As Dog Is My Witness (10 page)

“I’ll say,” I told her. “I can’t get my dog to
breathe on command.”

Karen smiled a little. “She misses Michael,” she said
quietly, then looked up. “Do you mind . . . ?”

“Do I mind what?”

“If we let her in.” Now that the growling had
stopped, it didn’t seem all that threatening a situation, so I
shook my head. Karen turned to Rezenbach. “Would you let her in
please?” she asked. Her lawyer wasn’t pleased about leaving his
client alone with the nasty old reporter, but he acquiesced.

Karen leaned over to me quickly, knowing it wouldn’t
be long before he came back with the dog. “Please don’t say
anything while he’s here,” she said, indicating Rezenbach. “I
shouldn’t be saying this—he doesn’t want me to—but I don’t think
that young man shot Michael.”

Sure enough, before I had a chance to react, the
lawyer trailed a large Dalmatian into the room. The dog was headed
for Karen, but then saw me, snarled, and changed direction, toward
the wing chair, which luckily was at the far end of the sofa.

Karen grabbed the dog by the collar. “No, Dalma!” she
commanded. “Bad!” The dog growled a little, but sat as Karen held
her. “Go to your pillow. Pillow!” The dog walked to a dog bed,
still glaring at me, and lay down.

I relaxed in the chair and looked at Karen. “Can you
teach me how to do that with my kids?” I asked. She chuckled
lightly.

I couldn’t follow up on her comment about Justin’s
innocence because Rezenbach sat down next to her again, looking
into her eyes to see if confidences had been betrayed or emotional
barriers broken during his 20-second absence. He looked at me with
intensity. Luckily, I live with a lawyer, so intense looks don’t
really have that much impact anymore. I’ve seen Abby rehearsing
them.

“My client,” he announced, “will not discuss anything
related to the case against the man accused of killing her husband.
She will discuss her marriage and her husband’s character, so long
as the questions are not so personal as to upset her. She has been
through an enormously difficult time and is still suffering great
emotional pain. I will not allow you to increase that pain. Is that
understood, Mr. Tucker?”

I took a long moment and studied him. “Did you
practice that?” I asked. “I mean, last night, when you were getting
into your pajamas, did you look in the mirror and do that speech?
Because it was very convincing, really.”

Rezenbach, who wasn’t used to people not quivering at
the sound of his voice, fumphered briefly, then regained his
composure. “If you are intent on being irreverent, young man, this
interview will be terminated.”

“Wow. Now you sound like my fourth-grade teacher,
Miss Rubinski. Did you know her?”

Karen Huston seemed not to be listening to this
exchange. She was watching the dog, who was lying on the dog bed
with her tongue hanging out, staring with one eye at the
ceiling.

“We are not prepared to continue,” said Rezenbach,
and he stood, expecting Karen to follow him. She kept staring at
the dog.

“Sit down, Mr. Rezenbach,” I told him. “I don’t
intend to violate your client’s privacy or ask her questions that
are going to make her more upset. She doesn’t know any more about
the murder than the cops, and they don’t mind me asking sensitive
questions, since they rarely answer
any
questions. So switch
to decaf and take a seat.” Surprisingly, he sat. I love summoning
my inner Bogart. Another minute, and I’d have been telling him to
shut his “yap.”

My diatribe at her lawyer seemed to snap Karen to
attention— she looked at me, her eyes open, but still haunted. I
knew I couldn’t press her on much of anything.

“How did you meet your husband, Karen?” You always
start with a softball question because it loosens the subject up
and gets her into the flow of the conversation.

She smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “We were
fixed up, believe it or not. My college roommate Pearl introduced
us when I was working in the city at HBO and Michael was in the
financial planning department at the charitable foundation where
Pearl worked. She thought we’d hit it off, because she knew I’d
been through a number of bad relationships in a row, and he seemed
like the kind of guy who wouldn’t hurt me.”

“She was right,” I suggested.

Karen nodded. “Yes, she certainly was. Michael was
devoted to me from the day we met. He actually proposed on our
first date, and I had to hold him off for three months.”

“But he wore you down, finally.” You don’t want to
put words in the subject’s mouth so much as lead them in a
direction and see if you’re right. If you’re not, they’ll tell
you.

This time, I wasn’t wrong. Karen nodded again. “Yes,”
she said chuckling. “He wore me down. How could you not give in to
a man that open and—” She sniffled and stopped herself
mid-sentence. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Karen. You’re doing fine.”

Rezenbach considered saying something lawyerly, but I
cast a glance in his direction, and the memory of my Sam Spade
impersonation came back to him. He decided to let it go, for now.
Even we little folk can be intimidating when we’re sitting
down.

Karen Huston composed herself, but it was an effort,
and it certainly wasn’t an act. I knew the more difficult questions
were on their way, and this doesn’t happen often, but I was
starting to wonder whether they were worth asking.

“All I can tell you, Aaron, is that no woman ever
felt more secure in a relationship than I did with Michael. He
loved me no matter what, and that is a very comforting
feeling.”

I took a deep breath. “Can you think of anyone who
would want to hurt Michael?”

Rezenbach’s eyes became the size of Eggo waffles—the
apple cinnamon kind, which is all Ethan will eat. “Mr. Tucker!”
Rezenbach barked.

The corner of Karen’s mouth curled in a strange way,
almost like a snarl. The dog’s head rose off the pillow and she
stared at Karen.

“It’s all right,” she said quietly.

Rezenbach turned his head to look at her, caught her
glance, and sat down. They clearly had a bond that went beyond
lawyer-client, but I had a hard time picturing them as lovers. I
had a hard time picturing Rezenbach and
anyone
as
lovers.

