Mom Among the Liars Read online

  “And why was he there in the first place? Have you figured out what motive he had for killing her?”

  “He broke into her room to rob her. These derelicts are always badly in need of money to support their drinking habit, and Edna Pulaski used to wear a lot of jewelry, right out in public. I saw her body myself, earlier this morning, just before the morgue people took it away from the scene. She was wearing several valuable-looking pieces—earrings, a necklace, a ring with a large green stone on it—quite a temptation for somebody like Stubbins. What happened, of course, was that he didn’t think she was in the house when he broke in, she caught him at it, he panicked and killed her.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you that Stubbins is small and old and a physical wreck, not exactly the type who’s likely to strangle somebody very effectively?”

  “The victim was small too, smaller than Stubbins. And of course we all know how much strength people can summon up if they’re desperate enough. The desire to commit murder produces a surge of adrenaline—”

  “Did he rob her?” Ann said. “I assume the police officers searched him when they arrested him. Did they find any of her valuables on him?”

  “No, they didn’t. That’s not at all surprising though. He didn’t have time to take anything from her apartment. He passed out before he could.”

  “Stubbins thinks he was drugged. He thinks there were knockout drops in the coffee she gave him.”

  “Oh, really, Ann.” On Grantley’s face was the kind of smile that makes you wish somebody would plant a bomb under the Harvard Law School and blow it all the way up to heaven where it likes to think it came from.

  “Did you test what was left in that coffee cup? Did you make any tests on Stubbins, to determine if there was any drug in his system?”

  “Naturally we did. We’ve taken samples of blood and urine from Stubbins, and we’ve sent the coffee cup and the pot down to the lab. We’ll have the report first thing in the morning, and of course we’ll pass the results on to you immediately. We aren’t trying to railroad anybody, believe me.”

  “What about fingerprints? Stubbins’s prints would be in the room, and so would Edna Pulaski’s—but maybe there are others. For instance, the prints of the person who came through the door just as Stubbins was passing out.”

  “That person is obviously a figment of Stubbins’s imagination. Figments don’t usually leave fingerprints. However, we did give that room, and in fact the rest of the house, a thorough dusting for fingerprints, and we’ll have that information tomorrow morning too. Anything else you’d like to know?”

  “Have you established the time of death yet?”

  “We’ve been in touch with the coroner, but he can’t perform the autopsy till early tomorrow morning. You wouldn’t expect him to give up his Sunday poker game, would you?”

  “What about the murder weapon?” I said. “What was she strangled with, or did the killer use his bare hands?”

  “The killer used some type of heavy cloth. We don’t know what exactly, because it was removed from the woman’s neck. Small traces of fabric were found in the bruises. We’ve sent them to the lab along with everything else.”

  “Why would Harry Stubbins remove that piece of cloth?”

  “That’s fairly obvious, isn’t it? It must have been something, some object, that he thought we could trace to him if we found it. Many of these street people wear ropes around their waist to hold their pants up, their belts having disintegrated long ago. Maybe Stubbins used his rope to kill Edna Pulaski.”

  “Was there a rope around his waist when he got arrested?”

  “Well, yes, there was.”

  “Are you testing it to see if the fibers match the ones on the victim’s neck?”

  “We are. But the point is a minor one. Even if it turns out this particular rope wasn’t the murder weapon, that simply means he used something else.”

  “Did that search the officers made of him come up with anything else?”

  “As a matter of fact, it didn’t. Obviously, whatever he used to strangle her—assuming it wasn’t the rope—he disposed of it before he was arrested. He could have thrown it out the kitchen window, there’s an alley in back.”

  “Have you searched that alley for the weapon?”

  “No, we didn’t do that actually. It seemed pointless. There’s so much junk out there, it’s been accumulating for years, how could we ever determine what did or didn’t belong to Stubbins? At any rate, it doesn’t really matter. I assure you our case is just as strong without the murder weapon.”

