Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1 & 2, January/February 2005

I

The punk rock receptionist in the suite of law offices had scored another piercing since I’d seen her last. The new ornament was a stainless steel stud beneath her lower lip, and when she spoke into the little wand of a microphone attached to her headset, I had the disorienting sensation of watching a plastic Wiffle bat try to hit a silver baseball.

As I glanced out the window behind her toward Steven Rothenberg’s late October view of the Boston Common, the receptionist said to me, “Steve’s available now.”

“Keep your seat. I know the way.”

Down the short hallway, Rothenberg’s door was open. Inside the office, a suit jacket hung from a coat tree, and his tie was tugged down below that prominent Adam’s apple. His hair wasn’t so prominent anymore, but the beard did what it could to make up for it.

Rothenberg stood from behind a cluttered desk. “John Francis Cuddy,” the right hand coming toward me, “Good to see you again.”

We shook, and I released my grip. “Bad sign, Steve.”

“I’m sorry?”

I dropped into one of the two client chairs in front of him. “Your wanting to shake hands with me. It tells my cynical side that this is a bad one.”

Rothenberg sat back down. “I’ll have to watch that.”

Since the criminal defense attorney had asked the private investigator to come over, I waited him out.

Rothenberg sighed and lifted a manila file from the corner of his desk.

“I got appointed on Commonwealth v. Tinch.”

Unusual enough name, it stuck with you. “The rape case out of Calem?”

“Alleged rape. Fourteen-year-old daughter of a conservative, incumbent state senator and a respected superior court judge. Eighteen-year-old defendant, so he’s going as an adult.”

The newscasts didn’t reveal the girl’s name, but the family was too well known for it not to be common knowledge. “Lisabeth Hamilton.”

A nod. “Ms. Hamilton claims that she was attacked two months ago, but reported the incident just last week.”

It didn’t take a genius. “When Ms. Hamilton discovered she was pregnant.”

“Right on the button. Her statement to the police reads that the attack occurred as she was walking home from school just after classes began. She’s ‘certain’ it was an African-American, though he wore a mask.”

“A mask, but not gloves?”

“Correct, hence she saw his hands. And Ms. Hamilton also claims she didn’t recognize her attacker, despite knowing Devonne Tinch from said school.”

“I thought the papers said Tinch lived in Dorchester?”

“He does. METCO student.”

A program that bussed promising kids from Boston’s inner-city neighborhoods like Dorchester to supposedly better “metropolitan” schools like Calem’s. “Steve, if the incident happened during the first week or so of classes, how sure are we that Ms. Hamilton would have met your client already?”

“He started last semester, struggled with his studies, and therefore repeated a year.”

I felt myself nodding. “Making the four-year age difference functionally three.”

“More like two, John. Ms. Hamilton skipped a year herself.”

“Okay, so the victim says she didn’t recognize the attacker, even though she actually knew him for eight or nine months.”

Rothenberg leaned back in his swivel chair. “And even though Mr. Tinch is three inches taller and twenty pounds lighter than the description Ms. Hamilton gave to the police.”

“Steve, that could be just the stress of the situation.” I tried to recall the news report’s details. “Didn’t your client get nailed by a DNA match on semen from the victim’s clothes?”

“Yes.” Rothenberg came forward now, frowning as he leafed through the file. “My client was arrested in the current case three days ago because his specimen went into the Registry’s database from a plea three years ago.”

“Rape also?”

“No. Indecent assault.”

“Which sounds an awful lot like rape bargained down to a lesser charge. And maybe a pattern of conduct on your client’s part.”

Rothenberg closed the file. “He didn’t wear a mask three years ago.”

“So he’s learning from his past mistakes. And he necessarily would have known the Hamilton girl could recognize him.”

Rothenberg sighed, then slumped back into his chair again. “You know what drives me nuts, John?”

“Private investigators?”

“Innocent clients. The guilty ones, I make the system work for them the best I can, but I can also sleep nights, knowing that something I didn’t think of never got the wrong guy put in jail. On this baby, though...”

“Steve, they’ve got a DNA match, so unless this Tinch has a twin brother—”

“Just an older one, I think—”

“—I don’t see there’s much I can do for you.”

Rothenberg pursed his lips, then gave a judicious nod. “Tell you what, John. On my dime, go see Devonne Tinch, give me your take on him.”

“Steve...”

“Please.” Rothenberg waved his hand over the file as though administering a blessing. “The paperwork reads right for him as the guy, but the kid’s attitude just doesn’t feel right for it.”

I dropped my head, then looked back up. “Is Tinch in Middlesex, then?”

The so-called “new” Middlesex County Courthouse and Jail had been open for about thirty years now, and the building’s furnishings were starting to show it. I sat in a little conference room with glass walls across a scarred and scorched tabletop from a slim, intense young black male with a shaved head and a face like a camp hatchet. A corrections officer stood outside the room, watching for security reasons but not listening in on us.

