A Face at the Window (3 page)

"Anyway, you said yourself there's nothing in your statement that'll mean anything at the guy's trial. No reason for him to want to get you out of the way, no new evidence against him, that you can supply."

She frowned. He was correct on this point, also; even all these years later, what happened on that night in the brownstone
in Greenwich Village was so clear in her mind, it could've been etched there with an engraving tool.

But the memories of a witness who was just three years old at the time, Assistant DA Lawrence Trotta had informed her, would carry little weight with a jury. They might even harm his case, being as there was absolutely no corroborating evidence for them.

"Nothing they can use, even though I was right there," she confirmed. "Basically, they're prosecuting him without me."

Juries didn't like feeling that they were being manipulated by emotion, Trotta had said. The wise prosecutor didn't even try it. "So getting me out of the way couldn't help him at all. More likely the opposite," she finished.

She slid the spade's blade deeper underneath the concrete chunk. The best she could hope for, Trotta had said as kindly as he was able—being a prosecuting attorney had put a hide like an elephant's on him—was that her victim's impact statement might sway the jury when sentencing time came.

If it came, because there could instead be an acquittal; in fact, that was the likeliest outcome. After so many years, most of them occupied by the FBI's search for the wrong man, the case was no slam dunk and Trotta had made no secret of that, either.

Especially since the one thing she hadn't seen clearly that night was the killer's face. "Probably Campbell doesn't like being reminded of what he did," she told Bob. And her statement, so full of vividly recalled detail even after all this time, would at least accomplish that much.

But Campbell wouldn't do anything so risky as harming her right before his trial, merely over hurt feelings. If he did he'd be the obvious suspect. So what was he up to?

"Back away, Bob, will you? If some concrete snaps off or the spade breaks, I don't want it to hit you."

He obeyed, stepping up onto the porch where a pair of blue canvas lawn chairs took up most of the space. Summer was nearly over, the temperatures on clear nights plummeting to the forties under stars turning hard and cold, but in Eastport, people clung to the last dregs. When she woke up to snow overfilling the blue canvas drink cups built into the chair arms, she would haul them inside.

"That looks like kind of a tough job, there," Bob observed. "You sure you don't want me to…?"

"Bob, don't treat me like a little old lady."
Or,
she added silently,
what you think of as a lady, at all.

He still seemed to believe she should be hiring help for this kind of thing, that she was somehow too fragile for fixing up an old house. Partly she imagined that it was because she was slender and five foot four, with small, regular features capped by clipped-short dark hair; overall, it was a package that made some people—not ones she liked—describe her as "pixieish."

And partly it was because, even though his wife Clarissa was the kind of tough criminal defense attorney for whom the phrase "junkyard dog" was invented, Bob just still thought that way.

She leaned on the spade; if you crossed Dirty Harry with the Pillsbury Doughboy and added a dollop of Miss Manners, Bob was what you'd get. In his mind, the womanly spheres didn't include any power tools or guns, two areas in which she actually had some hard-won expertise.

It was yet another way in which the house had repaid her for her work on it. When she came here the only power tool she'd ever used was an electric toothbrush, unless you counted the blender in which she'd made strawberry daiquiris. And heavy lifting had been out of her realm entirely.

As she'd hoped, the mechanical advantage of the spade's long handle lifted the chunk easily; so much for needing a tough
guy. Nothing like demolition work to put hair on a girl's chest, she thought; harness anger, keep a leash on revenge fantasies, even squelch fears…

Some fears. Pivoting, she deposited the big concrete piece on the lawn under the maple, whose roots were likely what had caused the concrete walk to fracture at all.

"Look, it's not like I don't sympathize. It can't be easy," said Bob. "The trial, remembering it all and hearing it brought up again—"

She laughed shortly. "That's putting it mildly." Having your mother killed and believing that your father had done it was the next best thing to being an orphan.

Or next worst. Her own experiences with parentlessness had made Oliver Twist look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. But that was all over and done with long ago, she reminded herself as, sighing, she peered into the hole.

It was wet. Muddy, even. "Oh, hell," she pronounced.

