Try Try Again Page 9

  Liv had tolerated her mother’s unintentional sexism, but knew she’d been right. And her life had turned out that way: no serious men, no close friends male or female. A succession of jobs she’d performed well at but she hadn’t inspired confidence from her management, nor trust from her clients.

  Liv phoned Nielsen, reached his voicemail, left a message that she’d be over as soon as she’d reviewed the case; please call back.

  Twenty minutes later, Brent got Liv’s message.

  Brent Nielsen, State’s Attorney for Grantwood County, had been following the case closely, because his office prosecuted those accused of any local non-Federal offense. There hadn’t been a good juicy murder there for at least seven years, and none had approached anywhere near the size, in terms of publicity, as the Barnes killing.

  Freshly pumped up and showered from an hour in the staff gym, Brent leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his full head of light brown hair. Yes, he considered, he’d be prosecuting this one himself. Then run for Congress? Barnes’ vacant House seat seemed sure to fall to the other party, to an amateur politician who should be easy to topple in two years’ time. Yes; two years.

  Then he considered the appointment of Olivia Saunders, as Dukes’ defense counsel. She seemed like a capable lawyer, but was going nowhere in her firm. Now she’s trying to defend a confessed murderer? May be pro bono, but there could be lots of publicity. For Brent himself anyway, and perhaps for her too. Maybe they could strike a deal. Brent called back, told her to come on by when she was ready.

  Two hours after Liv’s arrival, Brent gave a “we’re done here” exhale. “So that’s what we have,” he said. “I was glad to share it with you – this time.”

  “So there’s no doubt?”

  “No doubt at all. Just think about it: lengthy rap sheet with three gun possessions. About thirty-five witnesses who were close enough to see Charley Wayne Dukes draw and fire. A woman who had her Chevy Nova hijacked and ID’d Dukes in a lineup later: the governor’s mother, no less. A trooper stop of that car later in the day, with Dukes inside. A confession that wasn’t coerced, or even suggested to him; he yelled ‘I killed the politician!’ even before the troopers had a chance to tell him he was under arrest. But then he was Miranda’d and confessed again. So no, no doubt at all.”

  “’The politician’? Isn’t that odd?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Not ‘I killed Barnes,’ or ‘I killed the Congressman,’ or even ‘I killed that pinko liberal’?”

  “Ah – so what?” said Brent, a little testily.

  “Maybe nothing,” Liv said, “but maybe something.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know – yet.” After a pause, she asked “Has the trial date been set? Who’s the judge?”

  “Not yet, but probably soon since there are – so far – no pre-trial motions,” he looked at her sharply, “that I expect. DuCasse will be on the bench.”

  Liv gave a ‘cringe’ expression.

  “Yeah,” said Brent, “the ‘Duchess.’ Watch your objections or she’ll ram them down your throat.”

  There was a moment of profound silence as Liv and Brent contemplated dealing with a bench occupied by The Honorable, Ms. Harriet DuCasse.

  Then Liv said “Do you have a photo of Dukes? I’d like to have one.” Brent gave her a photo. Blurred but usable.

  “One more thing,” she said. “You’re not going to recommend capital punishment, are you?”

  Brent smiled. “Not likely.”

  Liv thanked Brent and left.

  Brent thought it over. No, he hadn’t actually lied: seeking the death penalty hadn’t been likely, for the past half-century, in Pennsylvania. But that’s what he was planning to do. Too bad to have to blindside her. Could be a really attractive woman, if she’d…. Or maybe in private she was different.

  His mind wandered. Guessed she’s about five-six years older than he was; hard to tell. Wonder if… Brent’s thoughts wandered farther away from a prosecutor’s normal line of work, then came back. He picked up a pile of papers from his inbox. He guessed he’d never find out if she … O hell, another subpoena.

  The next day, Liv drove to the Grantwood County jail. In contrast to some other courthouse-jail facilities, this one was a tall, modern, but no-nonsense building with people bustling in and out – mostly fellow lawyers, judging by their use of neckties or pantsuits. She showed her ID, was admitted, and asked to see her client.