Devonne Tinch stared through me as he spoke. “I did not rape that bitch.”

I clasped my hands on the table. “Looks like we have to start with a vocabulary lesson, Devonne. Ms. Hamilton is either the ‘victim,’ or the ‘accuser,’ or just the ‘complaining witness.’ ”

“Now you sound like a cop.”

“I was. Military Police, but a long time ago.”

“Army, huh?” Tinch stood down a bit. “I was thinking about joining the army too. Get that scholarship program for college.”

“Let’s think about more current events, like your version of what happened.”

A flare from the eyes. “My version is that nothing happened.”

“Then where were you on the afternoon Ms. Hamilton claims she was attacked?”

“How should I know, man? That was two months ago, and my lawyer says even Lissy’s not dead sure which day it was.”

Lissy. “Can you remember back three years, then?”

Tinch blew out a breath smelling of “mystery meat,” a jailhouse staple.

“I was just a kid — fifteen years old. The bit — the victim was twenty-five, gave me liquor, saying her old man wasn’t treating her right, then she starts touching and feeling me up. Next thing I know, we’re going at it, not even using a condom or nothing — hell, I could of caught a disease. Then her old man comes through the door, and she’s screaming rape.”

“The conviction still stands.”

“I wasn’t convicted. I plea-bargained it, on account I was a juvie, and they said that meant the record’d be sealed up. Only now it turns out they can unseal the DNA stuff.”

“You tell the good folks at the METCO program about your juvenile record?”

“You out of your mind? I’m a black student with decent grades in a crappy school, and I got the chance to attend an A-plus school in Calem that might get me on to college. What would you do?”

“I was never in the position.”

Tinch grunted out a derisive laugh and waved his hand behind him, toward the cells. “Yeah, well, this here’s my ‘position.’ And it’s gonna be, till you and Rothenberg figure out a way to prove I didn’t rape that girl.”

“Did you ever have consensual sex with her?”

“No, man. Never, not once.”

“Then how do you account for your DNA being on her clothes?”

A cruel, wise smile. “Same way Johnnie Cochran accounted for it in O. J.’s case. I was framed.”

“If that’s your best argument, Devonne...”

Tinch held his hands up shoulder high, as in a double stop sign. “Look, I knew Lissy Hamilton. Plus, my girlfriend Gloria and her go back to grammar school together.” Tinch looked around, then hunched forward, maybe being sure the corrections officer outside the glass wall couldn’t read his lips. “I’m gonna attack somebody who can identify me and is best buds with my own girl? Come on, man, there’s lots of easier ways.”

I was beginning to see what Steve Rothenberg meant by Tinch not “feeling” right for the crime. “Does Gloria have a last name?”

“Yeah. Carson.”

Time to change tacks. “Any chance your older brother could help us here?”

“Maurice?” A streak of what I took to be genuine sadness crossed Devonne Tinch’s features. “No, man. Maurice and me, we don’t get along so good.”

Five minutes later I’d recovered my cell phone from the security pod on the citizen side of the bars. Then I called Steve Rothenberg to tell him I’d give it a day. Or two.

I hadn’t been out to Calem for a while, and driving through the town center reminded me of why I never much liked it. Too clean, too cute, too aware of itself as a picture-perfect place to live. I tried to imagine the battle some poor school administrator had to have fought to get METCO kids like Devonne Tinch out to paradise.

I found a parking place on the street just down from the police station itself, but when I asked the civilian behind the inside counter for the one detective I knew there, she said he was on vacation. Then I mentioned Devonne Tinch and got a rotten egg scowl from the civilian, who asked to see my ID before calling “upstairs.”

The officer who came out a door to a short staircase was fortyish and plump, with an hospitable smile on her face. A generation before, she’d have modeled as a homemaker baking sugar cookies and pouring large glasses of milk.

“John Cuddy?”

“That’s me.”

“Aphrodite Smith.”

I tried not to cringe, but Smith caught something. “My parents figured that with a plain last name, I’d need an exotic first one to spur me on to beauty and grace. Nice game plan, just didn’t work.”

I was beginning to like her. “I gather you’re the detective on the Tinch case?”

“Sergeant Detective. Like the Boston force, we do rank first, duty second.”

“There somewhere we can talk?”

“Follow me.”

Smith entered a small interrogation area with the square footage of a walk-in closet. Table, chairs, one-way mirror on the wall. If there were four of us instead of two, you’d picture that stateroom scene from one of the Marx Brothers’ movies.

We sat, she examined my ID a little more thoroughly than the civilian had, then handed it back to me.

“You’re the visitor, Mr. Cuddy.”

“I’ve been asked by Mr. Tinch’s lawyer to investigate Lisabeth Hamilton’s complaint of rape against him.”

