Extenuating Circumstances (18 page)

The second glass fell from her hand onto the rug. This time she didn't notice. Curling up on the couch, she closed her eyes.

A moment later she was passed out.
 

25

I checked the girl's pulse after she passed out. Her heartbeat was strong, but I wasn't sure what other drugs she might have taken along with the booze. To be on the safe side, I phoned Trumaine at the plastics shop.

"Jesus," he said with alarm. "She knows she shouldn't drink while she's taking those damn pills." "What pills?"

"Elavil. It's an antidepressant." "Maybe we better call a doctor."

Trumaine hedged. "I'll come over. Give me ten minutes."

While I was waiting for Len to arrive I got an Indian blanket from one of the upstairs bedrooms and covered the girl. She looked a lot less troubled asleep than she had awake. But then she didn't dream when she was asleep.

What she'd told me about herself and Ira had been disjointed, skewed by the pills and the booze. But it was obvious that the guilt she felt over Lessing's death was destroying her. Kitty Guinn had claimed that guilt stemmed from the fact that Janey had known about her husband's homosexuality. But judging from what I'd heard that morning, I wasn't sure Janey had known Ira's secret until after he was dead. It wasn't unusual in a case like this for one spouse not to know, or not to want to know, the other's guilty secret, especially if the spouse was as childlike and devoted as Janey had apparently been.

Obviously the girl had guessed that something was wrong -Lessing himself had told her as much on the night he was murdered. Apparently he had known full well he was headed for disaster, and the girl had understood enough of his mood to react hysterically to his subsequent disappearance. But she hadn't understood the full meaning of it -or if she had, she'd kept it entirely to herself during the long, nerve-racking week after his car was discovered in the Terminal lot. Given her fragility and her devotion to the man, I had trouble seeing her do that, although I supposed it was possible.

I wished I'd had the chance to question her fully about what Lessing had told her on that hot July night. I wished she could have told me something about the third of June -that blank day in Lessing's charted life. But the answers to those questions would obviously have to wait until a time when Janey could face her own life without Elavil and Johnnie Walker Black Label.

Precisely ten minutes after I'd called, Len Trumaine came rushing into the living room with an anxious look on his drooping, moony face. He walked over to the girl and felt her cheek, then gently combed the loose blond hair from her forehead.

"Do you want to call a doctor?" I said.

He shook his head. "It's happened before. She'll be all right. It's the stress -some days it just overwhelms her." Len looked up suddenly, as if talking about stress had made him realize that I shouldn't have been in that room. "What are you doing here, Harry?"

I told him the truth. "I was asking Janey about a kid named Tom Chard."

Trumaine stared at me, slack-jawed. I knew at once that he recognized the name, and from the stricken look in his eyes, I realized that he knew about Chard's reputation too. What I didn't know was where he'd heard it.

His face reddened, almost as if he'd guessed what I was thinking. When he spoke his voice was angry, defensive. "You have no right to mention that bastard to Janey. Christ, you didn't tell her anything about him, did you?"

"No," I said.

"Because that's all we need," he went on, almost hysterically. "I mean she believes everything she reads about Ira or hears on TV, anyway. She absorbs it like a sponge and turns it into guilt. Blaming herself for not knowing. Blaming us for not acting to save him. Blaming the world for not seeing what wasn't even there. If she thought Ira was mixed up with that psychopath, I think she'd go right over the edge."

"Where did you hear about him, Len?"

He flushed again. "Finch mentioned him once," he said. "A few weeks ago. Carnova's lawyer had some ugly theory about this Chard and Ira. Finch didn't buy it. I didn't either. Why do you care?"

"Because I think Chard may have been involved in Ira's murder."

"That's ridiculous," he snapped. "Carnova confessed to the killing. He didn't mention any accomplice. And what the hell would Janey have to do with it, anyway?"

"Chard got two checks from Ira early in June.

Money to pay for rehabilitation at the Lighthouse Clinic. Janey apparently endorsed the checks."

"I don't believe it," Trumaine said flatly. "She never endorsed Ira's checks."

"Someone did."

"So what? Maybe Millie did it -she'd sign checks for both of us on occasion. So the kid had a couple of checks. Ira handed out money all the time. He was a charitable man."

I hadn't wanted to get into it with him because I'd known how he'd react. I guess I should also have known that he'd be familiar with Chard. After all, he'd spent almost two months working closely with the police, the D.A., and everyone else associated with the case. Months spent trying to ensure that this very issue -the question of Lessing's homosexuality and the bearing it had had on his murder wouldn't become the focus of the trial. He was protecting the family. He was protecting his friend. He was trying to keep the girl sane. But looking at the angry embarrassment written on his face, hearing the defensive tone in his voice, knowing that he'd tried to bribe O'Brien into laying off the beat-freak issue, I didn't believe that Len still thought that Ira Lessing was the chance victim of a homicidal teenager.

I didn't say that. It would have made him that much more defensive. Besides, I liked the man too much to call him a liar.

"Len, I'm not trying to hurt you or Janey or the family. But there are reasons, good reasons, to think that Carnova didn't act alone."

"You can prove that?"

"I have some evidence pointing to Chard. None of it conclusive."

"Then for God's sake drop it, Harry. For ber sake. She can't take more bad news. It'll kill her."

The girl stirred on the couch and Len shuddered nervously. "She's worn out," he said, looking panic-stricken. "Can't you see that for yourself?"

"You don't care, Len, that Chard will walk away?"

"I care about this." His hand hovered above Janey's face. "She's had a horrible life, Harry, except for the past few years with Ira. You don't understand how horrible."

"I'm sure the last two months have been tough."

"That's not what I mean." He took a deep breath, as if he were summoning his strength. "Look, if I tell you something about Janey, will you promise never to repeat it?"