Karen turned back to me, measuring each word
carefully. “I’m sorry, Aaron, but no. I can’t think of anyone who
would want to . . .  I mean, it just doesn’t make
sense. That poor young man must have just done it because
. . .  She gestured with her hands a couple of
times, but didn’t say anything else.

I snuck a peek at Rezenbach, who was poised like a
cobra about to strike. But there was no way around it. “Was there
any trouble in your marriage, Karen?” Even as I said it, I
regretted it.

Rezenbach wouldn’t be denied this time—he again leapt
to his feet, but Karen was faster. She feverishly shook her head
“no,” burst into tears, and stood, waving her hand and walking out
of the room in the direction in which she had come, toward her
bedroom—the bedroom where memories of her husband, whom I had just
suggested she might have been cheating on, would haunt her until
she left this home behind.

“I’m sorry . . .  I’m sorry,” she kept
saying, but she was gone before I could say the same to her.
Rezenbach, fire shooting from his pupils, glared at me, clamped his
teeth shut, and pointed to the front door.

“This interview is terminated,” he hissed, following
his client. “Let yourself out.”

I started toward the coat rack, but the dog growled
again. She stood up and glared in my direction, making that low
sound in her throat. It took me a few minutes to get out the door.
Sam Spade had long since left the building.

“
J
ustin Fowler is a nice
kid,” said Ted Mitchell, owner of Brunswick Sporting Goods. “He’s
the best employee I ever had.”

“Sporting goods,” in this case, meant mostly guns and
gun accessories. Mitchell, a man in his sixties with a white
goatee, was in the store alone until I arrived. He didn’t seem
terribly concerned, but once I mentioned Justin’s name, Ted became
downright effusive.

“He’s been working here four years,” he said of
Justin. “Before that, he’d hang around here for long stretches, but
never bought a thing, I was going to chase him away, but when we
got into a conversation about the guns in the store, he knew more
than I did. I offered him the job right then and there.”

“Do you deal in the kind of gun they found in
Justin’s room? Did he get it from here?”

“No, sir,” Mitchell said forcefully, as if I’d
accused him of a crime. “That kind of thing, with no serial number
and no traceable elements, is something you buy at a gun show, not
in a store like this. In New Jersey, it’d be against the law for me
to sell that kind of gun.” Okay, so I
had
accused him of a
crime.

“Any idea where Justin got it?”

Mitchell looked me straight in the eye and said, “If
Justin says he found it in his room, then he found it in his room.
That kid don’t lie, ever. If he says it dropped from heaven, then
that’s where it came from. No question.”

“I’m not questioning Justin’s honesty, believe me,
Mr. Mitchell,” I said. “I’m just trying to figure out what
happened.”

“Well, I don’t know where the weapon came from,” he
said. “He didn’t get it here.” He was calming down a little. The
last thing I needed was to get a man angry at me in a huge room
full of firearms.

“Have any of your customers talked to Justin about a
gun like that or asked him about it . . .  that he
told you?”

Mitchell shook his head, but there was something he
didn’t want to tell me. “No,” he said. “Nobody’s asked Justin about
that kind of a gun, at least not that he mentioned to me, and not
that I’ve heard them ask.”

I bit a little harder on my upper lip, trying to
phrase the next question properly. “Did any of your customers ask
you about that kind of gun? Someone you had to turn away,
maybe?”

He seemed to be very careful about looking me in the
eye as he answered. “No, none of my customers asked me about a
replica weapon like that one,” he said. “Not one.”

The jousting was getting a little tiresome. “Has
anyone
been in here asking about a gun like that? Come on,
Mr. Mitchell. I think we both want to help Justin.”

“I
am
helping Justin,” Mitchell said. “And if
you want to talk any further about this, you can call my
lawyer.”

There wasn’t much room left for negotiation, so I
checked my watch, made noises about how late I was (which was
true), and headed out the door. I beat the kids home by about ten
minutes, which is the last sentence you’ll ever read from me that
starts with “I beat the kids”. .  unless we’re talking
about a game of “Trivial Pursuit,” in which I’m a merciless
competitor. Ask a freelancer about trivial stuff, and you’re bound
to strike gold.

Ethan wasn’t any less surly than usual, and no more
so, and when a boy is about to become a teenager, that’s really the
most you can expect. He did his homework, grumbling, and showed it
to me, with even more grumbling, but without the four-alarm
meltdown we’d had the day before. Some days, that’s good
enough.

Leah, anticipating the arrival of her relatives, was
less effervescent than usual, but seemed to know she stood a decent
chance of getting a present out of the visit. Knowing her uncle
Howard, I was willing to bet it’d be a swell bag of peanuts with
“Continental Airlines” printed on one side, but perhaps I was
projecting just a bit.

Just before I was going to start making dinner, Lori
Shery called. I filled her in on my monumental lack of progress
with Justin Fowler, and she, being Lori, expressed her concern that
she’d asked me too big a favor.

“I’ve asked you to do something that’s impossible,”
she said.

“You expect it because you do impossible things three
times a week,” I reminded her.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked. Lori
should have that put on a business card, or have a tape loop made
of her saying it, to cut down on needless repetition.

“Talk to some doctors,” I said, knowing that “no, I
can handle it” would have been unacceptable to Lori.
“Psychologists, neurologists, people like that. Give them the
details of the case as you understand it, and see if they can poke
any holes in the theory that Justin shot Michael Huston just
because he was the first guy he encountered. The more experts we
have, the better off we are. And if you get any good ones, tell
them I’ll be calling to do an interview.”

Lori already sounded more upbeat now that she had an
assignment. I’m the same way, but I generally get paid when I have
an assignment. “Anything else, boss?” she asked.