Elbows came onto table, chins in palms of hands. “First ground rule: I do not say the name of the complaining witness.”

“Fair enough. Does the witness have an explanation for why she waited two months to report the supposed attack?”

A disappointed look. “Mr. Cuddy, I hope you’re neither that stupid nor that disingenuous.”

“Ms. Hamilton reported the ‘rape’ only after she realized she was pregnant.”

“Girls that age have irregular periods, and they’re often late.”

“A reason why Ms. Hamilton might not be sure she was pregnant, but not a reason why she wouldn’t be sure she’d been raped.”

“Mr. Cuddy, certainly you know how difficult it can be for any victim of violence to pursue it formally. In this case, the witness did not believe she recognized her attacker, so there was no one to accuse. And she wasn’t even aware of the DNA Registry being in existence.”

“Lucky thing, then, that she came forward even when she did.”

Smith paused, then rolled her head on her shoulders. “She was a frightened little girl, Mr. Cuddy. After being attacked, she took off her clothes and bathed, as anyone might under the circumstances.”

“She washed herself, but not her clothes.”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t throw them away, either.”

“As stated in my report, which I’m sure Mr. Rothenberg has shown you, the witness placed her clothes from the incident in a plastic bag.”

First shades of the O. J. case, and now Monica’s. “You’re comfortable with a DNA match based on two-month-old stains and three-year-old database samples?”

“The techies are, so I am too.” Smith lowered her voice, made it a little chilly. “For God’s sake, they’re exonerating convicted inmates left and right on matches — or failures to match — that go back two decades.”

“Did you test Mr. Tinch’s older brother, Maurice?”

“We requested he provide a sample, but Maurice Tinch declined, as he has every right to.”

“Won’t a jury wonder about that, though?”

“Not my department.” Smith spread her hands on the tabletop and dropped her voice another five degrees. “Look, Mr. Cuddy, Calem is a good town. I grew up here, and when the METCO program was struggling to get off the ground, people like Grant and Willa Hamilton argued in favor of bringing kids like Devonne Tinch into our public schools, to which the Hamiltons send their own children. Through the years, ninety-five, even ninety-nine percent of these METCO kids have been fine, but every once in a while, things go haywire, probably something from when they were younger and a kind of flashback hits them. And then they commit an incredibly stupid crime.”

When Smith seemed to be finished, I said, “Given that it was a rape, why not just have an abortion? Quietly.”

A sigh. “Mr. Cuddy, in this commonwealth, any child under sixteen must have a parent’s permission to have an abortion, or she has to go before a trial judge to get a court order.”

I considered that. “Difficult path to follow for the daughter of a judge and a conservative state politician.”

“That’s not the worst of it.” Smith seemed to warm up a little. “I’ve known girls — like the victim here — try so-called ‘home’ remedies. Jumping rope for twenty hours straight to induce a miscarriage. Eating Twinkies and drinking Dr Pepper.”

“Has Ms. Hamilton had an abortion as yet?”

“Quite frankly, none of my business, and certainly none of yours.”

Smith rose from her chair. “We’ve crossed every t and dotted every i on this one, Mr. Cuddy. Now, is there anything else?”

Given the current temperature of Sergeant Detective Aphrodite Smith’s voice, I decided not to ask what time high school let out these days.

II

I really felt like a ghost from history. Not only did the kids milling and strolling and acting out seem about twelve years old, but the campus and its buildings looked more like a private college than a public high school, even in a town as ritzy as Calem.

One pair of kids stood out a little, though. Maybe because they were arguing, and the others gave them a wide berth.

The first girl was about five-five and blonde, wearing a short skirt and boots out of a Frankenstein movie that kicked her height up another four inches. The second girl was olive-skinned, with brown hair streaked blonde, in a tank top and sweatpants with little strings at the bottom for tying. Probably in some fashion statement, the strings were untied and flopped around her sneakers as she shifted from one cocked hip to the other.

When I heard the second girl start a sentence with “Lissy, don’t be a bitch about this,” I figured I might have found Ms. Hamilton.

Then the second girl stomped off, nearly tripping on those untied strings at the bottom of her sweats.

I said, “Lisabeth Hamilton?”

She turned, awkwardly, given the boots. “Yeah?”

“I thought I was going to see a boxing match break out.”

Hamilton did a dry spit in the direction of the departed girl. “Well, like, her boyfriend raped me, so Gloria and I aren’t exactly on the best of terms anymore.”

Not exactly the “frightened” young woman Aphrodite Smith had described either. “I could see that three days ago, when Devonne Tinch was arrested, but now?”

“Yeah, well, I’m on meds, you know? Help me, like, handle the stress.”

Which made no sense to me as an answer, but then, if she were on drugs, it might explain both her attitude and the non sequitur.

“I wonder if I could ask you a few questions?”

