Witch House (28 page)

“A transvestite?” said Carlos. “I didn’t know
Indians had those, too.”

“No!” Spinelli answered, and I could hear him
laughing in the background. “She was not a transvestite. She was a
woman working for the armored car company.”

I asked, “How do we know the bones we dug up
aren’t hers?”

“It’s simple pathology. One look at the bones
and our forensic pathologist said they belonged to a male. It’s
something about the pelvic bones and how they—”

“Yes, yes, I know how he can tell the
difference. Okay, listen. I have a hunch about something
anyway.”

“What is it?”

“Do you remember the name of the driver
killed during the armored car robbery?”

Spinelli paused briefly before answering.
“Davis, I think.”

“Do you remember his first name?”

“John; John Davis.”

Carlos said, “Our ghost said his name was
John!”

“Dominic, didn’t you tell me that Johnny Buck
shot the armored car driver in the face with a shotgun?”

“Yes, according to the reports.”

“Then that means John Davis would have had a
closed casket funeral, just like Johnny Buck, right?”

“It makes sense.”

“There you have it. Get a hold of Mister
Davis’ dental records and do a comparison. Make it priority
one.”

“Roger that. Anything else?”

“No, just do it quickly enough that we might
still have time to get another subpoena from Judge LaHaye in case
we need to dig up Davis’ grave tomorrow.”

“Oh, boy, that sounds like fun.”

“Just do it.” I hung up and handed the phone
back to Carlos. He seemed vindicated in his smile. “What?”

He took the phone and slipped it in his
pocket. “I knew it. Johnny Buck is still alive. That ghost we saw
was Davis’ ghost.”

“How do you figure?”

“Well, first off, he told us his name was
John. He did not say Johnny or Johnny Buck. Secondly, he said he
wanted to find out who shot him. Johnny Buck would know who shot
him.”

“Yes,” I said, “but our ghost was shot in the
back. John Davis was shot in the face.”

“We never saw a face on our ghost. Maybe it
is because it had been blown away.”

“I suppose.”

“And then there is the money sack from the
Wampanoag Indian casino. John Davis would certainly have had
opportunity to get his hands on something like that, wouldn’t
he?”

“Again, I suppose, but how do you explain
John Davis’ ghost in Johnny Buck’s house? Why would he haunt
there?”

Carlos pinched his chin and began stroking
his at his whiskers. “He’s waiting.”

“For what?”

“Davis’ ghost is in Johnny Buck’s house
waiting for him to return. When he does, he will extract his
revenge.”

“That’s exact.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“No, the phrase is he will exact his revenge.
That is the expression.”

“No, it’s extract. It means to take something
out. To extract revenge is to take revenge out on someone.”

“Yes, but that is not the expression one
uses. The common expression is to exact revenge.”

“Well, what if it is not so exact?”

“It doesn’t matter. It is still exact.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes.”

He looked at me skeptically. “I’d like to
exact myself from this conversation.”

“No, that’s extract.”

“Ah-ha! See?”

I shook the keys in front of his face. “Get
in the car.”

The following morning, Carlos and I met up
with Spinelli in the detective’s lounge just off the main
conference room upstairs at the Justice Center. He had laid out
some of his notes and assembled a few key documents and photos for
reference if we needed them. Frankly, I did not think we would. We
were four days into our investigation, and things were really
beginning to stall out on us. Dominic, having failed to obtain
permission from John Davis’ widow to access her husband’s dental
records, petitioned Judge LaHaye for the same. By seven-thirty that
morning, the judge handed down his decision against it, citing lack
of compelling evidence to warrant intercession.

“I don’t get,” said Dominic. He seemed
agitated. I attributed it to the coffee, which he had been making
stronger than usual these days, that and his allergy meds. Together
they had him hopping like a junkie. I told him he should switch to
decaf, but who am I to say? Coffee is sometimes the only thing that
keeps me going when a case gets as sticky as this one. “All we want
to do is identify the bones we found in Johnny Buck’s grave,” he
continued. “If they belong to John Davis, wouldn’t Mrs. Davis want
to know that?”

