The Sundown Speech (6 page)

“She wanted attorney-client privilege. I can't offer that unless she hires me through an attorney. I'm pretty good at keeping the lid on, but if the cops jail me for withholding information, I can't be much help.”

“Are you afraid of going to jail?”

“You wouldn't ask that question if you'd ever gone. All things being equal, I'd choose walking barefoot on broken glass; a little alcohol and gauze and it's all over in a day. In either case I'm no good to anyone while it's in process.”

He smoothed a lighter-than-air lapel. “I wasn't aware Mr. and Mrs. Gunnar existed before this morning, so of course your name meant nothing. I made some calls. My grassroots poll puts you at fifty-fifty friends to enemies.”

“I'd rather you hadn't done that,” I said.

“Because you knew it wouldn't come out in your favor.”

“Because it's like someone checking your credit rating: Every hit knocks you down a point. Come the time I'll need those references, they figure time spent as opposed to time earned, and I'm left twisting on account of I'm not worth the effort. But I can't help thinking, since you and I are talking, that I gained some ground.”

Heloise slammed ice cubes from a bucket into another tall glass on the table. “Sit down, please. We haven't time for these male rites while Dante's in jail.” She filled the glass from a decanter and stuck it in my hand.

She hadn't offered, and I hadn't asked. I didn't care for the stuff as a rule; people who drink vodka straight up don't like drinking. Oblivion is the object. I sipped it anyway. It was going to be that kind of meeting. A full glass stood untouched in front of Suiz. We'd drawn our lines in the sand. I told Heloise she had a beautiful house.

“Thank you. We're subletting it from a professor of Medieval Studies while he's in Spain.” She refilled her glass without disturbing the ice in the bucket. “We gave up our apartment downtown. Traffic was horrible on a day-to-day basis, and four days each summer we were prisoners of the art fairs. There are too many people in the world, and far too many cars. You know the police have a picture of our car parked near the murder house.” She sat.

“That's not evidence,” I said. “Anyone can park his car anywhere, so long as he doesn't park it illegally, and that's just a misdemeanor. There's no law against parking it in front of a murder scene.”

“You have a sound layman's knowledge of the law,” Suiz said. “Lord knows there are only so many spaces in this town. I myself choose the side streets, hoping to find a slot ten or twelve blocks from my destination, even more by choice, sometimes; I like to keep fit.” He smacked a stomach as lean as ground round.

I looked at Heloise. “They're holding your husband on what charge?”

“Suspicion of homicide.” She shuddered at the phrase. “The arraignment's tomorrow. Bail won't be set until then.” She inhaled an ounce of pure grain alcohol. “I may be arrested too, for filing a false statement.”

“One moment.” The lawyer leaned forward. “Until we've engaged Mr. Walker's services, everything we say here is evidence.”

“Have you got it?” I asked Heloise.

Her face went vacant. I wondered how much she'd had to drink before I'd arrived. I'd had her down for another helping of mineral water, with a dash of bitters when she felt adventurous. Then she thrust a hand into her robe pocket and brought out a crumple of paper.

“Give it to Mr. Suiz,” I said.

The lawyer took it from her gently. He stretched it between both hands. After a beat he nodded and thrust it toward me.

It was a check made out in my hand to the Gunnars, in the amount of the retainer I hadn't earned.

I pocketed it. “I'm on the defense team now. If the cops put the screws to me, I'll let Mr. Suiz off the leash.” I looked at him. “If that's not how you see it, I'm off the case.”

A muscle worked in one brown cheek.

“I can't say I appreciate the metaphor; but I admire your layman's grasp of criminal law.”

“Is that a yes? I gave up trying to speak lawyer years ago.”

He sat back. “Yes.”

I looked at Heloise. “What did you tell the police?”

A pair of eyes marinated in pure grain alcohol floated my way behind rimless lenses.

“I said Dante was at my side at the country club all Saturday afternoon. That wasn't strictly true.” She drew her right hand up her right arm, elbow to shoulder, then back down.

“I doubt they'll arrest you,” Suiz said, “although they may apply it as leverage to force you to testify against Mr. Gunnar.”

She sat up straight, splashing liquid from her glass. “But they can't!”

“They can, if you turn state's evidence to save yourself.” Suiz's tone was deadly calm. “You must face it, Heloise. You're in this for yourself. Do you think Dante would hesitate to implicate you to save his own skin?”

I made a time-out gesture. “Who are you representing, counselor? Mrs. Gunnar hired you to defend Mr. Gunnar.”

