Carmel was shouting over the noise: “You think I killed Hale? We were gonna get married. I was here the night he was killed. Look in our phone records, asshole, you’ll find that he called me, we talked for ten minutes . . . Hey, asshole, I’m talking to you . . .”
And outside, the lawyers began chanting, “Asshole, asshole, asshole . . .”
Sherrill was getting angry, but Lucas touched her shoulder and grinned. “Haven’t had this much fun since we beat up that shitkicker in Oxford.”
And Carmel screamed, “What are you laughing about, asshole?”
And Lucas let it out, a long, rolling laugh: outside, the lawyers were chanting, scratching at the glass windows to Carmel’s outer office, watching him laugh and laugh . . .
AT FIVE O’CLOCK, leaving three detectives at the office to look through the last of the records, Lucas moved the act to Carmel’s apartment. Carmel followed in her bloodred Jag, which had been searched while it was parked in the office ramp. Lucas and four others were in the elevator when it arrived at the fifth floor, where Carmel’s parking space was.
Carmel got on with a man whom she’d introduced at the office as Dane Carlton, her personal attorney. Lucas knew him to nod to, a tall, slender, gray-haired man with a cool demeanor and icy blue eyes behind plain gold-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a blue suit with a white shirt and wine-colored tie.
To Lucas, Carmel said, “Fuck you.”
Lucas sighed, looked at Carlton. “You should tell your client to watch her mouth.”
“I’m her attorney, not her guardian,” Carlton said bluntly.
“And he’s gonna rip you a new asshole when we’re done with this,” Carmel said.
Lucas looked at Carlton. “That right?” Carlton, with the tiniest movement of his head, said, “Yes.”
When Carlton and Carmel got out at Carmel’s floor, Sherrill, looking after him, put her mouth close to Lucas’s ear and whispered, “I get the feeling he could do it.”
Lucas said, “I know him. He could.”
The search team was methodical and undiscriminating. They were looking for guns, cartridges, records, notes, letters—anything that would tie Carmel to any of the people who were murdered. They found a half-dozen notes and emails written to Hale Allen, most of them simply setting up dates.
Franklin, wearing white plastic gloves, gave one of them to Lucas: “‘Fuck around on me, and I’ll kill you,’” Lucas read aloud.
Carlton glanced at Carmel, who rolled her eyes. But she was angry, and getting angrier, Lucas thought. He dropped the D’Aquila scratches on her the first time he got an opening, which came when Carmel started screaming again.
“You’re messing up my goddamn clothes, those clothes are worth more fucking money than the city can pay . . . Dane, we gotta recover for this, they’re wrecking that suit.”
Carlton said, “We will, Carmel.” He turned to Lucas: “Chief Davenport, why don’t we end this charade? There’s no evidence that Carmel had anything to do with any of these killings. You’re simply fishing—and we will eventually find out why. It appears to be a personal crusade against one of the most highly regarded criminal attorneys in the state. Have you lost a case to Carmel? What is there in your past . . . ?”
“I don’t have anything against Carmel,” Lucas said, injecting a little steel into his voice. “I always kind of admired her. She’s a tough attorney. I stopped admiring her when Rolando D’Aquila used his fingernails to carve Carmel’s name into the back of his hand while he was being tortured and then executed.”
Carlton showed a thin smile: “That is . . . one of the more amazing things I’ve ever heard.”
“You’ll be even more amazed when you see the scratches. Or gouges; doing it had to be almost as painful as getting the holes drilled in his knees. And he didn’t just carve her initials. He carved her name: C. Loan.
Quarterinch grooves in the back of his hand . . .”
Carlton glanced at Carmel, who’d frozen in place when she heard D’Aquila’s name. “I just don’t believe it,” Carlton said finally.
“Well, we’ve got D’Aquila’s body on ice in St. Paul, along with the blood that dried on his hands and arms while he was carving her name out. So you all can go over and look at it. I’m sure you’ll find your own pathologist to examine the body . . .”
