Falls The Shadow

73

What do Broadway musicals and murder trials have in common? Leggy blondes with short skirts and high-heeled tap shoes? Only in my dreams, which might say more about my subconscious than I am comfortable with. No, they both need to end with the big finish, and I’m not talking about some glandular case named Paavo. I would have put on a big production number if they let me, but François Dubé’s fate was playing out not on the Broadway stage but in a court of law, where the performers wear suits and intone Latin and are required to follow the rules of evidence. Nothing puts a crimp in the old song and dance like the rules of evidence, believe me, but I still had my big finish planned. Mrs. Winterhurst to link the victim to Dr. Bob, Franny Pepper to link Dr. Bob to the circumstance of the photograph in Leesa Dubé’s cold, dead hand, and finally, Dr. Bob himself, to lie on the stand and then wither under the onslaught of my brilliant cross-examination.

I was so confident of the power of my big finish that I was barely paying attention in court. Beth had taken charge of the timeline of François’s alibi. It wasn’t much of an alibi, to be truthful, but every little bit helped. So Beth was putting on testimony of François’s whereabouts through the whole of the evening of his wife’s murder, placing him in the kitchen till the restaurant closed, at the zinc bar for an hour or so after, finally walking off into the night exhausted and ready for sleep. The jurors were ready for sleep, too, by the look of them, and I could relate. In fact, I was just about to zonk off myself when Torricelli waved his fingers at me.

I snapped awake. What the heck was that? It was as if he were saying “Toodle-oo,” which was strange, because Torricelli was not a toodle-oo kind of fellow.

The mystery of the little finger wave was solved at the lunch recess. As the courtroom cleared, Torricelli came over and placed his big old hand on my shoulder.

“How’s it hanging, Carl?”

I looked at his hand, looked back at Torricelli’s ugly mug. “Fine?”

“What happened to your face?”

“My television bit it.”

“No matter how inviting the porn, Victor, you still can’t jump through the screen and join the action.”

“Have you been drinking, Detective? Because some people when they drink become overly friendly.”

“Not me,” he said cheerfully. “When I drink, I turn into a mean son of a bitch.”

“So it has no effect.”

He laughed, which was more than disconcerting. Torricelli was in way too good a mood.

“What are you so merry about?” I said.

“I’ve been having this problem with my tooth. I couldn’t figure what it was, but suddenly it’s taken care of.”

“You don’t say.”

“It was a simple thing, a cavity hidden from the normal probes. An X-ray caught it. My tooth has now been drilled and filled, and I am feeling fine.”

“Sounds like you found yourself a dentist.”

“Yes I did. Nice guy, too. Maybe you know him.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Think of it, Victor. I come to him just to ask a few questions about a murder, and I come out with a whole new outlook on the world.”

“He has that way about him, doesn’t he? Did he explain away the name change?”

“He said it wasn’t the right image for a dentist to be named after a soda pop, which makes some sense, doesn’t it?”

“And you bought it?”

“Why not? And after he fixed me up, he gave me a little parting gift.”

“A lollipop?”

“His fingerprints.”

“You don’t say,” I said, though he just had.

“Quite voluntarily, I might add. I made the suggestion, and he ripped his rubber gloves right off and offered me his hands.”

“He is obliging, isn’t he?”

“You want to know the results of our comparisons?”

“Your smile pretty much says it all,” I said as a sickening slick of despair rose in my gut.

“They didn’t match,” said Torricelli, enjoying this way too much to stop. “The latent we found at the crime scene, the one that your expert identified as matching the one he found at the storage locker and then on the tape, didn’t come from Dr. Pfeffer.”

“I’ll have my expert check the results.”

“Do that, but he’ll come to the same conclusion. First, he’s got an alibi. Then the fingerprints don’t match. It sort of puts a hole in your theory that the dentist did it.”

I twisted my lips and tried not to throw up.

“I hope I didn’t ruin your lunch,” said Torricelli.

But he had, hadn’t he? The little treat of information he’d passed on had sent my stomach spinning. It was the kind of news that hurts the most, the news that you’ve been both dreading and expecting all along.

You might remember I had pocketed Dr. Bob’s whiskey glass during our strange night at the bar. But that glass still lay in its plastic bag, the prints still latent, still waiting to be spirited into being with chemicals and powders and then memorialized forever on contact sheets. I had never sent the glass to Anton Grammatikos to be tested.

Why had I never sent it? Because there were two possible answers, either Dr. Bob’s prints matched the unknown print from the tape and the crime scene or they didn’t, and my defense could survive only one of those answers. Better an uncertainty you can argue to the jury than a certainty that renders your defense a nullity. But now Detective Torricelli, proving himself to be quite the detective after all, had just done the rendering.

With my appetite having fled, I thought it through over the lunch hour and kept at it as Beth continued laying out the timeline in court. My whole theory depended on the killing being an accident. Dr. Bob had been trying to help Leesa Dubé. Dr. Bob had been bringing the tape to Leesa to help in her divorce case. Something had gone wrong, and Leesa had ended up dead, and Dr. Bob had framed François before squirreling the tape back to François’s storage locker, still covered as it was with Leesa’s blood. The picture found in Leesa’s hand, much as a picture had been found in the hand of Dr. Bob’s mother, was the crowning piece of evidence. In fact, I even believed that Dr. Bob had set up the storage area just as it was so that if anyone came snooping, like, say, me, he would sit in the chair and be horrified at the tapes and know that the frame had been the right thing to do.

But now it seemed that Dr. Bob was not the person who had taken the tape from the crime scene.

Who could it have been? The district attorney’s answer was damn convincing. Who would the tape hurt the most? François. Where was the tape with the victim’s blood found? In François’s storage locker. Who had the motive? François. It was all so clean, made so much sense, except why would François keep that tape after that? Why had it not been burned, shattered, destroyed irrevocably? Why had it been left lying around for someone to find? Because he was arrested too soon? Because he didn’t have time to destroy it? Time to return it to the locker but not destroy it?

None of it made sense if Dr. Bob hadn’t done the crime. But if Dr. Bob hadn’t done the crime, who had?

Strangely, at that moment I thought of Rex, the man mountain with the soft gaze who had confronted me outside the Hotel Latimore. Something Dr. Bob had said about Rex struck a chord. I’m always on the lookout for new talent, had said Dr. Bob, a pure soul with the heart, the muscle, the determination to make a difference in the world.

Rex had entered the story far too late to be involved, but maybe it was one of Dr. Bob’s other recruits who had done it, maybe someone whom Dr. Bob had found and trained, someone who had done Dr. Bob’s bidding and then left to go out on his own and who had now gone deep underground. But who could it be? And how would I find him? And how could I use him to save my client?

It was the phrase “deep underground” rattling through my thoughts that finally clued me in to the entire truth. When it came to me, it was as if a window shade had been lifted and the sun was streaming through. When the light hit my face, I stood up suddenly.

Beth was in the middle of framing a question. She stopped midsentence and looked at me. The courtroom stilled, all heads turned in my direction.

“Is there anything you want to say, Counselor?” said Judge Armstrong.

“Just that I have to go, Judge,” I said. “Right this instant.”

“Something you ate, Mr. Carl?”

Before the laughter died, I was out the courtroom door. Where was I headed?

To find me a two-bit whore.