Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 924 & 925, September/October 2018

For the Memoir by Robert S. Levinson

Robert S. Levinson, longtime contributor to and friend of this magazine, passed away in March of this year. He was the author of 13 novels and dozens of short stories, and winner of a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Fiction Society. He is currently nominated for the PWA’s Shamus Award for his 2017 EQMM story “Rosalie Marx Is Missing.” We have two more of his stories coming up in 2019.

So, Adam, like you wanted, I’m speaking slowly and distinctly into this damn tape recorder with some more stream-of-consciousness stuff for you to work into shape for the memoir I got going, picking up where we left off on Tuesday...

Out of the blue I got this phone call from G. Jerry Jones, Esq., telling me in a silky baritone I had come highly recommended by a mutual friend and, therefore, was the public-relations guy he wanted to hire to create his image as L.A.’s preeminent criminal attorney-at-law. I’d never heard of G. Jerry Jones, Esq., but I did know the actress he named.

She was new to the business, a beautiful but invisible face, when I took her on as a client.

I pulled strings to get her on The Tonight Show, and that exposure led to her landing the title role in a network series and the costarring spot in a big-budget movie extravaganza over at Paramount. She showed her gratitude by firing me, saying her agent told her she now needed a PR firm bigger than my one-man operation, Michael Allen and Associates, the associates being my cats Velez and Yolanda.

I suppose sending G. Jerry Jones, Esq., to me was her way of making amends, but I had to explain to him that he would be my first client specializing in criminal law and I had serious doubts about how well I could do by him.

He shrugged off my concerns.

It was a gamble he could afford to take, he said. He was prepared to settle for simple, honest effort, recognizing that miracles take longer.

Ours was a successful relationship from the onset.

I portrayed G. Jerry as the eight-hundred-pound gorilla that other attorneys feared to compete against in a courtroom showdown.

That image caught on quickly.

The quantity of his cases and the quality of his clientele escalated.

He landed on the cover of Time and Business Week the same week, and we celebrated with dinner at Chasen’s, where they seated us at one of the plush, see-and-be-seen booths off the entrance that usually went to rich and famous faces like Hitchcock, Stewart, Cagney, Tracy, Liz Taylor, and Gregory Peck.

G. Jerry accepted congratulations and handshakes graciously, but otherwise was not his usual cheery self. He seemed edgy, rarely flashed the neon smile he often turned on to sway a jury when the weight of evidence was working against his client. I waited for the right moment to wonder if something was bothering him.

He answered reluctantly after finishing his brandy and soda and signaling our waiter to bring him another. He had to let me go, he said, but not because of the job I’d done for him. He had to let me go because I’d done too good a job portraying him as the new “King of Criminal Law.” His ex-wife Melanie was taking him back into court, using the mountain of publicity I’d scored for him to seek five times the alimony she had agreed to in G. Jerry’s less affluent years.

It’s an unwritten rule in the PR game that you hide the hurt and the anger when you’re dumped — I never understood why that was, but it was — so I sucked in my resentment and told him I understood. We spent the rest of the evening getting drunker than Irish mourners at a wake and parted after sharing bear hugs, a handshake, tears, and one of those whiskey promises sincere in the moment but easily forgotten with the dawn of sobriety and a splitting headache.

Not long afterward, G. Jerry was front-page news again without any help from me.

He had become lead counsel on the defense team representing Dr. Maxwell Edwards, the notorious “Dr. Doom,” who would be facing a third trial for the brutal rape and murder of his pregnant wife Audrey. The jury in the first trial found Edwards guilty of second-degree murder and he received a life sentence, but the conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court after Edwards had served ten years in prison. His retrial ended in a hung jury. Dr. Doom’s people were gambling that the King of Criminal Law would work his courtroom magic and pull a not-guilty verdict from his top hat.

He did.

Genetic testing had come along by then and G. Jerry held up its results as “conclusive evidence” the blood found on Dr. Edwards’s clothing, on wife Audrey’s bludgeoned body, on walls, floors, and elsewhere throughout their Encino home was from a third party, identity unknown. G. Jerry harped on the fact no murder weapon was found at the scene. Most of all, he hammered home, there was absolutely no evidence tying Dr. Edwards to the killing of his beloved Audrey and the child she was carrying.