Straightening, she wiped her hands on her jeans and turned. "Bob, the guy murdered my mother. Strangled her, set a fire, blew up half a city block, and basically framed my father for it all. Sent him on the run."

The authorities had been happy to suspect Jacob Tiptree. He was already the kind of guy they liked making an example of, the kind who built bombs and exploded them as loudly and publicly as possible to highlight social injustice. Not hurting people; never that. He and his associates had been careful, and anyway in those days a big bang and a mimeographed manifesto had been enough.

The old, golden days…"You don't know for sure," Bob began again, "that Ozzie Campbell was really even the one who—"

"Yes, I do," she retorted. "Everyone does. Besides my dad and the man who finally ended up being my dad's alibi—"

The fellow he'd been selling explosives to when the fire began hadn't wanted to come forward. Only on his deathbed had he told authorities how he knew for sure that Jacob Tiptree hadn't killed his beautiful young wife, Leonora:

Because the fellow had been planning a demonstration of his own, in support of an antipoverty group he'd been a part of. At the rally he meant to blow up an enormous statue of a pig wearing a business suit, and in return for black powder, fuse cord, and the blasting caps to do it with, he'd just finished handing ten thousand dollars over to Jacob Tiptree when the murder occurred.

"Ozzie Campbell was the only other adult in the house," she finished. He'd even had a motive: his love for Jake's mother, which afterward he'd never bothered keeping a secret.

So as soon as the cops stopped thinking Jake's dad had done the deed, Campbell was the clear next choice. Add a Manhattan ADA who badly wanted that word "assistant" lopped off his title and presto, instant prosecution.

Campbell would get Trotta's name and his brand-new slogan—"Justice Never Forgets"—into the newspapers and onto the blogs.

Win or lose hardly mattered; it was the name recognition Trotta would get out of it that counted.

"Jake, you were just a little kid," argued Bob. "You don't know who all might've been there with your folks in the—"

"Oh, but I do." Why was it so hard to make people understand this, that the facts of the case were clear? "Everyone saw who all went in and out of our house. In those days in the Village it was just like it is here, a neighborhood."

She waved at the other big old white wooden houses on the block, their front steps bright with potted chrysanthemums and blowsy late-season geraniums, many of their inhabitants taking
advantage of the fine late summer weather and busy with chores: painting porches, washing windows, tidying dooryards.

A red muscle car rumbled by, thudding down the street to the deep bass thump of its oversized stereo speakers. An ice cream truck tootled in the opposite direction, jangling out its simple tune like a brain-dead Pied Piper.

"Still," Bob began again, wanting to reassure her.

He was like that. "Trotta has witnesses," she interrupted him. "From back then. People on their front stoops gossiping and watching the kids play It was," she added, "a nice day."

Or so she'd been told. "And there's plenty of testimony that no one else went in there that afternoon. No one but my dad, the guy who was buying stuff from him, and Campbell."

ADA Trotta had hinted recently about new forensics evidence, stuff that hadn't been possible back then, though she'd yet to be told anything definite. He was tight-lipped both about potential new lab results and about his trial strategy. But even if new scientific evidence came in, getting a jury to care would still be a challenge, everything faded by years and by the brighter contrasts of newer, more sensational crimes.

Bob relented a little. "So you think Campbell's nervous."

"Yeah. About me. And if I knew why, maybe I'd feel better about this little thin-air maneuver he's pulling."

Or maybe not. She dropped to her knees again by the muddy hole in the front walk, scowled into it.

No wonder the concrete had finally broken. There was nothing underneath to hold it up. All the dirt down there had washed away.

"I don't know what might've set Campbell off," she said, "but I don't care what the ADA's aide says about him maybe just wanting a vacation, a little peace and quiet before the you-know-what hits the fan."

A swiftly set bail requirement of two point five million had been no bar to Ozzie's gaining his freedom, a few days after the indictment. Defendants only had to put up ten percent; still, it was a lot of money. On the telephone, Sandy O’Neill had suggested Campbell's absence was probably no big deal, just on account of the potential forfeiture of so much money and property.

That Jake shouldn't be alarmed. But Jake thought O’Neill was alarmed himself on some level, or he wouldn't have called her.

