Sheer Gall (10 page)

“So?” I said.

“You're looking for a witness, right? Look at the date of the meeting.”

I did. “You're right. It was the day after she retained me.” I shook my head. “She didn't go.”

“How do you know?”

“Amy told me she called in sick that day.”

“Still,” Benny said, “she might have called someone on the committee to say she wouldn't be there. There are two state court judges on that committee. She wouldn't have wanted an unexplained absence.”

I mulled it over. “You might be right.”

“What if she called one of the judges on the committee? Better yet, what if she told him the truth? There'd be a helluva good witness for you.”

I looked at the meeting notice again. The only person listed was the committee chair, Lloyd MacLachlan. Lloyd was an older partner at one of the insurance defense firms downtown. Fortunately, I knew him. He'd represented one of the parties in a coverage dispute I'd worked on about a year ago. I called his office.

Unlike Jonathan Wolf, he did not dispense with the usual pleasantries, which, in Lloyd MacLachlan's case, were quite pleasant. Lloyd was one of the senior statesmen of the local bar, a gentleman lawyer with courtly manners, Southern charm, and a marvelous white handlebar mustache with twirled ends kept stiff with mustache wax. After inquiring about my health, my practice, my mother, and my dog, Lloyd said, “To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”

“I'm helping wrap up Sally Wade's estate.”

“Oh, what a tragedy. I had the privilege of becoming acquainted with that young lady during the past year. She served on a bar committee I chair.”

“Actually, that's what I'm calling you about.”

“Well, I can assure you that Sally Wade was a splendid member of our committee. She was bubbling with ideas and enthusiasm, and was always willing to take on extra responsibility. Why, at the last meeting she agreed to serve as our liaison to the architects, which is no small undertaking. My goodness, that still haunts me.”

“Why, Lloyd?”

“That poor woman was dead less than a week later.”

I looked over at Benny with surprise. “You mean Sally was at your meeting on October sixteenth?”

Benny raised his eyebrows and leaned forward.

“She most certainly was,” Lloyd said. “It made the news of her death even more shocking.”

“How did she look?”

“How did she look?” he repeated, perplexed.

“Physically.”

“Oh,” he said with an awkward chuckle, “she looked lovely.”

“Really? Did you notice a black eye?”

“A black eye? Good heavens, are you serious?”

“Dead serious, Lloyd. I take it you didn't notice any bruising around her eye?”

“Not at all.”

“Or a puffy lip? Did she look like she'd been in an accident?”

“Gracious, no. Sally sat directly across the table from me during the meeting, and nothing about her appearance seemed to be amiss.”

“You're sure?”

“Quite sure.” He chuckled softly. “Although it may be a mortal sin in these politically correct times, I plead guilty to having an eye for the lovelier ladies of the bar, very much including yourself, Rachel. I can assure you that on the day in question Sally looked as pretty as a peach, poor thing.”

Chapter Ten

It wasn't that I disliked Marvin Vogelsang, because I didn't really. I barely knew him. My negative feelings were triggered more by his obvious discomfort. Marvin Vogelsang was one of those people who are so ill at ease around people that they make the people around them ill at ease as well. To begin with, he only made sporadic eye contact when I spoke to him, and when he spoke his focal point shifted starboard. Worse yet, he had a slight stammer, and when he tripped on a bad consonant his eyes rotated up and his eyelids fluttered.

The fact that he was a principal in the Vogelsang Funeral Home didn't help matters. Embalming is, to be sure, an ancient and venerable profession, but the thought of what morticians do for a living just plain gives me the willies. Although my initial contact with Marvin Vogelsang was at Sally's funeral, he had come not to bury Sally but to praise her. Literally. Marvin had delivered one of four eulogies. Although his had been short and not particularly stirring, I had driven to his funeral home directly from the memorial service and was now seated in his strange office because of one sentence in his eulogy: “I was privileged to be with Sally throughout the last weekend of her life.”

Marvin Vogelsang seemed a thoroughly unlikely candidate for the role of Sally's boyfriend. He was tall and skinny and pale, with a long oval face, thick purplish lips, and dark eyes sunk deep beneath heavy eyebrows. His thinning black hair was carefully combed and swirled over the top of his head in an obvious and obviously unsuccessful effort to camouflage his bald spot. Even worse, the hair that had fallen from the top of his head seemed to have resprouted on other parts of his body, including his knuckles, his nostrils, and his ears. He was, in short, a thoroughly unattractive man. As Benny commented during the memorial service, “I've seen better heads on a cabbage.”

His office decor added another strange touch. Along the back wall behind his desk were four porcelain Buddhas of various sizes, each on a marble Greek column pedestal. In a lighted display case against one side wall were a half-dozen Chinese vases. The other wall was hung with four Japanese scroll paintings.

“It was a beautiful eulogy,” I lied.

His eyes shifted starboard. “You are kind to say so.” His eyes shifted back to me.

“How long have you known Sally?”

Eyes away. “Three m-m-months.” Eyes back.

