Temporary Sanity (5 page)

More likely, though, Geraldine plans to gloat.

She stops in the center of the tiny living room and gestures toward the couch like a Tupperware hostess unveiling the latest in snap-top containers. “You’re on for the lady of the house, I hear.”

She takes a drag on her cigarette and watches me digest the scene. It’s grisly all right.

“It was a girlfriend of hers who called,” she says. “Stopped by to see if your client was okay.”

Geraldine blows a stream of smoke from the side of her mouth when I look up. “Touching,” she adds.

The crime scene photographer was delayed-at his wife’s office Christmas party, he says-and he’s just getting started. Nothing has been moved. Howard Davis is sprawled on his back on the couch, bloody from the neck down. His eyes are closed, his expression that of someone in peaceful slumber.

The dead man’s arm hangs from the couch, his fingers resting on the threadbare carpet. Next to them is a bloodstained serrated knife, a tape measure already aligned with its blade for the photo shoot. Nine inches, it reads. On the other side of the knife is an empty bottle. Johnnie Walker Red.

A large maroon pool over Howard Davis’s left breast suggests that the single incision beneath would have done the job. It didn’t have to, though. It’s one of multiple stab wounds, too many to count through the patches of almost dried blood. His flannel shirt is sliced open in at least a half dozen places. His heavy work boots are stained red. Even the couch cushions are saturated.

There is little blood elsewhere. A few drops in the bathroom sink, Geraldine points out, and a smear on a hallway light switch, but the rest is confined to Howard Davis’s body and the living-room couch.

The cottage is not otherwise disturbed. We walk quickly through each of the small rooms, ending up in the kitchen. There’s no evidence of forced entry, no sign of a struggle.

“What have you got on Sonia Baker?” I ask.

She laughs. “What haven’t we got? Motive, opportunity, motive, fury, motive, the weapon. Did I mention motive?”

“For Christ’s sake, Geraldine, the man was a parole officer. He handled the most violent cretins the system spit out. He’s probably got as many enemies as you do.”

Geraldine rolls her green eyes to the ceiling, flicks her cigarette ashes in the sink, and shakes her head like a parent trying to reason with a misguided teenager. “Martha, Martha, what’s become of you? Surely you’re not serious.”

“You bet I’m serious. This guy’s been a parole officer most of his adult life. You’ve got to investigate the payback angle.” The confidence in my voice astounds me.

She takes a long drag and answers as she exhales. “Only if the evidence warrants it.”

She’s right, of course. They’ll dust the house and the weapon for prints, type and cross the bloodstains, take DNA samples. If the only matches are the people who live here, they won’t look any further.

It’s one of many prejudices built into our system. If a murder victim lived alone, the search for his killer begins with the analysis of evidence. If the deceased had a spouse or a live-in lover, that person is assumed to have crossed the narrow line between love and hate. The significant other is automatically identified as the prime suspect, before any analysis is conducted. This is not something I can fix-at least not tonight.

“When do you expect the reports, Geraldine?”

The Commonwealth is required to turn over the results of its fingerprint and blood analyses to the defense. If that evidence discloses the presence of an outsider in Sonia Baker’s cottage on the day of the murder, Geraldine is obligated to tell us so.

She looks up at the ceiling to calculate. “Monday night,” she says. “It’ll all go out in the morning. Should have blood work back late Wednesday. Prints sometime Thursday.”

“I’ll wait to hear from you then.”

“Oh, you’ll hear from me,” she says, blowing smoke through her half-smile.

I head for the door.

“But Martha…”

I turn back to face her.

“Don’t get your hopes up.”

The female violent offenders unit of the Barnstable County House of Correction is an austere, forbidding place. Nonstop gray cinder blocks serve as walls. Cement slabs-the same dull gray-make up the ceiling. The narrow hallway is poorly lit by yellow bulbs protruding overhead, protected by wire cages. The concrete floor dips every six feet or so to accommodate built-in drains, testaments to the need for occasional hose-downs.

