The Judgment (15 page)

But that’s not how she took it: “Charley, I refuse to talk about a case that’s under investigation. There’re a lot of people who think it’s crazy for a cop and a lawyer to
get together. I’ve been warned about it. If we’re going to continue and, you know, move ahead, then we’ve just got to keep our professional lives separate. Can you understand that?”

I nodded, managed a smile, and said, “Suits me.”

“Have you got any aspirin?”

“As I recall, Alka-Seltzer works better. I’ll get you some. But you’d better get dressed, Sue. You don’t want to be late. It wouldn’t be professional.”

On the drive back to her car, I pointed out that Lee Higgins and Catherine Quigley were the same age and must have been in the same class in school. Did they know each other? What else did they have in common? I suggested this might bear looking into. Although Sue didn’t say anything, she must have heard. It was her silence that told me this case was getting to her.

I got to the office that morning with just enough time before Mrs. Fenton came in to have one of those call-me-from-a-pay-phone conversations with Mark Conroy. I dialed his home number to put the process in motion, and just as before, his wife answered. Without identifying myself, I asked to speak to her husband.

“Is this Sloan?” she asked. “Charles Sloan, his lawyer?”

There was no point in lying. There was no reason why she shouldn’t know.

There was a pause of a minute or two, and then Conroy came on the line. “Mark Conroy here.” It was his professional voice.

“You know who this is. Give me a call.”

He sighed. “Okay. Same routine?”

“Same routine.”

Without another word, he hung up. I replaced the receiver and got ready to wait.

Theoretically, the sort of small-town, full-service law office I run offers something known as estate planning. I write a lot of wills, and I’m supposed to know enough tax
law to help people protect their bequests. No problem there. I subscribe to a service out of Skokie, Illinois, that keeps me up to date on that stuff—Federal and state. I read it as it comes through, then file it away for future reference in the looseleaf binders they provide. But estate planning also presumes my ability to give a certain amount of financial advice. Having blazed through three small fortunes in the course of three large divorces, I have reason to doubt my own competence in this area. I’m frank to my clients about my limitations and usually send them across town to Milt Hoffman, C.P.A., but you’d be surprised at the number of people who’d just as soon have me tell them what to do. I feel a certain responsibility toward them, and so lately I’ve been doing what I can to learn more. There are journals I take and a couple of basic texts recommended by Milt that I’ve read. I go through
The Wall Street Journal
every day. In other words, I try to keep up.

All of which will go to explain how, when I reached over and picked up the latest copy of
Financial Planning
to thumb its contents during the few minutes that it would take Mark Conroy to get to a pay phone, I wound up spending half an hour with it. I read an article on the current situation in municipal bonds—not good, it seems. I started another article, this one on the decline of the once-good-as-gold blue-chip stocks. About three quarters of the way through it, I heard the telephone on Mrs. Fen-ton’s desk ring, and a moment later, I got her buzz on the intercom.

“It’s the
assistant
chief,” she said. “He didn’t say, but I recognized his voice.”

“Put him through, Mrs. Fenton.”

There was a click as she made the switch. “This is Sloan,” I said. Although I checked my watch as I spoke just to see how long he’d kept me waiting, there was no edge in my voice. Just good old matter-of-fact Charley.

“Mark Conroy. You …” He hesitated. “You wanted
me to call. Is this going to take another trip out to Pickeral Point?”

“I don’t really think so. I just wanted to give you a report on yesterday.”

“What kind of a report?”

“On Mary Margaret Tucker.”

“What about her?” He sounded suspicious, more than suspicious—almost hostile.

“I found her.”

“Oh?”

“It didn’t take much effort,” I said. “I don’t know where she’s staying, but she’s going to classes every day. Something tells me that you could have found her, or the prosecutor could have, or your friends. But since I’m talking to you, let me ask you, why didn’t you look?”

“Maybe I didn’t care. Maybe I figured it was her business if she wanted to go off and hide someplace.”

“She might be able to do you some good.”

“Or she might be able to hurt me.”

