Cutwork (8 page)

“I’m attorney Gerald Wannamaker,” he said to the man.

Betsy thought for a moment to give a false name just to wipe that too-confident look off Wannamaker’s face, but only said, “I’m Betsy Devonshire.”

The man behind the glass queried his computer and found they were authorized for a visit. He issued them each a plastic pass on a lanyard and told them to wear it “visibly at all times,” and they obediently hung them around their necks. While they waited for yet another door to be unlocked, Betsy said, “Thank you for arranging for me to come with you to see Mickey.”

“No problem,” he said, managing to indicate in those two words that it had been a problem, which he had solved with his usual skill.

A man in khaki trousers and a green polo shirt came to unlock the door. He led them down a broad corridor to a metal door set with a thick glass window that had chicken wire in it. He unlocked the door to let them into a tiny room with concrete block walls painted cream and a dark cafeteria-style table. Two dark chairs were on either side of the table. The napless gray carpet of the corridor continued in here.

Wannamaker sat down facing the door, gesturing briefly at the chair beside him, and put his briefcase on the table. He opened it and lifted out several legal-size documents, stapled to blue backs, and photocopies of official-looking reports.

Betsy, old enough to be affronted by this continued lack of manners, sat down in the chair indicated.

“Do you know Mickey’s parents?” she asked.

“You mean personally? No.”

“What do you think about this case?”

“Open and shut.”

“You mean you can get him off?”

He stared at her, momentarily nonplused. “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

Before Betsy could reply, the door’s lock rattled and it opened to admit yet another man in polo shirt and khaki trousers—this shirt was red—leading by the elbow a short young man with narrow shoulders, a trace of mustache, and a surly scowl.

“Mickey Sinclair,” announced the polo shirt. “Knock when you’re finished,” he added and left, locking the door behind him.

Mickey had dark brown hair shaved to a shadow on the sides and grown into unruly curls on the top. His pale blue eyes were half veiled behind the lids. His hands were very large but delicately formed, neither knobby nor work-thickened. He wore gray scrubs that hung off his shoulders and were too short in the legs.

Wannamaker indicated one of the chairs on the other side of the table and Mickey took it a little too casually. He folded his big hands loosely and studied the thumbs.

“Mickey, I’m Betsy Devonshire,” said Betsy, since Wannamaker apparently was not going to do the honors. “Your parents asked me to come and talk to you. Did they tell you about me?”

“Yeah,” said Mickey with a rude glance up and down her.

“We need all the help we can get, from whatever source,” said Wannamaker, agreeing with Mickey, by his tone, that she wasn’t much. “You are in very serious trouble.”

“They can’t convict me,” sneered Mickey. “I didn’t do it!”

“They found your shoes in the park—” began Wannamaker.

“They aren’t my shoes,” said Mickey.

“They found money hidden in your bedroom, an amount that matches what was taken from the cash box at the scene of the murder.”

“No, it don’t, not exactly. Anyhow, money’s money. It’s my money, and I didn’t steal it.”

“You have a job?”

“No, I saved it up out of my allowance, plus some aluminum cans I collected. I didn’t steal it. Plus I didn’t kill anybody. They can’t put me in prison for something I didn’t do.”

“Do you ever watch the news on television?”

He gestured dismissively. “News is boring.”

“Then you may have missed those stories about people sentenced to death row, people who were later found innocent.”

Mickey stared at him, and some kind of idea came to him. “Yeah, wait a minute, I did hear about that. It was a DNA test that proved they were innocent. That’s a kind of blood test, right? They took some of my blood already, could they give it that kind of test?”

“It wouldn’t help you,” said Wannamaker.

“Why not?”

“DNA will tell them whether you left some skin under the fingernails of Mr. McFey.”

“Which I didn’t,” Mickey interjected.

Wannamaker kept going. “It will tell them if you raped Mr. McFey. It will tell them if you are the father of Mr. McFey’s baby.”

“Dammit, quit making fun of me! Tell them I want a DNA test.”

“They’re already doing one. Now, listen a minute. Whose skin or hair will they find on Mr. McFey’s body? Yours or someone else’s?”

“Not mine! I never touched him! And he never touched me! So you see? That could prove it, couldn’t it?”