My escort is a well-endowed, gum-chewing matron with wide hips bulging under a heavy holster. She’s annoyed. Evening meetings with inmates disrupt the all-important prison routine. Generally speaking, visits outside the established schedule are prohibited. But when an inmate newly placed in lockup asks to speak with her attorney, she’s entitled to do so. To hell with the schedule.

My escort doesn’t seem to share that view.

It makes matters worse, of course, when my obligatory trip through the metal detector produces a series of high-pitched shrieks. The noise doesn’t surprise either one of us, even though I turned in all coins and keys at the front desk along with my handgun. The metal detectors in the Barnstable County Complex scream for no reason all the time. Technicians are called in weekly, it seems, but the machines are never calibrated properly.

Miss Congeniality is obligated, because of the shrieks, to conduct a manual search, first with a handheld electronic scanner, then with her bare paws-an old-fashioned pat-down. Both are mandated by her job description, not by any real concern on her part. The rhythm of her gum chewing is unchanged. No weapon manufactured could make me a threat to her.

Apparently satisfied that my snow-sodden clothes hide only my underwear, she directs me toward the hallway with a toss of her head and a smack of her gum.

“Must be the dental work,” I tell her.

She walks past, wearing no sign that she heard, and continues down the hallway in front of me with neither a word nor a backward glance. Charm school didn’t work out, I guess.

She stops in front of a white metal door on our right and selects a key from dozens on her large oval ring. She shoves the door open with one hand and, with yet another toss of her head, directs me inside as she checks her watch.

Her glance at the watch prompts me to check my own. It’s after nine. “I won’t be long,” I promise, a futile attempt on my part to mollify her.

“Knock yourself out,” she says, the gum momentarily socked in her cheek. She assumes the pose of a sentinel as the heavy door slams shut between us.

The space has all the comforts of a telephone booth. Sonia Baker is already here, seated on the other side of a plastered partition, staring at me through a pane of bulletproof glass. She’s dressed in the standard prison-issued jumpsuit, a one-piece, bright orange version of the surgical scrub outfit she wore earlier.

I sit down in the solitary plastic chair that faces hers and pick up the black telephone on my side. She winces when she lifts her receiver, the movement apparently exacerbating some ache or pain. Neither one of us says anything at first. I’m wet, cold, and tired. Sonia Baker looks like she barely survived a train wreck.

The cast starts just below her shoulder, bends at the elbow, and extends to her wrist, with a narrow loop of plaster between her thumb and index finger. It’s the kind normally accompanied by a sling, but Sonia doesn’t have one. No such device is allowed in lockup; too many potential alternative uses. She supports the cast instead with her other arm, the phone cradled between her neck and head.

Her lips look somewhat better than they did earlier, but her right eye is much worse. We never iced it, I realize. It’s turned a deep purple, swollen completely shut. Her shoulder-length, bleached hair is tangled and matted on one side. It occurs to me that if I could slip her anything right now, it would be a hairbrush.

“What happened?” Her voice is brittle.

“I’m not sure.”

That’s a lie, of course. I have a pretty clear picture of what happened. But I want Sonia to do the talking.

“He’s really dead?”

The image of Howard Davis sprawled on the couch is fixed in my mind’s eye. He’s really dead.

“Yes, he is,” I report.

Her eyes fill. She lowers her head and hugs her cast tighter, but says nothing.

“Sonia, we need to start at the beginning. You need to tell me what happened to you.”

“To me?”

“Yes, to you.”

“What difference does that make?” She shakes her head. “Howard’s dead. I’m not.”

“It matters,” I tell her. “You’ve got to trust me on this.”

It’s too late and I’m too weary to delve into the legal and psychological complexities of battered woman’s syndrome.

“Please, Sonia, tell me what happened before you came to my office.”

She stares at her cast, apparently unsure where to start. “Sunday night poker,” she says.

“What?”

“That’s what happened. Howie plays poker on Sunday nights. Every week it’s the same thing. He stays out too late, drinks too much, wakes up hungover.” She lowers her eyes to her lap. “Mondays are always bad.”

“But this one was worse than usual,” I venture. Good God, I hope I’m right.

