Bearing Witness (18 page)

The state troopers responded quickly. Within twenty minutes there were two investigators in the kitchen, both wearing rubber gloves. I stood next to Jonathan and watched as they carefully opened the wrapping paper. They'd already dusted it for prints and had lifted several. No doubt all belonged to Leah.

I looked up at Jonathan. My heart went out to him. Although he appeared as implacable as ever, he had to be churning inside. I wanted to comfort him somehow, but I knew that reassuring words were just words now. His car had been vandalized, two thugs had tried to beat him up, and now this. I put my arm around his waist and gave him a squeeze, knowing even as I did it that his ordeal had moved beyond the hugs and kind words. There'd be bodyguards for his daughters, increased surveillance, and heightened security as his investigation pressed on.

I glanced over at the wall clock. I had to leave in a few minutes to pick Benny up from the airport. Although I wanted to remain here by Jonathan's side, I knew it was probably better that I go. The men in this house were in their criminal investigative mode, and there were more investigators on the way, including two FBI special agents. There was nothing helpful I could add, and soon I'd just be in their way.

“It's a book,” one of the investigators said as he pulled back the wrapping paper.

The other said, “Dust it.”

“Check inside first,” Jonathan told them.

With the wrapping paper open but still shrouding the book, one of the investigators lifted the cover and flipped quickly through the pages.

The investigator turned to Jonathan and shook his head. “Nothing inside.”

He closed the cover and removed the wrapping paper. I was staring at a hardbound copy of
Mein Kampf
.

***

Not even once?” I asked when Benny finished his description.

We were parked in front of his house. On the drive from the airport I was still so freaked out that I had to tell him about Jonathan's “gift” and get my chance to vent before I'd listen to his account of Otto Koll's deposition.

Benny shook his head. “Nope.”

“Rats,” I said.

Benny shrugged. “Hey, it could have been worse.”

I gave him a look. “It could have been better.”

“It's really not bad, Rachel. As soon as I realized his dodge, I just started firing questions at him. He may not have taken the Fifth, but he did the next best thing. We're talking two solid hours of ‘I don't remember.' To every goddamn question I asked him. ‘Were you active in the German-American Bund?' Answer: ‘I don't remember.' ‘Did you ever attend a meeting of the German-American Bund?' ‘I don't remember.' ‘Did you ever meet with representatives of Beckman Engineering to discuss an upcoming bid on a wastewater treatment plant for the federal government?' ‘I don't remember.' Over and over and over.” He paused to give me a wink. “I think the transcript is going to read better than you think,” he said. “Trust me, kiddo. You read that bilge to the jury and it won't take them long to figure out that ol' Otto has suddenly contracted the most suspect case of amnesia in medical history.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but I'm going to need more than Otto Koll's amnesia to meet my burden of proof.”

“Keep your fingers crossed,” he said. “Sounds like Harold Roth's journal might blow them right out of the water.”

I held up my fingers. They were crossed.

Benny grinned. “Hey, what's the worst that could happen? Even if his journal turns out to be the mad ravings of a lunatic, you can still use it to squeeze another hundred grand of settlement money out of them.”

“Harold Roth is no lunatic, Benny,” I said.

“Then all the better, eh?”

I gave him a weary smile. “What a day.” I leaned over and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Thanks, Benny. You're the best.”

“Ain't that the truth.” He opened the car door. “Take care, gorgeous.”

Chapter Seventeen

The skies were blue, the sidewalks were shoveled clean, and the temperature was a sunny forty-two degrees. I'd been hunkered down in my office since seven-thirty that morning grinding through myriad trial preparation tasks. After three hours of that drudgery I needed some physical activity, so I decided to walk to Harold Roth's apartment. It was just twenty minutes by foot.

He'd told me not to be late, and that was fine with me. I was eager to see his journal and hear any other nuggets of information he was willing to share. If he was willing to talk, I was ready to listen. My briefcase contained a fresh legal pad, a portable dictation machine, and three blank cassette tapes. Depending on what he had heard and what he had observed back then, Harold Roth might be an important witness for me. I smiled at the irony of calling Stanley Roth's uncle to the witness stand.

On the way over to Harold's apartment I ran through my schedule for the rest of the day. Since I'd be in Jefferson City for most of tomorrow, my pretrial preparation schedule had become even more compressed. I'd allowed myself two hours for Harold—perhaps an overly optimistic estimation of how much time he'd be willing to give me. Then came Otto Koll. The court reporter in Chicago had promised to modem down a copy of his deposition transcript by one o'clock. I'd budgeted ninety minutes to read the transcript. Which reminded me: I made a mental note to ask Harold about Otto Koll; in fact, I'd ask him about the founders of each of the five companies. He seemed to have recognized Kruppa's name.

