Extenuating Circumstances (11 page)

Just so I could tell myself I'd done the right thing, I picked up the phone again and called Art Finch at the CPD.

"Long time no hear," he said, as if he wouldn't have minded if it had been longer still.

"I just got done talking to Jack O'Brien."

"Yeah?"

"He's threatening to make a stink if you guys don't release Carnova without a trial."

Finch laughed.

"Seriously," I said. "O'Brien claims he's got some nasty information about Lessing that he's going to give to the press."

"I know all about it," Finch said. "He came to us, too, last month."

"Then you don't believe him?"

"Hell, no. All he's got is Kitty Guinn's hearsay. And she's in the bag all the way. The girl's a junkie, in case you didn't know. Jack probably didn't mention that, did he?"

"No, he didn't."

"Sure, we heard that shit about Lessing's love life. And we heard about the so-called real killer. What the hell did you expect him to come up with? He's got no defense at all unless he can discredit Lessing. Or unless we've got the wrong boy."

"You don't, do you, Art?"

Finch's voice hardened in a hurry. "You're not about to go south on us, are you, Harry?"

"I'd just like to make sure that the guy I'm helping you convict is the right man."

"You know fucking well he's the right man. Jesus Christ, you heard the scumbag confess. Do the world a, favor and save your sympathy for Lessing."

"What about Tom Chard?"

"What about him? He's a bad boy. But there's no one but the girl to connect him to Lessing. Besides, he's got an iron-clad alibi for the night of the Fourth. He spent the evening with some fag named Coates."

"You checked it out?"

"Yeah," he said disgustedly. "We checked it out. And if you don't mind, I got better things to do than hold your hand."

"One last question?"

"What?"

"Why aren't you using the items from Lessing's trunk as evidence? The tire iron and cables?"

"Jeez, even you should be able to figure that out. We didn't get any usable prints off the stuff. No prints. Got it?"

"So you can't tie them directly to Carnova."

Finch grunted. "Right. Now, are you satisfied? Or do you want I should arrange a home visit from Terry?"
 
 

I let it go after that. If I got subpoenaed . . . well, I'd worry about that when it happened, although I think I already knew I'd lie on the stand. I toyed with the idea of phoning the Lessings or their spokesman, Geneva, to let them know about O'Brien's threat. But I was weary of bringing bad tidings to that bedeviled family. Besides, there wasn't anything they could do to change things. Either Kitty Guinn's story would come out or it wouldn't. What the Lessings did didn't matter.

That was a Tuesday. Two days later, on a Thursday afternoon, Terry Carnova's aunt showed up in my office.

Of course I didn't know it was his aunt until she'd introduced herself. At first sight I thought she might be a hooker. She was short and well built. Maybe thirty years old, with a tough, handsome, experiencedlooking face, heavily made up around the eyes and mouth. Her short copper hair was set in curls, little ringlets that danced along her forehead and down either cheek like wire springs. She wore tight-fitting jeans and a white cotton blouse tied in a knot beneath her breasts.

There was a teenage boy trailing after her. A thin, sullen-looking kid, with a burned-out face that reminded me of Kitty Guinn's  -parchment-white and old beyond its years. He wore his bleached blond hair in a Mohawk, dyed purple at the tips and growing out mud-brown at the roots, like a two-tone Chevy with a pinstripe.

"You Stoner?" the woman said in a down-home voice.

I said, "Yes."

She had a cigarette in her mouth, and the smoke crawling up her face made her wince. "I'm Naomi Trimble -Terry Carnova's aunt. And this here is Kent Holliday."

The boy nodded perfunctorily.

"What can I do for you, Ms. Trimble?"

"Don't know if you can do anything."

She took the cigarette out of her mouth, cupped her hand, and tapped the spent ash into her palm.

"There's a tray right there," I said, pointing to the corner of the desk.

The woman walked over and stubbed the cigarette out, brushing the ashes from her palm.

"I ain't never been in a detective's office," she said. "I ain't never had no trouble I couldn't handle on my own -up till now. But I guess I got to talk to somebody, or Kent here does."

