Moment Of Truth

Top, let me ask you something. I got this case, at work. It's a tough one, a murder case.'

Her father's round eyes went rounder. 'Mare, you said you wouldn't take no more murder cases.'

'I know but this is different. This guy is a father, and I think he's innocent. So don't start on me like Mom. It's my job, okay?'

'Okay, okay.' Her father put up his hands. 'Don't shoot.'

'Sorry.' She sat down while the kitchen warmed with the aroma of brewing coffee. 'Here's the question. If I committed a murder, would you tell the police that you did it, to protect me?'

'If you did a murder?' His forehead wrinkled with alarm. 'You would never do no murder.'

'I know. But if I did, would you go to jail for me?'

Her father didn't hesitate. 'Sure, I don't want you in jail. If you did a murder, it would be for a good reason.'

Mary thought about it. What could Paige's reason be? 'What's a good reason?'

'If you were gonna die and you had to save yourself.'

'Self-defense.'

'Yeh.' He cocked his head. 'Or like tonight, I saw on the TV, this lady who killed her husband. He used to beat her up, you know, when he got drunk. Night after night. Then one night he came home after he went fishing and he stuck a fish down her throat. A fish, in her throat. Almost choked her with it. What a cavone.' He shuddered. 'And finally she got so sick of him doing things like that that she shot him.'

'So, if somebody did that to me and I shot him, that would be a good reason.'

'If somebody did that to you, / would shoot him.'

Mary smiled. Her father was such a peaceable man she couldn't imagine it, but the way he said it, maybe she could. He'd been a laborer, not an altar boy. 'Now, here's the hard part. What if I told you that the person I killed was my mother?'

'Your mother?' Her father's sparse eyebrows flew up. 'Your mother!'

'Uh-huh.'

'If you killed your own mother?' He ran a dry hand over his smooth head. 'Holy God. Well, then I would say your mother musta been doing bad things to you.'

'Would you go to jail for me, even then?'

'Sure, in a minute.' He buckled his lower lip in thought. 'Especially then.'

'Why?'

'Because if your mother was doing bad things to you, it would be my fault.'

'How so?'

'I woulda let it happen.' He pushed the plate with the roll toward her, as the coffee started to bubble madly. 'Now, eat, baby.'

11

'I attended the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Yale, and Girard before that.'

It was just after two o'clock in the morning but Dwight Davis would be working all night. He was arraigning Newlin at nine and he was watching the videotape for the umpteenth time. His care wasn't only because of what Brinkley had said last night; he was always scrupulous in case preparation. He had written down everything Newlin had said on a pad in front of him. The D.A.'s office didn't have the resources to order a same-day transcript, which any civil law firm could have done, although in criminal cases, it was justice, not money, that hung in the balance. Davis would never accept it.

'Don't believe everything you read. Reporters have to sell newspapers.'

He sat alone at one end of the table in the dim light of a small conference room in the D.A.'s offices. Boxes of case files sat stacked against the far wall, a set of trial exhibits on foamcore, and on top rested an open bag of stale Chips Ahoy. Davis didn't mind the mess. He liked having the whole office to himself. He'd had grown up an only child in a happy family and he coveted quiet time to think, plan, and work. As a prosecutor, time without ringing phones became even rarer, and Newlin would demand it. He'd already devoured the lab results, spread out in front of him like a fan.

I don't mean to be impolite, but is there a reason for this small talk?'

The bloody prints on the knife matched Newlin's. The serology was his, too, and fibers of the wife's silk blouse

were found on his jacket, as if from a struggle. The techs had even managed to lift his prints off her blouse and hands. And the photos of Newlin showed a small cut on his right hand, from the knife. The physical evidence was there. But watching Newlin on videotape, Davis 's canny eye told him that something was wrong with Newlin's confession. Something about Newlin had betrayed him. His nervousness, or something Davis couldn't put his finger on. The man was lying.

'I guess I should tell you, my marriage hadn't been going very well lately.'

Davis had to find his lie. Figure out what it was. Instinct and experience told him it was there. But where? He sat at one end of the table and Newlin, on video, sat at the other, squaring off in the dark. Or almost dark. A four-panel window faced Arch Street and the last blind was cinched up unevenly, like an Oriental fan on its side. The blinds would never be repaired; they were as permanent as the leftover Chips Ahoy.

'For a year, actually. Honor wasn 't very happy with me.'

The image on the screen was grayish, the focus poor, and the lighting gloomy. Under Newlin's face was a line of changing white numbers, a time clock that ran into split seconds. The numbers were fuzzy. When the hell would they get decent equipment? The same time the blinds got repaired. Money, money, money. Frustrated, Davis picked up the remote, hit STOP, then replayed the sentence. Where was the lie? What was wrong with this confession?

'Something snapped inside. I lost control. I threw my glass at her but she just laughed. I couldn 't stand it, her laughing at me like that.'

Liar, liar, liar. Then Davis realized Newlin was lying about the way the murder had gone down. It hadn't been a crime of passion, fueled by Scotch or threat of divorce. Newlin wasn't a crime-of-passion kind of guy, all you had to do was look at him to know that. He was an estates

lawyer, the kind of man who planned death. Could it be any more obvious? And what kind of pussy threw a glass in anger? Women threw glasses; men threw punches. No, Davis wasn't buying.

I realized there was no way I could hide what I'd done. I had no plan, I hadn't thought it out. I didn't even have a way to get her body out of the house.'

Classic protesting too much, he had seen it over and over again. Davis had Newlin's number. Everybody knew the family, one of the wealthiest in town, and it always was her money, Buxton money. So, follow the money. Newlin must have killed her because he wanted her money, pure and simple, and made a plan. Either he had decided to kill her himself or hired someone to do it for him, but something had gone wrong. Newlin was trying to cover that up, trying to sell that it was a fight that went too far. What had happened? Davis would have to find out, but with this much dough floating around, it had to be premeditated.

‘I wasn 't thinking logically, I was reacting emotionally. To her shouting, to her insults. To the Scotch. I just did it.'

Davis 's anger momentarily blinded him to the image of Newlin. He kicked himself for not realizing the scam at the crime scene, which had been too perfect to be real. Newlin had come home, stabbed his wife, and staged the scene to look like a fight. Thrown the crystal glass down after she was dead. Drunk Scotch over her body, to congratulate himself on a job well done. Acted real confused when he washed up his hands. Cried crocodile tears when he called nine-one-one.

'Detective, this interview is over. I want to call my attorney.'

Davis couldn't understand Brinkley's problem. Maybe the detective hadn't had the benefit of the lab results, or maybe Brinkley was smelling that Newlin was a liar and mistook what Newlin was lying about. To Davis, Newlin was a selfish, sick, cold-cock murderer. He would have to get to the bottom of Newlin's scam. Learn how he'd planned to get the wife's dough.

'I insist on my attorney.'

Davis hated people like Newlin, who were all about money. It was the ultimate perversion of values, and he had witnessed it firsthand. Crack pimps who knifed their more entrepreneurial girls, drug dealers who capped their light-fingered mules, teenage smoke dealers who executed their rivals with one slug from a nine millimeter. Newlin was no different from them; he just dressed better.