Defensive Wounds (21 page)

He walked briskly to the massive front door and knocked confidently, mainly confident that all the pep talks in the world weren't going to help. He had nothing on Dennis Britton, nothing to implicate him in any real way, and Dennis Britton would know that as well as he would know the definition of “habeas corpus.” But the police shooting case was on temporary hiatus after the judge developed a case of food poisoning from a bad breakfast, leaving Britton an unexpectedly free afternoon. Frank wanted to make sure the lawyer didn't enjoy it.

The door swung open, revealing the expected towering foyer and sweeping staircase, marble tile, and a boy of about thirteen. He had the baggy pants and oversize T-shirt of his age group with twice the required sullenness. “Yeah?”

“We're here to see Dennis Britton.” Frank had expected either a maid complete with French outfit or the lord or lady him- or herself, and this kid threw him off. Britton and the current lady hadn't been married long enough to have one this age, so he must be from a previous marriage or some kind of houseguest. Frank searched the kid's face for any sign that Britton had procreated, but nothing seemed familiar except the faint sneer. That was dead-on.

“I think he's in the garage,” the kid said, and shut the door.

The smooth white surface now two inches from his nose, Frank said, “I guess we'll try the garage. Wonder why Junior isn't in school.”

“He probably has private tutors,” Angela snapped out as they descended the front steps. Maybe the kid reminded her of her own, but Frank didn't ask. Let people start talking about their kids and you'd wind up hearing about every scraped knee or school-yard bully or teacher who “just doesn't get him” until you wanted to cover your ears and hum the theme from
Barney
. He never asked about Angela's kids.

Frank had been in garages with numbered slots for tools, garages impassable with stored junk, garages made of gaping planks that would fall over in the first strong wind, but he had never before been in a garage that required both a key card and a numeric code to enter. It appeared to be the emergency bunker to the main house's headquarters. Frank tried the knob. It didn't budge, leaving him no choice but to push the little metal button next to the little metal speaker plate. He refused to say anything, figuring the button would buzz and the two security cameras pointed at him would show Britton who they were.

He should have known better.

“Yes?”

Frank repeated his objective.

“What for?”
the voice said.

“What do you think?” He wasn't going to get into a pissing contest with a disembodied voice no matter how much it would amuse the attorney. Problem was, he didn't know what to do if Britton didn't let them in. He had no warrant, and if he put his foot in
this
door, he'd have to go to the hospital.

“I already talked to you,”
Britton said, his voice calm and smarmy even after passing through several electronic components.

“It's okay, Britton,” Frank said. “We can wait.”

Then he turned around, faced the meticulously landscaped area, and leaned his back against the building as if he had all the time in the world, not so much as glancing at the cameras. He lit a cigarette as a final show of nonchalance, making sure to scatter the ashes. Angela wandered over to the flower beds and appeared to examine the various flora.

It took ten minutes and Frank grinding his menthol butt into the sparkling buff concrete before Britton apparently felt he had scored some sort of point and let them in. And lo and behold, he wore a plain T-shirt tucked into straining jeans. No suit or tie.

Calling the space a garage seemed vastly inadequate. The ceiling rose at least thirty feet above them, and the walls sat in an enormous square, with space for five cars both front to back and side to side, so that with a little organization at least twenty-five could be parked inside. All of it had been painted a nearly blinding white. In the southwest corner stood a large metal lift, so that Britton could hoist his babies into the air instead of having to crawl under them like any average joe. Frank had never seen one in a private home before.

Despite the space there were only three automobiles present: a brown Jaguar, a purplish thing that looked like it hailed from the early days of Motown and miniskirts, and a metallic blue Corvette with large pipes running along each side. It had suffered some sort of indignity to its right front fender, and a raw fiberglass hole gaped just behind the headlights. Britton trimmed pieces of it with a pair of gleaming side cutters. “Have you found out who killed Marie yet?”

Just as well to skip the small talk. Pretending this was a friendly chat would be as pointless as Britton's pretending that one of his depositions was a friendly chat. “You're still our best suspect.”

That didn't even get a raised eyebrow. “Because we were friends?”

“Is that what they're calling it these days?” Angela asked.

“No, they call it something that's not repeatable in polite company.”

“Didn't think polite was your style.” She continued to observe the car instead of him.

He seemed genuinely offended. “I'm always polite.”

Frank said, “Then let me ask you, politely, to tell us about your relationship with Marie.”

Britton picked up a vinyl block with sandpaper attached to the bottom of it. “We slept together.”

“That's it? Just slept together? You weren't star-crossed lovers or anything?”

This had the unintended effect of making Britton laugh. “Neither Marie nor I believed in stars. We enjoyed each other's company and understood each other's work. That's it.”

Maybe,
Frank thought,
that's as good as it gets for him
. Letting anyone closer than that would be dangerous—when you're king of the hill, everyone's looking to knock you off.
And I thought my social life sucked.

“I'm surprised you're not using this break for some last-minute cramming, what with your client facing the death penalty and all.”

“Helps me think.”

Which meant he knew his client was doomed no matter what, or that he had a team of underlings to do all the work for him? Or he meant that working on cars helped him think. Frank returned to Marie Corrigan. “She have any enemies? I mean serious enemies, anyone she felt might physically harm her?”

“ ‘To earn the enmity of some men is a compliment,' ” Britton said, rubbing the sandpaper over the edges of the hole. “I forget who said that.”

