Extenuating Circumstances (12 page)

"Go on now," Naomi Trimble said gently, as if she were trying to soothe his sense of injury.
But it took a few moments for him to start up again, and, at that, I could still hear the wounded pride in his voice. "Me and Terry stayed in the living room while T.T. and Coates was . . . doing their thing." The boy gave me a withering look. "Soon as Coates and T.T. left, Terry starts acting crazy. He walks up and down in front of the couch, talking to himself and cussing. Then he starts tearing up the place. Pulling open all them drawers and closets. He says to me, 'Kent, I need to find me some more T's and B's right now. I need to stay high. It's my birthday today. And I'm gonna party the whole night long.' Then he says something that jus' knocks me out. He says, 'You know my dad give me that car for my birthday. He give it to me 'cause he's going away.' Man, I could not believe it!"

The kid looked off into space, as if he were still tasting the beauty of it. I heard the woman say, "Go ahead."

"Well, we's sitting there for a time, then we start hearing Coates in the other room, screaming and crying. That just seemed to freak Terry out more. It freaked me out some too. He jumps up and says. 'Fuck it. I ain't staying here.' He goes on over to the door, then he stops and takes them car keys out of his hip pocket and just drops them on the floor. He says, 'You tell Tommy T. he can have that car.' And I say, 'What're you doing, man? Your dad give you that car!' And he says, 'No, he didn't. He didn't give me nothing.' He looks at me real hard and he says, 'Kent, Tommy and me kilt a man tonight. And that's how come we got that car.' Then he walks out the door. Man, I lit out of there too. I wasn't gonna stick around after hearing that."

I glanced at the kid. His eyes were as stunned -looking as they must have been' when he'd heard Carnova confess.

"I thought it was the drugs talking," Kent said. "I swear to God I did. But just the same I didn't go near Terry nor Tommy T. for a couple days. Then on Sunday, me and my partner, Jamey, was walking down by the Terminal, and we saw that car sitting there with all them cops 'round it. And I knew it had to be so." He shook his head sadly. "Just had to be."

"So you called the police?"

"No, I never. But Jamey . . . well, I told him about it, and he went on down to a pay phone at the Hi-Lo and called it in. Jamey's father's a preacher, and then he never liked Terry none, anyway."

"Why didn't Jamey tell the cops about Tommy T.?"

Kent ducked his head. "Scared of him, I reckon."

I glanced at the clock on my desk and thought of Len Trumaine looking up at the big iron clock on the Union Terminal facade. It was 4 P.m.

"Where could I find Tommy T.?" I asked the kid.

"Sometimes he's over to the Underground on Fourth. Sometimes he's down there at the Ramrod on Walnut. That is, if he ain't with no john."

"You gonna look into it, then?" Naomi Trimble asked.

I stared at her a moment and said, "I'll think about it."
 
 

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Before Naomi Trimble left I asked her outright if she believed Kent Holliday's story. The boy snorted with outrage, but the woman understood where I was coming from.

"I guess I must," she said, "or I wouldn't be here."

She gave me a thoughtful look. "I didn't want to believe it, no more'n you do. Terry's a bad seed. I know it and I know he's gonna stay that way as long as he lives. He coulda kilt somebody easy. In fact, I was sure he did till I talked to Kent. But when you add what Kent says to the story that girl, Kitty, tells ... well, I guess there's room to doubt. And I can't make myself think it's right Terry should die without somebody finding out for absolute sure. I'll tell you something else, too, something I've been thinking on. That man Lessing, he wasn't a god like the newspapers make him out. He couldn'a been. I ain't saying he was Terry's sugar daddy, like Kitty claims. I can't believe he was. But I do believe there must've been something 'tween him and Terry. Or how else do you explain it?"

She shrugged as if the answer was beyond her, as if it was enough that she'd posed the question. She took Kent by the arm and walked out, leaving the finding of answers to me.

For a few seconds I just stared at the desk, wondering why I'd put myself back in the case. It would have been easy enough to dismiss Naomi and the boy before they'd had a chance to tell their stories. But I hadn't done that. Even though they'd come to me by mistake, I hadn't done that. And now it wasn't easy anymore.

It wasn't that I felt sympathy for Carnova. I didn't. I knew as well as Naomi Trimble did that Terry was guilty enough -whether he actually did the murder or not. Only there was a difference between guilty enough and guilty before the law. The woman had faced that fact. Now it was my turn. What if Carnova bad been an accomplice? I asked myself. He was still an accessory to murder. Finding the truth of it wouldn't change that. It wouldn't change the terrible thing that had befallen Ira Lessing, either. What if I let it slide?

I stared at the desk again. The woman had written down her address on State Street in lower Price Hill and left the tag of paper on my blotter. She didn't leave a phone number -presumably, she didn't have a phone.

I picked up the slip with her address and stuck it in my pocket. Then I picked up the phone and called my friend George DeVries, an investigator at the D.A.'s office.

"I need a favor, George," I said.

"Like what?"

"Run a name through CID for me. Tom Chard, a.k.a. Tommy T. He's a West End juvie. See if you can dig up a mug shot and an address."

"An address won't mean much for a kid like that."

"See if you can get one anyway. I'll come by in about an hour or so with an envelope with your name on it."

He laughed. "Just make sure there's a President's name inside."
 
 

Once I'd finished with George I took the elevator to the street and walked downtown to Jack O'Brien's office. I hadn't decided what I was going to say to him even as I knocked on the door of his run-down suite. As it turned out, he didn't give me the chance to make up my mind.

As soon as the secretary ushered me into his office, O'Brien's mortician's face got red, from his sunken cheeks to the top of his bald head. He'd been reading a brief -half-frame glasses on his nose, feet up on the desk. When he saw me come in, he dropped his legs to the floor and sat bolt upright in his chair.

