Beach Strip (24 page)

“Fuck you.”

“Not anymore, Mel. Not you, not ever.”

He looked over and actually smiled. “None of this matters. Either you shoot me now, which you can’t, or you just get the hell out of here while you can.”

“Or Walter Freeman and some other cops show up and take
over.” The flashing red and blue lights appeared on the bridge. Bubble gum lights, Gabe used to call them.

Mel twisted in his seat to look at the cruisers on the bridge, the officers spilling out and heading along the canal toward us. “They’ll shoot you when they see you with the gun,” he said.

“Or I’ll shoot you first,” I said, and I took aim and pulled the trigger.

W
alter Freeman wouldn’t look at me. He had avoided looking at me for the last hour while I sat in an interrogation room with him and Harold Hayashida and a female police officer who managed to look like a
Playboy
model with her blonde hair, blue uniform, black leather belt, gold badge, and silver bullets. What makes such a good-looking young woman become a cop, I wondered. Maybe good-looking young male cops.

Hayashida broke my thoughts by asking, for the third time, if I wanted a coffee. For the third time I told him no. He was sitting at a desk set at a right angle to me, flipping through pages in a red cardboard file. Walter had come and gone several times, conferring, I assumed, with whoever was behind the one-way mirror.

The mirror worked at blocking the view of the people watching me, but after a knock at the door took Walter out of the room, it couldn’t block the sound of his enraged voice.

A minute later the door opened again, but instead of Walter Freeman, a tall man in his forties entered, dressed and groomed as though he had stepped out of a Brooks Brothers catalogue. I had never seen a better-fitted pinstripe suit or a better-coordinated Oxford shirt and striped tie. His Afro-styled salt-and-pepper hair was the result of genes, not a hairstylist, and his tortoiseshell glasses were so out of fashion they were avant-garde.

He nodded at me, set a leather briefcase on a side table, and walked toward Hayashida with his hand extended. “J. Michael Robinson,” he said in a voice deep enough to deliver a good imitation
of Barry White. “I have been appointed legal counsel for Mrs. Marshall, and I am requesting that this interrogation be suspended while I ascertain the charges against her and advise her of her rights. I am also insisting that I be present during any future interrogations.”

Hayashida ignored Robinson’s handshake. Instead, he shrugged, closed his file, and stood up. “Sure,” he said. “You want to talk to her here?”

“Absolutely not.” Robinson turned to me with his rejected handshake. I accepted it. “I insist on a counsellor’s room and full privacy.” He smiled at me as he spoke.

Standing in the open doorway, Walter Freeman’s face was as blank as an empty plate.

I left the room, guided by the lawyer’s hand at the small of my back. Three doors down the hall, past some knots of uniformed cops watching me and whispering among themselves, we entered a room about the size of a walk-in closet, with two chairs and a lamp table. Robinson closed the door behind us and set the briefcase on the table.

“Who the hell are you?” I said.

“I’m your lawyer.”

“I didn’t ask for one. I don’t need one and I can’t afford one.”

He took a deep breath and let it out noisily while staring at the ceiling. Okay, he was exasperated. I got the message. “You didn’t ask for one, correct,” he said. “You tell me to leave and I will. But before you do, understand that you need a lawyer desperately. It doesn’t matter if you can afford one or not. You either get me or you get somebody listed with legal aid who is probably sitting in a bar on James Street right now.”

“It matters to me. Whether I can afford a lawyer or not.”

“But not to Mr. Pilato.”

“He sent you here?”

“He says he owes you.”

“Then he can fix my car, the one his guys smashed with a sledgehammer. I don’t need a lawyer.”

He withdrew a sheet of paper from his briefcase and began reading from it. “It appears you are facing a charge of obstruction of police, theft of police property, possession of a firearm, resisting arrest and …” He moved the paper aside to look at me. “… attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, which carries a penalty of up to twenty years in prison.”

“That’s garbage.”

He dropped the paper on the desk. “Of course it is. It’s also legitimate. Do you want to spend twenty years in prison?”

“What do you think?”

He smiled and leaned back in the chair. “I think,” he said, “that you have set a new record for embarrassing a major metropolitan police force in this country, and they are so upset with you that they are ignoring, for the moment, the reality that they have a rogue cop in custody facing a triple murder charge.”

