Close Case (9 page)

“No luck,” Chuck said, flipping his phone shut. “He’s not home. Ray tried his pager number, but nothing yet. Reminds me why I left apartment life behind. Can never find a super when you need one.” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye and smiled.

“Yeah, I thought that’s all it was,” I said, smiling back.

Back inside the box, Todd Corbett had the erroneous impression he was going home. “So, are we done here?” he asked Mike, reaching for his ball cap.

“Actually, Todd, we’re in a bit of a jam.” After all Mike’s talk about honesty, he sounded genuinely disappointed in Corbett. “Here’s the problem. I’ve got a dead body on Hillside, bashed in with a baseball bat, only a few blocks from where you just told me you were going to town with—guess what? A baseball bat. I really can’t ignore that, you know what I’m saying?”

Corbett looked like a train had just come barreling out at him from the inside of a sink drain. Mike’s intentionally schizophrenic questioning was probably unsettling enough, but Corbett had undoubtedly confessed to the property crimes only because he was convinced that the police hadn’t connected those to Percy’s murder. His body slumped in the chair as he realized his mistake.

“You hearing me, Todd? You see my predicament?”

“What about that crap you said about the ticket and your word and all?”

“But that’s not what I’m not talking about. We’re done with that subject, and I’m still giving you a cite. No booking. But you see the spot I’m in on this killing, don’t you?”

“I don’t know nothing about that. You never said nothing about a murder.”

“Sure, but you also said you didn’t know anything about all the broken windows on Twenty-third. And you’re probably going to tell me you don’t know anything about these poor people who got walloped at random walking down the street that night, even though I got pictures of that too.”

“I told you what you wanted to know about the shit on Twenty-third. But I’m telling you, I didn’t kill nobody.”

“You’re going to have to come up with something better than that, Todd. I mean, what else are people gonna think other than that you and”—he looked at his notebook—“this Hanks guy went a little bit further with the bat a few blocks over. Same time, same neighborhood, same weapon. You said yourself you were so tweaked out you can’t even remember what happened. How can you be sure you didn’t do it, Todd?”

They went back and forth like that as the minutes, and then the hour, passed. Mike resorted to all the standard interrogation techniques. He covered the tabletop with pictures of Percy, alive and dead. He continually mentioned the witnesses at the apartment, implying that they’d seen more than they had. He suggested that Corbett could reduce his liability if Percy had provoked him in some way, or if Hanks had been the instigator, or if the meth made him do it.

I was growing tired. More important, I was becoming convinced that Mike was wasting his time; Corbett wasn’t going to budge. Even Mike looked like he needed a break, which surely meant Corbett needed one too.

But then the dynamic of the conversation shifted.

“So do I need a lawyer or something?” Corbett asked.

Mike slid a piece of paper on the table in front of him toward our viewing window with his fingertips. He was making sure Chuck and I knew that Corbett had already signed a waiver of his Miranda rights. Believe it or not, once that’s done, only a crystal-clear request for counsel suffices to invoke a defendant’s rights. Corbett’s weak-willed question would be seen as an “ambiguous” reference to counsel that Mike was free to ignore, no different legally from a statement about a baseball game.

“That’s entirely up to you. You know your rights. But I can tell you one thing, though: a lawyer? He’s gonna tell you to clam up and go to trial. And that decision right there would leave you facing capital murder charges. You know what that means, right?”

Corbett shrugged his shoulders.

“That means the State goes for the death penalty, Todd. And once that lawyer of yours tucks you away in a cell tonight to wait for a trial—months down the road—you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna go to Trevor’s house and have a talk with him, just like this one. And he might not call that lawyer, you see? He might decide to say you were the one who did the whole thing. After all, you’re the one with the bat in the pictures, right? Then it’s you looking at the needle, and him looking at a plea bargain.”

“I don’t like where this is going,” I said to Chuck.

“He’s got the waiver, Sam. And I didn’t hear the kid say he wanted a lawyer.”