The rest of the afternoon was booked solid. Professor Kenneth Chalmers, my economist, was arriving at three this afternoon so that we could go over his testimony. It would be our third session. Chalmers had performed a computer analysis of the relevant bids and awards over the past twenty years and compared them to a control group of federal contracts in another area. His conclusion: the most likely explanation for the pattern of bids and awards was an agreement among the six bidders. It was a complex mathematical analysis, and it was also a critical building block in my proof of the conspiracy. Thus the real challenge for us was to come up with a way to present it to a jury of laypeople.

Benny was also coming by this afternoon, and he was bringing along my law student volunteers to start getting the trial exhibits and related computer records in order. That would be at least a two-day project.

***

The walkway to Harold's apartment building was unevenly shoveled. I got increasingly irritated as I skirted icy patches on my way to the entrance. Surely Harold was not the only elderly tenant, and even if he was, the landlord owed him better treatment than that. I rang the bell to apartment 3C to let him know I was here, and then I pushed through the broken security door and headed up the stairs.

Unlike last time, he wasn't waiting for me when I reached his landing, but his door was slightly ajar. I knocked gently, holding the doorknob as I did so that the door wouldn't swing open. I listened for the sounds of his footsteps. When I didn't hear any, I knocked harder. No sound.

Remembering his hearing aids, I opened the door a little wider and called, “Mr. Roth?”

Again no sound. I leaned my head in and called louder, “Harold? It's me, Rachel…”

My voice trailed off because suddenly I knew. I knew without even stepping into his apartment.

Oh, God
, I said to myself as I stumbled back a step.
Oh, God
.

I flashed back to my father, who had died of a massive heart attack on the morning after Thanksgiving two years ago. My mother had found him on the kitchen floor when she came down to make breakfast. The sports section of the Post-Dispatch was clutched in his left hand, his reading glasses were hanging from one ear. The mug of coffee on the kitchen table was cold.

I took a deep breath, steeling myself, and stepped into his apartment. I turned left and moved slowly toward the tiny kitchen, wincing as I peered around the doorway. On the little kitchen table there was a half-empty mug of black coffee—cold—but the room was empty. I moved farther down the hall, conscious of the silence in the apartment and the loud thumping of my heart. The bathroom was empty. So was the bedroom.

Standing at the bedroom door, I slowly turned. The living room was at the other end of the narrow hallway. I stared down that hallway, almost woozy with anxiety.

He might not be there
, I thought, trying to persuade myself to start down the hall.
He might still be out. It could have taken him longer to retrieve his journal than he anticipated. Maybe the sidewalks near the bank weren't shoveled
.

I took a few tentative steps toward the living room, cringing each time the floorboards creaked. I paused when I reached the front door, remembering with a wave of dizziness that it had been open when I arrived.

But he's old. Maybe he forgot to close the door when he left. You've done that yourself
.

I moved on toward the living room. One step, another, and then I saw him.

I backed against the wall. For one eerie moment, I thought he was alive. I thought he was smiling at me. I thought he was about to say something.

“Oh, God,” I moaned, covering my mouth.

I squeezed my eyes closed.

When I opened them, nothing had changed. He was still seated in his easy chair, his feet flat on the floor, his arms on the armrests. He was wearing the same white tennis shoes and black trousers as yesterday, but his shirt today was brown flannel, buttoned to the collar as before. His head was tilted slightly back and to the side, and his eyes were open. His face was set in a grimace that I'd first mistaken for a smile. There was a neat black hole above his right eyebrow and a corresponding stain on the nubby brown fabric behind his head.

***

The indignity of it bothered me, even though Harold Roth was long past caring about such things. Like all murder victims, he was now stuck in that grisly way station between person and dearly departed. He was “the body.” Never mind that this body still had a head, was still dressed, was still seated in his favorite chair with his eyes open, his mouth frozen in that awful smile, half his brain bunched against the back of his neck. He was no longer a person. He was a corpse.

They milled around him, the uniformed cops, the evidence techs, the two homicide detectives, the police photographer, the ambulance jockeys. Some talked homicide talk, the two uniformed cops talked bowling, the ambulance driver played Game Boy. And throughout it all, there in the middle of the crowd, untouched by the commotion, sat Harold Roth, gazing across the room at the darkened screen of his battered portable television.

