“Thank you.”
He turned to one of his fellow-officers. “Take him.”
“What charge?” the other asked.
“One eighty-seven,” the first officer replied. Penal Code section 187 — murder.
Out in the street the paramedics had arrived.
9
It took Sonny Patterson two hours and seven phone calls to get me out of jail. Most of the time I sat on one of the three bunks in a holding cell watching soundless reruns of Fantasy Island while he wheedled on the phone in the booking office for my release.
The last time I’d been at county was as a public defender the morning I met Hugh Paris. Nothing at the jail had changed, including the inmate population. Several trusties who recognized me from back then drifted past the cell, not saying anything but just to stare. I smiled and said hello and they moved on.
The sheriffs let me keep my own clothes but they did not spare me any other part of the booking process. I was strip- searched, photographed, finger-printed and locked up, all the while thinking, this is unreal. The worst part was the strip search. Until then it had never occurred to me to make the distinction between nudity and nakedness. Now I knew. Nudity was undressing to shower, or sleep, or make love. When you stripped in a hot closet-sized cell that smelled of the previous fifty men and under the indifferent stare of four cops, then you were naked. I still felt that nakedness. It was like a rash; I couldn’t stop rubbing my body.
I made my mind into a blank screen across which flickered the images of the day from Robert Paris’s casket to Aaron Gold’s fingertips dipped in a dark pool of his own blood. These pictures passed through me like a shudder, but it was better than trying to suppress them.
This entire affair began with the murder of one man, Hugh Paris. Now it was assuming the dimensions of a massacre. No one connected with the Paris family seemed safe, including, perhaps, Robert Paris himself. Had the judge’s death been purely coincidental to the fact that I’d begun to develop evidence that implicated him with three murders? Was there a gray eminence in the shadows directing events, or did the dead hand of Robert Paris still control the lethal machinery? Until that afternoon I had believed the investigation into Hugh’s death was closed. The killing of Aaron Gold changed all that. I was back at the starting line, but with this difference: I was exhausted.
I lay back on the bunk and closed my eyes. Maybe it was the ever-present atmosphere of sexual tension in the jail or just my own loneliness, but I thought back to the last time Hugh and I had made love. Once again I saw the elegant torso stretched out beneath me as I lowered my body to his, and felt that body responding, resisting, yielding. The image of his face came to me with such clarity that I could see the fine blond hairs that grew, almost invisibly, between his eyebrows. And I could see his eyes and in those eyes I saw, with more regret than horror, the face of Aaron Gold bathed in blood.
I sat up. Sonny Patterson was watching me from just outside the cell.
“You all right?”
“Yeah, I must have fallen asleep.”
“You look bad, pal.”
“I’ve had better days.” I rose from the bunk and walked to where he was standing. “Well?”
“It didn’t look so good at first. Two shots fired from the gun, and your fingerprints all over the place. Fortunately for you, the same neighbor who called the cops also saw the guy going into the yard, and it wasn’t you.”
“Saw the guy?”
“Well, saw a guy. Blond, about your height. Good build. Good looking. Couldn’t be you.”
“I do what I can.”
He lit a cigarette and offered me one. I hesitated and then accepted it. The last time I smoked I was eighteen.
“Incidentally, does that description sound like anyone you know?”
I shook my head.
“What about the guy you saw on the side of the house?”
I took a puff. It went down pretty smoothly. “It happened too fast. All I really saw was the gun.”
“You’re sounding like a witness for the prosecution. How come your defense witnesses always had such better memories?”
“Clean living, Sonny,” I said, dropping the cigarette to the floor and crushing it with my heel. The second drag had made me want to vomit.
“Well, that’s something I’ll never be accused of.” He smiled. “Hey, Wilson,” he yelled to one of the jailers, “release the gentleman. He owes me a couple of drinks.”
“I owe you a case.”
“No,” he said, suddenly serious. “You owe me an explanation.”
“Did you call Terry Ormes?”
“Yeah, she’s up in my office. That’s where we’re going.”
It was only around ten but if felt like midnight. Sonny brewed a pot of coffee and brought out a fifth of Irish whiskey from the deep recesses of his desk. Terry yawned, accepted coffee but laid her hand across the cup when he started to pour the whiskey in. He shrugged and poured me a half-cup of coffee, a half-cup of whiskey. For himself, he dispensed with the coffee.
“Now that we’re all comfortable,” he began, settling into his armchair and his affected Southern drawl, “why don’t you begin at the beginning?”
Between the two of us, Terry and I told Patterson the history of the Linden-Smith-Paris clan from the end of the nineteen twenties to the burial of Robert Paris that very afternoon. Patterson listened without comment, moving only to lower the level of fluid in the whiskey bottle now and then. There wasn’t a lot left when we finished.
He looked back and forth between us and shrugged. “So,” he said, “what crime has been committed that I can prove?”
Terry looked at him. “How about four murders, a burglary, and conspiracy to obstruct justice?”
“A crime that I can prove,” he repeated. “In the murders of
Christina and Jeremy Paris, the eyewitness is dead, the coroner is dead, and the deaths have the appearance of being an accident. The remaining evidence — the will — is grist for speculation but not nearly enough to make out a murder. And the trail is twenty years old. The officers who wrote these reports might be dead themselves, and you know as well as I do that their reports are inadmissible hearsay. The death of Hugh Paris-” he glanced over at me. I’d told him that Hugh and I were lovers. “Put out of your head how much you liked the guy. Let me put it as crudely as I can — a hype O.D.’s and drowns. No one sees the death, no traces of murder survive except in Ormes’ recollection. So maybe we can impute a motive to the judge, after a lot of circumstantial fandangos, but so what? The judge is dead. Even assuming he arranged Hugh’s murder, I doubt very seriously that he jotted it down in his appointment book.” He looked at us.
“Aaron,” I said.
“Yes, Aaron Gold. After I persuade the cops that you didn’t do it — and you didn’t, did you — ?” I shook my head, “what do you think they’re gonna conclude?”
“A break-in,” Terry said wearily, “that got out of hand.” Contemptuously, she added, “All the pieces fit.”
“Detective,” Patterson said, “cops are like prosecutors in this respect: we have to play the facts we’re dealt. We can’t engage in cosmic theories, because we’re bound by the evidence we gather and the inferences we can draw from it. You can’t expect me to put Robert Paris on trial for a murder that was committed four days after he died. All that the evidence will support in the case of Aaron Gold is a bungled burglary.”
“The perfect crimes,” Terry muttered.
“Exactly,” Patterson said, shaking the last drops of liquor out of the bottle, “the perfect crimes. No witnesses, no evidence. Plenty of motive — if the murders could be connected, but nothing connects them except a few bits of circumstantial evidence and one hell of a lot of conjecture.” He looked at us again and sighed. “Drink up.”
“Drink up? Is that the D.A.’s position on these murders?” “Jesus Christ, Henry, think of this case as a defense lawyer. Wouldn’t you love to be defending Robert Paris? With the case I have against him?”