Liar (31 page)

“I don’t know. He could have done that without the lie.” I thought for a moment while Rachel, who had ignored two empty chairs to sit down on the floor in front of us, began pulling copies out of envelopes. The envelopes made me think of the DeMont inheritance. “I hate to ask this, Travis, but have
you
made a will?”

“Yes. I provided for my mother,” he said, and again I saw him struggle for self-control. After a minute he said, “I guess I’ll have to make a new one. I’ll talk to Mr. Brennan. I-I wanted to talk to him anyway, about setting up an endowment in my father’s memory, something for local adult literacy programs.”

“That’s a good cause,” Rachel said absently. “I had an aunt-came here from the old country. She learned to read from one of those programs-adult school, at night.”

“Irene didn’t tell you?” Travis asked.

“I wanted to respect your confidences-” I began.

“Yes,” he interrupted, “and I appreciate it.”

“Tell me what?”

“My father was illiterate.”

“Really?” She took a moment to absorb this information, then said, “He did so well for himself-your father must have been quite a man.”

“Yes, he was. Charming, resourceful and bright. A bigamist, a liar and-well, let’s look at the file. You worked in homicide, Rachel. Maybe you can tell me if my father was also a murderer.”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I can definitely tell you that you shouldn’t hire Mr. Richmond to do any detective work for you.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Oh, he may not be bad at tracking people down, but he should have handed this homicide investigation over to people who knew what they were doing. He sure as hell didn’t.”

“What did he do wrong?”

“Well, the scene was obviously unnecessarily disturbed before the coroner got there-lots of people moving in and out of the room, touching things they shouldn’t have been handling-Richmond, too. Looks like some of that started before he got there, though, so he can’t take all the blame.

“The worst thing he did was to break rule one-he had an easy suspect and he worked backwards from there, instead of keeping an open mind while he looked at the evidence. Once he had your dad figured for this, Travis, he wasn’t going to budge from that position. He’s still defensive about it.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Travis said, sighing.

“So tell us what you think,” I said.

“Well, let’s start with the basics. She was stabbed to death. Someone placed a pillow over her head-apparently not pressing down hard enough to suffocate her, but enough to keep her quiet-and went at her with a knife. No weapon left at the scene, but they could tell it was a knife both from the wounds and because a small piece of the tip of the knife broke off when it struck a bone.

“There were no prints. Arthur’s prints were in the house, all right, but not anywhere unexpected. Killer was wearing gloves.”

“Wait!” I said, as she was about to go on. “Are you sure?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, are you certain the killer wore gloves?”

She picked up one of the stacks of paper and flipped through it. She read one page for a moment, then said, “Yes. There was a lot of blood, and they found bloodstained prints of gloved hands on some of the surfaces in the bedroom.

“Then his hand…” Travis said.

Rachel looked sharply at him. “What are you talking about?”

Travis told her what he had told me on the beach-but in slightly more detail, telling of seeing his father approach the house, and touch the glass-that Arthur’s hand was bloody, but not his clothing.

“Why didn’t you say something about this before?” she asked angrily.

“Can’t you guess why he didn’t?” I said.

She calmed down a little. “Which hand? Which hand had the blood on it?”

He closed his eyes. “His left hand.”

“You’re sure?”

He nodded.

“A few drops of blood, lots of blood, what?”

“It-it coated his palm. When he put it on the glass, it made a hand print. A red hand print. That’s what I drove my own fist through.”

“How far did you live from the DeMont farm?”

He shrugged. “About fifteen minutes away.”

“Less if someone were in a hurry,” I said. “And at that time of night, there wouldn’t be much traffic.”

“Did your dad ever tell you how his hand ended up coated in blood?” she asked.

