A Killer's Kiss (7 page)

“Only whether or not I can take the rest of that pie home.”

“I’ll box it up for you.”

“Why, thank you, Gwen.”

“You going to save her?”

“Maybe,” I said. “If she deserves to be saved.”

“We all deserve that, Mr. Carl.”

TUESDAY

He was waiting for me in my outer office when I came to work the next morning, a slight, dome-headed man with outsize shoes and a striped bow tie. He leaned forward in his chair, his small mouth pursed with worry, his long, pale hands wringing one the other. He might have been my age, or he might have been fifty, it was hard to tell with his wispy red hair and wide forehead. When he saw me, he lifted his chin.

“Victor Carl, is it?” he said.

“That’s right,” I said.

He rocked to his feet, still bowed forward at the waist, as if in a perpetual cringe. His hands continued to rub each other strangely. It was an insectile gesture, calculating and submissive at the same time, like a male praying mantis wringing his hands before sex.

“Mr. Carl, hello. Yes. It is an honor to meet you, indeed. An
honor.” His voice was whiny and dispirited, and the way he enunciated “honor,” he might as well have been telling me what a burden it was to be in my presence. “I apologize for dropping in unannounced like this. You can be assured that I wouldn’t bother a personage of your high status and accomplishment if it weren’t so vital. But could you possibly, perhaps, spare a moment in your busy day for me? If it is in any way inconvenient, we could do it at another time, certainly. Everything at your convenience, of course.”

I stared at him and then at my secretary, Ellie, who had an amused expression on her face. She subtly pushed forward a card on her desk.

I looked at the card, swiveled my head to look at the man and then back at the card. swift & son, it read. real estate management. title insurance. mortgage brokerage. life and disability insurance. And then, in the corner, in tiny print: clarence swift, attorney-at-law.

“Mr. Swift?”

“Clarence, please,” he said, interrupting me. “Call me Clarence. There is no reason for you to be so formal with the likes of me.”

“Fine, Clarence. You were Wren Denniston’s lawyer?”

“More than that, sir. We were friends, the best of friends. We spoke constantly, hatched plots together. His father did business with my father, and that was a bond that kept us together. I still can’t believe he’s gone. Not an hour goes by where I don’t start to pick up the phone and only then remember.”

He pulled a giant handkerchief from his inside jacket pocket, wiped the shine off his wide forehead, blew his pointed nose.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.

“Yes, thank you,” he said as he flicked the handkerchief back into his jacket. “It’s been a most traumatic couple of days. I am at sea, Mr. Carl, marooned on a floating piece of flotsam. Not even jetsam, sir, but flotsam.”

“Very understandable. Why don’t you step into my office?”

“Oh, thank you, sir, thank you. That is quite extraordinary of you to make the time to see me on such short notice.”

“Think nothing of it,” I said as I gestured to the hallway.

When he was situated in a client chair across from my desk, I stepped out of the office for a moment and returned to Ellie.

“Any calls?” I said.

“A few,” she said, handing me my messages.

“I need to talk to Derek Moats, the defendant I represented yesterday. Can you try to find him for me?”

“I have his cell-phone number. Do you want me to set up an appointment for him here?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Not here. Just find out where he’ll be tonight. Tell him I have a job for him, if he’s willing.”

“Fine.”

I glanced down the hallway. “What do you think of our Mr. Swift?”

“Peculiar, isn’t he?”

“Yes. How would you feel if your life was in his hands?”

“Concerned.”

“I suppose you should hold all my calls.”

When I returned to my office, Clarence Swift was just closing the briefcase on his lap and locking it shut.

“Looking for something?” I said.

“Just consulting my scheduler to see what is next. A man of business must always keep himself busy, my father used to say.”

I sat behind my desk and stared for a moment at the strange-looking man before me. His chin was pointy, his pursed mouth was just the right size for his thumb. And his philtrum was extraordinarily deep. You know what a philtrum is, it’s that groove that runs from your nose to your mouth, that thing we never think about, but it was hard not to think about it with Clarence Swift. It was so deep he could have stored his loose change in there.

“I so appreciate your seeing me unawares like this, Mr. Carl,” he said. “I’ve heard much about you, in both the papers and from Wren. Poor old Wren was quite the raconteur, always quick with the telling jab and the illuminating tale. He’ll be so missed. And you’ll be gratified to learn, I am sure, that you were often a favorite subject.”

“Oh, I bet I was.”

“It is from my bond with Wren that rises my commitment toward Julia,” said Swift. “You must believe that I would do whatever is humanly possible for her. She is a fabulous woman.”

“Yes, she is.”

“Truly extraordinary.”

“I agree.”

“Wondrous in oh-so-many ways.”

I eyed him for a long moment. “Are you married, Clarence?”

“Engaged.”

“Good for you.”

“My fiancée, Margaret.”

