Defense, p.24
Defense, page 24
I nodded again. “What did you find out?”
He glanced at a piece of paper. “April 17th.”
“It’s the same.”
“That’s right. What made you think of it?”
I sank back in the chair, relieved that something was finally starting to make sense. Denise Morel had been killed on the same date that her late, unlamented husband had been killed. Her murder celebrated the fifth anniversary of his.
“What made you think of it?” Horace asked again.
“I think I was delusional,” I replied. “I don’t really know. You know how it is. You stare at something long enough, and something happens. You don’t really think of anything. Then, suddenly, the thought comes to you.” With a rueful laugh, I added: “Maybe we don’t think thoughts at all; maybe thoughts think us.”
An ambiguous smile crept across his mouth. “That’s a question we can both take up with Leopold after the acquittal.” Abruptly, the smile disappeared. “So we have two murders on the same date. So what? Coincidence, pure and simple.”
“Don’t play prosecutor.” I said, sitting up. “Forget what Gilliland-O’Rourke is going to say about it. Forget all that. What does it mean? It can’t be a coincidence. Someone must have planned the whole thing, planned it so that it would happen on the same date as the murder of Johnny Morel, planned it so that Leopold would be the only suspect.”
“You know what that could mean?” Horace asked with eager intensity. “That someone was sending a message.” He narrowed his eyes as he tried to follow the logic of his thought. “Why would you plan a murder on the only date that would link one murder to the other? Why would you do the one thing that would jeopardize the case against the person you’ve gone to so much trouble to frame? Why would you do this unless sending someone a message was at least as important as what happened to Leopold Rifkin?”
“But we don’t know what the damn message is, and we don’t have any idea who was supposed to get it,” I interjected, staring down at the carpet. “Maybe it was intended for Denise. Maybe the killer wanted to let her know that she was going to die because of Johnny Morel.”
Horace dismissed it out of hand. “You don’t really think someone out there spent the last five years grieving over the death of that lowlife, do you?”
I glanced up at him and slowly shook my head. “No, but maybe someone spent the last five years thinking about how they were going to finish what they started when they killed him.”
“You never thought she did it, did you?”
It was a neat question: which was worse, defending someone you knew was innocent and losing, or prosecuting someone you later found out was innocent and winning? I did not have to remind Horace about the moral hazards of the work we did. “It was just a feeling,” I replied. “But if she didn’t do it, then the fact that both of them were killed on the same date has to mean that the same person killed them both.”
“But it doesn’t mean that the date was chosen to give Denise Morel a last-minute education in the reason she was about to die,” Horace retorted. “Hell, if that was the message, all the killer had to do was tell her—just before he pulled the trigger! No, if you’re right, if she didn’t kill Johnny Morel, if the same person killed them both, then whoever did it wants it known. And that means,” he said, leaning forward and staring right at me, “that we have to figure out who they want to know it.”
Horace was right. If the killer wanted the world to know it, then it made no sense to have someone else blamed for the murder. The killer wanted everyone to think Leopold Rifkin was guilty, everyone except … “Who do you think?”
“Among others, you.”
“Me?”
“Sure. Why not? Start from the most obvious fact. You do know it.”
“Yeah, but the police could have put it together. They might have come across the identical dates.”
“But they didn’t. No one did. No one except you, my friend. And who was more likely to find out than the defense lawyer? And who was most likely to become the defense lawyer in this case? You.”
“But why would they want me to find out, and not someone else?”
“Maybe someone else, too. I said you ‘among others.’ Think about it. Once you found out, who would then find out?”
We looked at each other and without exchanging a word we both understood. “Leopold.”
“Sure.”
“And you,” I said.
“No, I don’t think that necessarily follows. But either way,” he shrugged, “it still leaves us with the problem of why the killer wanted to let you know he killed them both.”
I picked up where he left off. “And gotten away with the first murder with every chance of getting away with the second.”
“Who would want them both dead?”
I remembered, and I wondered why I had not remembered before. “Can I use your phone?”
Horace turned the telephone on his desk so it was facing me. I dialed my office and got Helen on the line. I asked her to pull out the file of a ten-year-old case.
“You think that’s the connection?” Horace asked as I hung up.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
* * *
The file was waiting for me on my desk. I had not seen it since the day I gave my closing argument to the jury. I opened it and removed the dog-eared copy of the police report I had marked up so much that the typewritten words were barely discernible beneath the mass of my shorthand scrawl. Quickly, I found the date I was looking for.
I looked at it for a long time and then, after I turned away for just a moment, I looked again. There was no mistake. I had been wrong. Johnny Morel and his wife had been murdered on the same date, but it was not the date on which he had raped and threatened his stepdaughter with death.
It had all come back to me, the hatred in her eyes when she told me the night he was acquitted that I would have to pay for what I had done. Myrna Albright had every reason in the world to want them both dead, and to want me to know that she had killed them, so that when Leopold Rifkin was convicted I could feel the same helpless rage she must have felt when she could do nothing to protect the child from the monstrous abuse of Denise and Johnny Morel.
