Judge Me Not (8 page)

“Yes, I did. What does that mean?”

“I don’t know yet. Koalwitz pressured it through. Koalwitz doesn’t spit unless Raval tells him to. And Wetzelle took the case away from Captain Herb Leighton, present Homicide captain and the only square-shooting captain on
the force. So that gives me an idea. I’ll pick up Leighton and come on out there. You wait for us, hear?”

“I’ll be right here.”

After he hung up, Teed took out a handkerchief and wiped his sweating face. Ritchie Seward arrived in twenty-five minutes. With him was a cadaverously tall man Teed recognized as having seen around the Hall. Herb Leighton’s handshake was limp, damp and cold. He looked vaguely like a shaven Lincoln, and his thin high voice furthered the impression.

“Her car,” Leighton said when the introductions were over. “Checked the number again when Ritchie phoned me.” He stared at Teed out of deep-set eyes so lifeless that they looked as if the pupils were dusty. He folded his long bones into a chair. His knees stuck up sharply. He gave the impression of having some chronic disease that left his energy at a low ebb. When he yawned Teed saw that his teeth were tiny, like a child’s.

“Somebody fixing to clobber you, Morrow.” It wasn’t a question.

“It seems that way.”

“She was a busy woman. Least since Mark married her. Pretty sure I knew three boys who bedded her down.” He counted them off slowly on languid fingers, yellowed by nicotine. “Lonnie Raval. Luke Koalwitz. Judge Kennelty. Heard ’em comparing notes at the Lantana Brothers picnic last summer. Sort of had a hunger for the mature type, I guess.” He smiled without mirth. “Covering the City Hall beat, Rich, did you get to cover that too?”

Seward, astonishingly, blushed. “I was out there one day trying to get an interview with Carboy. That was when he was staying out of sight on account of that bus-franchise squabble. He wasn’t home, but she was. After about ten minutes I suddenly realized I was going to get myself into a position where I’d have to write nice things about the Mayor, just to ease my conscience. So I got out of there fast. I think she was a little peeved at me.”

Leighton turned his deep-eyed dusty stare on Teed. “Figuring it out, boy, I’d say she’d fling her tail at anybody who’d either do Mark good, or do him less harm. So I’m sort of putting you on the list too. Mind?”

Teed made himself grin. “And I was thinking it was my personal charm. O.K., Captain. If you’re going to try to help, I might as well come clean. Add me to that list.”

Seward looked at him with something close to contempt and turned away.

Leighton said softly, “I suppose you took her up to that camp.”

“She would come up by herself and meet me there. Week-end afternoons, and then only since the other camps have been closed.” Seward stood looking out the windows, his hands behind him, rocking back and forth from toe to heel.

“She try to pump you? Find out what Dennison is planning?”

“In a subtle way. I never told her anything. We broke up … a while back when she tried to tell me to take it easy on her husband.”

“I suppose people saw her driving up there and back.”

“I don’t know.”

Leighton sighed. “Seward seems to think I’m willing to go out on a limb for you, Morrow.”

“I’m not so sure now,” Seward snapped, not turning.

“It ain’t a moral issue, Ritch,” Leighton said softly. “It’s a murder situation. They keep me on the cops, boy, so they can look at my beat-up clothes and my old heap of a car and my goddam mortgage and they can say, ‘See, we got an honest officer on the force here in Deron.’ So I keep my nose reasonably clean, Morrow. When I go out on a limb, I don’t want any son of a bitch sawing it off close to the trunk. Now stop looking at the rug and look at my eyes, Morrow. Did you kill her?” His voice sounded like two files being rubbed together.

“No. I didn’t kill her.”

“Was she out at your camp last night with you messing around with her?”

“No.”

“She gave you any little keepsakes that could tie the two of you together?”

“No.”

“They liable to find anything of yours among her stuff?”

“Not a thing.”

He pulled himself slowly out of the chair. “I don’t condemn you on moral grounds, Morrow. Better men than you and me have done like that little old dog on the railroad tracks. I just think it was damn poor judgment for a man in your position to fediddle the Mayor’s wife.”

“I know that, now.”

“I think they’ll try to hurt Dennison through you. Hurt what he’s trying to do. I don’t like having that car planted outside your place. Might be, they’ll haul you in on suspicion and beat the hell out of you. Do you think you can take it?”

