Mom Among the Liars Read online

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  PROLOGUE

  Excerpt from Mom’s diary

  Dear Diary,

  I’m feeling foolish already, and I only wrote two words in you.

  When I was a girl I never kept any diary. Plenty girls that I went to school with had them, with fancy leather covers and locks on them. These emptyheads wore the key on a chain around their neck, they made a big schmeer out of how secret it was. The idea was, you ask them what they’re writing and they say, “I’ll never tell you in a million years!” so you go on asking and finally they tell you, naturally swearing you to secrecy. By me this wasn’t such an interesting game, so I never bought a diary.

  So tell me please, what am I doing with one now? At my age, after seventy-five years keeping such foolishness out of my life? The answer is, since I moved to this little town called Mesa Grande, in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains—where my son is investigating murders and other crimes for the public defender—I’m giving him more help with his cases than I used to do back in New York even. In New York, where he worked for the Homicidal Squad—the youngest man that ever got promoted to inspector, it was a big honor—he told me about his cases every Friday night, when he came to the Bronx for dinner. Here I’m seeing him a lot more often than once a week, so a lot more cases I’m hearing about.

  And it sometimes happens there are deductions I’m making about these cases, ideas coming into my head that I can’t tell him about, it would be dangerous or embarrassing he should know them. But I have to get them off my chest, no? Everybody has things they have to talk about to somebody. So that’s you, dear diary, you’re the one I’ll be doing my talking to.

  Like now, when I know something I never want Davey to know, concerning these murders that all the politicians got mixed up in.…

  DAVE’S NARRATIVE

  ONE

  I don’t like politicians. I never have. Back in New York, when I was working with the Homicide Squad, I couldn’t step out of my office without tripping over one. We’d arrest some hood, we’d have him dead to rights, we’d turn him over to the DA’s office—the next thing we knew, they were letting him plea bargain for a suspended sentence or dropping the charges altogether. Nobody had to spell it out for us. Behind the scenes some politician’s greasy fingers had been pulling the strings. One thing I was looking forward to when I took this job out here in the West—no more politicians in my hair.

  It hasn’t exactly worked out that way. This murder I’m about to describe was full of politicians. I won’t be able to make sense out of it, in fact, until I fill in some background on our local political situation.

  Outsiders coming to this town might be deceived into thinking that our politics is the easygoing, old-fashioned type, nice gentlemanly candidates kissing babies, delivering homespun speeches from their front porches, and refusing to soil their lips with abusive remarks about their opponents.

  This picture gains some plausibility from the looks of the town. Though in the last decade malls and shopping centers and rows and rows of jerrybuilt clones often advertised (by developers who have taken vacations to London) as “housing estates” have been spreading like crabgrass, the center of Mesa Grande, consisting of the so-called downtown area and the residential areas next to it, remains pretty much what it’s always been. It includes the oldest, most beautiful houses in town, the four acres on which our local ivy-covered liberal arts college sits, the upper-crust churches, and the elegant central branches of banks, insurance companies, and other long-established business firms. Separate all this from the other 90 percent of the town, and you’ve got the set for an old Andy Hardy movie right off the studio lot.

  Furthermore, there is the constant presence of the mountains, which you can see from almost every street corner if you face west. Especially in sunny weather, when they are at their most beautiful and majestic, they seem to be reminding us how unimportant human scrabblings and graspings are in the grand serenity of Nature. They make it easy to believe that the political sleaziness of other sections of the country couldn’t possibly have found its way into this paradise. Honesty, integrity, civility, and good sense must have managed to survive and flourish here.

  A quick look at our local system of government might tend to reinforce this belief. Mesa Grande’s chief elected officials are the seven members of the City Council. Each represents a different section of the city, and their campaigns are not identified with political parties; they run for City Council as individuals, not as Democrats or Republicans, although their political preferences are no secret. (Republicans do tend to get elected more often than Democrats, but then there are a lot more of them around.) City councilmen get no salary for their work; they are given “expense money” for each day the council is in session, and this stipend amounts to a little more than citizens receive for jury duty.

  The mayor of Mesa Grande is elected at the same time as the City Council, but he (as yet the mayor has never been a she) has no special executive powers or privileges. He presides over council meetings, where his vote counts the same as all the others; he cuts the ribbon at public functions and makes boring speeches on holidays. But he gives out no jobs, initiates no legislation, and has no right to veto the laws that the council passes. The other important elected officials in town are the district attorney and the members of the school board for District Nine—the district that coincides exactly with the boundaries of Mesa Grande. So it seems maybe that our system of government, even though more than two hundred and fifty thousand people live here now, is as simple and laid-back as if we still were in the world of Andy Hardy.

