Ring of Truth (16 page)

“How'd you get that?” he wants to know.

“The Carmichaels gave it to me.”

“Why the fuck'd they do that?”

“Because you told them you didn't want it, Carl, and because I'll collect anything to do with this case. You scared them away.”

His fierce face cracks a grin and he laughs. “It's what I do
best, Marie. I like to scare the good citizens so they won't report crimes and force me to do some actual fucking work around here.” He puts out his hand for the ring.

I hand it to him. “So, is it?”

“Probably.” He perches the ring atop his right index finger, unable even to slide it past the first joint of his finger. “Whoever wore it, she was a skinny thing,” he observes.

“Whatever happened to that other ring?”

“It's in the evidence room, unless somebody's stolen it.” He's not kidding. A diamond ring would be a temptation to a dishonest cop with a little credit-card debt. Almost playfully, he says, “What do you think I should do with them?”

It takes me a second to realize he is taking possession of it.

“I could pawn them, maybe,” he continues, looking at me to see if I'm falling for this. “What do you think this one's worth, Marie, a few thousand? I wouldn't get that much, if I pawned it.”

“And you'd have to split it with me.”

“Your word against mine.”

“You better be nice to me, Carl. My book's not out yet.”

“Oh, right, I'm gonna be famous. Felons all over South Florida are gonna want my autograph. I guess I'd better behave myself till your literary masterpiece is in print. I hope you told them how handsome I am?”

“There's a photograph of you in the book.”

“Damn.” He looks suddenly disgusted, but not, it turns out, about his appearance. “Do you know we have twenty-seven effing pawnshops in this city alone, Marie? And a hundred and twenty-nine in just this one county? And that I checked every damn one of them, on my own, without a computer, when I was looking for a lead on that engagement ring?”

“I know you did, Carl. I pray for a big budget increase for the police department, every night.”

“Right. You could give us your royalties on this book.”

“Yeah, that's gonna happen.” He laughs, and so do I. There's no central computer in Howard County for comparing pawn slips with stolen or lost property reports. That means that cops have to do it manually, and sometimes that means cross-checking literally thousands a day. It's a source of unending and welljustified complaints, but so far no money has been allotted to lighten the load on them. “So what
are
you going to do with it?”

“Check back with me on this, Marie.”

“Meaning, you don't know?”

“No, I just thought you'd want to make sure I really did tag it for evidence, instead of pawning it like I said I would.”

I give him a wry look. “If you're not an honest cop, Carl, I'm going to look pretty stupid for turning you into a hero.”

He looks smug, catches the eye of a cop across the room, and grins at her, before looking back at me. “Is that what you did? Aw. Why didn't the little girl give us this ring a long time ago?”

“It's pretty, and she wanted to keep it.”

“Also, she didn't want to get caught stealing.”

“Also that. You're not going to get her in trouble, are you?”

It's his turn to give me a look. “Yeah, I make it a practice to arrest ten-year-old suburban white girls and charge them with grand larceny.” Suddenly, his expression changes. “Which, now that I think about it, this may be.”

“If it's worth that much.”

“Why are you interested in these rings, Marie?”

“I am interested in everything about this case.”

“I thought you already finished your book about me.”

“About you?” I can't help smiling. Cops are pretty damned amusing, sometimes. Funny, caustic, quick-witted as hell. My own riposte is less than original. “You wish.”

“I've told all my relatives.”

“Or course. I make sure I only write about cops with big families. More book sales for me that way.”

“We're a library family, sorry to tell you.”

“Is that right. Well, maybe I'll have to rewrite my manuscript,
and get more about Norm in there, a little less about you.” Sergeant Jill Norman was his partner on some of the investigation, but she didn't play enough of a role to be as big a star in my book.

“My family just got bigger. You gonna give me a free copy?”

“Several, a box load if you want that many.”

“What if I don't like what you wrote about me?”

“So sue me.”