“It is a matter of privacy,” I said, “that
and closure. I am sure her husband’s murder pressed an impossibly
difficult situation upon Mrs. Davis, and she would simply prefer
not to drudge up all those difficult memories again.”

Carlos asked, “Why do we need dental records
anyway?”

Spinelli and I both turned to him, expecting
something silly and irrelevant from him next. But Carlos can
surprise you on occasion, even make you wonder if his step back
approach to things isn’t really a strategy for encompassing the big
picture without getting caught up in the minutia of the details the
way Spinelli and I sometimes do. I smiled guardedly, not expecting
this to be one of those times. “What was that?”

“Dental records,” he said. “That may have
been all we had to go on twenty years ago, but not now.”

“How do you mean?”

“DNA, don’t we have some downstairs?”

“He’s right,” said Spinelli. “We should still
have Davis’ uniform from the trial. It’s got to be downstairs in
the evidence room.”

“His blood will be all over it,” I said.

“Sure, and skin cells, maybe some loose hairs
in his hat; we compare that with DNA from the bones and bingo!”

“Bingo, we hope.”

“I’ll go down to evidence now and get—”

“Hold on, that can wait.” I pointed to the
chair across from me. “I want you here while we take a minute to
piece together what we have so far, make sure we are not missing
anything. Go on, take a seat, you too, Carlos.”

Spinelli came around the table and sat down
opposite me; Carlos settled in at the end. “Okay, first let us
start with some basic facts. We have the murder of René Landau,” I
said. “That is a fact, and as with any murder, we want to establish
motive, opportunity and means. Sergeant Powell; as a suspect, did
he have a motive to kill Landau?”

“He may have had several,” said Spinelli. “We
know he was seeing René’s fiancée while René was in prison. He
could have wanted to kill René after he got out so that he could
keep on seeing her.”

“The old love triangle,” I said, “A classic
motive if ever I heard one.”

“And if that wasn’t enough,” Carlos added,
“there is always the money. If Powell was in on the robbery, he may
have felt cheated out of his share after René claimed the money
burned up in the fire.”

I jotted those points down on a notepad and
followed it up. “So, he had motive; did he have opportunity and
means?”

Again, Spinelli answered. “He had opportunity
in the sense that he was on duty that night and cannot account for
his whereabouts at the hour René Landau was killed.”

“And means?”

Carlos and Dominic both gave me the look.
“That is your biggest hurdle, isn’t it?” said Carlos. “Without a
murder weapon, the D.A. will surely have an uphill battle.”

“Yes, but there is no doubt that if Powell
wanted to get his hands on a .38 he could. Look, we know Powell
went to Pete’s Place the night of the murder. He saw Landau there;
Pete will testify to that. We cannot put a .38 in the hands of any
of our suspects, but if we can help the D.A. show motive,
opportunity and enough circumstantial evidence, then we can get a
conviction on any one of them.”

“Amen to that,” said Dominic. “If
circumstantial evidence is what he wants, we’ve got a boatload of
it.”

“Yes, but focus. Maybe we can do better. How
abour Paul Kemper? What are the facts?”

“He went to college with Bill DeAngelo, we
know that, and by his own admission, he made numerous phone calls
to DeAngelo at the prison in the weeks leading up to Landau’s
release.”

“That ain’t enough to hang a man for murder,”
said Carlos in a decidedly Western accent. “That won’t even get him
disbarred.”

I agreed. “So, we are lacking motive.”

Spinelli came back, “Not if you consider that
Landau may have confided in him about the money.”

I shook my head. “No, that is a stretch. We
can argue that he conspired with Judge Cardell and Warden DeAngelo
to have Landau sent to Walpole, which may get him disbarred, but it
does not provide adequate motive, opportunity or means.”

“Which is exactly why I think he did it,”
Carlos complained. “He’s a slippery weasel and he knows the
rope-a-dope of law.”

“Regardless, we have nothing on him. How
`bout Bill DeAngelo?”

“Fact,” said Dominic, “he paid rent for the
state’s primary witness against Landau for the past seventeen
years, all the while providing for conjugal visits and other
special considerations for the two.”

“Couple that,” said Carlos, “with DeAngelo’s
relationship with Judge Cardell and his friendship with Kemper, and
you have some serious circumstantial evidence pointing toward a
conspiracy justifying a motive for murder.”