Carmel started to interject something, but Carlton waved her down, and turned to Lucas with a slightly warmer tone of voice. Lucas knew what he was doing: he was looking for information, anything that might someday help a defense. “We will challenge it, of course; because whatever might be carved on Mr. D’Aquila’s hand, it isn’t Carmel’s name.”
“You can say that without seeing it?” Lucas’s eyebrows went up.
“Of course: because it can’t be Carmel’s name.”
“Okay,” Lucas said, mildly. “If that’s your story.”
“It is, and we’re sticking to it,” Carlton said.
THE SEARCH CONTINUED: Sloan, one of the more mild-mannered of the homicide cops, mentioned to Carmel, in passing, that they knew about her connection with Clark at law school. Lucas, outside the bedroom when Sloan and Carmel were talking, heard Carmel spluttering, “She was a secretary, for Christ’s sake.”
And Sloan answered, “C’mon, Carmel, we know she took that legal writing course the same time you did.”
“If she did, I didn’t know about it.”
“Ah, c’mon,” Sloan said. “You guys go way back. You even did that Halloween Ball together. It’s right on the program.”
“Jesus . . . you guys.” But she was scared now. More angry than scared, but scared nevertheless.
AT SIX O’CLOCK, with Carlton glancing at his watch every two minutes, the search team began breaking up. A crimescene crew had been brought in to take samples from Carmel’s bed, the guestroom bed, and to dust the guestroom for fingerprints. They began packing their gear, and Sloan told Lucas he was heading home. Then two more detectives checked out, and Carlton asked Lucas, “I assume you’re not planning anything else dramatic? No new papers to serve . . .”
Lucas shook his head: “No. We’re about done. I’m gonna take one last cruise through the place.”
Carlton went to Carmel and said, “I’m chairing a bar meeting at seven o’clock. Will you be all right here?”
“Sure. It’s all over.”
And Sherrill, her voice low, asked Lucas, “Got the shell?”
“Yeah: take off as soon as Carlton’s out of here.”
“I’ll be across the street with Sloan. Franklin and Del are headed for your house.”
CARLTON LEFT, Sherrill looked at her watch: “You want me to stay?” she asked Lucas. “I’m kind of in a rush.”
“Take off,” Lucas said. “I’ll say good-bye to Carmel, make sure nobody left anything behind.”
Carmel shouted at Sherrill, as she left, “Good riddance to all of ya. Fuck ya. Fuck ya . . .”
Sherrill flashed her the finger over her shoulder, and Carmel’s eyes widened and she took a step after Sherrill, and Lucas stepped between them and said, “Hey, hey . . .” Then, to Sherrill, “Knock it off, okay?” At the same time, he winked at her.
“Yeah, yeah . . .” And she was gone, too, and Lucas and Carmel were left alone in the fabulous apartment.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Carmel asked, “Are you wearing a wire?” They were still standing in the living room, by the open door to the hallway.
“No. Should I be?” Lucas stepped over to the door and pushed it shut.
“When I think about it, I don’t really care,” Carmel said. “I’m gonna get you for this, Davenport, I swear to God. I’m gonna dedicate my life to it.”
“Gonna take a lot of dedication, if you’re out at the women’s prison for thirty years,” Lucas said.
She flushed, and he could see her eyeteeth, bared, as she spoke: “There’s not gonna be any prison. Not for me. Could be for you, when we’re done with you. You’ve got nothing.”
Lucas
shook his head and said, “They’re arguing about that over at the courthouse. Some of the guys think we’ve got enough, some of them don’t. Gonna be close.” He drifted across the living room as he talked, poked his head into the guestroom, then continued to her bedroom, Carmel following him down the hall. “What do you want in here?” she demanded.
“I’m just closing the place down, making sure nobody left anything behind,” he said. The shell was between two shoes in the open part of the closet. “I’ll tell you something, Carmel. Just between you and me—and I don’t care if you’re wearing a wire. I know you were involved in these killings. I know it. I know you were involved in the first one, Barbara Allen, and I think you did it because you wanted Hale. You were screwing him before the body was in the ground.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that. Hale told me that.”
