Angel's Verdict (16 page)

The photograph that really drew Bree’s interest was of Haydee herself. It was a black-and-white head shot, obviously a studio pose for publicity purposes. Haydee looked into the camera over her left shoulder. Her hair was dark, coiled on top of her head. She wore a jeweled cap, with feathers sweeping down her cheek to the tip of her chin. Her eyes were light—someone, it might have been Justine, had said they were blue. Bree was willing to bet her eyelashes were fake; they were too thick and lush to be natural. Her lips were distinctive; she had a triangular smile with a seductive curl that reminded Bree of the actress Vivien Leigh in the old movie
Gone with the Wind
.

Below the head shot was a photograph of Haydee in full theatrical costume. She wore a net bodysuit covered with spangles. She looked a little chubby to Bree’s eyes and definitely underexercised. But she supposed beauty standards in the Cold War era had differed from those now. And in any era, her face was dazzling.

The article stated the facts right up front. An early morning fisherman cast his line over the banks. The hook caught in Haydee’s hair. As soon as he realized what was on the other end of the line, the dismayed fisherman ran for the beat policeman, Patrolman Herbert Wilson. Bleeding and unconscious, Haydee was pulled from the river. An ambulance rushed her to Savannah General Hospital. Every effort was made to save her, but she died of a dozen wounds to the chest six hours later.

The articles subsequent to the discovery of the victim herself concerned the police investigation. Haydee was the star attraction at a nightclub called the Tropicana Tide in the docks area east of Old Savannah. Shipping was a dying industry at the time, but the area was home to what the newspaper referred to as “the rougher elements of our fair city.” (Bree was struck with the reticent tone of the reporting when it came to sex and drugs.) Her manager, a “notorious gangster, three times convicted of illegal gambling,” was Dysart William Norris, known as Bagger Bill. A helpful sidebar indicated that he’d come by this nickname after running numbers for “gentlemen from up North.” Bagger Bill was suspected of the crime almost immediately by “our fair city’s crack homicide team,” Lt. Edward O’Malley and Sgt. Robert E. Lee Kowalski.

There was a black-and-white photograph of O’Malley—Dent, to her—and another of a square-jawed man with slicked-back hair. Bree examined the picture of Dent closely. This was an official police photo taken in a studio, like Haydee’s. It showed a younger Dent, with a lot more hair, staring directly at the camera. Florida Smith must have come across this photograph, too. But most of the lenses at the time flattened faces out and added weight to their frames. It would have taken a highly skilled professional a lot of fiddling to get a genuinely representational portrait. And by the time Dent died in the car crash years later, alcohol had taken its toll on his face.

Two days after Haydee’s death at the hospital, O’Malley and Kowalski charged Bagger Bill with the first-degree murder of Haydee Quinn. In the statement given to the press, the police claimed Norris was found dead drunk with “blood on his hands” and a knife at his side. According to the bartender at the Tropicana Tide, the accused and the victim had a “knock-down, drag-out set-to” the night before Haydee was found in the river.

After undergoing extensive interrogation, Norris confessed. A few weeks later, he recanted his confession, and ultimately went to the chair loudly claiming his innocence.

Confessed.

Bree sat back and thought about this. There was no mention of the accuser’s lawyer until some weeks after the murder. The police weren’t required to Mirandize suspects until 1964. As far as police interrogation techniques at the time, there was a lot less oversight than there was now.

She wondered if Dent had been capable of beating a false confession out of William Norris.

Bree paged through the rest of the articles, pausing at the news stories about Alexander Bulloch’s tragic odyssey on the riverbank. The stories were remarkably restrained. Maybe not so remarkably, Bree thought, since the Bulloch family was reverently referred to when they were referred to at all. There were no photographs of Alexander himself, although Petru had researched a picture of Consuelo. Bree found it a little eerie to see a temporal representation of her client. The woman was quite thin, with a tight mouth and an even tighter perm. The peacock pin rode high on her right shoulder, fastened to the collar of her prim dress. The small headline below her picture read,
Mrs. Alexander Bulloch at the Red Cross Relief Fund-Raiser
. Bree studied Consuelo’s face. She certainly didn’t look like a woman who would welcome the lush curves of Haydee Quinn at her dinner table. She recalled the charges that had sent her client to Hell: spite, malice, bigotry, treachery. Yes, that face looked capable of all those behaviors. But murder?

