I felt myself drifting into sleep with the clicker still in my hand. I thought of Paul, wondering if he had left the house, but my last thought was of Tobin, in his Manayunk loft. I wondered if he was watching the news.
And I wondered if he was alone.
22
I felt refreshed the next morning, even though the free Inquirer outside my door served up the headline I expected:
RESIGNATION OF EMBATTLED FEDERAL JUDGE EXPECTED
I scanned the article, which rehashed the press conference, including plenty of self-righteous quotes by Julicher. Fiske, wisely, “could not be reached for comment,” and we all know where I was. The managing partner of Averback, Shore & Macklin, my favorite blackjack player, had managed to get in his share of hyperbole, dubbing me “one of the most prominent woman lawyers in the country.” I figured we were talking at least thirty-five thousand dollars’ worth of prominence in my new contract, but Mack couldn’t pay me enough for what this case had done to my life.
I gulped down my complimentary coffee and croissant and grabbed a shower using hotel shampoo, soap, conditioner, and moisturizer. After I had consumed everything free, I settled down to call Fiske.
“Rita, where are you?” he asked.
“In town. How are you? And don’t quote Gilbert and Sullivan.”
“You’ve seen the news.” He sounded tense.
“Of course. Want some legal advice?”
“I’m listening.”
“Don’t resign.”
“The chief judge called. He asked me to consider it for the good of the court. He wants my answer tomorrow.”
“Fine. Call him tomorrow and tell him you considered it and you’re not resigning.”
“Kate thinks I should. Lower my profile, all that.”
“Hamiltons don’t run, do they, Fiske? They don’t quit. You have a family name to uphold, don’t you?” I stopped short of explaining about general principles.
“I am innocent, goddamn it.”
Works for me. “Then do your job. Stay away from the press. Leave the rest to me.”
“You sound different, Rita.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. Better. Are you making progress with the investigation?”
“I have the motorcyclist’s address, and I’m on the trail of the black Jags in the area.”
“Wonderful work!”
“And I lost some weight, too.” About a hundred and ninety pounds, name of Paul. “But it’s probably the creme rinse. Nothing like a good conditioner to give a girl some confidence. And a silky shine.”
Cam swung the noisy electric hedge trimmers in a smooth arc from his perch on the stepladder. Above him was a hot midday sun and a mercilessly clear sky. His work boots were scuffed, he wore a sweaty Banana Republic work shirt, and his fifty-dollar khakis had grass stains at the knee. Camille Lopo was the best-dressed one-armed gardener-impersonator in Wayne.
“You’re not getting tired, Cam?” I shouted, over the loud chatter of the trimmer’s greasy teeth.
“Huh?”
“You okay up there?”
“What?” he shouted back.
“You sure you’re not tired?”
He checked his watch. “Almost noon!”
Only Italians would persist in talking over a hedge trimmer. It takes more than Black & Decker to shut us up, even when one of us is almost deaf. “You sure you’re not tired?” I fairly screamed.
“There’s a lotta new growth! You can tell ‘cause it’s greener! Yellow-green instead of a dark green!”
“Spoken like a pro!” I yelled back, scanning the grass. I wanted to reexamine every inch of the grounds around the carriage house and Mrs. Mateer’s house, and the newly incorporated Lawns ‘R Us was the only way to do it freely, without the official eyes of the Radnor police or their crime scene logs.
“This is our third lawn, kiddo! I am a pro!”
I felt a guilty pang, making a seventy-year-old do yardwork to serve my own purposes. “I owe you, big time.”
“Baby, I’m busier than a one-armed paper-hanger.” He swung the hedge trimmer on a plane as even as a card table. Sprigs of English hedge fell to either side and landed in mounds on the grass.
“YOU SURE YOU’RE NOT—”
“ASK ME AGAIN AND I’LL CUT YOUR ARM OFF!”
The clipper went back and forth, buzzing in my ear. I was posing as Cam’s assistant, in identical outfit except for my Eagles cap, sunglasses, and Canon camera. I snapped another picture of the hedge. I wanted enlarged photos of the grounds for the jury, taken from my own uniquely distorted perspective.
