Authors: Lisa Scottoline
“He didn’t age well, did he?” Judy asked, studying the photo. “You got a theory? Go with it.”
“Let’s say Darnton — Darning — is the man in the photo,” Mary said tentatively. “He used to be a guy with a job, but now he’s homeless. It happens every day. We know he was alcoholic, the neighbors told us that. Let’s say he started drinking after he left the bank teller job and went downhill from there. Lost his job, his girl. Grew a beard.”
Judy set down the photo, thinking aloud. “So you think this has to do with Darning?”
“Maybe. Maybe it wasn’t a chance meeting between Darning and Steere. Maybe they knew each other.”
“That’s even dopier than what I said.” Judy screwed up her large features, and Mary raised her hand like the Pope.
“Hear me out. Put together what we learned. Let’s say Steere didn’t know the traffic light was red. If he didn’t, his actions don’t make any sense, right?”
“Right. Unless he was really blitzed, which he wasn’t, according to his blood tests.”
“Besides, Steere’s a big guy. He can absorb a lot of booze.” Mary sipped coffee from her mug, more for courage than caffeine. “Steere’s stopping under the bridge doesn’t make sense unless you assume he wanted to meet Darning. They could have arranged to meet under the bridge. Assume Steere was stopping regardless of the light, to kill Darning. Then he made up the whole carjacking story.”
“The carjacking was a lie?”
Mary shook her head. “Not a lie, a
setup
. Work with me. Remember, it’s not a chance meeting.” Although Mary was only thinking aloud, she felt her pulse quicken. “Steere was driving a new Mercedes. Two weeks old, right?”
“Let me double-check.” Judy rose and went to the third accordion file. She flipped through the manila folders until she found the right one, yanked it out, and opened it up. “Here we go. The bill of sale for Steere’s new car. It was three weeks old. $120,000! Wow!”
“What did he trade in? Bet it didn’t look like the Snotmobile.” By that Mary meant her ancient BMW 2002, the only chartreuse car ever sold.
“Look at all this stuff.” Judy was agog. “ ‘Air-bags, leather-covered steering wheel and gear lever, speaker blanking plates integrated on the left and right side of the dashboard — ’”
“Jude, what did he trade in?”
“I wonder what a blanking plate is. How could I graduate from law school and not know what a blanking plate is?”
“Judy! The trade-in.”
Judy flipped to a series of long white documents and screwed up her face in triplicate. “Oh, here. Jeez. He traded in a Mercedes sedan. An S500. V-8. It says ‘Five-Sitzer, four Turen.’”
“How old was the trade-in?” Mary craned her neck to read the document. “How many miles on it?”
“Half a year old. It had fifteen hundred miles on it.” Judy looked up and the two associates locked eyes.
“It’s not as if Steere needed a new car, is it?” Mary felt an ominous churning in the pit of her stomach and it wasn’t the coffee. Suddenly the brief didn’t matter and neither did her job. “What if Steere planned this whole thing? What if he bought the car to make the carjacking more plausible? What if Steere arranged to meet Darnton — Darning — to kill him? That’s murder. Premeditated murder.”
Judy cocked her head, skeptical now that Mary’s expression was turning so grave. “You mean Steere used the new Mercedes as bait?”
“No. I mean Steere intended to kill Darning for some reason and bought the car in advance of that — to make the carjacking more plausible.”
“Wait, wait, slow up. You’re serious about this?”
Mary nodded. “It fits, doesn’t it? It’s consistent with what we found. Maybe Steere is a murderer.” It made Mary sick to say it. “And we defended him. We probably got him off.”
“Mary, wait.” Judy shook her head. “Just because Steere bought a new car doesn’t mean he’s a murderer. Rich people do stuff like that all the time. An impulse purchase.”
“A convertible? A white Mercedes that cost as much as a house?”
“So he’s a show-off, and it was almost summer.”
“Judy, he bought the most conspicuous car in history and drove it through the worst neighborhood in history. In the middle of the night. Isn’t that suspicious? I mean, if you wanted people to believe you’d been carjacked, you’d go out and buy a car that was flashy enough to steal. Steere was making it look like random street crime when it was really murder.”
Judy flopped back in her swivel chair with a sigh. Her lower lip puckered with concern. She was sorry she’d started all this, with the color blindness. She worried Mary was seeing murder mysteries because of her past. “But how could the D.A. prove this?”
“I don’t know, they’re a good office. Maybe they found some sort of after-discovered evidence. Your tax dollars.”