“I think so.”

“They’ll want you to talk about everything Dennison is planning to do. No man can take it for too long. So after I arrange about this car, I’m going to talk to Armando Rogale. He’s a tough little wop lawyer and a fighter. And he knows his way around. Soon as you drop out of circulation I’ll figure they’re hiding you in one of the precincts, and I’ll sick Armando on ’em. Anybody asks you, he’s your lawyer.”

“What are you going to do about the car?” Morrow asked.

Captain Leighton looked at him blandly. “Why, I’m going to check this whole place and see if I can find out who left it there. With any luck I’ll cover the whole area before it’s officially found. And then I’ll phone it in myself. If they jug you and Armando can’t get you out, Ritch here will sick the Times on the force. So figure that all you have to do is keep your mouth shut for not more than six or eight hours of pummeling. They won’t be stupid enough to try to charge you with her murder. Isn’t enough to go on.”

He ambled slowly out, pulling the door shut behind him.

“Like him?” Seward asked.

“He’s an odd man, isn’t he?”

“He wears very damn well, Teed. He settles a lot of department disputes, because they know he’s square. He knows a surprising amount about a surprising number of people, and he never forgets anything. I saw him drunk only once. That was the day three men he’d caught were electrocuted. He talked about murder. He said, ‘No human ever kills another human without also killing himself.’ I questioned that. I told him that a lot of people got away with it. He just gave me that tired smile and said, ‘And there’s a lot of dead people walking the streets.’ I guess in his own way he’s both a sentimentalist and an amateur mystic. I’m glad you told him the truth. He would have found out, and when he did, nothing you or I could say would make him lift a finger for you. He hates a liar.”

“He’s a tough man to lie to, I imagine.”

“And a tough man to kill,” Seward said, almost with
awe. “He’s got the lead that’s been dug out of him. He keeps it in a glass dish on his mantel. Enough lead so that when you first see it, it looks like a little dish of candy.”

“Have lunch with me, Ritchie. Then you’ll get an eyewitness report on the way I’m picked up.”

“Maybe you ought to tell Powell Dennison that you might be picked up. Maybe he’ll jump the gun on all the data you people have collected.”

“And how would you know about that?”

“Dammit, Teed, this is my town. The same way it’s Herb Leighton’s and even Lonnie Raval’s. Everybody knows that you and Dennison are hiding in your fort making up a pile of snowballs. A lot of us hope you’re going to have rocks hidden in the snowballs. As long as you come out fast, you’ll have people on your side. When you start to weaken, you two will be almost all alone. One thing in your favor—that’s Andy Trim, the D.A. He’s all wind and ambition. He’s played along with Raval because that has made sense so far. If he sees a chance to dump Raval in a way that will give him a reputation all over the state, he’ll do it. Come on. I’ll wait while you check in with Powell, and then we’ll have some food.”

He followed Teed in his car on the way back to the Hall.

After lunch with Ritchie Seward. Teed went back to the office and tried to work. Dennison had procured abstracts of the sheets from the Assessor’s records. The current project was to check the private-home assessments of the politically faithful against the rebels. For years the Board of Assessors had been one of the most potent weapons of the Raval clique. Step on the wrong toe and you start paying taxes on an assessed valuation of fifteen thousand rather than the previous five thousand. Grievance Day had become a farce.

But Teed could not keep his mind on what he was doing. He remembered the way he had awakened from the Sunday afternoon nap, content and self-sufficient. Just forty-eight hours ago. Now that precious detachment was lost and he missed it. He realized that for too many years he had been like a man in a crap game using somebody else’s money. Now he was being forced to gamble with his own money, and he didn’t like the sense of participation, the feeling of risk and potential loss.

He had taken pride in being able to do an honest and workmanlike job at his specialty. But always the job had been something he could toss over his shoulder at five o’clock. And smacking down the crooked ones had been a pleasure not so much from any innate sense of righteousness, but rather from joy in a good scrap. Detachment had been his armor and maybe, he thought, things had come a bit too easy. Maybe he was a very special type of flawed hero, a guy who could turn the last card without a tremble merely because nothing really important was at stake.