  “Well, we’ll thrash all that out in court, won’t we?” Ann said. “Now we have to move on to a very important matter—bail for my client.”

  “Bail?” Grantley’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “I’m afraid you’ll have to take that up with the district attorney. I don’t have the authority to—”

  “Come on, Leland. It’s your case, you can decide—”

  “Excuse me, did I forget to tell you? It’s Marvin’s case. I’ll be giving him as much help as I can, considering my own caseload, but he’s put himself personally in charge. He was in his office a moment ago, but I think I saw him leave. He mentioned he was going out to his campaign headquarters to confer with Ed Brock—”

  “Wait a minute!” I said. “You’re telling us that Marvin McBride got up and went to work before noon—and on a Sunday morning!” I couldn’t sit still in my seat. This news positively required jumping to my feet. “Next you’ll be telling me they’ve repealed the law of gravity!”

  “Well, I’m certainly not telling you that.” Grantley smiled gently. “I do expect Marvin back in an hour or so, however. I’ll leave a memo for him that you were asking about the bail matter, and I’m sure he’ll touch bases with you.”

  “Tell him I’ll be out finding a judge,” Ann said. “And that judge will be giving me a writ of habeas corpus. So if Marvin’s going to raise some objections, he’d better touch bases with me.”

  With her sweetest smile, she swept out of the room.

  FOUR

  The clock in the courthouse tower was just striking twelve as Ann and I headed back to the office. Mabel Gibson wasn’t there, of course; on Sundays she clucks over her real family, especially her new grandchild, just as on weekdays she does her clucking over Ann, Roger, and me.

  Once inside, what I wanted to do was listen to Ann’s comments on the incredible news we had just heard—the Miraculous Transfiguration of Marvin McBride. But before I had a chance to say a word, the phone in my cubbyhole started ringing.

  I went in there, shut the door, and picked up the receiver. “So where have you been?” said Mom’s voice. “I tried you at your house an hour ago. You didn’t answer, I was sure you were working.”

  I knew what she wanted, of course. The murder had been discovered too late for this morning’s paper, but it must be all over the TV news by now.

  “I saw it on the television,” she said. “The eleven o’clock news broadcast. With pictures of the dead body—terrible, terrible, such a little woman! And the assistant district attorney, this Grantley fellow, talked to the television reporter, he said this is a murder investigation like any other one, and the fact that the dead woman was one of society’s enemies, and the accused suspect was one of society’s dregs, wouldn’t stop the DA’s office from putting their full resources into the case. Isn’t it a coincidence? Only last night the district attorney’s election opponent challenges him to take charge of the next murder investigation that comes along—and this morning, a few hours later, one comes along. So is your office defending this fellow they arrested, this bum?”

  “We don’t like to refer to our clients by such names, Mom. He’s an unfortunate victim of a society that turned affluent before it was ready and wasn’t able to take all its members along with it. He’s not a bum, he’s a social problem.”

  “Thank you very much. So do you know anything already that wasn’t on the news?”

  I told her ever
ything I knew. I learned a long time ago that it’s no use holding out on Mom. If I do she never complains, but suddenly her living room is dark with reproachful looks. They seem to infect the air, the furniture, the very schnecken that she serves with coffee.

  When I got to the end of my story, I heard her give a little sigh. “So it isn’t much. But after lunch you’ll take a look at the scene of the crime, wouldn’t you? You’ll talk to the dead woman’s mother, you’ll question some witnesses, you’ll have a lot more to report.”

  “I hope so, Mom. Nothing looks very encouraging so far.”

  “Absolutely not. Except for one little thing.”

  “In our client’s favor? I’d love to hear it.”

  “Naturally. According to the assistant district attorney, this Harry Stubbins killed the woman, and then the shock and the liquor he drank knocked him unconscious so he couldn’t run away from her room?”

  “That’s right, Mom. It’s a hard line of reasoning to argue with.”

