Extenuating Circumstances (17 page)

Kingston saw me looking at them.

"Methadone," he explained in his husky, wised-up voice. "All those people who want to legalize drugs ought to pay a visit to this place around eleven in the morning." He looked down at the floor. "I haven't seen you since the funeral, Stoner."

"A lot's happened since then."

"Yes," he said somberly. "I've read about some of it. I suppose everyone in town has." He started to say something else -about the allegations, I thought- but held off.

"What can I do for you?" he said instead.

"You remember those checks I gave you?"

He nodded. "The ones I handed over to the cop back in July."

"Do you think I could talk to your bookkeeper about them?"

"Don't see why not, although your cop friend already has the story."

"Finch came back?"

"Right after the funeral. He spent an hour with Marty."

"I'd still like to talk to her."

"Right this way."

He led me across the room, past the line of junkies to a door marked "Staff Only." There was an office inside, with a barred window looking out on a sunlit alley behind the clinic. A small, dark-haired woman with half-frame tortoise-shell glasses on a nervous, owl-like face was sitting at a desk totaling figures on an adding machine. She peered at us menacingly over the half-frames as we came in.

"I'm pretty busy, Sam," she said.

"This is Harry Stoner, Marty," Kingston said, as if she had said nothing more than a polite hello. "He needs to ask you a few questions about those checks we gave to the cops. The ones from Ira Lessing."

The woman tapped her forefinger on the desktop. "I've been through that with the police."

"Would you mind doing it again?" I said with a smile. "It could be important."

She took off her glasses and tossed them on her desk. "Fine," she said disgustedly. "I'm made out of free time."

I sat down across the desk from her, and Kingston ducked out the door.

"Look, I've got a lot of things to do so let's make this quick," the woman said, putting a hand to her brow and massaging her forehead. "Ever since Ira Lessing died I've been up to my ears in work."

"Why is that?"

She dropped her hand and stared at me incredulously, as if she couldn't believe my gall in asking the question. "We've had to scramble for contributions if you really need to know. And I'm the one who does most of the scrambling."

"Lessing was a great supporter of the clinic, wasn't he?"

She nodded. "He had a thing for disadvantaged kids. Judging from the papers, he had a thing for kids, period."

"You believe the gossip?" I said, surprised that she'd admit it.

"I always felt there was something odd about him," she said matter-of-factly. "Sam couldn't afford to see beyond the charity. Well, maybe that's not fair -he genuinely liked Lessing."

"You didn't?"

"I liked him fine," she said. "I'm just a little suspicious of human goodness. I can believe it about dogs and cats. But human beings . . . Five years at a drug rehabilitation clinic does that to you."

It hadn't done that to Kingston, but then he was clearly a different sort of character than Ms. Levine.

"About the checks?" I said.

"Not much of a story, really. A young guy brought them in on the morning of June 4. I happened to be working the reception desk that day, otherwise it might've gone unnoticed."

"What might have gone unnoticed?"

"The signature on the checks wasn't right. I mean, it wasn't Lessing's. We've had kids try to pass bad paper on us before, so I called Lessing at the Court House. At first he was confused, but when I told him the name of the kid with the checks, he said to go ahead and accept them. We did, and the kid entered the program. At least he signed up and got a week's worth of free methadone. As far as I know we never saw him again after that."

"And what was the kid's name?"

"Well, he wasn't really a kid. I'd say he was twenty, twenty-one. And his name . . ." She opened a cardboard file box on her desk and flipped through the cards. "His name was Chard. Thomas Chard."

I stared at her for a long moment. "You told the police that?"

"Months ago."

"Did you ever figure out who'd endorsed the checks?"

"Lessing called back about a half an hour after I'd called him and said that his wife had endorsed the checks for him the day before -he'd simply forgotten about it."

"So Janey Lessing gave Chard the checks?"

"I guess so," Marty Levine said. "You'd have to ask her to be sure."

That was what I intended to do.
 
 

24

I stopped in Kingston's office carrel before leaving to see if he could tell me anything more about Chard.

"I don't really remember him that well," he said. "He only came in once."

"Was he alone when he came in?"

"As far as I remember he was. Why the interest?"

I didn't want to go through it with him -not until I had proof. So I said, "I'm just tying up some loose strings."

I could tell from the look on his face that he didn't believe me. But he must have been used to being lied to because all he said was, "Glad we could help."

"Do you remember what Chard's problem was?"

"T's and B's, I think. He didn't really want to kick the habit. He just wanted access to free medication like a lot of them do. We gave him a physical, blood tests, the whole nine yards. He never came back for the results."

"T's and B's. That's what that kid was high on the day I first came here."

"They're a poor man's version of base. Talwin and blues -Pyribenzamine. The one's a painkiller, the other's antihistamine. Mixed together they're dynamite. Kids combine the capsules one to three, one to four. Sometimes they break the caps, cook the stuff up, and shoot it." He stared through the glass of his cubicle at the raggedy line of strung-out teenagers standing in front of the dispensary. "That bastard Carnova. He shot the stuff regularly."

"I take it T's and B's can have a violent effect."

Kingston nodded. "Very violent, like angel dust. Sometimes kids will attack their friends, sometimes they mutilate themselves."

"Carnova was high on T's and B's the night of the murder."

Kingston got a pained look on his face. "That would explain the brutality of the crime. If he was high enough, he probably didn't even know what he was doing."

"I think he knew what he was doing," I said to the doctor.

