Authors: John D. MacDonald
“If your aunt had balls she’d be your uncle, Johnny.”
“She is very good, this Crissy. And she’s running in enough luck to make it work out for her. Once the Muñeca took off, she recruited a patsy for what she had in mind. Not some smart-ass kid, but exactly the kind of dumb idealistic kid she could con into taking care of a little problem called Staniker. The size of the stink has startled her a little. She didn’t guess how much there’d be. All she has to do is ride the wave, keep her head down, and eventually she’s home free.”
“Which means, Johnny, you can’t build a solid file.”
“That’s my problem.”
“And that confrontation, that little masterpiece of Perry Mason
drama, was bush-league desperation. You sweetened me into a little friendly cooperation, and then you pull that on my client.”
“The file isn’t solid. But there are some funny bits in it that don’t match up.”
“I bleed for you, Captain. You conned her into a hell of a lot of so-called voluntary interrogation before she had the representation she should have had from the start. That was your big chance, and I think she was a little too cute for you. You blew it.”
“Let me tell you something, Palmer Haas. Or ask you something. This file we’ve got. If she was pure dog, a dismal ugly woman, and if almost anybody in this area was representing her beside you, I think I’d take a chance and try to go with what we’ve got. But she’s got too much presence and looks and quickness of mind, and you’d use your challenges to set up a jury that would give her the most brownie points based on those assets.”
“And charge her with what, man?”
“Accessory. Murder one.”
“Come
on!
What do you take me for?”
“Palmy, do you remember how we got to know each other? Six years back, wasn’t it? That Todd couple. There were two places in the cross examination where you could have objected and didn’t.
Why?”
“Simple ignorance, Captain.”
“I contend that you knew they were guilty as hell and I contend you knew that was the only place where it could be opened up, and I contend that pair of butcher abortionists sickened you, just as that retired Atlanta whore sickens me. I further contend that in these past six years you’ve lowered your sights, Counsellor. You’re hooked on your batting average, and the better the average, the bigger the fees and the more of a celebrity you become.”
“Thanks for the lunch. I don’t have to take this crap from anybody. See you around.”
John Lobwohl found himself quite suddenly alone in the booth. You have to try. That’s the only constant. But, he thought, maybe the flaw is in trying harder when you can feel no pity, trying a little harder to nail the cold, clever, amoral ones, perhaps out of some pitiful compulsion to try to improve the world. The world penned up the sheep with the tigers, and nothing you could do until you could prove that was real lambs wool between the great white fangs.
Palmer Haas slid suddenly into the booth. “Six guys at the bar gave me the jolly greeting when I was on my way out, Johnny. It gave me that good old warm glow. I’m a real celebrity. What’s really on your mind?”
“I’m going to give you all the funny pieces out of the file. If it ever comes to trial, you might dig up most of them beforehand, but not all. After you get these pieces, then I ask a favor. When you say no, you’ve gotten all our ammunition free.”
“Interesting risk.”
“First item: She said she’d never been to those Mooney cottages before. She said she had a hard time finding them, a week ago tonight. We took some sneak shots of Harkinson. I assembled a set of ten similar photos, ten women, blonde, about the same age bracket. Staniker had been there one night back in April, as G. Stanley from Tampa. I sent Mercer and Tuck to see that little hump-back lady that operates the place, on the very slim chance maybe Crissy had been with him and the dwarf lady had a glimpse of her. She said she couldn’t remember any woman, and then when she went through the pictures she got a reaction to the Harkinson woman. She got flustered. She went into some kind of a wild story about remembering an outside screen wasn’t hooked on the cottage they were in, and going to fix it so the wind wouldn’t blow it off, and seeing the two of them in there. It turns out she’s a peeper, and goes scooting around in the night with her little aluminum kitchen ladder. She nailed the ID a little more solid by describing the car the blonde
arrived in, a little white foreign convertible, parked beside Staniker’s Olds in front of the place. She watched some pretty strenuous fun and games, apparently. That was at about the same time, according to Crissy, she was breaking up forever with Staniker. And it means she lied about never having been there before. Conclusion: They were setting up a hideout for Staniker after he got back from the Islands.