“He said he had gone into her room. The lights were out, but the room wasn’t completely dark. He could make out her shape on the bed. But she wouldn’t answer when he called to her, and there was a smell- he said it was an awful smell. He said he leaned his left hand on the mattress as he reached with his right to turn on the lamp near her bed.” He stood and demonstrated, using the couch as a stand-in for the mattress, placing his weight on his left hand as he reached out with his right. “It felt damp. When the light was on, he saw that his hand was in a pool of blood, Gwendolyn’s blood. He could tell that she was dead. He became frightened and turned out the light, then left. He panicked, he said, and the first person he thought of turning to was my mother, so he drove to our house, but then he realized that it wasn’t really his home anymore, and that he had no right to be there. He also felt sure that his own life was in danger, that he would be accused of murder.”

“He talked about it that night?”

“What I’ve just told you I learned later, when I talked to him about the handprint on the window. I know he talked about it with my mother that night-she came downstairs and asked what had happened, and I told her I had cut my hand. He was only worried about me then, but she asked him what he was doing there-it wasn’t asked in an angry way. And he said, ”We have to get him to a hospital.“ She asked again why he was there, and he said, ”Because I need my family.“

“I have to admit that I wasn’t really paying much attention after that, because my hand was bleeding and I was focused on that. I just remember that we got into his car, and my mother drove, and he held on to me in the backseat, as if I were a much younger child, but I remember liking it, feeling safe and-” He paused, then said, “I had a towel wrapped around my hand, but I still bled all over him. I remember watching the stain soak from the towel onto his shirt and telling him I was ruining it. He said not to worry about it, the shirt wasn’t important, I was the one who mattered most to him. I remember him trying to soothe me, to keep my mind off my hand. I think he must have told my mother something about Gwendolyn’s murder while they first took a look at my hand in the emergency room, because Mom was the one who got rid of the car.”

“She what?”
I asked, shocked.

He turned red. “Whatever my father is guilty of, my mother engaged in a criminal act that night. When we first got to the emergency room, it was really busy, so they just cleaned my cuts and then put some kind of a temporary bandage on my hand, just to stop the bleeding until the hand surgeon could come in. My dad stayed with me while they were doing that, and Mom went out to the car. She wiped off the steering wheel and the door handle, then took the car to a bar not far from the hospital and left it parked in the parking lot. She said she thought of setting it on fire, but decided that would attract too much attention, and might result in damaging someone else’s property. So she just left it there and walked back and waited for us in the waiting room.”

Apparently Rachel was just as stunned as I was, because she just sat there staring at him.

“She was really very cool-headed about it. I had seen that side of her before-the protectiveness, I mean. Mom was shy and timid, except in one circumstance: when anything threatened someone she loved. Then she turned into this fierce Irish warrior woman.”

I smiled. “My mother wasn’t as shy as Briana, but she was just as protective of her family. God help anyone who so much as said a word against any of us.”

“So the car wasn’t really stolen?” Rachel said.

“Well, yes, it was, but from that lot-not the hospital, I mean. She said she thought it might get stolen, because it was a tough neighborhood. The car was a new T-Bird, and she left the windows down and the doors unlocked. The more my father and I thought about it, the more we realized how dangerous it had been for her to be walking around in that area by herself at two-thirty in the morning. God knows who might have come out of that bar. My mother always said a lot of prayers for that car thief-that he’d keep the car and never steal another. She was grateful to him for putting a little truth in her lies to the police.”

“Your dad didn’t know what she planned?” I asked.

“No. Neither of us did. We were both amazed when she told us.”

“But what if the police had found the car?”

“Well, I suppose she thought that it might help my father’s lawyer raise some questions about where the blood came from-if the police had found any traces of blood on it. But mainly she wanted the police in Las Piernas to be able to attest to the fact that my dad was there that night.”

“How long were you at the hospital?” I asked.

“Oh, a long time. I had to have surgery, because I had severed a bunch of tendons. I wasn’t ready to go home until about ten or eleven o’clock the next morning; then we couldn’t find the car. So by the time we talked to the hospital security people and did the police report-they just took the report by phone-and hired a taxi to come home, it was early afternoon on Saturday. We were all exhausted.