On an impulse, Bree took the peacock jewel from her briefcase and held it between her palms.

“Mrs. Bulloch?”

A faint sigh went around the room. The blinds at the window stirred, although there was no breeze.

“Mrs. Bulloch?”

Somebody rapped on the office door. Bree, absorbed in the frustrating task of summoning her client, thought for a wild moment it was Mrs. Bulloch herself, released from the Sphere.

It wasn’t.

There’s husbandry in heaven,
Their candles are all out.

—Macbeth
, William Shakespeare

 

 

 

 

“Oh,” Bree said. “It’s you, Dent.”

“Got a minute?” He stepped into the office. He held his driver’s hat in one hand.

“Sure. Come in.” She gestured at the visitor’s chair. “Have a seat.”

“This your office?” He looked around at the bare walls and the sparse furniture. “Business doesn’t look too good.”

“It’ll be even worse if you keep bouncing into my head at inopportune moments. I behaved like an idiot this morning.”

“What d’ya mean?”

“I mean that episode this morning. In John Stubblefield’s office? In front of Sammi-Rose Waterman?” She thought a moment and then added indignantly. “Not to mention Payton the Rat.”

His brow cleared. “Oh. You mean the ass-grabbing incident. Yeah, well, it’s something I want you to keep in mind.”

“That you want
me
to keep in mind?” Then, she added automatically, “Please don’t call women’s asses, asses. It’s demean—oh forget it. Just what am I supposed to keep in mind?”

“That there’s a standard for the muckety-mucks and a standard for the rest of us down here.” He pursed his lips. “Thing is, you’re one of the muckety-mucks, so . . .”

“Dent!”
Bree took a breath, stared down at her knees, and counted backwards from ten. “Okay. So you’ve got a self-esteem problem. I’m your sponsor, right? It’s one of the things we can work on. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident,’ remember? ‘That all men are created equal?’”

“Except some are more equal than others.” Dent wasn’t smiling. “Look, I want to go out and see Bobby Lee and I want you to come with me.”

“Sergeant Kowalski?” Bree glanced at her watch. “Not enough time today. I’ve arranged to meet Flurry Smith at seven tonight, and I’m hoping that she’ll have a lot of useful information. But let’s talk about the case a little bit, shall we? We can make up a list of questions for him. I’ll make sure we see him tomorrow or the day after, at the very latest.” She pulled a legal pad from her desk drawer and headed it SUSPECTS. “Now, I know you think you don’t remember a lot about the case, but I’d like to try.”

“I was drinking then. A lot.”

“So you told me. But it’s not a total blur, is it?” The newspaper photograph of Lt. Edward O’Malley was on top of the pile of papers on her desk. “You remember this?”

Dent picked it up. His hands trembled slightly. “The department took that when I made lieutenant.”

“When were you promoted?”

“About a year before the Haydee Quinn case. Maybe less.”

“You must have been a good cop, to get promoted,” Bree said encouragingly.

Dent’s smile was cynical. “I was a Marine. The police commissioner was my CO at Iwo.”

Bree felt chilly. She’d read about the war. “Iwo Jima?”

Dent scratched the back of his neck. “What the hell does this have to do with the Quinn case?”

“Just trying to get a handle on you and the times.” Bree’s long hair was a nuisance during the day, so she braided it and coiled it around her head. Sometimes after a long day, the weight of her braids gave her a headache. She was getting a headache now. She pulled out the tortoiseshell pins, let her braid fall over her shoulder, and tugged absently at the end. “I think we have two tasks here. The first is to find out the facts.”

“And if Consuelo did it, after all? That’s not too good for your client. Lawyers are supposed to get people off.”

Bree wound the tip of her braid around her finger. “I’ve thought hard about this. The state—or in this case, the Celestial Sphere—has an obligation to turn over any and all evidence of a crime to the defense. There is an extraordinary obligation to turn over exculpatory evidence. We have a different standard of duty as the defense. Our obligation is to our client. If we find out that Consuelo is guilty of murder, and that the miscarriage of justice here is that she’s not being punished enough, we are not obliged to turn her in. It’s the plaintiff who has to prove it.”

