Bleeding Hearts (6 page)

“I suppose they do,” Casey said. “Never mind. I guess Linda and I were really hoping that you were the one—well, you know—that you were the person who knew what really happened, and that you’d
hint.
”

“My dear girl,” Candida said. “If I did anything like that, I’d be sued. These are educated people we’re dealing with here. They don’t put up with nonsense of that kind. They make you pay for it.”

There was a soft sound of footsteps, rubber soles against hardwood floors, and Candida’s maid came into the room, still in uniform and looking expectant.

“There was something you wanted, Mrs. DeWitt?”

Candida DeWitt had never been married, but she understood that after a certain age that was not an asset. She called herself a widow and provided no further information.

“Louise,” she said now, “I’d like a cup of coffee, if you wouldn’t mind getting it for me. Perhaps Ms. Holder would like a cup of coffee too.”

“Coffee,” Casey Holder said. “I don’t think so. Unless you have decaf?”

Candida kept her expression neutral. She didn’t keep decaf in the house. It tasted like cow’s piss.

“We have herb teas,” she suggested instead. “Red Zinger, I believe, and—Sleepytime?”

“Yes, Mrs. DeWitt,” Louise said. “We have Sleepytime. We also have Mandarin Orange and Lemon Zinger.”

“Mandarin Orange,” Casey said quickly. “That will be perfect.”

“I will bring along the honey in case you like it sweet,” Louise said. Then she turned around and disappeared.

Candida stared at the empty space where Louise had been and thought hard. It was so difficult to decide what to do sometimes. She had always been a very easygoing sort. She had always had to be. She had never operated out of revenge before. She found it very difficult to understand what it would be best to say or who it would be best to talk to or when it would be best to sit still and not move at all.

This did not seem a time for sitting still. Casey Holder was gazing up at her, half-fascinated and half-tense, an anxious young woman who would always resent other women, for reasons she would never be willing to explain to herself.

“You know,” Candida told her, “if what you really want is some kind of hint, you ought to talk to Fred Scherrer. If your Gregor Demarkian is right and somebody always knows, then Fred Scherrer is definitely the man who knows about
this.
”

F
RED SCHERRER HAD BEEN
interviewed for
60 Minutes
by Ed Bradley, and in the middle of that interview he had declared—in a sound byte that made the air—that he could defend Saddam Hussein in an Israeli court and get him off. Fred Scherrer was fifty-two years old, and for the last thirty of those years he had been the most famous defense attorney in America. He might have been the most famous lawyer in the history of America with the exception of Clarence Darrow. He was certainly a phenomenon. Illiterate teenagers in southern Georgia knew his name. Associate justices of the United States Supreme Court cursed him over cocktails in the bar of the Burning Tree Country Club. Millions of middle-aged women with a lust for blood and an insatiable curiosity about capital cases snapped up the books he wrote for $22 a pop, making him the only lawyer on record to have a book spend one hundred sixty-four weeks on
The New York Times
hardcover nonfiction best-seller list.

If one of the middle-aged women with a lust for blood had met Fred Scherrer, she might not have been impressed. He was not a physically prepossessing man. Five foot seven, a hundred fifty-four pounds, kick-sand-in-my-face thin running to wrinkles and paunch—from a distance, Fred Scherrer resembled the sort of man who spends his life working at the post office but never has quite enough juice to get promoted off the carrier routes. It was only face-to-face that he began to be impressive.

Right now Fred Scherrer wasn’t even being impressive face-to-face. He had shut himself down, in a way, turned all the interior emotion off, blanked himself out. He always did that while he was waiting for a jury to come in, which was what he was doing. He was being especially impassive, because there was no doubt whatsoever what verdict this jury would bring back. Getting Saddam Hussein off in Jerusalem was one thing. Getting Chuckie Bickerson off in Westchester County was something else. This was the sort of case Fred took for practice. Chuckie Bickerson had kidnapped a fifteen-year-old Mount Vernon cheerleader from the parking lot of her school at four o’clock in the afternoon in full view of her boyfriend, the junior varsity cheerleading squad, and the sour-faced Puritan English teacher who served as adviser to the Glee Club. The phrase “asking to get caught” came to mind, but Fred found it ludicrously inadequate. And dumb? Good God. Talking to Chuckie Bickerson could give a normal person a migraine. Chuckie had raped and murdered the cheerleader, of course. He’d raped and murdered a few other girls too, and when the police finally caught up to him—which, after the stunt in Mount Vernon, wasn’t too difficult—they’d found the bodies of those girls in Chuckie’s basement, just lying there stacked up against the vinyl-covered furniture and stretched out on the industrial-grade rug. The smell had been awful.

