Unforced Error (13 page)

“What did you just say? This chick was feeding ropes to johns?”

“If ‘ropes' means Rohypnol, that super German sleeping pill that guys sometimes slip into cocktails, then that's what she was doing.”

“That's what ‘ropes' means. Well, that makes it obvious, doesn't it?”

“To half of us, apparently,” Rep said.

“She wanted to get a guy into what we used to blushingly call a compromising position. Find someone in Kansas City who could be blackmailed into tucking a billion-dollar tax-break into a budget bill or quashing a drug investigation, and I'll bet you've found Anita Lay's target.”

“How about someone who could sell ten million copies of
Star
magazine by being shown on the cover with his pants down?” Rep asked.

“Bingo.”

“Thanks.” Rep hung up and summarized his mother's well-informed conclusions for Linda and Melissa.

“You mean whoever she was, she came here just to set up a phony picture of Peter committing adultery?” Linda asked.

“Sure,” Rep said. “Peter became an instant, mini-celebrity for turning down a proposition on television. You can bet some scandal sheet would pay middle five figures for pictures that it could headline ‘
REALITY CHECK'S
“GOOD” HUSBAND CAUGHT IN LOVE NEST.' ”

“That's why Peter thought he'd done something terrible,” Linda sniffled, near tears again but this time from happiness. “Not because he'd killed Quinlan. Because of the drug he couldn't remember exactly what happened, but he remembered enough to think he'd been unfaithful to me.”

“I'd bet that way,” Melissa said. “But she presumably got her pictures, so you two are going to have to brace for a couple of weeks worth of ugly ink.”

“Well,” Rep said modestly, “the intellectual property bar might have something to say about that.”

“You mean threaten to sue them for libel?” Melissa asked skeptically.

“No, I mean threaten to libel them.”

“You're being opaque again, dear.”

“I have the e-mail address of the general counsel for every tabloid in the country,” Rep said.

“Do they all owe you favors?” Linda asked.

“They'll think they do after I pass on a hot tip that police in Kansas City are looking into charges of second degree sexual assault involving the drug-assisted rape of Peter Damon by a self-proclaimed starlet who let slip that she was working for their papers.”

“But only one of them is guilty,” Melissa said.

“That's what makes it libel. The ones that aren't guilty will start chasing down the story. The paper that actually gave that bimbo an advance will know that its rivals will crucify it if it runs the story. Which it wouldn't anyway, once its lawyers told it about accessory before the fact, aiding and abetting, criminal conspiracy, and extradition. It might not work, but it's sure worth a shot.”

Melissa saw Linda's face come alive with a gently radiant glow.
She loves deeply and fiercely,
Melissa thought.
She could have killed for that love.
But Melissa banished all thought of cross-examining Linda or checking the VW's odometer. Sometime in the last twenty minutes, she'd made a decision.
I love justice,
Camus had said,
but I'd defend my mother in court
. Guilty or innocent, Linda was her friend. Guilty or innocent, she needed Melissa's unqualified and unconditional support, and guilty or innocent she'd have it. If Linda had killed Quinlan, someone else was going to have to prove it.

For the first time since she'd realized Tuttle was going to slap her, Melissa's shoulders relaxed. They stayed relaxed for almost five seconds. Until the scream.

Chapter 19

“Stop him! Don't let him get to the west stairwell!”

This command came out of the darkness in Klimchock's piercing contralto as Rep, Melissa, and Linda rushed into a halo of light outside the acquisition head's office. Rep had no idea where west was. He vaguely recalled that row upon row of seven-foot metal shelves holding books and bound periodicals started perhaps fifteen feet away. Beyond that, he didn't have the first clue about the layout of the mostly pitch black third floor of the Jackson County Public Library.

He groped his way toward the first row of shelving and then down that row, away from the sound of Klimchock's voice, to a wide aisle running along the ends of the rows. He began to jog cautiously down this aisle and had passed the ends of three rows when, incredibly, he heard the
thump-thump
of running feet hustling along a parallel aisle on the other end of the rows.

Two, three, four more rows and then abruptly he lost the sound. He backtracked a row picked the
thumps
up again, a bit fainter this time, as if the runner were now moving away from him. He turned and began running between two rows, toward the aisle at the other end and, presumably, another set of shelves beyond that aisle.