Baby doll pout. “You’re a cop, let’s see a badge.”

I opened my ID holder.

Hamilton just glanced at it. “Oh, that is so lame. You’re a private eye working for that monster?”

“Trying to make sure an innocent man doesn’t—”

“Hey,” from over my left shoulder, “what’s going on?”

Hamilton glanced that way, then belted out, “Trevor, this asshole was just leaving.”

I turned to see three guys, looking very football, walking in stride with each other. The one in the center seemed to be the leader, with a Mohawk cut and a quarterback’s build. The other two were shorter and heavier, kind of second-string offensive guards, though they affected the same hairdo.

Quarterback said, “You’re leaving, asshole.”

“Perhaps not just yet, Trevor.”

He grabbed me by the lapel of my suit jacket. I let him pull me toward him, then stepped aside and did a sweep kick, taking his feet out from under him. He landed with a very satisfying “whoosh” sound gushing from his lungs.

“Hey,” said one of his friends, facial features tightening but his body language making no attempt to back it up, “you can’t leg-whip somebody. That’s against the rules.”

“Let’s hope a rule is all I break.”

Again from behind me, I heard something, but more a car gunning its engine than a voice, though I thought I caught the word “Lissy” shouted over the noise.

The car turned out to be a Lincoln Navigator, roughly the size of a Navy destroyer. A bearish guy who looked just like he did on television broadcasts from the statehouse steps stormed out of the S.U.V., and a kid who could have been Lisabeth’s younger brother slipped from the passenger’s side.

Grant Hamilton strode mightily toward us as Trevor, still on the ground, coughed and gurgled a little. “What are you doing with my daughter?”

I glanced toward the young lady in distress, tending to her fallen knight, and I tried to take the sensibilities of her younger brother into account. “Asking questions about some accusations against Devonne Tinch.”

Lisabeth turned to her father. “He’s a private eye, working for that... boy.”

Daddy’s jaw jutted out like Gibraltar. “I have a re-election campaign to run, and we have nothing to say to you.”

“Fine, but I was just assaulted by — what, your daughter’s boyfriend?”

Grant Hamilton whipped out a cell phone. “I’m calling the police.”

Time to bluff. “Just came from there, actually. But it’s a nice department, and Sergeant Detective Smith is a sweetie. On the other hand, we could just go to your house, straighten this out, before the media gets a hold of it and blows it way out of proportion. In front of your electorate.”

Daddy fumed, but instead of 911, he hit a speed dial and announced that everybody would be home in fifteen minutes. With a guest.

“Home” turned out to be a garrison colonial on about three acres. I parked at the curb, since the driveway was dominated by a Mercedes sports coupe and the Navigator, which had been barreling ahead of me for the past ten minutes. Grant Hamilton exited the driver’s side, his son the passenger’s. Lisabeth had chosen — stamping her feet — to stay by the side of boyfriend Trevor back at the high school.

Hamilton himself ushered me through a living room to a family one that had various placards on stakes, with legends reading HAMILTON: INCUMBENT, TRUSTWORTHY; THE RIGHT TO LIFE; and MANDATORY SENTENCING MAKES SENSE, just in case you had some doubt about where “the incumbent” stood on such issues with elections coming up early the next month. Then he bellowed out a “Willa” while I descended three beautifully tiled steps toward a daybed next to a door that, from its window panels, gave onto the attached garage. By the time I’d turned around, the young son had disappeared and the wife had replaced him in the room, moving with that almost athletic grace authority seems to give certain people, in this case a superior court judge still on the law-school side of fifty, wearing a business suit.

“Willa,” said Hamilton, “this man is a private investigator working for that Tinch bastard.”

I thought Mrs. Hamilton might flinch, but instead she smiled, as though used to such introductions. “And does this private investigator have a name?”

“John Cuddy,” I said, taking a seat in the middle of the daybed.

“Mr. Cuddy, Willa Hamilton.”

She lowered herself into an easy chair the way a ballerina might. Her husband stayed standing.

I addressed the judge. “I know this is difficult for you.”

“You know nothing,” said Her Honor, pleasantly enough.

Okay. “Your Lisabeth claims to have been raped two months ago, yet she reported it only last week. Did she tell you sooner?”

“We decline to answer.” Again, pleasantly.

“Judge, I don’t think that’ll be an acceptable response in a courtroom.”

Now a pleasant smile. “We’re not in a courtroom, sir.”

“I just saw your daughter having an argument with her close friend, Gloria Carson.”

“Good family and a fine girl.”

I noticed the order of the compliments as Daddy chimed in with, “Until she took up with that ghetto scum.”

I began to get the feeling that it was mostly Mrs. Hamilton who had advocated for the METCO program to come into Calem. Looking from one parent to the other, I said, “Are you going to give your permission for an abortion?”