I leafed through the file, not even trying to read the words of that lamentable chronicle of a case I should have lost. I came to the document that was always the last irrevocable statement of what happened at the end of every trial decided in an American court of law, the official declaration that announced whether the defendant had been found guilty or not guilty. There it was, right in front of me, the charge written out and the words Not Guilty indelibly embossed right next to it. And all of it properly signed and dated. Heating my body with something closer to fear than excitement, a sudden surge of blood coursed through my veins. The date on which the verdict had been rendered, when Johnny Morel had walked out of court a free man, acquitted of all charges against him, was April 17th. It was also the date of his death.
xx
Myrna Albright had fallen off the face of the earth. The only proof that she had existed at all was a criminal record of minor offenses accompanied by infrequent and abbreviated periods of incarceration. She had been an addict who had become habituated to the joyless necessity of selling herself and stealing from others. And then, after several years as a sometime prostitute and a small-time thief, the compilation of what were always peaceable transgressions against the criminal law simply stopped. After a date roughly two years before the trial of Johnny Morel, neither the police nor the public prosecutors had any further occasion to record her name. She had lived in the dreary anonymity of that dreadful Oregon City apartment until, a few days after the trial, she left and never came back.
“She just disappeared,” Emma Gibbon explained.
We were sitting together at the far end of the table in the conference room. Wearing a plain white blouse buttoned to the throat, Emma glanced once more at the file folder that lay open in her lap. Removing her glasses, she looked at me, discouragement written all over her tired eyes.
“There’s nothing,” she sighed, setting her glasses down on the table. “Nothing at all. It’s always more difficult to find a woman than a man. She can do more to change her appearance. Hair, eyes, makeup, the way she dresses, the way she walks, even the way she speaks.”
Emma seldom gestured when she spoke, and she spoke slowly, more slowly than anyone I knew, each word pronounced as if it was being measured from all sides to make certain it was just right, each sentence a long march to what she wanted to say. Sometimes I wanted to shake her to make her realize that she had to go faster, but then I would remember that it was not that she was slow, but that everyone else spoke too quickly and said too little. Listening to her was like shutting the door to a rock concert and finding yourself alone in a room with a classical musician playing the cello.
“She can change her name and find a man willing to believe anything she tells him,” she went on, a smile of resignation on her lips.
“Or find a man willing to buy a gun and forge a name on a registration form,” I interjected.
“Even that,” she agreed. “On top of everything else she’s not an American, she’s Canadian. She could be anywhere, using any name, going from one place to the next on a perfectly valid Canadian passport, with a driver’s license no one would bother to check and a set of identification papers no one would have any reason to question.”
“Wherever she is,” I said solemnly, “we have to find her.”
Without a word, Emma reached for her glasses and thumbed through the file until she reached a page filled with handwritten notes.
“You told me what she said after the trial. That was the second time you had seen her. The first time was at her apartment,” she said, summarizing what she had written. “That’s when she told you how she had taken care of the girl when she lived with Denise Morel?” she asked as she looked up.
“Yeah. She said she took care of her whenever Denise was gone, which was almost all the time.”
“And how she wished she had killed them, or at least done something to protect the child,” Emma added as she closed the file folder and slipped it into her leather attaché case. She got to her feet, took the attaché case in her hand, and permitted herself a small, self-confident smile. “I should have thought of this before. I think I know how to find her.”
Before the end of the week, Emma had found everything we needed. The girl, Michelle Walker, the stepdaughter of the late, unlamented Johnny Morel, had never lived with her mother again. She had gone from one foster home to another, five of them in two years, leaving behind a trail of unsupported and routinely dismissed allegations of sexual misconduct against nearly every foster father she had. When she was fifteen years old, a petition for adoption was filed in circuit court. The caseworkers at the Children Services Division unanimously endorsed the desire and the ability of one Myrna Albright to provide a good home for the child. Their enthusiasm was not dampened in the least by the fact that Michelle Walker’s new home would be outside the territorial boundaries of the United States. With the hand-wringing sincerity that invariably accompanied their explanations of failure, they insisted that a change of scene was the best thing anyone could do for her.
It was late Friday afternoon. Emma was sitting in the chair on the other side of my desk. “What about parental rights?” I asked. “There can’t be an adoption unless the parental rights have been terminated. There could have been grounds to do that to the mother. I don’t know about the father.”
“No,” she replied with an almost imperceptible shake of her head, “there was no termination. Both parents consented.”
Consented for a price perhaps. Myrna Albright had promised to commit perjury for Johnny Morel and then refused. That was not the kind of thing someone like Denise Morel would have forgotten or been willing to forgive. This would have been the last chance she would ever have to use her daughter to get something for herself. She would have gotten everything she could get.