She glanced at the teenage boy, who was still staring sullenly around the room.

"Look," I said. "I'm not the guy you want to talk to. I don't have anything to do with Terry's case."

"You got something to do with it," the woman said with certainty. "I heard Kitty say your name and how you was going to testify for Terry."

"Kitty's dreaming. If you've got something to report, talk to Jack O'Brien, Terry's lawyer."

"I ain't gonna talk to no lawyer," the teenage boy said, with such ferocity that I turned in the chair and stared at him.

"Why?"

He stared back at me defiantly. "'Cause I ain't gonna testify in no courtroom is why. I ain't gonna do that bitch Kitty Guinn no favors neither. Not the way she bad-mouths me and Naomi."

The woman gave the kid a long-suffering look. "Hush up with that stuff now. That ain't what we come to talk about."

Turning to me, she said, "It's true that girl and me don't get along so good. I just ain't that fond of junkies, always sneaking around and stealing stuff. And as far as going to Terry's lawyer, well, he ain't interested in talking to us neither."

"How is that?" I asked.

"To tell you the truth, he come by about a month ago looking for me to be a, whad'ya call it, character witness. Only I didn't have nothing good to say about Terry, so he left all pissed off. Pissed off. Kitty so damn much that she threatened to shoot me." The woman shook her head stubbornly. "But I ain't gonna be intimidated by no threats. I told him and I'll tell you, Terry's been a burden to me since he was twelve years old. Always in trouble, always on the street. I tried to do the best I could by him, but the fact is, I ain't cut out to be nobody's mom."

She touched the tight knot in the shirt beneath her breasts as if she were touching her heart. "I work nights and sleep most of the day. Ain't much of a cook and ain't much on cleaning house. The little time I have to myself, I don't want to spend keeping an eye on some wild kid. I told Estelle that when she brought Terry by six years ago. But there wasn't really any other family to leave him with -what with his daddy run off and Estelle having her problems with the booze. So I let her talk me into looking after him till she got back on her feet. Then she went off and got married to some guy who didn't want to hear about no other children, and I got stuck with Terry. First night I had him, he run over to Fourth Street with some of those boys. Didn't come back till Friday, stoned out of his head and smelling like a brewery. Been that way ever since. Soon as I leave the house he just runs off and ends up in trouble. Used to be I could whup him or scare him with the truant officer. But since he got so damn big and mean, I've been afraid to do anything. And once he got tight with that Tommy T., well, I could see the handwriting on the wall. I just knew Terry'd end up killing somebody, and, by God, he did."

I was surprised by her candor. And even more surprised by the fact she wasn't defending Carnova. "You knew how he was making his, living?"

The woman ducked her head. "Yeah, I knew. I never come right out and said it to myself. But I knew he was shaking queers down to get money to cop T's and B's. Him and Tommy T."

"What do you know about Ira Lessing?" I asked curiously.

"Not a thing," she said flatly. "Never heard his name before I read it in the newspaper. Kitty says that he and Terry were real close. But I never saw it. Course for the last couple of years, Terry's been living over on Baltimore with Kitty, so I ain't seen that much of him. Could be Terry and him were close. But I doubt it."

"Why?"

"Well, for one thing, Kitty'd say about anything to help Terry out after she turned him in. And for another . . . Terry just don't have no feeling in him. I mean not so's he'd be friends with a man like that Lessing. The way Terry grew up, he lost all his respect for other people. Not having a daddy. Bouncing around from place to place, with Estelle getting so drunk she'd have to be locked up, and Terry getting farmed out while she dried out. That just killed all his sympathy."

She ducked her head. "Maybe I didn't help any neither. I ain't fit to be nobody's mother -I know that. But I do believe Terry was far gone before he ever met me. He was headed down that road anyway. And he finally got to the end of it. Least that's the way I was thinking till I talked to Kent last night. Now I ain't so sure."

"Sure of what?"

"That Terry kilt that man."