Mickey seemed in earnest, but Wannamaker sighed and consulted one of the reports. “Now, they found a pair of shoes in a trash container behind the food vendors.”

Mickey threw his head up in an angry gesture. “So what? Everyone wears shoes, don’t they?”

“Yes, but these shoes seem to match a pair you own, and your own shoes have gone mysteriously missing.”

“Someone took them,” mumbled Mickey. He was staring hard at his thumbs.

“Why would someone steal a ratty old pair of shoes?”

“’Cause they were really good Nikes? Anyway, maybe they didn’t steal them, maybe I loaned them to someone.”

Wannamaker didn’t even bother to ask for the name of a possible borrower. “Do you ever wear those shoes without socks?”

Mickey thought a few moments, trying to think what Wannamaker was getting at so he could choose the least damaging reply. “Hardly ever,” he guessed.

“So there may be little traces of skin inside them. They are looking for little traces of skin in the shoes they took out of the Dumpster. Skin has DNA, and they are testing scrapings from the inside of those shoes, to see if your DNA is in them. They are also doing a DNA test on the blood that was on the outside of those shoes. They already know the blood type is Mr. McFey’s, not yours. If they find your DNA inside the shoes and Mr. McFey’s DNA on the outside, that will put those shoes on your feet at the scene of the crime.”

Mickey threw his arms up and Betsy leaned backwards and sideways, sure he was going to reach for Wannamaker. But he was only giving himself room to fill his lungs and yell, “I thought you were on
my
side!”

Wannamaker, unafraid, barked, “Shut up!” Mickey dropped his arms. “I am on your side,” continued Wannamaker. “I’m only stating the facts. Let me ask you this: When the DNA test results come back, will they help you or the prosecution?”

“I wasn’t there,” Mickey grumbled doggedly. “I wasn’t in the park, I was supposed to but I changed my mind, and I didn’t go.” He said it as if saying it often enough would make it so.

“You’re a fool to stick with that story.”

Mickey sat back with an unhappy sigh. “What else can I do?”

“We should talk about your options. There are at least two eyewitnesses who saw you running up Lake Street wearing socks but no shoes.”

“They’re lying, they hate me, everyone hates me. They saw someone else, someone who looks like me.” This was said with no conviction at all. He rubbed one eye sleepily. “All right, you’re supposed to be my lawyer. What do you think I should do?”

“I think you should consider a plea bargain.”

Faint hope dawned. “Yeah, I did that once before. I didn’t have to say I did it, even. Can we do that again? Last time I got probation. Can we get that same kind of bargain?”

“Not a chance. But maybe we can do the kind that has you home in eight or ten years.”

Mickey came out of his chair as if lifted by a rope.
“Ten years?!”
He pirouetted on one foot, arms spread. “What kind of a lawyer
are
you? Ten freakin’
years!
I don’t
think
so! I didn’t
kill
him!
Ten years,
when I didn’t freakin’ kill him!”

“Sit down,” Wannamaker said quietly.

But Mickey’s face suddenly twisted with hatred. “You’re just like everyone else, you aren’t here to help me! I tell you I wasn’t there, I didn’t kill him, but you don’t believe me. You don’t want to help me, you
want
me to go to prison!”

“I said, sit down.” Wannamaker spoke no louder than before, but something in his voice was not going to permit argument.

The boy sat. “I’m done talking to you, you’re no help to me. Why don’t you just freakin’ leave? And don’t come back.”

“Fine, I’ll do that. And I’ll tell your parents you don’t want me to represent you anymore.” Betsy thought this an obvious ploy, but Wannamaker underlined it by beginning to sort the papers he’d laid out on the table into two stacks.

Mickey sneered, “Go ahead, quit. You’re no good anyhow.”

Wannamaker picked up a stack of papers and bumped them lightly on the table to align them. Without looking at her, he asked Betsy, “Do you want to ask this loser anything?” He didn’t think so, his behavior suggested, he opened his briefcase and put the stack into it.

So Betsy, tired of being treated as a nuisance at best, said, “If you don’t mind.” She turned to Mickey. “Despite all the evidence against you, despite the bloody shoes, despite the money they found, despite the eyewitnesses, what if I told you I believe you did not murder Robert McFey?”