The prosecution offered the same case it had twice before, unable to effectively puncture any of the new arguments raised by G. Jerry, whose courtroom manner was universally hailed by the media as performance art at its finest.

The jury returned with its not-guilty verdict after deliberating for a scant ten and a half hours. Edwards sat motionless and wept. The King of Criminal Law rose and smiled broadly for the press photographers flooding the courtroom, hands locked and arms raised like a boxer who had proven once more his right to wear the heavyweight crown.

Looking after my own public relations, I called G. Jerry’s office and left a congratulatory message. That was that, or so I believed right up until I got called six months later by his private secretary. Mr. Jones was inviting me to dinner, she said. She told me when, where, and the time like it was a command performance. I asked the reason. She pleaded ignorance in a way that told me she knew more than she was saying.

The Garlic Potato was a blue-collar restaurant tucked away on a side street in a sleepy section of North Hollywood, one of those places where you had to know where you were going to get there — or were someone looking to avoid being noticed.

The place reeked of garlic.

The bar was alive, but the dining room had seen busier hours.

The elevator music Muzak was pumping out featured golden oldies by pop-song stylists like Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Patti Page, Rosemary Clooney, Pat Boone, Tom Jones, and, of course, “Ol’ Blue Eyes” himself, Mr. Sinatra.

I mentioned G. Jerry’s name and the hostess nodded knowingly and led me to a draped-off private room at the rear.

G. Jerry rose to greet me.

He wasn’t alone.

Over the years I had seen his other guest’s face in the papers and on the television news often enough to recognize Dr. Maxwell Edwards without needing an introduction, but G. Jerry introduced us anyway. Edwards was a muscular six-footer with a grip of iron, strong cheekbones, and a receding hairline. His dull blue eyes seemed to be off visiting some distant planet and he’d forgotten how to smile. His one-dimension voice lacked melody, even when he claimed pleasure at meeting me and urged me to call him “Max.”

G. Jerry steered the conversation to small talk before the bosomy, braless waitress in thigh-high shorts and a Grateful Dead T-shirt returned with our drink orders and left with our menu selections, carrying on at length about the Lakers’ chances to make it to the play-offs. He was starting on the Dodgers when the food arrived, his steak, my prime rib, and the doctor’s shrimp salad, all three orders drenched in enough garlic to stop a charging rhino. I had feigned attention and Dr. Edwards sat stonefaced and silent, picking at his fingernails until this moment, when G. Jerry announced solemnly it was time to move on to the business at hand.

Max was in desperate need of help, the kind of help outside an attorney’s skills, even one of his stature, but well within my proven expertise at influencing public opinion through media manipulation, he said, or words to that effect, hand to heart, nodding in agreement with himself.

He carried on like that for a few minutes more, softening me up for whatever point he intended to make, until Dr. Edwards signaled him to be quiet with an open palm and urged him please to get specific. He nodded assent and got specific:

Max had applied to the California Board of Medical Examiners for reinstatement of his license to practice and was set to appear at a hearing in two weeks. There was talk in medical circles his application would be denied outright or otherwise stalled for years in an arbitrary tangle of review and regulation, based on the assumption that, although he had been proven innocent, the lingering taint of the original murder accusation and the trials could irreparably stain and damage the entire profession.

Hogwash, he said.

I was the best PR man he knew to scale that wall, he said, so how about it?

Oh, and by the way, Max was currently surviving off the kindness of a few old family friends, including one or two doctors, who had never wavered in their belief in his innocence. My services would have to be pro bono.

G. Jerry had been building to that moment. He looked at me like I’d be committing my own criminal act if I refused him, unleashing the same sanctimonious expression he had often turned on the Edwards trial jurors.

I glanced over at the doctor.

He looked hopeful.

That said more to me than all of G. Jerry’s words and declarations.

I didn’t know if I could help restore his license to him — conjure up an outpouring of sympathy for the doctor that would make it virtually impossible for the Medical Board to deny him reinstatement — but I knew I wanted to give it my best shot.

