Chain of Evidence (19 page)

Throughout his years of public service, he believed that he had concealed well his sentimentality. Only Lucky had ever seen that side of the otherwise iron-willed sergeant. Yet dialing this number and anticipating the voice on the other end flooded him with such emotions, alarming him with a vulnerability that both relieved and ashamed him. Relieved, because it reminded him of his own humanity. Ashamed, because Walter Zeller was above sniveling about the past. His blunt fingertip hesitated alongside the final digit. An eighteen-wheeler roared past, carrying behind it a train of raised dust and the stench of diesel and burning rubber. Zeller stabbed the button. Fuck it, he thought.

“Dartelli,” the voice answered.

Walter Zeller hesitated, a knot in his throat.

“Hello? I can’t hear you.”

Without introduction, Zeller asked, “Why do it the easy way when there’s a hard way?”

“Sarge?”

Zeller registered the astonishment in Dart’s voice, the fear and concern, his decades of skilled interrogation techniques not lost. “Are they suicides, Ivy?”

Silence as even the kid’s breathing stopped.

“Answer me!” Maintain the upper hand at all times.

“No.”

“Of course not. Good. Very good.”

“I’ve been trying to—”

“Don’t try—do!” he said, purposely interrupting to prevent the kid the completion of even a single thought, keeping him off balance and out of sorts. Maintain control. “They took their own lives, but they’re not suicides, Ivy. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“Don’t get sidetracked with insurance records, for Christ’s sake. What the hell can that accomplish?”

“It was you on the bridge?”

Disappointed that he’d allowed the man a complete sentence, Zeller strung together a series of thoughts and voiced them as a single spoken stream. “I’m your fucking guardian angel, Ivy. I’m watching over you so that you don’t go astray, and believe me, it’s a fucking full-time job with you. What’s happened to you? Making a huge tangle out of something so simple. Over-thinking,” he said, raising a complaint that he had voiced dozens of times. “Making problems instead of solving them. Losing track of the basics. Didn’t you retain anything? For any conviction to stick, the detective needs to be able to connect all the dots himself. That is, unless the snitch is willing to take the witness stand, and I can tell you right fucking now that that is not the direction we’re going—you and me. The basics, damn it all. Didn’t you retain anything? Shit! If the suicides aren’t suicides, and if, on the other hand, these guys all killed themselves, then what the fuck is going on here? Make sense of it, Ivy. Don’t make a mountain of confusion. What about their blood, Ivy? The basics! Sometimes the enemy is within.” He slammed the phone into the cradle, his hand still shaking, though not from the cold.

Things never went as planned, and people were as unpredictable as the weather. Walter Zeller felt the need to take the kid by the shoulders and shake some sense into him—set him straight. He stood in the phone booth looking down at his trembling hands, wondering what was happening to him. How could he let the kid get to him this way? How had he become involved in the first place? Kowalski was the one he had targeted—as dumb as stone, and yet smart enough to let a sleeping dog lie. The truth would out soon enough, all by itself.

Joe Dartelli, the pride and joy of his police career, was another thing entirely. Dartelli, with his college degree and his barnyard sense of where the rat was hiding, was proving nothing but trouble.

I’ll put him in the hospital if I have to, Zeller thought, just like they’re trying to do to me.

He glanced down the street nervously, alert for the familiar Toyota, for the cracked and bent face behind the wheel—the hired knee-breaker he had been outrunning all this time. Outsmarting. Out-thinking.

Looking down once again, he felt relieved to see that his hands had stopped shaking. He was under control again, and for Zeller, control was everything.

CHAPTER 19

Dart was part theatre critic, part acting coach. It was his job to make this woman tell him what she didn’t want to. Any interrogation amounted to the same thing: a con game of give-and-take, of tricks, the challenge of making someone say something that he or she had no intention of saying. Any investigator worth his salt knew that everyone held secrets. The skill was finding a way to pry it out.

The CAPers interrogation rooms were a pair of small unattractive cubicles, each containing a cheap table and two metal chairs. Dart dragged a third chair inside and shut the door, well aware of the effects of such an austere environment. Interrogation offered only a single door. That door lead either to jail or to freedom, depending on how the critics rated a performance.

