Guardian of Lies

EIGHTEEN

Harry and I are wearing a rut in the road, twenty miles each way every time we need to meet with Katia at the women’s lockup in Santee. But today Harry doesn’t seem to mind. “I think we found one of the coins taken from Emerson’s study,” he tells me. “And this one wasn’t in Arizona.”

According to Harry it showed up in a probate estate, an old man who’d succumbed to a heart attack a couple of weeks ago. His executor found the coin in his safe along with a printed card showing its provenance. The police now have the card and the coin.

“Please don’t tell me they identified Katia as the seller,” I tell him.

“No, according to the records the seller was a man named John Waters. We don’t know if there’s any identification on him yet. I’m told Templeton’s people are checking it out.”

“Stay on top of it.”

“You bet,” says Harry.

This morning when we get to the jail Katia knows by the expression on our faces that there is a problem. We are closeted in one of the lawyer-client cubicles.

“What’s wrong?” she says.

“I want you to think very carefully before you answer the next few questions,” I tell her.

She looks to Harry, then to me. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Did you ever have any difficulty sleeping at night when you were living with Emerson Pike at his house?”

“Sometimes. Sure. I was in a strange house. Especially at the end, I was scared.”

“Did you ever take anything for it, any medication to help you sleep while you were there?”

“No.” She shakes her head.

“Did you ever borrow any medication from Mr. Pike?” I ask.

When she turns to look at me, her eyes are alight with the sudden realization of where this is going. “You’re talking about Emerson’s sleeping medicine.”

“Then you knew about it?” says Harry.

“You want to know if I gave Emerson medicine to sleep the night I left.”

“Did you?” says Harry.

“Yes.”

“Damn it.” Harry turns away from her, looks at the opposite wall, and swears under his breath, several choice words.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Aye, aye…I didn’t think it was important.”

“Not important!” Harry’s voice goes up a full octave as he turns to look at her again.

“Let’s keep it to a mild roar,” I tell him.

When Harry looks at me, I nod toward the door and the guard stationed outside. “We don’t want them calling the Dwarf’s office with a blow-by-blow and color commentary when we leave.”

“How the hell could this not be important?” This time Harry whispers, but the venom is still in his eyes.

“But Emerson didn’t die of drugs. You told me he was stabbed to death,” says Katia.

“That’s not the point,” I tell her. “The problem is, you didn’t tell us and you didn’t tell the police about the medication you gave him. Now they have a toxicology report showing that Pike had an elevated level of sleeping medication in his system when he died.”

“And they have your fingerprints on the bottle from the medicine cabinet in his bathroom,” says Harry.

The look on her face says it all. “No. No. I didn’t try to poison him, if that’s what you’re thinking. I only gave him the medicine so that he would sleep, so that I could get away. When everything happened, when they arrested me and I found out that he had been stabbed to death, I didn’t think about the medicine. I would have told you if I had remembered, if I thought it was important, but it wasn’t.”

“We can all take bets, but I doubt that the police are going to see it that way,” says Harry.

“When he didn’t fall asleep, when Emerson refused to go to bed and instead took a shower, I realized that the medicine was not going to work. I thought I must not have given him enough, so when he went into the shower I ran. I can tell, you don’t believe me.”

“The question is not whether we believe you,” I tell her. “It’s what the prosecutor will do with the toxicology report and your fingerprints on the pill bottle.”

“He has the dagger with your prints, now the medication,” says Harry. “Tell us everything. No more surprises. I want to know everything and I want to know it now.”

“It’s what I told you. Emerson would not let me out of his sight.”

“He allowed you to go to the grocery store alone, where we met,” I remind her.

“True, but it was only because he had a meeting a few blocks away with a customer. He gave me a few dollars and told me to buy food for a practice dinner I was going to cook. He knew where I was, and that I couldn’t go far. Every time I moved during the night, he would wake up. That’s why I gave him the medicine.”

“Had you ever given him any medication or other drugs before that night?” says Harry.

“No, never, but that night I knew it had started to work. I could tell he was sleepy. I told him to go to bed but he wouldn’t do it. He kept shaking his head and rubbing his eyes. He said he was going to take a shower and that it would wake him up, because he had work to do. He always had work to do. That’s when I realized he wasn’t going to fall asleep. I knew if I didn’t leave that night, I would never get away.”

“So what did you do, put it in his food?” says Harry.

“I put it in his coffee when we had dessert. I crushed up two pills and mixed the powder into his coffee. I gave him decaf hoping he would sleep. You remember when we first met?” She looks at me and smiles. “I told you the man I was living with never had any good coffee in his house. He always drank bad coffee.”

“I remember.”

“Emerson didn’t know the difference. I knew the coffee was so bitter he would never taste the medicine. But I gave him just two pills. If I had wanted to kill him, I could have given him the whole bottle. I knew two pills would not harm him.”

“What about the maid, she was there?” says Harry.

“I didn’t know she was going to be there until later. That’s when Emerson told me he had called her. I told him it wasn’t necessary, that I could clean up, do the dishes. But he said no. He wanted the maid to do it and he didn’t want to wait.”

“So you’d already given Emerson the pills when you found out the maid was coming,” I say.

“That’s right. I figured it was not a problem. She would be working downstairs in the dining room and the kitchen. When Emerson got sleepy I would help him to bed, then get my bag with the passport, money from his wallet, some coins from the study, enough just for an airline ticket, and go out through the garage. The maid would never know I’d left. And if I was lucky, Emerson would not wake up until morning. That’s what I thought. But he refused to go to sleep.” She gives Harry a kind of plaintive expression. “I know now it was probably not the right thing to do. It must look very bad, but at the time it was all I could think of.”

Given the low dose, the cops would never have given the sleep meds a second thought. It’s a common enough prescription. The natural assumption would be that Pike had taken the stronger dose himself, especially if he’d built up a tolerance to the medication over time. But all the assumptions went out the window when they found Katia’s fingerprints on the prescription bottle.

Alone, by itself, and given the sum of other conflicting evidence in the state’s case, this might not be cataclysmic.

What worries me is the wild card, the prosecutor Larry Templeton and the artful ways he might try to use this. We may get a peek at the Dwarf’s crystal ball tomorrow when Harry and I meet with him on another issue.

It’s a courtesy call. Why Templeton has asked for this meeting we’re not sure. It happens all the time. A clerk puts something in the wrong box in the evidence lockup, and it takes them a few days to find it. It seems the evidence clerks have misplaced the six photos taken by Katia’s mother in Colombia, the photographic prints made by Emerson Pike, reclaimed by Katia the night he was murdered and seized from her by the police the day she was arrested.