“My parents put me to bed, then they stayed up talking for a while. I was really excited, because I thought they were getting back together. Then when I woke up, late on Saturday, my mother told me that Gwendolyn had been murdered, and that my father didn’t kill her, but he would be blamed. She said that if anyone ever asked me, my father had been home with us all evening. I guess I knew right at that moment that we would only have a little time together. There wasn’t any way that things were ever going to be okay again. Maybe I should have told the truth to the police, but I loved my father-I had figured that out that night, when I got hurt, that even if I was angry with him about some things, I loved him. If he were alive right now,” he said, his voice breaking, “I would lie for him again.”

Neither one of us said anything. I could tell that his story didn’t sit well with Rachel, but she didn’t criticize him. I sat trying to imagine what it would have been like to be an eleven-year-old boy in that situation.

“Rachel,” I asked, “wouldn’t his hand print have remained in the blood on the sheet?”

“It probably was there,” she said, “and might still be on the sheet if they’ve kept it. But as I said, the scene was disturbed. The housekeeper and several other people-including Richmond-were leaning on or kneeling on the bed to look at the victim. It may have gone unrecognized after that.”

Travis drew a deep breath and said, “So, back to distraction. What have you got to show us, Rachel?”

Rachel pulled out one of the copies of the crime scene photos. It was a sharp image in black and white-too sharp.

“That’s an actual print, not a photocopy,” I said.

She smiled. “Switched them on old Richmond. I’ll give these back to him when we’re done with them.”

“Rachel-”

“Hell, he’s had over a dozen years to look at these things. If he hasn’t memorized them by now, he’s a bigger jerk than I think he is.”

Travis was half looking at it, half looking away.

As crime scene photos go, it wasn’t one of the more gory ones I’ve seen. It was a shot taken inside Gwendolyn DeMont’s bedroom, from across the room, looking toward the bed. The body was not uncovered; there was form under a single, bloodstained sheet. A pillow lay across the face.

Rachel looked at it dispassionately. “There’s a lamp here where your dad said he reached for one.”

She handed the photo toward him, and when he shrank back from it, she gave it to me. She moved on to the next photo, which was taken directly over the bed. It was easy to see why Arthur knew his wife was dead. The one part of her that could be seen between pillow and sheet was her throat, which lay slashed open like a strange dark mouth.

“That was probably one of the last blows,” Rachel said. “Not much bleeding for that type of cut, no arterial spray. I think she was already dead when the killer got around to this slice. The ones over her chest and stomach bled more.”

I made myself ask, “What about spatter patterns?”

“That’s some of the best evidence-Richmond and the housekeeper didn’t touch the walls and ceiling.” She thumbed through the photos and handed me several.

“Even though there isn’t blood all over the place, you can tell that her killer really went at it,” she said. “There’s a pattern to the spray-it’s called cast-off blood, because it was projected or cast from an object, not the site of the wound; it came from the weapon, not directly from the victim, like this arterial spurting, here and here.” She pointed to large spots with long drips running down from them.

“Look at this, then,” she said, showing me other, finer drops. “A bloodstain specialist could give you a good estimate of how far, how fast, and at what angle this blood traveled from the knife, and would have been able to count the blows delivered.

“See the way the spray arcs up the walls, even to the ceiling? Look at the close-ups of the spatter-at the shape of the blood drops. See the tails on these drops? They’re more elongated as they’re more distant from the source. And they indicate two directions-up and back down. He was really putting some swing into it.” She demonstrated with a closed fist, making a motion that would bring a knife up high above the killer and back down in a powerful sweeping curve. “I’d say this killer was pissed.”

She handed me other photos, not as close up as the previous ones. “Some of the spray is blocked,” she said, pointing to places on the photos-on the ceiling and the wall nearest the foot of the bed-where there seemed to be “shadows,” or areas where something blocked the spray of blood. “See here?” she said, “and here?”