Natural Suspect (2001) Read online

  He knew, and when he'd been younger he'd consistently and often proved, that he could beat up just about anybody, and that confidence now resided quietly inside him. He didn't have to talk loud. He didn't have to shove anyone, or clench his fists, or even frown. He knew who he was, who he'd become after a rocky start. He was content with it, and wore that contentment in his face ninety percent of the time.

  He really had nothing to prove, except to Janie. He had to prove to her that he loved her. And he wasn't going to do that by fighting. "Work it?" he asked softly. "What does it look like I'm doing now?"

  And in fact, he was working. Working hard. He'd already spent an hour on the books and the cash--Jaksnakshak, so far, was only open for the lunch trade, and it had closed for the day at four o'clock.

  Now, at eight, the two automatic slicers were cutting tomorrows paper-thin Italian salami and Virginia ham, and he was peeling the bologna and pastrami for the slicers' next rounds. At the same time, he was wrapping the cheeses--Swiss and provolone and cheddar--in tight packets with Handi-Wrap so that they'd be almost as fresh as fresh cut the next day. The almost bothered him, but he'd learned he had to make some compromises.

  Janie wiped her hands on the apron that pinched at her expanding waist. The baby was due in three more months, and she was sick with worry. She didn't mean to snap at Jack--God knew he was the best man she'd ever even dreamed of, much less gone out with--but this trial was . . . well, a trial for them, too. It seemed such an unnecessary burden, so unfair that the jury summons had come just when it had, leaving so much of the work to her.

  Suddenly she realized that the anger was gone. She crossed the space to her husband, put her arms around him. "I know, hon. I know you're working. I didn't mean that. I just don't see why it had to be you. Us."

  He held her against him for a minute, marveling at the changing feel of her, the once-flat swimsuit belly now a beautiful orb of potential--their family beginning at last. "Well, Janie, I don't think there's any why about it. Me getting summoned just happened." He moved his hands down to her stomach. "You're thinking I've got a duty to this little zygote here, and you're right, but it's not just the store. Long term, best thing I can do for the next generation is be a good citizen, dumb as that sounds. Guys like me, maybe going against type, making the system work, doing what's right. That's the hope."

  Janie put her arms around him, so glad Jack was the person he was. She felt the baby move. "Oh, feel." She put Jack's hands on the spot until it happened again. "Okay." Janie beamed up at him. "The bump checks in and agrees with you. So I'll work here and keep this place going, no more complaints. Meanwhile you and this jury make the right decision, hear?"

  At the opposite end of the Hightower mansion from the Rotunda, Devin was attempting to conduct a postmortem on the first day of the trial. When they'd left the courthouse, Julia had suggested that her lawyer drive them both back to the fabulous Hightower estate. Since Devin's alternative was either her one-bedroom apartment in the Village or her drab and depressing (and embarrassingly small) office on Fourteenth Street, she had accepted.

  Devin always accepted, she never said no--that was, she told herself, her problem.

  Because she believed that no one really liked her, that she wasn't worth liking, she sometimes did things that were not in her own best interest--driving her client out to the Island in a blizzard so she could be in a nice environment for a couple of hours. Sleeping with Trent Ballard.

  No! She wasn't going to think about Trent Ballard. Not tonight of all nights.

  She and Julia had gotten here at around seven forty-five, and it had immediately become apparent that her client didn't really care for her company after all. And she didn't care about the case either, even if it did threaten her life. Didn't care about her ex-husband, her kids, the gardener.

  But she did care about her cocktails, especially after the dry and exhausting day she'd already put in at the trial. Julia Hightower wanted to come home because that's where the gin was.

  So five minutes after they'd arrived, they were sitting at the kitchen table--really not much nicer than Devin's own, she noted with some disappointment--and Julia had taken her pitcher from its home in the freezer and filled a glass and started to drink. The frozen stuff poured like maple syrup and disappeared with what Devin thought must be a kind of alchemy.

  They made small talk about the case for a while, but Julia's agenda here wasn't communication. Seriously sipping the gin, Devin's client slipped from slurring to snoozing in under an hour. Now, Julia's head was down on the table, and Devin was thirty icy miles from her own sad and lonely apartment, just about ready to cry.