Chuckie’s smell was awful too. It was as if the sourness of his sweat were woven into him, unremovable by soap. Fred would never have taken his case if Chuckie hadn’t insisted on pleading innocent.

Ass.

Chuckie stirred in his seat, stretched his arms, shook his head. “I got to go to the bathroom,” he said. “Where’s that guy that takes me to the bathroom?”

“Maybe he’s gone to the bathroom himself. He’ll be back in a minute, Chuckie. Just hold your water.”

“I
been
holding my water,” Chuckie said. “I been holding
myself.
Why didn’t you let me get up there and talk?”

I didn’t let you get up there and talk, Fred thought, because I didn’t want to be witness to a lynching. He said, “The defendant doesn’t have to testify, Chuckie. And it’s generally a good idea if he doesn’t. Prosecutors can be very tricky bastards.”

“I could have explained myself,” Chuckie objected. “I mean, I had things to say.”

“I know you did, Chuckie.”

“I could have told them all about those girls. The things they said to me. The things they did.”

“I know.”

“Once you’ve screwed ’em, their lives are ruined anyway,” Chuckie said. “My mother told me that. A woman’s virtue is all she has. If she loses it, she might as well be dead.”

“Your mother must have been a very interesting woman, Chuckie.”

“Oh, she was. Except she wasn’t really my mother. My real mother went away somewhere. Why didn’t you tell them about the eyes?”

“The eyes?”

“Yeah, you know. When somebody gets murdered, the picture of the murderer stays in their eyes, and all you have to do is look. But my picture didn’t stay in any of their eyes. So I couldn’t have murdered them.”

“It was a case of multiple serial suicides.”

“Suicides,” Chuckie said firmly. “That’s the ticket.”

“There’s Sergeant Devere,” Fred said. “If you’re going to the john, you’d better do it now.”

“I still say you should have told them about the eyes,” Chuckie said. “That would have cleared up everything.”

Fred stood up and waved to Sergeant Devere, who nodded and began to come across the front of the courtroom to them. Sergeant Devere didn’t like Chuckie any more than Fred did, but Sergeant Devere was a professional. In fact, as far as Fred was concerned, Sergeant Devere was awesome. If Devere ever started to play poker for serious, he’d get rich.

“Chuckie wants to go to the bathroom,” Fred told Sergeant Devere. “I’d like to go for a walk, if you get what I mean.”

“Of course,” Sergeant Devere said. “I’ll take Mr. Bickerson out back for a while.”

“I don’t see why I always have to be out back whenever you take a walk,” Chuckie said. “I’ve seen trials on television. The accused guy doesn’t always have to go out back.”

“Judge’s orders,” Sergeant Devere said.

“Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the first day here, you grabbed a paperweight during recess and tried to take a policewoman hostage.”

“Self-defense,” Chuckie said sullenly. “You can’t blame a guy for what he does in self-defense. I’m being railroaded here.”

“Right,”

“Mr. Bickerson?” Sergeant Devere said.

Fred moved away from the table, giving Devere room to work with Chuckie’s shackles. Chuckie was wearing shackles because on their
second
day in court, he’d tried to kick the bailiff in the groin. Fortunately for the bailiff, Chuckie had seen karate kicks only in the movies. He’d never before actually tried to do one.

Fred left the courtroom, looked around the corridor outside—newspeople everywhere; more cameras than a store that was going out of business on Broadway—and then made his way to the stairs. He went down the single flight to the basement and along the corridor there to the cafeteria. He found Sydney Mellerstein, his junior partner, sitting alone at a table against the wall, drinking coffee. Fred got a cup of coffee for himself, paid for it, and went over to join Sid.

“Jury’s still out.” He sat down.

Sid sighed. “They must be staging an orgy. They couldn’t be having trouble coming to a decision. How’s Chuckie?”

“Chuckie’s Chuckie.”

“That’s too bad. I picked up our messages before I came down here. You got a call from Caroline Hazzard.”