HALF AN HOUR LATER
we gathered in Walter Freeman’s office. Walter sat behind a desk as big as my dining-room table. Two uniformed officers stood behind him, their feet apart, their hands behind their backs, as approachable as bookends. Hayashida, Robinson, the blonde policewoman, and two guys from internal affairs, wearing cheap suits and faces that desperately needed shaving, flanked me in chairs arranged in a semicircle. An overweight guy Walter introduced as a Crown attorney stood to one side, like a referee.

Walter wouldn’t look at me. His head down, he read aloud in a flat voice from a sheet of paper on the desk in front of him. “We will withdraw the charge of obstructing police on the basis of Mrs. Marshall’s telephone call earlier today to Sergeant Hayashida, who confirms that she offered information she legitimately believed would assist us in our investigation.”

“It sure as hell did, Walter,” I said. Robinson nudged me to be quiet.

“We will suspend the charges of theft of police property and illegal possession of a firearm subject to evaluation of the projectile fired by your client, the aforesaid Mrs. Marshall, this evening—”

“The one you recovered from the sandbank, right?”

Walter’s eyes flicked from the paper to me for a heartbeat, then back to the paper again. “Subject to evaluation of the projectile fired by your client this evening by the provincial forensics laboratory. We are also suspending the charge of attempted murder of a police officer pending the same forensics report and, as requested, will issue a document to the administrator of Trafalgar Towers confirming that our suspicions of possible fraud committed by Mrs. Marshall have no basis in fact.”

“I am requesting that all criminal charges be dropped as of now,” Robinson said, “on the basis that the alleged acts were conducted by Mrs. Marshall as a means of obtaining an exhibit that the forensics laboratory could use to confirm that the weapon was used in three unsolved homicides—”

Walter couldn’t take it anymore. “Citizens are not permitted, are never permitted, to seize possession of a law officer’s weapon and fire it in the direction of a member of the police force,” he partially shouted, partially spat—I could see the spittle flying like water from a lawn sprinkler—”no matter what her motives might have been!”

Things turned into a verbal food fight after that. I screamed that no cop was likely to compare rifling marks on a bullet from Mel’s gun with the ones that had killed Gabe and Dougal Dalgetty unless I gave him good reason to, and I had. Robinson quoted some statute supporting a citizen’s arrest, Walter told me to keep my damn mouth shut and ordered Robinson to stick to the facts, Hayashida asked somebody to close the door and
turn off the digital recorder, and Robinson said he would consider requesting a judicial inquiry into the operations of the police force. The two bookend cops looked at each other with confusion, especially when Walter Freeman lost it and stood up, crumpled the sheet of paper he had been reading from into a ball, and threw it at J. Michael Robinson, striking him squarely in the tortoiseshells.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It was midnight, I was running on distilled adrenaline, Mel Holiday was being interrogated in a room down the hall, and the chief of detectives had just hurled an oversized spitball at my lawyer, who had been hired by the most notorious gangster in the city. What wasn’t there to laugh at?

The Crown attorney walked behind Walter’s desk, placed a hand on Walter’s shoulder, turned him and his swivel chair around, and began speaking to him in a low voice while Robinson made notes in a binder pulled from his briefcase. Hayashida buried his face in his hands. I couldn’t tell if he was crying or laughing.

Robinson leaned over and whispered to me while making his notes. “The Crown is telling Walter to free you on your own recognizance, with charges pending,” he said. “When they confirm the forensics that prove Sergeant Holiday’s gun killed your husband and Honeysett, all charges will be dropped.”

I asked him how he knew that.

He closed the binder and slipped his Montblanc into his jacket pocket. “It’s been previously discussed,” he said, “between me and the Crown. Freeman is just learning about it now.”

Let’s have a cheer for our legal system, I thought.

“HOW CLOSE DID YOU COME
to shooting Holiday in the head when you fired the gun?” Robinson asked. He was driving me back to the beach strip. His car was expensive, quiet, dark, warm, and smelled of Italian leather. I could marry a car like that.

“I don’t know. I aimed for the open window. Missed him by maybe three or four inches.”

“Clever of you to fire the bullet into the sand, to preserve the rifling marks.”

“I’d rather have buried it in his head.”

“Why not let the police do the test, once you explained it to them?”

