“No.”
“Yes. He would’ve killed us.”
“Give me the bat,” she says.
“What?”
“Give me the bat, and leave.”
I’m amazed at how calm she is at this moment. She knows precisely what has to be done.
“What … ?” I try to ask, looking at her, looking at him.
She takes the bat from my hands. “I’ve been here before. Leave. Go hide. You were not here tonight. I’ll call you later.”
I can do nothing but stand still and look at the struggling, dying man on the floor.
“Please go, Rudy,” she says, gently pushing me toward the door. “I’ll call you later.”
“Okay, okay.” I step into the kitchen, pick up the .38 and walk back to the den. We look at each other, then our eyes fall to the floor. I step outside. I close the door quietly behind me, and look around for nosy neighbors. I see no one. I hesitate for a moment and hear nothing from inside the apartment.
I feel nauseated. I sneak away in the darkness, my skin suddenly covered with perspiration.
IT TAKES TEN MINUTES for the first police car to arrive. A second quickly follows. Then an ambulance. I sit low in the Volvo in a crowded parking lot, watching it all. The paramedics scramble into the apartment. Another police car. Red and blue lights illuminate the night and attract a large crowd. Minutes pass, and there’s no sign of Cliff. A paramedic appears in the doorway and takes his time retrieving something from the ambulance. He’s in no hurry.
Kelly’s in there alone and scared and answering a hundred questions about how it happened, and here I sit, suddenly Mr. Chickenshit, ducking low behind my steering wheel and hoping no one sees me. Why did I leave her in there? Should I go save her? My head spins wildly and my vision is blurred, and the frantic flashing of the red and blue lights blinds me.
He can’t be dead. Maimed maybe. But not dead.
I think I’ll go back in there.
The shock wears off and the fear hits hard. I want them to bring Cliff out on a stretcher and race away with him, take him to the hospital, patch him up. I suddenly want him to live. I can deal with him as a living person, though a crazy one. Come on, Cliff. Come on, big boy. Get up and walk out of there.
Surely I haven’t killed a man.
The crowd gets larger, and a cop moves everybody back.
I lose track of time. A coroner’s van arrives, and this sends a wave of excited gossip through the gawkers. Cliff won’t be riding in the ambulance. Cliff will be taken to the morgue.
I crack the door, and vomit as quietly as possible on the
side of the car next to mine. No one hears me. Then I wipe my mouth, and ease into the crowd. “He’s finally killed her,” I hear someone say. Cops stream in and out of the apartment. I’m fifty feet away, lost in a sea of faces. The police string yellow tape around the entire end of the building. The flash of a camera inside streaks across the windows every few seconds.
We wait. I need to see her, but there’s nothing I can do. Another rumor races through the crowd, and this one is correct. He’s dead. And they think she killed him. I listen carefully to what’s being said because if anyone saw a stranger leave the apartment not long after the shouts and screams, then I want to know it. I move around slowly, listening ever so closely. I hear nothing. I back away for a few seconds, and vomit again behind some shrubs.
There’s a flurry of movement around the door, and a paramedic backs out pulling a stretcher. The body is in a silver bag. They roll it carefully down the sidewalk to the coroner’s van, then take it away. Minutes later, Kelly emerges with a cop on each side. She looks tiny, and scared. Thankfully, she’s not handcuffed. She managed to change clothes, and now wears jeans and a parka.
They place her in the backseat of a patrol car, and leave. I walk quickly to my car, and head for the police station.
I INFORM THE SERGEANT at the front counter that I am a lawyer, that my client has just been arrested, and that I insist on being with her while she’s being questioned. I say this forcefully enough, and he places a call to who knows where. Another sergeant comes after me, and I’m taken to the second floor, where Kelly sits alone in an interrogation room. A homicide detective named Smotherton is looking at her through a one-way window. I hand him one of my cards. He refuses to shake hands.
“You guys travel fast, don’t you?” he says with absolute contempt.
“She called me right after she called 911. What’d you find?”
We’re both looking at her. She’s at the end of a long table, wiping her eyes with tissue.
