Suspicion of Malice (12 page)

"But you're a regular lawyer, right?"

She smiled. "Yes."

"Ms. Connor, I really appreciate this, your time
and everything, but I don't expect you to do this for
nothing. I brought some cash with me."

"No, keep your money for now, and let's just see
what we've got. And remember, whatever you tell
me stays here. We take an oath of confidentiality."

He nodded. "Sure."

"First, a little personal information." She took
down his full name, his address, his telephone num
ber. Date of birth. Contact number at the Miami
City Ballet.

Bobby sat forward, an arm on her desk. "What I'm
worried about is, they might arrest me, even if I didn't do anything. It happens. They put people in
jail because they want to say they solved the crime,
and then you have to prove you didn't do it. If that happens, I can't make bail. My family doesn't have
the money, and I don't think the ballet would pay it."

For a few moments Gail looked for words to cor
rect this amazing ignorance. Did he truly believe
what he'd said? Police throwing citizens in jail on no
evidence solely to clear a case, then making them
prove their innocence? But Bobby had stumbled on
one truth: Whoever was arrested for this crime
would be staying in jail. There was no bond in capital murder.

Gail said, "Why do you think they're after
you,
in particular?"

He made a quick shrug. "Because they keep com
ing back." His thick-lashed, puppy-brown eyes
seemed completely guileless.

"Well, that certainly explains things." A few crack
ers were left on the napkin by the telephone, and Gail broke one in half and ate it. "Oh, I'm sorry,
would you like one of these?"

"No, thanks."

"Lunch." She took a sip of soda. "Let's talk about Roger Cresswell. He was shot to death last Saturday
night at a house near Old Cutler Road—"

"Outside, in the backyard," Bobby corrected. "The
owner is Jack Pascoe. Jack is Roger's cousin. He hired
me to help him out at the party, and Roger showed
up, then they found his body the next morning, back
in the trees."

"How well did you know Roger Cresswell?" She broke another cracker and brushed away the crumbs.

"Not real well. I'm friends with his cousin, Sean.
Sean's sister, Diane, is in the ballet. Sean got me a
job at Cresswell Yachts for a few weeks this summer,
and I'd see Roger around. Their families own the company, but I think Roger was running it since his father got sick. They put me in the glass shop—that's
where you make the boat hulls out of fiberglass.
Roger fired me after the security guard found a disc sander in my locker, but I didn't put it there. I think
Roger did. They keep spare keys in the office."

"Why would he do that?"

"Because I wouldn't kiss his butt. If he was wrong,
I said so. Nobody liked him." Bobby shrugged. "I
was about to quit anyway. It was only temporary, to
make some money till rehearsals started."

"When did he fire you?"

"Last week, on Thursday."

"Two days before he was killed?"

"That looks bad, right?"

"Do the police know about it?"

"Probably, if they talked to anyone at Cresswell. I didn't tell them. They came to my apartment, and I told them what I knew, trying to be cooperative, but
then they came back with more questions, and I
didn't want to say anything else." Bobby leaned over to unzip a pocket in his backpack. "One of the detec
tives gave me his card."

He laid it on Gail's desk. Sgt. Frank Britton,
Homicide Bureau, Miami-Dade Police Department.
"Well, look at this." In explanation, she waved a
hand and said, "We've met in the past. What did
Sergeant Britton ask you?"

"Did I know Roger, did I know who might've
wanted him dead, could I account for every minute
at the party? I can, but they don't believe me. I got
to Jack's at eight o'clock, and I was in the house—
you can ask anybody—from eight to eleven, and at
eleven I went down by the seawall to have a beer,
and I was talking to this guy named Alan. Then Sean beeped me at eleven-forty, and I walked back to the
house and called him, and he said to meet him on South Beach. So I left Jack's at a quarter to twelve and met Sean at twelve-thirty at my place. It's
twenty-eight miles, and you'd have to drive like a
maniac to get there in less than forty-five minutes.
We went to Club Amsterdam, and I got home at
three o'clock and went to bed. My roommates saw
me."

"Sounds like you're covered."

"Except the cops say there wasn't an Alan. They
say Jack never heard of him, which is weird because Alan knows Jack. I called Jack and he doesn't know what I'm talking about. What a lie. I
saw
him in the
living room looking through Jack's old record
collection."

Gail reached for another cracker. "Someone else must have seen him—unless he was a ghost. When
you and he walked to the seawall, no one saw you
together?"

"I don't think so. There was this black drag queen from Brazil with a red wig on, and she was showing
people how to do the samba." Bobby laughed. "I
said to myself, man, I'm outta here before she grabs
me, so that's when I left. It's about fifty yards to the water, but you can't see it through all the trees and
bushes, then it clears out. The moon was straight up,
just about full. So I sit down with my feet hanging
off the edge, and about a minute later—not even—I
hear somebody say, 'Oh, hello!' like he didn't know I was there."

"Are you saying he followed you?"

Bobby's foot was on his knee, and he flexed it one
way, then the other. Under the fuzz of dark hair, muscles bunched and released. "I think so."

"He's gay?"

"He was pretty drunk—I know that. He said he
used to be married, but I've had married guys hit on me. You can't always tell. It doesn't bother me, unless they push it. Alan stood kind of far away at first,
like, oh, I'm not really here, we're not having this
conversation. But he was cool. I think he'd back me
up, if you could find him."