“Who would believe me? Who would even
listen
to me? Who would ask for Mel’s gun to do forensics on it on the basis that I, Gabe’s crazy widow, was claiming that Mel Holiday had murdered three men, including my husband? I was sure I’d worked things out. How Mel had switched guns after shooting Gabe, substituting his own for Gabe’s, and when they were getting the bullet for the forensics lab, how he told Hayashida the serial number of Gabe’s gun, then in Mel’s holster, rather than reading him the serial number of the gun in evidence. And how Hayashida trusted Mel enough to record it without inspecting it himself. Then Mel switched guns again, putting his own gun back in his holster and filing Gabe’s in an evidence locker. Someday, somebody might have tested both guns, compared the results with Gabe’s and Dalgetty’s autopsy reports, and realized what Mel had pulled off, but it wasn’t likely. And nobody was ever going to get anything from what was left of Honeysett’s head.”

“Walter Freeman said he suspected all along that the metal they found in Honeysett’s remains had been a bullet.”

“Walter Freeman would say he suspected the sun would come up in the morning if it made him look good. How could he stand it?”

“Freeman? Stand what?”

“Not him. Mel Holiday. How could he stand holding Honeysett’s body like that, waiting for the bridge to come down on his head?”

“You’d be surprised what some people can do in desperate
straits.” We were approaching my house. “Besides, he was a homicide detective for how many years?”

“Ten. Maybe more.”

“Would you care to guess how many mangled bodies he encountered in ten years? How many autopsies he attended? Holding a body until the skull is crushed wouldn’t be a picnic for anybody, but if it were necessary, a guy like him could do it. You can get used to anything, Mrs. Marshall.”

I could get used to being in the company of a man like Robinson very late at night, every night, but when he stopped outside my door, I simply thanked him, stumbled inside, and climbed the stairs to my bed. The peeper in the garden shed was long gone. Mel Holiday was locked up, probably for life. I had a high-powered lawyer retained by an influential gangster to defend me. When Tina heard the news, she might actually admit that I have more intelligence than a string of barbed wire.

I hadn’t slept so well in weeks.

MOTHER, OF COURSE, WAS SURPRISED
to see me the next morning. She had finished her breakfast and was sitting at her window, watching the strollers on the boardwalk and along the canal. I startled her when I entered, and I hugged her longer and more firmly than normal, which made her reach for her chalk and blackboard and write,
Why are you here so early? Is something wrong?

I assured her that nothing was wrong, and told her that the police had solved Gabe’s murder. It was another police officer, I said. In fact, it had been Gabe’s partner.

Mother’s hand, gripping the chalk, flew across the blackboard like a drunken insect, writing,
Mel Holiday?

“Yes,” I said. “How did you know? Has it been on the news?” Walter Freeman had told Robinson that nothing would be revealed
until the forensic examination of the bullets from Mel’s and Gabe’s guns was completed and charges laid.

She wrote,
He was here.
Then she added,
You slept with him, didn’t you?

I sat on the edge of the bed. I think it is a wonderful thing for a daughter to be surprised and impressed by her mother, no matter what their ages. At the moment, I just wished it were some other daughter. “When was he here?” I asked.

She wrote,
The day before yesterday. The day you left for Tina’s. In the afternoon.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She wrote,
I didn’t want to upset you.

“What did he want?”

She erased everything she had written earlier and wrote,
He wanted to talk to me. He wanted me to talk to him.
She looked up and smiled at that.

I had mentioned Mother to Mel, I suppose. Only that I visited her now and then, and I had named the retirement home. I’d told him she had suffered a stroke, but I had not explained that she was unable to speak. “What did he want to talk about?”

Mother wrote,
What I knew about Gabe’s death. What you had told me about it.

“Did you tell him anything? By writing it down?”

She shook her head, erased the blackboard again, and wrote,
I told him to leave and asked for a nurse to take him out.

“Did he tell you …” I had to start again. “Did he say that he and I … that we …” Damn. Then, in a torrent, “Did he say that he and I had slept together?”

Mother smiled and shook her head.

“You could tell, couldn’t you? You figured it out all by yourself.”

She nodded.

Harold Hayashida arrived at my house after lunch. I made tea, and we sat in the living room, not fully comfortable in each other’s presence, like two patients waiting to see the same doctor.

He pulled a small sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket and read from the notes. “Couple of things,” he said. “First, forensics says there’s no doubt that the projectile from the Glock G22 with serial number HPD7083, which is Mel’s gun, matches the one that killed Dalgetty and Gabe and probably Wayne Weaver Honeysett.” He looked up at me, his face downcast. “I trusted Mel, Josie. He read the serial number to me, I wrote it down, and we both signed the investigation document. I didn’t think I needed to examine the weapon myself. I was supposed to, but I didn’t. That was a mistake.”