The manner was that of a close friend, a buddy, but the voice was not one he recognized, and the people he was that close to mostly called him John. He waited, and the fellow left a number and an extension. And, not too surprisingly, no name.
On a hunch he rang the number but didn’t punch in the three-digit extension, waiting until an operator came on the line and said, “New York Post, will you hold please?” He replaced the receiver and drank the rest of his beer.
All in all, he preferred the straightforward approach. “Mr. Creighton, my name’s Alison Mowbray, with the Daily News. I’d love to give you a chance to get your side of the story in front of the public.”
His side of the story.
“They’ll try to persuade you that it’s dangerous to get all the pretrial publicity flowing in the prosecution’s direction,” Maury Winters had told him, “and there’s some truth in that, but we have to pick the time and the place, and most important the person we talk to. It’s way too early, you haven’t even been indicted yet.”
He’d be indicted?
“You think you’re less than a ham sandwich?” And, when he’d just stared in response, the lawyer had explained that one judge had said famously that any good DA could get a ham sandwich indicted. “A grand jury does pretty much what a prosecutor asks it to do, John. You ever been on a grand jury? You’re stuck there every day for a month. After a week or so you’re mean enough to indict a blind man for peeping in windows. You’ll be indicted, and the sooner the better.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because, my friend, I’m happy to say I don’t think much of their case. Usual procedure, I’m out there asking for postponements, looking to delay the start of the trial as long as possible. You know why? Because time’s a great fixer. Witnesses disappear, they change their testimony, sometimes they’re even considerate enough to drop dead. Evidence gets tainted and can’t be introduced, or, even better, it gets lost. They lock it away somewhere and forget where they put it. Don’t laugh, sonny boy, it happens more often than you’d think possible. I stall, and I’m a hell of a staller when I want to be, and some innocent little ADA like Fabrizzio, who’s got a cute little ass on her, I don’t know if you happened to notice, stands there with her mouth open and watches her whole case fall apart. My client’s guilty and everybody knows it including his own mother and they have to give him a walk.”
“But because I’m innocent...”
“Guilt, innocence, who ever said that’s got anything to do with it? A case is strong or it’s weak, and that’s what we’re dealing with here, not does she or doesn’t she. Their case is weak as midwestern coffee, my friend. You ever been to the Midwest? You ever had coffee there? Then you know what I’m talking about. They got a roomful of drunks who saw you leave a bar with the dead girl. Not that she was dead at the time, but she got that way before too long, though exactly how long’s a matter of opinion. They got evidence’ll place you in her apartment, though how strong and solid it is remains to be seen.”
“I already admitted I was in the apartment.”
“Who says the jury’s gonna get to hear that? Never mind, beside the point. You got a whole apartment full of evidence, all of which gets cleaned and scrubbed by this darling little faygeleh who couldn’t have done better by us if we were the ones paying him. He sweeps, he dusts, he wipes, he mops, he vacuums — I tell my wife, all she wants to know is has he got two afternoons a week open. He’s a jewel, this kid. Time he trips over the dead girl, he’s got half the evidence stuffed in the garbage cans along with everybody else’s in the building, so how can you tell whose is whose, and the rest of it’s down the drain, and so’s their case. You sure he’s not your cousin?”
Winters hadn’t waited for an answer. “Constitution says you’re entitled to a speedy trial,” he said, “and for a change that’s what we want. Their mistake was arresting you as early as they did. Granted, there’s pressure, a professional woman murdered in her own bed in a decent neighborhood. High-profile case, so you got all these newspaper readers thinking that could be me, that could be my daughter, that could be my sister, so why don’t the cops get off their asses and do something? Case like that you want to be able to announce an arrest, and, my opinion, they jumped the gun. Now they got to indict you, and once they indict you they got to give you your speedy trial, and once that’s over, my friend, you can forget the whole thing ever happened.”
“Just like that?”
“Better yet, write about it. Don’t forget, I want an autographed copy.”
And if they were to drop the charges?
“They got that option, drop ’em and reinstate ’em later on. But they hate to do that because it makes them look like morons, tells the world they can’t make a case. And later on that’s what everybody remembers. Hey, didn’t they drop this case once already? What’s the matter, they can’t find the guy who did it so they’re picking on this poor zhlub again?”
Meanwhile, he was the poor zhlub. And what was he supposed to do with himself?
His apartment — his legendary rent-controlled apartment, that even the judge had to agree he’d be crazy to jeopardize — was a good deal larger and more comfortable than a jail cell. Quieter, too. It was funny, but none of the books he’d read over the years, none of the TV shows, none of the prison movies, had suggested how fiercely noisy the place could be. But his apartment, on a lazy weekday afternoon, was as quiet as a grave.
They’d buried her, of course. Or did whatever they did, whoever they were. She must have had family, and they’d buried her or had her cremated, whatever they decided, whoever they were.
Or did they hold the body of a murder victim for a certain amount of time? He’d watched countless episodes of Law & Order, you’d think he’d have learned something about forensic procedures by now.
Then again, what did it matter?
Marilyn Fairchild.
He tried to remember what she looked like, but his own memory had been supplanted by the picture they’d run over and over in the papers and on television, a photo that must have been taken four or five years earlier. She’d had long hair then, and when he pictured her now that’s what he saw, long hair, and he had to remind himself that the woman he’d gone home with had had short hair.
He remembered her voice, pitched low, with an edge to it. The voice had been part of the initial attraction, it had seemed to promise something, though he was unsure just what. A low voice was supposed to be sexy, and he had to wonder why. Was it some kind of latent gay thing? But her voice was neither mannish nor boyish. There was just something about it that managed to suggest he’d find the owner engaging.
Yeah, right.
His other images of her were more fragmentary, rendered so by the drinks he’d had before and after their time together. He remembered the look on her face when she paused on her way to the kitchen and glanced over her shoulder at him. He’d been turning the pages of a magazine, more a brochure, her office’s portfolio of co-ops and condos for sale, and something made him look up, and she was looking at him. There’d been something enigmatic in her expression, something that even now kept the image in his memory, but before he could work it out she’d turned again, and when she came back with the bottle and glasses whatever it had been was gone.
He raised the beer bottle to his lips, remembered he’d finished it. There was booze in the house, unless the cops had gotten into it while they went through his things. They’d had a warrant, and they’d come back and searched the place after they took him to Central Booking, and predictably enough they’d left the place a mess. He wasn’t what you’d call compulsively neat, and Karin had once accused him of being the third Collyer brother, but the clutter he lived with was his own, and it had taken him a while to restore some semblance of order (or manageable disorder) to the scene.