“It doesn’t matter what you told me before. The world has changed now; you have to look at everything from an entirely different perspective. There’s-”
He interrupts me. “But you don’t understand-”
I return the favor, interrupting him. “It’s you that has to understand . . . so listen carefully. There is a reason you’re here. For us to prevail, we have to find out what the reason is, then shoot it down. And your recollections, your perceptions, can be our most valuable tools. So I know this is hard, but you don’t have the luxury of worrying, or feeling sorry for yourself. You’ve got to help yourself, by helping me.”
There is no chance that little speech will get through to him, at least not yet, since the shock of his arrest is too fresh. But if I harp on it enough, it will eventually have an effect.
For now I’ll give him a specific assignment. “You know as much about these murders as the police do. So what I want you to do is piece together where you were when each one was committed. I want to know where you were, what you were doing, and if anyone saw you do it. If we can prove you didn’t do any one of the four, their case falls apart.”
Daniel nods, but it’s not hopeful, and I’ve got a feeling he’s going to report that he was home in bed, alone, at the time of the murders. Or that aliens abducted him and sprayed him with antimemory juice.
The door opens and Millen and another cop in plain clothes come into the room. Millen speaks to me. “We would like to question your client, if that’s okay with you.”
“It’s not.”
“Maybe he would like to present his side of the story,” he says.
“Maybe you should have given him that opportunity before you arrested him.”
Millen just nods and the two of them leave. He doesn’t seem terribly disappointed; he knew I’d never let Daniel speak to him. As a thorough cop, he had to go through the motions.
The guard comes to take Daniel back to his holding cell, and when I leave, there are two messages waiting for me at the desk. One is a notification from the district attorney’s office that the arraignment is scheduled for tomorrow, which is Friday. They are moving quickly and don’t even want to wait until Monday, another sign of confidence. They think their case is strong enough already and have no doubt the grand jury will indict based on it.
The other message is from Laurie, reporting that she and Vince will be at Charlie’s, waiting for me. I head over there, though in truth I would prefer to go home and think things through.
Laurie and Vince are sitting at our regular corner table when I arrive, but it would not take Sherlock Holmes to look at this scene and know there is something amiss. First of all, there is a full plate of french fries on the table, and Vince is paying no attention to them. I can’t overemphasize the inconceivability of such an event. Secondly, the television facing their table is tuned to the local news, while every other one in the entire bar has ESPN.
Vince sees me walking toward them and stands up, as if somehow that will get me there faster. “What happened?” he asks. “How did it go?”
I explain that Daniel volunteered nothing much to me and that I refused to let him volunteer anything to the police. “But they seem very confident of their case.”
“What is their case? What do they have?” He’s asking questions in pairs.
“I don’t know, and Daniel claims not to either. I’ll probably learn more when I meet with the DA, and in any event they’ll have to turn over everything in discovery.”
He tosses out another pair. “So this is going to trial? We can’t stop it?”
“Not unless Daniel pleads guilty.”
He shakes his head. “Impossible. Won’t happen.”
“Vince, why don’t you tell me everything that you know and I don’t?”
He sighs and then nods in resignation, as if this is something he dreads. “Daniel was married when he lived in Cleveland. Things didn’t go well for him.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“About a year and a half ago his wife was murdered.”
The thud that echoes through the bar is the sound of my stomach hitting the floor.
“Did they catch the killer?” I ask.
“Nope. It’s still an open case.”
“Was Daniel a suspect?”
“Of course not. I mean, you know how it is, they always check the family first. Especially since she had a lot of money; her parents left her a bundle. But there was no evidence he was involved, which he wasn’t.”
“And you kept all this a secret?”
He flashes some annoyance. “What secret? He didn’t do anything wrong. Nobody kept it a secret. The guy’s wife was murdered. Is that something you’re going to go around broadcasting?”
“How was she killed?” I ask.
“She was shot.” He says this with a measure of triumph, as if the difference in causes of death completely exonerates Daniel from being involved in any of this. “And both her hands were still on the body.”
I look over at Laurie, who doesn’t seem surprised at what Vince is saying, which means that Vince told her all of this before I arrived. She and I make eye contact, but my eye-reading skills are not quite well developed enough to know what she is thinking.
“Vince,” I say, “you need to face the possibility that Daniel is guilty. There can be some civil ramifications for your newspaper, so-”
“He’s not guilty. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“You’ve met your quota. So why don’t you tell me how you can be so sure?”
I see Laurie flinch slightly; she must know what’s coming and also knows I’m not going to like it.
“I’m sure because he’s my son,” Vince says.
• • • • •
“I WAS IN THE RESERVES, stationed in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri,” relates Vince. “Putting in my six months so I could get out of going to Vietnam. I got a weekend pass, I met Daniel’s mother, she got pregnant, end of story.”
My keen intuition is telling me that her pregnancy was in fact not the end of the story, so I probe further. “So you’ve kept in touch with Daniel all these years?” I ask.
He shakes his head with some sadness. “No. His mother never told me about him . . . we had no contact at all. Then, when he was eighteen, he contacted me. Since then I’ve tried to do what I can. I mean, I’m not Ward Cleaver, but I’ve done okay. I’ve been there when he needed me. I paid for the parts of college that his scholarship didn’t cover.”
Vince, a responsible father. The mind boggles. I wouldn’t trust him to watch my beer.
“Where is his mother now?” Laurie asks, helping me out. She knows that I have trouble speaking when I’m totally incredulous.
“She died about three years ago,” Vince says.
“I don’t suppose it was of natural causes?” It’s an obnoxious question to ask, but Vince doesn’t seem to notice.
“Yeah, some kind of cancer,” he says. “I’m not sure . . . we didn’t really have a relationship . . . it was just that one night.”