For the moment that’s all I knew.

Max and I met again two nights later at a Chinese storefront restaurant in Burbank. By now I had pored over published accounts of the murder and wasn’t any closer to having a handle on how to swing public opinion in his favor. I figured, maybe, if I heard his take, it might pop on the little Eureka! cartoon-world light bulb over my head.

He wasn’t forthcoming at first, insisting it was bad enough he had to relive that terrible scene in his memory every day, and every night in his dreams. I persisted. He surrendered only after I said I couldn’t help him if he wasn’t prepared to help me... and himself.

Max finished his last spare rib, shut his eyes, and sank his voice to a near whisper, remembering how he was sleeping downstairs on a sofa after an inconsequential argument with Audrey when her screams woke him. He sprinted upstairs to their bedroom and ran to his wife’s bloody, beaten, and lifeless body. He knew at once Audrey had been raped. Her pajama top was raised up and her breasts exposed. Her pajama bottom had been pulled down past her knees. He heard a noise behind him. Before he could turn, he was knocked out by a sharp blow to the head. Rousing, he hurried to check on their eight-year-old daughter, Barbie. Relieved to discover her sleeping soundly and unharmed, he headed downstairs to call the police. That’s when he spotted a heavyset intruder wearing a ski mask ducking out through the patio door and chased after him. They traded blows until the intruder landed a punch hard enough to send him sailing backward into the pool. He had disappeared by the time Max managed to drag himself out of the water and dial 911.

The evidence against him was nonexistent or circumstantial at best, but that didn’t stop the press from casting him as the guilty husband from the first, to the exclusion of any possible suspects the cops might uncover, he said. The press even gave short shrift to the sworn testimony from friends and medical professionals who spoke to his character and the loving relationship he and Audrey shared.

That raised one of the questions I had, about Barbie. Who better than their daughter to testify about her parents’ loving relationship, but she was never on the witness list and so never was called to the stand. The press made this out as another sign of Max’s guilt — when not even his daughter was willing to come forward to defend her daddy.

It was his decision, Max said. She was only eight and he didn’t want her exposed to the intense glare of public scrutiny. The trauma brought on by the savage death of her mother and the finger-pointing jeers aimed at her by classmates was already too severe for a sensitive child. Enough was enough. After the guilty verdict was handed down and he was shipped off to prison, the state put Barbie in the care of Child Protective Services. She was not permitted to visit him. Their contact was limited to letters, and hers stopped coming after a year. It was as if he’d never had a daughter. Eventually, he learned she had moved from one foster home to another until she turned eighteen and was free to flee the system, change her name, and live life on her own terms.

And there it was—

The light bulb clicked on over my head.

Barbie emerges from anonymity after all these years to publicly reunite with her father, let the world see she never faltered in her love for him or her unyielding belief in his innocence, and to personally urge the Medical Board to grant Daddy the license that allows him to resume the practice taken away from him after he was falsely accused and convicted.

I said those words to him with all the passion I could muster, like I was auditioning for a role in some stage play or movie, but I saw from Max’s somber expression that he was troubled by the concept. He pushed aside his plate, settled an elbow on the table, planted his chin in his palm, and quietly rejected it.

His reasoning was simple.

He had made it a point over all these years to discourage communication or a reunion of any sort and, as much as it pained him, he was not open to reversing himself now and risk causing unwanted scrutiny or harm to the life Barbie had built for herself.

Maybe it was something Barbie was ready to risk, I said. She was no longer that eight-year-old child he so lovingly remembered and cherished. She was a young woman capable of making adult decisions. Maybe she would want with all her heart to end their separation if it would help her dear father get on with his life.

Was I getting through to him?

It was impossible to tell.

I waited him out.

He stared at me for an eternity, quiet as a corpse, frozen in time and space until he stood and dug into a jacket pocket for his sunglasses, his one concession to disguise, and cracked what I read as a condescending smile. Throwing out his palms in a gesture of surrender, he gave me permission to ask her — but it had to be Barbie’s decision without any undue pressure from me — and ambled out of the restaurant.