“Don’t forget to look at the ground!” Cam called out. “For evidence!”
So much for secrecy. I looked down but saw only the buzz-cut surface of Mrs. Mateer’s newly shorn lawn. “You do good work, you know that?” I told him.
“What?” He switched the trimmer off and wiped his brow. The steely hair at his receding hairline was so damp it had returned to its original black. “Maybe this’ll be a new career for me.”
“You’d make more at the track.”
“I don’t know, I liked that sit-down mower. I liked it a lot.” Cam had mowed the lawn with a rented Toro while I stayed out of sight. He was the one who went to Mrs. Mateer’s door because she might have recognized me, even in my disguise. “Felt like a buggy ride, that mower.”
“How do you know what a buggy ride feels like, city boy?”
“Are you kidding? I used to ride around with the iceman. We jumped on the back of the wagon to get the chips.”
I took another picture, one of the house in the distance. Then a shot of Cam getting down from the ladder, just for fun.
“Look at it this way, kid,” he said, tugging the ladder. “We had no problem gettin’ work. We got three lawns right off the bat.”
“That’s because we’re doing it for free, Cam. And you have your charms.”
“It’s the stump, it gets ’em every time.” He flapped his empty sleeve. “Theresa married me because of this stump, I swear. Said she felt sorry for me. When we got in a fight, I used to tell her I got phantom pains, then—bing—it was all over.”
I laughed, but I had banked on it. Who wouldn’t accept a free lawn cleanup from a handicapped senior trying to start a new business? Especially when he’d just done the two houses across the street and they looked terrific?
“So what’s the take so far?” he asked.
“You mean the defense evidence?” I reached into my fanny pack for my official evidence-collecting kit, a gold Lancome makeup case. I had plucked each item from the ground with a Revlon tweezers, put it in its own Baggie, and labeled it with a Clinique eye pencil. “Let’s see, Exhibit A is a Fruit Stripe gum wrapper. Exhibit B is a cigarette butt. We have a plastic figurine of Garfield the cat, in mint condition, as Exhibit C. The smart money’s on Garfield, Camille. He could crack this case wide open.”
“The toy is from the Donovan place?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “That Donovan kid was a brat. I never saw so many toys in a backyard in my life. And that castle thing with the green top and the sliding board? Did you get a load of that?”
“Little monster.” I had tripped on the tetherball pole. “Turd.”
He laughed. “When I was little I had a truck. A red truck. That was it.”
“The rich get richer, Cam.”
“Ain’t it the truth.”
He climbed back up the ladder and switched the trimmers on again. It buzzed away while I flipped through the thirteen bags I had collected. Each one contained apparent backyard trash, so I resumed my treasure hunt, walking along the hedgeline at the back of Mrs. Mateer’s property, eyes to the ground. At the bottom of the hedges were dry dirt, crumbling brown leaves, and at the end, pricey bark mulch.
The sound of the trimmers grew more and more distant. It took me five minutes to reach the property line, where the hedge abutted the equally vast grounds of Mrs. Mateer’s neighbor. The end o
f the line. Maybe I was wasting my time. And poor Cam’s, who was sweating away, with one arm, on a ladder. I would burn in hell and it would feel a lot like this.
I thought of trying to call Price, the motorcyclist, again, but I had already left three messages on his machine. I had packed a flip phone in my pants pocket in case he called back. If he didn’t, I’d visit him unannounced after this escapade was over.
I pivoted on my sneakers and saw the carriage house in the distance. It was crisscrossed with yellow police tape, sealed but unguarded. Still, I had to be subtle about my snooping because of the neighbors, and the suburbanites who slowed their Range Rovers to gape at the house where a woman bled to death.
I walked all the way back to Cam, nose to the ground like a bloodhound with a law degree, and retrieved a new blue-enameled Ames rake. Lawns ‘R Us was not only the most fashionable fraud on the Main Line, we were the best-equipped. I avoided thinking about what I was going to do with this stupid equipment later and concentrated on raking the hedge clippings into piles that I rolled toward the carriage house.