“He can still claim his statements are involuntary. A waiver isn’t consent to coercion.” And Oregon judges were especially uncomfortable when the threat of lethal injection was thrown around the interrogation room.

“Mike knows what he’s doing,” Chuck said, “and we need that confession.”

I knew Matt was on his mind. Despite his alibi, the cop husband of the victim’s girlfriend would be a natural target for the defense at trial—unless, of course, the defendant confessed now. Jurors convict defendants who confess. And defendants don’t go to trial when they know a jury will convict.

I looked at him uncertainly. “It’s fine,” he assured me.

Todd Corbett didn’t think so. “They’re gonna kill me? You got to be kidding me. I’ve told you everything I know. And I’m getting tired, man, and I gotta use the can. I want my ticket, and then I want to go home.”

“I’ll take you to the men’s room, Todd, that’s not a problem. I’ll walk you down there myself just as soon as you explain to me which of you used the bat. It’s only the one with the bat who faces the needle.”

“OK, this is getting ridiculous,” I said. Chuck tried to reach for my hand as it reached toward the glass, but he was too late. The rap of my knuckles two times against the window made Corbett hop in his seat, but Calabrese only blinked.

“Oh, boy, Todd, now you’ve really got a problem. You know what that means?” Without warning, Mike hit the switch that illuminated the observation area where Chuck and I stood. Just as quickly, he hit it again. In what had appeared to be the interrogation room’s mirror, Corbett would have seen a half-second flash of two strangers watching him through a clear pane of glass. “That knock means the lady in there just ID’d you to my partner. You better get up. It’s time to take you downtown.”

I started to open the door to interrupt, but this time Chuck was faster. “Think, Sam. If you walk in that room right now, you give Corbett the upper hand. What’s done is done. Let’s just see what happens.”

I pursed my lips and stared into his eyes and at his set jaw. He was right. I was over a barrel. The damage was already done. If I interrupted now to rein Mike in, Corbett would almost certainly invoke his rights, terminating any chance we had of getting an admission. “Fine, but Mike better be wrapping up.”

“I’m sure he knows that too.”

Corbett’s right foot tapped a staccato rhythm against the linoleum floor, his eyes squeezed shut tightly as his torso rocked front to back in time with his nervous beat. Mike looked at his watch. “I got to get going soon, Todd, so you need to decide what we’re doing here.”

“Did that lady in there see Trevor too?”

“Just his picture, but my partner knocked twice. That means she ID’d both of you. He’s probably being picked up right now as we speak.”

Still handcuffed, Corbett was tapping his fingers now against the back edge of the chair, no doubt looking for the out that every defendant thinks he’ll find. The story the police will believe. The one that will end his trouble and take him home. The out is something that every defendant thinks he can conjure, but which every cop knows does not exist. It’s the belief in the out that convinces suspects to waive their rights and talk to police, locking themselves into an untenable defense from which they cannot escape at trial.

Corbett had lasted longer than most before committing to his out. But what Corbett had displayed in tenacity, he lacked in creativity. He chose the out that Mike had been suggesting all along.

“All right, man, I think we did it,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut again, struggling for the right words to convey the truth he was about to admit. “It was the meth. I felt—I don’t know, invincible.”

“You
think
you did it?”

“Fuck, what do you want from me? Fine, we did it.”

“Why?”

“I told you, we were fucked up.”

“And the car?”

“Yeah, we were just after the car. It got out of hand.”

“When you hit him with the bat,” Mike added.

Todd Corbett hesitated, coming to terms with what he was saying. “No. Trevor’s the one who hauled off on him with the bat. Check his jacket.” He paused again, assuring himself once more before he sank his friend for good. “He called me this morning. There was blood on his jean jacket. Check for yourself.”

Heidi Hatmaker worked until seven o’clock on Monday night. Nothing new in that.