He laughs, unaware that I mean it. I try like hell to portray the real people in my books accurately, and with some compassion for the fact that after I make use of them they still have to live in the world. But there's no guarantee that I will write about them as they want the world to see them. They have no idea the risk they take with their reputations when they put their words in my hands. I smile back at the detective, but I feel queasy, because I know that Carl Chamblin is not a man who will take it kindly if I don't completely share his own high opinion of himself.

“If I don't like it,” he suddenly says, “you better not fucking park on my streets.” At his own supposed joke, Carl Chamblin laughs loud enough to attract the attention of other cops in the room. When I glance around at them, however, it seems to me they are looking at me, and not at him. I spot two of them—two women—talking behind their hands, and when they see I am looking at them, they smile at me in a kind of embarrassed way, and quickly turn away from each other. Hmm. Call me paranoid, but it seems to me there is something in their expressions—

“Carl, you ever hear any rumors about my private life?” He looks surprised, then foxy. “What should I hear? You got a little secret you don't want us crack detectives to find out about, Marie?”

I feign innocence, and stand up.

“You know,” he says, looking up at me from where he's leaning back in his chair, “now I won't rest until I find out what it is.”

I nod in the direction of the two women cops. “Ask them. Maybe they know. And when you find out, tell me, okay? I'm sure it will be as great a surprise to me as it is to you.”

Carl laughs, and makes a move, as if to escort me to the door.

“So you don't think the rings are connected at all?”

“Oh, let it go,” he advises me, and props his butt on his desk. “It's over. We got a conviction, you got a book. The fuck else do you want?”

“Just these loose ends.”

“Fuck 'em. They're not important. Somebody stole some rings and that house was where they hid them, and if you go looking for who those people are they may not be real happy if you find them.”

It sounds as if he is warning me away from my own curiosity.

“Don't you want to investigate it, Carl? If they're stolen?”

“The sign on the door says homicide, not theft.”

I notice something and ask, “Speaking of signs, what's that, Carl?”

He turns to see what I mean: a big white cardboard sign with a fat black “8” on it. “The number of days left till the execution of Stevie Orbach,” he tells me. “That's our countdown calendar.”

“You do that for all your killers?”

“No, just Stevie. Somebody rapes and murders the niece of one of our guys, we're going to pay special attention.”

“Will you do that when it's time for Bob Wing?”

“No.” Carl shrugs. “He's nothing to us.”

“One more question.”

He fakes a put-upon sigh.

“It's about Artemis McGregor. Do you think she's dangerous?”

He gives me an amused, cynical look. “No, I think she's scared.”

“Scared?”

“Sure. I think she got caught up in something she never intended to happen and she feels lucky to have got off so easy.”

“Doesn't it piss you off that she was acquitted?”

“Nah. We got the bad guy. Her life is ruined, she'll never pick up the pieces from this. She was just a pawn. If they'd gotten away with it, she'd probably have been next on his list.”

“You think he'd have killed her, too?”

“Sure, first they killed his wife, then they would have killed her husband, and then Wing would have killed her. She's got money, right?”

“So,” I say, a shade ironically, “you're saying that in a way you may have saved her life.”

“Listen, we don't need to execute her. She'll fall for another one just like him. Women like that, they do themselves in, every time.”

The assistant state attorney, Tony Delano, tried to make the case in court that Artie McGregor was a canny, manipulative femme fatale who bashed her rival to death with a baseball bat. And now here's Carl Chamblin saying she's nothing more than a fool and a helpless tool for a good-looking man.

“What about the stuff in the boat bag, Carl, the condoms and stuff?”

“What about them?”

“Seems like evidence of their affair. I'm going to put a photo of it in my book. I'm taking a photographer out to the mansion with me today to pose the bag in the cabinet where Jenny found it.”

“You got permission to go in there?”

“I've notified the owner.”

Carl's good-bye smile is cruel. “If you ask her nice, maybe she'll recreate the murder for you. Get pictures. Ask her to sign one for me.”

In the lobby, I stop to use a pay phone to drop my third piece of bait. When defense attorney Tammi Golding comes on the line, I
say, “Tammi, it's Marie Lightfoot, and I won't take but a minute. You know that canvas boat bag that Jenny Carmichael found? Well, they gave it to me. I'm going to take it out to the old mansion this afternoon and get some photos of it up in the tower where Jenny found it. Is there any chance your client would come out to have her picture taken, too?”