He stared at her, unable to speak, then his face suddenly rumpled in all directions, his eyebrows going up and drawing in, his eyelids turning down at the corners, his mouth twisting oddly, as he struggled not to burst into tears.

“Yeah, right,” growled Wannamaker, and as suddenly as it rumpled, Mickey’s face pulled smooth, then twisted with anger. He proceeded to show that while the young are fluent in all manner of scatology and pornography, they often lack imagination.

Well before he was finished, Wannamaker went to the door and rapped sharply on it. The man with the key appeared so promptly that Betsy suspected a hidden microphone or camera.

“That’s enough, Mr. Sinclair,” the guard said, and Mickey subsided at once, not even offering a parting shot at Wannamaker as he passed him on his way out.

“Sorry about that,” sighed Wannamaker.

“Are you going to withdraw as his attorney?” asked Betsy.

“No, that was an empty threat. He’s not the one who hired me,” said the lawyer, amused. He consulted his watch and used what he saw as an excuse to hustle out ahead of her.

On her drive home, Betsy growled to herself about the rude attorney, and then about the dreadful young man whom she was supposed to help. But as she cooled a bit, she recalled the brief but utter transformation of Mickey’s attitude when she offered to believe his denials. She’d blindsided him with that offer, so his reaction was very likely honest. Could it possibly be that he was, in fact, innocent?

She decided to talk to his parents.

5

The Sinclairs lived in a modest brick house on a small lot fronted by a hedge that needed trimming. A corner of the lot was cut off by one of Excelsior’s ubiquitous diagonal alleys that once had served as fire lanes. This one was unpaved, and had a slight curve punctuated by mature trees. Early pink peonies and the many colors of bearded iris thrust between the slats of backyard fences. The yards without fences marked their borders with lilac bushes or bridal wreath, the latter so heavy with white blooms the branches dipped to the ground as if caught in a fragrant blizzard. The lilacs were in their brief purple glory, the scent of them and bridal wreath and—What was it? Yes, mock orange—heavy in the air.

Betsy’s shop carried a counted cross-stitch pattern of a romanticized country lane that was not as pretty as this, nor could it capture the heady fragrance. No wonder people paid ridiculous prices for houses in Excelsior!

She suddenly remembered why she was there, and her pleasant reverie faded. She collected her wits and went up the sidewalk to ring the doorbell.

The door was opened promptly by a short, thin woman with dark brown hair tucked behind her ears. There were brown shadows under her brown eyes, but her sleeveless white blouse and pale plaid shorts were crisp. “Yes?” she said.

“Faith Sinclair? I’m Betsy Devonshire.”

“Oh, of course. Won’t you come in?”

“Thank you.” Betsy smiled to herself. Faith had never met Betsy, and was probably expecting a tall, thin sleuth with piercing gray eyes and a lot of presence. But Betsy was not tall, or slender, and the only thing gray about her would have been her hair if she didn’t make regular trips to a hairdresser.

The woman led Betsy into a small, warm living room—no air-conditioning. The place looked and smelled immaculate, but the furniture and carpet were badly worn. On the couch were a girl and a young woman, and standing in front of an easy chair was a good-looking man in a nice suit and thick hair, all one shade of brown.

“Ms. Devonshire, these are my daughters, Kristal and Kathy, and that is my ex-husband, Greg.” There was the slightest emphasis on
that.

“How do you do?” said Betsy.

The girls mumbled something, then became interested in how their arms crossed their chests. There was an unhappy tension in the air that somehow did not seem linked to her visit.

“How do you do?” said Greg, stepping forward and extending his hand. His grip was firm, his expression that of someone hoping his show of pleasantness would disguise the tension. She noticed a few gray hairs in Greg’s eyebrows and, when he stepped back, a shiny new wedding band on his left hand—a reason to dye one’s hair, certainly. But the girls narrowed their eyes at him, not liking his false show, or perhaps the man himself, their father with a shiny new wife.

“Won’t you sit down?” said Faith. “May I bring you something? A Coke? Bottled water?”

“Water would be nice,” said Betsy. Greg stepped away from the easy chair and gestured that she should take it. He looked at the couch, but the hostile eyes of his daughters warned him off, so he went to a wooden chair with a flat pillow tied to its seat and sat down.