Danielle Payne, the wife of the Halloween suicide, had an artificial look of surprise around her eyes that could be attributed only to a face lift. Her skin was flawlessly smooth, her lips a sensual red, and the rest of her could have been the model for Tommy Templeton’s Venus, a pinup of epic proportions with a pair of breasts that would have made her surgeon proud, displayed in a tight turtleneck top that accentuated the lack of any visible means of support, defying all rules of gravity and age. That she had been married to a known pornographer could be easily determined by her lousy taste in clothing, her platinum hair, the gum that she chewed between her front teeth, and a heightened sense of sexual readiness, communicated by repetitively placing her hand into her crotch and withdrawing it slowly, and a tendency to shift her upper body around restlessly, jiggling her breasts and twisting her narrow waist as if she needed an itch scratched. Scratched hard, by the look of her.

The attorney to her right, Dart’s left, was a silver-tongued, six-hundred-grand-a-year asshole by the name of Gambelli. His mere presence warned Dart not to expect much.

After formal introductions for the sake of a tape recorder, he asked the woman to recount her activities on the night of her husband’s suicide—a suicide that Dart considered a murder but lacked the evidence to investigate as such. Throughout her narration, Dart sensed in her an underlying nervousness that he associated with lying. There were two different kinds of anxiety that surfaced in an interrogation—the person uncomfortable and unfamiliar with being in the company of a cop; and the person who had something to hide. Danielle Payne fell firmly into the second category.

“How would you describe your relationship with your husband, Ms. Payne?”

“My relationship?” she asked, checking with the attorney, who offered a barely visible nod.

“Warm and fuzzy?” Dart offered. “Turbulent … Nurturing?”

“We got on okay, I guess.”

“Okay?” Dart asked. “Affectionate? Romantic? Distant? Cold?”

“We liked each other fine. Harry, you know, had his work, his stuff, and I had my stuff too. Okay, I guess.”

“He was never rough with you,” Dart stated, clearly making her uncomfortable.

“Rough?” she gasped, blushing.

“Physically abusive,” Dart clarified.

Gambelli tugged at his French cuff and said, “Where are you going with this, Dartelli?”

Danielle Payne squirmed in her chair, all sexuality lost. Her face puckered up into a knot of worry.

“Abusive situations are difficult on the victim of that abuse.”
I ought to know
, he thought, thinking of his alcoholic mother and hiding inside the dryer.

“Meaning?” Gambelli questioned.

“Ms. Payne,” Dart said, doing his best to ignore the attorney, “was your husband ever physically abusive toward you?”

“Did he rough me up some? Sure he did,” she admitted. “He’s gone now. What’s it matter if I tell you. He was not an angel. So what? Show me a man who is.”

“And you put up with this behavior of his,” Dart said. “You tolerated it. You endured it.”

She shrugged. “We’ve got a nice place to live. I drive a Mercedes. Have you ever driven a Mercedes?” she asked, her eyes searching Dart, as if to say that this mattered a great deal. Dart shook his head no. She said, “It’s a nice car. A real nice car, a Mercedes. So what do you know?”

“Isn’t it true,” Dart asked her, “that on at least six different occasions you admitted yourself to the emergency room for injuries sustained from conflicts with your late husband, that on two occasions you telephoned Nine-one-one and asked for help from the police?”

She said defensively, “It was all a mistake.”

“He’s dead,” Dart reminded. “You don’t need to fear him. You don’t need to lie to me.”

She looked away. Her attorney advised her that she need not answer any question that she chose not to. Her eyes pooled with tears, she waved him off.

Dart waited until she appeared more at ease. He needed to judge her reaction carefully to this, his most important question. He studied her and asked, “Were you ever approached by a man offering to help you with your husband?”

Her expression disappointed him, for she didn’t appear to understand the implication that Dart was attempting, whereas her attorney certainly did.

“I don’t want you to answer that,” the attorney snapped to his client.

But Danielle Payne had already formed an answer in her head, and she spoke it. “They approached
him
, not me. It was his problem, not mine. Nothing I could do about it.”