  Do I have to point out that this appearance of innocence and serenity is strictly an illusion? Mesa Grande is a real estate town. People come here to retire, especially from the military, which has three bases nearby; the population is older and richer than the national average. In recent years computer companies have moved in, in a big way, and so the malls and shopping centers have grown. Last year’s economic dip shook us badly and created a lot of foreclosures and bankruptcies, but until that happened Mesa Grande was a success story, a town with a lot of money in it.

  Where there’s money the vultures gather, and their first move is to get their claws on the machinery for putting that money in their pockets. The machinery here as elsewhere is political. The City Council has contracts to award, decides what new real estate developments to approve, sets up conditions for the settlement of new business, and through its appointed City Planning Board controls the zoning laws—and the exceptions to them. The council being instrumental in dividing the pie, there is no shortage of special interests to put on pressure to get that pie divided their way.

  Because a great deal is always at stake in our local elections, they can be lowdown and dirty. They haven’t usually involved murder—like the election I’m about to describe—but there’s no reason, when you think about it, why they couldn’t have. We can point with pride to the fact tha
t our politicians are just as coldblooded as the ones they have back East or anywhere else in the world.

  Anyway, the election I’m referring to was in an odd-numbered year, so there was nothing presidential or congressional or even state-legislatural to distract us from local politics. A couple of city councilmen were on the ballot, but there was only one genuinely dramatic race. Our district attorney, Marvin McBride, was running for reelection. Ordinarily nobody would interrupt a yawn over this, but for the first time in the twelve years he’d been in office—his term runs for three years, and he was finishing up his fourth one—he was being challenged by a genuinely formidable opponent.

  I’ve had occasion to mention McBride before: that belligerent little bulldog, with his bloodshot eyes and the thin red veins crisscrossing his cheeks. I’ve explained that McBride hardly ever tried any cases personally; he usually turned them over to his assistant DAs. This was because judges insist on convening their courts at 10 A.M., and McBride was seldom in condition to appear at such an early hour; it took him the whole morning to blink and cough away his hangover from the night before.

  His opponent in the upcoming election could hardly have presented a more extreme contrast. She was Doris Dryden. For the last ten years she had piled up an admirable record of acquittals as a criminal lawyer, making herself almost as big a thorn in McBride’s side as my boss Ann Swenson, the public defender. The difference, of course, was that Dryden pocketed huge fees for her efforts while Ann pocketed nothing but her modest salary from the city.

  Dryden was half a head taller than McBride (maybe more; we all suspected Marvin of wearing elevator shoes) and beautifully turned out, her hair always impeccably coiffed, her clothes clearly coming from the best stores in town, and some of them imported from New York or Paris. She had come to Mesa Grande from the East and had been married once; the rumor was that her affluence was founded not only on her success as a lawyer but on a spectacular divorce settlement, which she had won for herself in court.

  Her decision to run against McBride was announced early in September, and his first public reaction was to say to some reporters, off the record, “She’s a nice lady, but let’s face it, she just doesn’t have the balls for this job!” Since her announcement, however, Dryden had been putting on a whirlwind campaign, with a real genius for getting her name and face in the papers. And her efforts were paying off; according to the latest poll, conducted by The Republican American, our only local newspaper (which supported McBride), the two candidates were now neck and neck.

  “How do you explain, Mr. DA,” asked old Joe Horniman, The Republican American’s veteran political reporter, at one of McBride’s press conferences, “that Mrs. Dryden seems to be growing balls?”

  Evidently McBride didn’t hear this question, because he went right on to the next one.

  * * *

  It was Saturday night, the end of October, ten days before election. We had been having one of those autumns that the human race dreams about: temperatures in the seventies, plenty of sunshine, gentle balmy breezes. But this afternoon a suspicion of a chill had come creeping into the air, and the TV weathermen were putting anxious looks on their faces.

  On this particular Saturday night the local chapter of the League of Women Voters held a dinner at which the two candidates for district attorney were the guests of honor. Each of them would be addressing the assembled diners, who had paid fifty dollars a plate for the privilege—except for a few who had special connections and had been invited gratis by the League. This included Ann Swenson, because she was the public defender, and me, because I was her chief investigator.

  Along with the other freebie recipients, we sat at a table off to the side of a banquet room in the Hotel Richelieu, our local resort, which occupies a few acres on the outskirts of town. Joe Horniman from The Republican American sat at this table with us. So did two anchormen and one anchorwoman from our three TV stations. So did McBride’s number-one assistant DA, Leland Grantley III, whom Ann and I had come to know all too well in his official capacity.

  The speakers’ table was halfway across the room, but I had a good view of who was sitting there. In the center spot was the presiding officer from the League of Women Voters, a heavyset, organ-voiced lady with gray hair and glasses and the no-nonsense look of my third-grade teacher. McBride was on her right, and next to him was Ed Brock, his longtime campaign manager. Ed’s massive fleshy face and knobby bald head were familiar sights at most of Mesa Grande’s political events. He had been in the insurance business years ago, but he was long retired, and he now officially listed himself in the yellow pages as a “consultant.” In fact, it was only politicians who consulted him. He had plenty of wins to his credit; he turned away business.