We were seated in the conversation pit, Heloise and I on a couch upholstered in tough yellow Naugahyde, Suiz in an Eames chair. He subsided into leather and down. He ignored me, addressing Heloise.

“I doubt they'll arrest you, although they may apply the threat of it as leverage to force you to testify against your husband, regardless of the law against it;
force
as a psychological term is open to interpretation. The police play childish games, as transparent as they are cruel, but they know what they're about.”

Heloise looked at me. It was as if Suiz hadn't spoken.

“The truth is, I lost track of Dante several times during the fund-raiser. You have no idea of what goes on at those things. Later, the police talked to the people who were there. Most of them said I was present the whole time, Dante, too, but of course I excused myself to go to the bathroom once or twice, and I doubt anyone timed how long I was gone. I'm sure it was the same with Dante. I mean, who pays attention? Everyone has a life.”

She took a long draft from her glass. “It's just possible Dante slipped away long enough to—kill Jerry Marcus, and return to the club without anyone noticing he'd been gone. The drinking, the too-loud conversation, the goddamn band—the fucking band, ‘Don't go changin',' for chrissake—” She threw another slug on top of the last. Bad music and strong alcohol went together like beer and pretzels.

I looked at Suiz. “What else have they got?”

“I spoke with a lieutenant named Karyl. He's much more certain of his suspect than he is of his case. He has a motive: Mr. Gunnar thought Marcus cheated him of fifteen thousand dollars he and Mrs. Gunnar had invested in his independent film, a science-fiction thriller to be shot entirely in Ann Arbor, employing local actors. Karyl hasn't found the weapon, a nine-millimeter automatic pistol—”

I broke in. “Tech on the scene thought it was a thirty-eight, or a three-fifty-seven Magnum.”

“I'm a criminal attorney,” Suiz said stiffly. “A lot of things get said on a crime scene that don't hold up in the lab. To be fair, it's a matter of a few grains on the scale. Either way it's a big enough caliber to put a serious hole through anyone's plans for the future, yes?”

“Don't badger me, counselor. How many times I've been shot is my business.”

He backed off, lowering his lids over the whites of his eyes.

“So no murder weapon yet, but Karyl has opportunity, thanks to the confusion at the country club, and a bit of film Marcus shot showing what may be the Gunnars' automobile parked in front of Marcus' place of residence, indicating although not proving he knew where to find him. I understand you supplied that intelligence.”

“They'd have found it out soon anyway. I've got a license, just like you. What else?”

“There's nothing else. Gunnar's clammed up on my advice. If they had any case at all they'd go after
Mrs.
Gunnar as an accomplice before and after the fact. And they have a whopping loose end that can destroy them in court.”

“Jerry Marcus' yellow Mustang.”

All the air went out of him then. He'd tagged me for a gum sole and the brain of a draft horse, and I knew he'd never forgive me for disappointing him on that issue.

I lit a cigarette, depositing the match in a pottery dish on the coffee table. I didn't want it especially, just the pause for devastating effect. Outside, a cricket yawned and scratched its butt. “The last witness who saw him alive told me she saw Marcus load what looked like a toaster-oven box into an old yellow Mustang and drive away. No vehicle answering that description was parked anywhere near the house when I found the body.”

Suiz produced something the size of a pinochle deck from a pocket and thumbed some buttons.

“Holly Zacharias,” he said. It sounded like an oath. “Undergraduate at the University of Michigan. She lives in a dormitory on campus. Police found a Mustang registered to Marcus burned out on a country road north of town. They think Mr. Gunnar drove his Volvo to within walking distance of Marcus' house, walked the rest of the way to avoid having his car seen in the neighborhood at the time of the murder, and drove the Mustang back to where he'd parked. They think he left the keys in the ignition and some obliging joyrider came along and stole it. Very convenient—for a mastermind.”

“No mastermind would have hired me to find Marcus after he'd already driven his car to Marcus' house once,” I said. “Even if he didn't know Marcus had it on film, he had to have known someone might have seen it and remembered. What's Gunnar's story?”

Suiz shook his head. He looked as heartbroken as any lawyer ever could, if any lawyer had a heart and you could break it with a sledge.

“I don't know. He won't confide. He's being foolish.”

“First he's a mastermind,” I said. “Now he's foolish. The middle ground? Guilty as hell.”

Heloise moaned and fell off her chair, out cold.

