Extenuating Circumstances (4 page)

He got out into the shade of the front awning and looked up at the enormous Art Deco facade of the Terminal, at the huge iron clock on the mullioned windows of the half-dome. "Five o'clock," he said, as if he was fixing the hour in his mind.

Out in the lot three other police cruisers were parked beside a silver BMW 325i. A yellow bunting of ribbon had been strung around the car to cordon it off. Even at that hour of the afternoon, in that heat, there was a small crowd of people trying to catch a look. Well-dressed clerks and shoppers from the Terminal stores, bandy old men from the neighborhood, teenage kids in T-shirts and ragged cutoffs. An insectile van with a TV antenna looming from its back like a beetle's wing stood beside the cruisers. A sweating newsman was rehearsing for a Minicam operator, using the BMW for backdrop.

"Do the newsmen have to be there?" Trumaine said to Finch.

"I'll scare 'em off." Finch started across the lot toward the car.

Trumaine watched him closely.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"No." He chirruped nervously, a high-pitched squawk like the sound of the police radio.

I patted his arm. "You're doing fine."

"You think so? When I got out of the car, I was afraid my legs wouldn't work."

"You'll make it."

"This is just the start, isn't it?" he said.

I told him the truth. "I'm afraid so."

"Oh, it's all right," he said with eerie serenity. And I realized again that some part of him was resigned to self-sacrifice. Not even bitterly resigned to it.

But resigned to it as if it were his lot, as if it were the price he paid for staying close to Janey Lessing. I hoped the sacrifice was worth it, because he was showing a lot of guts and I liked him for it.

After he'd cleared the area of newsmen, Finch waved us over to the BMW. The passenger-side door hung open, and even at a distance you could see the dark bloodstains covering the leather seat. Then you could smell the foul stench of decaying blood.

Trumaine covered his mouth and gagged. "Christ," he said, turning away.

"Is that Lessing's car?" Finch asked.

Trumaine nodded, his back to us.

Finch glanced at me uneasily. "I have some items from the car I'd like you to look at."

Trumaine waved his hand, as if he were calling time-out. After a few seconds he turned around again. "Okay," he said between his teeth. "But could we move away from the car? I don't want to get sick in front of all these people."

I walked Trumaine back to the Terminal plaza. He didn't say anything as we walked. He was too busy talking to himself. He was saying, "Dog, dog, go away." He was saying, "This can't be real." He was saying whatever it took to keep him from breaking down. A soft man trying to be strong. When we got to the plaza, he asked me if he could go inside and get a drink of water. He walked straight through one of the revolving doors, his back bent, his face white and tormented, as if he'd taken a brutal, beating. Finch came up carrying a plastic bag with a bunch of credit cards and a wallet inside it.

"They were in the car?" I asked, pointing to the contents of the bag.

He nodded. "Weird robbery, huh? Leaving all this stuff behind?"

"Does that mean you don't think it was a robbery?"

"It means I think it's weird. Period."

"Do you have any leads?"

He eyed me coldly. "Stoner, you know better than to ask that."

"It would help the family to know."

Finch looked around him, as if he didn't want to be overheard. "Someone saw a kid driving the BMW on Sunday night."

"Where?"

"In Price Hill."

"You know who the kid is?"

"We're working on it," he said vaguely.

"You don't have any idea where Lessing is, do you?"

"We're working on that too."

Len Trumaine came out of the Terminal, not looking much better than he had when he went in. There was a water stain on his shirt, above one of the fat paps on his chest. He fingered the wet spot nervously, as if it embarrassed him.

Finch opened the plastic bag and held it out to Trumaine. "It's okay to touch the stuff," he said. "It's already been dusted for prints."

Trumaine took a deep breath, reached in, and fished out a stained leather wallet. His lip curled back as he held it out in front of him. "It's Ira's, all right. Those are his initials on the inside there."

He dropped the wallet back in the bag and rubbed his hand savagely against his pants leg.

"Was Mr. Lessing in the habit of carrying large sums of money on him?" Finch said.

"He always carried a few bills. Mostly he paid for things by check."

"Do you know if he was carrying money with him on the night of the Fourth?"

"You'd have to ask Janey."

"Do you have any idea why he might have been over on this side of the river?"

Len shook his head. "He told Janey he was going to the office on Sunday night."

Finch gave him an irritated look. "I guess we'll have to talk to the wife, then."

"She's going to need a few days to recover from this," Trumaine said quickly.

Finch ignored him, signaling to a beat cop to bring one of the prowl cars around. "I guess that's it. I'll have an officer drive you home."

Len gawked at him in disbelief. "But what about Ira! What happened to Ira?"

"I think we have to assume that he was the victim of a robbery and an assault."

Trumaine looked astonished. "That's all? I mean that's all you can tell me?"

"For the time being," Finch said.

"That's not good enough. Not by a long shot."

"Take it easy, Len," I said to him.

"Don't tell me to take it easy!" he shouted. "I want to know what happened. I want to know bow this could happen to a decent, respectable man."

"Mr. Trumaine," Finch said, "I just can't answer that question."

"Well, I'm going to get an answer," Trumaine said angrily.

The police cruiser pulled up on the plaza.

"C'mon, Stoner," Trumaine said, piling into the backseat of the cop car.

Finch stared after him unhappily. "Try to explain to him how it works, will you?" he said to me.

"I'll try."
 
 

6

So many cars were parked on Riverside Drive that there wasn't enough room for the police cruiser to pull up in front of the Lessing house.

"The whole family must be here," Trumaine said, staring out the window at the Mercs and BMW's lining the curbs.

