Rogues Gallery (22 page)

“Why not simply leave her fingerprints on the gun and plead self-defense?” Mac said. “You yourself indicated that she might have escaped the penalty of the law by doing so, Mr. Slade.”

“Well, maybe she panicked. I never met a real-life killer who planned things out quite like Professor Moriarty. That's why they get caught.”

“How about gunshot residue?” Mac wondered. “Was there any on Ashley or her clothing?”

Slade wiggled in his chair. His triumphant march through the case against Ashley wasn't going as smoothly as he had expected. We kept asking those pesky questions. “It was so obvious that she'd shot him, the officer on the scene didn't test for that. She could have washed her hands before calling nine-one-one anyway. By the time Chief Hummel arrived on the scene and ordered a test for GSR on her clothes and hands, more than an hour had passed.”

“So you're saying there was no residue on her hands or on whatever she was wearing - night clothes, I guess.” It was hard to keep the satisfaction out of my voice. I'm not much of an actor.

But Slade allowed himself a supercilious smile. “Correct. But we didn't stop there. We got a warrant to get the unwashed clothes in her laundry on the off chance that she was actually wearing something else when she shot him. Pay dirt! There was GSR on a plaid flannel shirt.”

“But Ashley - ” Mac kicked me under the table before I could say “frequented the shooting range.” That's where she must have picked up the gunshot residue. But Mac, being a genius, quickly calculated that there was no percentage in informing Slade about Ashley's hobby of putting holes in the silhouettes of men if he didn't already know it. We were here to get information, not give any away.

“Go on,” Mac said. “You still have to cover motive.”

“Ah, yes, motive. There's more than just the obvious there, much more.” Braced for a suggestion that Ashley's “Die Like a Dog” short story wasn't just fiction, I was totally unprepared for what Slade actually said: “Ms. Crutcher bought a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar life insurance policy two months ago. That was just two weeks before she and her husband split up.”

If Mac had had a cigar in his mouth, it would have fallen out. This was big news. A quarter of a million dollars isn't anybody's idea of a fortune, but it was a lot for somebody at Ashley Crutcher's paralegal pay level.

Mac recovered quickly. I could almost hear the wheels turning in his head. “If her intention in purchasing the policy was to kill her husband, would it not have made more sense for her to preserve the façade of their marriage at all costs? That would have deflected suspicion from her.”

Good comeback!
But Slade smiled, undaunted. “If she were that clever, Professor, she might be as successful at writing mysteries as you are.”

“At any rate,” Mac plowed on, “the fact is that the Crutchers were not living together at the time of Mr. Crutcher's death. What is your theory of how he happened to be in his former home at that hour of the morning?”

“Not former - he was still half-owner of the house. Since Ms. Crutcher denies that she killed him in self-defense, I'm forced to conclude that it was cold-blooded murder. Therefore, she must have lured him there somehow.”

Mac chuckled softly, provoking a look of irritation on the prosecutor's face. “I have to say, Mr. Slade, that if your theory is correct she must have drawn him to the house without much of a plan considering that she shot him ... and then wiped her fingerprints off the gun, which she left beside the body ... and then called nine-one-one with the preposterous story that some third party shot her estranged husband. That simply does not make sense. Why would an intruder leave the gun behind? It would scarcely take a Professor Moriarty to come up with something better than that. That is not even considering the minor matter that a gun went off during the nine-one-one call and you have not mentioned finding a second empty cartridge.”

Slade sat back. I sensed a lecture coming on. “I can assure you, Professor McCabe, that in the decade-plus that I have held this office, I have encountered much more irrational behavior on the part of murderers. Sam Klein stabbed his girlfriend seventeen times in their kitchen, then used the same knife to slice himself some ham. He was still eating a ham sandwich when officers arrived in response to a call from the neighbors.”

“That's not much of a parallel,” I argued. “Sam didn't make the call himself.”

For some reason, Slade looked exasperated. “My point is that in real life killers do strange things more often than not.” He made a show of looking at his watch. “I don't want to rush you out, but I have an appointment with Ms. Rawls of the
Observer
in five minutes.”