Tammi expresses the opinion that I must be nuts.

I laugh, and say, “I have learned that it never hurts to ask. Will you at least run the idea past her this morning?” I get the reluctant agreement I'm seeking and hang up, thinking: Almost hooked now. I figure it has to be Artemis who tried to get her hands on the bag, and Tammi's my best bet for being the one who told her about it, however innocently. But I need to contact everyone the Carmichaels told, just in case Artemis fails to listen to her messages and there is another route by which the news gets passed along. That's why my next stop is the assistant state attorney's office, and my excuse is that he's the one who asked to see me.

I don't make it out of the back door of the police station, however, before I'm waylaid by the chief of police himself.

“Marie?” I turn to find Marty Rocowski bearing down on me, looking dapper in a light summer suit with a matching shirt and tie, so that he's dressed all in cream. After a few polite preliminaries, he gets to the point, with a self-effacing grin. “How you doing on that book of yours?”

“Mailed it to my editor yesterday, Marty.”

I can't bring myself to call him Rocco.

“Hey, congratulations. Would you let somebody read it now?”

“I don't usually do that.” That's a partial truth; frequently, I allow some people to read short excerpts, to check for accuracy. But I don't want a chief of police getting his hands on my manuscript, because he'd naturally be inclined to try to censure anything he didn't like that I had written about his officers. “Why, Marty?”

“I'm only asking for my wife.” His grin grows wider and more charming. “Betty is one of your biggest fans. She can't wait to get her hands on this one, and her birthday's coming up. I'd score bigtime if I could take a copy of it home to her before any of her friends could read it.”

“I'll give you a signed copy when it comes out.”

He hides his disappointment fairly well, but it leaves us in an awkward moment of silence, which he fills by asking, “Now that you're finished with it, will you take a vacation?”

“Hope to, although I still have some work to do on it.”

“You ought to go,” he urges, enthusiastic as any travel agent.

“How about you?” I ask, to get his attention off me. “Can you and Betty escape any of Spring Break?”

“For a few days. We're going to Ft. Meyers to play golf right after the execution.”

“Excuse me?”

“Stevie Orbach. I'm taking a group of officers up to watch, friends of Lyle Karnacki's. Then I can go play golf.”

“Is that usual, for groups of you to watch executions?”

“I consider it part of the job.”

I'm truly curious now. “Why, Marty?”

He looks at me thoughtfully, then says, “My philosophy is that we ought to see the consequences of the laws we enforce. If we arrest people and testify against them, then we ought to take it all the way to the end and see them executed, if that's the case. Families aren't the only ones who need closure. Cops do, too.”

“You mind if I use that quote in my book?”

He smiles down at me. “Not at all. If you change your mind about the manuscript, call me, all right?”

“Sure,” I say, while thinking that as much as I want to keep on the good side of my hometown police department, that particular favor is not gonna happen. As I return to my car, I have a moment of realizing how lucky I am to have the easy access I do. Computers have made life hard for regular crime reporters on newspaper beats. There are new security systems to keep you out of anywhere
the cops don't want you to go, and there's the new fashion of “escorts” who keep you from wandering off into interesting corners, and new gag rules on cops, prohibiting them from talking freely to reporters. Not only that, but there's no paper trail to follow anymore. If you're a journalist with a police beat, you want to be able to search inventory lists, for instance, that show everything the cops seized with a warrant. But those physical files are gone, replaced by impenetrable computers. To get inside information now, you may have to file for it under the Freedom of Information Act, and you'll be lucky if the city attorney okays it. At that point of maddening frustration, some reporters write the only story left to them—about how the cops won't cooperate with the press. You can just imagine how popular that makes the reporter and how congenial that makes the cops. As I sail past the metal detector, I know these same doors would lock me out if I were any writer but me doing any other kind of crime writing. But since I am only writing about good cops doing good jobs in cases that are already solved, they let me pass “go.”