  After enduring a few minutes of Julia's graceless snoring, she found herself wondering, and not for the first time, what she had gotten herself into. Also, not for the first time, she wondered why Julia Hightower had chosen her. Out of all the lawyers in the city, why her?

  But she could wonder about that as she drove home. With the snowstorm and the slick roads, she'd have plenty of time. She poked a gentle hand into her client's shoulder. "Julia," she whispered. Then spoke more loudly. "Julia! Let's get you up so you can go to bed. We've got another full trial day tomorrow."

  But she might as well have been trying to wake Arthur Hightower. His wife was out for the night.

  Sighing, Devin finished her coffee and went over to put the cup in the sink. She opened a couple of drawers until she found the kitchen towels and pulled out a few, draping them over Julias shoulders so maybe she wouldn't catch a chill. She took the nearly empty gin pitcher and, thinking about it for a beat, replaced it in the freezer. It wasn't hers to throw away. Maybe, she thought, Julia would come to that on her own.

  And then maybe Devin would flap her arms and fly to Tahiti.

  The snow was anything but inviting, and Devin was really in no hurry to be out in it. And here she was, in one of Long Island's grandest houses. It wouldn't hurt to look around a little, she told herself, get a more personal sense of her client and the life she lived, give the blizzard another half hour or so to blow itself out.

  The other half lived this way, and she burned to know what it was like. She'd bet nobody here worried about being lovable or pretty. The Hightowers were glamorous. The jet set. Rich and famous. All those cliches. Devin couldn't help but think that though the Hightowers had problems of their own, they were somehow more important than she'd ever be. People who lived in homes like this made a difference; that's all there was to it.

  And Devin didn't make any difference, not to anybody. She wanted acceptance here so badly she could taste it. She wanted all these folks to like her. If she could just get their mother off. . .

  Well, she reminded herself, it shouldn't be all that hard. After all, what she'd said today in her opening statement wasn't all false. There was almost no physical evidence tying Julia to the crime--certainly the prosecution (Trent Ballard!) couldn't convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that there was. Plus, Devin hadn't even mentioned her client's alibi for November second. She wanted to give Trent Ballard a long enough rope to hang himself on the exact time of Arthur Hightowers death--then, if she had to, Devin would trot out the alibi.

  By the front door, she stood in a foyer as large as her apartment. High over her head, a huge chandelier glowed with a bright elegance. A majestic staircase curled around behind her, leading to the upper floor. Here on ground level, she pushed the door nearest her and it opened into a dark-paneled library--floor-to-ceiling books with one of those great, old-fashioned sliding ladders to get to the top shelf, a large working desk, a four-foot globe, a fireplace. It was the perfect room, Devin decided. But she dared not stay in it for long.

  Across the way, off the opposite side of the foyer, the hardwood floors in the living room made her steps echo deliciously. There seemed to be three or four separate sitting areas, a grand piano, more books in built-in bookshelves . . .

  A noise.

  She froze, completely still, and listened.

&n
bsp; Upstairs.

  Male and female voices. Whoever it was, it sounded as if they were having a serious fight. She imagined she could hear punches being thrown, garbled human sounds.

  She had to move. If someone were getting hurt, she couldn't let it go on. Out in the foyer, she waited again, heard more commotion, and began climbing the stairs as fast as she could, two at a time.

  When she reached the upper landing, she heard a heavy slamming sound coming from one of the rooms off the long hallway. "Hey!" she yelled, poking into the first room. "What's going on?" She was back out in the hallway, going to the next room.

  The noises had stopped.

  "Stay back!" A woman's voice, ringing with authority. "Stay where you are. Who's out there?"

  "It's me. Devin McGee." Her voice seemed to have swallowed her as--too late!--she realized what she had interrupted.

  An instant later, the truth was borne out. Marilyn Hightower, disheveled but regally gorgeous in a pale blue silken peignoir appeared. "What the hell are you doing here?" she asked.

  "I, uh, I drove your mother ..."

  "I see. And now she's done her passing out routine and you're snooping, aren't you?"

  "No, I ... I heard noises. I thought somebody might be getting hurt."

