A Very Simple Crime (9 page)

“Anne. I’d love to help you with your story, but I’m kinda busy right now. We’ve got a murder case we’re working on. You might have read about it.”

“I hear Guaraldi’s gonna walk.”

“You heard wrong.”

“I hear you’ve got nothing on him. I hear it’s gonna be James Nice all over again. You’ve got what? Two issues of
Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage
?”

“We’ve got plenty on Guaraldi.”

“We’ve got plenty on Guaraldi.”

“That’s not what I hear. Come on, Leo, it’s only me. Level. Wouldn’t you rather
I
broke the story? I’ll do it gently. Like always.”

“‘Time is getting short for Leo Hewitt.’ That gently?”

“My sources are very reliable.”

“I’m your only source. Look, Anne, it was a nice try. And on the chance that you’re not making this up just to trick me into commenting on it, did it ever occur to you that Monty Lee might be generating this rumor to make his client look better? Take it from me, Frank Guaraldi is not going to walk.”

“Well I’m running the piece whether you confirm or deny.”

“Anne, I just denied it.”

“And if it turns out to be true, you’ll look—”

“Good-bye, Anne,” he said, and hung up on her. She was right about one thing, though. Well, actually, she was right about two things. It was looking more and more like Guaraldi might walk. And, worst of all, time was getting short.

Eventually, even the prosecutors began to lose faith in the case, as did Leo. A roundtable discussion was called by the entire prosecution team, after-hours and without Bob Fox’s knowledge. The prosecutors demanded that Leo go to Bob with the suggestion that the charges against Guaraldi be dropped. There was simply no hard evidence against the man. Leo agreed, but first he met with Paula, alone. He had to make one last effort at getting something going before he asked Bob to drop the case and essentially throw away his career. He decided to start at the beginning with the Conners woman and her statements.

“Look, one of the big reasons we kept after Guaraldi was because of the Conners woman. I want to go see her before I ask Bob to drop the charges, which he will never do anyway.”

“Do you want me to come?” Paula asked.

“No, I want you to dig up her original call to the tip line. I wanna hear the tape.”

Carolyn Conners lived in College Park in an upscale home directly across from the Guaraldi residence. From her front porch, Leo could see the mass of yellow police tape and open craters and what was left of the Guaraldis’ once-beautiful home. If we did this to an innocent man, he thought, who was going to take responsibility? Who was going to make it right? He rang the bell. When no one answered, he rang again. A lace curtain hanging in a window off to the side of the house inched open. Leo saw an eye peering out from behind the curtain. The curtain dropped closed, and seconds later a woman opened the front door. She was wearing a hat crudely fashioned from aluminum foil on her head.

“Ms. Conners?”

“Who wants to know?”

Then the smell of her body odor hit him. Rank and foul, the smell of a body months unwashed. He took a step back.

“My name is Leo Hewitt. I’m with the district attorney’s office. I’m the assistant DA. I wanted to ask you about what you saw.”

“I see a lot. Are you a Democrat?

“Uh, no, I’m not.” Behind the woman, Leo could see masses of cats. Hordes of them crawling over tables and chairs. He saw what could only be feces smeared on the walls. And the smell of the shit and the cats wafted out to him.

“Well, that’s good at least, ’cause they been sending agents out here to spy on me. They been sending out transmissions. They put a transmitter in my head, but I block it with the hat.”

“Really,” Leo said, and began to wish for a cigar.

 

 

The prosecution team sat around the conference table. The silence was uncomfortable, and no one would look Leo in the eye.

“You mean to tell me that no one ever just sat down and talked to this woman?”

Paula looked up. “We had her initial statement. The affidavit. We didn’t need anything else. She must have seemed lucid at the—”

“Lucid!” Leo growled. “She’s fucking Boo Radley on acid! I have to go into Bob’s office and tell him that we practically bulldozed this guy’s house into the ground—into the
ground
—based on the accusations of a lunatic!”

“It gets worse,” Paula said, and opened her briefcase.

She laid a series of audiocassettes on the table.

“What are those?”