As his eyes adjusted to the blackness he was able to make out a dim suggestion of a figure running only thirty or forty feet ahead of him. Rep didn't regard himself as particularly athletic. He'd once joked about timing a three-mile jog with a calendar, and no one had laughed. Astonishingly, though, he sensed himself gaining on the runner. Within a dozen strides he had crossed the intervening aisle and halved the distance separating him from his quarry. He began to wonder what he might do if he actually caught the guy (or, he supposed, gal).

The runner started pulling books from the shelves to the floor as he ran, presumably in an effort to impede Rep's pursuit. Rep stumbled a couple of times, but at the end of the row the runner slowed to turn down the intersecting aisle and suddenly Rep was less than ten feet from him. Rep reached for everything he could to quicken his pace.

Suddenly the runner whirled in Rep's direction. At that instant, Rep's right instep hit a thick tome and he found himself airborne and horizontal. He saw a muzzle flash and heard the booming
POW
! of a gunshot. Shortly after that he was still horizontal but no longer airborne, for gravity had performed in its predictable way and he sprawled painfully on the linoleum floor.

Rep scrambled to his feet but then immediately fell to one knee as his throbbing right ankle gave way. The lights came on. An alarm bell began to ring. He heard scurrying steps—behind him, this time—and turned to see Klimchock, Melissa, and Linda hurrying toward him through a swarm of black dots. He began to drag himself toward the end of the row, in the faint hope that he could at least glimpse the fugitive now that the lights were on.

“No, no, dear,” Klimchock said, laying a restraining hand on his shoulder as she came up and knelt beside him. “Discretion the better part of valor and all that. He has a gun and we don't, so he wins this round. End of issue, full stop. Remember, the spirit of Dunkirk is running away so that you can fight another day. Besides, that alarm means that he's opened the emergency door at the bottom of the west stairwell. He's long gone.”

“You're absolutely right,” Rep said.

“Are you hurt?” Melissa asked.

“Dinged my ankle,” Rep admitted.

“That must have been a nasty fall,” she said.

“A lucky one, though,” Rep said. He had by now gotten his shoe and sock off and was examining his swelling ankle. “Without my stumble that bullet might have hit something important.”

Melissa glanced down the aisle at the thick tome he'd stumbled over. The title on the spine read
Burr
.

“How ironic,” she said. “The greatest service Gore Vidal has ever rendered to American literature is saving your life.”

“That's a sweet thing to say,” Rep said, managing a wan smile.

“You obviously haven't read much of Mr. Vidal's work,” she said.

“With the alarm and the shot, police will be here soon,” Rep said. “It might be best if Linda were somewhere else when they arrived.”

“Just so,” Klimchock said. “So perhaps I was here alone.”

“Up to a point, Lord Zinc,” Melissa said.

“That means ‘no,' ” Linda explained to Rep. “It's from Evelyn Waugh.”

“Right,” Rep said to Klimchock. “You were here with all three of us when we talked to Lafayette Wyatt and when we all left time-of-use data on telephones and computers on this floor.”

“Then what happened?” Klimchock asked. “In case the bobbies ask.”

“Then,” Melissa said, “I think Linda had to help me take Rep somewhere to care for his ankle. While you waited for the police.”

“Right, got it,” Klimchock said, focusing as intensely as if she were prepping for her final in Greats at Oxford. “And where did you go?”

“Uh,
well
,” Rep said, “you don't know that, do you?”

“No, of course not. Ah, right, got it. Off you go then, to wherever.”

“It can't be a coincidence. We've been thinking about this whole problem backwards.”

Rep muttered this statement rather drowsily about forty-five minutes later. Pillows propped him up in the bed in Linda's hotel room, his right ankle clumsily wrapped in ice-cube stuffed towels and his neurons sedated with Advil.

“What can't be a coincidence and what do you mean backwards?” Melissa asked, not unreasonably.

“I've heard a fair number of live gunshots in my life, from duck hunting to sighting-in to the encampment,” Rep said.

“And a shotgun doesn't sound like a rifle or a rifle like a handgun, I'm betting,” Melissa said.

“Not only that. A thirty-thirty doesn't sound like a thirty-ought-six, and neither of them sounds like a rifled musket. The gunshot tonight sounded like the revolvers I heard on the firing range at the encampment. No judge would let my impression into evidence, but you can take it to the bank. The intruder's gun was a Civil War era replica revolver.”

“Honey,” Melissa said, “maybe you'd better get to the backwards part.”

“We've been assuming that Quinlan getting killed while Peter was out there for the encampment is some kind of grotesque coincidence. Assume that it's not a coincidence—that, it's all connected.”