He pulled out his wallet, opened it, dug deep until he pulled out a bent and spindled photograph of a large woman holding a gray cat. The woman was stout and hardy, with big-knuckled hands and floppy ears. Ouch.

“We often had dinner together with the Dennistons,” said Clarence, looking at the photograph with a depressed gaze before sticking it back into his wallet. “We were all so close.”

“So tell me, how is Julia holding up?”

“Hanging on as best she can, under the circumstances,” he said. “I think she has a slight cold.”

“A cold, huh?”

“Yes. It’s understandable, the tragedy weakening her defenses.”

“I’m sure that’s it.”

“It has rocked us all. But this is no time to be paralyzed by grief. We must put away our own personal anguish and sally
forth. And so here I am, thrust into the role of defender, determined to do my best for poor Julia. Though, of course, I don’t expect my meager experience in such matters can compare with the achievements of your brilliant career.”

“It hasn’t been that brilliant,” I said.

“You’re being modest, but I would expect no less. It is a certified truth that the greater the man, the greater the humility. And you, Mr. Carl, are living proof.”

“I’m not that humble either.”

“Still, Mr. Carl. Still.”

“Call me Victor,” I said.

“That would be a privilege.” He bowed his head in gratitude, as if I were a lord granting some great favor to a serf. “One of the reasons I have come today, Victor, is that I am trying to understand all that Mrs. Denniston was doing on the night of the murder. A timeline, so to speak. That is what they always do in the television shows, is it not? And so I am quite interested in what she was doing at your apartment when the police finally found her. The police detective has already given me your statement. The handsome one—”

“Sims.”

“Right, Detective Sims. I much prefer him to the other one, the big Irish one, who comes off as quite a brute. But Detective Sims seems much more reasonable.”

“Oh, he’s a great guy, he is.”

“He’s actually been very helpful.”

“I bet he has.”

“So, Victor, do you have anything to add to what you told the police?”

“No, the statement is still operative.”

“Still operative. That’s a funny phrasing. Quite atypical, don’t you think? May I ask you straight out what is the exact nature of your relationship with Julia?”

“No.”

He sat back awkwardly, stared at me over his pointy nose. “It would help my preparations tremendously.”

“I don’t see how. And in any event it’s personal.”

“Personal? Oh, my.”

“If you want an answer, Clarence, simply ask your client.”

“Yes, well, she hasn’t been, how do I say this”—he leaned forward, lowered his voice to a whisper—“as cooperative as I would have hoped.”

I tilted my head a bit. “She’s not talking? Even to you?”

“No. Do you have any idea why?”

I did. We had made a deal, a deal she had kept but that I had violated at the first convenient moment.

“No,” I said. “No idea. But she is being smart not to talk.”

“I don’t think it is smart at all. I have advised her, of course, that she should cooperate completely with the authorities. That is simply what one does after a great tragedy. But she has sadly not taken my advice. Which is too bad. I’m afraid if she doesn’t talk to the police soon, they are going to become suspicious.”

“That boat sailed long ago.”

“But it is not too late to turn the tide. I was as surprised as anyone when Julia called from police headquarters, but since that moment I have been working like a demon. And you’ll be gratified to know, I’m sure, that I have poor Julia’s case well in hand.”

He pulled out his handkerchief, blew his nose while staring at me, stuffed the handkerchief back in his jacket.

“Well in hand,” he repeated.

“That’s interesting,” I said, “because it appears from the papers that they are building an airtight case against her.”

“A flimsy case of circumstantial evidence only, Victor. A tissue of lies that I can, that I must, pull apart. And preparations are being made.”

“What kind of preparations?”

“As her attorney, you must understand, I am not at liberty to say.”

“The cops mentioned a guy named Cave. Miles Cave. Have you ever heard of him?”

Clarence sucked his teeth as he stared at me a moment. “No. Never. But I will get to the bottom of everything, Victor, trust that at least. And, like I said, Julia’s case is well in hand.”

Well in hand indeed, I thought. It didn’t take but a glimpse to size up Clarence Swift. He was eager, earnest, humble, and harmless, all fatal traits in a defense lawyer. And in court, no matter whom the D.A. put against him, he’d be terminally overmatched. If Julia had to depend on him in a murder trial, she’d be lost.

“What kind of law do you normally practice, Clarence?” I said.

“Mostly wills and such, taxes and real estate.”

“Have you ever defended a murder charge before?”

“Not precisely.”

“Ever tried a criminal case?”

“The son of one of our clients was arrested for driving under the influence.”

“How’d that turn out?”

“Well, he had failed his Breathalyzer, Victor, and there was not much anyone could have done.”

“I suppose not.”

“I know this won’t be easy, being Julia’s bulwark against the ravages of false accusation. But trust me when I tell you, I have her case well in hand.” Clarence raised a long, bony finger in the air. “She’ll be free and clear before you know it.”

