her phone, listen, nod, say something cryptic and replace the phone in its cradle. As she frowned at him, Bernhardt realized that, without the generous application of black eyebrow pencil, her eyebrows would not exist. Or, if they did indeed exist in their natural state, they would have softened the face, doubtless an undesirable option.

She gestured to the frosted glass door marked
SHERIFF FOWLER,
and nodded. Bernhardt’s patience had been rewarded. Plainly, his pleasure caused the lady officer mild consternation.

Dressed in a tan uniform, Sheriff Fowler sat behind a large steel desk that was strewn with piles of papers, each pile secured by a paperweight. Grossly overweight, Fowler’s body bulged on either side of his swivel chair’s armrests. As Bernhardt introduced himself he stepped forward, signifying that he sought to shake hands. Ignoring the gesture, Fowler grunted once, wetly, and gestured to a chair placed beside his desk. As Bernhardt took his seat he played the secret game he always played when he met a fat man: mentally stripping away the fat from the face and neck to divine the true nature of the face beneath. The younger Fowler, he decided—the much younger Fowler—must have had a choirboy’s face. His lips were pursed in a cupid’s bow, his china-blue eyes were round and guileless, his nose was cherubic. Even in this overweight incarnation, the flesh that covered the fat was smooth and clear and pink. Even Fowler’s bald pate was a glowing pink, fringed with finely spun brown hair.

Bernhardt opened his wallet to show his license, then took Janice Hale’s letter from an inside pocket. He unfolded the letter, leaned forward, placed it on the desk. Before he turned his attention to the letter, Fowler let a long moment of silence pass as he stared at Bernhardt, playing the eye contact game. Finally, inscrutably, Fowler grunted again, then took a pair of heavy black-rimmed reading glasses from his center drawer. As he read the letter, his lips moved. Finally finished, he pushed the letter across the desk to Bernhardt. After another round of hard eye contact, another draw, Fowler shrugged his large, pudgy shoulders. “I guess,” he said, “that we can start by you asking me questions. I’ll tell you what I can. What I can’t answer, I won’t.” His voice was thick, clogged with phlegm. Sunk deep in the porcine face, his eyes were small and shrewd. Plainly, Fowler was nobody’s fool.

A disarming aw-shucks approach, Bernhardt decided, was the only tactic that could possibly succeed. Playing the big-city private detective role would never work, not with the taciturn, Buddha-size despot across the desk, bulging in his chair. Although sparsely populated, Benedict County included dozens of rural retreats owned by the idle rich. Saint Stephen, population six thousand, was Benedict County’s only town of any consequence. Earlier in the day Bernhardt had called Lieutenant Peter Friedman, cocommander of San Francisco’s homicide detail, Bernhardt’s indispensable law enforcement mole. Friedman confirmed that Fowler had presided over Benedict County for almost twenty years. In that time, Friedman said, Fowler had learned all the tricks the rich can play—and had devised some tricks of his own. No one messed with Fowler, Friedman said. His power was absolute.

“I guess,” Bernhardt began, “that I’m only looking for two things—how the murder came down, from your point of view, and whether you have a suspect.”

Fowler’s sparse eyebrows drew together, affecting a tactical puzzlement. “When you say ‘my point of view,’ what’s that mean, exactly?”

“It means what you think happened,” Bernhardt answered. “And why.”

“Well, now, I have to tell you, Mr. Bernhardt, I don’t go in much for theorizing. That’s uptown stuff, according to my way of doing things. I just try to stick to the facts and leave the theorizing to others, if they’re so inclined.”

“Of course,” Bernhardt answered. “I—obviously, I go along with that.” Aware that, already, he was on the defensive, he cleared his throat, began again: “What I meant was that—”

“We got the call about one-thirty on Saturday morning, June seventeenth, if I recall correctly,” Fowler said, smoothly interrupting. “Maybe it was quarter to two, I’d have to check. It was Dennis Price, and he said he thought his wife was dead, that someone had killed her. I was home at the time, of course, sleeping. Time I got dressed, and called Roy Parker, who’s my captain, and got out to the Price place, it was probably two-thirty. Roy was already there, and so was an ambulance, from Santa Rosa General, that’s the closest hospital. Roy was outside the house, waiting for me. Price and Al Martelli—he’s Price’s foreman, at the winery—they were inside the house, downstairs, in the living room. John—that’s the Price’s little boy—he was with them. Both Price and Martelli had guns—a rifle and a shotgun. Are you familiar with the layout, out there?”

