Hounded (16 page)

Castro looks at his watch, probably wondering why I’m using up my fifteen minutes on comments of no substance.

“I’ll tell you why I wanted to talk to you, Mr. Reynolds.”

“Please do.”

“Did your wife have any enemies?”

He laughs a short, derisive laugh. “Katherine? Don’t be ridiculous. Jonathon, what is this about?”

Castro, not pleased that his boss seems not to be pleased, turns to the source of the displeasure, me. “Mr. Carpenter, what kind of a question is that?”

“I am simply trying to determine if Mr. Reynolds believes his wife’s death might not have been of natural causes.”

“That is ridiculous, and probably even beneath you,” Reynolds says. If he thinks that question was beneath me, he hasn’t checked me out very well. He continues. “She died of a sudden heart attack. It was confirmed by an autopsy. Is there anything else?”

I shrug. Since I now don’t believe him, I’m not going to get much more from listening to him. “No, that’s pretty much it.” I turn to Castro. “I think I’ll use up a few of my minutes by going to the bathroom, and I’ll still have six or seven minutes to give back.” Back to Reynolds, “Do you mind?”

“It’s down the hall.” He’s probably already making mental plans to have the bathroom fumigated after I use it.

“Thanks.” I walk down the hall, which puts me out of their sight line. There’s a bathroom on the left, but I pass right by it and go down to another one much farther down, which is off of what appears to be the master bedroom. If it isn’t, the actual master bedroom must be the size of Madison Square Garden.

I don’t have to use the bathroom at all, so once I close the door behind me, I instead use a minute or two to take inventory. Then I leave the bathroom and walk back down the hall to the den, where the two men are waiting for me. I stop at the door and say, “Thanks. I can’t remember when I’ve enjoyed myself this much.”

Castro gets up and follows me to the front door. “Your reputation is an accurate one, Mr. Carpenter.”

“You trying to get on my good side?”

“Hardly.”

On the way home, I call Sam Willis. “Great job on the phone lists,” I say.

“Thanks. What else you got for me?” Sam desperately wants to be a detective.

“There’s a guy named Carson Reynolds. Lives in Alpine and runs a private equity fund in New York.”

“What about him?” he asks.

“Can you get his phone numbers?”

“That’s an insulting question. Of course I can get his phone numbers.”

“Good. Get them, and a list of all the calls he’s made in the last couple of months. Then compare them to the list of Diaz calls.”

“You want to know if Diaz called him? Because I don’t remember seeing Reynolds’s name on the list.”

“You can check, but I doubt that Diaz called him. What I want to know is if any of the numbers on the called or received lists appear on both Diaz’s phone and Reynolds’s.”

“What about calls made to and from Reynolds’s company?” he asks.

“Can you check those?”

“Sure, but there will be a lot of them, so it will take a while. And of course, one of his employees could have made any of the calls.”

“It’s worth a try anyway,” I say.

“Okay, I’m on it.”

“Fast, please. Very fast.”

“Reynolds was lying. I’m seventy percent positive.”

Laurie smiles. “Seventy percent positive?”

“Yes,” I say. “I’m also somewhat sure, and mostly certain.”

“You might want to avoid those terms in your summation to the jury. But why do you think he was lying?”

“Because when I said I thought his wife might have been murdered, he got pissed off.”

“Seems like a natural reaction to me,” she says.

“Of course it is. But the thing is, that was his only reaction. If it were me, I’d be angry also. But I’d also want to know why he asked the question. I’m an attorney, often involved in murder cases. His lawyer would have done some research on me; they would know I’m a reasonably serious guy.”

“Reasonably,” Laurie says.

“Right. So he wouldn’t even be curious why I thought his beloved wife might have been murdered? It doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s it?” she said. “The guy is in mourning; maybe his reactions aren’t what they would be if he were not under that stress.”

“It may not be as much stress as you think,” I say. “I checked out his master bathroom while I was there.”

“Excuse me?”

“Hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go. Anyway, there were three kinds of shampoo in the shower. One was just regular stuff. Another was for colored hair, and another was some kind of conditioning thing for split ends.”

“So?”

