Extenuating Circumstances (6 page)

"How could a guy like Lessing end up getting his brains bashed in by a kid like this?" I asked.

"That's the question, all right," Finch agreed.
 
 

When I got back to my apartment I phoned Len Trumaine. Finch had given me a copy of Carnova's rap sheet, and I stared at the kid's picture again as I waited for Trumairie to pick up. Try as I might, I had a hard time putting that dead-eyed kid together with Ira Lessing in Lessing's BMW. Len Trumaine had the same problem.

"It just doesn't make sense," he said after I'd told him most of what Finch told me. "Why would Ira give a ride to a punk like that?"

"Maybe he didn't have a choice," I said, playing devil's advocate. "Maybe he got jumped outside the car and was forced to drive off at knife point. You know that office of yours isn't in the best neighborhood."

"Yeah," Trumaine said, "but Ira knew that too. You saw the gate and the fence -it would have been a bitch for anybody to get in there at night."

"Lessing could've parked on the street."

"No way. Ira was compulsive. If he went back to the shop on the Fourth, he would have parked in the lot and gone in the side door."

"Well, if we rule out a mugging outside your building, that leaves only two possibilities."

"Which are?"

"That Lessing didn't go to his office on Sunday night, that he went somewhere else instead or in addition, and got mugged there."

"And the second possibility?"

"That he knew Carnova and gave him a ride."

"Knew him?" Trumaine said dubiously. "Knew him from where?"

I hadn't really thought it through, but Lessing's commitment to troubled street kids was one obvious answer. Carnova had a record of drug offenses. He might have passed through the Lighthouse Clinic. Or Kingston might have sent him to Ira for a handout.

I spun it out for Trumaine, at least as far as I could go. But Len didn't buy the idea.

"It's just not like Ira, Harry, to pick some kid up on a dark street in the middle of the night. I mean not unless the boy was in real trouble. Ira wasn't impulsive like that. He thought things through, you know? Planned them out. I'm not saying that he wasn't sincere about helping youngsters. He had a deep, genuine concern for disadvantaged kids. But he showed it in his own way -methodically, rationally, keeping everything under strict control. That's just how he was."

A philanthropist with the soul of an accountant. It was a weird combination.

"How did he get like that?" I asked Trumaine.

"Lord, I don't know. His dad, Tom Lessing, was a strict son-of-a-bitch. One of those dyed-in-the-wool Catholics who are really just Fundamentalists who genuflect. Ira didn't talk about Tom much, but I think he borrowed a lot of his behavior from him. And from Meg of course." Len sighed. "Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he did give the Carnova kid a ride. Maybe he remembered the boy from Kingston's clinic. Or maybe Ira just stepped out of character for a minute. Christ, wouldn't that be awful?"

"Do you want me to nose around? Talk to Kingston?"

Len thought it over for a minute. "Let's discuss it tomorrow morning -after I've talked with Meg and Janey."

"You're going to tell them all of it?"

"Hell, I don't know," he said miserably. "I don't know what I'm going to say. I mean, I don't know how I feel about it myself. It still doesn't seem real to me. It's like I'm playing a role I didn't try out for."

"I don't envy you."

Trumaine laughed. "That's all right, Harry. Nobody ever has."
 
 

9

About seven the next morning the weather finally broke, with a sound like the roof caving in. A thunderclap shook me out of bed. A second one got me on my feet and moving toward the kitchen. I'd begun to brew a pot of coffee on my shiny new stove when the phone rang.

It was Len Trumaine. I could tell from his voice that something bad had happened.

"You think you could come over to the Lessings' house right away?"

"What's it about, Len?"

"The cops just called. They think they've found Ira."

"Alive?"

"Dead," Trumaine said in a numbed voice.

Even though I'd fully expected it, the news shocked me. "Do you know any of the details?"

"Not yet. The cops are on their way over right now -to fill us in. The family would like you to . . . well, to keep on top of things. Make sure we get all the facts. Try to find out how this could have happened."

"We may never know why it happened, Len," I said.

"We just want to be sure that every effort is made. That somebody . . . makes an effort."

"I'll do what I can," I told him.
 
 

The thunderstorm slowed traffic to a crawl on the interstate, so it took me the better part of an hour to make it to Riverside Drive. By the time I got there patrol cars were already lined-up on either side of the narrow street -Covington, Newport, and Cincinnati police. The cruiser at the head of the drive was parked on an angle, blocking off entry. A Covington cop stood watch in front of it. The revolving flasher on top of his cruiser played against his wet slicker, turning it from bright yellow to a deracinated blue, then back to yellow again, as if the cop himself were some sort of weird warning sign placed beside a roadside accident.

"You're going to have to back on out of here," the cop said when I pulled up to him.

"I work for the Lessing family," I said. "My name is Stoner. Check me out."

"Wait a minute."

He walked over to the car, reached in, and pulled out a mike. As he talked into it I stared at the French Quarter house on the hill. The skeletal cane furniture on the terrace looked abandoned in the rain, like the bare bones of a deserted mansion. A moment later the cop came back.

"You can go in," he said. "But you'll have to park here."

I pulled over on the sidewalk beneath a dripping gas lamp and stepped out into the storm. By the time I made it to the terrace, I was soaked through. I knocked on the door, and Len answered. He looked as if he hadn't slept at all. His eyes were bagged with fatigue. Beneath his too-tight clothes he smelled of nervous sweat and booze. Behind him the hall was filled with cops, all the way down to the living room.

"Christ, Harry, it's been an hour," Len said, giving me an exasperated look.

"I'm sorry, Len. The traffic held me up."