“Remember you wanted her original call? Well, they fed her name into the system and pulled every call she ever made to the hotline. There were over fifty.”

“What? You’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I haven’t had time to listen to all the tapes, but in each call she accuses another suspect.”

“I just don’t understand why this was ever taken seriously.”

“It was just an unlucky coincidence. If you remember, Bob demanded that every call be followed up on, no matter what. It was just a coincidence that the call in which she names Guaraldi came in at the same time we started looking at Guaraldi because of the Peters and Easton children. Any other time, the call would have been tagged as a nutcase, but because Guaraldi was being investigated by us at the time, someone took the call seriously. It was just a coincidence.”

“Just a coincidence. Christ.”

 

 

Bob stared at the stack of tapes on his desk.

“Has defense heard them?”

“No. Not yet.” Leo stood in front of Bob, felt the rage coming off the man like a fever. Paula stood off to the left.

“Not yet? What do you mean, not yet?”

“I figured you’d want to hear them first.”

“You’re goddamn right I do. But we are not, let me repeat that, we are
not
giving these tapes to the defense.”

“It’s discovery. We have no choice.”

“Sure we do. Bury the tapes. Lose them. Erase them. I never heard of these tapes. Paula lost them before she got a chance to listen to them. Right, Paula?”

“Yeah. Sure, Bob.”

“We’ll put the woman on the stand,” Bob said.

“Look, I’m telling you, she’s a basket case. She wears a hat made out of Reynolds Wrap!”

“We’ll shoot her full of Thorazine! One way or another, she’s going on the stand.”

“Bob, think about what you’re saying. We’ve got nothing on Guaraldi. Nothing.”

“We’ve got one of the dead girls’ DNA in the man’s car. DNA. You call that nothing?”

“It’s diluted. It has no value. There’s blood, spit, prints, and hair from nine of the day-care kids in that car. All alive.”

“All but one.”

“This is ludicrous.”

“No, Leo, this is critical mass. It’s fuck or walk. Where do your loyalties lie?”

The two men stared at each other like tyrants on a playground. Leo looked to Paula for some backup, but she was of no help. She had, quite clearly, shown where her loyalties lay.

Leo picked up the tapes off Bob’s desk. “Bob, the case is over. It’s over.”

Bob jumped to his feet so quickly and violently that Leo had been sure the man was going to hit him. His face had gone from an angry red color to an apoplectic purple. “Like hell it is. Put those goddamn tapes back on my desk.”

“Look, you’re not thinking clearly. We can’t put a man who’s obviously innocent in prison just so your résumé will remain unblemished.”

“You had best think about what you’re doing here, Leo. I would hate to see you ruin what could be a brilliant career. Think about it. You know he’s innocent? You
know
?”

“It doesn’t matter. We don’t have a case against the man. I’m turning these tapes over to the defense team. They’re discovery. We’re legally obligated.”

“No, we’re not. They have the same access to the hotline tapes as we do. We are not legally obligated to give them something that they in fact already have.”

“It’s wrong and you know it.”

“We are not legally obligated.”

“We’re morally obligated.”

“Fuck morally! Fuck you! Give me those tapes!” Bob lunged across his desk and grabbed at Leo. He got hold of the cuff of Leo’s suit jacket, and Leo jerked away, tearing the jacket. Leo backed slowly away from Bob, who was sprawled out across his desk, a thin thread of saliva dangling from his chin. “If you walk out of this office, that’s it! I never want to see you again!”

“You won’t. I quit.”

 

 

After listening to the tapes, Judge Duran ordered the charges dropped. Frank Guaraldi was set free and Monty filed a seventy-million-dollar civil action lawsuit on Guaraldi’s behalf for wrongful imprisonment. Bob Fox held a press conference that culminated with his stating that in the wake of his monumental mishandling of the Guaraldi case, Assistant District Attorney Leo Hewitt had voluntarily resigned his position. This statement was interpreted, as Fox knew it would be, that Leo was forced to leave. The media, and more important, the voters, accepted Leo as the scapegoat and Fox was ultimately reelected for another term as district attorney and named Paula Manning as his assistant DA.

