Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests (11 page)

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A
T MY ARRAIGNMENT
, Beyer works his magic and gets me out on bail. It’s a miracle, but that’s why I’m paying him the big bucks. I have to wear
a tracking bracelet on my ankle, but it beats sitting in jail. Stone objects, but the judge cuts her off and calls for the
next case. After I’m released, I go home, make a couple of phone calls, and wait.

Three hours later, I stroll into the Shamrock Bar. At this time of day, even the hard-core drinkers have other places to be,
so it’s easy to spot Dexter Bass waiting in the booth in the far corner. With my arrest, his claim of self-defense rang true.
His new attorney didn’t have any problem getting the charges dropped. Bass raises his glass when he notices me.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” I tell him.

“I’m a curious guy,” he says, a sly grin creasing his face. It quickly fades. “So, what’d you wanna talk about?”

“How did you do it?”

Bass sits up straighter. “Hold on there, Counselor. How’d I do what?”

“Cut the crap,” I hiss. “I’m looking at life, maybe even the needle. The least you can do is tell me how you and Eve set me
up.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Bass finishes his drink and starts to leave. I grab his wrist, stalling his exit.
I need to hear the truth, and to get it I’m gambling that his ego is bigger than mine.

“C’mon, you can tell me. I’m pretty bright, but I know when I’ve been outsmarted. It was your idea, wasn’t it?”

Bass jerks his hand free. “You wearing a wire?” I tell him no, but he isn’t convinced. “Follow me.”

We head to the bathroom and Bass motions me inside. The smell stings my nose, and I watch where I step. Must be the maid’s
day off. Bass locks the door.

“Unbutton your shirt.”

I undo the buttons and show him my bare chest. He spins me around and shoves me against the wall. He frisks me, leaving no
place unchecked. I’ve had less thorough exams at my doctor’s office. Bass seems satisfied.

“It was Eve’s idea,” he says.

My stomach churns as Bass guides me through the double-cross. He and Eve worked a few scams in Vegas until he went to prison
and she reinvented herself. When he got out, they hooked up again and looked for a patsy. I fit the bill. After I contacted
Rupp, Eve had Bass take the photos of my meetings with him. Then Bass “bumped” into Rupp in the bar. Once everything was in
place, he and Eve waited for me to murder her husband. And while I was busy killing Toscar, Eve snuck into Rupp’s office and
planted the photographs.

“How did my fingerprints get on the hammer? I wore gloves that night.”

He gives me a smug grin. “It’s your hammer.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Eve took the hammer from your garage,” Bass explains. “She gave you your own hammer and said it was one I’d used. But I never
touched it.”

My cheeks burn. “What about Dan Dorsey?”

Bass smirks. “What about him? I never met the guy. I visited Eve on the days Dorsey wasn’t scheduled to be there.”

I step toward him. “Was it worth it?”

Bass jabs his fingers in my chest. “Don’t go righteous on me, Counselor. You tried to frame me too.”

“Aren’t you worried she’ll set you up?”

“No. Lucky for me, Eve likes outlaws better than lawyers.”

There isn’t much to say after that. Bass looks at his watch and tells me he has a plane to catch. He unlocks the bathroom
door and walks out.

The bartender is clearing the table where Bass was sitting. As I walk by, he puts his hand on my chest. I recognize him as
one of the cops who searched my house.

“Stone’s waiting for you across the street,” he says.

I push through the back exit and cross the street to the pawnshop’s parking lot. I knock on the side door of the gray cargo
van parked in the shadows. Lois Stone opens the sliding door and steps out into the afternoon heat. She’s wearing a dark green
pantsuit that complements her auburn hair. There’s something on her lips—lipstick or gloss—that leaves them shiny. I’d like
to think she did it for me, but that’s wishful thinking.

“Did you get it?”

“Loud and clear. There’s enough for arrest warrants. Eve Toscar and Dexter Bass won’t be spending her money anytime soon.”

“How’d you know he wouldn’t find the bug?”

Stone grabs the van’s door handle. “Jack, guys like you and Bass always think you’re smarter than the rest of us. That’s your
downfall. Once he frisked you and didn’t find anything, I knew he’d stop looking. There was no way he’d suspect we bugged
the john.”