“Hale?” Her hand went to her throat.
“Yeah. We had a long talk about you. I know all about you, about your sexual preferences, about what you like to talk about in bed. And you know what? You scared the shit out of Hale. He didn’t have the courage to stop you, but he did have the courage to come in and talk to me, and I taped it. Hale telling me about how you hated Barbara, about how she was holding him back, about how he was lucky to be rid of her.” Lucas was adding that last bit on, but he bet it was true.
“That sonofabitch,” she said.
“Naw. He was just a dummy. Worked hard, liked women, not too much upstairs. Not a lot of guts, either— but he was just trying to get through life. He felt guilty about Louise Clark, but a lot of guys who love their wives have affairs. And Louise was something else in bed. He couldn’t stop talking about her. He said she could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch: that’s the way he put it. He said that compared to Clark, you were like the Roman Army, just grinding him down.”
“He never said that,” Carmel shouted. But there were tears streaking her face now, and she hated it, and screamed louder, “Hale never said that.”
“Yeah, he did, and I think you know it, because it rings right,” Lucas said. He felt odd, standing in the cool, professionally feminine bedroom, alone with this tearstreaked women, hands in his pants pockets, almost abashed: he felt cruel. He pushed on. “He said you were like some kind of machine, marching all over him; but he was afraid to dump you, because he was . . . afraid. Because he thought you may have killed his wife.”
“Louise Clark killed her . . . and him.”
“Oh, please,” Lucas said, sounding in his own ears like a character in a New York TV comedy. “Louise Clark had him. He was going to marry her, as soon as he could get rid of you. And Louise Clark, to tell you the truth, was a good match for him. Smart enough, but not exactly the wizard of the Western world. But a nice woman. And good in bed. And as far as we can tell from talking to all of her friends, Louise Clark had never fired a gun in her life, right up to the day when we found her in the middle of that phony suicide tableau in her bedroom.”
“Fuck you, Davenport,” Carmel said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Get out of my house.”
Lucas said, “Yeah, I’m going: I’ll scout the . . .” It seemed a little faked, he didn’t do it quite right, the frown, the near double take, but Carmel was tired, stretched out of shape. “What is that?”
“What?” Carmel was confused.
“Here,” Lucas said. He brushed past her, pushed the sliding door back so he could get a better look at the shoe. “Goddamnit.”
He stood up, took Carmel by the arm and said, “Come out here,” tugging her toward the living room.
“Let go of me . . .” She tried to pull away.
“I just want you out in the living room with me.” And in the living room he shouted, “Hello? Hey, anybody here? Goddamnit . . .”
Carmel took a step back toward the bedroom, and Lucas said, “No.” And he said it with bite, and she stopped. He looked around, stepped into the kitchen, got a roll of Saran Wrap from the kitchen counter and carried it back toward the bedroom. She followed behind him and he knelt by the closet door and pushed the shoe away and, wrapping his thumb and forefinger with Saran Wrap, picked up the cartridge.
“A twenty-two,” he said. He looked at her. “A fuckin’ twenty-two.”
“You put that there,” she said.
“Bullshit. You know I didn’t put it there. And I’ll tell you what—I bet it’s got your fingerprints on it. I bet it’ll check out when they do the metallurgy, won’t it? What’d you do, drop a box of twenty-twos in the closet? Shuck out a clip or something? How’d the cartridge get into your closet, Carmel?”
DAVENPORT SEEMED to recede from her. He loomed over her in real space, but the pressure on her was so great that he seemed to squeeze down, until he looked like a little man seen through the glass peephole on an apartment door. Carmel’s brain stopped: she couldn’t bear this. She said something to him, but she didn’t know what, and walked stiff-legged out of the bedroom. He was talking to her, at her, reached out to her, but she batted his arm away.