“Yes.” She looks up at me, tears streaming down both cheeks. “This time he did it up big.”

I wait in silence.

“He was out all night. It was after five when he came crashing through the door. And he’s supposed to be at work at eight. He passed out on the couch, didn’t even make it to the bedroom.”

I nod.

“I tried to wake him at seven. I really did. I tried five or six times to get him up for work.”

It seems important to Sonia that I believe this particular piece of information. “I’m sure you did,” I tell her.

“When he wouldn’t get up, I called in for him. Told them he was sick. Lots of people get sick this time of year; I think they believed me.”

I nod again.

“That doesn’t usually happen. Howie almost never misses work.” A man with a work ethic. What a catch.

Sonia rests her cast on the counter and wipes her face with her sleeve. “He woke up around noon, really mad. It was my fault he missed work, he said. It was my fault because I didn’t get him up. I told him I tried. I swore I tried, but he didn’t believe me.”

Sonia shakes her head, her expression bewildered, and lowers her eyes again. “When I told him I called in for him, called in sick, he got even madder.”

I stare hard at her. She doesn’t recognize the insanity in what she’s describing.

“He started drinking again,” she continues, still staring into her lap. “The day was wasted anyway, he said. He was storming around the living room; he was so mad his eyes were bulging. I went into the kitchen to get away from him, but he came in and grabbed me and slammed me against the refrigerator. He kept slamming me; I thought the damn thing was gonna fall over. When he let go, my knees wouldn’t work and I fell.”

She looks up at me. “He kicked me then.”

“Where?”

She points to her swollen, purple eye.

Howard Davis’s thick work boots appear before me.

“I thought he was finished,” she says. “Maggie was already outside and…”

Sonia catches her breath and interrupts herself. “Maggie,” she breathes, her good eye wide with panic. “What about Maggie? Where is she?”

“She’s fine. She’s at my office. She can stay with me until things get sorted out.”

Sonia sits back and takes a deep breath. “Thank you,” she whispers.

“It’s no problem. But Sonia, today’s Monday. Why wasn’t Maggie in school this morning?”

She drops her head onto her cast and I wait.

After a while, she looks up at me, embarrassed. “Maggie misses a lot of Mondays,” she says.

Of course. Mondays are always bad. She told me that.

“Okay, Sonia, so you thought he was finished.”

“Yeah. Usually it’s just one fit, you know what I mean? Usually once he takes a break, it’s over.”

“But not this time.”

“No, not this time. I tried to get to the kitchen door. Maggie left it open and was calling for me to come out. She’d started the car.”

Sonia almost smiles, her tears still falling. “I didn’t even know she knew how.”

I do my best to smile back at her. “So you ran for the kitchen door.”

“Yeah. But Howie grabbed me from behind. He threw his arm around my neck, really tight. I couldn’t breathe. When I tried to pull away he grabbed my arm with his other hand.” She pats her cast. “He bent my arm back, and he kept bending it.”

I close my eyes, picturing the physical disparity between Howard Davis and Sonia Baker.

“He wouldn’t stop.” She cries harder with the memory. “I heard a bone snap. He heard it too. He had to. But he wouldn’t stop.”

I remind myself to breathe.

“When he let go, I tried to get out again. Maggie was screaming outside. But I wasn’t fast enough. He smacked me in the face with the back of his hand.”

“That’s when your lip split.”

“I think so. Anyway, I fell into the kitchen table. I remember the salt and pepper shakers rolling onto the floor.” Sonia shakes her head and almost smiles again. “It’s funny I remember that, don’t you think? With everything else going on?”

I nod, encouraging her to continue, but she falls silent. We’re just getting to the hard part, I realize. “Then what, Sonia?”

“Then what?”

“What happened next?”

“Nothing happened next. He was done. He let me go. I got into the car with Maggie and she drove to your office. She said it was time to put an end to this and that you could help. She’d seen you visiting Patty Hammond, she said. And she’d seen you on the news. I wasn’t in any shape to argue.”

I stare at her. She’s composed now.

“Maggie driving,” she says. “I still can’t get over it. She did all right, too.”