For the first time in this meeting, Dart and Gambelli met eyes, neither able to contain their astonishment at her answer. Dart’s eyes said sternly,
Let me pursue this.
Gambelli’s were a cauldron of concern.

The attorney admonished. “Danielle, please!”

But she had to protest, “He didn’t tell me any more than that—only that they could help him and he was going to try it.” To Dart she said, “Harry loved me loads. He didn’t want to be mean. Really. He didn’t want to hurt me.”

“They?” Dart asked, knowing full well that the attorney would interrupt, which he did. But Danielle Payne seemed to be venting.

“What’s he care what I say? He’s dead and gone. What’s it matter to him?”

Seizing quickly on this, Dart asked, “Who offered to help your husband, Ms. Payne? What do you mean by that?” Dart had imagined just the opposite—that Walter Zeller had made himself available for hire to women who wanted their abusive spouses eliminated, that he had created a profession out of reversing his years of investigating homicides. An abused wife or lover, or the mother of an abused child, would have plenty of motivation to see the sex offender killed. A carefully manufactured suicide would be quickly cleared. Zeller could carry out his own passion and earn a living while convincing himself he was doing the world a favor. This fit Zeller’s controlling personality and his disenchantment with the legal system that he had abandoned. But Danielle Payne was throwing him off completely: The mention of a third party, and this third party approaching Payne himself, did not fit with any of Dart’s preconceived notions.

“I don’t know,” she answered, and he trusted the confusion in her eyes. “Harry said he couldn’t tell me, but that things were going to get better, that
he
was going to be better, and that I just had to trust him and the doctors.”

Gambelli released a chest full of air and said, “Enough!” attempting to silence his client. To Dart, he said, “I’d like to speak with her alone, Detective. If you intend to pursue this any further, I must speak with her first.”

“Doctors?” Dart said to the woman.

“Do
not
answer that, Danielle,” Gambelli warned, and this time his client obeyed. She nodded, and hung her head. She wore sky blue eye shadow on eyelids edged with pencil, her lashes gobbed with mascara.

The woman murmured, “There’s nothing to tell. I don’t know any more than that.”

Gambelli shook his head in disgust and slapped his legs with open palms.

“Doctors,” Dart repeated, in the voice of a man thinking aloud.

“I never met ’em,” she said. “But Harry was better toward me, nicer and all, and so I wasn’t complaining.”

A thought occurred to Dart. “Did your husband ask that you leave the house that evening?”

“No way,” she answered sharply.

“It was Halloween,” Dart countered. “Didn’t he want you home to help give out the candy?”

She hung her head again. “It isn’t a friendly neighborhood,” she said.

At least not toward convicted pornographers,
Dart thought, realizing that the Paynes would have been shunned following his arrest.

“He didn’t have a meeting planned?”

Gambelli allowed this question to pass.

“No. Not so as he told me about.”

Reading from his notes, he questioned her about the housecleaner, and she confirmed that the house had been cleaned that same morning. She also confirmed that there was no Dustbuster or similar small vacuum in the house. “And who had access to your garage? It operates via a remote, is that right?”

“A clicker, yeah. Sure. Harry and me, we both had clickers in our cars.”

“And you used yours upon your return?” Dart asked.

She nodded.

He said, “And the garage door was down at the time?”

“Sure it was. What’s this with the garage door and all?”

Dart believed that Bragg’s evidence—the pine needles, rock salt, and potting soil found in the garage and inside the study—pointed toward Payne’s killer having entered through the garage. Once inside the garage, the kitchen door was unlocked and would have allowed egress, undetected. Access to the garage was only through the automatic door openers, one of which Danielle Payne controlled. It was this combination of facts that had led him to consider that she had arranged for her husband’s staged suicide—providing her garage door opener to a killer she had hired.

“And none of your husband’s business associates would have a garage door opener for your house.”

“Of course not!”

“Your housecleaner?”

“No.”

“And your security system that night. It would have been on or off?”

“Harry liked to keep it on when we were home. He didn’t want no surprise visits.” She blushed and averted her eyes. It was the police he had hoped to avoid. “But Halloween it would have been off for sure. At least I think it would have been.”