“And the second job?”

Bree smiled at him. “To present an alternative theory of the crime. Sometimes a successful defense is built on getting the judge to entertain the notion that someone else did it. To establish reasonable doubt. But you can bet that the defense is going to be ready to tear those doubts apart. That’s why I need to know everything you can possibly remember. Especially about the William Norris confession. I’d like to start there. Even if it doesn’t . . .” She paused, searching for the least brutal way of phrasing her suspicions about Bagger Bill’s confession. “. . . reflect very well on you or Sergeant Kowalski.”

Dent sat up a little taller in his chair. “Right. ‘Continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong, promptly admit it.’ ”

“I beg your pardon? Oh! Of course! The steps.” Bree did her best to look both encouraging and sympathetic.

“You want to know what kind of encouragement we gave Norris to get that confession.”

“That’ll do for starters.”

“We didn’t touch him.” Dent’s grin was a little crooked. “I can see what you’re thinking. You’re remembering what Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to do with us Marines.”

Bree tried to look as if yes, she certainly was.

“Keep us all on an island for a year after the war.”

“Eleanor Roosevelt said that?” Bree was astonished.

“We weren’t saints, most of us. Not during the war. Not afterwards. But you do what you have to do. So you’re thinking Bobby Lee and I found this lowlife drunk out of his mind at the back of that scummy bar, planted a bloody knife on him, and beat a confession out of him because he was the most likely perp.”

“Yes,” Bree said. “The thought crossed my mind.”

He shook his head. “Nope.”

“Nope?”

“He confessed, fair and square.

“You have to know what it was like back then. This was what the commissioner called a high-profile case. Lot of muckety—sorry, a lot of influential people were involved with Haydee Quinn and Bagger Bill one way or another. Norris bootlegged liquor in the ’30s, in the black market during the war years, and supplied a lot of the upper crust with whatever dope they needed after that.” Dent set his jaw. “Marijuana and worse. Anyhow, this nightclub of his, Tropicana Tide, had been a thorn in the city’s side for years. Gambling mostly, along with the drugs. Norris signed Haydee on as a dancer a year and a half before all this happened, and I’ll tell you, I knew even then she was trouble. She slept around a lot. Mostly men who could give her a hand. Rich men. Power brokers.

“As far as Haydee herself.” His face softened. “She reminded me a lot of Ava Gardner.”

“Ava Gardner the actress?” Bree asked. The name was familiar from the occasional crossword puzzle.

“The movie star,” Dent said, as if it made a difference. Maybe it did back then. “Haydee had that same hardscrabble background. Her daddy was a dirt-poor cotton farmer from the Low Country. Haydee got herself out of that dirt-floored shack and never looked back. How she did it, when she could barely read and write . . . well, you would have had to have seen her in the flesh.” He reached over and tapped the news photo of Haydee in costume. “That doesn’t begin to show you how drop-dead gorgeous she was. When she walked into a room, everything stopped. With those eyes and that hair and that white, white skin. She had a perfect face, you know. Perfectly proportioned. They did an article on it in one of the big newspapers after she died. Anyhow, she hit Savannah like a Mack truck on a mud slide. Everybody was nuts about her. The men, that is. The women not so much.

“So she got herself hooked up with this kid Alex Bulloch. He was a couple of years younger than she was. I never saw them together, but those that did seem to think they really loved each other. That’s what the argument was about. The one Haydee had with Norris just before it all happened.”

“Norris told you this?”

“Oh yeah. The man was crazy jealous. She was a bit of a hellcat, from all accounts. Told Norris he could shove his contract where the sun don’t shine, or words to that effect, and that she was going to marry the kid come hell or high water. Norris said he grabbed the first thing that came to hand when she started to walk out the door. A knife they used to slice up the ham at the club.” Dent sucked his lower lip reflectively. “Always had a big old ham on the bar at Tropi. Norris said it made people thirstier for the booze. Worked like a champ on me, that’s for sure.”

Bree nudged the conversation back to the night of the murder. “Norris attacked her with the knife?”