“Well, either way, you or anyone else can reach her. I’ve got her schedule. All you have to do is wait outside the door until class lets out. That’s what I did. If you want, I’ll drop it in the mail.”

“Keep it,” he said. “Hold on to it. Maybe sometime down the line …”

“I got something from her,” I said.

“What do you mean? You got what?”

“A name. She mistook me for somebody else.”

There was a long pause at the other end of the phone. “All right,” said Conroy, “what’s the name?”

“Timmerman,” I said. “Mean anything to you?”

If that last pause seemed long, this one was endless. I got the feeling that I’d given him the verbal equivalent of a deep right into the midsection. I waited him out. “Maybe it does,” he said at last. “I know somebody by that name. I’ll have to consider the possibility of a relationship of some kind between them.”

“Do that,” I said. “And let me know what you come up with.”

I meant that to wind things up, but Mark Conroy had something more in mind. “I’ve got a question for yow,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Earlier, when you called, my wife answered.”

“That’s right.”

“She knew it was you. What did you two talk about?”

“Nothing. I just asked for you, and eventually you came on the line.”

“You haven’t had any conversations with her when I wasn’t around?”

“None whatsoever. What’s this all about, Conroy?”

Again he was silent for what seemed like a long time but was probably only about half a minute. He seemed to be making up his mind about something. Was he rational? Most men, under the same strain, would have shown signs of unsteadiness by this time. How long could he maintain this facade of cold composure indefinitely?

“She and I had a discussion just after you called about plea bargaining. She argued strongly for it, and I wondered if she’d gotten some encouragement in that direction from you. I made it clear to her and I’ll make it clear to you, Sloan, that any sort of plea bargain is out, repeat
out!
I’m not copping a plea for something I didn’t do. Get it?”

“Okay, all right, but I want it understood, too, that I haven’t had any discussions with your wife, and I haven’t encouraged her to talk about plea bargaining or anything else with you. Is that understood?”

“I guess so,” he said sullenly.

As I hung up, I couldn’t help wondering what, exactly, Mark Conroy could possibly be thinking.

All the way to Hub City I debated whether I was doing the right thing. I was sure about the pretext of my visit. Since I’d known the Higgins family and done work for
them, it seemed no more than proper that I offer to help out now. From the way Sue had described their state, it seemed likely that they were too stunned by their son’s murder to even consider the legal and financial aspects surrounding it. My only fear was that I might be intruding. But when I called ahead, Frank Higgins assured me Pd be welcome.

What worried me a little and played at my conscience was that once I got there, I meant to ask Frank and Betty a few questions. Nothing harsh or hostile, nothing they could object to. They were just the questions I’d tried to interest Sue Gillis in earlier that same morning. It seemed significant to me that Lee Higgins and Catherine Quigley were about the same age, that they might have been in the same class in school, that they might have known each other. Why Sue had been indifferent to all this I couldn’t say, though it was probably because of that footprint she’d found at the crime scene.

They were good, reasonable questions, but I had no real need to know the answers. I am a firm believer in leaving the police work to the police and the detecting to the detectives. Lawyers must often, by necessity, deal with the facts of a crime but not until they’re invited in. I hadn’t been invited, but it was more than curiosity that drove me on. It was that awful image of the child in the snow. Wrapped head to foot in plastic, like a life-sized doll or an undersized mannequin left by the side of the road. The Higgins boy must have looked just like that, too.

The house Frank and Betty Higgins had bought two years ago was on a street of large houses. I pulled up at the right address and as I got out of my car, it occurred to me I’d never been inside the place before, or even seen it. The closing had been held in my office in Pickeral Point. It was an odd-shaped barn of a place, a two-story frame house in the grand old style. As I climbed the steps to the porch, the front door opened, and Frank stood there in the entrance. It was the face I had put together with the voice on the phone. But the life had been squeezed right
out of it. He offered his hand, and I shook it. Hard and rough, it was a carpenter’s hand.

“It was good of you to come, Mr. Sloan.” His voice was hollow.

“Charley,” I said. “Please call me Charley. This is no time for formality.”

“Come on in.”