Smotherton grunts while he decides how much he should tell me. “Found her husband dead on the den floor, skull fracture, looks like with a baseball bat. She didn’t say much, told us they were getting a divorce, she sneaked home to get her clothes, he found her, they fought. He was pretty drunk, somehow she got the bat and now he’s at the morgue. You doing her divorce?”
“Yeah. I’ll get you a copy of it. Last week the judge ordered him to stay away from her. He’s beaten her for years.”
“We saw the bruises. I just wanna ask her a few questions, okay?”
“Sure.” We enter the room together. Kelly is surprised to see me, but manages to play it cool. We exchange a polite lawyer-client hug. Smotherton is joined by another plainclothes detective, Officer Hamlet, who has a tape recorder. I have no objections. After he turns it on, I take the initiative. “For the record, I’m Rudy Baylor, attorney for Kelly Riker. Today is Monday, February 15, 1993. We’re at Central Police Headquarters, downtown Memphis. I’m present because I received a call from my client at approximately seven forty-five tonight. She had just called 911, and said she thought her husband was dead.”
I nod at Smotherton as if he may proceed now, and he looks at me as if he’d like to choke me. Cops hate defense lawyers, and right now I couldn’t care less.
Smotherton starts with a bunch of questions about Kelly and Cliff—basic info like birth dates, marriage, employment, children and on and on. She answers patiently,
with a detached look in her eyes. The swelling is gone in her face, but her left eye is still black and blue. The bandage is still on her eyebrow. She’s scared half to death.
She describes the abuse in sufficient detail to make all three of us cringe. Smotherton sends Hamlet to pull the records of Cliff’s three arrests for the beatings. She talks about assaults in which no records were kept, no paperwork was created. She talks about the softball bat and the time he broke her ankle with it. He also punched her a few times when he didn’t want to break bones.
She talks about the last beating, then the decision to leave and go hide, then to file divorce. She is infinitely believable because it’s all true. It’s the upcoming lies that have me worried.
“Why’d you go home tonight?” Smotherton asks.
“To get my clothes. I was certain he wouldn’t be there.”
“Where have you been staying for the past few days?”
“In a shelter for abused women.”
“What’s the name of it?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Is it here in Memphis?”
“It is.”
“How’d you get to your apartment tonight?”
My heart skips a beat at this question, but she’s already thought about it. “I drove my car,” she says.
“And what kind of car is it?”
“Volkswagen Rabbit.”
“Where is it now?”
“In the parking lot outside my apartment.”
“Can we take a look at it?”
“Not until I do,” I say, suddenly remembering that I’m a lawyer here, not a co-conspirator.
Smotherton shakes his head. If looks could kill.
“How’d you get in the apartment?”
“I used my key.”
“What’d you do when you got inside?”
“Went to the bedroom and started packing clothes. I filled three or four pillowcases with my things, and hauled a bunch of stuff to the den.”
“How long were you there before Mr. Riker came home?”
“Ten minutes, maybe.”
“What happened then?”
I interrupt at this point. “She’s not gonna answer that until I’ve had a chance to talk to her and investigate this matter. This interrogation is now over.” I reach across and push the red Stop button on the recorder. Smotherton simmers for a minute as he reviews his notes. Hamlet returns with the printout, and they study it together. Kelly and I ignore each other. Our feet, though, touch under the table.
Smotherton writes something on a sheet of paper and hands it to me. “This will be treated as a homicide, but it’ll go to Domestic Abuse in the prosecutor’s office. Lady’s name there is Morgan Wilson. She’ll handle things from here.”
“But you’re booking her?”
“I have no choice. I can’t just let her go.”
“On what charges?”
“Manslaughter.”
“You can release her to my custody.”
“No I can’t,” he answers angrily. “What kinda lawyer are you?”
“Then release her on recognizance.”
“Won’t work,” he says, with a frustrated smile at Hamlet. “We got a dead body here. Bond has to be set by a judge. You talk him into ROR, then she walks. I’m just a humble detective.”
“I’m going to jail?” Kelly says.
“We have no choice, ma’am,” Smotherton says, suddenly
much nicer. “If your lawyer here is worth his salt, he’ll get you out sometime tomorrow. That is, if you can post bond. But I can’t just release you because I want to.”