“I wish I had your confidence.”

“Which brings me to the other reason I have come today.”

“Go ahead.”

“I understand you paid an uninvited visit to the house last night.”

“That’s right.”

“It must have been a disappointment to learn that Julia was still being held by the authorities.”

“I got over it.”

“I am working out a deal with the district attorney to have my client released. She could be out quite soon.”

“That’s great news.”

“Yes. ’Tis. But that might cause other problems in the investigation. So this is what I request, with all due respect, from you, Victor. It would be best for everyone, I believe, if you could manage to stay far away from Julia. No more visits to the house, no more rendezvous at your apartment or surreptitious meetings in hotel bars.”

“Hotel bars?”

“There is no need to stoke the suspicions of the police about a relationship between the two of you, no matter how misguided. No need to set tongues to wagging. As Julia’s attorney, I am asking that you don’t see her or communicate with her in any manner until this matter is resolved.”

I thought about that for a moment. “You don’t have the right to ask that.”

“Maybe not, but think of it as a favor to me.”

“I don’t owe you a favor.”

“Then think of it as an urgent request from her attorney. One that, if you refuse, might result in serious consequences.”

“Consequences?”

Clarence lifted his briefcase from his lap, stood. “Thank you so much for seeing me on such short notice. It was quite generous of you.”

“Consequences?”

He walked to the door, stopped at the entranceway, and swiveled his head. “I will keep you informed of the progress of the case and any further information I might be needing. I’m sure the two of us will work famously together. Famously.”

“What kind of consequences?”

“Good day to you, sir,” said Clarence Swift. “A most earnest good day.”

I sat in my car and stared out the window at the front of the Denniston house.

It looked altogether less disturbing in the late-afternoon sun. A lovely home in a lovely neighborhood where a loving family could pursue its lovely future. Which of course I knew to be a lie. This wasn’t a home that protected with its warm embrace, it was a heap of stone and wood in which the twisted destinies of flawed people played out to their bitter ends. Usually that meant divorce and desolation, other times it meant a slow descent into decrepitude and madness, and sometimes it meant murder.

Yet I couldn’t help myself from driving over, parking on the street, waiting as if in stakeout for some blessed arrival. Gwen had called with the ring of excitement in her voice. Mr. Swift was waiting at the police station with his car. He had worked out something with the authorities. The missus was coming home.

Shortly after I showed up, a boxy black Volvo pulled into
the circular drive and parked behind the BMW. Clarence Swift bounced out of the driver’s seat of the Volvo, jumped around the car, bent at the waist as he obsequiously opened the passenger door. He remained in a bow as Julia left the car and headed toward the house as casually as if she had just come back from a routine day of shopping and lunch. Clarence Swift slammed shut the door and slipped into position beside her, his mouth at her ear, talking and whispering and importuning as they walked inside the house. The big green door closed behind them both.

I had the urge to run over, yank open the door, grab hold of Julia, and swing her around in the air, which was peculiar, because Julia was not a grab-hold-of-and-swing-around-in-the-air kind of girl. I could just imagine her puzzled expression, wondering what on earth I was doing. But I also had the paranoid urge to get the hell out of there, to run away and stay away and not allow myself to be drawn any further into the murderous mess she had made of her life. I was poised between two equal urges that left me paralyzed.

So I sat and thought about our shared past, our blighted present, our possible futures. One involved a lovely life in that very house, drinking champagne bought with Julia’s dead husband’s money, making love on Julia’s dead husband’s bed. The other involved me sitting in prison, growing old with my roommate Bubba while Julia shopped for scarves at Nordstrom. I thought about what I had found in the purse snuck behind my desk drawer and wondered which future that made more likely.

Clarence had said she had a cold. A cold indeed.

About half an hour after they had arrived, Clarence left the house and closed the door behind him. Before entering his car, he lifted his chin as if he had sensed something. I crouched down lower in my seat and kept staring. With his head swiveling back and forth like a dog’s head sniffing the air for a stray squirrel, it was as if a mask had slipped from his features. No more was he
the humble and overmatched attorney. In this unguarded instant, I saw something else, the truth behind his fawning manner, and this is what I saw: Dylan Klebold in the flesh.

You remember Klebold, the quiet boy who went to school one day and started blasting away with a sawed-off shotgun and a TEC-DC9 semiautomatic. Before his big day at Columbine, Klebold wrote in his day planner, “The lonely man strikes with absolute rage.” And now here was Clarence Swift, scanning the landscape with a cold anger, as if everything his gaze alighted upon were about to be obliterated.

