The Judgment (42 page)

Women—there were three of them. They bustled by, paying me no attention at all. They were well dressed, wonderfully coiffed, and beautifully perfumed. They livened the room with giggles and brightened it with their greetings to Ismail, who they addressed most respectfully. They fussed over him, patted his shoulders, his hands, whispered in his ear, while all the while he beamed back at them, like the happy boy he seemed just then. He assured them he was feeling fine, just fine, and urged them all to find places and seat themselves.

As they moved chairs and settled on the bed, I went unnoticed by the ladies and said a quick good-bye.

“I can see you’ll be busy for a while,” I said to Ismail.

“Oh, I will indeed. These ladies will keep me entertained the rest of the day, just like they do every Saturday. But I have some special interest in that young man Conroy. I want to help. I’ll give some thought to how I can do that. I’ll respect your confidence, and get back to you on this matter.”

I thanked him, and we shook hands. Then, as I turned to leave, one of the visiting harem caught my eye, winked, and waved. I recognized her from all those years ago—Melody Martin, the barber’s niece, her face a bit rounder, her figure amplified, but with the same sweet smile she had shown the jury when she testified to Ismail Carter’s fine character and fair nature.

I waved back to her on my way out the door.

I
hadn’t gotten as much from Ismail Carter as I had hoped. During the next few days, I scolded myself often for relying upon him as I had. What help, after all, could a sick old man in a nursing home be likely to give? I might as well have applied for aid from the tooth fairy. Or so I was telling myself by Tuesday.

In the meantime, I worked, filling a couple of yellow legal pads with speculations, arguments with myself, questions, and details, details, details. My theory of the crime was supported by a couple of facts dug up by Mark Conroy and sent by messenger to me late on Monday. The first was a confirmation that, as I had supposed, Mary Margaret Tucker had indeed left 1300 Beaubien bearing a cardboard box nearly half her size; in it were the gifts that had been showered upon her and the contents of her desktop and middle drawer, which would have left plenty of room for a million or so in cash. When one of the detectives on the Untouchable squad had tried to take it from her to help her with it down to her car, she resisted his efforts almost to the point of physical violence.

The second bit of information sent to me by Conroy was unexpected—in fact, I could not have anticipated it. But it may certainly have had greater significance: It seemed that the house on Westburn, where Mary Margaret Tucker resided and where I had spoken to her, was
the property of the City of Detroit, taken over earlier that same year for nonpayment of taxes.

By Tuesday, as I said, I had lost all faith in Ismail Carter’s ability to influence the situation. It seemed unlikely that he would have the clout to do Conroy any real good; he might not even have the inclination.

Yet Tuesday morning, of course, was when Ismail called.

“Charley, I got good news for you.”

“What’s that, Ismail?”

“I got an audience with the pope.”

“The pope?”

“Okay, have it your way. The mayor?”

“You’re serious?”

“Very serious indeed. I dropped so many nickels, dimes, and quarters down this little project, I might as well have been droppin’ them down a well. You think it’s hard get-tin’ through to you with that constipated secretary? It’s about ten times harder to get His Royal Highness on the phone. And I got what’s supposed to be his private number!”

“But you did talk to him?”

“Oh, yeah, and a meeting’s all arranged. Manoogian Mansion, four o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

“But I don’t have any idea what I’ll say to him.” I moaned a bit. I sounded pretty ineffectual even to myself.

“I can tell you what you’ll say to him—not a damn thing! You better understand right from the start that I do all the talking.”

“You mean you’re coming along with me?”

“No, you’re coming along with me. I’m
lettin’
you come along, Charley, because I
might
need a little help gettin’ in and out of the car. Now, you tell me, what kind you got?”

“What kind of what? Car?”

“Yeah. I mean what are you driving?”

“A Chrysler. It gets me where I want to go.”

“Well, it won’t do to drive up to the mayor’s front door
in one of those. Order up a limo, Charley. Take your pick, Lincoln Town car or Cadillac, but make it big and make it black. Have it in front of Parkview about three-thirty. That’ll give me plenty of time to get in and out, maybe take a little drive around town. Just be there. Understood?”