I didn't particularly want to have my sympathies played on. But the man obviously wanted to talk me out of going any further, and I was more than a little curious about the Lessings. So I said, "You have my word."

"Janey's father ..." Len's face got very red. "He abused her."

"Janey was sexually abused as a child?" I said, feeling sorry that I'd heard it.

He nodded unhappily. "A young child."

"Did Lessing know that?"

"From the start. Almost by instinct. On that very first night I introduced them, he knew. We talked about it later on, when we were driving back to school, and he'd guessed it all."

"Perhaps he'd already had some experience with parental abuse," I said, thinking of what Raymond the bartender had said.

"I've wondered about that myself, seeing what a heartless bastard his dad was. And over the last few months . . . well, you can't help thinking all sorts of crazy things. But if it was true, Ira never told me or anyone else I know. If it was true, he kept it inside of him and concentrated on work and charity and Janey."

"That would have been in character, wouldn't it? Keeping it inside?"

"Jesus, Harry," Len said in an outraged voice. "Do you have to turn it all against him, even his pain? If you could have seen how gentle and kind he was to Janey, how patient and understanding . . . He gave her a sense of identity, without making any demands on her strength. He let her escape her past." His face flushed guiltily and he ducked his head. "I couldn't ever do that."

"Why not, Len?"

He wouldn't look at me..He didn't answer, either, for a long time.

"Because I was part of it," he finally said in a terrible voice. "I knew about Janey's dad and I never told anyone. She didn't want me to. She was afraid, and I . . . I was afraid for her."

"You can't blame yourself for that."

"Oh, can't I?" he said with a horrible laugh. He plucked at his tight-fitting shirt, at the layered flesh underneath it, as if the fat were something he wore in penance for the past. "I will never stop blaming myself for that. I let her down when I was all she had. I'll never do that again. This time I'll fight for her. I swear it."

I stared at him, at the angry, shamefaced schoolboy that had emerged from inside him. "Forget it, Len," I said. "It won't come to that. You have my word."
 

26

I had a much better picture of the Lessings now, wife and husband. I even had a lead to follow -Millie the secretary, who sometimes signed the checks for Mr. L. I hadn't actually shown her the checks the day I took them from Lessing's office; it was possible she'd endorsed them -or knew who had. And Lessing & Trumaine was no more than a few blocks away. But it was just too far to travel to find out the truth about Tommy Chard. At least that was the way I felt at that moment.

I headed back across the river, back to the city. On the way I thought about Trumaine, a fat, unhappy kid who'd grown into a fatter, unhappier man because he'd blown his one chance at love, because, at the age of ten or eleven, he couldn't muster the heart to speak the unspeakable. And now I wasn't going to speak it either. I knew it as I drove away from Riverside Drive. There had been too much unhappiness visited upon all the actors in the Lessing case, victims and persecutors alike. The extenuating circumstances kept extenuating, further and further back into each one's past, until the lines converged in lonely childhoods where there wasn't any love to be found. That wasn't the kind of damage I could fix or that a court could settle. Chard would get his due, inevitably. But not this day, not this case, not by me.
 
 

I parked in the underground garage on Fifth Street and walked back to my office. I knew I was going to have to call O'Brien sooner or later. But before I did that I wanted to pay Naomi Trimble a visit. She'd done a brave thing, a dangerous thing, coming to see me. So had her cousin Kent. I owed her an explanation of why I was backing off.

I found the tag of paper with her address on it in the top drawer of my desk. She lived on State, in the heart of the Appalachian ghetto. It was a short drive, and I had nothing but time on my hands that afternoon.
 
 

The house on State was a few doors up from the iron fretwork of the Elberon overpass. I parked on the west side of the street, in the heavy noonday shadow of the viaduct, then walked across to number 310. It was a frame one-story bungalow, sided in shingles, in a block of frame bungalows built on the sloping bias of the street. The shades were drawn in the two front windows of 310 and in the tiny window of the door. I stepped up on the stoop and knocked. No one answered.

Naomi Trimble had said that she worked nights, so I figured she was probably asleep. As I stood there on the stoop a woman in a floral housedress, her red hair wrapped in a scarf, stepped out of the door of 312 and stared at me with naked curiosity. She had a blotchy alcoholic's face, puffed up around the eyes and collapsed at the cheeks where her back teeth had been pulled. She was probably in her mid-thirties, but hard drinking had turned her into an old woman.

"Y'all looking for Naomi?" she said, putting a hand to her brow to shield it from the sun.

"Yes, ma'am."

"You a bill collector?"

"A friend," I said.

The woman smiled a salacious, broken-toothed smile. "A friend, huh? Well, I don't think she'll be seeing no friends this afternoon."

"Why is that?"

"She run on out of here after that guy come to see her 'round nine this morning. They had some words, I can tell you! Heard them shouting from next door."

"What guy is this?"

"Don't know his name. Just a young guy -goodlooking but kinda mean. I seen him around the neighborhood a couple times. Used to pal with Terry Carnova and that bunch of no-goods."

It didn't have to be Chard, but it certainly sounded like him. I stared nervously at Naomi's door. "Do you know when she's coming back?"

The woman shook her head. "Way she was workedup, she may not come back."

"Great," I said under my breath. To the woman I said, "Would you tell her Harry Stoner stopped by? Tell her to call me."

"Stoner," she repeated. "I'll do that."

But I had my doubts. In a couple of hours the woman probably wouldn't be able to think about anything except hitting the glass with the bottle.

When she went back in I took a pencil and a piece of paper out of my notebook, wrote down a short message, saying I'd stopped by and would come back later that evening, and left it in the door.
 
 

I took Ninth Street back to town, then went south on Vine to the underground garage again. After parking the car I walked down to the Tri-City Building and Jack O'Brien's office.