“Yes. They arrested Helio Gonzalez, then age twenty-two. A resident of Barker House in Harlem. Had a felony sheet that read like a Hall of Famer’s career stats. Armed robbery, arson, assault, a real sunshine, our Mr. Gonzalez.”
My mouth was dry. “Weren’t the charges eventually dropped?” I asked.
“Yes. They didn’t have much really. His fingerprints were found at the scene, but so were plenty of others. There were strands of Scope’s hair and even a speck of matching blood found where Gonzalez lived. But Scope had been to the building before. We could have easily claimed that was how that material got there. Nonetheless, they had enough for an arrest, and the cops were sure something more would break.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
Flannery still wouldn’t look at me. I didn’t like that. Flannery was the kind of guy who lived for the Willy Loman world of shined shoes and eye contact. I knew the type. I didn’t want anything to do with them, but I knew them.
“The police had a solid time of death,” he continued. “The M.E. got a good liver temperature reading. Scope was killed at eleven. You might be able to stretch it a half hour in either direction, but that was about it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What does this have to do with my wife?”
He bounced the fingertips again. “I understand that your wife worked with the poor as well,” he said. “In the same office with the victim, as a matter of fact.”
I didn’t know where this was going, but I knew I wasn’t going to like it. For the most fleeting of seconds, I wondered if Flannery was right, if I really didn’t want to hear what he had to say, if I should just pick myself out of the chair and forget all about this. But I said, “So?”
“That’s noble,” he said with a small nod. “Working with the downtrodden.”
“Glad you think so.”
“It’s why I originally went into law. To help the poor.”
I swallowed down the bile and sat a little straighter. “Do you mind telling me what my wife has to do with any of this?”
“She freed him.”
“Who?”
“My client. Helio Gonzalez. Your wife freed him.”
I frowned. “How?”
“She gave him an alibi.”
My heart stopped. So did my lungs. I almost pounded on my chest to get the inner workings started up again.
“How?” I asked.
“How did she give him an alibi?”
I nodded numbly, but he still wasn’t looking. I croaked out a yes.
“Simple,” he said. “She and Helio had been together during the time in question.”
My mind started to flail, adrift in the ocean, no life preserver in reach. “I never saw anything about this in the papers,” I said.
“It was kept quiet.”
“Why?”
“Your wife’s request, for one. And the D.A.’s office didn’t want their wrongful arrest made more public. So it was all done as quietly as possible. Plus there were, uh, problems with your wife’s testimony.”
“What problems?”
“She sort of lied at first.”
More flailing. Sinking under. Coming to the surface. Flailing. “What are you talking about?”
“Your wife claimed that she was doing some career counseling with Gonzalez at the charity office at the time of the murder. Nobody really bought that.”
“Why not?”
He cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “Career counseling at eleven at night?”
I nodded numbly.
“So as Mr. Gonzalez’s attorney, I reminded your wife that the police would investigate her alibi. That, for example, the counseling offices had security cameras and there would be tapes of the comings and goings. That was when she came clean.”
He stopped.
“Go on,” I said.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“Tell me anyway.”
Flannery shrugged. “She wanted to spare herself—and you, I guess—the embarrassment. That was why she insisted on secrecy. She was at Gonzalez’s place, Dr. Beck. They’d been sleeping together for two months.”
I didn’t react. No one spoke. In the distance, I heard a bird squawk. Probably the one in the waiting room. I got to my feet. Tyrese took a step back.
“Thank you for your time,” I said in the calmest voice you ever heard.
Flannery nodded at the window blinds.
“It’s not true,” I said to him.
He didn’t respond. But then again, I hadn’t expected him to.
33
Carlson sat in the car. His tie was still knotted meticulously. His suit jacket was off, hung on a wooden hanger on the backseat hook. The air-conditioning blew loud and hard. Carlson read the autopsy envelope: Elizabeth Beck, Case File 94–87002. His fingers started unwinding the string. The envelope opened. Carlson extracted the contents and spread them out on the passenger seat.
What had Dr. Beck wanted to see?
Stone had already given him the obvious answer: Beck wanted to know if there was anything that might incriminate him. That fit into their early theories, and it had, after all, been Carlson who’d first started questioning the accepted scenario on Elizabeth Beck’s murder. He had been the first to believe that the killing was not what it appeared to be—that indeed it was Dr. David Beck, the husband, who had planned the murder of his wife.
So why had he stopped buying it?
He had carefully reviewed the holes now poking through that theory, but Stone had been equally convincing in patching them back up. Every case has holes. Carlson knew that. Every case has inconsistencies. If it doesn’t, ten to one you’ve missed something.
So why did he now have doubts about Beck’s guilt?
Perhaps it had something to do with the case becoming too neat, all the evidence suddenly lining up and cooperating with their theory. Or maybe his doubts were based on something as unreliable as “intuition,” though Carlson had never been a big fan of that particular aspect of investigative work. Intuition was often a way of cutting corners, a nifty technique of replacing hard evidence and facts with something far more elusive and capricious. The worst investigators Carlson knew relied on so-called intuition.
He picked up the top sheet. General information. Elizabeth Parker Beck. Her address, her birth date (she’d been twenty-five when she died), Caucasian female, height five seven, weight 98 pounds. Thin. The external examination revealed that rigor mortis had resolved. There were blisters on the skin and fluid leaks from the orifices. That placed the time of death at more than three days. The cause of death was a knife wound to the chest. The mechanism of death was loss of blood and dramatic hemorrhaging of the right aorta. There were also cut wounds on her hands and fingers, theoretically because she tried to defend herself against a knife attack.