He didn’t even wait for me to say yes. His receiver clicked in my ear.

I sat for a moment, weighing what I had just heard. He had surprised me by coming through for me, as requested. Yet doubts lingered. He would do the talking? How did I know what he had to say? How did I know he had anything to say? And this business of the limousine, that seemed downright stupid to me. Were we being asked to finance an old man’s last hurrah? Well, maybe we were. I shuffled back through the pages I had written on the legal pad in front of me. There were some good ideas there. I had some degree of confidence in the case as it was shaping up. I wasn’t desperate. But I knew Conroy needed all the help he could get, all that I could get for him. If a direct appeal to the mayor would help, and Ismail Carter seemed to believe it would, then it should be tried. I only wished that I knew what sort of approach Ismail intended to use.

During the morning Dominic Benda called. No, he hadn’t been asked to come in. Yes, he was feeling a lot better now, recovering from his long walk into Pickeral Point. I talked to him for a while just to keep his spirits up, and by the time he hung up, he seemed good. The whole family was getting together for Thanksgiving dinner day after tomorrow, he told me, and that was just what he needed.

I walked over to Benny’s around noon. It was damned cold and getting colder. I had a bowl of chili, eating at the counter and reading my copy of the
Free Press
without interruption. That suited me just fine.

The bank’s time and temperature clock read thirty-five degrees as I left Benny’s. I tucked the paper under my arm and headed for the men’s store in the mall just down the
street from my office. I’d bought a suit there last winter. It fit as well as any of mine did, but it seemed kind of pricey for Pickeral Point—who did they sell to in this town, anyway? I’d more or less promised myself I’d do my buying elsewhere. But being without gloves on a day like this constituted an emergency.

Just as I expected, the clerk brought out a pair from under the counter that looked like they’d go for a good hundred bucks.

“We just got these in,” he said. “They’re really something special.”

They looked like kidskin, light in color, and so slender that I doubted they would fit my stubby hands. But they did—perfectly, snug and tight as if they’d been made of rubber.

“They’re unlined, aren’t they? They won’t keep my hands very warm.”

“NO, look here.” He slipped it off my hand. It certainly didn’t feel like rubber coming off. Then he folded it back and showed me that it had a micro-thin plastic lining with a pattern of holes throughout. “That’s so your hand can breathe,” he said. “You’ll never pull it out sweaty. And look at the workmanship. You can barely see the stitching.”

It turned out that they were from Argentina, calfskin, boiled and rubbed down to the consistency of kid.

“They’re trying to break into the luxury leather market, show what they can do,” the clerk explained. “The price is the best part—fifty bucks. They can also use the hard currency.”

I was sold. I whipped out my checkbook and wrote one out on the spot. They felt like a second skin as I wore them out of the shop. Flexing my hands into fists, wiggling my fingers, it didn’t take me long to decide I’d never had a pair of gloves I liked as well as these. If I couldn’t hold on to this pair into next winter, I’d never forgive myself.

It’s odd how much these little blessings can cheer you up. I jogged across the street, feeling the way I used to
when I’d just won a tough one in Recorder’s Court. Hopping up to the curb on my side of River Road, I almost bumped into Sue. Literally. She didn’t seem shocked or annoyed, but she did give me a puzzled frown.

“My,” she said, “you’re certainly acting chipper.”

“New gloves,” I said.

I held up my hands and wiggled my fingers at her.

“Aren’t they pretty?” She sounded singularly unenthusiastic.

“How’ve you been, Sue?”

Although we hadn’t seen, each other since Dominic Benda’s polygraph examination, and our last direct communication had been the telephone conversation that followed it, the decision to cool it had been hers. She had left a message for me on my answering machine, asking me if we might not “give our relationship a rest while we still had one.” She’d gone on and on, talked nearly the length of the tape and pointed out along the way that I seemed to show up “on the wrong side” every time a suspect was brought in. She had ended quizzically, “What is it about you, Charley?”

But here she was, only about a block from my office. I wondered if she had popped in to see me. I wasn’t sure whether she’d want to be asked that or not. Oh well, what the hell.

“Were you looking for me?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “But I was just up at your office.”