He wouldn't find it as easy to charm that young lady as he might expect. Tall Rawls was becoming an excellent reporter, thanks in part to some mentoring from my own true love.

“As an elected official, you certainly have an obligation of media availability,” Mac said. “One cannot help but wonder, however, whether media attention might not be the driving factor in your planned prosecution of Ashley Crutcher.”

Slade made a good show of looking offended; I have to give him that. “I strongly resent your implication, Professor. I strongly resent it.”
That wasn't an implication, Marv; he said it flat out.
“This is all about justice for Tim Crutcher, not publicity for me. You've obviously been paying too much attention to my - to Ms. Crutcher's attorney. Let me give both of you some friendly advice: You run a very grave risk of embarrassing yourselves if you continue down the path you're on.”

“That is a risk I am quite prepared to take,” Mac said.

“That goes double,” I added.

“May I remind you that you're not licensed private investigators?”

“We are well aware of that, Mr. Slade,” Mac assured him. “Accordingly, we have never charged a penny for our services. I am sure you will acknowledge that as private citizens we are well within our rights to ask a few questions here and there that might prove useful to the competent defense to which every defendant is legally and morally entitled.”

Slade didn't acknowledge anything except that our last five minutes was up. He stood. “Well, it was a real pleasure to meet you at last, Professor McCabe. Jeff, I'll be seeing you at the gym. Have a great day.” He pumped our hands as if we were the last undecided voters in the county.

VII

“What do you think he's running for?” I asked Mac when we hit the sidewalk.

He shrugged. “Who knows, old boy? Perhaps even he doesn't. These political types like to keep their options open.”

“Speaking of options, what are ours? Do you have a counter-theory?”

“I would not be so bold as to call it a theory. Let us say I have been engaging in a thought experiment. It goes like this: Suppose that Tim Crutcher had a paramour, as Ashley suspects. Suppose they entered the house together to recover something that Crutcher left behind, but they quickly quarreled and she shot him in anger. Or perhaps, although she carried a gun, she was inexperienced at weapons and was startled into firing it when Ranger barked. Either way, she dropped the gun and fled. She left no fingerprints because she was wearing gloves.”

Stranger things have happened, I guess. “So how do we find out whether there was a girlfriend and, if so, who she was?”

That question would have been a no-brainer if Crutcher had worked at St. Benignus: Popcorn would have found out for us in five minutes, if she didn't know already.

“Philanderers often confide their misdeeds to someone,” Mac said. How would he know? “Perhaps Crutcher shared such a confidence with one of his friends. Ashley can tell us who her husband's friends were.”

“If Erica lets her,” I mumbled.

But I left that to Mac to work on. Being a full professor, he had plenty of time on his hands. I, on the other hand, felt it was time to put in a guest appearance at my office.

It turned out to be a busy afternoon. My boss, Ralph Pendergast, stopped by to let me know that two students had been expelled for hacking into the St. Benignus computers and adjusting a bunch of grades for themselves and a dozen fraternity brothers. I know how they did it, but I'm not going to tell you. You could be a potential grade-changer, for all I know. An eagle-eyed professor noticed the discrepancy between her own written records and what the computer showed. Campus Police were getting ready to file charges. The miscreants could get as much as a year in prison and a $2,500 fine if they took a fifth-degree felony rap, but I expected Marvin Slade to let them plea down to a misdemeanor, which could still land them in jail for six months and have them paying a $1,000 fine on each charge. They'd have been far better off taking the bad grades.

Always a fast writer, I turned out a press release in about a half hour, expressing the disappointment of our president, Rev. Joseph Pirelli, and detailing the steps St. Benignus was taking to make sure that this didn't happen again. I also produced a series of talking points for me to use when the phone calls started coming in from media who wanted to go beyond the press release. I e-mailed the drafts to Father Joe and, covering myself, to Ralph. Both men responded within the hour. Father Joe called the release “excellent work as usual!!!” Ralph said exactly the same thing in Ralph-speak: “OK.”