Judy’s eyes narrowed. “You still have a motive problem, Mare. Why would Steere want to kill Darning?”
“I don’t know.” Mary paused, then brightened. “Maybe there’s a motive and we just don’t know it yet. We don’t have enough information. If we find the connection between the two men, we find the motive.”
“What connection? There is no connection. One is at the bottom of the food chain and the other is at the top.”
Mary blinked as the answer struck her. “What is the connection between a rich man and a bank employee? Get a clue. It rhymes with money.”
Judy considered it. Maybe it wasn’t completely nuts, or paranoid. “Wait a minute.” She got up and searched the Steere file again, checking each accordion. “What bank did Darning work in?”
“PSFS. The Philadelphia Savings Fund Society. They’re out of business now, but they still have the neon sign on top of their old building. You know the sign.”
“PSFS? Sign? No.”
“It’s on the building, on the east side of town. It’s huge, you can’t miss it. It’s a historic landmark now. You know it.”
“Didn’t we just have this conversation?”
“Forget it.” Mary’s headache returned. It was too late to be working. What a job. Mary remembered the plastic PSFS passbook she had as a child, in trademark tartan. It had an inky little S that stood for Student Account. Where was that frigging passbook now? Maybe she was rich and didn’t know it. Then she could quit.
“Here it is.” Judy had flipped to the back of a thick document and handed it to Mary. “Steere’s most recent tax return. It shows all his bank accounts, even under his corporate names. None of them are at PSFS.” Judy flipped through the other returns in the folder. “Even as long ago as five years, nothing says PSFS.”
Mary read down the list on the tax form. Her heart stopped midway. “Steere has two accounts at Mellon Bank, for $100,000 combined. Now why would he leave that much money in an account that earns almost nothing?”
“What’s the difference? Mellon Bank isn’t the one Darning worked in.”
“Yes, it is. Mellon bought PSFS about five years ago.”
Judy blinked. “For real?”
“Mellon came out of Pittsburgh in the eighties and started buying up all the Philly banks, including Girard, which was a real Philadelphia thing. My mother won’t bank at Mellon because they had the nerve to buy Girard.”
“Odd.”
“My mother?”
“No. I love your mother. I like your mother better than you do.”
But Mary was thinking. “Maybe Darning rose up in the ranks at the bank, and there was some finagling with Steere’s accounts or something. Bribes. Embezzlement.”
“You’re guessing.”
“Can you blame me?” Mary asked, but that was all she said or needed to. She didn’t want to talk about the past, she didn’t even want to think about it. And she certainly didn’t want to relive it.
Suddenly there was a commotion outside the conference room. The lawyers heard Marta talking to someone and sprang into action like Pavlov’s associates. “Yikes!” Judy yelped, snatching the papers and photos from the table and stuffing them in the nearest accordion. “How’d Erect get here so fast?”
Mary punched a key to wake the laptop. “She took the broom.”
J
udge Harry Calvin Rudolph brooded at his heavy, polished desk in his modern chambers at the Criminal Justice Center, fingering the handwritten note that threatened to put the kibosh on his judicial career. The promotion of a lifetime was in striking distance, and Judge Rudolph wasn’t about to let it slip away, not at his age. His hands had only recently begun to sprout liver spots and the strands of hair sneaking from under his French cuffs were just silvering to gray. Judge Rudolph was in his prime as a jurist. A scholar, a leader. He could make history.
Before he presided over the Steere case, Judge Rudolph had spent fifteen years on the Common Pleas Court of Philadelphia County. He’d wanted to be a judge so much in the beginning, he’d left private practice when it was beginning to prosper. Money wasn’t everything, and young Harry was drawn to the scholarship, trappings, and prestige inherent in a judge’s station. A robe, a gavel, a dais. He imagined what his Bucknell classmates would think. The frats who ignored him at rush week. Now Harry Rudolph was not only in the frat, he
was
the frat.
Judge Rudolph twisted the piece of yellow legal paper in his hands, remembering his idealism in the beginning. Leave it to others to fight for money; let his colleagues battle for the ephemeral power of partnership. Judge Rudolph’s power was real, lasting, reinforced by judicial might. In his tenure on the bench he caused fortunes to change hands, ordered criminals to jail, and even locked up a couple of reporters. Judge Rudolph administered justice. When you had that, who needed money?