In that moment he envied Powell Dennison. Dennison believed with all his heart in what he was doing. And he felt guilt that Dennison presupposed a similar dedication in his right-hand man. Powell would never sell out. Teed had thought he would never sell out, either. And now … if the price were high enough … if safety were the price?

The old saw was that a man has to live with himself. But
if the choice is to either live with someone you can’t respect, or stop living entirely …

He recognized the potential danger of that train of thought, and tried to push it out of his mind.

At three o’clock Miss Anderson told him that a Mr. Armando Rogale was here to see Mr. Morrow.

Rogale came bustling in. He was about thirty, a small, stocky, swaggering man wearing a beautifully cut gabardine suit. His face was pale and, except for the snapping black eyes, as expressionless as an egg. From the small, thin-lipped mouth came a rich and astonishing baritone.

He shut the door behind him, shook hands briskly, plumped himself down in the chair and stared at Teed with both amusement and speculation in the dark eyes.

“I appear to be your attorney, Mr. Morrow, according to that Leighton spook.”

“I don’t really know whether I’ll need a lawyer, Mr. Rogale.”

“We’ll call this preventative medicine.”

Teed studied him. “How come you’re willing to be unpopular?”

Rogale inspected manicured nails. “Good question. This town is a jungle. The jackals run in a pack. You want to be a jackal, you can get along O.K., if you listen to the boss jackal. I’m a porcupine. Every once in a while a jackal takes a slap at me and gets a noseful of quills. Just say I’ve got a porcupine temperament, Morrow. Too sharp to be swallowed. You ever see a skinny porcupine? They live pretty good.”

“Rebellion for the sake of rebellion?” Teed asked.

Rogale gave him a sharp look. “What do you want from a lawyer? An emotional strip tease? I grew up in Deron. My old man was a carpenter, an immigrant, a professional patriot. Bill of Rights. Constitution. You know what I mean. In our ward there was a code of behavior. No matter how bright you were, you were supposed to ask for help when you voted, just like you were illiterate. Our ward always threw every vote to the machine. My old man went to night school. He did his own voting and kept splitting his ticket. Bad example to the others. They beat him up three times, and the third time they accidentally cracked his skull and he was in a coma for three weeks before he died. After I passed the bar I tried to set up in Utica, then in Syracuse. No dice. I had to come back here. Now I’m a
minor irritant. Someday I want to be some sort of avenging angel—or maybe demon. Cross-examine?”

“No, thanks.”

“You and Dennison are on the hot spot. Want to hear a theory?”

“Sure.”

“Felice Carboy was a bitch. And a pretty bright gal. She tried to make a trade—her body for hubby’s immunity. No dice, I imagine, from what Leighton told me. So she wanted to add a little more to her side of the scales. Something juicy. Something that would help you and Dennison. It might have been good enough so that you would be willing to make a deal with her. She actually knew more about the Raval operations here than Mark Carboy does. Maybe she trusted the wrong guy. Anyway, somebody found out. She’s potentially dangerous, playing around with you. So kill her and implicate you. Two birds with one thud.”

Teed said slowly, “That same sort of idea has been growing in the back of my mind. Her call to me came through the switchboard here, the call where she said she had something hot to tell me.”

“That could be it.”

“Her name wasn’t used.”

“Nevertheless, if the girl on the board at that time recognized the voice and reported it, that girl will be a little queasy right now. It’s something to work on. Look, Morrow. I’m your lawyer. It’s a confidential relationship. The more I know, the more I can help. I want to be awful damn certain you didn’t kill her.”

“I didn’t.”

“Is there anything I should know, then?”

Teed got up and walked to the windows. He looked out on the parking lot, at the office-building windows across the way. He came back to his chair and sat down. With an effort he kept his voice steady. He told Rogale every detail of the previous evening.

After he finished Rogale let the silence grow for long minutes. He bounced out of the chair, walked over to the wall and drove his fist against it.

“Mother of God!” he said. “
Sangre de Cristo!
Of all the fatuous idiots in the wide world, I have to offer my services to the clown prince.”

“Now, listen, Rogale! Maybe my reaction wasn’t too bright, but …”

“Shut up! Let me think. Mortimer Snerd masks, yet. Imported talent. Guys who probably hit town Sunday and are gone now.” He held out his hand. “Give me the key to that camp.”