“Ms. Tree,” Bernie said, gripping the wheel tight, “my client is an innocent woman.”
“Aren’t all your clients innocent? Until proven broke?”
“That’s unkind.”
Notice he didn’t say “unfair.”
“So this is an indigent innocent woman, then? Pro bono work, Bern?”
He winced. “No...not exactly.”
“A wealthy innocent woman, then?”
“Why, is that a crime?”
“No. But what crime are we talking about?”
He sighed heavily. “It’s just that this...this is the weirdest goddamn case. She killed her husband, all right. This afternoon. No question.”
I frowned at him. Traffic might have been slow, but we’d just gone from innocent to guilty in ten seconds. “She admits it?”
“Admits it. Caught at the scene with the murder gun. And yet...”
“There’s an ‘and yet’?”
He nodded, honked at a taxi, and we moved a few inches. “You may have heard of her husband—Richard Addwatter? Addwatter Accounting?”
When Bernie dropped a name, he dropped a name. “I know the firm, obviously,” I said. “Who doesn’t in this town? But I don’t know the man.”
“And you never will. The man is dead. Mrs. Addwatter made him that way. And you’re going to find me extenuating circumstances.”
My eyebrows took a hike. “What happened to the ‘innocent woman’ angle?”
“Oh, she is innocent, legally speaking. Even without your help, I can get her found not guilty. No problem. Slam dunk.”
I didn’t have to say, What the hell? My face did it for me.
“Better give me the basics, Bern. She killed him where and when?”
“This afternoon, about three PM—at a no-tell motel out by the airport.”
Traffic picked up a little, and Bernie told me the story, based upon his client’s confidences and the police reports.
Richard Addwatter, a graying, handsome man in his early forties, had been in bed, apparently asleep and naked as God had first made him though considerably hairier, next to an attractive if slutty-looking blonde woman in her thirties, who was sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette, looking bored, sheets not covering large breasts with half-circle surgery scars on the underside of large brown nipples.
The woman in bed might have been waiting for a taxi.
This was the tableau awaiting Marcy Addwatter, a beautiful desperate housewife, also in her thirties, impeccably dressed in white stretch twill pantsuit and a pale blue blouse and black Jimmy Choos. Her wildly permed dark blonde hair may well have given her a Medusa aspect, when she threw open the door and sent her own shadow into the room in a slant of sunshine.
The blonde in the bed looked up at the figure filling the doorway, just a little surprised, then immediately got bored again, smoking insolently. “You must be the little woman.”
“You must be the dead whore.”
Then Mrs. Addwatter’s arm swung up and the gun in it aimed itself at the two figures in the bed, the slumbering man and the woman who was scrambling, fighting the sheets as she tried to get out of harm’s way.
Mrs. Addwatter had been smiling, just a little, when the big nine millimeter automatic in her small hand bucked as she blasted away at the bed, emptying all eight rounds, eight small explosions that rattled everything in the room, until Mrs. Addwatter was clicking on an empty chamber.
The newly minted widow did not even bother to step into the room, where her husband had slept through his own murder, his shopworn afternoon delight wrapped up in a bloody sheet like some awful Christmas present, hanging half out of the bed and staring sightlessly with surprised, indignant eyes.
*
“Mrs. Addwatter used a nine millimeter?” the doctor asked.
“Yes.”
“That was the weapon in your dream, Ms. Tree.”
“And the weapon in my purse, doc.” I gave him a sideways glance. “Sometimes a nine mil is just a nine mil.”
He raised an eyebrow. “She shot her husband, and his, uh, ‘date’ until all the bullets were gone. Until she was ‘clicking on an empty chamber,’ as you put it.”
“Right. Like in my dream. You think that’s significant?”
“Perhaps. Please continue.”
Bernie Levine and I were walking down an endless corridor at the city jail. Our pace was steady but not frantic—Bernie had left his anxiety behind once we’d conquered traffic, and anyway he needed me to be filled completely in.
“My client is a disturbed woman, Ms. Tree—clinically a schizophrenic. And her husband was, for years, a confirmed womanizer, whose behavior aggravated his wife’s mental illness.”
“For how many years?”
The attorney frowned. “I knew Rich Addwatter. He wasn’t a close friend, just a...country club golfing buddy. But I do know he changed his ways a good five years ago.”
“He really changed ’em this afternoon.”
Bernie stopped.
So did I.
“Ms. Tree, Rich Addwatter loved his wife. Loved her very much. I truly believe he turned over a major new leaf, five years ago, to save her...and himself.”
I couldn’t suppress the smirk. “Nobility like that rarely winds up in sleazy motel rooms.”
Bernie ignored my expression and my words. “Otherwise, with her sickness? He’d have skated. Dumped her like a falling stock—a lot of guys would, you know.”
I couldn’t argue with him.
We began to walk again, and I said, “Okay...so she snags the insanity verdict and is institutionalized. You know when she’ll get out, don’t you? The day after Hinckley.”
He nodded, said, “Which would be a major miscarriage of justice. Marcy Addwatter has been stabilized for years.”
“Her husband falling off the faithfulness wagon unstabilized her in a hurry.”
Bernie stopped again, took the sleeve of my trenchcoat. “All right, Ms. Tree, fine...but how? How did that happen?”
I thought for a moment, then started walking again and Bernie fell in step with me.
I said, “Okay. Richard...let’s call him Dick...made an afternoon pick-up in a bar, most likely.”
“After all these years, why?”
“Bernie, you don’t know for sure that hubby hadn’t been feeding his letch habit by picking up the occasional working girl. And the dead woman was a pro?”
“The police haven’t confirmed that, but that’s the assumption.”
“Okay, then. Maybe Dick’s idea of being faithful was not to have a serious affair. Strictly cash and carry on.”
“Even so,” Bernie said, “how did my client happen to know about this pick-up? And find her way to that no-tell motel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then find out, Ms. Tree. Talk to her.”
I was shaking my head, not in refusal but to clear the cobwebs. “Top of the list of a couple hundred things I don’t understand is why I’m even able to talk to her—the murders happened just hours ago. Nobody should be getting in but you and maybe family....”
“Haven’t you guessed?” Bernie smiled for the first time since he’d spirited me off. “Your friend Lt. Valer of Homicide greased the wheels.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“You’ll have to ask him. I don’t look gift cops in the mouth.”
Within minutes Bernie Levine and I were seated on our side of the booth and its Plexiglas divider in the city jail visitor’s area, a study in gray institutional brick and no windows. We watched as a uniformed policewoman escorted in a shell-shocked Marcy Addwatter—her permed hair a fright wig, her face pale and sans make-up—and guided the small woman in jailhouse orange over to the seat opposite us.