Naomi Trimble was a hard, loveless woman living in a hard, loveless world. She had a great deal to pay back for, but self-delusion didn't seem to be one of her sins. She wasn't being dishonest about herself. And I had the feeling that she wasn't being dishonest about Terry Carnova.

I glanced at the boy -Kent Holliday. He tilted his head and stared down his nose at me, contemptuously. A tough street kid, not about to give an inch to an adult. I knew Carnova wasn't any of my business -not anymore. But part of me was damn curious about what it was that had changed Naomi Trimble's mind. I let that part win out.

"What do you have to say?" I said to Kent.

"I know what happened to that man," he said in a sullen voice.

"Lessing?"

He nodded slightly.

"You were there when he was killed?"

"After. They picked me up in that car after, over to Elberon."

"What car?"

"BMW. It was real messed up inside. Terry said it was on account of they had a fight with a nigger. He said his dad was gonna be real pissed off 'cause it was his dad's car and they done ruined the seats."

"I thought Terry didn't have a father."

"He don't," Kent Holliday said. "That's just what he called this guy who give him money and clothes and shit. This guy Lessing."

"You saw him with Lessing?" I said.

"No, I never did. But somebody sure as hell give Terry a lot of money pretty regular. And I saw Terry driving that car a couple times before -only he was always alone before."

"Who else was in the car that night?"

The boy hesitated a second, and Naomi Trimble gave him an angry look.

"Go on and tell him."

"It was Tommy T.," Kent said.

I stared at the boy's face. He was still trying to look tough, but it had cost him some brass to say that name. "You're afraid of Tommy T.?"

The kid laughed a scoffing laugh. "Hell, yes, I'm scared of him. Anybody got any sense at all is scared of Tommy T. He's a bad-ass dude."

"Is that why you don't want to go to court?"

Kent nodded. "He knew I was talking to you now, he'd come looking."

"Then why are you here?"

The boy glanced at the woman. "'Cause of her," he said. "She's my second cousin."

It was like the flip side of Len Trumaine and Janey Lessing -the down-home version.

"Tell him what happened, Kent," Naomi Trimble prompted.

The boy looked at me and I said, "Go ahead."

He took a breath. "Soon as I got in the car, I could see Tommy T. was real high. He's snapping his fingers. And stamping his feet. And singing to the music on the radio. Every once in a while he starts laughing like crazy. Terry starts singing and laughing, too, like it was all some big joke. Only I can tell he ain't really into it the way T.T. is. He's just copying him, like he always does. We head on down Ninth, playing that radio s'loud as she'll go. T.T. says to Terry, 'That was some good show.' Talking about the fight, you know?

And Terry says, `Yeah.' And they both laugh some more. Then T.T. says, 'Let's go on over to Coates's so's I can get me some new clothes.' 'Cause he's got blood up and down his shirt and pants from the fight. So Terry goes on down to Walnut Street and parks in front of the Deco. And we go up to Coates's place."

"Who's Coates?"

"He's this fat old faggot lives in the Deco apartment house, across from the Ramrod. He's got the hots for Tommy T. Do 'bout anything for him. Man, Tommy treats him like shit too." The boy laughed as if it was funny.

"Anyway, we get on upstairs and Coates lets us in. Tommy T. says to him, 'Give me some fresh clothes, you old faggot.' Then T.T. takes off his shirt and pants in front of him. Coates, he gets all hot and bothered and asks Tommy if he'll do him right there. Tommy grins and says, 'I will if you pay me fifty dollars. You gotta wash out my old clothes and ream my asshole too.' Coates says he'll do anything for some of that. So they go on back to the bedroom and-"

"I get the picture," I said sharply.

The kid looked shocked. It wasn't embarrassment. Judging from the way he'd been talking, there wasn't much that could embarrass him. It was the fact that he'd embarrassed me. It made his face turn red and his eyes go cold, brought his redneck pride to life -that fierce sense of propriety that had sent Kitty Guinn squirming away from me on the CPD bench. I'd inadvertently underlined the distance between his world and mine, and he didn't like it.