Final Appeal Read online

  “I didn’t ask anybody for you. I just said I needed to talk to one of the detectives about Judge Gregorian.”

  He takes one look at me and seems to sense there was something between Armen and me; he’s not a detective for nothing. “I’m sorry,” he says, softening. “Sit down.”

  So I do, in a stiff-backed metal chair catty-corner to him.

  “Listen to me,” he says, leaning on the typewriter. “I’ve been a detective for nine years now, spent twelve years on the force before that. I don’t rule it a suicide unless I’m one hundred percent. On this one, I was one hundred percent. So was the ME.”

  “ME?”

  “Medical examiner. He was there himself, since the judge was so prominent, husband of the senator and all. They’ll have the toxicology reports in a month, and the autopsy results. But I tell you, we agreed on the scene, him and me.”

  A medical examiner; an autopsy. I can’t even think about it, not now anyway. “What was the evidence?”

  He shakes his head. “I couldn’t tell you that even if I wanted to.”

  “I read a lot about it in the newspapers. They seemed to have plenty of information.”

  “An important man, a case like this, the papers will know a lot. We may have a leak or two, there’s nothin’ I can do about that. But none of it comes from me.”

  “I read in the paper that the gunshot wound was to the right temple. Armen—the judge—was right-handed. Is that the type of evidence you look for?”

  “One of the things.”

  “The papers said the gun was his wife’s.”

  “She kept it in the desk. Felt very bad he used it that way. Cried a river.”

  “The paper also said the doors and windows were locked. So that’s something you look for too, right? In a suicide.”

  “Yes. Generally.”

  “In the Daily News they said it was a contact wound. What does that mean? Like you said, ‘generally’?”

  “Miss Rossi, I’m not going to tell you about this case. I can’t.”

  “Just generally, not in this case. Does it mean a wound where the gun makes contact?”

  Ruscinjki purses his lips; they’re as flat as the rest of his features, and his receding hairline is a gentle gray roll, like a wave.

  “How can you tell that it made contact?”

  “I can’t say—”

  “I’m just asking a question. Not in this case or anything. Hypothetically.”

  “Hypothetically?” A faint smile appears.

  “Yes. If I were to say to you, How can you tell if something is a contact wound, what would you say?”

  “How we know it’s a contact wound is the gunpowder residue. If it’s a contact shot it sprays out like a little star. A shot from a coupla inches away, the gunpowder sprays all over.”

  I try not to think about the gunpowder star. “Okay. What else do you see with a typical suicide? Educate me.” I imagine I’m taking a deposition of a reluctant witness, and I’m not far wrong.

  “Gunpowder residue on the hand, and blowback.”

  “Blowback?”

  “Blood on the hand that held the gun. Blood on the gun, too.”

  I try not to wince. “Okay. Anything else?”

  “Cadaverous spasm.”

  “And that is?”

  “The body’s reaction to the pain of the blast, the shock of it.”

  “How does the body react? Generally?”

  “The hand grips around the gun and stays that way. After death.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “No. That’s mostly all of it.”

  “I see. Now. If you don’t have this type of evidence, the three things you mentioned, the case is not one hundred percent. Is that right?”

  “Right. In a case where there’s no note.”

  I almost forgot. “Is it odd there was no note? I mean, in the typical case do you see a note?”

  “Most times there is a note. Most suicides lately are your AIDS people, people who know they’re going to die. They leave a note. They prepare.”

  “So if there’s not a note, does that tell you it’s not a suicide?”

  “Not at all. It doesn’t tell me anything, one way or the other. Lots of suicides leave their notes way in advance—depression, preoccupation, withdrawal.” His tone grows thoughtful, more relaxed; he’d rather talk psychology than pathology. So would I.

  “But Judge Gregorian wasn’t depressed.”

  “According to the secretary, he did become depressed about this time of year. Something about Armenians.” He brushes dust off the typewriter keys. “The press was all over him because of that death penalty appeal. Not that I’m talking about the actual case.” The sly smile reappears, then fades.

  “But he seemed to handle that fine.”

  “The senator said his mother committed suicide. It runs in families, you know.”

  “But it’s not inherited.”

  “They get the idea. All of a sudden it becomes a possibility. It’s like kids in high school, they come in clusters.” He looks sad for a moment. “People kill themselves all the time, for lots of reasons we can’t understand. Who can understand something like that, anyway?”

  I consider this and say nothing, sickened by the image of Armen slumped over, his lifeblood seeping out. A lethal black star on his temple. His own blood spattered on his hand.

  “The judge had a watchdog, too. A good watchdog.”

