Damage (53 page)

“None of what? What do you mean?”

“I mean I came down here thinking it would be a good place to end things, you know? A little symmetry. Janice betrayed me and I splash my brains all over her office. You see what I’m saying?”

“There’s no reason to end things, Michael. If you didn’t do it . . .”

“What do you mean,
if
I didn’t do it?” Michael moved up to the front edge of the couch, his voice raspy. “You of all people know goddamn well I didn’t do it. And you know why you know that?”

“No, I don’t.” Chuck was the picture of rational calm and concern for his brother-in-law. “Except that I believe you if you say it wasn’t you.”

Michael all but collapsed back on the couch. “God, you’re good,” he said.

Like an inquisitive bird, Chuck cocked his head to one side. “What are you talking about, Michael? Good at what?”

Regaining his composure, Michael straightened up. “Maybe it was actually getting close to thinking I was going to end my life over this, Chuck. What a goddamn waste that would be when I knew I was innocent. So while I was sitting here trying to rationalize myself out of it, my brain must have gone into high gear and I remembered something you said.”

“Something I said?”

Michael nodded. “That first weekend after Janice was killed. You told me that Glitsky had asked you about all these cell phone calls to and from you on Janice’s phone, and you’d told him that you were both planning a surprise party for Kathy’s birthday, that was the reason for them. You remember that?”

“Sure.”

“Well, the thing is, Chuck, you in fact weren’t planning a surprise party for Kathy. Janice wasn’t planning a surprise party for Kathy.”

Chuck put on a rueful expression. “I know,” he said. “She found out about it and we had to cancel the surprise part. I don’t see anything sinister in that. I wasn’t hiding anything.”

“No? That’s funny, because once I started thinking about those phone calls, that it might have been you who was having the affair with Janice ...”

Stung with a cattle prod, Chuck held up both hands. “Whoa. You’re out of your mind, Michael. Janice and I didn’t—”

Michael cut him off. “So I started thinking you two must have been meeting all those nights she told me she was out with her patients and you were at school, working late. And where would those meetings have been? Probably right here. And since I was down here anyway, I went to the security office, just down the hall, just a couple of hours ago. Did you know they keep track of the nontenant cars that are parked here at night? Hard-copy records, Chuck. With license plate numbers. How about that? So are you going to try to tell me you were visiting somebody else in this building all those times? Or maybe you had become one of Janice’s patients? And you certainly got here fast enough when I called you today, didn’t you? No directions needed.”

Both men were breathing hard in the tense silence. After a long moment, something went out of Chuck’s shoulders. “We didn’t plan it, Michael,” he said. “It was just one of those things that happened. We were trying to stop. We didn’t want it to hurt anybody in the families. I am so, so sorry.”

Crushed by the enormity of this admission, Michael hung his head. When he looked up again, he asked in a hoarse whisper. “So why did you have to kill her?”

Chuck’s eyes went wide as if he couldn’t believe the accusation. “Michael, I didn’t kill her. I swear to God. I had no reason to kill her. I loved her.”

“You loved her, but you were fucking someone else, too?”

“I wasn’t . . .”

“Chuck, she had chlamydia. She didn’t get it from a toilet seat and she didn’t get it from me. You gave it to her. So who gave it to you? One of your students?”

Chuck held Michael’s gaze until it became too much for him, and this time it was Chuck who hung his head, letting out a deep sigh. Looking back up, he saw that Michael was wiping tears from his eyes. Suddenly as quick as the strike of a snake, he bolted from the chair and reached out across the small room, getting his hands on the shotgun, snapping the barrels shut, and bringing it to bear on Michael’s chest.

“You fucking idiot,” he said. “You stupid, meddling fool.” He let out a one-note bitter laugh. “You and Janice deserve each other. You want to know what happened? One of my students happened to go to her for counseling, fed her a load of shit about being exploited.”

Novio kept talking, working himself up. “All they wanted was their fucking As, you know. They were happy as hell to trade a little tail for it. But Janice thought that was
wrong
. That wasn’t just fucking. That was taking advantage of the poor students.”

His knuckles were growing white holding the shotgun. “So now it’s not just being mad at me, it’s a moral crusade. And do you know what she was going to do? She was going to go not just to Kathy, but to the school, the dean. You hear that?”

“Sure. I hear it.”

“Well, that would have been it for me.
You get it?
Turns out the little bitch was seventeen. Like I knew.”

Lowering his voice, he drove in the last nail. “And that’s statutory rape, my friend. Janice was going to call the cops and have them put me in jail. She wouldn’t even admit it was personal. She kept saying that as a therapist, she was mandated to report sexual abuse.”

Michael sat back on the couch, his eyes trained on the twin barrels. “So what are you going to do now? Kill me, too?”

Chuck let out another humorless laugh. “Me? I’m not going to do anything. I’m afraid I’m going to have not gotten here fast enough. I was just coming through the door when my poor brother-in-law, thinking he was about to get arrested for killing his wife, blew himself away.”

Chuck advanced a step. “And, by the way, thanks for the tip about there being no good forensic record with a shotgun.” Coming closer, now within a couple of feet, he cocked back both hammers and went down to one knee. “I like this lower angle,” he said. “Like you put the thing up to your own throat.”

And he pulled both triggers.

Glitsky had started to lead Bracco and the three other inspectors in their charge to the door of Janice Durbin’s office before they heard the pop and came barreling in with their weapons drawn.

“Throw down the gun and put up your hands!” Glitsky yelled. “The gun!”

Chuck Novio dropped the shotgun to the floor with a heavy thud. He stood there, staring down at an unharmed Michael Durbin as though he were looking at a ghost. “What the hell?”

Pairs of strong hands took each of his arms, jerked them back behind his back, and fastened them together with handcuffs.