“From what you said about her in your eulogy, I got the sense that you spent lots of time with Sally her last weekend.”

Pause. “Almost the entire weekend.”

“Here?”

“No. I attended an out-of-town sem-m-m-inar. Sally accom-m-m-”—eyes up, eyelids fluttering—“m-m panied me.”

“Were did you go?”

It took a while to get out the word “Milwaukee.” The letter “M” seemed to be a problem for him.

I asked about his relationship with Sally. Their intimacy did not seem to extend beyond the physical part. Although she had told him about her pending divorce, she hadn't shared any of her feelings about her soon-to-be ex-husband. They talked only once during the week before their trip to M-M-M-M-Milwaukee—a single brief telephone conversation, during which Sally made no mention of Neville's assault and attempted rape.

Although that was disturbing to hear, it wasn't why I had driven all the way over to Belleville, Illinois, to visit him. For my purposes, the best possible boyfriend for Sally would have been a physician, but a mortician was a close second. Both were familiar with signs of trauma on the human body.

I tried to gently steer the conversation toward the questions I had come here to ask, but with his personality quirks and speech mannerisms it was anything but a smooth approach. Finally, however, I caught sight of the runway.

“So the first time you saw Sally after the assault was Friday evening?”

He nodded slowly, staring off to the side.

“Did you notice any bruises and injuries on her face?”

He shook his head.

“No black eye?”

He shook his head again, still staring off to the side. His watch started beeping. He held it up to eye level and squinted at the dial. He turned to me, apparently hesitant about what to do.

“Uh, excuse me,” he finally said, pulling open a desk drawer. Giving me a furtive glance, he took out what looked like an eight-ounce white plastic bottle of pills. He unscrewed the cap and shook out a gold tablet into his palm. Turning sideways, he popped the tablet into his mouth and crunched it up. His face puckered from the taste. Holding the bottle out of my line of sight, he started screwing on the top. The telephone rang. The noise made him start, and the cap fell onto the floor. I heard it hit the plastic mat under his chair and roll beneath the desk. Flustered, he glanced at the phone, peered under his desk, and then looked at the pill bottle in his hand. He put the bottle on the desk and reached for the phone. “Uh, yes?” he said.

As he listened, he bent down to retrieve the cap. While he was hunched beneath the desk, I leaned toward the plastic bottle. It was half filled with gold-colored tablets. The label was in English and Chinese. The English part read
Shim Lai Porpoise Virility Pills
. I leaned closer to read the writing beneath the brand name:

Ingredients: Top-quality testicle and penis of porpoise ground into powder and pilled in form convenient for the intake.

I sat back as his head came up from beneath the desk.

“Fine,” he said into the phone and hung up. He grabbed the pill bottle, screwed on the top, opened the desk drawer, put it inside, and shut the drawer. He raised his eyes to mine, his face reddening slightly. “You were s-s-s-saying?”

“We were talking about the weekend in Milwaukee,” I said in a matter-of-fact tone, as if I hadn't just watched him scarf down a powdered puree of Flipper's family jewels. “I assume that the two of you stayed in the same hotel room.”

He nodded.

“I don't mean to offend you by this next question, Mr. Vogelsang, and I hope you understand why I have to ask it. Did you have the opportunity over that last weekend to see Sally without her clothes on?”

He shifted his stare toward me, his brows knitted, his thick lips pressed together. He stayed in that position, virtually immobile, for what seemed a long time. I couldn't tell whether he was angry or insulted by the question or just pondering it. Eventually, he looked down at his desktop. “Yes, I did.”

“Did she have any bruises or visible injuries?”

With his eyes still down, he lifted a brass letter opener off the desk blotter and rotated it between his fingers. “There was a m-m-m-mild abrasion on her right knee. She said she skinned her knee working in the basem-m-m-ment.”

“Was that all?”

He slowly slid the blade of the letter opener in and out of the brass sheath. “I saw n-n-n-nothing else.” He looked up, his eyes narrowing. “I have work to do. I'd p-p-p-prefer that you leave now.”

***

The offices of Wolf & Diamond were on one of the upper floors of One Metropolitan Square in the heart of downtown St. Louis. Compared to the usual glitzy decor of a successful criminal attorney, Jonathan's office seemed modest and downright traditional. No chrome, no leather, no bearskin rugs. Instead, there were several comfortable upholstered chairs, a large rolltop desk, two tall healthy ficus, and an old-fashioned oak worktable in the corner piled with stacks of pleadings and legal pads and photocopies of cases. It took me a moment to realize that there was no computer in his office—a rarity these days.