"It's hard to keep a murder secret."

"Murder," he said, trying the word out for the first time. "You think Ira's dead, then?"

"I think there's a strong possibility."

"I just can't believe it. I don't think I'll be able to believe it until they find a body."

The cop let us off at the head of the drive and we walked the short block to the stairway. The mist of the river had begun to climb the cut-stone retaining walls along the Ohio's bank, trailing up the narrow cobbled street like a thin, damp fog.

"What a day for it," Trumaine said miserably. He looked at the stairway. "It's going to be awful in there."

"I'm sure Janey will take it hard."
 

"She'll be crazy," he said flatly. "Thank God for Meg. She'll help her through this." He turned toward me, wiping the sweat from his face with a trembling hand. "You've been a help, Stoner. I . . . I don't think I could have done this without you."

"You did the hard part," I said.

"Thanks anyway."

"You need me anymore tonight?" I said to him, hoping that he would say no.

"I think you better come up. Meg may want to talk to you about what to do. And Janey."

He hitched up his pants and started for the stairs. Reluctantly, I fell in behind him.

As we neared the top steps we began to hear the tumult inside the house. I thought of the sound of the stadium crowd that afternoon, the steady grumbling noise from across the river, rising and falling with the wind. From the terrace this sound would have been just as ambiguous if we hadn't already known its meaning.

Trumaine hesitated by the door, then pushed it open.

As he stepped inside, Janey Lessing came tearing up the hall, her beautiful face wildly anguished. She came to a stop in front of Trumaine and stared at him for a moment, with a flicker of hope in her eyes. When he ducked his chin, her eyes went dead.

"It's true, then?" she said. "What they said about Ira's car?"

Trumaine took a deep breath and nodded.

Janey started to whine -a muffled siren sound, like the noise of an electric alarm going off. She collapsed against Trumaine, burying her head in his chest and pounding on his shoulders with clenched fists, and all the time making that little electric noise. Trumaine stared at her piteously, his hands hovering above her shoulders as if he couldn't quite bring himself to touch.

The hall had filled up with people. A smart-looking woman with closely cropped white hair and a tear-stained face came forward and lifted Janey away from Trumaine, as if she were pulling off a frightened cat. Her fists still clenched, the girl stared at the older woman in horror. For a second Janey's mouth hung open noiselessly, then it filled with an awful moan. The woman clasped Janey to her immediately, stifling the scream with her body and leading the girl back down the hall.
Trumaine sobbed.

"Oh, my God," he said.

I put a hand on his shoulder and guided him toward the living room, where the fifteen or twenty friends and relatives were gathered. Somewhere on the upper floor Janey Lessing began to scream like a baby in the night. The sound of her voice sent a thrill of visible terror through the room, making the others shift nervously where they stood or sip at drinks or begin to cry out loud themselves. As soon as he heard Janey shriek, Len Trumaine bolted toward a staircase on the far side of the room and disappeared up it.

Within a matter of minutes the screaming died away. I settled in a corner chair, feeling desperately out of place, and waited for Trumaine or someone else to tell me to go.

More people came to the door. Cousins, nephews, aunts, uncles, friends. Most of them had heard the news on TV -that Lessing's bloodstained car had been found in Queensgate. Nobody wanted to believe it. "Ira, of all people!" they said in stunned voices, as if crime should never have touched him, as if his goodness made him immune. I watched them, murmuring in groups in the middle of Lessing's handsome living room, and knew that each of them was hoping to hear that it had all been a mistake. Hoping that Lessing himself would come through the door.

It could happen. He didn't have to be dead. He could have been dumped somewhere after having been beaten. But I didn't believe that -not after seeing the amount of blood inside the car.

Twenty or thirty minutes went by -slowly. I saw Geneva come through the front door, a grim, abstracted look on his face. He didn't see me. After a time I got up and found my way down a short hall into a kitchen full of tin pots, Poggenpohl cabinets, and brushed-aluminum appliances. There was a phone beside the refrigerator. I picked it up and tried calling Lieutenant A1 Foster at CPD to see if he could fill me in on what Finch had held back. But Foster was out of the office for the week -on assignment.

As I was standing there with the phone in my hand, the smart-looking white-haired woman who had comforted Janey walked into the kitchen. She'd been crying and her eyes were still wet with tears.

"You're Mr. Stoner, aren't you?" she said.

"Yes."

She held out her right hand. "I'm Meg Lessing, Ira's mother."

I shook with her. Under different circumstances I would have thought her attractive in a chic, sportive, well-tended way. But the terrible strain of the afternoon had put a cruel edge on her good looks. I could see it clearly in her gray eyes -a coldness that made her tears look like dew on stones. I withered a little under her gaze, feeling as much the outsider as her eyes seemed to say I was.

I asked about Janey to break the pall.

"She's asleep, thank God. We have a doctor coming, but I don't think he'll be much help. Janey loves Ira so." Meg Lessing's voice shook for a moment, and she put a hand to her throat to steady it. "We all do. He is a very good man."

She eyed me expectantly, as if she were waiting for me to agree.

"I'm sure he is a good man," I said.

"Is there something you can tell me about ... about what happened? I mean, Len doesn't seem to know anything at all."

"I don't think anyone knows very much at this point, Mrs. Lessing. I have been told that a boy was seen driving your son's BMW in Price Hill on the night of the Fourth."

The woman looked alarmed. "A boy? What boy?"

"The police don't like to give out names before they make an arrest. They're always cautious at this stage of an investigation."

"But I want to know the boy's name!" she said with real urgency.