It took another forty minutes, but finally one of the homicide detectives, a forty-something black man named Ray, was able to leave the scene to come with me to the branch office of Mercantile Bank that was two blocks from Harold's apartment. The reason? The receipt. We'd found a battered leather briefcase in the corner of Harold's living room. There was nothing inside it but a Mercantile Bank receipt for the withdrawal of $100. According to the receipt, Harold had withdrawn the cash from the branch office at 9:28 a.m. that morning.

The bank had its procedures. Even when faced with an irascible homicide detective and an impatient attorney, it took more than an hour for the bureaucracy to disgorge someone with sufficient authority to drill open Harold Roth's safe-deposit box. By then it was a mere formality. Whatever we might find in there, I knew what we wouldn't find. According to the security guard I talked to while we waited, Harold Roth had been standing at the entrance when the bank opened at nine o'clock. He hurried straight to the safe-deposit vault where, according to the log, he'd signed in at 9:05 a.m. and signed out thirteen minutes later. The vault clerk remembered that Harold showed up with an old leather briefcase, took his safe-deposit box to one of the privacy cubicles, and stayed in there for about two minutes. He came back out acting furtive and clutching the briefcase against his chest.

“Here we go, Detective.” It was one of the bank vice presidents. He was holding a safe-deposit box. “If you don't mind,” he said, gesturing toward a dour, gray-haired woman standing behind him, “Vera here will take an inventory of what you find inside.”

The contents proved easy enough to verify: thirty shares of May Company stock, five Israel bonds (total face value: $3,400), $2,050 in fifties, an expired passport, and a photocopy of the Last Will and Testament of Harold A. Roth.

“Anything else?” Vera asked.

I held up the empty box so that she could see inside.

***

I stormed past the flustered receptionist, not even bothering to identify myself.

“Oh, ma'am,” she called after me.

I headed down the corridor, ignoring her. I'd been on this floor often enough to know the exact location of his corner office with its panoramic view of the Arch and the riverfront. In fact, he was standing by that window when I came storming in.

He turned, surprised, just as a male voice came booming over his speakerphone. “They just might go for that approach, Stanley. I like it.”

He leaned over and quickly lifted the receiver. His courtly smile faded, no doubt in reaction to the wild expression on my face. “Run it by the mayor first,” he said, his voice smooth. “See whether he thinks it'll fly. You'll be at the dinner tonight, right? We'll talk then. Got to run, Donny. Be sure to give your lovely bride a big hello from me. Certainly. Take care, Donny.”

He hung up and gestured toward the upholstered chair in front of his antique table desk. “Well, hello, Rachel. I wasn't expecting you.”

I remained standing. “Who did you tell?” I demanded.

He looked perplexed. “Tell? About what?”

“About what I told you yesterday. About your uncle Harold.”

He settled into his high-back chair and steepled his hands beneath his chin. “I don't believe I am following you.” He spoke cautiously.

“Did you tell your client? Did you tell Conrad Beckman?”

He took his time, seeming to contemplate the question. “Rachel, I certainly do not want to seem evasive, but I believe that question crosses the boundary. I should think that any discussion I may have had on the subject of Harold Roth is protected by the work product privilege and the attorney-client privilege.”

“I want an answer,” I said, practically shouting.

“What makes you think you are entitled to one?” he responded, trying to sound self-righteous, to reclaim the high ground.

“Because of what happened, that's why.”

“Ah,” he said with the hint of smile, “has someone served my uncle with a subpoena?”

I stared down at him. “No, Stanley. Someone has killed your uncle with a gun.”

He lurched back his chair. “My God. When?”

“This morning. Sometime before eleven. Who did you tell?”

“Maybe it was a burglar.” His voice was unsteady.

“Come on.”

He looked at me, perplexed, defensive. “Why do you doubt that?”

“Because the police found his wallet on top of the bedroom dresser. In plain view. With one hundred seventeen dollars still in it. Whoever killed him wasn't looking for money. Answer my question, Stanley. Did you tell Conrad Beckman?”

He stood up and walked over to the window. After staring out at the Mississippi River for a moment, he turned back to me. “Rachel,” he said, his mask partly back in place, “the death of my sole surviving uncle comes as a complete shock to me.” He came back to his desk and took a seat behind it. “I can assure you that I have absolutely no reason to believe that our conversation yesterday afternoon or any subsequent conversation I may have had played any role whatsoever in his death.” He stared at me calmly. “Accordingly, I am afraid we have nothing further to discuss today.”

I placed my hands on his desk and leaned toward him. “Your own uncle.” I shook my head in revulsion. “My God, Stanley, what runs through your veins? Antifreeze?”

I straightened up and stared down at him.

He said nothing, his face expressionless. He tried to meet my stare, but after a moment he looked down at his desk and picked up his Mont Blanc fountain pen.

I turned and left.