"Tell me what he looks like."

"Uhhh . . . bushy gray hair. Round glasses. About
five-ten, kind of skinny."

"How does he know Jack?"

"He didn't say."

"What did you and he talk about?"

"Jeez." Bobby let out a breath. "I remember he
said he was getting away from the music, which was
pretty loud. I said, yeah, me too. He went to school
in Chicago, and he said how much weed they used to smoke back then. Pot. That's what he called it.
And
...
oh. He said his wife was an artist, but she passed away. Then he starts talking about the mean
ing of life and death and all that. He recited this
poem about athletes dying young, then he cracks up
laughing. Hey, maybe he's a professor. That could
be. Jack knows some professors at UM."

Gail twirled her pen by the ends, then lifted her eyes. "That beer you were drinking—"

He looked back at her. "Yeah?"

"You sure it wasn't a joint? I don't care, but I'd
like to know."

He made a guilty smile. "Somebody gave it to me. A friend of Jack's. But I wasn't, like, hammered. I
remember everything."

"You shared it with Alan?"

"He took a few hits. He said he doesn't do it any
more. I don't either, but this guy gave it to me,
and—"

"It's okay. Is there anything else? Really, you have
to be up front with me."

"No. That's it." Bobby cleared his throat again— only a nervous gesture, Gail thought. Bobby Gonzalez seemed as healthy as a young stallion. What else was he holding back? Gail had interviewed enough clients to know that they routinely skipped over awkward details. Not a lie, exactly. They simply wanted the attorney to like them, not even aware, sometimes, of this filtering process.

"All right. Did you and Alan go back up to the
house at the same time? Maybe someone saw you then."

"No. Sean beeped me and I said I had to make a phone call. Alan just, like, rolled back into the grass
and looked up at the sky and said good night, take
care of yourself, young man. That was it. I didn't see
him again."

"And would Sean confirm that you called him at
a certain time?"

"Definitely."

Gail tapped her pen on her notes. "Tell you what. You sit right there for a few minutes and write down names of people at the party, as far as you can recall them. Write down everything you said to the police.
And everything you know about Roger Cresswell.
Put that down too."

"I'm not a great speller."

She tore her pages off the pad. "That doesn't matter in the least. If you need anything, ask Miriam. I'll
be right back."

In her office a few floors above Gail's, Charlene
Marks sat at her desk with minestrone soup from the deli downstairs, delicately eating, avoiding drips on
her skirt. "Did I not tell you so?"

"Charlene, Bobby's in the clear. He has an alibi for
every moment. He arrived before Roger Cresswell,
he was busy in the house, and when he wasn't, he was with this man Alan."

"Who either doesn't exist or doesn't want to be
found. A man, possibly a university professor, proba
bly in the closet, who was smoking dope with a twenty-one-year-old ballet dancer at a wild—very wild—party.” Charlene tapped her watch with a perfectly manicured nail. "It's eleven-thirty. Just a
reminder."

"Yes, all right." Gail stole a piece of her bread. "You know more about the Cresswells than I do.
You've talked to Roger. You've been following this
case in the news."

"I don't know who Alan is, and don't even try to get the guest list from the police. They won't give
you
bupkis
in an open investigation."

"Alan said his wife was an artist, and she died.
Wasn't there something in the paper about Roger Cresswell's sister? She was an artist, and she committed suicide?"

"Yes. She overdosed on pills. You're correct, it was
in the paper. 'Tragedy again strikes Cresswell fam
ily.' You think Alan was married to Roger's sister."

"It would explain how he knows Jack. What was
her name, Charlene? I need the last name. If she used
his, we've found him."

"What was it?" Charlene lowered her plastic
spoon. "An artist. Cresswell. Something Cresswell." Rolling her chair back, Charlene stood up and looked
around her office. "Wait a minute. Wait a minute."
She strode across the thick carpet to one of the book
cases and ran her finger along a line of magazine boxes. She tilted one out.

"It's funny what sticks in your mind, isn't it? I spoke at a seminar a few years ago on battered
spouses, and there was a judge who did a section on
restraining orders. He wrote an article about it for
the
Florida Bar Journal."
Charlene sat in an armchair
and flipped open one magazine after another, drop
ping the discards in a disorderly pile. "His wife had recently committed suicide, and by way of condolence, I suppose, I mentioned that I'd seen her obituary in the
New York Times.
She'd been an artist, apparently quite well known. Where in hell—? Ah!"

She flipped pages as she walked back across the
room. Folding the magazine open, she thrust it in
front of Gail, who saw a page of text and a small, black-and-white photograph of a man in his forties with graying hair and tortoiseshell glasses. The cap
tion read, Nathan A. Harris, Judge, Eleventh Judi
cial Circuit.

"He transferred into the criminal division after I'd left, that's why I didn't immediately hear bells going off." Charlene tapped the photo. "You do notice the
middle initial, don't you?"

"A is for Alan. I've met him, Charlene. He was
at a cocktail party that Anthony's office threw last Christmas. He was on our invitation list for the wedding! Anthony said his wife was deceased. Oh, my
God. A judge. He's going to be just
thrilled
to talk
to me."