So I was feeling rather pleased with myself when Popcorn came into my office late in the day. I had the phone in my hand, ready to call the communications director for the eminent Cardinal who would be our St. Benignus Day keynote speaker, when she sat down. I put it back in the cradle. My assistant's facial expression told a tale of woe. For one scary moment I was afraid that her belief in Ashley's innocence had opened up a breech in whatever she had going with Oscar. But that wasn't it.

“What do you think of Oscar's mother?” Popcorn asked.

“I try not to.”

Where did that come from? That's not fair.
Sometimes I get carried away with verbal gymnastics and forget that words are supposed to mean something. In truth, Mrs. Hummel is a very nice octogenarian whose disapproval of smoking keeps Oscar from doing it even more than he does. It's not her fault that he's a momma's boy. Or is it?

“I don't think she likes me,” Popcorn said, her voice on the edge of tears.

I stared. How could anybody not like Aneliese Pokorny? My irreplaceable assistant is attractive, benevolent, competent ... I could continue through the whole alphabet like that!

“That can't possibly be the case,” I assured her. “You must be getting the vibes wrong.”

“Oh, yeah? I just talked to her on the phone and she didn't sound warm at all. And whenever I'm around her, she looks at me like I'm, I don't know, a seductress out to ravage her son, maybe.”

Well, aren't you?
Once, when she wasn't looking, I paged through one of Popcorn's romance novels and quickly decided I wasn't old enough to read it. Anybody who laps up stuff like that must have
something
in mind.

“I'm sure it's just that Oscar's always been there for her,” I said. “She's not used to him dating.” Approaching delicate territory, I paused. “You are dating, aren't you?”
Not that I'm prying!

She took a pull on her coffee. At least, I assumed it was coffee. “I guess so. Do they call it that at our age? He's been taking me places.”

So that was out of the closet at last! I mentally composed a text message to Lynda:
Oscar is hooked. She just has to reel him in.

I didn't make that call to the Cardinal's media guru for another forty-five minutes, what with dispensing advice to the lovelorn and then bringing Popcorn up to date on the Crutcher case. Since everything always happens at once (Cody's Law), Mac called when I finally managed to get on the phone. I called him back after a ten-minute chat with a friendly northeasterner.

Ashley had offered two suggestions of where to go for a line on who Crutcher might have been seeing on the sly: Joe Robards, who used to work with him at the county recreation department, and Meredith Blake.

“Oh, come on, Mac!” I protested. “There's no way a fast number like Meredith Blake was comparing lifestyle notes with her handyman.”

“Perhaps not, old boy. However, he surely was not in her employ alone. He may have bragged to some of his colleagues about his amorous adventures. That is certainly my hope, for Mr. Robards has not yet returned my phone call. Through the kind intervention of a friend of a friend, we have an appointment at Miss Blake's at six-thirty.”

I'm convinced that Mac can connect with anybody on the planet with two or three phone calls, max, so finding somebody to put him in touch with the infamous Meredith Blake must have been a breeze.

I had more than enough time to shave and change my clothes first.

Neither the Blakes nor the Caraways, Meredith's mother's family, had old money on the scale of the Gambles or the Masons. But both of her parents were the ends of the lines. So when their Lexus crossed a double yellow line late one night, making Meredith an orphan during her second year at Vassar, she inherited two small fortunes. She'd been partying and protesting ever since. Her causes changed but her antics didn't. I forget what she was protesting when she was arrested naked in front of the White House in 2006, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't public indecency.

Like much of Erin, I had followed her escapades for years even when she lived on the fringes of the Hollywood crowd in Los Angeles. The headlines on the papers in the supermarket checkout lane kept us posted. But within the past year she had reoccupied the old Blake family manse, which had been empty for some time. Wagging tongues said her journey home was an economy move, necessary because she was spending money faster than her trust funds could dole it out. Maybe so, I thought, as we stood on the porch of the big brick house, but the operating expenses on Chez Blake could not be negligible.