  “Maybe so,” Mom said. “But here’s a funny little question. If he killed her, and then he passed out on the floor and didn’t wake up till seven in the morning—will you tell me please, how come, when the body was found, the lamps were turned out and the television set was off? A dead woman and an unconscious man couldn’t do this. So don’t this suggest to you that maybe there was a third party who came into the room, like your Stubbins is saying? Maybe this Edna was still alive when Stubbins passed out, and maybe she turned off the television herself so she and this third party could talk? And maybe this third party killed her, and turned out the lamps so her lights wouldn’t be seen from the street and nobody would call the police to investigate?”

  I couldn’t deny it, Mom had made a good point. But it took me only a few seconds to come up with an answer. “Edna Pulaski’s mother—the old lady who found Stubbins with the body—she must’ve turned out the lamps and turned off the TV when she got there this morning.”

  “Not possible,” Mom said. “When Stubbins woke up, he saw this old lady screaming in the doorway, isn’t this right—and the next second he sees the lamps and the television aren’t on? So you’re telling me, when this old lady got to the room and found her daughter’s body, the first thing she did was she turned off the lamps and the television, and then she went to the door and started screaming? All right, even assuming she’s got a terrible dislike for wasting electricity, this is a peculiar way to behave.”

  “Well—maybe Stubbins is lying about the TV and the lamps being on in the first place. After all, we’ve only got his word for it.”

  “Why should he tell such a lie? It don’t help his case if the dead woman was or wasn’t looking at the television, or if the lamps were or weren’t lit, when he came into her room. There’s no point to such a lie. Things that got no point to them make me nervous, they ootch at me, I can’t get them out from my mind. All right, we need more facts before we can talk some more. When you go to this Pulaski woman’s apartment today, you’ll find out a couple of things for me.”

  “What things, Mom?”

  “First, you should find out what was the state of this Pulaski woman’s health. Did she have some type condition that maybe she was being treated for?”

  “What makes you think she did?”

  “I don’t think she did, I don’t think she didn’t. I’m asking you should find out.”

  “All right, what’s the second thing?”

  “You should find out was she a big drinker? How did she feel about alcoholic liquor?”

  “But what does it matter—”

  “Never mind matters. Only ask.”

  God, she gets me furious when she does that! Putting on this big mystery act, like I was some stupid kid and there was no point explaining things to me. And the reason for it is, I am a kid, in Mom’s eyes. I’ve never grown older than ten or twelve, as far as she’s concerned, even though I’ve been married and widowed, and I’ve earned my own living since the age of twenty-one.

  One of these days, I told myself, there’s going to be a showdown between Mom and me. I’m going to make it clear to her once and for all that I’m a grown man in my fifties and she can’t give me orders anymore.

  “Okay, I’ll find out all that if I can,” I said.

  “And maybe tonight you and Roger will come over for dinner. You’re both looking a little thin lately, I’ll make a nice chicken pot pie and fatten you up.”

  And while she was fattening us up, I thought, she would also be pumping us about the murder.

  I hung up. Election day, I thought, is a symbol of freedom and independence. So maybe, by election day, I’d get up the nerve to acquire some of my own.

  FIVE

  Some days, in this job, you just don’t get to eat lunch. It was half an hour past noon already, and I had a feeling this was going to be one of those days. That’s why I keep a supply of Hershey bars, with almonds, in my glove compartment. I wolfed one of them down while I was driving to South Arizona Avenue.

  Long wide avenues in Mesa Grande tend to be named after either states or people. The ones that are named after people are lined with beautiful old trees and sweep through neighborhoods with big expensive houses on either side. The people they were named after were once distinguished big shots in town; naming an avenue after them was meant to be a compliment. The avenues that got named after states, on the other hand, are the ones that never could have been used to flatter anybody.