G. Jerry pulled for me from his trial files the name Barbie had taken, Barbara Jefferson, when she took off on her own, and her location, Owensboro, Kentucky, where she worked as a production coordinator at the RiverPark Center entertainment complex on the southern banks of the Ohio River.

I reached her by phone. When I explained who I was and why I was calling, she hung up without comment. I did no better on my second try, but that only spurred me on. Owensboro-Daviess Regional Airport was closed for the duration, so I grabbed a Delta to Nashville and drove a rental three hours and 134 miles to Owensboro. A light rain plagued me for most of the trip and was still falling when I got to the Center and tracked Barbara Jefferson to the main auditorium, where a touring national company of The Sound of Music was rehearsing.

She was sitting by herself in the back of the house, humming along to the music while scribbling in the three-ring binder on her lap.

I waited until some fellow at the sound console removed his headphones and called a break before I settled in the seat next to her and announced myself.

She wasn’t thrilled to see me, about as pleased as Colonel Custer at the Little Big Horn, and started to rise. I cuffed her wrist with my hand, promised I only wanted five minutes of her time.

Five minutes, she said, grudgingly, and sat down.

Her voice reminded me of my old high-school history teacher, firm in a no-nonsense sort of way, but at twenty-four, she was younger than Mrs. Streeter by a couple hundred years. She was casually dressed in form-fitting jeans and a tight sweater advertising her oversized breasts, her hair piled under a University of Kentucky Wildcats ocean-blue cap that matched the color of her wide-set eyes; gorgeous enough to pass for a beauty-pageant contestant in spite of distracting worry wrinkles and creases that covered her face and hinted at the dark family secret she’d kept to herself all this time.

I told her almost matter-of-factly that her father needed her and what I had in mind for what I perceived as a heart-tugging father-daughter reunion played out on the public stage. She eased back like she was dodging a bumblebee circling for an attack, drew her lips tight in a show of distaste, and sounded a sour grunt.

I remember her words almost exactly:

“My father never needed me before, so why now, after all this time?” she said.

“He needed you as much then as he does now, more,” I said, without hesitation. “But then you were only a child, eight years old. Your father chose being found guilty and sent to prison over exposing his precious baby girl to questioning by a single-minded D.A. bent on using any means available to him to wring a guilty verdict out of the jury. Your father was protecting you. Can’t you see that yet, now that you’re older? He was protecting you, Ms. Jefferson.”

“You mean I was protecting him,” she said. “By not testifying, not swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, there was no possibility I’d spill the beans, reveal that I saw my daddy murder my mommy.”

What?

What did she say?

What was she telling me?

She caught my incredulous look and said: “You heard me correctly, Mr. Allen. Daddy was always saying I was sound asleep when the murder happened, but I was not. Their arguing woke me up, so I slipped out of bed and tiptoed over to their bedroom. The door was open a crack and I saw what Daddy was doing to Mommy, and I—”

She stopped speaking. Her eyes had grown wide, moist, relating the ugly memory she’d carried with her since childhood, but—

Was it the truth?

I was hearing nothing I didn’t know from the research I’d rushed through after I was hustled into Dr. Edwards’s orbit by G. Jerry Jones.

Why then, when she grew older, hadn’t Barbie come forward, gone to the authorities and told them what she knew?

I put the question to her.

She sucked the air out of the room and let it stream from her mouth in small doses, then again, and a third time, all the while shaking her head hard enough to spring it loose from her neck, before telling me:

“Daddy saw me standing in the doorway. He charged over and said for me to get back to my room and stay there. I asked him what he did to Mommy. He said he didn’t do anything and that I saw nothing. He repeated that — I saw or heard nothing, because I was asleep — and said to make sure I always said that or what happened to Mommy might happen to me, and we wouldn’t want that to happen — either one of us — would we?”

I had no choice but to challenge her.

“How do you explain the blood evidence that wasn’t your father’s and supported his claim that he fought with a stranger who had broken into your home and was probably guilty of killing your mother?” I said. “It was enough for the jury in his third trial to find your father not guilty and allow him to walk out of the courthouse a free man.”