He turned away, leaving me to shut the door, and led the way into an old-fashioned parlor just off the hall. He gestured to a chair and sat on a two-cushioned sofa nearby.

“Frank,” I began, “as I said on the telephone, I’m sure there’s paperwork of one kind and another connected with your son’s death. If you’d like me to handle it for you—pro bono, at no cost—I will. I suppose there’s an insurance policy?”

“Not on Lee, just on me.”

“But your dependent children are probably covered for modest benefits, too. In most life policies they are. Do you have it on hand?”

“Betty’s looking for it now. To tell you the truth, we hadn’t given any thought to it at all. It’s all been just too much.”

“I’m sure it has. It’s a terrible thing, Frank, the worst trouble people can have.”

I listened to the words I’d just said to Frank and realized how insignificant they sounded. My God, what could be worse than the death of a child? Parents were not supposed to bury their children. It was against the natural order of things.

I remembered my friends Larry and Laura Rayburn and how they almost went crazy after their twelve-year-old daughter was killed by a drunk driver. Who could blame them? And now here were poor Frank and Betty Higgins confronting not only the death of their little boy Lee but also having to confront the perverse and inexplicable manner in which he was murdered.

“Yeah,” he said bleakly, as though he had run out of
words. “There’s some other stuff, a form that the cops wanted us to fill out. I don’t know, Betty may find—” He broke off. “Can I ask you a question? Why’re you doing this?”

“It beats a sympathy card.”

“It sure does. I’ll never tell another lawyer joke as long as I live.”

Just then there were steps on the stairs, and a moment later Betty Higgins entered the room. Her eyes were vacant and in her hand were two or three envelopes. I rose to meet her. Frank straightened up and made room for her on the couch. She preferred to stand, obviously in a state of shock.

“Now this,” she said, dispensing with any sort of greeting or small talk, “is the insurance policy on Frank. It didn’t occur to me to look for anything on the kids in it. You don’t expect…”

“Of course not. I understand.”

She looked at me severely as she handed it over. “Well, I should have thought to check. This funeral is setting us back some. God knows we can use anything we’re entitled to.”

“I’m sure you can.”

Determined to soldier on, she offered me another envelope. “This one is the Victim Report that the county police asked for. They just want details on Lee, I suppose. I don’t know why. It’s not like he was a missing person or a runaway. Now this one, I don’t know what it is, but it looks official, and, well, that’s it. That’s all we have to give you, I guess.” It was as though she couldn’t stop herself from rattling on.

That last envelope was from the attorney general’s office of the State of Michigan; I noted that it hadn’t been opened. Maybe they kept Victim Reports, too. What good does it do, all this paperwork? They had to get their statistics someplace, I supposed.

Betty Higgins looked like she wanted me out of there.

I didn’t blame her for that. But still, I hoped to ask those questions. Maybe I could ease them into it.

“I wonder if I could have some basic information on Lee,” I said. “It might save a phone call later on.”

Frank patted the seat next to him on the sofa, and his wife marched over and sat down, rigidly erect, her hands clasped tightly on her knees.

“What was Lee’s full name?”

“Lee Thomas Higgins.”

“Thomas was my father’s name,” Frank volunteered.

“Date of birth?”

He was seven years and two months old.

I took them through all the routine details—place of birth, height, weight, number of siblings, and so on—and I wrote it all down in my pocket notebook in a businesslike way, a question following each answer, taking it as far as I could. Then I looked up at them, frowning, and asked, “Lee was just seven?”

“Just seven,” said Betty. Frank nodded.

“The little girl who was murdered, Catherine Quigley, she was just seven, too. They must have been in the same grade in school. Did he ever mention her? Were they friends?”

Mother and father looked at each other, both puzzled. Then they shook their heads in unison.

“Did they have the same teacher?”

“I don’t know,” said Betty, “you’d have to check. Lee’s teacher was Miss Dieberman. He liked her.”

“But he never mentioned Catherine Quigley?”

“No.”

“And you don’t know the family?”

“Nope,” Frank answered. “They live clear on the other side of town. And they’ve only been here about a year.”