  After waiting in a small room for a time she thought was too long, Charley Dukes arrived accompanied by six guards. She looked up at the entourage.

  “Murder suspect, lady. Important case. Can’t be out of our sight. New rule.”

  “Well then look through the window. There, the little one in the door. Or you could go around outside and use a periscope. My client and I are entitled to privacy.”

  “We’ll stand back,” the burliest of the six answered.

  “Here?” She gestured at the twelve by twelve room. “That’s not good enough. Should I call someone?” (Someone more important than he was, she meant.)

  Burleyman made a call.

  “OK,” he said after a few minutes, “we’re all going to one of the rec rooms. You’ll have to stand up there - I trust that will be satisfactory,” he said with a smirk.

  Unwilling to complain further, she nodded and followed the parade of three jailers, the defendant, three more jailers preventing the otherwise inevitable bloody jailbreak, and herself.

  They reached the rec room and stood, Liv and Charley near one wall, the guards on the other side of the room.

  “Charles Duke?”

  “Charley.”

  “Well, let’s keep it formal here.”

  “No, my mom named me ‘Charley,’ not ‘Charles’. She told me it sounded friendlier.”

  “Is she living?”

  “No.” he said.

  “Well, I suppose it does sound friendlier. Look, my name is Olivia Saunders, and you can call me “Ms. Saunders,” or “Liv,” your choice. I’m your court-appointed attorney. They shook hands, Charley with no enthusiasm. He looked down throughout the interview, and to Liv his posture and voice were those of a guilty man just waiting for his punishment, which was pretty much the way it was. She tried to avoid pre-judging him, but that wasn’t possible for her.

  “Do you know why you’re here?”

  “I shot a man. A politician. I guess he’s dead.”

  “Did you mean to kill him? Or did you just mean to scare him?”

  “No, I meant to kill him.”

  “Why?”

  Charley Dukes thought for a minute. George had given him a story to tell just in case he got caught, but it sounded pretty dumb to him, and the cops sure hadn’t believed it, and the prosecutor hadn’t believed it, and then he’d offered up his own idea that was shot down pretty fast, the one about the Arabs. He guessed he’d try the drug story again. Well, George was a smart fellow, so I’d better say what he told me to. Maybe it’ll work this time.

  “There was a drug deal,” Charley said. “The guy took the drugs but wouldn’t pay me.”

  “No,” Liv said. “You gave that story to the police and it didn’t fly. I don’t believe it, either. And I looked at your record. You’ve never been busted for drugs.”

  Charley shrugged, muttered “…smart, I guess. Maybe lucky.”

  She wasn’t getting anywhere with this.

  “Do you want to die in state prison?” she asked, louder. The six men on the opposite side of the room stirred.

  “The food’s on time there,” said Charley.

  Half an hour later, Liv Saunders saw she was getting nowhere. Charley wouldn’t say anything more than “I killed the politician.” But he wouldn’t say why, or how he got to Grantwood, or gave any details except the period after he’d fired at Barnes. From then on, it was all detail. About what happened before the shooting, he wasn’t talking.

  Liv reviewed, with Cha
rley, the various statements he’d made to the police after the “drug deal” story, receiving no response other than “yeah, I told them that.”

  After an hour, Liv shook hands with Charley, told him to contact her if he had anything else to say, and she’d be back before the trial. He nodded. She left.

  The next day, Liv met with Brent again, and summarized where she was. “Dukes said it was all his idea at first, he had some cockeyed story that Barnes was in with him on a drug deal and Barnes refused to pay off. But everything was wrong with that story, completely unbelievable. Then there was that Arab story, then the story about someone driving him here who wasn’t an Arab. It’s all bullshit. And then there was that thing about the Greyhound bus station.

  “So why did he do it?” she concluded. “What do you think?”

  “Beats me,” Brent said. “But I got a confession and our shrink says he’s not legally insane, and it was obviously premeditated; so I get murder-one for this one. Lotsa luck, Liv!”

  “But why did he shoot Barnes?” she insisted. “We have to know that to understand what kind of sentence he should get.”

