Extenuating Circumstances (19 page)

When I knocked on the door to the suite, O'Brien himself answered.

"Secretary's gone to lunch," he said, looking a little embarrassed at having to act as his own receptionist. "I was grabbing a bite myself, back in the office."

"Have your lunch."

"Fuck it," O'Brien said miserably. "I don't feel like eating."

"What's the trouble, Jack?"

He shook his head. "You don't want to know."

I followed him into the inner office. O'Brien sat down behind his desk and stared at a half-eaten corned-beef sandwich sitting on a paper plate in front of him.

"I love corned beef," he said wistfully.

I smiled. "What the hell ruined your appetite?"

"Terry Carnova called me in for a conference at the Justice Center about an hour ago. I thought it was going to be more of the usual bullshit. You know, the guards aren't treating him right, the other prisoners are giving him a hard time -that sort of thing. Instead, he tells me he wants to plead guilty to all charges. He doesn't want me to put up a defense of any kind. He particularly doesn't want anyone else implicated in the Lessing murder. There wasn't any question who he meant, either. Because when I tried to argue him out of it by telling him that his pal Tommy T. was going to laugh at him when he went to the electric chair, he said that was the way he wanted it. Chard had had nothing to do with the murder; it had been between him and Lessing from the start."

"Isn't that what he's always said?"

"Yes and no. He'd begun to loosen up a little over the last few weeks. To tell me a few things about his relationship with Lessing. You know -to humanize it and himself."

I gave him a grim look. "Just how did he manage to do that?"

"Don't start with me, Stoner," O'Brien said irritably. "That man you're so fond of defending was a fucking weirdo. Maybe he wasn't always that way. Maybe he was a great guy in his off time. But not on summer nights. Not after this spring."

"What happened this spring?"

"Terry said Lessing changed," O'Brien said. "Before the spring he was just a guy looking for somebody to hold hands with -some kid he could play daddy to. Then something must have happened to him, something that really screwed him up, because by June he was a completely different kind of cat -sick, snarly, looking to get hurt. That's what Terry said, anyway." O'Brien stared disgustedly at his corned beef. "I was just winning that kid's confidence. Now . . . it's like day one. All he wants to do is get the thing over with and take his punishment."

"Do you have any idea what changed his mind?"

"The fact that he got a visit from Tom Chard around eleven this morning should tell you something."

"You think Chard threatened him?"

"I think he's been threatening everybody. I tried to talk with Naomi Trimble early this morning, and she wouldn't say a word about Chard or Terry. And I haven't been able to get hold of Kitty Guinn since last night:"

"They've always been afraid of Chard, Jack." "Yeah, but this is different. It's like Chard's suddenly gone on a rampage, like something's set him off." He stared at me curiously. "It doesn't have anything to do with you, does it?"

I'd toured Tommy T.'s world the night before, asking questions, stirring up trouble. If the kid had come back to the Underground or the Ramrod or gone to visit Coates later that night, he would have heard about me wherever he stopped.

I said, "It might."

"Does that mean you're onto something?"

"Nothing solid, Jack."

O'Brien got a belligerent look in his eye, as if he intended to grill me about Chard, then gave it up with a sigh. "Aw hell, what do I care? It was a lousy case anyway. I don't know why I got so worked up about it to begin with. I guess twenty-five years of rewriting wills and probating estates makes you a little triggerhappy when you finally do get something with flesh on it. We'd have been lucky to get Terry off with twenty-to-life."

"So you're going to plead him guilty?"

"What choice do I have?" O'Brien said. "The trial starts next Monday."
 

27

I brooded about what O'Brien had said on my way uptown to the Riorley. If Carnova had decided on his own to plead guilty, I wouldn't have cared. In fact, given the situation with Len and Janey, I might have been relieved. But the fact that he'd been intimidated into doing it by Chard-and that I was part of the reason-bothered me a lot. It bothered me even more that Chard had apparently threatened Kitty Guinn and Naomi Trimble.

Tommy T. had probably been feeling pretty safe up until the night before, when I'd come barging into his world, asking leading questions. I hadn't really tipped my hand at the two bars, but I had with Coates. I'd frightened the man badly, and I'd made him betray his friend. He might have felt guilty enough afterwards to seek Chard out and tell him that a cop was on his tail. After two and a half months of feeling safe, Tommy T. could well have had a violent reaction to that kind of news.
I told myself that Chard wasn't my business anymore -that I'd made a decision and I'd have to live with it. But the whole thing left a taste that I knew wasn't going to go away for a long time to come.
 
 

Around four that afternoon I got a call from Don Geneva.
"Look, Stoner," he said, "I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to help you with this Tom Chard business after all."

I should have told him that it didn't matter, but I didn't. Instead I asked, "Why?"

"The family doesn't want any more complications. If you had solid evidence, it might be different. But as it stands, they don't want me to get involved."

"They?"

"Meg, actually. I couldn't get hold of Len. She was . . ." He cleared his throat noisily. "She had a very bad reaction to this thing. It surprised me a little."

After what Janey had said it didn't surprise me at all. It was clear that Meg and Len were the powers behind the cover-up, and that, for different reasons, each one was prepared to sacrifice the truth to avoid further scandal.

"That's all right," I told Geneva. "I'll handle it on my own."

"Stoner, I wouldn't if I were you," he said, suddenly sounding very much the lawyer. "You don't have any right to involve yourself in this matter. In fact, your interference could constitute illegal tampering."

"Jesus Christ," I said with a bitter laugh. "Are you threatening me?"

"I'm stating the facts as the family sees them."

"All of this because her kid was gay?"

"Just stay out of it," Geneva said, losing his cool. "You don't have the right to pass judgment on them. Or on him."