“I'm assuming,” Linda said. “I'm not getting anywhere.”

“Sometime after you took Peter upstairs last night, Peter saw something totally unexpected that sent him hurtling away the moment he was certain you were all right. What was it?”

“Well, beloved,” Melissa said, “we don't know, do we?”

“Yes we do. It was a problem with the library expansion funding, and Peter's role in getting it. That's what he said in his note to Klimchock.”

“Which leaves only the detail that we don't know exactly what the problem was,” Linda pointed out.

“That's right,” Melissa said, snapping her fingers, “but we do know it must be something very dramatic in the editorial offices and that it's related to what got Quinlan killed, with Peter neatly framed for the murder.”

“And we know that—how?” Linda asked.

“Because otherwise it's coincidence,” Rep said, “and I'm not buying it.”

“So all we have to do,” Melissa said brightly, “since the police would laugh in our faces just before they arrested us if we went to them with this, is figure out for ourselves what Peter saw.”

“Well,” Rep said, “for a group that just accounted for Gore Vidal's single greatest contribution to American literature, that should be a piece of cake.”

Chapter 20

“Welcome to the house that crack built,” Norm Archer said as he showed Rep, Melissa and Linda into his office—or into what Rep took to be his office, for it might have passed as easily for a small law library or a large storeroom. Two library tables scarred with nicks and cigarette burns formed a T toward the near wall of the high-ceilinged room. Hard-bound volumes of Vernon's Annotated Missouri Statutes and West's Southwest 2d Reporter lined the walls. No water, coffee, or ashtrays. Archer apparently didn't want his typical clients to linger.

He pointed his visitors to chairs on either side of the T's leg and seated himself at its apex. Folding hands two shades darker than a grocery sack in front of him after he'd adjusted his white suspender straps a quarter-inch on each shoulder, he looked at each of them in turn with coolly appraising eyes, neither judgmental nor accepting. Late forties or early fifties, Melissa thought. Bristly white hair, more than a hint of a paunch, but definitely not fat.

“All right,” he said in a voice that suggested a drill sergeant slightly (but only slightly) mellowed by age and miles, “what do we have?”

He heard them through twice, the first time without questions and the second time with. He didn't take a note from beginning to end. Below the neck, in fact, he scarcely moved at all.

“You have no idea where Peter is?” he asked after the encore.

“Right,” Linda said.

“Well, I expect we'll know soon,” Archer said. “In a job-one case like this the cops will have a preliminary report on that saber by ten o'clock—and it sure won't take
them
long to find him. Unless he's flown the coop.”

“No,” Linda said, shaking her head. “Peter wouldn't run.”

“He won't run far, that's for sure,” he muttered. Then, abruptly twisting his head over his right shoulder toward the office door, he raised his voice to bark, “Streeter. Miss Phelps.”

A white man in his early twenties and a grandmotherly African-American woman answered the summons, which had apparently penetrated the substantial door without difficulty.

“Monitor the police band on short wave,” he told the man. “Any chatter about arresting Peter Damon, I wanna know A-sap. All we can do is hope he keeps his mouth shut until I talk to him. Miss Phelps, please take these ladies down to the coffee shop get them something to drink. Mrs. Damon is giving blood this morning and she should have some fluids beforehand.”

Melissa raised her eyebrows at Rep—
What is this, the last scene of the Godfather?
He tried to shrug apologetically with his. After a moment of delicious tension she acquiesced. Once the women had filed out, Archer strolled across the office to a window looking over Thirteenth Street and McGee in downtown Kansas City. He clasped his hands behind his back. Gold lettering on the window read NORM ARCHER ATTORNEY AT LAW. Sunlight streaming through the window projected the R and the C across his chest.

“Trevelyan is the best bet,” he said. “His motive sounds like a reach, but Pendleton is a cop and Tuttle's a woman. For some damn reason American juries will
not
believe that a white woman killed someone with a blade.”

“Even though Lizzie Borden orphaned herself with an axe and Lana Turner took out Johnny Stompanato with a knife,” Rep commented.

“They both walked,” Archer said. “Still, three alternative suspects is better than none. One of them might even be guilty.”

“Might?”

“Oh, odds are your boy did it,” Archer said.

“I don't think he did, but I can't argue about the odds.”