“I don’t quite follow.”

“I brought you your copy of the report on Dominic Benda’s polygraph test. I left it with that cute little secretary of yours, Charley. If you want to give a copy to Dominic, you’ll have to Xerox it off the one I gave Mrs. Fenton. You only get one copy. Mark Evola begrudged you even that.”

“Well, thanks for sticking up for me.”

“Oh no, Charley, it wasn’t me. It was Stash.”

“Well, thank Stash for me, then.”

She nodded but made no move to go. She seemed to want to talk but evidently had little or nothing to say.

“How’s the investigation going?” I asked. “In general, I mean.”

“In general? Well, I suppose it’s—what’s the phrase?— proceeding apace. I think that’s what Mark tells the reporters. Between you and me, I still think Bud Billings may be right about old Delbert Evans.”

“And Dominic?”

“Charley, let’s not talk about Dominic.”

“Why not? Look, Sue, you said you were going to check the radio logs. You must have discovered that the night Catherine Quigley was murdered, Dominic brought in a prisoner and turned in his patrol car early. He wasn’t around. He’s eliminated.”

“Why do you always have to act like a lawyer?”

“Because I
am
a lawyer, dammit!”

“I can see this isn’t getting us anyplace. Let’s get together when this is all over. We’ll look back on it and talk it over.”

“A little damage control?”

“Damage assessment comes first.”

It is always remarkable to me how long people—intelligent, sophisticated people—will submit to police interrogation before calling in a lawyer. Often it has to do with feelings of blamelessness and innocence. If you feel that you have nothing to hide, of course you will be happy to answer questions, any questions that the police might have. Often one question leads to another and another and another, and soon the individual who had nothing to hide finds himself chased up a dead-end street, his way out blocked by the cops. That’s when he wants a lawyer.

That wasn’t how it went with Doris Dieberman, Lee Higgins’s teacher. She made it clear from the start that she would answer no questions whatever unless a lawyer was present to give counsel. And not just any lawyer would
do; it could be none other than Charles Sloan. They tried to intimidate her into responding. They asked provocative questions that any lesser person would have answered readily enough in his or her own defense. They made implications. They made accusations. Yet she remained silent, except to repeat again that she wished Charles Sloan there as her lawyer.

Why? Was she a friend of mine? A former client?

No, Pd never met the woman before in my life.

But as she explained to me on Wednesday morning in that empty office opposite Interrogation Room Three, Doris Dieberman is a serious and faithful newspaper reader. She is well informed and remembers what she reads. She recalled me from the Harwell murder trial and the Becky Harris case. And more recently, she had been following the story of the child murders, and noticed my name come up twice as counsel for two who had been brought in for questioning on the matter. Since she had been taken in for questioning on the same investigation, it seemed reasonable to her to ask for help.

“After all,” she said to me, “you must be pretty familiar with the facts of this terrible case by now.”

Ms. Dieberman taught second grade at the Hub City Primary School. Catherine Quigley and Billy Bartkowski both had been in her class. Lee Higgins, a little older, had been Ms. Dieberman’s student the previous year. She was the teacher whom Bud Billings had denounced so bitterly for the callous way she had informed her class of Catherine Quigley’s death. As I talked with her, she didn’t seem particularly callous to me, just kind of withdrawn and impersonal. It made me wonder if the woman really could hold her own before a bunch of lusty, wild second-graders. It also made me wonder if she was hiding anything.

“I really don’t understand what they want from me, Mr. Sloan. They were never really very specific about that. I tried to get her to tell me that before they brought me here.”

The “her” was Sue Gillis, of course. She and Larry Antonovich
had reported early to the office of the principal of Hub City Primary School and asked to talk to Doris Dieberman.

The principal, a man who was certainly used to having his own way at the primary school, began to dictate to Sue just where and how long she and Larry might talk to the teacher. Sue objected. It became a contest of wills, and in order to enforce hers, put the principal in his place, and win the day, Sue ordered Ms. Dieberman to get her coat and climb into the car, for she was going down to Kerry County Police Headquarters. More shouting, but Sue prevailed. And so here we were again: same situation, a few of the roles changed, new lines improvised.