“I'm more interested in what Marie said.”

“You won't believe me, but I've thought of nothing else for two days. If she felt a threat from someone, she never told me about it. But she might not have. Marie didn't show fear, ever. Not even to me.”

“Maybe she didn't express it as fear, exactly,” Angela qualified. “Were there any cases she talked about, maybe more than usual?”

“No. We didn't talk much about work, again believe it or not. Our time together was limited.”

“Right, because of your wife.”

“No.” He frowned, either at Angela or at the tough fiberglass. “Because of our schedules.”

Frank said, “So fitting in sex with you could be tough. Is that why she went back to Bruce Raffel the second he got back into town?”

“Raffel? Don't make me laugh.”

“It's funny when your girlfriend's old boyfriend comes sniffing around?”

Britton sanded some more. “He was more of an unofficial co-counsel than a boyfriend, in my humble opinion. They thought alike, especially when it came to
U.S. v. Booker
issues. Anyway, Marie has lots of old boyfriends. Most still live here.”

“How many of them got her pregnant?”

Again the unintended effect. Britton snickered. “You've been listening to rumors. Marie was never pregnant, not by Bruce, not by anybody. Some frumpy secretary made that one up.”

“Did you see Bruce Raffel at the convention?”

“Yeah, he came to my seminar on the first day. I don't think I ran into him after that. We didn't speak.”

“You didn't hold any sort of grudge against Bruce Raffel?”

Britton set down the sanding block, picked up a plastic jar of something or other. “Nope.”

“He and Marie, they got along. Really well, more than one person told us—you just said so yourself. And things weren't going so great for Raffel in the big city. Maybe he planned to come back home, pick up your girlfriend, start stealing your cases again?”

If the idea bothered Britton, he hid it masterfully. “Let him try.”

“So you weren't angry at Marie, maybe for hooking up with him, maybe for hooking up with someone else at the convention?”

A snort. “I wouldn't be angry if Marie had hooked up with the Ohio Supreme Court. I'd be impressed. Besides, you know I couldn't have killed her.”

“Because you loved her too much?” Angela suggested.

Again the quick frown. “No, because I was with other people the entire evening.”

“About that,” Frank said. “Turns out your alibi isn't quite as solid as it seemed at first.”

He waited until Britton looked up, then made a show of pulling out his palm-size notebook and flipping a few pages. “There were five of you who went to the hotel bar after attending the last session of the day—which was, I believe, ‘Strategies for Invoking the Fifth Amendment.' From the bar you all went to Morton's steak house, where you paid a big bill and a small tip, and then to House of Blues. They must make good drinks at the House of Blues, because that's where people's memories get a little fuzzy. Your alibi men are equally split—two say you went to the Crazy Horse with them, and two say you showed up later.”

Britton set down the jar and returned to trimming his car's gaping hole. “I'll bet I can guess which two. The assistant registrar of the convention and our illustrious keynote speaker tried to outdo each other with blue martinis. They probably aren't sure
they
were there, much less me.”

“No, the two with bad hangovers insist you were with them every minute. It's your more sober compatriots who think you did a disappearing act.”
Slightly
more sober. “And, you see, the cabdriver doesn't remember you either.”

Britton barely paused. “Because you can't fit five guys into a cab. I grabbed another one.”

“All by yourself?”

“With the effort it took for my colleagues to get into the vehicle in the first place, I wasn't going to ask them to get back out. I just slammed the door and hailed the next one.”

Frank hesitated. The cab company hadn't said anything about a single fare immediately following the first, but then he hadn't asked. And there were several major cab companies in the city, as well as minor ones. He considered bluffing Britton—considered it very briefly.

Besides, he had more. “Then there's your destination. The Crazy Horse remembers your four friends—not that they're the only ones in history to walk in drunker than they walked out, but still memorable—and remember only four. No fifth.”

“As I just explained, I arrived a few minutes later.”

“Got lost in traffic?” As if traffic would be a problem, downtown after dark with no ball games scheduled.

“It took me a few minutes to find a cab.”

Again Frank considered bluffing, then abandoned the idea. No one in the dim lighting and cacophony of the Crazy Horse would remember a single man in a business suit, not unless he tipped with hundred-dollar bills, and Frank suspected that Britton would not. “Just letting you know that your alibi has some potential holes. You're sure you didn't walk two blocks back to the Ritz for a quickie with Marie?”

“Positive.” Britton was watching Angela, but not in a flirtatious way, more like a disapproving mother watching a child as she slowly circled the purplish car, as tense as if he had a body stuffed in the trunk. It said “Stutz” on the radiator and “Bearcat” on the grille. Frank hoped his partner would make the mistake of touching the immaculately painted body, so that just once he could see Britton discombobulated.

“You sure about that?” Frank pressed.

“Asked and answered.”

“Because I'm kind of wondering who left the sperm in Marie, if it wasn't you.”

This got Britton's gaze back from Angela, if only momentarily. An odd expression crossed his face—a flash of anger that immediately turned pensive, then to something Frank would not have believed possible from this man. Sadness.

“Was she raped?” Britton asked, without the trademark smirk. “They're saying she was.”

Frank let him stew for a bit before answering. “There's no sign of it.”

Relief. “Oh. Well, I don't know who the sperm belongs to. I haven't—hadn't—seen Marie for at least a week. I mean other than at the convention, where we were both too busy to shed our clothing.”