What made this evening different was that for once she was actually excited to be there. Thrilled, in fact, to hunker down in her tiny cubicle in the news pool offices. To an outside observer, the transformation would go unnoticed. Same room, same chair, same petite frame locked in its studying pose: right leg tucked beneath her, thumb-nail between chewing teeth, sandy-blond bangs concealing the direction of her gaze.

But Heidi felt a surge of excitement. She used her forearms to block the source of that excitement from the view of passersby moving frantically, as usual, behind, in front, and beside her in the newsroom. She really needn’t have bothered; no one ever paid attention to what she was doing anyway.

It was better, though, she reasoned, to avoid any possible notice of the plan she’d come up with this morning—a plan she thought Percy Crenshaw would approve of. This could be her chance to change the persona she’d been stuck with since she moved to Portland.

As unglamorous as the Portland
Oregonian
might seem, most of the reporters who worked there had paid their dues. They’d slaved for years at community newspapers or as freelance writers. They’d gone into debt, hocked heir-looms, and slept on the same futon for a decade straight.

And they resented the Yale graduate who pulled up in her parents’ BMW for an assignment handed to her by their new editor-in-chief. About six months into the job, her father had interfered, and she’d suddenly been offered a regular position on the crime beat. Knowing where the assignment came from, Heidi turned it down and forced her father to promise that his college buddy would never again disrupt her natural career path at the paper.

Since then, she had regularly sat through semiannual job reviews that all delivered the same verdict: She was one of the smartest, most thorough, hardest-working staff members they had. But she had neither spark nor flair. She didn’t have the spark that convinced the nonreporters of the world to share secrets she could turn into news. And she didn’t have the flair that enabled reporters to take information that was readily available to other news outlets and humanize it in a way that made it Pulitzer Prize–worthy.

Percy Crenshaw had had both. In the months and months she had been relegated to fact-checking and line editing, she had watched him carefully. Once, he’d pulled her aside and told her he had noticed she was hungry. She tried to brush it off with humor, responding, “Thanks, but actually I just had an apple.” But because he had the spark, Percy got her talking—and kept her talking—about what it was like to be the only staff member who knew the editor’s college friends called him Thor, let alone why. It didn’t take him long to realize that she was sick of hearing how dependable and detail-oriented she was, while no one ever let her do anything that came close to reporting the news.

To her surprise, Percy had been kind—almost paternal—but in a manner she had never experienced. He had told her she needed to adopt a new persona, to think of it as acting. He had even teased her about her name, something she usually minded. “You need to act like a Wolf Blitzer or a Hannah Storm, not a Heidi Hatmaker. Heidi Hatmaker’s a girl who skips down cobblestone streets and gives presents to children. You need to be ruthless. You need to push those children out of the way to get to your story.”

In other words, she needed to
act
like an ambitious reporter even if she still felt like a spoiled-rotten college kid who drove her mother’s old car and needed a haircut she refused to let her parents pay for. For the past four months, she’d been trying. But no one seemed to notice.

Then today, after she’d been standing guard outside Percy’s office for more than two hours, her editor Tom Runyon finally delivered the instructions he’d received from the newspaper’s lawyer. It was yet another task that required a detail-oriented, smart, thorough, hardworking kid to see through—no drive, instinct, or charisma required. The police were going to search Percy’s office, and her job was to screen every single file and scrap of paper. She was to make certain nothing revealed a confidential source.

She knew immediately that the stint would be easy. Percy had said it was a mistake—at least for him—to put too much on paper before he knew for sure what his take was. He preferred to store the facts in his head and let them stew until he envisioned his final spin. He only jotted down minutiae that might elude his steel-trap memory. The big-picture stuff stayed upstairs.

In retrospect, Percy Crenshaw had been the yang to her yin. This strong magnetic African-American man had possessed every raw talent that she coveted, while lacking at least some of the learned skills she had mastered. She knew the police wouldn’t find much in Percy’s office.