“So he’s mostly bald; his ends split a long time ago. And his dear, departed wife had gray hair; I saw her in a picture in his den.”

“So you think he has rebounded quickly from his loss?”

“I do. I think he’s a fast rebounder. And his rebound-ee is named Susan Baird. There was a prescription bottle for a thyroid drug in the medicine cabinet with her name on it.”

“You looked in their medicine cabinet? This may be a new low for you, Andy.”

“You think looking in a medicine cabinet is a new low for me?” I ask. “Reynolds said pretty much the same thing; he thought a question I asked was beneath me. Do you people not know me at all?”

“Perhaps not.”

“Anyway, I’m going to check out Susan Baird, and I’ll bet I find out she has colored hair, split ends, and a screwed-up thyroid. And I’ll further bet she loves potpourri.”

“Potpourri?”

I nod. “The place reeked of it.”

“Of course, he could have been fooling around with Susan Baird without having murdered his wife. Or Susan could be his daughter, and Baird is her married name. And he could have a thing for potpourri.”

I nod. “All very true. Which is why I am only seventy percent positive.”

The phone rings and Laurie answers it. She spends a couple of minutes chatting with the caller, and then hands me the phone. “Janet Carlson,” she says.

I take the phone, and it turns out that while Janet chitchats with Laurie, she has no inclination to do so with me. “I checked the other two autopsies, Reynolds and Zimmerman. And I spoke with the doctors who did them,” she says.

“And?”

“Well, of course both doctors listed the cause of death as natural heart attacks, and they see no reason to doubt their conclusions.”

“What’s your view?” I ask.

“Taken individually, I see no reason to doubt them either, but I did find some consistencies that are worth noting. Certain of the compounds that we talked about are elevated in each case, in a similar pattern.”

“So what does it mean?”

“I want to be careful about how I state this,” she says. “I am slightly suspicious, but only because of what you’ve told me. Had I not spoken with you, and just examined the results, I would not have raised any red flags.”

“On the remote chance that I can get any of this admitted, will you testify to it in court?”

“Who’s the prosecutor?”

“Richard Wallace.”

“Andy, you’d be better off if you couldn’t get it admitted. With what we have here, Richard would laugh me off the stand.”

I have no doubt that she’s right, but at this point it’s moot, since I couldn’t begin to establish enough relevance to our case to get a judge to allow it.

When I get off the phone, I tell Laurie what she said. “She thinks I’m nuts.”

“So do I,” Laurie says. “But that’s never stopped you before.”

“I’ve got a hunch there’s something there. Pete had the same hunch, and he hunches much better than I do.”

“You got anything better?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t.”

“Then let’s hope your hunch is right.”

Everything is elusive, and nothing connects.

I know these things are real; I know it in a place and a way that I have learned not to question.

But it is one of the imperfections of life that Andy Carpenter is not in complete charge. I can’t be the judge, and I sure can’t be the jury. I can’t say, “Andy, you’re right. Pete, take the ankle bracelet off, you’re a free man.” I wish I could. If I had the choice, I would rather be a dictator than the quarterback of the Giants.

In the world that I inhabit, I have to go much further than convincing myself that something is true. I have to convince others, twelve others to be exact, and to do so I have to make sense out of it. I have to create a truth and a logic that other people can see, and right now I’m not close to that.

Part of the problem is that the things I see don’t have any relation to each other, not even in my mind. I believe that Juanita Diaz probably left Danny and Ricky willingly, the result of a troubled marriage. But I believe more strongly that after that decision she was kidnapped and held prisoner in that dump, the Oakmont Gardens. The purpose was to pressure Danny to turn on Pete.

I also think that Carson Reynolds was lying, and that his wife, and Robbie Hambler’s father, and maybe this guy Zimmerman, and who knows how many others, were probably murdered. I’m not as certain of this as I am about Juanita Diaz, but it’s close.

But these two things might well have nothing to do with each other. In fact, they probably don’t. The Juanita Diaz piece is the essential one: it explains why Danny was under such pressure, and why he would lie about Pete. What it doesn’t include is a reason why the bad guys would be after Pete in the first place.