  Arizona Avenue, one of our longest thoroughfares, is very wide, with an island in the middle to separate northbound from southbound traffic. It passes through the sleazy motel/honkeytonk section at the extreme north and the even sleazier motel/honkeytonk section at the extreme south. In between it touches on some respectable commercial and residential neighborhoods, but none of them is more than modest in appearance or cost. Nobody in our upper crust lives or works on Arizona Avenue.

  Edna Pulaski’s house, on South Arizona, was two stories high, the first story long and wide, the second story much smaller, as if it had been stuck on top as an afterthought. The outside of the house was more or less white, with only the tiniest scrub of lawn between its front porch and the street. Sticking up from this lawn was a post with a white piece of board nailed to it. Painted on this board, in large black capital letters, were these words:

  Massage Parlor.

  Clean Rooms. Expert Masseuses.

  Good for Your Health.

  E. Pulaski, Prop.

  On one side of the house was a small dilapidated-looking motel, with a neon sign that wasn’t lit up yet. On the other side of it was a fast food hamburger joint and next to that was a tiny drugstore on whose front window, in whitewash, was the announcement that it was open “all nite.” Directly across the street was another motel, just as small and dilapidated-looking, and a fast food fish joint.

  This block and the two or three surrounding it would have looked exactly like all the others that stretched along South Arizona Avenue, except for one distinctive feature. Many of the signs mixed strings of Chinese letters (or Korean or Vietnamese letters, I couldn’t tell the difference) with the English ones.

  A lot of Asians have moved into Mesa Grande in the last thirty-five years or so, first a wave of them from Korea after the war, then from Vietnam after that war, and most recently from mainland China. The blocks that intersect South Arizona Avenue to the east and west are pretty much segregated: There’s a Chinese enclave, a Vietnamese enclave, even a small one that’s Japanese. Which became which was just a fluke, I suppose, depending on who happened to be the first to settle where; once the lines were drawn, they were reinforced by the streams of relations and friends who followed. The different groups get along peaceably with one another, but they keep to themselves. The people who live in the block where Edna Pulaski’s house was located are mostly Korean.

  Anyway, on this chilly Sunday afternoon, dozens of people from all four Asian groups—and also a lot of whites—were milling around in front of the hous
e and spilling into the street. Some uniformed cops were guarding the entrance, keeping the gawkers from getting too close, and three or four hand-held TV cameras were adding to the congestion. Some of it had even spilled out into the street. You don’t see too many classic New York–type traffic jams in Mesa Grande, with wheels screeching, horns honking, exhausts and tempers boiling over. I knew I’d never be able to park on South Arizona, so I swung into a side street and found an empty spot a block and a half away.

  Walking back to Edna Pulaski’s house, I paused at the alleyway that Harry Stubbins had called home for the last few months. Dark, dirty, and cold—not much different, in other words, from a lot of the other “homes” our city was beginning to acquire. Who said we were the boondocks? Who said we wouldn’t some day be right up there with New York, London, and all the other sophisticated cosmopolitan hellholes of the world?

  The uniformed patrolman in front of the house was a kid, and not too flexible a thinker. He wanted to keep me out, even when I showed him my identification, because he’d been told to keep people out. Luckily his superior, dressed in plainclothes, came along to see what the fuss was about. It turned out to be Pat Delaney, the big red-faced captain of Homicide, probably one of the few Irish cops west of the Mississippi; the Mesa Grande force is made up mostly of Hispanics and the sons of farm boys from outlying ranch counties.

  Delaney and I knew each other, and had cordial feelings toward each other, from a couple of cases in the past. “Didn’t expect to run into you down here, Pat,” I said. “What’s the good of being the Big Chief if you have to work routine jobs on Sunday?”

  “Routine? Didn’t you hear the news? Our esteemed DA is running this one in person. Seems he got needled a bit at some dinner last night, accused of being an absentee or some such word, and the needle is still sticking up his ass. So we’ve all been told to give this one the highest priority.”