He glanced at the cops crowding the hall. In the gloom of the storm the Impressionist prints on the wall had lost all of their brilliance, like lights that had been switched off.

"His body was dumped on River Road," Len said, turning back to me. "In a field near the Anderson Ferry."

"How did the police find it?"

"An informer, I think. A girlfriend of Carnova's. Finch told me the name, but I forgot." He shook his
head apologetically. "I'm pretty tired."

"Where is Finch?"

"In the living room, talking to Meg."

"And Janey?"

Len closed his eyes. "She's under sedation. It was very bad, Harry."

"Have they arrested Carnova?"

"Later today, I think. I missed some of it when Janey freaked out." His mouth started to tremble, and he clapped a hand across it. "Carnova tortured him, Harry. The little bastard tortured him. And then beat him to death and left his body to rot in the heat. Ira!" Trumaine's face bunched up, and he began to cry. I looked away.

"I better talk to Finch."

"Yeah. Go." Len waved his free hand tragically.

"Help Meg."

I made my way down the hall into the living room. Like the hallway, the room was crowded with cops and friends of the family. I recognized a few faces from the week before. I recognized the looks of the faces too.

Meg Lessing was sitting beside Finch on the white couch. She appeared to be in shock -her face flushed, her eyes fixed but unfocused. She held a rosary loosely in her hands. Finch glanced at me as I walked up to the couch. Meg Lessing followed his gaze as if she were under his spell.

The woman stared at me for a second, then frowned menacingly. "Why did this happen?" she asked. "Why have we been judged like this? Why couldn't He have shown mercy to a man who was so merciful?"

I looked down at my rain-soaked shoes.

"It's wrong." Meg Lessing turned to Finch. "All wrong," she said again.

"Mrs. Lessing," Finch said helplessly.

The woman folded her arms at her bosom and stared bitterly off into space, as if she couldn't be consoled. A Catholic priest with gray hair and a heavily lined face came over to the couch and sat down beside her. But she didn't see him.

Finch got up from the couch, looking shaken. Grabbing my sleeve, he pulled me out into the hall. Like Trumaine, he smelled of sweat and long, sleepless hours.

"God almighty," he said when we were out of the room. "You should have heard the wife! It was like Christ himself got nailed again."

"Lessing was a good man," I said softly. "They can't accept it."

Finch gave me an odd look. It wasn't contemptuous, but there wasn't any sympathy in it, either. I guessed he'd had his fill of wailing women and unanswerable questions.

"When did you find him?" I asked.

"About three this morning. The kid left the body under an old sheet of corrugated siding down by the Anderson Ferry. It's been lying there since a week ago Sunday." Finch shuddered up and down his spine. "Lying there in all this heat."

"There's no question that it's Lessing?"

"Not in my mind."

"Trumaine said he'd been tortured."

Finch nodded slowly. "That's how it looks. We're still piecing the story together. We'll know better after we get the coroner's report and after we talk to the kid."

"You've got him?"

"We got him," Finch said. "Busted him on the Square about an hour ago. He'd been living in Fairmount with a girl named Kitty Guinn. She's the one who tipped us off on where to find Lessing's body and where to find Carnova."

"When are you going to interrogate him?"

"As soon as I'm done here."

"Mind if I tag along?"

Finch gave me another odd look. "Maybe you should," he said after a moment. "The press is bound to find out about this sooner or later. And the family should hear the whole thing before it comes out in the papers."

"Before what comes out in the papers?"

He glanced through the doorway into the living room, where Meg Lessing was still sitting, stony-faced, on the couch. "There are a couple complications you don't know about. You or the family. Things we found out when we busted Carnova."

"Like what?"

Finch ignored the question. "You coming with me?"

"Just give me a second to tell Trumaine."

He nodded and started down the hall to the front door.
 
 

10

After telling Len I was leaving, I rode back across the river with Finch to the justice Center, where Carnova was being held. I expected Art to explain himself on the way over. But it wasn't until we'd parked in the Justice Center lot that he began to talk. Outside, the storm banged and rattled like a drunk in an alley.

"We're going to treat this as a robbery-murder."

Finch said it with great deliberateness, as if it were a decision rather than a statement of fact.

"How else could you treat it?" I asked.

He pulled a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket and struck a match against the dashboard. "The arresting officers say that the kid claims he knew Lessing."

I'd thought of the possibility myself the night before. "Knew him from where?"

"That's the tough part," Finch said, breathing out a cloud of smoke. "From what we're piecing together, it looks like this kid, Carnova, was a hustler."

For a second it didn't sink in. "What kind of hustler?"

"He peddled his ass, Harry," Art said, looking aggravated with me for making him say it. "He's a homosexual prostitute."

I stared at him stupidly. "You're telling me that Ira Lessing was a homosexual who liked teenage boys?"

Finch sighed. "That's what the kid says."

"Carnova has to be lying."

"Maybe. We talked it over with the D.A.'s office, and whether Carnova is bullshitting us or not, they don't much like the idea of this coming up at the trial -the fag angle. It might make a jury think twice, hearing that Lessing had the hots for a teenager." He laughed sarcastically. "I've got the feeling it won't sit too well with the family, either."

"You've got that right," I said. I stared at him for a moment. "You believe any of this?"

Finch stubbed the cigarette out in the dashboard ashtray. "Let's just say it wouldn't completely surprise me. Sometimes a family's the last to know when a relative goes south. I've seen it before."
I shook my head. "I don't believe it. This guy was a straight arrow."

"Well, let's go talk to the little cocksucker." Finch opened the car door and stepped out into the rain.