Low Pressure (37 page)

Rupe formed a reasonable facsimile of a smile, wondering if it looked as distorted as it felt, and figuring that if it did, all the better. “I didn’t land a single punch.”

“You sold the guy a lemon?”

He and the ER doctor must have attended the same school of comedy. Rupe formed the expected grin, then turned serious. “I wish that was all it amounted to.” Leaning back in his chair, he made a steeple of his fingertips and studied his manicure. “I wasn’t quite truthful with you before, Mr. Van Durbin.”

“Your wife was only first runner-up?”

If Rupe’s gums weren’t already throbbing, he would have been grinding his teeth. He wanted to squash Van Durbin beneath his boot heel like a cockroach. It was taking a huge amount of self-control to appear contrite.

“When we spoke a few days ago, I was trying to protect the integrity of the Austin Police Department and the honest officers who serve this community.”

“Implying that there are some
dishonest
officers serving it as well?” Van Durbin winked. “Let me guess. Dale Moody.”

“As you are already aware, he and I worked closely together to indict and convict Allen Strickland. However—”

“I thrive on howevers.”

“—there were some . . . tactics . . . used during that police investigation which I found off-putting. I turned a blind eye to them. I’m not proud of it, but I was young and ambitious, and I was assured that these, uh . . .”

“Tactics?”

“Yes. I was assured that they were commonplace and accepted as a part of police work. An unpleasant aspect of the job, perhaps, but excusable because, after all, officers deal with lawless individuals. Often, violence is the only language that violent offenders understand. I was told—”

“By Moody? He’s the one telling you all this?”

“That’s right. Anytime I asked Dale how he had come by a piece of information during an interrogation, or how he’d obtained an article of evidence, he would dismiss my concerns. The more outspoken I became about his methods, the more truculent he got.

“So,” Rupe said, raising his hands in the sign of surrender, “I took the high road. I backed off. I let him conduct his investigation as he saw fit. I concentrated on what I could control, which was preparing the case for trial and representing the state in the courtroom.”

Van Durbin squinted at him. “Having second thoughts about Strickland’s conviction?”

“Not at all. I did my job. His fate was up to the twelve jurors, not me.”

“Then what’s this little mea culpa chat about, Rupe?”

“I believe Bellamy Price shares the misgivings I had about Dale Moody’s investigation. In her book, the detective’s competence and integrity are brought into question.”

“So are the prosecutor’s.”

“She did that for dramatic effect, to create tension and conflict between those two characters. I didn’t take it personally. But apparently Dale Moody took offense at the way his character was portrayed, because since you and I spoke the other day, he’s come out of hiding.”

Van Durbin swiftly added two and two together. “Holy shit! Dale Moody did that to you?”

“Night before last. He jumped me and attacked so viciously I was powerless to defend myself.”

“You didn’t write
Low Pressure
. Why’d he attack you?”

“Your column. He saw me quoted in it.”

“You didn’t say anything derogatory about him.”

“No, but—”

“He knows you could have.”

Rupe didn’t respond but made a face that strongly hinted that the writer had guessed correctly. He reached up and touched his bandaged nose. “I think this demonstrates how afraid Moody is that you’ll turn up something that could prove to be embarrassing. Possibly criminal,” he added in an undertone.

Van Durbin gnawed on the eraser of his pencil as though weighing a decision, then hiked up his hip and withdrew a sheet of paper from his rear pants pocket. He unfolded the square and pushed it across the desk toward Rupe. “Recognize them?”

It was a grainy black-and-white photograph of Bellamy Price leaning over a balcony railing, looking terribly distressed. Behind her was a bare-chested Denton Carter. “Where was this taken? When?”

“Outside Carter’s apartment, night before last.”

“What was going on between them?”

“Don’t I wish I knew,” Van Durbin said, bobbing his eyebrows. “But that looks like a bandage around his waist to me. And get a load of his face. Doesn’t look as bad as yours, but he’d taken a pounding, too.”

When Rupe raised his eyebrow quizzically, Van Durbin shrugged.