Glitsky was already around Novio next to Durbin on the couch, looking for signs of burns or other damage.

“I think I’m okay,” Durbin said. “Maybe a little deaf.”

“You did good,” Glitsky said. “You did amazing.”

Behind them, Bracco was telling Chuck Novio that he was under arrest, that he had the right to remain silent, that anything he said could and would be used against him.

Glitsky turned back to Durbin. “Sorry we didn’t get in sooner. We thought he’d give a little more warning but he moved too fast. But the good news is you’re okay and we got it all. Quite a confession.”

As the inspectors marched Novio out of the room and down to the waiting car, Durbin tried to get to his feet, but found that he didn’t have the strength. “I’ve just got to sit here a minute, Lieutenant,” he said. “I can’t seem to get my legs to work. I feel like I might faint. Jesus Christ. Poor Kathy. Those poor girls.”

“Take a deep breath,” Glitsky said. “Put your head down between your knees. You’ll get all the time you need to think about it later. For the time being, though, you’re a bona fide hero.”

“I don’t feel anything like a hero.”

“Well, join the club,” Glitsky said. “Most of ’em don’t.”

“There was no evidence,” Glitsky said. “Even after I thought it probably was him, I needed evidence. I had to trick him.”

He was in a booth at Lou the Greek’s two days later. It was after the lunch hour, and hence there was no pressure to order the special (yeanling clay bowl for the second time in two weeks), so Abe was drinking iced tea. Across the table, Vi Lapeer and Amanda Jenkins sipped their Diet Cokes. It wasn’t altogether a casual meeting. Lapeer had come up to Glitsky’s office needing to understand why he’d done what he’d done so that she could go and defend it to Leland Crawford, while Jenkins—who’d drawn the prosecution case against Chuck Novio—simply wanted to get all the information she could on general principles.

“But what made you even think of him in the first place?” Lapeer asked.

“Well, I didn’t remember it right away, in fact almost not at all, but he told me a lie. The very first time I talked to him, I asked him about him being all over Janice’s cell phone, and he said he and Janice were planning a surprise party for his wife. But later his wife, Kathy, was telling me about how they were all planning for her big monster blowout fortieth birthday party. She was in on it, so it wasn’t a surprise, now, was it? Luckily the contradiction came back to me.”

Lapeer still didn’t like it. “And on that one lie, Abe, you risk a citizen’s life?”

“Well, two things. First it wasn’t just the one lie. The lie got me to wondering about Novio and Janice, which led to his car in her parking lot.”

“Still a long way from murder.”

“Granted. And I wouldn’t have risked any life on it, civilian or otherwise, if that was all I had. But it wasn’t. Once I was up and had Novio on my mind, and I admit I was desperate with Mr. Crawford and the Curtlees and all that, I surfed the Web about half the night. Novio’s got about fifteen thousand hits on Google.”

“Thousand?” Jenkins asked.

Glitsky nodded, sipped his tea. “So naturally I just found what I wanted in five minutes or so.”

Jenkins stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

“Yes,” Glitsky said. “It was more like three hours, and even then it was lucky.”

“I’m sorry, Abe, but what were you looking for?” Lapeer asked.

“Anything, nothing, I didn’t know. All I know is that if somebody lies to me during an investigation, there’s usually a reason. And his lie was deliberate around a woman who I knew was having an affair.”

Jenkins got him back on point. “So what’d you find?”

“A couple of articles in a small New England newspaper in 1995 about this scandal they evidently were having where Novio was named as one of the professors who was selling grades for sex. The second article just said that all the charges had been withdrawn and a settlement reached.”

Jenkins nodded. “They hushed it up, paid off the girl, and shipped him out to San Francisco with great recommendations.”

“That’s what I think,” Glitsky said. He chewed some of his ice. “So, Chief, I had Janice’s affair, Novio’s past sex with coeds, the chlamydia, and the lie. So I went to Janice’s office and found out he’d been parking there after hours, basically your smoking gun. So I had the affair with Janice, but still no evidence and no murder.”

“Okay,” Lapeer said. “This is where it gets squirrelly. So then you go to Michael Durbin? Why him?”

“His wife was the victim, Chief. He wanted to catch the killer, no matter who it was. You want to know the truth, I came up with the wire idea, okay, but he’s the one who came up with the shotgun, which was just brilliant. And remember, Novio would never have admitted any part of this if we interrogated him, even if we had him dead to rights on the affair. To get him to talk about the murder, it had to be with someone he didn’t suspect.”

“But it could have killed him, Durbin.”

Glitsky shook his head. “Not really. Not even probably. Not with empty shells in the shotgun. At the worst, he could have maybe gotten burned.”

“Badly burned. And sued the city for a zillion dollars.”

“True.” He met the chief’s eyes. “Entirely possible, but to tell you the truth, I didn’t much care about that. And Michael wasn’t going to do that anyway. I knew the guy was a justice freak from the Curtlee trial. He’d do what it took and take the consequences. He was all the way on board when he realized about Novio and Janice. Devastated, but on board.”

“So,” Amanda continued, “to go back to the beginning. What got Novio thinking about this? Ro getting out?”

“Exactly,” Glitsky said. “Janice had just told Novio what she was going to do to him. She just didn’t make up her mind fast enough to actually expose him. And the hesitation—maybe a couple of days, a week at most—that’s what killed her. Because Chuckie boy thinks he’s ruined and he’s going to jail, and he’s probably right. Meanwhile, just at this time, Ro gets out and burns up Felicia Nuñez’s apartment. Novio knows the connection between Ro and Durbin, and comes up with this great idea. Make it look like Ro did it! And hey, while we’re at it, slash the paintings. That would be Ro all over.” Glitsky’s face went sour. “And I almost helped him get away with it.”