  The last time the League of Women Voters had thrown an election dinner for district attorney candidates—three years ago, just after I moved to town—McBride had been flanked by his wife and his thirteen-year-old daughter. They weren’t in attendance tonight though. A messy separation had taken place in the interim.

  On the presiding officer’s left was Doris Dryden, McBride’s opponent, looking trim and elegant in a greenish suit. No campaign manager or other assistant sat with her. This was deliberate on her part. She had gone out of her way in these last months to let the world know that she had no entourage, no political connections, nobody to help her with her campaign. Her strategy was to push the David and Goliath image hard.

  We ate the usual institutional dinner—fruit cocktail, breaded chicken breasts, french fries, and broccoli—and washed it down with our choice of wine and beer. Coors beer, it’s practically illegal to drink any other brand in our state, and California white wine, not exactly the best vintage either.

  McBride wasn’t turning up his nose at it though. Practically every time I looked at him, he had his glass up to his face. A characteristic position for him to be in.

  Ann Swenson, my boss, wrinkled up her nose. “I don’t have any moral objections to the way he laps up the stuff,” she said. “It’s the smell that gets to me. I must be allergic to it. I feel like throwing up whenever he gets within a foot of me.”

  “From what I hear,” said Joe Horniman, “his wife developed the same allergy. Only it took her twenty-five years to throw up.”

  Joe Horniman had turned gray at his job with The Republican American. There was no human being or institution in Mesa Grande, including the newspaper that employed him, about which he didn’t know everything and respect nothing.

  Cake and coffee came, and with it the speeches. McBride stood up to give the first one. He was wearing a conservative gray suit, and for once it didn’t look as if he had slept in it all night. He was also, untypically, wearing a tie, a red, white, and blue one, with some kind of repeated design on it; I was sitting too far away to make out exactly what this design was.

  The loudspeaker system, at least on our side of the room, left a lot to be desired. His voice came to us in waves, some sentences ringing out sharp and clear while others turned into incomprehensible squeaks.

  He started off with the prologue he gives to every one of his political speeches—how pleased he was to be there, but also how surprised, how positively amazed, because who ever would’ve thought that a poor farm kid who grew up in the mountains south of Mesa Grande, whose folks sometimes didn’t have enough food in the house to feed the cows and the kids both—so guess who went hungry? it sure as hell wasn’t the cows!—well, only in America could a barefoot ragtag kid like that end up getting himself a law degree from a Great University (actually the University of Northern Michigan), and holding down the solemn office of district attorney in the very county where he was born and brought up, and addressing a body of distinguished ladies and gentlemen like he saw before him tonight?

  The squeaks and squawks were particularly active during this prologue, which gave the rest of us a chance to relax and guzzle our wine. But they cleared up for the next part of McBride’s speech.

  “My opponent’s lon
g association with the criminal element, though strictly legal in every respect, I don’t want to give you any wrong ideas about that, has nevertheless had its effect on her attitudes and her philosophy. She’s devoted her life to throwing roadblocks in the way of law and order, so without even being conscious of it she’s absorbed the criminal point of view. In all her public statements so far she has made it clear that she’ll be soft on crime—”

  The rest of his sentence was lost in loudspeaker’s noise. “If your job is to investigate and prosecute crimes,” said Joe Horniman, addressing nobody in particular at our table, “wouldn’t it be a good idea to understand the criminal point of view?”

  “No, no, you’ve misunderstood Marvin’s point completely,” Assistant DA Grantley put in. “He’s not just talking about understanding, he’s talking about the regrettable tendency of criminal lawyers to identify with the people they defend, to accept their rationalizations and excuses.”

  Grantley came from a well-to-do Mesa Grande family and was married to a young woman from old New England stock, reputedly very high up in the most impeccable social circles of Rhode Island; as a matter of fact, the reason she wasn’t here tonight, he told us, was that she had gone back to Newport, with their two small sons, for a month’s visit to her impeccable relations. After graduation from Harvard Law School, Grantley had returned to his hometown because he “felt the need to give back something to the community which gave so much to me.” You wouldn’t know from Grantley’s stiff manner and his pedantic vocabulary—or from the staid dark Brooks Brothers suits, vests, and ties he always wore—that he was still in his thirties.

  By this time McBride had come to the end of his speech and sat down to genteel applause. Grantley was the only one at our table who contributed to it.

  Doris Dryden was introduced now, and her speech was subject to the same arbitrary censorship from the loudspeaker system. “Mr. McBride accuses me of associating with the criminal element,” we heard her say. “Is he referring to the people I’ve defended in court against him, people whom juries have seen fit to find not guilty? There have been a great many of them, I admit.” Laughter from the audience and from everyone at our table, with the exception of Grantley.