She was screaming back at him, but a broken, isolated part of her brain seemed to be in control now. She walked straight across the living room, picked up a fistful of car keys from the entry table, and went out the door, leaving the door open, Davenport staring after her, saying something incomprehensible at her back . . .
Out the door, down the hall, into the elevator, pushing blindly at the buttons, out the door at five, into the parking ramp, down the ramp to the blue Volvo, into the trunk, into the gym bag, out with the gun.
Because this is where she’d put the gun she got from Rinker: the car, with her mother’s registration under her mother’s new married name, nobody to know, nobody even to look at such an out-of-character non-Carmel-like motor vehicle.
She marched back through the door, propelled by the rage, got the elevator where it waited, the gun solid in her hand.
LUCAS WATCHED HER go out the bedroom door, thought, Whoa. He followed after her, holding the shell. He had to tell her that he was taking the shell with him: she had to see the shell go in his pocket. But something about the way she was walking, robotlike, across the front room. And suddenly he feared she’d had some kind of a stroke, and he said, “Carmel? Carmel? Are you all right?”
Then she was gone down the hall. He stood uncertainly in the bedroom door for a moment, expecting her to come back, then flipped out his cell phone, punched a speed dial button and said, when Sherrill answered, “This is me. I think something’s happened to Carmel. She just went out of here, acting weird.”
“Want us to come back up?”
“No. I’ll . . . Well, maybe. Yeah. Come on back. Think of some reason to come back, I’m gonna check on her.”
Lucas walked across the living room, out into the hall— and she was gone. Either through the door into the stairway, or the elevators. Lucas walked down to the elevators and pushed the button. He bounced on his toes for a moment, thought about going down to look at the stairway door, then thought about the apartment door and hurried back, checked that it wasn’t locked and started to pull it shut. At that precise moment, an elevator ding ed, and Lucas stepped toward it. “Carmel?”
She stepped out of the elevator: Lucas didn’t see it as it was coming up, didn’t instantly recognize it in the context, but then . . .
• • •
CARMEL FIRED at him as the sights crossed the line of his face and saw the surprise and the gun jumped and Davenport was moving sideways and down and she felt the rush of a kill and tracked him with the barrel and fired again and again and then . . .
LUCAS FELT the first shot sting his neck and then he was moving, diving back into the apartment, felt another shot across his shoulders, and then, back in the living room, he was rolling across the fabulous carpet as a hornet’s nest of bullet fragments ricocheted off the door a few feet away. As he fought to get upright and oriented, his cheek stung, then something hit him in the thigh, and his own gun was coming out and Carmel
was in the doorway . . .
LUCAS FIRED ONE SHOT and Carmel felt as though she’d been hit by a baseball bat. The .45 took away a fist-sized chunk of skin just below her rib cage, and she staggered back. Hurt. Bad hurt. Hospital. She still had the keys to the cars in her left hand, and she turned and lurched down toward the elevators. The doors were just closing, and she slapped at the button and they started to open and she looked back and saw Lucas peek from behind her doors and she fired again, and let herself fall into the elevator.
Lucas fired twice more, but had a bad angle at the closing doors; one slug hit the doors, the other might have slipped inside . . . He crawled toward them and pushed the down button.
“FUCKIN’GUN,” Sherrill said to Sloan in the lobby, their guns coming out. “That was a fuckin’ gun. A big fuckin’ gun.”
“Wait for the elevator, it’s coming down,” Sloan said. “I’m taking the stairs.”
“Too far, too far,” Sherrill said, but Sloan was moving: “Gotta block them, gotta block the parking ramp.”
“Careful,” she shouted after him.
“Call in,” he shouted back, and Sherrill got her cell phone out and pushed the speed-dial for dispatch and began shouting into it as the numbers came down to five. Then it stopped, and Sherrill ran to the stairway and yelled up, “Elevator stopped at five, watch the ramp.”
“Got it,” Sloan called.