Grant Hamilton’s face actually went purple. “Our daughter was raped! Of course—”

Mom said simply, “Grant?” in that same pleasant tone, but it shut him up like he’d been slapped.

I decided I was glad I’d never dated a judge.

Then Mrs. Hamilton made a graceful gesture with her right hand.

“Darling, I believe it’s your turn to drive Kenny and his friends to their soccer game.”

Daddy said, “Yes, it is,” then bellowed out a “Kenny, let’s go,” before heading toward the door that opened onto the garage.

I stayed with his wife. “Where do Gloria and her good family live?”

On his way, the senator stopped at a telephone table. He grabbed a White Pages and slung it at me, the book fluttering like a shot duck on the way down.

Grant Hamilton said, “Take it with you as you leave.”

When I got back into my car, I searched for Gloria’s last name. No “Carson” listed for the town of Calem.

Figured. A cellular moment.

I dialed a friend at the Department of Revenue, the commonwealth’s tax arm. He gave me a hard time, but on my fourth “Bernie, it’s just an address,” he gave me that, too.

III

“Gloria is not here, and you are not to see her anywhere.”

The woman who opened the front door bore a striking resemblance to her daughter, who would age awfully well if the gene pool somehow held its sway over American fast food.

The woman’s slight Spanish accent led me to say, “Mrs. Carson, may I ask where you’re from originally?”

“Cuba. Now, please go.”

“Mrs.—”

“I have been in this country as many years as the Castro refugees were when we Marielitos arrived here, thanks to your President Carter and our ‘beloved’ Fidel. I know my rights of citizenship, and among them is the one not to talk with you.”

The door closed.

Maurice Tinch wasn’t at home when I knocked on the door of the three-decker in Dorchester, a neighborhood that functioned pretty well as a mixing pot — if not a melting pot — of Irish-, Greek-, and African-Americans. However, a neighbor tending her window boxes told me he’d likely as not be at the tavern down the block.

And he was, corner stool, using the nail of an index finger to peel the label off an empty bottle of Miller High Life. Tinch seemed to take great pride in his work.

The place was nearly empty, smelling of stale beer and urine, the linoleum tacky to the soles of my shoes as I walked over to him. Like the Carson mother and daughter, Devonne’s brother and he bore a striking resemblance to each other.

But, best to be sure. “Maurice Tinch?”

He didn’t look up from his peeling operation. “Depends on who be doing the asking.”

I took the next stool. “You ready for another one of those?”

“Now that’s the kind of question I been waiting on.”

I made a circling peace sign to the bartender, and when our beers arrived, Tinch drew about half his bottle before setting it back down.

I said, “Thirsty today?”

A shrug. “Man wants to buy me a drink, could be he’ll buy me another when this one here’s gone.”

“Could be.” I took out my ID holder. “I’m a private investigator, trying to help your brother.”

“Devonne?” Now a harsh laugh, Tinch never even glancing at my license.

“Man, nobody can help that boy.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Another few ounces of High Life took its next to last trip. “Devonne, he don’t just want to not be from here. He want to forget he ever was from here.”

I couldn’t guess why. “And that’s why nobody can help him?”

“Devonne, he got himself into this, going out to that nice surburban town, and its nice school, learn all that fancy stuff like math and science. Well, it seem to me science is what sunk the boy.”

“I understand you declined to have your DNA tested.”

“Damned straight. Look what it done for my little brother.”

“You know any of his friends from Calem?”

The fingernail scraped a mite harder against the clear glass. “Devonne, he never did like to bring his friends to our apartment down the street. He showed me a picture once, though, somebody took of them all standing together. Devonne and his squeeze name of Gloria, that Hamilton fox the police say he raped, and the fox’s boyfriend, the quarterback or some such on the football team, probably wear helmets made from gold. Well, you look at that picture, man, and what do you see?”

“You tell me.”

“Devonne, he look like a turd next to three slices of Wonder bread.”

“And you never met any of the three?”

“Uh-uh. Like I said to you, Devonne, he don’t want his fine friends meeting his worthless brother.”

Tinch downed the last of the beer. “How’s about a refill?”

I slid the one I hadn’t touched over to Maurice Tinch and wished the man a nice day.

Which it was. A nice day, that is, at least for late October.

And after spending time with the people I had earlier, a little cleansing ceremony seemed appropriate.

The flowers on the next grave in the row overlooking Boston Harbor had wilted badly, but not having put them there, I didn’t feel right moving them either. So instead I split my bouquet in two and knelt down, covering the long-dead flowers with some recently dead ones.

John, John. Always the best kid on the block.

I looked at her headstone. ELIZABETH MARY DEVLIN CUDDY. “Beth, I haven’t been ‘on the block’ for a long time now.”

Doesn’t matter. You always will be.

The remark reminded me of something Maurice Tinch had told me about his brother, and therefore I shared the lowlights of the case so far with my one and only wife.