"What the hell do you want?" he snapped.

"To talk about the Lessing case."

O'Brien laughed bitterly. "Tell the Lessings to send another boy."

"I don't work for the Lessings anymore."

"Sure, you don't." He pulled the half-frames from his nose and tossed them on the desk. "Listen, Stoner, everybody works for the Lessings. The cops. The D.A. The papers. In fact, some fat guy named Trumaine came by my office the day after I talked to you and tried to hire me too. Funny about the timing, huh?"

"Len tried to bribe you?" I said with surprise.

"In so many words. Mostly he rattled on about what a great guy Lessing had been and how much the family had already suffered and how none of their friends wanted to see them suffer anymore. The message was clear. If I kept the homosexual -stuff out of court and out of the the papers, Ira's friend would be 'grateful.' "

I stared at him hard. "I didn't tell the family what you told me about Carnova -or about Chard."

O'Brien gave me a thoughtful look, then picked up the glasses and began spinning them around by the ear-piece. "Well, somebody must have told them some of it -enough to get them upset. What's more, somebody's been talking to Kitty Guinn."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning she's been receiving threatening phone calls almost hourly, and she's scared. Hell, it's worse than that -she's almost crazy, ranting about enemies and settling old scores and, at the same time, so frightened she shoots up three or four times a day. It's a miracle she can function. We've got the preliminaries coming up next week. If she goes over the edge, I might as well plead the son-of-a-bitch guilty as charged. That's probably what it'll come down to anyway, even if Kitty does testify. I'd try to plea-bargain if I had anything solid to bargain with."

"Won't Carnova testify in his own behalf?"

"You know better than to ask that," O'Brien said flatly.

But I had the feeling that he wasn't about to put Terry Carnova on the stand. As far as I knew, Carnova had never recanted his confession. Which meant that O'Brien's defense rested exclusively on extenuating circumstances, on Kitty Guinn's testimony about Chard. At least it did at that moment.

I stared at O'Brien for a second, at his dour face. "Hold off on any plea bargaining for a while."

"Why? So you can make damn sure everyone else's nailed down?"

"Just hold off," I said evenly. "Give me a chance to look into a few things."

O'Brien curled his lips sarcastically. "Don't tell me. You've had a change of heart."

"I talked to Naomi Trimble this afternoon."

"That's great. Just great. The woman is as bad as the Lessings. As far as she's concerned, the kid's as guilty as sin. Never mind that she helped to make him what he is. Never mind that her holier-than-thou attitude doesn't extend to her own life and character, which are about as low as you can get."

"She's changed her mind," I said. "She thinks Terry didn't do it now. She thinks Tom Chard did. And she's found a witness who can confirm some of Kitty's story."

O'Brien stopped twirling the glasses and stared at me, slack-jawed. "Why didn't she come to me?"

"Because the witness is a kid who doesn't want to testify in open court."

O'Brien's jaws snapped shut, as if he had Kent Holliday between his teeth. He leaned forward, hooking the glasses around his ears and staring at me belligerently. "I'll subpoena the little bastard. Just tell me his name." .

"Take it easy with the subpoenas, okay? They won't do any more good with the kid than they would with me."

"Then what do you suggest I do?"

"I told you. Sit tight. Let me poke around. Nobody wants to see Lessing's killer go free."

"I wish I believed that." He leaned back again and squinted at me down his nose. "Does this mean you'll testify about the doctored confession?"

I shook my head. "I'm making no guarantees about that."

"Then what are you guaranteeing?"

"That I'll look into Kitty's story," I said.

"And what if you don't come up with anything?"

"Then you're out a couple of days. And Carnova's no worse off than he is now."

"No better, either."

"It's the best I can do," I told him.
 
 

I caught a cab outside the Tri-City Building and took it up to Government Square. I could have walked the six blocks easily, but it was getting late, and it was hot, and I wanted to catch George DeVries before he left for the day.

I just did catch him, stepping out the door of his office on the second floor of the Court House. A tall, paunchy, red-haired man, with a face so netted with wrinkles that it looked like something drawn on crumpled butcher's paper. I'd known him for fifteen years, and in all that time he'd never done me a favor without a payoff.

"Thought you were going to stand me up," George said with his wrinkled grin.

He reopened the office door and waved me through.

"Did you get it?" I asked him.

He handed me a folder from off his desk. "Right in here. Mug shot. Rap sheet. The works. Now how about the envelope?"

I pulled a twenty from my wallet. "Buy your own stationery."

He stuck the bill in his shirt pocket. "Anything else I can do for you?"

"You can tell me what's new with the Lessing case."

"Yeah, I heard you were on that. Art Finch told me."

"I'm just a bystander, George."

"Well, bystander, you don't have to worry about a conviction. We got this kid cold, and you can tell the family that."

"You're the second guy this afternoon who thought I was still working for the family."

"You're not?" George said with surprise.

"Not anymore."

"They've been sending so many people through this office, I figured you were part of the crowd."

"They've been conferring with the D.A.?"

"That's one way of putting it. What they're doing is pressuring him, politely but persistently. They want that kid convicted. And they want the conviction clean. No extenuating circumstances. No more nasty headlines. If you get my drift." George stared at me with naked curiosity. "This guy Lessing . . . I've been hearing a lot of rumors about him over the last few weeks. Maybe some of it's true?"

"I don't know, George. I never met the man." I glanced at the folder in my hands. "Chard's name hasn't come up in the Lessing investigation, has it?"

He shook his head. "Haven't heard him mentioned. Just Carnova. He's the whole ball of wax as far as I know. Why? Is Chard a witness or something?"

"Could be, George," I said, slipping the folder under my arm and heading for the door.

Or something.
 
 

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