“Agreed. What about opportunity and
means?”

“Opportunity, yes,” Dominic offered. “We know
he went to see Landau at the bar.”

“And means?”

“There again, no murder weapon, but a man
with DeAngelo’s connections would have no problem getting his hands
on a .38.”

I jotted down a few more notes. “Okay, so
that takes care of Powell, Kemper and DeAngelo. Who else do we
have?”

Carlos laughed. “Who don’t we have?”

“Stiles,” Dominic answered. “She might be the
catalyst motivating any one of our boys, but I don’t see her as a
suspect.”

I looked up at him from across the table.
“You don’t think she is capable?”

“Well, I suppose she is in the sense that she
might have pushed one of the guys to do it.”

“Then she is a suspect.”

“I suspected her all along,” said Carlos.

Spinelli and I both looked at him amusingly.
“I thought you were putting your money on Kemper.”

“I’m not putting money on anyone.”

“No, I mean I thought you…never mind.” I
sifted through some of the paperwork on the table. “Who’s
left?”

“The chief,” said Dominic. He pointed at an
old surveillance photo of Chief Mochohyett. “You know, he is the
closest thing to a mob boss that we have in this town.”

“Technically,” I said, “he is not in this
town. The casino sits on sovereign land within the state of
Massachusetts.”

“He’s still the closest thing to a mob boss
around here. If you ask me, he had a compelling motive, clear
opportunity and the surest means. After all, we know he has killed
before. Hell, he even snuffed out two of his own on Christmas
Eve.”

I scribbled the highlights of Spinelli’s
argument down on the paper before dropping my pen in complete
despair. “This is bad. Do you realize that for every reason we come
up with to insinuate one person’s guilt, we provide reasonable
doubt for the others? There is no way the D.A. can advance the case
with what we have here. There must be something we are
overlooking.”

“Well,” said Spinelli, sighing as he began
gathering up the photos and documents and stuffing them into manila
folders. “Maybe we’ll find it downstairs in the evidence room when
we tie those bones from Johnny Buck’s grave back to John
Davis.”

“Let’s hope,” I said.

“Oh!” He smiled, turning one of the photos
over and handing it to me. “I almost forgot; I have this
surveillance of you and Carlos. I thought you might want it.”

“Surveillance photo?”

“Yeah, but don’t worry. We weren’t surveying
you. We were surveying Stiles’ apartment. You two just happened to
be in the picture.”

I took the photo and looked it over
curiously. It was of Carlos and me all right, taken outside
Stephanie’s apartment the last time we were there. I remembered we
had loitered out in front of her building discussing first the case
and later Lilith, and how she employs witchcraft in everything she
does. We had not noticed the man in the car, sitting half a block
away, taking pictures of us. “This is from two days ago,” I
said.

“Yes.”

“I thought we stopped surveillance on
her.”

“Yeah, well I subbed the work out to an off
duty forensic officer who likes taking pictures in his spare time.
We already paid him up until the end of the week, so I figured what
the hell. You can keep that one.”

Carlos came in and leaned over my shoulder.
“Hey, that’s a good one,” he said. “Look how much taller I am than
you.”

“You are not that much taller than me.”

“Sure I am. You can see it right there.”

“Carlos, you are standing on the curb. I’m in
the street.”

“No, you’re not. You are up on the curb with
me.”

“I am not.” I grabbed a magnifying glass and
held it over the photo. “See here. I am standing in…shit!”

“You’re standing in shit?”

“No! Look at this.”

“Ah-ha. I told you. We are both on the
curb.”

“No, Carlos, I mean look at this.” I pointed
toward the top of the picture. “Look up at the balcony by Stiles’
door. There is somebody leaving.”

“Let me see.” He grabbed the magnifying glass
and held his nose to it. “It is. It’s someone coming out of her
apartment.” He backed away and slapped me on the arm. “It’s the guy
in the bedroom! I knew she was hiding someone in there.”

Spinelli said, “Give it here. Let me see.” He
took one look and said. “I know this guy.” He handed the photo and
glass back to me. “You know him, too. Take another look.”