But doesn’t the DNA evidence mean it has to be your client?

“Sure seems that way. But like Steve Rothenberg said, the kid doesn’t feel right for it.”

I wouldn’t want to bet on a jury “feeling” that way too.

I was about to tell her I agreed when my cell phone danced a little jig in my jacket pocket. I took it out, and the yellow window display showed in green letters the abbreviation in my “address book” for the Law Offices of Steven Rothenberg, Esq.

IV

It was nearly dark by the time I arrived at the location his punk rock receptionist had given me, so the State Police Crime Lab Unit had klieg lights up in the copse of majestic oak trees, giving a theatrical flair to the otherwise carnival-like atmosphere of spinning and flashing lights of the official vehicles, including the blue-and-white bubbles atop the medical examiner’s minivan.

Wending my way through the rubberneckers, I asked a young Calem uniform for Sergeant Detective Aphrodite Smith. He said she was consulting with a statie detective and couldn’t be disturbed. I told him she’d called a lawyer looking for me, and he told me to follow him.

As we entered the wood line, I could hear the buzzing of the evening flies thirty feet before we reached the cordoned area around the body. Techies were inside the yellow tape, Smith and a former fullback in a business suit just outside, notebooks out and pens in hand. The fullback began asking a long question of one techie as I reached Smith and she looked up at me.

“Recognize the decedent?”

I willed my eyes to go to the body, still in its tank top and sweatpants with the untied strings. “I never met this young woman, but I saw her on your high school campus around two thirty P.M. I believe that’s Gloria Carson.”

“As in girlfriend of Devonne Tinch?”

“Yes. I saw Gloria’s mother about half an hour later, at the Carson house, but she wouldn’t let me inside.”

Smith motioned toward the body. “Joggers found her. Popular place after five, but pretty much empty earlier in the day.”

I looked down again. “That’s a pretty nasty head wound for so little blood here.”

“Agreed. Preliminary is fractured skull, but done elsewhere.”

“One silver lining.”

Smith looked at me like we were playing poker. “I’d love to hear it.”

“My client’s in jail.”

“Meaning, it couldn’t have been him.”

“That’s right.”

“His brother isn’t.”

I was about to tell Smith I didn’t think Maurice “High Life” Tinch would be in any shape to make his way to Calem when I heard what sounded like Mrs. Carson’s voice, crying out her daughter’s name.

Desperately.

Smith squeezed her eyes shut. “Cuddy, you seen Mystic River yet?”

I knew what she meant. “No, but I’ve read the book.”

Sergeant Detective Aphrodite Smith closed her notebook and began to walk toward Mrs. Carson’s voice. “Well, now we both get to act in the play.”

“My husband is away on his business in New York City.” Mrs. Carson swiped a handkerchief across her nose, then brought it against her eyes. “I must telephone to him.”

Since I knew the poor woman, even just slightly, Smith asked me to stay as we waited in the Carsons’ darkened living room for a neighbor to drop off her own child with another family and come to comfort the bereaved.

Smith said, “We believe your daughter was killed somewhere else and then moved to the park. Mr. Cuddy here saw her with Lisabeth Hamilton just after classes ended today. Do you have any idea where Gloria might have gone from the high school?”

“No.” The hankie came down to half-mast. “She did not come home yet, but that is not unusual. Even after Devonne — her...” Mrs. Carson seemed to leave us for a moment. Then, “In Cuba, when I am very young, there was a man from Holland. He tells me once the story of the stork. The way I believe him, little babies come from eggs, like the birds. For years I would see a shell on the ground, broken, and I would smile, even to look up at the sky, because for me, it meant a new life had just begun itself.”

The hankie covered Mrs. Carson’s eyes again. “Only now somebody has killed my little bird, and Gloria is gone from my sky forever.”

Aphrodite Smith looked over at me now, and I decided I was also glad I’d never dated a police detective.

Given the head start I had on Maurice Tinch’s likely whereabouts, I found him in the nearby tavern before the unmarked sedan parked in front of his three-decker began a canvas of the neighborhood.

Still on the corner stool, Tinch caught me coming into the bar. He’d just about finished peeling the label off the fifth of five empty bottles of High Life. You could bet he’d finished the beer itself long before.

“The man who likes to buy me beer.”

I took the next stool again, but waved off the approaching bartender.

“You do that with every bottle you drink?”

“The way I pace myself. I don’t drink the next one until I finish scraping off the last.”

“You been pacing yourself here since I saw you?”

“Uh-oh.” He stopped his fingernail and actually engaged my eyes. “Now that sound to me like a police question.”

“It soon will be. Gloria Carson, Devonne’s girlfriend, was killed out in Calem sometime this afternoon.”

“Well, well.” A shake of the head as he doubled his efforts on the label. “Seem like that town just bad luck for everybody, don’t it?”