“No. I thought I should come here first, check with you.”

“Ah—” As Fowler nodded approval, his chin disappeared in rolls of flesh. “Yes. So noted.”

Bernhardt was careful to smile, an exercise in calculated self-effacement. Thank God for all the acting lessons.

“The way it’s laid out,” Fowler said, “the main house—a big, three-story redwood-and-shingle house—is back maybe two hundred feet from the county road. There’s a garage, and a couple of outbuildings there, all very nice, very rustic. The house was built by Avery Weston, the writer. There’s a rise in back of the house, and that’s where the winery is, behind that rise. It’s not much of a winery. They do maybe ten thousand cases a year. The vineyard itself is about forty acres, if I’m not mistaken. Mostly chardonnay grapes. Al Martelli’s house is behind the rise, about a quarter mile from the main house, I’d say. You can’t see the winery from the house, and you can’t see the house from the road, either, because there’s a screen of trees planted beside the road. Well—” Suddenly Fowler coughed: a hard, wracking cough. Was it a smoker’s cough? Bernhardt looked for ashtrays, saw none.

“Well,” Fowler continued, “Roy gave me the rundown, and I put in a call for the coroner to come out, and Cliff Benson—he’s our D.A.—I called him, too, of course. Cliff and I decided we’d talk to Price, while Al Martelli looked after the boy. Roy, meanwhile, was seeing to the pictures, and fingerprints, and all those things. Preserving the chain of evidence, in other words.

“It all seemed pretty straightforward, what happened. And the physical evidence—forensics, et cetera—all pretty much tell the same story. Mrs. Price and the boy had been down south, visiting relatives and going to Disneyland. They got home at maybe eleven-thirty or twelve, we never were able to determine the time for sure. Apparently Mrs. Price took the bags out of the car, and put them in the entry hall of the house. Then she got John out of the car, probably. Price speculated that John fell asleep in the car, and Mrs. Price carried him into the living room, and put him down on the couch. She probably intended to go upstairs where the bedrooms are, and wake Price up, and get him to carry John upstairs, to bed. Anyhow, she obviously left John downstairs, asleep on a sofa, while she went upstairs, to the master bedroom. Price wasn’t there, he was sleeping in another bedroom. Al Martelli was in his house, in bed with a lady friend, as it turned out. And Maria—that’s the Prices’ Mexican cook—she was asleep in her room over the garage, which is a good distance from the main house. So the rest is pure speculation, since Price didn’t wake up until after the murder was actually committed, apparently, and neither Martelli nor the Mexican woman heard anything. But it seems pretty obvious that Mrs. Price surprised a burglar. There was a struggle—a sizable struggle by the look of the room. Mrs. Price was apparently an athlete, a first-class tennis player, and swimmer, by all accounts, so she would’ve been capable of putting up quite a fight. But when it was over, she was dead. Whoever it was hit her with the fireplace tongs, and she probably died within a few minutes, the coroner said.”

“And Price didn’t hear a thing?” Deliberately, Bernhardt gave the question a skeptical accent.

Fowler shrugged, then glanced pointedly at his watch. As if he’d lost interest in the proceedings, he allowed his voice to go flat, his eyes to wander to the littered desk and the work that awaited. “He heard something, no question, but he didn’t know what it was he actually heard; that’s the way it seemed to me. He’s a real heavy sleeper, he says. But, of course, he
did
wake up, eventually, and he investigated.”

“And you believed him, accepted his account of what happened.”

Fowler shrugged again, obviously a chronic habit. “There’s nothing to contradict what he said. Still isn’t, as far as that goes.”

“Was anything stolen?”

“No,” Fowler answered. “Nothing.”

“Were the drawers ransacked?”

“No.”

“So if it was a burglar, Mrs. Price must’ve surprised him when he’d just gotten there.”

Fowler nodded.

“But—” Pretending puzzlement, Bernhardt frowned. Speaking hesitantly, as if he would certainly need help to finish the thought, he said, “But this doesn’t sound right, Sheriff. I mean, first, we’ve got a burglar—or a prowler, whatever—who’s just broken in, for whatever reason. He’s upstairs, when he hears a car drive up, and hears someone enter the house, downstairs. Wouldn’t it be logical that he would have gotten out then? It sounds like he’d’ve had plenty of time, seeing that Mrs. Price probably made a couple of trips to the car.”