I know she’s right. “So is our deal back on?”

“Yeah, it’s back on. You’ve got until Monday to get your affairs in order.”

I shake my head. “I’m gonna die an old man in prison.”

Stone’s face softens for a moment. “Cheer up, Jack. With good behavior, you could get paroled in fifteen, twenty years. You’ll
still have plenty of life left.”

“Not quite what I had in mind.”

She shrugs. “A word of advice?”

“Sure, what’ve I got to lose?”

Her eyes sparkle. “When you’re in the shower, don’t drop the soap.”

BY EILEEN DUNBAUGH

T
he rag-and-bones man was the terror of my childhood. “Useless girls, like useless things, go to old Rags,” my mother would
say if I slacked on the chores she’d assigned. We knew him only as “Rags,” the small, swarthy collector of junk, until the
day my father got saddled with him as a client. Despite my mother’s constant warnings, Daddy always seemed to be in the courthouse
at the wrong time, when some judge or other was assigning lawyers to represent the latest crop of indigents who’d come before
the bar. There were no public defenders back then, and the fool lawyer who ended up at the end of a judge’s pointing finger
took the case pro bono. It was possible to decline, but woe to the attorney who did if he found himself before that particular
judge again.

I don’t know why Daddy was always at the courthouse, unless it was because he was lonely. Each evening before he came home
my mother would comb her hair and change her dress—and then spoil it all by talking at him, endlessly, and mostly in the same
groove, telling him that a smart lawyer would keep away from the courthouse except when it was necessary to be there on a
paying case, and that the way to feed your family was with last wills and testaments. I used to imagine that she was a record
and that her voice would distort and finally stop if only I could figure out how to make the machine wind down.

She and Daddy had moved to Chicago from Missouri, mostly because of Mama’s “aspirations.” That was the word she used, proudly
and without irony; she “aspired” to a better life. So instead of taking his share of the family farm, my father went to law
school, moved to Chicago, and set up a one-man office on the fifth floor of a building on State Street. For a while, my mother
was satisfied. The business boom of the twenties was big enough to bring well-paying work even to unambitious lawyers. And
it wasn’t that Daddy was lazy; his “problem,” as Mama put it, was that he “pondered” too much. In the evenings he’d read,
and when he could get away from the office, you’d find him puffing contemplatively on his cigar as he threw his fishing line
into the stream not far from our house. We lived on the North Side then, in a tiny one-story, two-bedroom wood house that
had seen better days. The neighborhood grew all around us in the twenties, but we still had country at our backs.

If Mama reminded me of a record, like all records of that time she played only two songs. She didn’t like the grammar I picked
up from the children of the slaughterhouse-working Poles and tried to arrange for me to play with the daughters of Dr. Adams,
from our street, instead. She nagged my father until he built a playhouse in the backyard, thinking the Adams girls wouldn’t
be able to resist it. When they didn’t come, her song for me—her “wayward Sadie”—became a lament.

I preferred it to the song reserved for my father—a relentlessly upbeat march, as if he only needed the example of others
put before him to catch the rhythm and fall in line. He
must
have been lonely, for how can you confide your secret fears and doubts to someone who responds by pointing out that others
don’t have any? I think he had one friend, a man called Tom Fenton, who dealt in stocks and had an office in my father’s building.
It was a name, at any rate, that sometimes came up at the dinner table. He never brought Tom Fenton home, though, and in my
partiality to my father I assumed it was because he didn’t want to subject his friend to my mother’s endless talk.

I would run a dozen blocks to meet my father on his way from the streetcar each evening. It may sound irresponsible to let
a child wander alone through city streets, but it wasn’t unusual—before the murder anyway. Children weren’t supervised much
as long as they chipped in around the house and were respectful in sight of a parent. Outdoors—and out of adult sight—we mostly
did as we pleased, playing on construction sites amid broken glass, asbestos, and oil; sneaking in and out of hobo camps;
climbing trees in the snatches of woods that remained. It was anything but a childproof world, but then accidents, even inside
homes (where the absence of insulation in walls and on appliances made tinder boxes of the houses), were accepted as part
of life.