"Yeah, I've read those stories too. And we've been hearing the same crap from some of the kids on the street."

"You don't believe them?"

Kingston leaned back in his chair and stared at the clutter of papers on his desk. "Ira Lessing was a good man. I'll never think any less of him than that. But where is it written that a man's goodness isn't just as complicated as every other part of his life? Who can look into anyone's heart and find perfection? Who could say that about himself?"

"No one."

"Damn right," Sam Kingston said.
 
 

It was almost noon when I pulled up on Riverside Drive beneath the pretty French Quarter house on the hill. I got out into the sun and walked up the flight of steps to the terrace. There was a water glass half full of whiskey sitting on the tile by one of the cane chairs. It should have told me something about the mood inside.

Instead, it made me thirsty. I wasn't looking forward to what I had to do.

I knocked, and a few moments later Janey Lessing answered. Her pretty little-girl's face looked chalky and careworn, aged as if by illness. She stared at me for a moment without reacting, as if I wasn't really there. I thought perhaps she'd forgotten my name, but when she held that dead-eyed stare awhile longer, I realized she was drugged or drunk. When I stepped closer to her I could smell the liquor on her breath.

I said, "Do you remember me, Mrs. Lessing?"

"You're the detective." Her voice was flat and weary -not at all like the anxious, pouty-little-girl voice I remembered.

"You think we could talk?"

"Why not?" Janey said. "I still talk, when someone will listen."

She waved me through the front door.

I followed her down the hall with the Impressionist prints to the too-white living room with its red Rothko blazing above the fireplace. Janey went directly to the liquor cart and poured herself a drink. A glass of booze was already sitting on the coffee table in front of the couch, but the girl didn't notice it, like a person lighting a second cigarette when the first is still burning.

"You want a drink?" she said to me.

I shook my head, and she laughed sarcastically. "Too early in the day?"

She came around the side of the couch and sat down across from me.

"I drink a lot now," she said in that flattened-out, emotionless voice. "It's the only thing Len and I share anymore, except for a morbid interest in my mental health. Which, as everyone will tell you, isn't very good. I'm not . . . what is it Meg says? I'm not making the adjustment." She drained half of her drink and let her head loll heavily against the cushions. "What do you want, Mr. Stoner?"

"I need to talk to you about a boy named Tommy Chard."

"I don't think I know anyone named Chard."

"You gave two checks to him about four months ago."

"Chard?" she repeated curiously. "What were the checks for?"

"They were made out to the Lighthouse Drug Rehabilitation Clinic."

She took another sip of the drink. "It couldn't have been very important because I don't remember it."

She certainly didn't sound as if she was lying, but then she'd had a lot to drink and the past few months had clearly taken their toll. "Maybe if you think back to that day June 3?"

The girl smiled gruesomely. "I don't much like thinking back. It's getting harder and harder to remember what I did an hour ago. These damn pills I take . . . they're supposed to cheer me up, but what they really do is make me forget. You know, the weirdest thing is that I don't dream anymore. Why is that? I can't seem to remember my dreams."

"About the third," I said, trying to get her back on track, even though it looked hopeless. "Your husband didn't have any appointments that day. Is it possible that he was out of town?"

"We were here in June," she said matter-of-factly. "There was nothing special. What day did you ask about?"

"The third."

"I can't remember anything."

She took another sip of whiskey and stared at me blearily. "Aren't you enjoying our talk, Mr. Stoner? Most people get that look on their face after two or three minutes with me. You've lasted ..."

She turned her wrist to look at her watch and spilled the drink she was holding into her lap. Her face flushed with embarrassment.

"Oh, Janey's made a mess," she said with a wretched laugh. "Maybe I've had enough." She swiped viciously at the ice cubes, knocking them on the floor. "Maybe Janey shouldn't drink -that's what Meg and Ira say." She flushed again. "Did I say Ira?"

I looked away, at the floor.

"Isn't that the oddest thing? But there's a point to it. There's a point to little slips, they tell me. I guess what I was really saying was that I feel guilty."

"For what?" I said, looking up at her red, ravaged face.

"For what happened to Ira," she said. "They all blame me, anyway."

"They?"

"Meg and her crew. They blame me. I mean they don't say it, but they do. Isn't that why you're here -to blame me?"

She was a little right. She was also a little crazy and quite drunk now-so drunk she had trouble sitting up.

"I'm here to find out what happened to Ira."

"What happened to him?" she said with a single laugh that racked her like a sob. "Anyone can tell you what happened to him. He's dead. He was here and now he's gone. It's what happened in between that we don't talk about. We do drop hints, though, from time to time. Mostly we act as if there was something Janey should have done. What should Janey have done? Like an assignment in school."

She struggled to keep her eyes focused on me. "You know, it's probably a defect in my personality -lack of initiative. I didn't dare ask questions when I lived at home with my father. And when I met Ira, well,. I was so grateful to be taken away that anything he did was all right with me. Even when I knew he wasn't happy -and he wasn't, despite what Meg says- I didn't ask him why. I didn't think I was supposed to. Can you blame someone for that?"

"No one blames you," I said.

She gave me a disgusted look. "Now you sound like Len." Janey picked up the other glass of whiskey from the coffee table and drank it down. When she started talking again her concentration failed. "I shouldn't have let him leave -that night. I knew . . . I knew something would happen."

"Why?" I said. "Why did you think that?"

Her eyelids fluttered, as if she was going to pass out. "Because he told me something was going to happen," she whispered.