  Bernice. “What about his dog? Did you see her that night?”

  He laughs. “I would say so, it tried to take my arm off. We had to lock it in the bathroom, wouldn’t let us near him. I read the wife donated it to the Boys Club.”

  So much for his detective work; Bernice is in my wagon out front, she fussed so much I decided to take her with me to work. “So you figure that in, right? The dog would have attacked a stranger.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “But not someone she knew.”

  He shrugs. “So?”

  “So if he was killed, the killer was someone he knew.”

  “He wasn’t killed. All the evidence is consistent with him killing himself.”

  “It’s only consistent with him putting a gun to his right temple. What if someone made him do it?”

  He shakes his head. “There would be signs of a struggle, or a forced entry, and there aren’t any.”

  “But it’s possible.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “But is it possible? Hypothetically?”

  He gets up with an audible sigh, pushing down on his thighs like a much older man. “You know, there are support groups.”

  Support groups. Therapy. He sounds like Ricki.

  “Listen, Miss Rossi. You may never understand it. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

  I meet his cool eye. He’s a detective, an experienced one. Maybe he is right about Armen. Still, maybe he’s not.

  I leave the police station and walk to my wagon, parked at a meter across the street. Bernice has escaped from the cargo area and is nestled officially in the driver’s seat, but she doesn’t notice me coming toward her. She’s watching a thick-set man get into a black boxy car a couple down the line.

  Odd, he looks like someone I saw yesterday in my neighborhood.

  I watch the car pull out quickly. A new car, American-made. The license plate is from Virginia.

  Strange.

  “Roarf!” Bernice says, startling me.

  “Get back, beast,” I say to her through the car window.

  You’re no fun, say her eyes.

  Christ. I fish in my blazer pocket for my car keys, but they come out with a folded strip of legal paper. I figure it’s an old shopping list until I open it up:

  Grace—

  This is only the beginning for us. I love you.

  Armen

  P.S. I hope you find this before your dry cleaner.

  I look at the note in disbelief. I read it again. Armen.

  I love you. My God. I fee
l a wrenching inside my chest.

  It’s his handwriting; it always looked like he was writing in Armenian, even when he wasn’t. How did this get here? When did he write it?

  Of course.

  The last time I wore this jacket was Monday, the night we were together. It was slung over the back of my chair.

  I check the other pockets, but they’re empty. When did Armen leave this note? Then I remember. I used his bathroom before we left. My jacket was at the conference table.

  This is only the beginning for us.

  I shake my head. Not the sentiment of a man intending to kill himself. Not at all.

  “Roarf!” Bernice barks again, trying to stand in the seat. Her slobber has smeared up the window.

  I look back at the police station and consider running back inside. No. I’d have to tell the detective everything, and he’d find a way to dismiss it anyway. He’s one hundred percent, he said.

  I look down at the note in my hand, feeling a surge of pain inside, and with it, a certainty. Armen didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered. I know it now. I’m holding proof positive. Exhibit A.

  Unaccountably, I think of the black car. I look down the street, but it’s long gone.

  Someone’s life is at stake, Armen had said. Get involved.

  I put the note back in my pocket and slip my car key in the door. There’s going to be an investigation, but it’ll have to be my own. Because I’m involved, starting now.

  As soon as I can get into the driver’s seat.

  The intercom buzzes on my telephone as soon as I get to my desk in the vacant clerks’ office of the judge who lives in North Jersey. It’s lined with case reports and lawbooks, and furnished in a cheap utilitarian way, with a wooden desk, side table, and chair. “Yes?”

  “Grace? I’ve been calling you at home, it’s your day off, isn’t it?” It’s Sarah. My heart gives a little jump.

  “Yes, but I’ll be in every day for a while, and today I have to look at that marshals’ tape.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’ll be right over.”

  My heart pounds as we hang up. Jesus, is she going to confess to murder? What will I do? I open my desk drawer, and a gleaming pair of scissors glints from a logjam of yellow pencils. I put the scissors near my right hand on the desktop, feeling idiotic for arming myself against a baby lawyer from Yale.

  “Knock knock,” Sarah says. She leans confidently against the doorjamb. A filmy skirt billows around her freckled ankles; a melon sweater complements her hair.

  “That was fast.”

  “We need to talk, you and I.”

  I let my hand linger near the scissors. “I’m listening.”

  She slides into the hard leather chair across from my desk and crosses her long legs in the drapey skirt. “You might as well say it. You know I’m on the tape.”

  “I haven’t seen it yet, so I don’t know that. Why don’t you tell me what I’m going to see?”