Leo lived well with his decision to turn over the Conners tapes. He knew his actions were appropriate.

Two months after being acquitted of all charges, Frank Guaraldi was stopped late at night for a routine traffic violation. The patrolman deemed Guaraldi’s behavior suspicious. As the neighborhood in which he had stopped Guaraldi was notorious for high drug trafficking, the patrolman searched Guaraldi’s car. He found nothing in the interior of the car and asked Guaraldi to pop the trunk. Guaraldi ran. The officer caught him easily and restrained him with handcuffs. He opened the trunk of Guaraldi’s car. Inside he found the limbless, headless torso of a seven-year-old girl.

Guaraldi was taken into custody and retried. Paula headed the prosecution team, and there was no doubt that Guaraldi would be convicted, but he never was.

Late one night in his jail cell, Guaraldi tore open his wrists with his own teeth, biting and tearing the flesh until he reached the artery and severed it. He jammed his wrists into an open toilet and quietly bled to death in his cell in the middle of the night, and thus saved the taxpayers of the city the cost of another trial.

Leo succumbed to depression and felt that he was responsible for the death of the last child. He could not find a job anywhere in the country (much less Fulton County), and a brief attempt at a private practice proved to be a folly. Even the most desperate of clients felt that they could do better than the man who had set a child murderer free. He grew poor and found that he missed having money. He took a low-rent apartment in a bad neighborhood. When the lease expired on his Lexus, he purchased a used Nissan pickup truck. He fell into the habit of driving through tony neighborhoods and dreaming of the prosperity that being a successful trial lawyer might have brought him. He imagined what might have happened had he destroyed the Conners tapes as Bob had suggested. He could see himself as the district attorney. He could see himself resigning the position to accept a full partnership in a prestigious law firm. The reality was that he took a job as a data entry clerk. He showed up every day and pushed buttons on a keyboard and dreamed his dreams. The job was functional and paid the rent, but the law was all he knew, all he had ever cared to know.

One day, he went to the criminal courts building and hid out in the parking garage. When Paula spotted him waiting near her car, her eyes widened and she reached into her purse. Leo was sure she was reaching for a can of mace, but she only pulled out her keys. She opened the car door and told Leo to get in. Without shame, he begged her to help him get back. To go to Bob and somehow get him back in. She agreed.

Two weeks later Paula contacted him. She had talked to Bob. He would take Leo back. As a junior deputy prosecutor. Traffic cases only. Take it or leave it.

He took it.

“Leo, please, Mr. Lee. Just Leo.”

“And I’m Adam. How can I help you?”

“This is a hell of a nice office, Adam. Is that desk mahogany?”

“Yes. How can I help you?”

“Well, Adam, the thing is, I thought you were going to have Ms. Perkins call me.”

“Yes, I was. I’ve been unable to contact Violet. I tried, but her number has been disconnected. It was a, uh, one-night-stand type of thing. I’m sure you understand.”

“Oh, I understand perfectly. We’ve all been there, right? Hey, I like that suit. Armani, right?”

“Yes, Armani.”

“Mine’s just an off-the-rack job, but not too bad, huh?”

“No, it’s quite dapper.”

Leo could sense Adam tensing up, not sure if he should tell this short little bald man to get the fuck out of his office. Leo loved playing the cat-and-mouse game. It felt good. He liked being the cat. He liked the look of terror in the mouse’s eyes. He liked letting the mouse think he’d lost interest, then pouncing on him and starting the game anew.

“Yeah, we’ve all been there. One-nighters. But you were with her the entire weekend?”

“Yes, just as I told you earlier. I was under the impression that this matter was closed. It was a tragedy. I am still in mourning. I’m afraid that I can’t quite see how bringing my marital indiscretions into the light will deepen anyone’s understanding of a senseless death.”

It felt good to have a little power again. Leo wished for a cigar to top off this extraordinary sensation, this exhilarating rush of the kill. It had been so long. He was on top of his game like never before. This cheap prick in his thousand-dollar suit was easy prey.

“Of course not, but as I said earlier, I have to verify your story in order to close the file. Do you happen to remember where you first met Violet?”