"Campbell's a slime toad," she said. "A thug, with thuggish connections." Everyone knew that about him, too; the indictment, along with a brief profile of him, had appeared in the papers as Trotta hoped. "And no one knows where he is."

Looking around for the possible cause of the muddiness in the hole, she found it a few feet away in the metal downspout of a gutter still dripping from showers the night before. "Damn."

"What's the trouble?" Bob asked.

A half-hour repair job had just expanded to the better part of a week. "That," she replied, pointing up in disgust.

New aluminum gutters gleamed at the roofline of the house, an 1823 white Federal clapboard with three full floors plus an attic, three tall red brick chimneys, and forty-eight old double-hung windows each with a set of old green wooden shutters.

And a collapsed front walk. Squinting, Bob frowned. "Looks okay to me. The rainwater used to come down there—"

He pointed to where small rust stains betrayed the earlier presence of metal. "But you rearranged it so it comes down here." He aimed an index finger at the relocated downspout. "So … ?"

Inhaling deeply, she pressed the pad of her thumb to the spot just between her eyes where her head was beginning to throb.

"So when I redirected the rainwater runoff, I didn't take into account where the water would run once I got it away from the foundation, that's what. And where it would go turns out to be under that sidewalk."

"Oh," Bob said, nodding comprehendingly. "Then, when it got under there, it caused…"

"Erosion. And then the concrete cracked. So the other day when my dad stepped on it, it collapsed and so did he."

"He's okay, though? Your dad?" Bob asked solicitously.

The lean old man with the stringy gray ponytail, big work-roughened hands, and pale blue eyes was a favorite of the Eastport police chief, even though Jake's dad wore a ruby in his earlobe and Bob believed firmly that earrings on men were against the laws of nature.

"Yeah." Jake eyed the hole. "Cast on his foot, but he and Bella went on their honeymoon anyway, just the way they planned."

Her dad and her housekeeper Bella Diamond had been courting for years behind a smokescreen of quarrels and spats. Underneath all the friction, though, they were as made for each other as a pair of Siamese fighting fish.

"Going to be interesting," Bob remarked. "Got the first-aid kit stocked?"

A laugh escaped her. "Yeah. And one of those bells they ring at boxing matches to make them get back to their corners. I guess I'm the designated referee."

She looked up. "Seriously, though, if she doesn't nurse him to death after his foot injury, and he doesn't get so cranky he ends up swatting her with a rolled newspaper, they'll be fine."

Behind Bob, the house soared solidly into the sky, its proportions—from door height to window width to the arc of the
leaded-glass fanlight over the massive front entry, right down to the lap of the clapboards nailed precisely upon one another—as satisfying as a mathematical equation.

That more than anything was what had attracted her to the old structure, she supposed, the idea that if you stayed in such a place long enough, you might come to resemble it. That a person might eventually learn to live by its dignified example.

So far it hadn't happened, but one could hope.

Just then a car pulled up alongside her and a familiar hoot issued from its open window. "Ja-ake!" called Eastport's closest equivalent to a human foghorn, Billie Whitson.

Reluctantly, Jake turned. Billie was a recent arrival to the area, fresh from the sunny climes and even sunnier financial prospects of Carmel, California. She was full of marvelous plans for turning Eastport into a Maine island paradise.

That it already was one seemed not to have occurred to her. "Now, Jake, I want you to tell me I can put you on the list," she declared.

The California sun had turned Billie's short, straight hair to yellow straw, and her face into a leathery mask of bright paint, jangly earrings, and black-rimmed eyes. "If people see how beautifully you've rehabbed
that
old monstrosity," she went on with a wave at Jake's beloved antique dwelling, "they'll be more likely to buy one of the truly good old homes that
I'm
in the business of selling."

Feasting her eyes upon Internet photos of cheap shoreline property and unaware that in Maine what you saved on land, you spent on heat, Billie had wasted no time getting a Realtor's license and setting up a Web site of her own. Now she wanted to put Jake's place on her virtual home tour, "just to show what you can do with even the worst old heap," as she so flatteringly put it.