Moment of Truth (45 page)

“How did you know that?”

“We interviewed the secretary.” Walsh glared at her from the driver’s seat, which barely accommodated his burly frame. “In fact, a big cheese like Whittier was, I came down and questioned her in person. What did you want him for? She said you told her it was important. You had to see him about Honor Newlin.”

“I was coming to confront him. Whittier was responsible for Honor Newlin’s death. He blackmailed Trevor to do it. That’s what the fight was about last night, in Whittier’s office. The one Jack broke in on.”

“
What
? This a new theory? And it’s
Jack
now?”

“Look, I swear it. Trevor sold drugs to Whittier’s kid and Whittier must have known that I knew that.” Mary checked her urgency to convince him, but his eyes narrowed with trained skepticism. “I was onto him, and he knew it was only a matter of time before it all came apart. It must be why he—”

Walsh cut her off with a chop. “DiNunzio, don’t give yourself so much credit. Whittier killed himself because
you
were onto him? Get real.”

Mary felt an undeniable pang of guilt. “Not that I’m proud of it. But it proves that what I was telling you is true. Whittier knew it was over and he couldn’t face it. This proves Jack Newlin is innocent.”

“Newlin confessed!”

“He recanted!”

“They all recant when they realize they can get out of it! As soon as they find a lawyer young and gullible enough to buy their rap. I saw you two in the interview room, makin’ eyes.”

Mary ignored the slight. You get a crush on your client, you have to take the heat. “It’s the truth, Captain. Honor Newlin’s murder just got solved.”

“Oh please! You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re pingin’ around like a Ping-Pong ball, and in the end good people get hurt. Don’t you get it? You’re an amateur!” Walsh looked away, obviously trying to keep his temper, but Mary couldn’t let his words hit home.

“Captain, I know this seems crazy to you. I know I haven’t had it figured out from the beginning. I’m not a professional detective, I know that, too. But I’m right. I’m really right this time, and this suicide confirms it.”

“Please.” Walsh harrumphed audibly and his eyes scanned the scene around the squad car. Police officers milled around, controlling traffic and ushering in a snub-nose yellow truck with hoses to wash down the sidewalk. Walsh appraised their progress, then turned to Mary. “You honestly think we’re gonna let Newlin go, because this lawyer committed suicide?”

“It’s proof! Didn’t Whittier know I was coming?”

“Yeah, he got the messages, but so what?”

“How soon after my last message did he kill himself?”

“Fifteen minutes, okay?”

“So there. Not much time, is it? What happened?”

“He sent his secretary down to the cafeteria for doughnuts. When she came back, he had jumped. A lawyer down the hall heard the crash. He broke the window with a chair first.”

“What did the note say?”

“No note.”

“So we don’t know the reason for sure.”

“Wrong again.” Walsh laughed, without humor. “You think he’s gonna write, ‘I’m a bad guy, I’m scared of DiNunzio, this is me jumping’?” Walsh shook his head, eyes focused again on the scene through the windshield. “And we
do
know the reason for sure. The secretary told us Whittier came in late this morning and she smelled booze on his breath. He looked so low she asked him what was the matter and he told her he was ashamed of being all over the newspapers. He thought he embarrassed himself and the firm. She said that Whittier had already lost four of his biggest clients. I’d jump outta the building, too!”

“But that’s not the reason. He knew it was going to get worse, when I proved he killed his own client.”

“Come off it! You got proof of nothing! You can’t have! Whittier didn’t kill the wife, Newlin did.”

“Captain, hear me out,” Mary said, and told him the whole story, omitting the aid of Brinkley and Kovich. As she spoke, she experienced a sinking sense of déjà vu. She had no credibility with Walsh and she knew, even as she tried to convince him to the contrary, that she had no hard evidence against Whittier. It sounded like supposition, especially without Trevor’s record in juvenile. She knew it was true, she just couldn’t prove it. “Captain, you’re holding an innocent man.”

“According to you. I’ll pass it along to Davis. I hear he liked the one about the daughter and the bruises, too.”

“You want evidence, I’ll get it.” Mary opened the passenger side door. “I’ll make you let him go.”

“Not with your track record, kiddo,” Walsh said, but Mary was leaving.

She hurried from the squad car and broke into a light jog, running upstream against the swarm of business-people, some of whom stared at her curiously as she ran by. She didn’t know where she was running. She let her feet carry her away from the bloody tarp on the sidewalk and Walsh’s words.
Not with your track record, kiddo.

Her pumps clattered on the cold concrete. The sun was cold on her back. The chill stung her nose and made her eyes water, but still she kept running, her bag and briefcase flying at her side. Her emotions churned within her. Her chest felt bound with cold and fear, making it hard to breathe.

She had felt so close to the solution, right at Whittier’s door, and now he was dead. She had succeeded in nothing except forcing the man’s hand. Driving him to end his own life. Fresh tears sprang to her eyes and she didn’t pretend they were from the cold. As dreadful a man as Whittier was, he didn’t deserve to die. She had wanted to bring him to justice, not suicide. And not that way.
Not with your track record, kiddo.

She kept running, blinking wetness from her eyes. A woman hurrying toward the business district looked at her with a flash of recognition. Mary didn’t care. Jack was back in jail, and with Whittier’s suicide, his fate could be sealed. She didn’t have the proof to free him, and with Whittier dead she was no closer to getting him out, but farther away. Now both conspirators, Whittier and Trevor, were gone. How could she prove dead men guilty of murder?

It made her run faster. Brinkley and Kovich were in custody, too. Could Judy keep them out of jail? Mary kept running, the gun in her briefcase. Would the police find out about that, too? Would that make it worse for Brinkley? Was Walsh right? Was Mary just an amateur, doing damage?