And then Clarence Swift was in the Volvo, and then he was pulling out of the circular drive. I ducked lower as his car passed mine and stayed down until I was certain he was gone. Not the bravest of acts, I admit, but something about that meeting in my office had told me to be cautious of the peculiar Mr. Swift. And it wasn’t just the threat of unpleasant consequences if I tried to see Julia that was causing my caution, though the flash of Klebold in his features added a little jolt to his warning. Swift had known about my meeting with Julia in a hotel bar. How had he known that if Julia wasn’t talking? And why did it bother him so much? Between the time he stepped out that door and the time he drove away, in my eyes he had morphed from an overmatched attorney to something far more frightening.

When I was sure he was gone, I popped up and stared again at the big green door. Was I going to go in and see her? Was I going to start it all anew, despite the fear that had blossomed along with the desire? As I dithered, someone else beat me to it.

A Jaguar, gray and predatory, passed my car, slipped into the circular driveway, stopped at the door. The rear passenger door opened, and a man climbed out, a broad bus of a man with a huge belly and a bushy black beard. He wore sandals and white pants and a loud print shirt, as if he had just stepped off the streets of Bangkok. He looked around, much the way Clarence had looked around, and then walked quickly, almost skippingly,
to the door, lifted the serpent knocker, and let it drop loudly once, twice.

Gwen opened the door, gave him an astonished stare, and let him in. I checked my watch. When the door opened to let him out, I checked it again.

Seventeen minutes. Not much of a visit.

The way he was dressed, it wasn’t a business call, he wasn’t a plumber or the air-conditioner guy, he wasn’t a banker, he wasn’t anything I could figure. And for sure he wasn’t Julia’s normal type, pretty much the opposite, actually. Maybe he was a proctologist.

He climbed back into the rear of his Jaguar. It started to rumbling, pulled out of the driveway, and drove quickly away from the house. I started my car and followed.

I don’t know how quickly my tail was marked, but after turning left and right and right again, I followed him down a rather narrow street, where he disappeared. The street was blocked by a parked truck. I stopped the car, peered through the windshield, and then checked the rearview mirror, where I spied the gray Jaguar parked right behind me and two men striding toward my car, one on either side. The first was a thin, dark man with hooded eyes and a black leather jacket. The second was Julia’s visitor.

When he reached my window, he dropped his thick hands on the edge of the door and peered down at me with a strange, dull gaze, as if I were nothing more interesting than a fly buzzing harmlessly by his ear.

“Who are you?” he said. His voice was a gravelly, accented growl that seemed to have originated somewhere in a bad Cold War movie. Russia? Uzbekistan?

“I’m nobody,” I said. I glanced through the passenger-side window. The thin, dark man was reaching into his jacket, scratching his side. At least I hoped he was scratching his side.

“Why you following me?” said the man with the beard.

I turned my head back to him. “I liked your car?”

“You have good taste for a nobody, but I think you’re lying. What is your name, nobody?”

“Victor Carl.”

He continued staring at me for a moment with the same dull, uninterested eyes, before his mouth, beneath the black beard, opened and closed, as if he had just swallowed the annoying fly, and his eyes snapped into focus.

“I know you,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Yes, yes, I do. Victor Carl. You were the one she threw to garbage heap when she ran off with Wren. It was you.”

“Who?”

“Oh, don’t be silly man. Victor Carl, yes, yes. So let me guess. You were sitting in car outside her house, thinking romantic thoughts, when you saw me visiting and grew insanely jealous. For how could she prefer a skinny runt like you when she had chance with real man like me? So you decided to find out who I was. Isn’t that right?”

“That would be a little weird, wouldn’t it? Me sitting outside her house, just watching.”

“Yes, it would. Demented, actually. Are you demented, Victor?”

“Well, when you put it that way…”

“So, my friend. Let me introduce myself. Gregor Trocek, at your service. And my companion is Sandro. Go back to car, Sandro. Don’t worry. Nothing to fear from man like Victor, who can let someone like Wren Denniston steal his woman.”

Sandro stared at me for a moment, still scratching at something beneath his jacket, then nodded and bared his teeth like a hyena before heading back to the car.

“So tell me,” said Gregor Trocek. “What can I do for you, Victor?”

“I was just wondering who the hell you were?”

“A friend of the beautiful Mrs. Denniston. Through her husband. The doctor and I were business associates.”

“So you were merely giving your condolences to the grieving widow?”

“That, too.” He tilted his large head and narrowed his eyes. “But we should talk, yes. For you would not believe what wonderful coincidence this is. Even as you were following me, quite badly, I might add—you need work on your technique, Sandro could teach you—but even as you were following me, I, too, was looking for you. Are you hungry, Victor Carl?”

I quickly glanced at my watch.

“Never trust man who checks clock to see if he is hungry,” said Trocek. “Pleasure follows no timetable. What does gut tell you?”

I looked up at him for a moment. There was a merry sort of knowingness in his gaze. I wondered what it was he knew.

“That I’m ready to eat,” I said.

“Good boy. Follow me, I know a place.”

And from the size of him, I was sure he did.