What was not accepted was the default of trusted institutions such as the banks with the stock-market crash of 1929. I was
nine. Old enough to sense even before Daddy came home ashen-faced on “Black Thursday” that something was wrong. My mother
sat him down in a chair and knelt on the floor to take his hand. It was the tenderest moment I ever witnessed between them.
I wasn’t told until years later that my father’d heard a gunshot that afternoon and rushed to the next-door office of the
broker named Tom Fenton to find he’d shot himself through the mouth.

We all knew our life was about to change. Now my father hung around the courthouse hoping to hear of paying work—any paying
work. People didn’t need a lawyer to draft a will when all they had was two sticks to rub together.

My mother started her own small millinery business from our house, and it was then that her threats about the rag-and-bones
man began in earnest. She needed my help, and I was getting old enough to provide it. Gone were the Polish washerwomen who’d
sloshed and wrung and hung and ironed our laundry. I watched Mama do it herself, surprised at the strength of her hands, which
I’d never seen put to such hard work before. We didn’t have the powerful detergents then that came out after the war; you
got things clean with water heated in a tank without a temperature or pressure control, and with a washer that didn’t rinse
or spin. Before long my mother’s hands turned lobster red from the scalding water, just like the hands of those sturdy Polish
women. We both looked out at my playhouse as if it were a relic from an irreclaimably happy past, and for the first time I
understood her “aspirations.”

All three of us now lived in fear that we’d end up even worse off than where she and Daddy began. We never lost our tiny house,
but we knew we could, and unlike many others who had family they could move in with, my parents had too thoroughly severed
their ties back home to expect help in a crisis.

My mother passed her anxiety on to me through her threats about old Rags. I was young enough to take her seriously, and what
made it worse was that Rags used to park his cart, which was pulled by a bony horse with an overlarge head, half a block down
our street while he stopped to get a soda from a nearby shop. You couldn’t see the shop from where he parked the cart; he
chose the spot, I suppose, because there was a big tree there that shaded the horse on hot days.

For me, his parking place was a constant worry. It meant he didn’t just pass our house shouting “Rags and old iron!” at a
pace that allowed people to run out with their recyclable trash—the old clothes, bottles, tin cans, and iron he’d pay a penny
or two for. My mother would have an hour each Tuesday to catch him and sell me to him.

If my mother was an unsympathetic adversary to me during those years, she surprised me by showing a strong streak of compassion
and generosity toward others. She had something mildly disparaging to say about just about everyone whose background wasn’t
exactly like ours. But she never let her prejudices stop her from giving assistance to anyone who needed it. She even used
our few saved dollars to buy extra food for the endless stream of homeless men who knocked on our back screen looking for
work.

Old Rags, as we called him until the day he became Daddy’s client, had a name that was unspellable, let alone pronounceable.
Something with a jumble of
z
’s and other consonants. Naturally that made his background a subject for discussion at our dinner table. A Russian, my mother
was certain, but Daddy said no, he was Hungarian. A Gypsy, then, my mother insisted.

But Rags’s roots were not discussed with my mother’s usual nonchalance. Her voice was hushed, because of the horror of the
thing he was said to have done. It was my father’s first murder case, and not one he’d elected to take. Why he’d taken it
at all, even at the behest of the judge with the pointing finger, my mother could not understand.

A little girl had been found dead in Rags’s cart, under some pieces of iron and a lot of loose clothing. I was ten, and they
felt no need to shield me from their conversation as one would protect a child’s tender ears today. As I listened, I was filled
with new loathing for my mother. I thought her a hypocrite, without knowing the word. So this was what happened to girls who
were sold to old Rags. And my mother had threatened me with it a hundred times. I wondered if my father knew how close I’d
come to being the girl on that cart.

No one could change Daddy’s mind about representing the ragman. We were already feeling the impact of the Depression, and
my father’s health, by this time, had also started to give out. My mother was right that he shouldn’t be subjecting himself
to the strain of such a notorious case, but he’d heard other lawyers murmuring that they’d give Rags short shrift if he was
assigned to them, and he wasn’t going to turn his client over to someone who’d get him summarily convicted.