The crowd thinned as she fled the business district. The pavement grew emptier the farther south she went. She didn’t know where she was going at first. She had nowhere to go. She couldn’t go home and upset her parents. It wouldn’t serve any purpose to go to the office or even to see Jack.

Her heels rang out swift and certain on the concrete. Her ears were filled with the sound of her own breathing. She was on her own. She couldn’t call on Judy or Lou; she didn’t want to. Mary was meant to get to the bottom of this, it would have to be her. She had to think, she had to plan. She had to keep moving and not give up. Most of all, she had to succeed.

And when she finally stopped running, she was only partly surprised at where she found herself.

Atheists never feel completely comfortable in church, and Mary was no exception. She had returned to the city church of her childhood and thirteen years of schooling, coming back even to the same pew. She wasn’t sure exactly why she had come to Our Lady of Perpetual Help. She was praying, if anything, to figure out what the hell she was doing there, much less on her knees.

She couldn’t puzzle it out. She didn’t believe in the perpetual help part and she knew it didn’t do any good to put her hands together in prayer, thumbs crossed like a staged Communion picture. But she did these things in this place, her feet having followed routes only they remembered and her hands obeying messages of their own. Mary was a Catholic on autopilot.

The church was completely quiet, as it would be during a weekday afternoon, if there wasn’t a funeral. She knew the schedule and rhythms of the church as well as her own. Only a few older people sat in the front pews, and Mary knew they would be stand-ins for the same older people who prayed every day when she was little, who most often now were her parents and their friends, like Tony-from-down-the-block. She squinted at the outline of the silvery heads, but none of them was related to her, which was good considering the gun in her briefcase, by the padded knee rest.

Mary breathed easier. The church was as gloomy as it always was, Our Lady of Perpetual Darkness, because the overhead lights were so dim, the light from their ancient fixtures squandered in the vaulted arches of the ceiling. The darkness emphasized the votive candles that flickered bloodred on either side of the altar and the vivid blues, greens, and golds in the stained-glass windows, depicting the Stations of the Cross. Bright lights over the white marble altar set it glowing, and no stage was ever lit to more dramatic effect. The brightest spot in the church, illuminated by a white spotlight, focused on a singular, martyred image.

He hung from an immense gold crucifix at the front and center of the church; a life-size, lifelike statue of Jesus Christ. His blue eyes were lifted heavenward in fruitless appeal. Painted blood dripped from the crown of thorns on his head. Even now, an adult and a lawyer, she had a hard time looking at it. As a child, she used to obsess about what it must feel like to have a crown of thorns forced down onto your forehead and nails driven clear through your ankles and wrists. But as she gazed at the statue, her hands folded against the smooth back of the pew in front of her, Mary realized why she had come.

Because the church was the same as it had always been, since as long as she could remember. The cool, slippery wood of the pew. The hollow echoes of someone’s cough. The splotches of dense color. The white-hot image at center stage. Everything outside the church’s stone walls had changed—Mary had lost a husband, seen her parents age, changed jobs, ducked bullets, and met an interesting man—but this city church had remained the same.

And that everything stayed the same implied that it would always stay the same. Why? Because it always had been. As a lawyer, Mary recognized that the logic was circular as a Möbius strip and the exemption from change applied only under this roof, but she found herself comforted nonetheless.

As it was, is, and ever shall be, world without end,
were the words of the prayer, and she found herself murmuring them quietly, and then, after them, other prayers. The words summoned themselves from a place in her brain she didn’t know existed, the useless information lobe, where she kept the lyrics to “Good King Wenceslas” and the commercial paper provisions of the Uniform Commercial Code. And though it was sunny and busy and bustling outside the church, inside it was dark and still and familiar. The words were the same as they always had been, as were their rhythms, falling softly on her ears.

In time Mary could feel her heartbeat slow and her muscles relax. She eased back onto the pew, linked her hands in her lap, and let her thoughts run free. She said the words that came to her lips and breathed in the smells and sounds of the world without end, and that world was good and generous enough, even after all this time, to give her peace and room to think. And when she opened her eyes it was growing dark outside the church as well as in and afternoon had faded to dusk. And though it was still strange and new beyond the walls, Mary was no longer afraid.

Tears she couldn’t quite explain came to her eyes and as she brushed them away she realized what they were. Exhibits A, B, and C. Mary had been looking for evidence all this time, but it was streaming down her face. A lawyer naturally wanted proof, was trained that way, and now she had finally found it. Evidence that she had been lying to herself for quite some time. And it wasn’t a time for lies anymore; it was a time for truth.

So Mary spent one last moment whispering a thank-you to someone she always had believed in, and when she got up to go, with her briefcase and her gun, she knew exactly what to do.

Streetlights and lighted offices illuminated the street corner where Tribe & Wright rose from the concrete, and Mary was relieved to see that the crowd had gone, so her waiting had paid off. No police, no press, not even a sawhorse to mark the spot where Whittier had died. She looked up to the broken window and found the bright square of plywood. She gripped her briefcase and strode to the building in the chill night air. She felt refreshed and determined, with Walsh’s words a faint memory. She might have been an amateur detective, but she was a professional lawyer. And this was lawyer’s work.

She conceptualized her task as a legal case, about to be tried. The case she had to prove was that Whittier had made Trevor kill Honor Newlin and that he had done so to get the money from the Buxton estate. She needed exhibits to make her case and there had to be a paper trail in Whittier’s office, some document, accounting records, or something in the wills. Anticipation quickened her pace. The paper trail had to begin, or end, with Whittier.