“Second item: She claims she did not tell the Akard boy where Staniker was. She guesses he probably followed her. Yet on that same Friday night Sam Boylston tried to follow her, and she pulled a very smart trick, exactly the same trick Staniker pulled on Raoul Kelly when he tried to tail Staniker that same day.”
Palmer Haas asked what ruse was used, and Lobwohl described it. “Nothing much yet,” Haas said. “Keep going.”
John Lobwohl recounted the deft way Crissy had tricked Kindler and Scheff into letting her dispose of a bundle of something or other when they drove her in. “We phoned Kelly in Texas,” Lobwohl said, “and he questioned his girl. As far as the maid knows, Crissy never bought yard goods, never used a dressmaker. We combed that shopping center and came up empty. Conclusion: She wanted to get rid of something, and improvised a good story and dropped the bundle in a trash can, and it is long gone.”
“What would have been in it?”
“Something worth getting rid of with as much cold nerve as a burglar.” With his hands he showed the dimensions of the bundle as Kindler and Scheff had described it.
“Anything else?”
“Yes. And it doesn’t make any sense either. Mercer and Tuck searched the Akard boy’s room. There was a dufflebag in the back of his closet, packed for a trip. They found a duplicate of the note found in his pocket. It was under the blotter on his desk in his bedroom. It was almost identical to the note on the body. There was
one change. The note on the body said at the end, ‘I have to get everything straightened out in my head before I do something real crazy.’ The one in the room said ‘things’ instead of ‘everything’.”
“As if one was a first draft?”
“Which one?”
Haas drained the stein and set it down. “The trouble with this, beginning to end, the ones you want to ask questions, they just aren’t around any more. Questions from your point of view, of course. My job is to defend my client to the best of my ability.”
“You know what’s holding her together, don’t you?”
“How do you mean, Johnny?”
“All that pie in the sky. She hangs on through this and she’ll never have any pain again. As Boylston said this morning, now that we know Staniker didn’t have the use of the Muñequita, the places where he could have hidden the money narrows down.”
“What direction are you going?”
“There’s an interrogation room over at Female Detention. You said this morning, Palmy, that we by God better have charges to file or we better leave your client alone. You said you were all through advising her to cooperate in any way. You said you wouldn’t let your client be used for fishing expeditions.”
“And I said it loud.”
“I would like to have you bring her in again, smuggle her in through the back way and up to Room C, third floor, east wing. Very routine stuff. All very polite. You and me, two of my people, recording clerks, and Sam Boylston if you agree.”
“I haven’t agreed to any part of it.”
“I ask permission to have her taken down to the little ID section downstairs for a photograph. Nothing to be construed as being in any way a charge against her. I explain that we are being swamped by crazies who claim to have seen her in a hundred different places, and this will just help weed out the ones who are sick-minded.”
“And I just sit there and say, go ahead, Johnny, old buddy.”
“It just happens that the matron who’ll take her down there belongs to the same church as the Akards. She’s called Little Annie. She’s been teamed with another matron named Norstund for a couple of years. There will be a little misunderstanding.”
“Now come
on
, Captain!”
“I swear to you on my word of honor that there will be no brutality. Those two are competent people. They will pay absolutely no attention to anything she says. They’ll probably be talking to each other about their favorite soap opera. If Harkinson puts up a fight, they’ll subdue her without hurting her or marking her. They’ll merely put her through the complete physical search routine, from hair roots to rubber gloves, that they give suspected female pushers. They’ll scrub her down in a disinfectant shower, put her in gray twill and paper slippers and bring her back up to Room C.”
“Have you lost your mind, Lobwohl?”
“This isn’t social register goods, Palmy. This isn’t a first horrid contact with ugly reality. But it’s been a long time for her. A long, lush time. Maybe she’s forgotten what that special kind of indignity feels like.”
“How can I justify letting a client in for …”
“Why do you have to? You don’t even know there’s going to be a little misunderstanding. The basic request is reasonable.”
“Just a lousy moralistic Christer cop after all.”
“But here is what I lay on the line. So you can get your kicks, Counsellor. If Lady Harkinson rides with it, you can cover yourself by making an official complaint. Then, you see, I can’t stay out of it and let the two matrons take the grief. I stand up at the hearing and say they did it on my orders.”