  “I dispute that premise and so does the law, pretty much. To answer your question, I don’t know. Maybe some grudge, some fantasy. All of those stories he gave, Charley had no details, nothing. So he was making it up on the spot. Everything but his confession.”

  “I haven’t heard he confessed before he was read his rights. You’ll have to tell me all about it. The law, you know.”

  “OK, that’s all in the police report. He confessed right when he was caught. The officer had to shut him up so he could read him his rights. “I did it, I did it,” Charley kept saying, over and over, “I shot the politician.”

  “Well,” said Liv, “I’ll admit he confessed. He’s still confessing to this day. A little too much, don’t you think? I won’t belabor the point. But I don’t think he acted alone: there are questions that haven’t been answered yet.”

  “Such as?”

  Liv shifted in her seat and cleared her throat. “Such as,” she said, “how did Charley get to Grantwood from D.C.?”

  “Drove, I suppose, although he finally told us someone else drove him, someone of course too mysterious to be real.”

  “But if he drove, or rode with someone else, why did he have to hijack a car to get away?”

  “I dunno. Why does it matter?”

  “He had help,” she said. “Someone drove him to Grantwood, just as he told the police, and finally, didn’t stick around to give him a ride home. Someone you should be interested in.”

  “Well then, maybe he took a bus the day before, stayed in a motel or something overnight.”

  Liv persisted. “That just didn’t check out. There aren’t many hotels and motels this side of Harrisburg, and there’s no indication he was at any of them – the police showed his photo around. Or if he did, someone was fronting for him and Charley kept out of sight. And if he slept in a doorway or in a car, or just stayed put somewhere out of sight, it would be a big risk for him. I don’t think he’d have done that.”

  “Look: Charley confessed,” Brent said with some annoyance. “Open and shut. Criminals know other criminals and sometimes they help each other out. So what? But even if he had some kind of help, it was Charley who pulled the trigger. Right? Why should we care if some other low-life was in on it but left him to take the rap alone?”

  “There are a lot of holes in that argument, Brent. For example,…

  Brent interrupted. “You do believe his confession, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the word of all those witnesses?”

  “Yes.”

  “So?”

  “I just don’t believe him when he says he acted alone, just caught a ride with some stranger.”

  “So what? Look, we’re going around in circles here. Catching an accomplice would be a good next step, but first I want to finish off the Charley Dukes case. I want a guilty verdict, and then we can look at this again once Dukes has been put away.”

  “Not just an accomplice,” Liv said, “but a plot. Charley was just a tool, I think. It’s very implausible someone like Charley Dukes would, or could, plan and execute an assassination like this. The important thing is to uncover who’s behind the plot. Wouldn’t that look great on your resume Brent, uncovering a successful plot to kill a U.S. Congressman? Dukes will fully cooperate if he is allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge than first-degree murder, perhaps even manslaughter.”

  Liv knew she was taking a chance here. Dukes hasn’t actually said anything about cooperating; she was bluffing. But perhaps she could talk Brent into a further investigation.

  Brent laughed. “A sinister plot of some kind? Evil masterminds behind the scenes? Great movie, bad case. Just think; Dukes was a pretty unlikely hit man, wasn’t he? Who would have hired a convenience-store hold up artist to kill anyone, especially someone of Barnes’ importance? No, I just can’t believe there were evil conspirators who, in their wisdom, picked the most unlikely of hit men to carry out their dark plans, the one most likely to screw it up, as he almost did with those wild shots, and then left him out to dry.

  “Dukes had never shot anyone before, did you know that? Never even aimed and missed apparently, just waved a gun around and shot into the ceiling once or twice. And he’s the one these brilliant masterminds selected to kill a Congressman? Look. It just doesn’t make sense.” Brent sat back in his chair, smugness on his face.

  “But does it make more sense that he acted alone?” Liv questioned, speaking gradually louder and faster. “Why would he do that? If he wanted to kill a member of Congress, there were four hundred forty five of them working in a place he could have just walked to, waited for one to drive out of one of the House garages, for example, or just strolled by the House steps a little after adjournment one day. Congressmen wear these round lapel buttons, you know. Think of those as bull’s-eyes. Shoot me.”