Fifteen years later, Judge Rudolph did. Fifteen years later, money was all he needed. The income of his peers had skyrocketed past his, even though he was making a hundred grand a year. He’d heard that Blumenfeld was taking home $450,000 at Dechert Price & Rhodes and Simonsburger was raking it in at Morgan, Lewis. Hell,
everybody
was raking it in at Morgan, Lewis. Judge Rudolph couldn’t stand to look at their faces at reunions, law review banquets, or those rare occasions when his classmates appeared before him in court. He knew they were having the last laugh on the way home. In the Jag.
Judge Rudolph set the note down. If he held it in his hands any longer he’d tear it in two. He stared at it in contempt, there on his soft green blotter in the middle of his glistening desk. Just last week, Dave DeCaro came to court defending a CEO at Witmark. DeCaro was tanned from a vacation on Grand Cayman. A winter vacation to the
Caymans
, for God’s sake, with all six kids and his wife. Judge Rudolph couldn’t have done that in a pig’s eye and he was ten times the lawyer DeCaro was.
The judge laced his fingers in front of him, studying the note. Christ Almighty. Not now. There was an opening coming up on the state Supreme Court, and Judge Rudolph was a shoo-in for the nomination. Justice Harry C. Rudolph. Chief Justice H. C. Rudolph.
Superchief
. He wasn’t about to let this note ruin everything. Not his last chance.
The Steere case had gone so well and the judge had done everything right so far. No cameras in the courtroom; a gag order as soon as the lawyers started yapping. Only fifty spectators at a time; all press conferences after business hours. Two side-bars a day; arguments limited to five minutes a side. He’d even seen to it that the Steere jury could deliberate through the snowstorm and bound Steere over at the courthouse. They didn’t call him “Rocket Docket” Rudolph for nothing, and that was exactly the kind of thing that got the attention of the big boys. Keep the cases moving and don’t fuck up the felonies. Steere was the case that would make him a Supreme Court justice. If this note didn’t queer it.
Judge Rudolph fumbled beside his blotter for his reading glasses. Maybe he had misread it, in anger. Then again, maybe not:
YOUR HONOR, ONE OF THE JURORS HAS A MEDICAL EMERGENCY AND WANTS TO TALK TO YOU.
SINCERELY,
CHRISTOPHER GRAHAM YOUR FOREPERSON
The judge snapped off his glasses and barked, “Send him in!”
“You were a tailor, Mr. Tullio?” Judge Rudolph glared over his glasses at the juror, who couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. He wore a brown suit with a hand-stitched lapel, worn thin.
“Yes, Your Honor. Until I retired. Your Honor. Sir.”
“You live in South Philadelphia, near Second Street. Is that right?”
“Yes, sir. Your Honor. Near the museum.”
“But the art museum’s on the parkway.”
“The Mummers’ museum, I mean.” Nick nodded with jittery vigor. “Got the Mummers costumes and all. In glass.”
Judge Rudolph cleared his throat. “Mr. Tullio, I understand you have a medical emergency. Do you?”
“Yes. No. Your Honor. Not an emergency. I’m not bleedin’ or nothin’.”
“I can see that.”
“I just heaved, is all.”
Judge Rudolph sighed deeply. “Is that your medical problem, Mr. Tullio? You—”
“Heaved.” Nick slipped in the red cushion in the chair across from the judge’s big desk. The seat was too wide and slippery for his heinie. He had to hold on to the armrests just to stay up. Nick kept looking around but not so it was obvious. It was just him against the judge and the clerk and the lady with the machine. Nick had never been in such an important place as a judge’s chambers, with the papers and books and paintings. Thank God he was wearing his good suit. It paid for a man to be well dressed.
“Mr. Tullio? Your medical problem is that you … vomited?”
“It’s my ulcer.”
“You have an ulcer?” asked Judge Rudolph, correcting the man, who’d pronounced it “elcer.”
“Yes, an elcer,” Nick said anyway. “In my stomach. I want to go home.”
Judge Rudolph would be damned if he’d lose a juror now. He’d sent the alternates home already, and it would take hours to get one back in the snow. The judge skimmed his voir dire notes, then the juror’s questionnaire in front of him. “You didn’t mention an ulcer in voir dire, Mr. Tullio. You didn’t say anything about an ulcer.”
Nick slipped sideways in his chair. “I wasn’t sure I had one then. I mean, my doc said I don’t have one, but I know I do. It’s acting up from my nerves. It’s burning.”
“Your doctor examined you and he said you don’t have an ulcer, is that right?”