“Do you know what that might mean?”
“I do indeed.”
“Johnny, you want this one real bad, I guess.”
“This bad. If I can’t nail this one, I think I will stop giving much of a damn about any of them from now on.”
“She’s tough. She’s hard as stones, Captain Johnny. I tell you what. I’ll bring her in. I’ll have her there at four. A picture? I can advise her to cooperate. But forget all this other stuff. Okay?”
Lobwohl said slowly, “You couldn’t bring her in if you thought I was fool enough to try anything as stupid as that. You wouldn’t be living up to your obligations to your client. Okay. We’ll have a final chat with her, take a picture, apologize and let it go at that.”
“Takes about fifteen minutes to get a good picture?”
“Twenty, sometimes. You know how it is.”
“I’ll just have to be patient. Thanks again for lunch. Your kids want my autograph?”
“Next year, maybe, Palmy. They’re still hooked on the Green Bay Packers. Retarded, I guess.”
SAM BOYLSTON WATCHED
the door swing shut as Crissy Harkinson left with the matron. The name for it was presence, he thought. Control so perfect there was mockery behind it. Today a little green dress with white trim. White gloves, shoes, purse, and jaunty little white hat on the sunstreaked casual hair. Wraparound glasses, very dark. Sensuous flavor of perfume still hanging in the air after the sway of the round hips under cool green fabric had disappeared into the corridor.
Scheff sighed and lifted a laundry case onto the table top and took out the bricks of white paper wrapped in manila bands.
“More funny tricks, Captain?” Palmer Haas asked.
“What this is,” Scheff said, “it’s from that time we had to fix up a dummy ransom, the guy was already dead before the FBI got into the act even.”
“Mr. Haas,” Lobwohl said, “I am not going to make any statement
or ask any question about what might appear to be on the table when she comes back into this room. She knows nothing about any money according to her testimony thus far.”
Sam Boylston reached into his inner jacket pocket and took out the thick envelope and slid it down the table to Scheff. Scheff opened it and began to doctor each brick of paper by sliding a bill under the brown band on both sides of it.
Haas said, “I wish to make an official objection to Mr. Boylston being here.”
“You objected last time too,” Lobwohl said.
“Why should he be permitted to help you with your shabby little tricks, Captain?”
“If I requisitioned this much cash, how long do you think it would take me to get it?”
“Maybe two weeks,” Kindler said, “and with a guy assigned to it who wouldn’t let it out of his sight.”
“The way you’re handling this, Lobwohl, is offensive to me,” Haas said. “I’m letting you get away with …”
“With murder?” John Lobwohl asked.
Scheff finished doctoring the packages. He stacked them in an orderly and impressive heap on the table top.
Haas looked at his watch. “Isn’t this taking too long, just for a photograph?”
“Maybe,” Lobwohl said lazily, “I’ve got people down there beating her with rubber hoses.”
“I’m beginning to wonder. I think this case is too big for you, Captain. The publicity makes you dizzy. You keep getting these delusions. I don’t like this money nonsense. The minute my client comes back through that door I’m going to tell her to keep her mouth shut.”
“You do your job and I do mine,” Lobwohl said.
“You shouldn’t use your office to try to punish immorality, my friend. You are an officer of the law, not an avenging angel. I demand that I be taken to my client right now.”
Lobwohl asked Kindler to go see what the delay was. Kindler went out. As the door started to swing shut he pushed it open and said, “She’s being brought back right now, sir.”
Kindler had a tone of awe in his voice. He moved back into the interrogation room, holding the door wide. Little Annie, five ten, wide as two women, face of pale granite, nocolor eyes, gray hair pulled into a tight bun, marched in a swift choppy stride. Behind her came Crissy Harkinson, in a clumsy jolting trot, hair stringy damp, head humbly bowed, clad in a gray twill prison dress three sizes too large for her. Sam saw that Little Annie was using a come-along, a small loop of chain that went over the prisoner’s thumb and was tightened by turning a short metal bar the guard held in the palm of the hand. It would cause pain only when the prisoner tried to hold back.