 

EIGHT

Heloise Gunnar's body barely had time to make a thud when Hernando Suiz threw himself out of his chair, dropped to his knees, and put an ear to her breast.

“She's alive, thank heaven,” he said. “She fainted.”

“Let's say that.” I picked up the glass she'd dropped and stood it next to the half-empty decanter of clear liquid on the coffee table. She was snoring by then, loud enough to drown out a block plant, and filling the air with fumes; the same guy who'd sold Ann Arbor a bill of goods about being the cultural center of the world had started the rumor about vodka being undetectable on the breath.

I took her arms, the lawyer her feet, and we stretched her out on the slate-colored sofa. Suiz unhooked her glasses from the ear they dangled from and folded them on the table. “Should we do anything?”

“We could shove a dish towel in her mouth, but she might suffocate.”

“I
meant,
should we call a doctor?”

“Let her sleep. In the morning she'll have Whitney Houston screaming in her head, but no one ever died of it.”

“What makes you an expert?”

“The last time I was in a bar during happy hour, I woke up in the middle of a cockfight in Tijuana. Let's find someplace where we don't have to yell.”

We ascended from the conversation pit and found a stainless-steel kitchen with granite counters and a cluster of copper pots hanging like a chandelier from the ceiling. Here, Mrs. Gunnar's snoring sounded as gentle as pounding surf. I asked Suiz if he thought Dante Gunnar had killed Jerry Marcus.

“We haven't met yet; for some reason he refuses to see me. But whether he did it isn't my concern. Mine is whether the Washtenaw County prosecutor's office can prove it. Without a murder weapon or a witness or evidence to place him at the scene, they'll have to release him.”

“We won't know there's no weapon until we toss the house.”

“We can't do that without Mrs. Gunnar's permission.”

“By the time she sleeps it off the place could be crawling with cops.”

“I'm an officer of the court,” he said. “I'm bound to report it if we find anything.”

“Better you know it now than in discovery.”

I took the second floor, he the basement. There was nothing under the king mattress in the master bedroom, nothing in the drawers or on the top shelf of the walk-in closet that belonged in an evidence room. I went through the pockets of all the clothes hanging there and came up with a handful of fluff and a ticket stub from a Springsteen concert. The guest bedroom was even less enlightening; the closet and drawers were empty. I figured they didn't play host often. No arsenal in either bathroom or in the attic, accessed by a pull-down hatch and ladder. I caught up with Suiz while he was pulling the cushions off the love seat in the sunken living room. We exchanged a wry look over the snoring woman on the sofa and off-loaded her to the love seat to frisk the sofa.

When we finished with the kitchen, I fetched the decanter and poured two inches apiece in two water tumblers. We sipped from them facing each other in the breakfast nook.

“They'll just say he threw it in the river,” I said. “He's still their number one till they get a better offer. I want to talk with him.”

“He won't talk to me. Why should your luck be better?”

“If my luck were any good I wouldn't be groping through people's underwear drawers for a living,” I said. “Mostly I'm sneaky. Being a lawyer you wouldn't know anything about that.”

For the first time his face showed something stronger than chronic disapproval.

“Okay, I'm a shyster, a mouthpiece, a spring expert; I'd represent the devil himself for a share in hell. When I prove a cop's a crook on the stand I twisted his words. A sweet young thing lies through her teeth in front of a jury and I have to handle her with oven mitts or the jury thinks I'm a bully, so I have to call someone who can refute her, only he looks like Charles Manson and ‘fuck' is the only adjective he knows, so I'm better off not having called him at all. When I win a case I slipped one past the panel, and when I lose it's because I'm incompetent. People watch Court TV and suddenly they're experts. A few years ago, a high-profile defendant in a rape case was acquitted for lack of evidence and the network reporter covering the case called it ‘a flaw in the system.' Lady, that
is
the system. I put myself through law school working in a laundry, shaking maggots out of sheets and tablecloths, and it took me six years because they were both full-time jobs. The Michigan Bar exam's one of the toughest in the country; I aced it, only to spend another six years doing pro bono work for a storefront firm in Grand Rapids. I've been with my present firm fifteen years, been passed over for a partnership twice, and they tell me I have to wait for the senior partner to die before I get another shot. The senior partner's forty-two years old, plays tennis five days a week. I cry every time I lose, and when I win I'm too tired to celebrate. So I go home and flop down in front of
The Tonight Show
and listen to lawyer jokes that if they were about black people or women, the comedian would be arrested for committing a hate crime. And I'm the guy he'd call to represent him, because I'm sneaky.”