And finally, and most surprising, there were walls, not shrines. There were none of the usual awards and bronzed newspaper articles and plaques and autographed celebrity shots that crowd the walls of so many attorneys, although Jonathan Wolf possessed plenty of displayable laurels, including one priceless memento from Operation Paddlewheel, his most famous criminal case. Operation Paddlewheel, inevitably rechristened PaddleGate by the press, ended in prison terms for several state court judges, court clerks, and local attorneys, including, ironically enough, Sally Wade's old boss, Abe Grozny. When the last of the cases ended, Jonathan's colleagues presented him with the framed, signed original of the Thomas Englehardt political cartoon that had appeared in the
Post-Dispatch
during the height of the prosecutions—the one with Jonathan Wolf standing tall and splendid at the helm of his combat ship, the S.S.
PaddleGate
, ordering his men to fire on the crew of rapscallions frantically poling their raft toward shore. When he left the government for private practice, he left that souvenir behind as well. I knew because I had seen it there just two weeks ago, still hanging on the so-called Hall of Fame in the offices of the U.S. attorney.

Instead of plaques and awards, Jonathan's walls were decorated with art. On one wall, centered and alone, was a large, striking abstract painting—bold brushstrokes in reds and oranges and yellows. The signature in the lower right corner of the canvas read SHEILA WOLF 1991. It took a few seconds for it to click: Sheila was the name of his deceased wife. A lawyer when she married Jonathan, Sheila Wolf had returned to her avocation—painting—after the birth of her first child.

The back wall was crowded with children's artwork: watercolors and crayon pictures and homemade Valentines and school art projects and plenty of I Love Daddys. From the signatures on the artwork, one of the artists was named Sarah and the other Leah. On the roll-top desk were several framed photographs of the artists, including one of both on their father's lap. They weren't trophy photos—those professional jobs with everyone impeccably attired and so carefully posed that the scene reminds you of a tableau at Madame Tussaud's. No, these were warm, casual shots of a dad with his two little girls.

The decorating statement was clear: here works a papa. It was a statement so utterly unexpected that I was momentarily flustered. In the courtroom and the boardroom, there was an intimidating take-no-prisoners aura about Jonathan Wolf that seemed to leave no room for a gentler side. And thus, when he told my mother that he made
kamishbroit
with his daughters, it had sounded so incongruous that I dismissed it as a ploy to enlist her assistance in softening my attitude toward his client. But now, looking at these genuinely affecting pictures of him with his daughters, I found myself wondering again about what was beneath the surface of this intense, aggressive, but very private man.

Fortunately, Jonathan's secretary brought my cup of tea soon after I stepped into his office. By the time I finished fumbling with the tea bag and the lemon slice, I had regained my composure and was able to focus on his description of the results of Sally Wade's autopsy.

Certain details stood out, the most important of which was the absence of the usual signs of a struggle—no scratches or abrasions or contusions on the body, no damage to the face, no skin under the fingernails. The only sign of violence was a blow to the back of her head, apparently with a blunt instrument; however, from the condition of the skin and blood vessels around the head injury, the blow came near or possibly after the time of death. Although there was chafing around her wrists and ankles from the cords, the coroner had concluded that those probably occurred as Sally was suffocating, not before.

I weighed the information. “So that means the killer tied her up without a fight.”

Jonathan nodded. “It's an excellent development.”

I looked at him curiously. “Why?”

“Why no struggle?” His eyes were bright with zeal. “That's a difficult question for the prosecution. Unless one posits the highly improbable scenario of a kinky boyfriend killer who used the lure of sexual bondage as a pretext for tying her up, the most likely explanation is that her killer had a gun. That was how he was able to tie her up without a struggle. Neville doesn't own a gun.”

“He could have bought one for that night.”

Jonathan smiled. “That's even more unlikely.” I could detect an air of condescension in his voice that reminded me of some of the more insufferable professors I had had at Harvard Law School. “There would be a record if he bought one legally, and there would certainly be a witness if someone as unfamiliar with the illegal gun trade as Neville McBride tried to buy one on the black market.”

I mulled it over. Although when I arrived at Jonathan's office I hadn't been sure whether I wanted to share with him what I had learned from Marvin the mortician—after all, the absence of bruises and scratches on her body just a few days after Neville's alleged assault further undercut my lawsuit—I decided to anyway. The coroner's conclusions about the absence of such injuries were probably even more damaging to my case than Marvin's observations; moreover, one of Jonathan's investigators was no doubt planning to ask Marvin the very same questions I had asked him this morning.

So I told him what I'd learned. When I finished, Jonathan leaned back and nodded thoughtfully. “Excellent.”

I shook my head doubtfully. “Even if I dismissed my lawsuit, which I'm not yet prepared to do, you're not that much closer to getting your client exonerated.”

“Oh, but I am.”

He stood up and stretched his back. He walked over toward the bay window and its commanding view of the Arch and the riverfront and the muddy waters of the Mississippi River. Today he was sporting another
GQ
look: a full-cut navy pinstripe suit with pleated pants, a crisp red Bengal-striped broadcloth shirt with French cuffs, and a British regimental silk tie in red, navy, and gold.

“Why?” I asked.

He turned to face me, his back against the window, his arms crossed. “Because now Neville has you on his side.”

I laughed. “I beg your pardon.”

Jonathan didn't smile. “Sally used you, Rachel—or someone posing as Sally did. You were the dupe in a get-rich scheme. Agreed?”