The Barkeep (5 page)

5.

LIME RIKKI

T
he doubts came at night for Mia Dalton, and they came with teeth bared.

During the daytime, Mia Dalton lived in a world of certainties. The sky was blue, the ocean was salty, guilt was a condition of the soul merely ratified in court by a jury of the defendant’s peers. And the most important certainty of all was that when Mia Dalton was prosecuting homicides with a ferocity that made hers a cursed name in penitentiaries all across the state, she was always acting as a crusading instrument of justice.

Mia Dalton had convicted some of the most notorious murderers in Philadelphia’s history, including a famous sixties icon who decades ago had decapitated his girlfriend, stuffed her body into a trunk, and then gone on the lam in France until being found and extradited. Now chief of the Homicide Division, Mia was much in demand as an after-dinner speaker, peppering her popular talk with the lurid details of her most lurid cases. And after each of these talks, during the Q-and-A, there seemed always to be the same type of questioner: young, a bit scruffy, a law student usually, with an eye on a job with the public defender.

“Have any of your convictions been reversed?” would ask the questioner.

“I work especially hard to keep my trial records spotless,” she would say, standing proudly behind the lectern. “I take no shortcuts and follow the letter of the law. I’m proud that none of my convictions have ever been overturned on appeal.”

“Has any new scientific evidence ever shown one of your convictions to be unjust?”

“No, never,” she would reply. “In fact, in the few cases where new DNA tests were requested and allowed, the tests only confirmed the rightness of each conviction.”

“So you have no doubts about the guilt of any of the defendants you’ve convicted of murder?”

“Let’s just say I sleep well at night. Very well.”

But this last response was a lie. Because Mia Dalton did not sleep well at all.

Late at night, lying beside the hard body of Rikki, she would sleep uneasily, fitfully, waiting for the doubts to descend. And descend they would, with a marauding relentlessness, teeth of doubt within a huge gaping maw that would swallow her whole and leave her twisting with anxiety in the darkness. Doubts about life, about love, about her uneasy place in the world, about her mother’s cancer and her father’s clumsy hands, about Rikki’s fidelity, about any good she had ever tried to do. And worst of all, doubts about her stellar career. The strategies, the tactics and tricks, the closing arguments structured with telling bits of humor and outrage. And all the men and women sitting behind bars as their lives rotted away because of her. What if her self-righteous certainties were only a tattered curtain to hide unthinkable truths? What if one of her defendants was really a victim himself, whose life was rent by her ability in court? What if her electric ambition was
not a servant of justice but instead just another instrument of injustice in a soiled world? And for Mia, these last, most serious of doubts had a name.

Mackenzie Chase.

She had already been the star of the Homicide Division, up for promotion to deputy chief, when she had been assigned the Eleanor Chase murder. It was a hot case for an ambitious prosecutor, and the press was all over it. The Chestnut Hill mansion, the well-loved poet and teacher, the body tragically found by the youngest son, a scruffy law student at the time. The husband, a prosperous businessman, had an airtight alibi: he was at a meeting at the time of the killing. The marriage by all accounts was strong. The victim, by all accounts, had no enemies. And there was clear evidence of a theft, making the crime seem like a targeted robbery gone horribly wrong. The case was going nowhere, and Mia Dalton was at a loss, when the son who found the body, a boy named Justin Chase, had paid her an unscheduled visit.

He was sallow, soft and a little heavy, wary, his clothes unkempt and eyes red, as if he had been getting stoned nonstop in the weeks since he had found his mother’s body. If so, she couldn’t blame the kid. “I know how hard this must be for you,” she had said.

“Do you?”

She ignored the comment because she didn’t, she couldn’t. “I just want to assure you that our office and the police department are doing everything we can.”

“Do you have any leads?”

“Absolutely.”

“Suspects?”

“Of course we do, and we’re looking at each of them quite carefully. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can talk about
now, but please be assured, Justin, that the investigation is moving forward. You know, we’ve asked you to come to the office and speak with us, but you never responded.”

“I made a statement the night I found her.”