Projecting long-suffering patience, Fowler grunted. “When you say ‘logical,’ you blow the whole thing. Prowlers—burglars—don’t do things logically. Some of them, for instance, get their rocks off hot-prowling—running the risk that someone’ll wake up, and catch them. That’s why they’re so dangerous. They work so close that when they get caught, they’re all ready with the knife—or the fireplace tongs. Same thing with sex offenders. It isn’t the sex per se they’re after. It’s the high they get when the victim struggles.”

“Was there any indication that the killer might’ve been a rapist?”

Fowler shook his head. “Nope. All the victim’s clothing was intact. It was torn, because of the struggle. But it was intact. There wasn’t any semen, either. Not inside her, not on her clothes. Whatever it was, it wasn’t sex.”

“What’d you think it was, Sheriff?” Bernhardt asked quietly. “You, personally?”

Fowler sat silently for a moment, staring at Bernhardt. For a moment it seemed that he might be willing to speculate, one-on-one. But the moment passed, punctuated by another grunt, this one more decisive, signifying that the conversation was almost finished. “I already told you I don’t deal in theories. It’s a sucker’s game.”

Accepting the autocratic disclaimer, resigned, Bernhardt nodded. Then: “Have you turned up any suspects?”

“Afraid not. We talked to a couple of drifters, and a few local characters who’re mean enough or crazy enough to’ve done it, but we didn’t turn up anything.”

“What about fingerprints? Blood types? Any match-ups from the computer in Sacramento?”

Fowler shook his head. “There was lots of blood, but it was all the victim’s type. As for fingerprints—” He shook his head. “So far, nothing. There wasn’t any flesh under her fingernails, either, nothing easy like that.”

“So—” Deliberately, Bernhardt let a calculated beat pass. Then, deftly planting the barb, he said, “So are you pretty much waiting to see what happens next?”

Fowler’s china-blue eyes seemed to grow visibly smaller. Sunk in the smooth pink flesh of his cheeks and chin, his cupid’s mouth stirred, gently up-curving. Except for the coldness around the eyes, it might have been a smile. Fowler’s voice was very soft. “We plan to find the killer, Mr. Bernhardt. We aren’t waiting. We’re watching.”

Signifying that he was about to leave, Bernhardt moved forward in his chair as he said, “I just have one more question, Sheriff.”

“Oh?” Grunting, this time with the effort it required, Fowler leaned forward to grasp the contents of his “in” basket, which he began spreading out on the littered desk.

“Is Dennis Price a suspect?”

“Naturally,” Fowler answered. “The husband’s always the number-one suspect.”

“But you aren’t—” He hesitated, once more searching for the phrase. “But you aren’t leaning on Price, I gather.”

“As to that,” Fowler answered, “I have no comment.” He forked the black-rimmed reading glasses to his temples. Mouth pursed, eyes even smaller behind the glasses, he began reading. As before, his lips moved.

W
ITH THE SUN SINKING
toward the ridge of hills to the west, the light was softening. Between the pines and the oaks that shielded the Price home from the two-lane macadam county road that bordered the property, the late afternoon sunlight was slanting golden through the tree trunks. As Bernhardt down-shifted the Corolla, a fragment of memory flashed: summer camp in the Berkshires: the long, fragrant summer evenings, the mountains to the west turning purple as the sunset above them turned golden. Were those the best times of his life? Sometimes he thought they were. Every summer, the same group of noisy kids clustered around the Camp Chippewa sign in Grand Central Station. They piled into a decrepit train and began the journey to the Berkshires. With every mile, as inhibitions fell away, the volume of youthful voices rose. Camp Chippewa … his mother with her dancing … his grandparents with the big house in Jersey … his own huge room in his mother’s loft …
The Nutcracker,
during the holidays … they all defined him. Several times he’d tried to write about it all, a one-act play, a slice of life, maybe beginning at Grand Central Station, maybe on the train, to save a scene change, all those raucous kids, most of them Jewish. Even so young, some of them only seven or eight, they played the “What’s your father do?” game. He’d felt uneasy, somehow, that his father had been a bombardier, killed in the war. All the other kids had fathers who went to offices and had secretaries.