But she knew where the minutiae were. She had watched him. She had read every article he had ever written. When the female District Attorney and the good-looking cop were done in Crenshaw’s office, she left it just as she’d found it. But first—before she locked the door behind her and returned the key to Lon Hubbard—she and Percy’s pocket-sized notebooks made a pit stop at the photocopier.

Now she had pages filled with an intense, nearly illegible scrawl. Heidi might be young, but she knew her strengths and weaknesses. She was patient, and she was smart. She might not have spark or flair, but she had photocopies of Percy Crenshaw’s light-blue notebooks. If anyone could reconstruct the reporter’s knowledge that Percy had taken with him in death, it would be Heidi. That’s cool, Percy would have said.

Back in her studio apartment, Heidi sat Indian-style on the bed, the television turned down low, documents spread around her on the quilt, a larger circle on the floor beneath her.

She had reread several of Percy’s older, more notable investigative articles. Now she was searching for any entries in the photocopied notebooks that might line up with the ultimate published work. Scooping carryout chow mein into her mouth as she read, she felt herself recognizing the rhythm of Percy’s style.

Heidi was a student of work habits. From what she’d seen, writers were typically funnelers, jotting down their biggest themes and concepts first, filling in the skeleton outline with increasingly specific details down the road. Percy Crenshaw’s approach was comparatively spigot-like; first he amassed pages and pages of minutiae; then he decided on the theme that would tie it all together. Percy’s earliest notes stuck to basics: numbers, dates, and other specifics he might otherwise forget.

Right now, she was looking at a perfect example of the Crenshaw method. His big magazine article for the
L.A. Times
—the one that got him the movie deal—involved a murdered judge who was blackmailed over an affair she had with an elected official. The earliest notes Heidi had been able to identify on the story didn’t include the judge’s name or any mention of corruption, murder, or blackmail. Instead, Percy had scrawled
VMI-Van
above a list of dates. Because the published article was long on details about the affair, Heidi eventually realized the note reflected the dates of the couple’s liaisons at the Village Motor Inn in Vancouver, Washington. Only later did he begin to fill out the story.

Trying to work Percy’s system to her advantage, Heidi had begun compiling a list of cryptic entries from his recent notes. Every time she saw a date, number, or initials, she added them to her list. The problem was, the list was getting longer and longer, and she was no closer to any big ideas.

Most intriguing—and confusing—was Percy’s seeming fascination with a set of numbers he had been tracking. Initially, he recorded them in a list-type format. In the first such entry she had found, he had written:

NEP 80 S (50 B) 25 A (10 B)

The next few entries were similarly headed by the caption NEP but contained different numbers next to the letters
S, A,
and
B
. Then the entries became more complicated, throwing in additional numbers marked by the letters
L
and
W
.

Heidi had no idea what any of it meant, but she knew Percy had been interested in it. More recently, he had come up with charts, two for each month, from January to August. For each month, Percy had written NEP on top of one chart, and EP on top of the other. On the horizontal axis of the charts were columns titled
B, L, W, A,
and
TOTAL
. On the vertical axis, he kept track of rows marked
S
and
A
. The numbers on the charts differed, but the labels were always the same.

Heidi stared at the first charts, for the month of January:

There was definitely a pattern. In the numbers rows,
S
’s always outnumbered
A
’s. In the columns, the
TOTALS
were always the sum of the figures under
B, L, W,
and
A
, indicating that those letters marked a breakdown of the larger whole of whatever Percy was tracking. And the NEP charts always had more
B
’s and fewer
L
’s,
W
’s, and
A
’s than the EP charts.

Now, if only she knew what the letters stood for.

Heidi stretched her cramped legs and looked at the hopeless piles of articles and notes around her. Percy may have taken his current big ideas with him, but Heidi kept telling herself that she had the important details right here somewhere. She could come up with the rest, including the significance of all these numbers and letters.

She needed to remain methodical. She wasn’t in a race. She was the only one with Percy’s notes. First she needed some sleep. On the television, she was surprised to see Conan wrapping up, a definite sign that she needed to turn in.