“I don’t have to explain anything, sir,” she said, using sir like it was a dirty word. “I know what I saw, and no amount of circumstantial evidence will ever change that, no matter how hard you or anyone attempt to convince me otherwise, not in a million years.”

With that, there was nothing left for me to say.

Her memory of that night, however false, was too ingrained to be ousted by the truth.

I hated the idea of returning to L.A. with the news I’d failed in my mission and my idea for a father-daughter reunion was out the window. Hopefully I’d have a different idea, maybe a better idea, by the time my plane hit ground at LAX.

I pushed myself up from my seat, thanked Barbara Jefferson for her time, and started to leave the auditorium. I’d reached the aisle when she whistled for my attention and followed with a colossal smile before breaking out the kind of laughter I always associated with kids and circus clowns.

She motioned for me to come back and sit down, saying: “I sure sold you a bill of goods, Mr. Allen. Best performance since I was Martha in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? right up there on that stage with the Owensboro Players. Got the rave notices in my scrapbook, you ever want to see them.”

I barely kept my temper under control at having been played for a fool, asking: “What exactly is your game, Ms. Jefferson?”

She said: “No game, Mr. Allen, just testing your grit. Everything you believed about my father and me is as true as the colors of a rainbow. A day has never passed where I doubted my father was looking after what was best for me, no matter what personal cost to himself. Yes, of course I’ll do what you ask. It’s been a long time, much too long, since I saw Daddy in the flesh. Embraced him. Kissed him. Felt the warmth of his love.”

I arranged Barbara’s arrival for four days prior to her father’s appearance in front of the Board of Medical Examiners. This allowed time for substantial media coverage that would keep the story of their loving reunion fresh in the public eye and mind and, most importantly, in front of board members who would be deciding the doctor’s future.

Max was waiting for her at the arrival door inside the airport terminal, holding a dozen long-stem red roses and shifting nervously from foot to foot, his expression tight with pent-up emotion, as the door swung open and the Delta passengers streamed out, many to greetings by their own relatives and friends.

Newspaper reporters and photographers along with TV crews filled the area, poised to capture the magical moment of a long-overdue father-daughter reunion that my press releases had predicted would produce enough tears to rival Niagara Falls.

That’s how I had coached them to react, and to keep the crocodile tears flowing while I guided them arm-in-arm to the Delta VIP lounge for a brief press conference, afterward to a limo that would whisk them away to an unspecified destination for deserved moments of togetherness away from prying eyes.

The arriving passengers dwindled down to a few, then none.

I broke out in a sweat, fearing Barbara had changed her mind at the last minute and wasn’t on board. The press was growing impatient and began grumbling, growing noisier as the flight crew strode into the terminal, followed by the flight attendants. I expected the arrival door to be closed at any moment. My mind raced through the possible excuses I could offer, sickened by the thought I was contributing to the end of the doctor’s career, not its resurrection, no matter what I said.

Then—

There she was—

Barbara Jefferson—

Framed in the open doorway, dressed modestly in a coffee-brown blazer and matching slacks, her bonfire-red hair falling over her broad shoulders, her sparkling blue eyes searching the crowd.

I could breathe again.

Max called out to her: “Barbie! Barbie, darling! Here I am!”

She tracked the voice to its source, squealed, “Daddy!” and raced to him, abandoning her luggage tote in the excitement of the moment. The cameras came alive, capturing every moment of the reunion.

Max wrapped his arms around her, tearfully rejoicing in her name, planting kisses on her cheeks and forehead, and speaking words of endearment. This went on for an eternity before she maneuvered out of his grip, stepped back, pulled a kitchen utility knife from inside her blazer, and charged at him, shouting: “You killed my mommy, you miserable son of a bitch. Now it’s your turn to die, you bastard.”

She plunged the blade into his chest and belly, again and again.

He gave her what seemed a forgiving look, and called out her name one last time before he sank to his knees, then facedown onto the ground.

She dropped the bloodied blade and stood over his lifeless body, breathless and dry-eyed, and called to me: “Who do you believe now, Mr. Allen? Who?”

So, Adam, I’m too tired to tell the tape machine any more memories today. I’ll see you on Thursday. Don’t be late.