I glanced toward the beer cooler. “Our bartender be willing to alibi you?”

“Like they call it in the movies, I am iron-clad. Been sitting here since twelve noon, and I left my fine stool only to go to the Men’s. And Devonne, he in jail, so he be free on this one too.”

“Any ideas who might not be?”

“Like I say before, Devonne never bring any of his ‘society’ friends around. Besides, I think he like it fine, visiting his girl-friend’s house out there. Her daddy travel a lot, her momma got to go to the store and such. Privacy, if you catch onto my drift.”

“Your brother and Gloria Carson made love in her parents’ house?”

“Wouldn’t be up to our bloodline if he didn’t.” Maurice Tinch finished with the label. “My, my, what do you know? Looks like you come just in the nick of time.”

V

“Any good news?”

From the way Devonne Tinch toned his voice in the jail’s little conference room, I didn’t think he’d yet heard about Gloria Carson.

There is no easy way to tell someone that kind of bad news, so I decided to go for shock value in the hope of opening him up.

“Devonne, Gloria’s dead.”

His hard eyes bore into me. “Say what?”

“Somebody caved in her skull, then dumped her body in a public park under some trees.”

Tinch came out of his chair, fists curled, but more to pound my chest than punch. I clamped my hands around his wrists, and shook my head in an emphatic “no” to the guard stationed outside the glass walls.

Tinch shuddered once, twice, then just seemed to collapse inside himself, dropping back into his chair nearly hard enough to break it.

I waited a moment before, “Devonne?”

He brought his palms up to his face. “Who would want to kill Gloria?”

“Your brother told me you visited her out in Calem.”

“Of course I did. That’s where she lives... lived.”

“At her house. When her parents weren’t home.”

Tinch snapped up at me, his hands slapping the tabletop in front of him. “You mean, did I do the deed with her? Oh, sure, man. I nailed every damned white girl in the whole damned town.”

“Devonne, stay with me on this. It’s important.”

A sullen expression. “What is?”

“You remember telling me about the incident three years ago, with the older woman?”

“Yeah. So?”

“Did you ever mention it to Gloria?”

“Man, that’d be crazier than me telling the METCO people about it.”

“You also said something like, ‘I didn’t even wear a condom. I could have gotten a disease.’ ”

“Like I told you. But what does that have—”

“When Gloria and you made love, did you use a condom?”

“Of course we did. You think I didn’t learn my lesson?” Tinch closed his eyes and hung his head. “We even made a little game out of it, her putting the thing on me and then her taking it off again afterwards.”

“And Gloria was friends with Lisabeth Hamilton since grade school, right.”

“So?”

“So where do you suppose Lisabeth got a sample of your semen to put on her clothes?”

Devonne Tinch opened his eyes, and his mouth too, though no words came out.

More of a wail.

On my drive back out to Calem, the radio news broadcast closed its coverage of Gloria Carson’s murder with an announcement that the town’s high school would be closed for the following two days, except that grief counselors would be available “as usual” for any students wanting to talk about their friend and classmate’s death. As I turned onto the right street, I turned off the radio, thinking that it would have been unthinkable during my teenaged years for there to be a standard protocol for dealing with a student’s sudden, violent death.

The big Lincoln Navigator roared out of its driveway, the garage door opened behind it to show the Mercedes coupe still there. Because of the window tinting on the S.U.V., I couldn’t see who was in it, but the driver sped the car down the street the way Grant Hamilton had led me to his home earlier that day.

I parked at the curb again and walked up to the Hamiltons’ front door.

I knocked, first softly, then really pounding. Nobody responded.

I went into the garage, and the door from it onto the family room was unlocked. I walked quietly until I could hear muffled crying from upstairs. I climbed the steps, staying to the inside edge of each to minimize any squeaking.

And to notice that two people were crying behind separate closed doors.

I picked the one that sounded more like a fourteen-year-old girl.

After knocking and hearing a “Go away,” from behind the paneled wood, I tried the handle. Unlocked, also. I eased the door open.

Inside the room, Lisabeth Hamilton was lying prone diagonally across her bed, crying into a pillow she’d scrunched under her face. There was some kind of video playing on the computer screen in a hutch next to the bed, a frilly reading chair beside the hutch.

Given the thick wall-to-wall carpeting, I didn’t think she’d heard me walk in. “Lisabeth?”

She abruptly rose up onto knees and elbows, swinging her face around to glare at me through the tears. “What are you doing in my house?”

“I know what you and Gloria did, and I even know why.”

Hamilton went back to her pillow. “Get out of here.”

“But you have to tell me who killed her and why.”

“Get out now!”

A bluff had worked with her father back on the school grounds. “Whether you’ve had the abortion yet or not, some tissue from the fetus is kept as evidence in the rape case. And tested, Lisabeth, including for DNA.”