“Cops here are straight-ahead guys,” Archer said. “They'll lie through their teeth to keep a low-life from beating a rap on some picky technicality like the United States Constitution, but they wouldn't take a twenty to drop a speeding ticket even if there wasn't any milk in the house. They're gonna go with the odds. This anti-Semitism/library expansion stuff—forget about it. Even if I'd gotten the Damons in here yesterday morning and worked out statements for them without any disappearing acts, Peter would be the prime suspect. As it is, there's no way they're looking at anyone else.”

“So. You want the case?”

“You kidding?” Archer swiveled and gave Rep something just south of a grin. “This is a dream case for a guy like me. Respectable client—maybe he killed someone, but the guy had it coming. And at least he doesn't sell smack to school children. Brave wife sitting in the front row in her Sunday best. Enough money to do a full-scale, no-stone-unturned investigation. TV cameras lined up outside the courthouse after trial each day. Couple of twists the right jury might get its teeth into.”

“On the other hand,” Rep prompted.

“On the other hand, seems to me there's an alternative suspect we haven't talked about yet. Motive, opportunity, no alibi, and explains the blood on the saber very nicely. That's why I wanted to have this chat stag.”

“Linda?” Rep demanded in astonishment as he parsed the comment. “That's impossible. Linda couldn't—”

“I know, I know,” Archer sighed. “You know her and she couldn't have done it. I hear that in almost every homicide rap I handle. Murder is supposed to be committed by kids from the ' hood and stone cold gangsters like we see in the movies. We can't imagine a normal guy who mows his lawn and whistles while he carries the garbage out or a cheerful matron who clips coupons and fusses over laundry committing murder. But they do, my friend, oh yes they do. Murder is the ultimate amateur crime. You tell me Linda Damon couldn't knock over a gas station or hustle crack, I'll listen. Don't tell me she couldn't kill a guy who endangered her marriage by using her for cheap sex.”

“That could be a complicated defense to present,” Rep said dryly, thinking of the brave wife in her Sunday best suddenly quailing under the accusatory finger of the lawyer she herself had hired.

“If it were easy Andy Pignatano could handle it. But I don't want it any more complicated than it has to be. So tell me why I'm wrong about Linda. Or about Peter, for that matter. Tell me why it isn't one or the other.”

“The blood that isn't there,” Rep said. “No blood on the uniform
or
the dress. Whoever killed Quinlan all but decapitated him, drenched the saber in blood. How did either Peter or Linda do that without splattering a drop on their own clothing?”

“Fair point. The state will have an expert talk about blood spatter patterns and angles of dispersion, but thank God juries have common sense. Anything else?”

“Well, it sure wasn't Linda who took a shot at me in the library last night when I got too close.”

“The state might say that didn't happen at all, unless the bullet turns up—and there's no guarantee it will. You look like an honest guy, but I'd lie to save a buddy's butt and I'll bet you would too. And the shooter coulda been Peter anyway. He'd certainly know the library well enough to find an obscure exit stairwell in the dark. With the lights off, maybe he didn't know who he was shooting at. And don't kid yourself: I could square that one with either Linda or Peter cutting Quinlan.”

“If it's either one of them, though,” Rep said, “we have a two-piece puzzle: a tawdry fling and a bloody saber.”

“Nice and simple,” Archer said. “The way most murders are.”

“Nice and simple, though, leaves a lot of pieces unaccounted for. And not just the anti-Semitism pieces.”

“Maybe we're actually sneaking up on reasonable doubt,” Archer said. “What pieces would those be?”

“The money pieces. Jackrabbit Press publishes maybe eight titles of paperback-original genre fiction every year. Say eight-ninety-five each retail, to be generous. That means Jackrabbit Press sells them for less than five bucks a pop, with a gross profit of maybe two dollars per copy.”

“So what? I thought Jackrabbit Press did lots of other stuff besides the bodice-rippers to make money.”

“It does,” Rep said. “The D and B I looked over when I prepared my pitch to Lawrence said it gets millions a year in overseas printing and distribution work, mostly from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia.”

“So there's your money pieces right there.”

“Not really. Unless John Paul Lawrence is publishing paperbacks as a hobby the bodice-rippers still have to pay their own way. How could it make sense for Jackrabbit Press to pay Tommy Quinlan DeLorean wages? How could it think about paying me a hundred-thousand dollars just to defend a possible exclusive right to use this fictional military unit to promote Civil War romance novels? They'd have to sell fifty-thousand
additional
copies just to break even—and that's before they've spent a penny on the make-believe soldiers themselves. A romance novel that sells fifty-thousand copies total is a pretty big deal. Those let's-pretend soldiers would have to turn two or three titles into mega-hits just to pay the legal bill. Put that together with Quinlan having some kind of mysterious midnight meeting and what do you have?”