“Yes, and it was quite detailed. But sometimes we like to go over things a second or third time.”

“They kept me at the Roundhouse for twelve hours.”

“And I assume you told them everything.”

“Pretty much.”

She thought she was being perceptive, noting the tone and flavor, and then pouncing with the predatory instinct of a career prosecutor. But she could see now that those words were like a lure for a hungry trout, something to flit across the water, to reflect light and entice, before the fish leaped for the bait. And she had come to believe, now, that all the time this Justin Chase had known she was that fish.

“Pretty much?” she had asked.

He didn’t say anything.

“Justin?”

“Would it matter,” he had said finally, as if she had squeezed it out of him, “if you found out my father was having an affair?”

Would it matter? Of course it would matter.

And once she had the hook in her mouth, there was no stopping her run. The husband who had lied to the police. The mistress, a luscious tomato named Annie Overmeyer who had much to say. The friend in custody who testified against the defendant to shorten his own sentence. The circumstances of the alibi that had always seemed so peculiar. It all came so easily, so naturally, and her performance at the trial was so brutally inspired that the conviction seemed like an inevitability.

It was only later, after Mackenzie Chase had been sent off to death row, that she began to see how loose it all was, how weak and circumstantial was the case, and how brilliantly, in the face of that weakness, she had brought it all together for the jury and drove the conviction home. It was only later, as the doubts began to descend in the middle of her nights, that she saw how maybe she had been cunningly manipulated by the young Justin Chase in some perverse oedipal drama of his own.

So you have no doubts about the guilt of any of the defendants you’ve convicted of murder?

If she were a stronger person, she would have taken hold of the Chase file on her own initiative and reviewed everything to make sure the result was just. If she were a stronger person, she would have welcomed the questions and doggedly followed their twisting paths to some firm resolution. But in the dark of the night when the doubts came, she simply hoped, prayed, that if she ignored them long enough, maybe they would simply disappear. Or maybe no one would notice. Or maybe something would come along and make everything moot, like maybe a car accident, or a heart attack.

But she needn’t have bothered with all that hoping, for all the good it did. Life is unbearably perverse; that which we most seek to avoid always becomes unavoidable. How inevitable then that the Mackenzie Chase file would once again sit open upon her desk.

“He’s late,” said Mia.

“He’s an addict,” said Detective Scott. “Of course he’s late.”

“And you’re sure there’s nothing here?”

“I told you already, Mia, I never laid a glove on him.”

From behind her desk, she looked over her reading glasses at the detective. Scott was a large hunch of a man with rounded
shoulders and a thick, ugly tie. At the time of the Chase murder he had been one of the old bulls in Homicide, but since then he had been farmed out to Missing Persons as the department eased his path to retirement. He was strictly a desk jockey now, and apparently quite content with his reduced duties, which allowed him to comfortably drink his coffee and do the Jumble every morning. He wasn’t pleased that Mia had jerked him away from his desk and up to the DA’s office for today’s interview.

“That’s not what he says.” Mia looked down at the file and traced her finger across a page. “He says you put a knee in his gut, grabbed him by the hair, and hit him so hard in the jaw you loosened a tooth.”

“I don’t doubt his tooth was loose. Guys under as long as he was, their mouths look like ruined cemeteries. But I never popped him, never needed to. The guy was facing serious time for a burglary. He needed to deal, he made the claim, they brought me in. All I did was sit there with a stenographer while he spilled.”

“So why is he recanting? And why now?”

“He’s an addict. All you need to know is that if he’s an addict, he’s lying.”

“He was an addict then, too.”

“True.”

“So?”

“So, what do you want me to say? Was he lying then? Who the hell knows? C’mon, Mia, you more than anyone know what the deal is here. He made his statement, we went soft on his sentencing, and we put everything on the record. They cross-examined him. They cross-examined me. You gave a hell of an argument, and the jury convicted. You got your stat. I closed a case. It all sounds good to me.”

“And you’re ready to testify about what went on in that room?”

“If you need me to.”

“Oh, we’ll need you to, if we’re going to keep that bastard behind bars.”