I looked everywhere as I raked and bagged any trash I found. An hour later, Cam was almost at the end of the hedgerow bordering the Mateer driveway, and my work shirt was drenched with sweat. On the lawn in front of me lay rolls of hedge clippings, like hoagies on a party tray. I had collected two more gum wrappers, both Doublemint, and yet another cigarette butt. Either it was a trashy backyard or a killer with a major oral fixation.
Picture time. I glanced around to make sure I wasn’t being watched, but everybody had gone to buy more things they didn’t need. I took some shots of the Mateer house from the vantage point of the carriage house, snapping away like a hungry realtor. When I looked through the square window of the Canon, I saw Cam, waving at me with his arm.
What a ham. I snapped the picture he was begging for and shifted the camera to get a better view of the Mateer house. Cam kept waving. It was a cute photo, but I didn’t think it would enlighten the jury. I took another picture of the Mateer house, showing how the view from the kitchen window was partially obstructed by the trees.
“June, June!” I heard Cam shout. It was the alias we’d agreed upon for me, since it was, after all, June. Plus I liked sounding like a centerfold for a change. “June!”
I looked at him over the camera.
Cam was waving again, but something in his movement was odd. Jerky. Either he’d found something or he was having dyspepsia. I looked through the lens and zoomed it up to telephoto so I could see his face. It was streaked with grime, strained and anxious. He was pointing excitedly to the ground at his feet.
Baby, baby. I broke into as subtle a sprint as possible, the camera swinging around my neck. Cam was standing on Mrs. Mateer’s asphalt driveway, where the end of the hedge reached the white stucco of the house.
“Rita, look,” he said, in a hushed tone.
I looked. Nestled among the hedge trimmings, a soggy green tennis ball, and a chubby pink begonia was a knife.
I blinked, but it was still there. I’d handled more than my share of knives in my father’s shop, but I didn’t know what kind of knife it was. It had a dark brown handle and its dull bronze blade was scarred by brownish stains. The stains could have been any kind of goo, but what it looked most like was dried blood. I couldn’t believe my eyes, neither could Cam. We stood over the knife like kids who’d found a garter snake in the backyard. Too afraid to touch, but too amazed to turn away.
“Way to go, Camille,” I said.
“I’m lucky today, kid. Maybe I shoulda gone to the track.”
“Then you would’ve missed playing junior detective.”
“You mean senior detective.” He smiled, then stared down at the knife. “What are you gonna do?”
An excellent question. Should I bag it? Should I call the cops? Can you pluck a knife with an eyebrow tweezers? “Damned if I know. Garfield I can handle, but this?”
“We can’t take it, can we?”
Hmmm. “Let me think about that.” Meantime, I grabbed the camera and fired off shots from every angle. From close up, from far away, I finished an entire roll on the knife alone. And the more I looked at the knife, through the white viewfinder inside the camera lens, the more I believed Cam had found what I hadn’t dared hope we’d find. The knife that killed Patricia Sullivan.
But I needed to learn more about the knife, so I could draw some conclusions about its owner.
As it turned out I knew a knife expert, rather well.
23
My father, propped up slightly in his hospital bed, squinted through his bifocals at the photo. “It’s a knife.”
My expert. “I know that, Dad. What kind of knife is it?”
“All-purpose, like a buck knife.”
“But it’s not a buck knife?”
He held the photo closer. “No.”
“Told you,” Cam said, sitting on the other side of the bed, still in dirty gardening gear.
“Could it kill someone?” I asked.
“This knife? In a New York minute.”
It sent a shiver through me. “Who would own this kind of knife, Dad? What would it be used for?”
“Anything, everything.”
“Like what?”
He peered at the picture. “Hunting, fishing, working in the garden or somethin’. Even around the garage. You could cut boxes with it, maybe wire. Anything.”