“I don’t know who, what, when, where, or why.” He frowned with malice. “Never got a chance to ask him, either. He sicced the police on me and my photographer.”

He relayed what had happened and Rupe laughed in spite of the pain it caused.

Van Durbin scowled. “Funny now. Wasn’t then. Took me hours to get my editor on the phone so he could tell them I wasn’t a weenie-wagger. The point is, Denton Carter got crosswise with somebody.”

“You think it was Moody?”

Van Durbin turned his question around. “What do you think?”

Rupe thoughtfully settled against the back of his chair. “I don’t know. If one of them is bearing a grudge against the other, it should be Dent. Moody came down hard on him, and, if not for Dent’s alibi, he would have been tried for the crime.”

“Wait,” Van Durbin said, sitting forward. “Are you saying it could have gone either way? Dent Carter or Strickland?”

Rupe didn’t answer, letting the writer draw his own conclusions and hoping to Christ he would catch Rupe’s drift without being so smart as to see through the manipulation.

Lowering his voice to a confidential pitch, Van Durbin said, “Doesn’t that kinda contradict what you said earlier about second-guessing Strickland’s conviction?”

“I said Strickland’s fate was in the hands of the jurors.”

“But their verdict was based on what you told them, and you told them he was guilty.”

“My arguments to that effect were founded on what came from Moody’s investigation. Was everything factual? At the time, I accepted it as such.”

“Maybe it was.”

“Maybe.”

“But you’re not one hundred percent sure?”

“Moody was under a lot of pressure from his superiors to nail that girl’s killer. He’d already put forth one suspect that fizzled. He’d’ve been made to look like a bumbling fool if his case against Strickland had fallen apart, too. The man was determined to see Strickland convicted.”

“By whatever means necessary?”

Again Rupe avoided giving a straight answer. “All I’m saying is that Dale felt the squeeze from city hall, the PD, the almighty Lystons, and Joe Q. Public.”

“So he bent rules to produce a culprit.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But if he’s got nothing to hide, why did he attack you?”

Rupe looked pained. “My thought exactly. It’s hardly the action of a man who is entirely innocent of wrongdoing. He also threatened me against speaking about this. To you. To anyone. But saying nothing smacks of a cover-up, and I want no part of it.”

Van Durbin’s ferret nose was practically twitching. As though composing the opening sentence of his next column, he said, “Moody nailed the wrong man, and that innocent young man died bloody in prison.”

“You’ve put words in my mouth that I didn’t say, Mr. Van Durbin. If you print that, I’ll demand a retraction and sue your newspaper. I hope to God that justice was served,” he added piously. “However—”

“There’s that word again. It gives me a hard-on.”

“If you want an exclusive quote from me, here it is. And this is all I will ever say on the subject: I swear on the heads of my beautiful wife and children that I did my job as prosecutor to the best of my ability, with integrity and a burning desire to see that Susan Lyston got the justice she deserved. I can’t speak to the motives or actions of former detective Dale Moody.”

“You would have been disappointed.”

Dent looked over at Bellamy where she sat in the right-hand co-pilot’s seat. She had been quiet throughout most of the flight, and he’d left her to her own thoughts. He figured she was reflecting on her dad’s declining condition and how his death would impact her.

But obviously he’d somehow factored into her thoughts, and they were compelling enough for her to have put on the headphones so she could share them with him now.

“Disappointed?”

“If we’d gone through with it last night, you would have been in for a letdown.”

“I
was
let down.”

“Yes, but not like you would have been if we’d continued.” She faced forward again, but he knew that her mind wasn’t on the view through the cockpit window. “When I described my marriage to you, you remarked on how boring it sounded.”

“I was being a smart-ass.”

“Of course you were. But you were right. Except for one thing. My husband wasn’t to blame, I was. Through no fault of his own, he became bored with me.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Why did he get bored with you?”

“I have issues with intimacy.”

“With fucking.”

She winced. “That’s an aspect of it.”

“What’s the other aspect?”