Hamilton let out a wail that didn’t sound any better coming from her than its mate had from Devonne Tinch back at the Middlesex jail.

I took another step into the room. “And this time, the DNA won’t match my client’s.”

From behind me, I heard the choked voice of the Honorable Willa Hamilton manage to say, “You move, and I’ll shoot.”

We made an odd trio. Lisabeth, still lying on her bed, crying in denial. Mrs. Hamilton, standing, with her makeup ruined and her hands shaking around a short-barreled revolver, its muzzle wavering but close enough not to miss if she emptied the thing in my direction. And me, sitting in the frilly reading chair next to Lisabeth’s computer hutch.

“Judge, put down the gun and call Sergeant Detective Smith.”

“You broke into our house, and I—”

“I walked in, the doors were open. And what motive would I have for harming either of you?”

“You’re working for that monster, that—”

“Judge, private investigators don’t kill complaining witnesses. We interview them, dig around a little, even figure some things out.”

“What... things?”

I’d finally broken through. Maybe. “Your daughter became pregnant all right, but not by rape and not by Devonne Tinch.”

Hamilton’s eyes told me this wasn’t news to her, and I hoped that would make the difference.

I said, “My money’s on a certain quarterback, from a tryst about two months ago. But when Lisabeth discovered she was pregnant last week, she’d have had to decide what to do about it. Since your daughter’s underage, she’d also have to get her parents’ permission. Not exactly likely, given your husband’s ‘pro-life’ placards in the family room downstairs. There’s a procedure Lisabeth could have followed to get a court-approved abortion without parental permission, but your daughter would probably fear that one of your judicial colleagues would leak the news to her mother. Unless, of course, the pregnancy was the result of a rape, which would let Lisabeth go the parental route and make it ‘acceptable,’ family relations-wise.”

“That Tinch monster raped my daughter.”

“No good, Judge. Lisabeth knew she’d need to give you an extreme case to guarantee the abortion, and so she chose an anonymous somebody from another race as the unwilling donor. Ah, correction: My client ‘donated’ voluntarily enough; he just didn’t know that Gloria would bring the used condom to your daughter, who smeared the contents on her clothes before going to the police.”

“That... is... absurd.”

“Then why aren’t you asking your daughter to deny it?”

No response.

I said, “Devonne was in Calem thanks to METCO, but he never revealed the juvenile offense that put his DNA into the Registry’s database. He didn’t tell his girlfriend, either, so given Lisabeth’s and Gloria’s long friendship, he was the perfect donor, as the two girls probably thought any ‘black’ DNA specimen would back up the rape charge, and, by Lisabeth claiming not to recognize — or even be able to identify — her ‘masked attacker,’ the abortion happens quietly with that grudging but understandable parental permission. Only Devonne’s DNA was ‘matched,’ and I’m guessing Gloria went ballistic as the news reports played out and she realized what she’d conspired to do. She confronted your daughter in the schoolyard this afternoon.”

Time to play my last card. “And then Gloria went ballistic with you.”

Her Honor shook her head. “You’re out of your mind.”

“At first, I liked your husband for it. He seemed to have the temper and certainly the strength. But he was off with son Kenny at that soccer game, right? And when Gloria decided she couldn’t convince Lisabeth to tell the truth, she did the most rational thing in the world: Gloria turned to her friend’s mother — who’s even a judge — to right a terrible wrong.”

Willa Hamilton’s hands dropped, the gun following the right one to her side, and not very gracefully, she slumped into a miserable sitting position on the thick carpet. “Gloria came here, demanding — demanding — that I call the police, the jail, everybody in sight, to exonerate her boyfriend. I tried to reason with her in our family room downstairs, to tell her we might be able to resolve it all quietly, but she screamed back that ‘my Devonne’ isn’t ‘jailing’ quietly. She started to storm out of the room, by the tiled steps, and I grabbed her, just to spin her around and talk sense to her. But she stumbled — those stupid laces at the bottom of her sweatpants — and she fell backwards and hard onto the edge of... The sound her head made...”

Speaking of sounds, I’d been so focused on Willa Hamilton and her gun that I hadn’t registered that her daughter wasn’t crying anymore. Just as I looked to the bed, Mrs. Hamilton said, “Then I wrapped poor Gloria in a shower curtain, and I drove to the park.”

That’s when Lisabeth sprang like a leopard from the bed and onto her mother, screaming and tearing at her hand for the revolver.

I’d just managed to pin the daughter’s hands behind her and scoop up the gun when her mother said in an anguished voice, “Honey, I didn’t want to kill Gloria, but once her life was already gone, I didn’t want anybody else’s life to join hers.”

I thought about the tiled step and Mrs. Carson’s parable from Cuba.

“Two birds with one stone.”

“What?” said Willa Hamilton.

I shook the cartridges out of the revolver’s cylinder. “Skip it.”