He hung up with a bang.
 
 

It was just about quitting time when I got the second call. In fact, I'd closed shop fifteen minutes early, gotten the office bottle out of the desk, and begun to drink. I drank to take the bad taste away. But it wouldn't wash out; it kept getting worse.

When the phone rang I was feeling mean enough to say just about anything to anyone. As it turned out I didn't do very much talking.

It was Jack O'Brien. I could tell from the traffic noise in the background that he was calling from an open-air phone booth. And it was clear from his voice that he was upset.

"Stoner, could you come over to ..." He went off the line for a second, and I heard someone else talking excitedly.

"I'm sorry," he said when he came back on. "The address is 4678 Baltimore. Can you get over here right away?"

"Why?" I said, lifting the glass of booze to my lips. "It's Kitty Guinn." A truck rumbled past him on the street, and I couldn't hear what he said next.

"Say again?"

"I said she's dead," he shouted over the roar of the truck.

"Dead?" I put the glass down on my desktop. "So is the other kid."

"What kid?"

"Kent Holliday."
 
 

It took me about twenty minutes to make it to Baltimore Avenue in South Fairmount. I didn't have any trouble finding the right address -there was an ambulance in the driveway and patrol cars up and down the block. Guys in work clothes, just home from second shift, their anxious-looking wives, their excited kids, were standing on porches, staring fixedly at the doddering frame two-story with all the cops inside it. I parked three doors up and walked back down to the crime-scene barricade.

This was a working-class neighborhood. Peeling frame houses, fields full of auto parts and flat tires, little squares of yard going bald or to weeds. It was a far cry from Riverside Drive, and the cops at the barricade didn't give much of a damn who came and went as long as they looked semiofficial. I managed to get past them by flashing my ersatz special deputy's badge.

I went up a cracked walkway to the porch and found Jack O'Brien leaning heavily on the railing, head down, tie loosened, shirt unbuttoned at the neck. It was hot in the setting sun that poured over the .gray slat veranda, but it wasn't hot enough to make a man look like O'Brien looked. He'd obviously been sick, but then he wasn't used to violence. He was used to probates and wills.

"It's a horrible mess inside," he said, swallowing hard.

I stared at him coldly. "Was it Chard?"

"No one knows. They're questioning Kent's aunt, Naomi Trimble, right now."

"She's inside?"

"The cops picked her up after I phoned Station X."

"You found the bodies?"

He nodded grimly. "After I talked to you I had an attack of conscience and drove over here looking for Kitty. I thought maybe she could talk Terry out of pleading guilty." He stared ominously at the door, lit up by the sunset. "I don't know how I'm going to break the news to him."

I stared at the door too. It opened on a narrow, unfurnished hall.

"You going in?" O'Brien said.

"I think I better."

I stepped through the door into the hallway. There was a stairway to the left and a living room to the right. The living room was where the trouble had been. It was where the cops were now -a half dozen of them sifting through the broken furniture and the blood.

I didn't go into the room itself. I could see all I wanted to see from where I was standing.
The two bodies were still lying where they'd fallen. The girl was collapsed on a threadbare floral-print couch, head thrown back, her red hair streaming down over the cushions. She'd been shot in the mouth. The concussion had broken her front teeth and burned her tongue almost black. There was a great deal of dark clotted blood in her hair, on her lips, and down her pale, neck. She held a rusted Colt .38 in her right hand.

The boy was facedown on the floor, directly across the room from Kitty Guinn. He'd been shot several times in the body. Judging by the bullet holes in a spindle-legged coffee table and the blood smears on the hardwood floor, Kent had tried to hide from the bullets. At the end he'd apparently grabbed a heavy glass ashtray and held it over his head -like a shield. He was still holding it to the crown of his head in death, like a glass coronet. It lent an absurd edge to the frightening carnage inside the room.

I went back out onto the porch, feeling stunned. The kid had been all redneck, so had the girl. Neither one of them had had much use for me -or for each other but they'd both shown courage and street smarts when it counted. At least they had up until that afternoon.

O'Brien stared at me searchingly. "What do you think? I mean about . . . in there?"

I glanced at the street, squinting into the sun and all those other fixed faces staring back at me. "I don't know, Jack. It looks like a murder-suicide. Of course it could have been made to look that way." I turned to him. "I know she didn't like Naomi or Holliday, but did she hate him enough to kill him?"

O'Brien ducked his head. "Yesterday I told her what you told me," he said in a guilty voice. "About Naomi coming to see you, about a witness who could implicate Chard."

I thought about that for a second. "So let's say Kitty figured my witness was Kent. That's certainly no reason to kill him and then kill herself."

"She's been pretty crazy the last few days, Harry. The phone threats and the pressure of testifying at the trial -they'd unhinged her. I told you that -I told you she was right on the edge. Paranoid as hell and swallowing every drug she could find."

"That was normal, wasn't it? The drugs?"

"What I mean is she was at. the end of her rope mentally. I knew it last night when I talked to her -I could hear it in her voice. I guess I shouldn't have told her about Naomi Trimble. I knew the girl didn't like her or Kent. But I was getting near the end of my rope too." He slapped his right hand against the side of his leg. "Christ, I might have caused this thing."

"I can't buy that," I said, maybe because I was feeling guilty too. Because if O'Brien had had a hand in it, so had I.

"I don't know, Harry," Jack said, shaking his head. "If Chard was planning to kill Kitty, why did he go to see Terry this morning? I mean, why did he bother to threaten Terry if he was planning to carry out the threat?"

"Maybe Chard wasn't planning to carry out his threat. Maybe something happened to change his mind this afternoon."

"Anything's possible," Jack said without conviction.