  Brent smiled at her, but not in a friendly way. “I have work to do,” he said, “I’ll speak with you again later.”

  Liv drove slowly back to her law firm. “Putting Charley away” rang in her mind. Could mean prison, could mean the needle. And something else was wrong. Had Charley been paid to smear Barnes’ reputation by calling him a drug addict? Then why shoot him? It should be one or the other, if his enemies wanted to ruin Barnes’ bid to replace Thomas Conning in the Senate or to get him in trouble for some other reason.

  Was that it? Someone didn’t want Barnes in the Senate. He’d been stirring up discomfort with his various investigations into inefficiencies and corruption. Maybe Barnes’ former staff would know something.

  Liv asked Belinda Chase Epperly if the firm could hire a PI to retrace Charley’s tracks in D.C. and find something that could possibly make some sense of the crime. She was laughed at, and then apologized to, and then reminded of the minuscule effort called for in this type of case, especially minuscule expense.

  Disappointed but not surprised, Liv sat down at her desk, determined to do some investigating herself. She jotted down the main lines of inquiry as she saw them:

  Was Charley hired to kill Barnes? She was pretty sure he was. By whom? If so, where did the money go?

  Why would Charley go to Grantwood to kill someone who had an apartment not far from his shabby room in D.C.? Actually, that one was easy: Access and positive identification.

  But that brought up another question: Why didn’t the mastermind behind the killing hire a local Pennsylvania shooter? Maybe not enough talent in Grantwood – but in all of Central Pennsylvania?

  Another thought: How did Charley get from D.C. to Grantwood? She recalled her conversation on that topic with Brent. Well, driving was obvious, but Charley was poor and didn’t own a car. Better check with the rental companies. But who would rent a car to a scruffy-looking loser with no credit card? Hmm. That track was becoming interesting. Maybe someone rented a car and handed it over to Charley? If so, where was t
he car now? Again, her thoughts circled back to that unknown person who might have given Charley a ride.

  Who profited from Barnes’ death? Not Charley in any way she could see, except possibly by being paid. Senator Conning? Yes, but unlikely. Still, he’d have to be in the mix until he could be ruled out. What could Barnes’ former staff tell her about a possible motive?

  Who had Charley been seen with recently? That was a blank so far. According to the police workup, Dukes lived near-Northwest D.C., in one of the last rat-traps to vanish before an advancing army of condos, and he hung out at several neighborhood bars and strip joints, wherever his tab didn’t get too high.

  The last two items seemed useful to investigate, and they were areas the police hadn’t pursued, although it was likely the FBI had interviewed Barnes’ staff. As both items were related to D.C., she’d just have to go there.

  First, she intended to meet with Barnes’ former staff. Some of them may have left already, even though the new seventeenth-district representative wouldn’t be sworn in for another few days. Yes, she thought, she’d go to Capitol Hill and see if she could unravel this. Charley sure seemed to her like he was taking a fall for someone, but facing twenty to life in prison, or worse, why would he ever do that?

  Second, she’d try to find out what she could about Charley by visiting his D.C. hangouts, if he had any and if she could find out where they were.

  Back at the office, Liv had a long and loud discussion with Belinda Chase Epperly about permission to take a few days to go to D.C. She outlined her goals for the trip.

  Epperly listed patiently but then denied Liv’s request. “I suppose you’ll want to be paid for this, plus expenses even though the economy”… and the firm… and bills and clients who don’t pay on time and all the taxes and expenses the state puts us to blah blah blah, and the occasional yaddy yack.

  The outcome of the meeting was Liv could do whatever she damn well pleased on the case, including visiting D.C., especially after Liv threatened to go to Judge DuCasse, and tell her she wasn’t being given sufficient resources to prepare her defense of Charley Wayne Dukes.

  Liv left the meeting knowing she’d be fired as soon as the Dukes trial was over. She tried not to think about that.