The coffee the cafeteria served in this courthouse was terrible. In Fred’s experience, the coffee the cafeterias served in all courthouses was always terrible. The coffee served in the cafeterias in state legislative buildings was worse. Fred doctored his cup with enough milk and sugar to produce something on the order of a mocha egg cream, and put Chuckie Bickerson firmly out of his mind.

“Caroline Hazzard,” he said. “Now, there’s a blast from the past—the recent past, but the past. I wonder why it was Caroline who called instead of Paul.”

“Maybe because Paul has sense enough not to bother you with hysterical phone messages when you’re right in the middle of a murder trial.”

“Hysterical. That’s right. Caroline is the hysterical one. Always talking about her inner child and how hard she’s working to heal her addictions. What did she want?”

Sydney took a long swig of his coffee. He grimaced. “She wants to hire you. She wants you to work for free. You owe it to the family. You can’t let that woman get away with this.”

“Let what woman get away with what?”

“Let Candida DeWitt get away with publishing her memoirs,” Sid said. “That’s what this flap is all about. Candida DeWitt is publishing her memoirs. I refrained from telling Ms. Hazzard that I intend to camp out all night in front of the door to my local bookstore when the time comes, just so I can have the first copy I can get my hands on. Whew. This is going to be a pip.”

“I wonder how graphic she’ll get,” Fred mused. “ ‘Mr. Fortune Five Hundred Empire Builder may look self-possessed in public, but in private he likes to be dressed up in diapers and fed a bottle of baby formula.’ ”

“Do people do things like that?”

“They do considerably worse. I hope she gets
very
graphic. I’ll defend her in the libel actions for free. It’d be worth it for the publicity. It’d be worth it to see Candida again. I wonder how she is.”

“I always thought you rather liked her,” Sid said. “I liked Candida better than I liked any of them, at least at the time. Of course, they were all under a lot of strain.”

“You could say that. They’re probably still under a lot of strain. I knew Paul at Harvard, you know.”

“Yeah,” Sid said. “I know.”

“He was very successful at that—stuff he does. Enormously so. I suppose that’s where Caroline picked it up.”

“He married a rich woman,” Sid said. “It’s funny how nobody ever mentions that. Nobody mentioned it at the time. Paul had made a fair piece of change, but she had serious money.”

“That’s true.” Fred nodded. “And there was that house, right in the middle of Philadelphia—that belonged to her originally, didn’t it?”

Sid snorted. “You shouldn’t let Harvard cloud your judgment. It belonged to her all right, but Paul was always going around saying how it had been in ‘his’ family since whenever, that ‘his’ great-something grandfather built it. He would outright lie about it.”

“I’m sure he still does,” Fred said. “I think the family name was originally Hazuelski. His father changed it. Paul was Hazzard at Harvard. But it—got around.”

“Did it matter?”

“In a way. In those days. Yes. Of course, I was an outsider too, a public school boy on scholarship—but I like being an outsider. It doesn’t bother me. Paul was from Philadelphia and he was almost-but-not-quite, if you know what I mean. A second-string prep school. A dancing class but not the right dancing class. Invitations to the big deb balls but not to the really important little ones. I remember wondering at the time if Paul was marrying Jacqueline for love or for position or for simple obsession. I don’t think I ever reached an answer in my own mind.”

“Why did she marry
him
?” Sid asked curiously.

Fred laughed. “Because she was a thoroughly ridiculous woman, that’s why. Jacqueline was the sort of rich woman who has love affairs with projects. The recovery movement was her project. Or maybe Paul’s career in the recovery movement was her project. I don’t know.”

“Whatever,” Sid said. “They’re always saying in the papers that you know who really did it. They’re always saying you’re the only one who knows.”

“The only way I could be the only one who knows is if I’d done it myself,” Fred said, “and I didn’t. I’m glad to be able to say I was in Gstaad at the time. You shouldn’t read the tabloids, Sid, they’re bad for you.”

“You read them,” Sid said.

“The Bickerson jury will be returning to the courtroom in three minutes,” a woman’s low voice said pleasantly through the loudspeakers hanging above their heads. “Will all principals please return to the courtroom. The Bickerson jury will be returning to the courtroom in three minutes…”

Fred checked his watch. “Hour and a half. Maybe they sent out for Chinese.”