The “Hambler-Reynolds” piece has no connection to Diaz at all, but connects to Pete. Pete was investigating those deaths, the killers became afraid he was getting too close, so they wanted to remove him from the picture. That’s the theory, at least, but it presents some major obstacles.

The first one would be proving that these were murders at all. The medical and forensic evidence simply isn’t there, and what is there leads to the opposite conclusion. The fact that Robbie thinks his father was killed, or that Reynolds was having an affair and was unconcerned about my view that his wife was murdered, just doesn’t cut it as proof to anyone.

But even if we got through that problem, the tie to Pete is remote at best. Pete does not think he was close to breaking the case, so why would they have been so afraid of him as to hatch and execute this complicated plan?

Pete mentioned that there was a New Jersey state police detective who had contacted him about the Reynolds case, so he is my logical next step. Maybe he has already solved the case and tied it up in a neat bow for me to present to the jury. Then they can unwrap it in court, everybody can nod in agreement, and Pete can go free.

The detective’s name is Lieutenant Simon Coble, and he works out of the Englewood station. I call him and leave a message, simply my name, that I’m an attorney, and I want to talk to him. He doesn’t call back, so I leave a second message, then a third. Perhaps he is unfamiliar with the Andy Carpenter legend.

My fourth message says that it’s about Pete Stanton and Carson Reynolds, since the Reynolds case is the one he had called Pete about. This seems to do the trick, and Coble calls me back fifteen minutes later.

He sounds like a man who is really busy, or wants me to think he’s really busy. He’s rushed to the point of being breathless; I wonder if he might be talking to me while on a treadmill.

“Carpenter? What’s this about?”

“I’m defending Pete Stanton.”

“Did he do it?”

“No.”

“I hope that’s not defense attorney bullshit,” he says. “He seemed like a good guy.”

“It’s not, and he is.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“To help me prove it.”

He seems reluctant to get involved, but finally agrees to meet with me, if I can come down right now. He’ll give me fifteen minutes, which seems to be the standard amount of time that people have for Andy Carpenter.

Englewood is just twenty minutes from Paterson; it’s adjacent to Fort Lee, which means it’s right by the George Washington Bridge, but there is an accident on Route 4, so it takes me forty-five minutes. I’m concerned that Coble won’t be available when I get there.

But he is. He’s much younger than he sounded, maybe thirty-two or thirty-three. “You’re late. Your fifteen minutes were up a half hour ago,” he says.

“Traffic.”

He nods. “Big surprise. Talk to me.”

“There are at least three deaths that were recorded as having been from natural causes, in each case a heart attack. I know you are familiar with Katherine Reynolds, and I know you spoke to Captain Stanton—Pete—about her.”

“He turned his cases over to you?”

The tone is a tad derisive, which is one of my least favorite tones, at least when directed at me. But I can’t afford to antagonize Coble just yet. “No, it’s my feeling that this can aid in his defense.”

This brings on a smirk, not one of my preferred facial expressions. “How is that?”

“Can we start at the beginning? Why did you contact Pete?”

“Katherine Reynolds’s niece reported some concern about the circumstances of her death. I investigated and came to the conclusion that her concern was unfounded, that she died of natural causes. Then I found out that Stanton was investigating as well.”

“How did you find that out?”

“Local cops. He went to them first to keep them in the loop, since he was out of his jurisdiction. It’s courtesy. Anyway, Stanton came in, we had a nice talk, I thought he was wrong, he thought I was wrong, and we said goodbye.”

“What made you conclude that Katherine Reynolds was not murdered?”

“Because there was no evidence that she was. When the coroner tells me that someone died of a heart attack, I tend to believe that the person died of a heart attack, unless there is evidence that the coroner is wrong. You’re familiar with the concept of evidence, right, Counselor?”

“Vaguely. I’ve also seen cases where the evidence exists, but it takes a competent cop to investigate and find it.”

“You’re saying I’m not competent?” he asks.

“No way. You did all you could; you called the coroner. That must have been exhausting.”

He smiles. “I think your fifteen minutes are up.”

I return the smile. “Time flies when you’re having fun.”