  Marilyn's expression indicated that on the evolutionary scale she considered Devin about equal to, and certainly no higher than, a cockroach. "Well, dear," she said bitingly, "it may be outside the realm of your experience, but sometimes when people make love they also make, well, noise."

  Back at the door, a short, gray-haired man appeared in the hallway. Over his black socks, he sported a potbelly and nothing else. He waved sheepishly to Devin, who raised a hand awkwardly, returning the greeting. Marilyn turned, saw the man, looked back at Devin, and smiled icily. "That phenomenal male specimen is Georges Franco, our gardener. Georges, this is Mummy's lawyer, Devin McGee. Now be a dear and go back into the bedroom, would you?"

  Marilyn waited until he'd disappeared, then gave her full attention to Devin. "I'm going way out on a limb here and guessing that you're not inclined to join us. No? Well, then, drive carefully and be sure to close the door on your way out."

  And I thought I was depressed before, Devin mused. Here it is, nine-thirty, I'm stuck in traffic with twenty more miles to drive, they haven't plowed the road yet, I've got to go to the bathroom, and I need to be up by six in the morning to prep for the trial. How could things get any worse?

  At that moment, her right front tire hit a brick that had fallen off a truck directly in front of her. The tire blew with a sound like a gunshot and Devin's old trusty Toyota began a slow pirouette that ended in a shallow ditch just off the Long Island Expressway. The car turned a full hundred and eighty degrees around before coming to a stop.

  Devin cried. The snow fell and the wind howled and she waited and waited, watching the miles of headlights creep past her, not one of her famously sympathetic New York neighbors giving even a moment's thought to the disabled wreck on the side of the road.

  All of them, she was sure, hated her. And she didn't blame them.

  "Come on, Buck, come on."

  Trent Ballard was trudging in the wind and snow with his boss, District Attorney Aaron McCandliss. Trent had his pet, a twenty-pound giant rabbit named Buck, on a leash, and the two humans waited impatiently for the animal to "do its business."

  "Come on, Buck," Trent repeated. "There's a good boy."

  McCandliss spoke through gritted, chattering teeth. "I cannot believe this. I cannot believe it."

  Trent looked over at him. "Normally, he's much better--"

  "Damn it, Ballard. Why don't you keep your rabbit in a cage like everybody else?"

  "Well, Aaron, in the first place I don't think everybody else has a rabbit." Trent pulled Buck along to a new space a few hops away. "That's why I got Buck. I didn't want to be like everyone else. Besides, it took me months to get him house-trained, and now if I let him go in the house, even in his cage, he'd get confused and revert to bad habits."

  "I'm not sure that confused is a word that applies to rabbits, Ballard."

  "Oh, they're a lot smarter than people give them credit for, sir. Sometimes I think Buck has thoughts, I swear."

  "Don't go there, Ballard."

  "It's true. And I've taught him some great tricks."

  A fresh gust of wind hit them. McCandliss hunched down into his greatcoat. He didn't want to give Ballard any opportunity to describe Bucks fascinating tricks. "I don't care if you've taught him to fly. I care that now were out in a blizzard in the middle of the night, two grown men, walking a rabbit, for God's sake. If anyone from a newspaper sees us . . .

  "It won't happen, sir. Reporters don't like to go out on nights like this."

  "Who does? Why are we--oh, never mind."

  Trent Ballard shrugged. "Anyway, Buck's almost--ah, there you go. Good boy."

  "Is that it? We came out here for that?"

  "Well, he is only a rabbit, sir. And usually we do make a couple of stops."

  "How about if we don't tonight, okay? How about instead if we go back inside and discuss what seems to be the weakening case against Julia Hightower."

  "It's not weakening, sir."

  McCandliss shook his head. "Well, it sure as perdition isn't getting any stronger, Ballard. This Devin McGee woman gave a powerful opening statement. And you know we've got some evidence problems she didn't even mention, although she knows about them. I think she's setting a trap, and frankly, I'm worried that you might step into it."

  Trent frowned at the criticism, then tugged gently on the specially made leash that he'd attached to Buck's front legs and around his neck. But the rabbit obstinately huddled down into the snow, unmoving.