She didn’t answer, leading him to believe there was no other aspect, but even if there was, this was the one that had caused her marriage to fail, the one that had caused her to freak out on him last night, so this was the aspect that interested him.

“What kind of issues?” he asked. “Other than the use of the word. You don’t like it. A lot of people find it offensive, but they still do the deed. So what sent you into orbit last night? I had bad breath? My feet stank?”

“It wasn’t anything you did or didn’t do. I’m to blame. Let’s just leave it at that.”

“No, let’s not.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Then why’d you bring it up?”

“To tell you again that I’m sorry it happened.”

“Apology accepted. Now tell me why I would have been disappointed. Which I think is total bull crap, by the way. But what makes you think I would have been?”

“Now’s not the time to talk about it.”

“It’s the perfect time. I’ve got to fly the airplane. So no matter what my reaction is, I can’t act on it. You’re safe to say anything.”

She wrestled with indecision for nearly half a minute, then said, “When Susan—”

“Aw, jeez. I had a feeling this was going to come back to her.”

“Everything comes back to her.”

“Only because you let it.”

“We’re discussing this at your insistence. Do you want to continue or not?”

He motioned for her to continue.

“The manner in which Susan died left a lot of people thinking that she had it coming. Even if they didn’t say so out loud, it was implied. By the media. The same with close friends. Condolences were sometimes tinged with a reap-what-you-sow undertone. We all sensed it. Daddy, Olivia, Steven, and me.

“One day during the trial, Allen Strickland’s defense lawyer came right out and stated that if Susan hadn’t been sexually promiscuous, she would still be alive. Rupe Collier objected. He and the defense lawyer got into a shouting match. The judge sternly reprimanded the lawyer, ordered that the comment be stricken from the record, and instructed the jury to disregard it. But the damage had been done.

“Up till then it had only been an insinuation which we—the family—had publicly ignored. But once it was put into actual words, we could no longer pretend that each of us hadn’t entertained similar thoughts.

“And owning up to such disloyalty toward Susan was painful for all of us. Olivia broke down and sobbed for hours. Daddy drank heavily that night, and that’s the only time I’ve ever seen him overindulge. Steven withdrew to his room without saying a word to anyone.

“And I . . .” She paused and took a deep breath. “I also locked myself in my room where, after hours of tearful contemplation, I concluded that the source of all this grief was Susan’s sexuality.

“She didn’t deserve to die because of it, but none of us would be suffering as we were if she hadn’t given in to sexual impulses. Ergo, they had to be bad. Dirty. Destructive. That’s the conclusion I reached.”

She smiled wryly. “This at a time when I was going through puberty and beginning to experience the kinds of mysterious and uncontrollable yearnings that had cost Susan her life. I thought I would be destined to end like her if I surrendered to them. Instead I resolved to deny them. I pledged not to become like my sister.”

A dozen different responses instantly came to his mind, but all were crude, inappropriate, and insulting to Susan. He chose the safer option and kept them to himself.

“During high school, I developed mad crushes on a few boys and did my fair share of dating, but—to counter Susan and her reputation—I kept my virginity. Through college and young adulthood, I slept with the occasional guy, but I didn’t let myself have fun in bed, so my partners rarely did. As I got older, I got better at the pretense, but men must sense when a woman isn’t really into it.”

She glanced at him, but, again, he prudently said nothing.

“My husband never questioned my reserve, before or after we married, although he felt it. I never turned him down, but I wasn’t, hmm, adventurous. Maybe he hoped he could eventually overcome whatever hang-ups were keeping me from enjoying him as I should. But it never happened, and I suppose he tired of trying to force it. Losing our baby was just the last of his disappointments in me.”

A few seconds elapsed, then she looked over at him. “There. Now that you know, you should feel better about last night. It had nothing to do with you or your technique.”

He waited until he was certain that she was finished, then he said, “Let me get this straight. At twelve years old, you made this stupid pledge to deny your own sexuality, and you’ve spent the past eighteen years trying to uphold that vow?”

“No, Dent,” she said sadly. “I’ve spent eighteen years trying to break it.”