I reach across and take her hand. “It’s okay, Kelly. I’ll get you out tomorrow, as soon as possible.” She nods quickly, grits her teeth, tries to be strong.
“Can you put her in a private cell?” I ask Smotherton.
“Look, asshole, I don’t run the jail, okay? You gotta better way to do things, then go talk to the jailers. They love to hear from lawyers.”
Don’t provoke me, buddy. I’ve already cracked one skull tonight. We glare hatefully at each other. “Thanks,” I say.
“Don’t mention it.” He and Hamlet kick their chairs back and stomp toward the door. “You got five minutes,” he says over his shoulder. They slam the door.
“Don’t make any moves, okay,” I say under my breath. “They’re watching through that window. And this place is probably bugged, so be careful what you say.”
She doesn’t say anything.
I continue in my role as the lawyer. “I’m sorry this happened,” I say stiffly.
“What does manslaughter mean?”
“Means a lot of things, but basically it’s murder without the element of intent.”
“How much time could I get?”
“You have to be convicted first, and that’s not going to happen.”
“Promise?”
“I promise. Are you scared?”
She carefully wipes her eyes, and thinks for a long time. “He has a large family, and they’re all just like him. All heavy-drinking, violent men. I’m scared to death of them.”
I can’t think of anything to say to this. I’m scared of them too.
“They can’t make me go to the funeral, can they?”
“No.”
“Good.”
They come for her a few minutes later, and this time they use handcuffs. I watch them lead her down the hall. They stop at an elevator, and Kelly strains around one of the cops to see me. I wave slowly, then she’s gone.
Fifty-two
W
HEN YOU COMMIT A MURDER YOU make twenty-five mistakes. If you can think of ten of them, then you’re a genius. At least that’s what I heard in a movie once. It wasn’t actually a murder but more of an act of self-defense. The mistakes, though, are beginning to add up.
I pace around my desk at the office, which is covered with neat rows of yellow legal paper. I’ve diagrammed the apartment, the body, the clothes, the gun, the bat, the beer cans, everything that I can remember. I’ve sketched the position of my car, her car and his truck in the parking lot. I’ve written pages recalling every step and every event of the evening. My best guess is that I was in the apartment for less than fifteen minutes but on paper it looks like a thin novel. How many screams or yells that were capable of being heard from the outside? No more than four, I think. How many neighbors saw a strange man leave just after the screams? Who knows.
That, I think, was mistake number one. I shouldn’t have left so soon. I should have waited for ten minutes or
so to see if the neighbors heard anything. Then I should have eased into the darkness.
Or maybe I should have called the cops and told the truth. Kelly and I had every right to be in the apartment. It’s obvious he was lying in ambush somewhere nearby at a time when he should have been elsewhere. I was well within my rights to fight back, to disarm him and to hit him with his own weapon. Given his violent nature and history, no jury in the world would convict me. Plus, the only other witness would be squarely on my side.
So why didn’t I stay? She was pushing me out of the door for one thing, and it just seemed like the best course of action. Who can think rationally when, in the span of fifteen seconds, you go from being brutally attacked to being a killer?
Mistake number two was the lie about her car. I drove through the parking lot after I left the police station, and found her Volkswagen Rabbit and his four-wheel-drive pickup. This lie will work if no one tells the cops that her car hasn’t been moved in days.
But what if Cliff and a friend somehow disabled her car while she was at the shelter, and this friend comes forth in a few hours and talks to the cops? My imagination runs wild.
The worst mistake that’s hit me in the past four hours is the lie about the phone call Kelly allegedly made to me after she dialed 911. This was my excuse for being at the police station so quick. It’s an incredibly stupid lie because there is no record of the call. If the cops check the phone records, I’m in serious trouble.
Other mistakes pop up as the night wears on. Fortunately, most are the result of a scared mind, most go away after careful analysis and sufficient scribbling on the legal pad.
I allow Deck to sleep until five before I wake him. An
hour later he’s at the office with coffee. I give him my version of the story, and his initial response is beautiful. “No jury in the world will convict her,” he says, without a doubt.