  For an instant, McCandliss considered that Ballard might have been correct--maybe the rabbit did have some intelligence. Certainly, Buck was now regarding his master with an almost human malevolence--and more intelligence than he ever expected to see in a rodent.

  "Okay, you bad boy, no treats for you tonight." Trent gave up pulling on the leash and turned back to McCandliss. "Don't you worry about Devin McGee, sir. That situation is completely under control. Totally."

  He gave another smallish tug on the leash, and must have been standing on a patch of ice over snow, because the movement caused him to slip, and suddenly he was on the ground, moaning. Sometime during his fall, he let go of the leash, and Buck--an immovable statue up until then--jumped up and covered twenty feet of snow-covered sidewalk in three leaps.

  Through his pain, Trent called out, "Buck! Here, boy. Come on back."

  "Ballard!" McCandliss employed his sternest tone. The rabbit could wait, damn it. "Why shouldn't I worry about Devin McGee?"

  Trent had pulled himself to his feet and was wiping snow from his coat, all the while using a cajoling voice, his attention focused upon his pet. "Just stay there, Buck. Don't move. Easy, boy." At last he remembered his boss. "Devin McGee? Because I can handle her, sir. Personally." A conspiratorial wink. "A little charm, a little of the old--you know. Piece of cake. I own Devin McGee."

  The rabbit hopped again, trailing his leash. "Buck!"

  District Attorney Aaron McCandliss watched Trent Ballard--the man he'd chosen for the year's most high-profile murder case--as he attempted to stalk and capture his huge, house-trained rabbit in a snowstorm on a busy Manhattan street. Trent Ballard was confident that he could handle Devin McGee, was he? He owned her?

  McCandliss watched Buck jump a few more feet, the super-intelligent bunny rabbit managing to keep the leash just out of Ballard's grasp.

  "Here, Bucky, come on. Be a good boy now. Come to daddy."

  The D. A. suddenly wished he'd brought his antacids. His ulcer was acting up. He couldn't bear to watch any longer. But the farce held his attention for another few seconds, and in those seconds, his ace trial attorney Trent Ballard slipped and fell a second time and the old Buckster, the Buckaroo, the Buckwheat Bunny, put another five yards between himse
lf and his master.

  "Pathetic," McCandliss muttered under his breath. He turned on his heel and didn't look back.

  Patrick Roswell knew that he wasn't going to become a famous reporter if he let opportunities like this one get away.

  Love-struck, crossword-challenged Henry from Murray's Bar & Grill might be an impeccable source for great cheeseburgers, but as a source for hard news, he was as yet unproved. Still, if Patrick could verify Henrys information about Arthur Hightower Sr.'s condition on November 4--that he'd been alive, and at the Sweeney Hotel--it would break the case wide open. And even more important, it would prove to Mr. Whitechapel that his young advertising salesman had what it took to be an investigative reporter.

  But first, he had to endure a long, slow afternoon calling on his accounts--Hargrove Printing, DeBrook's Flowers, Dodge's Storm Doors, Cornelius Cups and Trophies, Cantors Custom Accessories, whatever they were. And all the while the wind was picking up and the clouds piled on one another.

  He made his last call on Karpfinger's Quality Caskets at seven-fifteen and, since he'd neglected to bring his heavy overcoat to town with him that morning, he decided that he had better go back to his apartment in Little Italy and get on some winter clothes if he didn't want to freeze to death. Somehow, with Hightower Sr. in the news and on his mind, this fate didn't seem as far-fetched as it normally might.

  But before he went investigating, he had to get some food inside him. He hadn't eaten since lunch at Murray's, so he stopped in at the pizza place a block from home and ordered a ground beef and cheese calzone. "And, hey, Luigi, you want to throw in some tomatoes and lettuce and onion and maybe a pickle and some ketchup?"

  "On a sesame seed bun yet?" Luigi spun his dough in the air, slapped it down on the marble counter, and barked his familiar laugh. "You want, Patrick, I could just make you up a cheeseburger?"

  Patrick shook his head. "No, thanks, Luigi. You go to an Italian place, you don't order American. You know what I'm saying? Besides, I had a cheeseburger for lunch. I'm trying to get out of the routine."