Emma had a copy of the adoption order, and the address where Myrna Albright had then been living. It was in British Columbia.
“I checked with an investigator in Vancouver. Apparently, she’s still there.”
It was only after Emma left that I remembered I was meeting Alexandra for dinner. Already ten minutes late, I threw everything I needed into my briefcase and dashed out of the building. The restaurant was only a few blocks away, and while I walked my mind wandered back and forth between what I imagined I might find in British Columbia and how I was going to tell Alexandra that, despite my promise to spend the weekend with her, I was flying to Vancouver first thing in the morning.
Sitting at a table for two, Alexandra held a glass of red wine in her hand as she studied the menu. A single, delicate red rose, just beginning to open, stood in a slim glass vase.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said as I sat down.
Her eyes had not left the menu. “Are you late?” she asked with studied indifference. She closed the menu, set it down on the corner of the table, and raised the glass to her mouth.
“I really am sorry. I was meeting with Emma, and it took longer than I anticipated.”
She noticed my briefcase leaning against the legs of my chair. Her eyebrows went up and her nose tilted back. “Is this going to be a working dinner?”
Pushing my chair back, I stared at her, nodding slowly. “That’s good, very good. You been practicing that for a while?”
The look in her eyes that told me I had become invisible because I was no longer important enough to be seen, dissolved. Her head bent forward, her shoulders seemed to relax, and she began to gesture with her hands. “Not too long,” she said. “Just a little while. Since I saw you come through the door, twenty minutes late.”
I waited until we had finished dinner before I told her. She was sipping her coffee, balancing the cup with three fingers of each hand. “It doesn’t make sense to me,” she said, putting the cup down on its saucer. “This Myrna Albright hates the stepfather because of what he did to the girl.”
“With the mother’s help, don’t forget.”
“With the mother’s help. So she shoots the stepfather. Fine. Except she doesn’t do it right away. She waits—what?—five years? But, all right, she shoots him because he raped the girl. And she does it in a way that the mother gets blamed and goes to prison. But what reason could she possibly have to then kill the mother after another five years and do it in a way that places the blame on Judge Rifkin?”
“All I know,” I tried to explain, “is that the date of the acquittal and the date of the two murders are the same. Whoever killed Johnny Morel killed Denise Morel. I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true. And Myrna Albright is the only person who had any motive. She didn’t just forget what they had done. She adopted the girl.”
Alexandra was incredulous. “Aren’t you overlooking the obvious? I mean, if you’re looking for a motive, isn’t there someone with a much more powerful motive than whatever feelings of regret or even guilt Myrna Albright might have had? Aren’t you forgetting the girl who was raped, the girl whose own mother sold her for drugs? Haven’t you ever wondered what she must have thought, what she must have felt?”
“She was just a child,” I objected.
Alexandra tilted her head to one side and searched my eyes. “Do you really think so? Do you really think she was just a child? When did she have a childhood?”
“You really think she would have killed her own mother?” I asked as if there could be only one answer.
“Mother!?” she exclaimed, staring at me in disbelief. “After what that woman did to her!? Do you really think that word had any meaning anymore?”
I remembered something Carmen Mara had told me that night he told me everything. The girl had tried to stab Johnny Morel with a pair of scissors. That was the impulsive act of a damaged child, not part of a precisely calibrated scheme of revenge.
“I think you’re wrong,” I said, after I gave my credit card to the waiter. “Anyway, why don’t you come with me? We can spend the weekend in Vancouver.”
I lifted the rose out of the glass vase and gave it to her. She smiled and turned it slowly in her fingers, watching the way each petal clung softly to the one next to it even as they parted.
“I can’t. I have to study. And besides,” she said, as she held the rose against her lips, “I’d only be in the way.”
* * *
Jack McKeon, the investigator with whom Emma had worked, was waiting for me when, after nearly an hour of waiting, I finished with Canadian customs. He was a square-jawed man with grayish hair, steely blue eyes, and the ruddy complexion of someone who either spends a great deal of time outdoors or drinks too much.
“How long have you known Emma?” I asked as we drove away from the Vancouver airport in his gray Range Rover and headed toward the city.
He reached down to the ashtray and picked up his pipe. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked as he snapped shut the tarnished metal lighter he had used to light his pipe. “I’ve known Emma for nearly ten years now,” he said, watching the road ahead of him. He drove with one hand while he held the pipe in the other, puffing intermittently. “She came up here on a securities case. Some Americans had lost a lot of money on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. The government was conducting its own investigation. That’s when we met. I was with RCMP then.”
“RCMP?” I asked blankly.
“Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Retired two years ago,” he said.
We drove through the center of town and as we approached Stanley Park, I watched as long, sleek boats, sails lowered, glided out from what seemed, as we passed, the tangled maze of hundreds of mastheads protruding above the calm waters of the marina.
“Been here before?” McKeon asked, his face surrounded by a thin haze of smoke.