My heart sank. “Really, anything?”
“General purpose.” He set the photo down on his tummy and picked up the next one by its edges. “You think it’s the killer’s knife?”
“Yes. Who would have this kind of knife around?”
“Anybody.”
“Shit.”
He wet his lips, which looked parched. “It’s a good knife to have around, what can I say? I have one just like it in the back kitchen, even old like this. I use it on the fig tree, to trim it.”
“I never saw it. You never pointed it at me.”
He smiled weakly. “Maybe it’s not the murder weapon.”
“It looks like blood to me,” I said, gathering up the photos. “What do you think? You’re the hematologist here.”
“Yeah, maybe.” He closed his eyes, suddenly fatigued. “What’d the cops say?”
Cam laughed. “We didn’t wait around, Vito. We hadda see a man about a horse.”
It had taken an hour to get the pictures developed but far less than that to summon the Radnor police to the Mateer property. I had called them from the flip phone but opted not to stay on the scene until they arrived. No need to tell them I was perpetrating a fraud in a work shirt, not to mention corrupting the morals of a major.
“What I don’t understand is why the cops didn’t find it,” Cam said. “It was right there.”
Which is what was bothering me. Cam and I had gone back and forth about it in Thrift Drug, while we waited for the pictures. The technician kept looking at us funny, he didn’t hear many conversations about murder weapons in front of the Midol.
“I mean,” Cam continued, “how come I could find it and they couldn’t?”
“You found it?” my father asked. “With your eyesight?”
Cam looked offended. “My eyes are good. Right, Rita?”
“Right, Cam. It’s your hearing that sucks.”
“Bullshit,” my father said. My heart warmed to hear him regain his profanity. “Your eyes are lousy. Half the time you’re asking Herman whether it’s a club or a spade.”
“I did that once,” Cam corrected.
“Come on, more than once.”
“I can still see better than you, Vito.”
“That’s not saying much,” I said, and my father nudged me with his foot. His color had improved and the nudge felt strong, but I noticed his lunch had barely been touched. He felt terrible that he couldn’t go to LeVonne’s funeral. It had been set for tomorrow because the coroner had just released the body. “So why do you think the cops didn’t find it, Pop?”
>
He set the photo on his belly with a sigh. “Who knows? Cops. They can’t find who killed LeVonne either, even though I gave ’em a good description.”
“Still no leads?” Cam asked.
“That’s what Herman says. He calls ’em all the time, the detectives. He gives ’em hell.”
Cam chuckled, but my father didn’t. He sank deeper into the thin pillows. I worried he was becoming depressed. “You sleeping okay, Dad?”
“Fine.”
The nurses had told me he slept only off and on. “You eating okay?”
“Like a horse.”
What a load. “The nurses say you’re not.”
“The nurses think they know everything,” he said, his eyes still closed. “They love to boss you around. Except that little one with the red hair that Sal likes. Betty.”
“Are people still named Betty?” I asked.
“This one is,” Cam said. “Madonne, she’s a tomato.”
Va-va-va-voom. “Do men still say that?
What is this, a time warp?”
My father smiled. “Sal likes her, but he’s too chickenshit to talk to her.”
“Where is Sal?” Cam asked.
“Out with Herman.” My father opened his eyes and reached for my hand. His felt rough and warm, familiar. “You all right, kid?”
“Fine.”
“You all wrapped up in your case?”
“Yep.”
“Don’t work too hard now.”
“Me? Never.”
“Miss Fresh.” He closed his eyes but hung on to my hand. “I can hear that brain of yours, workin’ away.”
I laughed, but he was right. I was arriving at one explanation why the police hadn’t found the knife during their investigation: It hadn’t been there. Did the killer plant it after the fact, and why? It was a risky, risky thing to do.
So if I couldn’t learn anything from the knife itself—because I was guessing the killer was too smart to leave his fingerprints all over it—I learned something from the fact it had just been deposited beside the begonias. This killer wasn’t afraid of risk any more than I was. He was playing a game with the police, or even with me.