Mackenzie Chase had killed his wife because of love. At least that was the theory. He had been in love with his mistress, Annie Overmeyer, with her alluring lines and pouting lips. And Annie Overmeyer herself was ready to testify about his repeated promises to her that they would be married, and soon, just as soon as he could do something about his wife. And then, of course, the wife had been brutally murdered. But there had been no apparent opportunity for Chase to have done the deed himself. He had been in a late meeting in his factory at the time of his wife’s murder. And though the meeting had been hastily called, and the matters discussed were in no way pressing, and the other participants had been puzzled as to why the meeting had been called so late at night, there was no doubt that the meeting had taken place. So Mia Dalton somehow had to link Mackenzie Chase with a murder he couldn’t have committed himself, and this had proved exceedingly difficult. It was why no indictment had been issued for weeks, even after Justin’s unannounced visit to Mia’s office.

And then Detective Scott had come up with the answer. And his name was Timmy Flynn.

Timmy Flynn was a high-school classmate of Mackenzie Chase’s at Overbrook High. Everyone has one old friend who turns into a burnout, who loses himself in drugs and crime and lives a life you find almost unimaginable, one friend you keep up with even though you shouldn’t. You keep up out of loyalty, out of fascination, out of acknowledgment of the fact that the two of you are not so different as it might seem. That
was Timmy Flynn for Mackenzie Chase. They spun in different circles, but every now and then they met in a bar or at a ball game and caught up on the different trajectories of their lives. Flynn was like a visitor from Mackenzie’s own dark side. And for Flynn, Mackenzie was living the life Flynn could have lived if only he had made different choices. They both seemed to need each other. And then, during one of their meetings, out of the blue, Chase asked Flynn if he knew anyone who could do a certain job.

“What kind of job?” had asked Flynn, according to the statement he gave to Detective Scott.

“Maybe I need someone taken care of,” said Mackenzie.

“What are you talking about? You looking for a nurse?”

“Don’t be an idiot, Timmy.”

“Are you asking what I think you’re asking?”

“I’m just asking.”

“Well, don’t.”

“So you don’t know anyone?”

“What I’m saying is, you don’t want to be asking that question.”

“Maybe I do.”

“What the hell is going on with you? Someone causing you problems?”

“Do you have any idea, Timmy,” had said Mackenzie Chase, according to Timmy Flynn’s statement, “how much a divorce costs?”

Mia Dalton put Timmy Flynn on the stand, and she still wondered whether she had done the right thing. He was so undeniably unreliable, his statement was so self-serving, that she herself didn’t really believe a word he said. But there wasn’t enough of a case without him, and Justin Chase had somehow put the bit in her mouth, and her certainty about
Mackenzie Chase’s guilt was so secure that she decided to leave it up to the jury. She put that skeevy old addict on the stand, and the jury bought it. Even after Chase’s lawyer sliced and diced Timmy Flynn like a Genoa salami, the jury bought it. And the maw of doubt bared its teeth.

Now, five years after his conviction, and after all appeals had been exhausted, Mackenzie Chase was petitioning the court for a new trial. And the basis for that petition was the recantation of Timmy Flynn. So this interview was going to be quite difficult for Mia. She wasn’t just after some sense of why Flynn was changing his story, and why now. She was also hoping to encounter maybe something close to the truth. Because if she saw even a glimpse of the truth, perhaps the doubts would subside, finally, and she could get a full night’s sleep.

“Where the hell is he?” said Mia.

“You want I should pick him up?” said Scott.

“You know where he lives?”

“Probation has him down in Kensington.”

“Go get him.”

Detective Scott slapped his legs and breathed heavily as he stood.

“And Scott,” said Mia Dalton, “do me a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t go alone.”

Detective Scott stared at Mia for a moment and then smiled. “I get the feeling, Mia, that you don’t trust me.”

“You know what I’ve always admired about you, Detective?”

“What’s that?”

“Your perspicacity.”

“I’ll take it as a compliment,” said the detective, “whatever the hell it means.”

An hour later the call came in.