“I don't know,” Archer said. “Drug dealing? Money laundering? Or maybe just a boss who had to get a party over with before he could hold a production scheduling meeting that couldn't wait.”

“Like I said. Puzzle pieces.”

“When the OJ verdict came down,” Archer said, pursing his lips, “I was driving back to KC from St. Louis. I'd had an argument in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals that morning, and the news hit about ten miles onto I-70. All the way back I heard call-in radio feedback on the verdict. The only other time I heard anger like that was after nine-eleven.”

“I can imagine,” Rep said.

“Thing is, the callers weren't mad because a brother had beaten the rap. They were mad because a
rich guy
was gonna walk. O.J. Simpson stood for every time they'd had the electricity turned off for missing a payment, every time they'd had to have macaroni and cheese for dinner on Thursday because there was a strike at Ford Claycomo and cash was short, every time they had to buy their kids Converses instead of Nikes.”

“And Peter Damon is OJ?” Rep asked.

“Romany Road ain't quite Brentwood, but it looks pretty fancy from Blue Springs or Raytown. Or from anywhere much east of Troost, for that matter. If we just pick holes in the prosecution's evidence and make some noise about Pendleton sending his own boys over to grab the saber, maybe find a few other wives Quinlan rogered so we can put their husbands on trial—that Criminal Law 101 stuff isn't gonna get it.”

“The OJ syndrome is that bad, huh?”

“That bad and worse,” Archer said, glancing over at Rep. “Count Basie called Kansas City a happy town. He was right. Our cooking is better than New Orleans', our honest politicians are cleaner than Minnesota's, our crooked politicians are more colorful than Chicago's, and our jazz is better than what passes for blues in St. Louis. But don't let that cheerful attitude fool you. Southern populist working-class resentment is bred in the bone here. It's not just a question of
dealing
with the OJ syndrome, we've gotta turn it in our favor. We gonna save Peter without putting Linda in the soup, we have to find someone richer than Peter Damon doing something nasty in this story.”

“Peter didn't own a DeLorean, for starters,” Rep said.

“We're communicating.” Archer spun towards Rep and his voice took on the kind of pulpit resonance that Rep imagined juries heard from him. “Turns out what you said before is exactly right. The money pieces
are
the key. This case
reeks
of money. Five-figure checks being thrown around like confetti. Fast cars, fast lives, fast sex. There's a Quinlan-money connection at Jackrabbit Press. There has to be.”

“Do you really think it has anything to do with the murder?”

“Doesn't matter what I think,” Archer said. “All that matters is what the jury thinks.”

“So we have to put some of those puzzle pieces together.”

“Right. Get ourselves a plausible dirty-money alternative scenario going and tell the jury, ‘ We
gave
the police this. We
handed
it to them on a silver platter. But they didn't investigate it because they didn't wanna uncover anything about Mr. Quinlan that might embarrass Massa John Paul Lawrence with his fancy donations and his political pull and his big country house.' ”

“Pretty raw,” Rep said.

“So is the death penalty.”

“
Touché.
”

“It can't just be a clever story with winks and nudges, though. We'll need some honest-to-God, sonofabitchin'
evidence
.”

A light bulb went off over Rep's head. The evidence, if there was any, was at Jackrabbit Press. It wouldn't be there for long. The police wouldn't go after it. Archer couldn't go after it. He couldn't tell Rep to go after it. All he could do was state the obvious and hope Rep had at least as many street smarts as your average white guy.

Saying yes meant crossing a line, as he had when he'd braced Trevelyan—who, now that Rep thought about it, was slow enough for Rep to outrun. That made him a plausible suspect for last night's library shooting. And Rep had no trouble seeing him at a shady midnight meeting with Quinlan. But taking Archer's hint meant more than holding Linda's hand and searching a few databases. If there was nothing at Jackrabbit Press, it meant acting like fools. And if there was something there, it meant going in harm's way.

“If I were you I'd start now,” Rep said. “The next thing I've got to do is call Andy Pignatano.”

Archer glanced over at Rep for a long moment. Then he nodded. They were on the same page.

“There is the matter of my retainer,” he said.
Which I really shouldn't take from Linda until we clear up the little detail of whether I'm going to accuse her of murder
.