We stand in front of the theater, as Edward and Denise must have. Just another couple out on a date, except one of them only had about one hour left to live. Denise isn't here to tell us about the rest of the evening, so all we have to go by is Edward's testimony. So far I have no reason to doubt it. At least not this part of it.
“So they leave here,” I say, “just after midnight.
” Laurie nods. “And they decide to go for a drink.
” I point down the street. “They walk that way, although Edward had parked down there. Which means they didn't just happen to pass the bar … they were intending to go there.”
“Edward said it was a bar he used to go to when he was in college.”
Edward had gone to Fairleigh Dickinson University, less than a mile from where we were standing. I nod. “Care for a drink?”
We walk the three blocks down to the bar. The inside seems to have made the transition from trendy to seedy, and the ten or so patrons do not look as though they're waiting for their book club meeting to start. The television above the pool table is tuned to wrestling, and it has captured the attention of most of the group.
The bartender is a burly guy, about forty, with a friendly but grizzled face. It is as if we called Central Casting and asked them to send us a bartender. He comes over.
“Help ya?” he asks.
I point to the television. “Any chance you can change that to CNN? There's a Donald Rumsfeld press conference coming on.”
Laurie and I have developed a strange kind of synchronization between us. As soon as I open my mouth, she starts rolling her eyes. “Don't mind him,” she says. “He can't help himself.”
The bartender shrugs. “No problem.” You would think he hears Donald Rumsfeld jokes every day of his life. He directs his next question at Laurie. “What can I do for you?”
“We're looking for a guy named Donnie Wilson.”
“You found him.”
Surprised, Laurie says, “The same Donnie Wilson that was working here seven years ago, the night Denise McGregor was murdered?”
He nods. “My career ain't exactly taking off, you know?”
“Do you remember much about that night?” I ask.
“Are you kidding? Like it was yesterday.”
This is a mixed blessing. He'll be able to describe to us what happened, but he'll also look credible in front of the jury. When a crime has happened this long ago, one of the things the defense hopes for are faded memories by the key witnesses. This guy thinks it happened yesterday, which is not quite faded enough for our purposes.
I ask him to tell us about that night, and he jumps right into it. “Not much to tell. A preppie guy and a good-looking broad come in … didn't look much like they belonged here, but who knows, you know? This place was classier then. Anyway, the broad gets up and goes to the john. I was real busy 'cause Willie, that's the guy that killed her, had taken off an hour before.”
“Did you hear a struggle?”
“Nah,” he says. “In fact, I didn't even know what happened until the boyfriend told me. Then this older guy showed up. Turns out the preppie called his old man and the cops when he found the broad's body. When the cops showed, the place turned into a zoo.”
Laurie leans over to talk to him, as if she had a secret they were about to share. “Listen, Donnie, don't take this the wrong way, but if you call Denise McGregor a broad again, I'm going to cut off your testicles and shove them down your throat.”
Ever helpful, I tell Donnie, “I've seen her do it a number of times. It only takes a few seconds.”
Donnie has enough sense to be nervous and respectful. “Hey, I didn't mean no offense.”
Laurie gives him her sweetest smile. “None taken.”
It's now incumbent upon me to get Donnie thinking about the night of the murder, rather than the prospect of swallowing his testicles. It's not an easy job, but I give it a try. “So Denise gets up to make a phone call. The phone is in the ladies’ room.”
“Right. The ladies’ room … the ladies’ room.” Laurie has him unnerved.
“And that's the last time you saw her?”
“Well, I saw her in the alley afterward. You know … her body. The woman's body.”
Laurie and I go to the ladies’ room to check it out, and Donnie is really happy to see us go. The door has a faded drawing of Cleopatra on it, which identifies it as being for ladies. I start to push the door open, but Laurie grabs my arm.
“Where do you think you're going?”
“To check out the room, see where the phone is, solve the crime, whatever.”
“Let me make sure it's empty,” she says.
I shake my head in mock disgust. “Come on, this is business. Why do you have to turn everything into a sex thing?”
At that moment, even before Laurie has time to tell me what a pig I am, the bathroom door opens. A person comes out; I think it's a woman but I'm just guessing. She's at least two hundred fifty pounds, with tattoos all over her shoulders and arms. If she played for Dinky, we could kick Florida State's ass.
I take a deep breath and wait for my life to stop flashing in front of my eyes. In this case, if Laurie hadn't stopped me, I would have been alone in a bathroom with Queen Kong.
I'm nothing if not a quick learner. “Laurie, maybe you should go see if there's anyone else inside.”
“Maybe I should.”
Laurie goes inside and comes back out moments later.
“The coast is clear, macho man.”
I nod and enter. Except for possibly with my mother when I was too young to remember, this is the first time I have ever been in a ladies’ room. It turns out I haven't missed that much.
This particular ladies’ room is as unenlightening as it is unimpressive. There had been specks of blood near the telephone, and the police version of the crime was that Denise was struck over the head, and then dragged outside into the alley. Since there was no evidence of sexual molestation, I'm not sure why the assailant didn't kill her right there, but he clearly did not. The blood would have been everywhere.
Laurie and I go out into the alley where the body was found, which is no more than fifteen feet down a hall from the bathroom door. The hall cannot be seen from the main area of the restaurant, so if Denise were unconscious and unable to scream, it makes sense that she and her assailant would not have been noticed. She most likely was unconscious, both because of the blood in the bathroom and the fact that there were marks on the back of her shoes indicating that she was dragged down the hall.
While there is obviously no good place to be brutally murdered, this alley is particularly without dignity. Various establishments throw out their garbage in and around a group of Dumpsters against the far wall, and there are so many stray animals picking at it that they must be required to make a reservation. “Two rottweiler mixes, table for two? Yes, we're running a little behind. Care to have a drink from the gutter while you wait?”
One of the more puzzling aspects of this is what the eyewitness was doing here in the middle of the night. Willie's lawyer, Hinton, barely touched on this at trial, but then again, he barely touched on anything. He seemed to have no strategy, no coherent focus, and no desire to probe until he found weaknesses in the prosecution's case.
We hang out at the scene for a little while, not saying much, each of us lost in our own thoughts about how horrible that night must have been for Denise McGregor. I try to picture Willie Miller committing this crime, but I can't. I try to picture anybody committing this crime, but I still can't.
I drive Laurie back to the office, since that is where she left her car. She mentions the photograph, and I realize I haven't thought about it all day. I'm having lunch the next day at Philip Gant's club. He had called and invited me, saying that he wanted to “catch up,” but really wanting to know how things are between Nicole and me. I'll take advantage of the situation to ask him about the photograph. I'll do this because I need to find out information about rich people, and Philip is the proverbial horse's mouth.
Nicole is asleep when I get home, and I realize with a flash of guilt that I'm glad about that. I need to get the upcoming days straightened out in my mind, so that events don't just whiz past me. I want to be alone with a glass of wine and Tara, not necessarily in that order.