  She tosses her hair back. “I have a better idea. Why don’t you tell me what I saw that night in Armen’s office? On the conference table and the couch, as I recall.”

  I feel myself stop breathing. I love you. “What you saw was none of your business. You were spying.”

  “You were fucking your boss.”

  I rise to my feet involuntarily behind the desk. “What were you doing there?”

  She doesn’t bat an eye. “What’s the difference what I was doing there? You were fucking him, Grace.”

  The mouth on this child. “Stop saying that.”

  “You two were having an affair, I knew it all along. That’s why he wanted you on Hightower. When he told you he wouldn’t marry you, you threatened to blackmail him. Tell the papers, ruin his reputation. You and Ben put so much pressure on him that he killed himself the same night.”

  I look at her in astonishment. “That’s ridiculous, all of it. Where did you get that from?”

  “I figured it out.”

  Typical Yale grad; totally impractical—or smart enough to know that the best defense is a good offense. “It’s crazy.”

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she says. Her voice rises in anger, but I can’t tell if it’s an act or not.

  “Wait a minute, Sarah, what were you doing in chambers in the middle of the night? You were supposed to be in bed with Artie.”

  “I knew Armen would be working late. I was bringing him a sandwich.”

  “You left Artie to bring another man something to eat?”

  “Artie wouldn’t mind. He loves Armen.”

  “So you told him?”

  She looks uncertain. “Not exactly.”

  “Of course you didn’t. You didn’t care if Armen was hungry, Sarah, you knew I’d be working late with him, and you wanted to see if anything was happening that shouldn’t be. If he was cheating on Susan, your friend.”

  “Are you kidding?” She laughs abruptly. “I knew their marriage was over.”

  Part of it is true, leaving me dumbfounded. “How do you know that?”

  “I practically ran her campaign, remember? I’ll be her chief aide after this job. She tells me everything.”

  “Then why were you so worried about the tapes?”

  “Because I knew I was on them.”

  It doesn’t square. “So why is that a problem, if you have nothing to hide? A tape of you with a sandwich, so what?”

  Her blue eyes freeze like ice. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. What are you accusing me of?”

  I don’t even know, but she’s getting angrier, so I spin a plausible argument out of the meager facts I’ve been dealt, making something out of nothing, like any good lawyer. “All right, how’s this? You come to the office and see Armen and me on the couch. You’re so enraged you can’t sleep. You go to his house, and he lets you in. Even Bernice is happy to see you, so she doesn’t make a fuss.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  My hand inches over to the scissors. “You scream at him, lose control, like you did the other morning with Ben. He tells you he loves me and you go even crazier.”

  “Why would I do all that?”

  “Because you’re in love with him.”

  Sarah’s mouth drops open, and before I can stop her she’s lunging right at me. I feel the sting of a hard slap across my cheek and stagger backward, the scissors slipping from my hand. She comes at me again, her face contorted with uncontrollable rage. I know that expression, have seen it before on someone else, and for the first time in my life I realize I’ve been slapped before, with that much force. I slide down against the bookshelf, then am caught by strong arms. My father’s. Sarah’s.

  “Grace!” Sarah yells. “Oh, God, are you all right?”

  Grace, are you all right? Are you all right?

  The room is spinning, and fear runs cold in my stomach. “No, no,” I hear myself saying.

  “God, Grace, I’m so sorry! Here, wait,” I hear Sarah saying, as if through a fog. The next thing I feel is a warm splash on my face. Wetness dribbles down my cheeks and onto my blouse. Sarah comes into hazy focus as a familiar odor brings me around. “Are you okay? Are you conscious?” she asks.

  I wipe my face, then smell my wet hand. “Is this coffee?”

  “Yes. Here, sit up.” She helps me to a sitting position against the bookshelf and kneels on the rug opposite me.

  “Why did you throw coffee at me?” Dazed, I watch as a full cup sets into a brown Rorschach blotch on my white blouse.

  “I thought you were going to pass out. It was the only thing around. Not that you didn’t deserve it,” she adds, a trace of resentment wreathing her voice.

  “I deserved it?”

  “You shouldn’t have said I loved him.”

  “You did, didn’t you?” I wipe my cheeks on my sleeve; the blouse is a goner anyway.

  “Don’t say that, it would hurt Artie so much. And what you said, about me killing Armen, that was awful.”

  “I didn’t sa
y you killed him.”

  “You were about to.” Her eyes well up as suddenly as Maddie’s. In all her bravado, inside she is a child. A sheltered, spoiled child. “I would never kill Armen. I would never kill anyone. It’s inconceivable.”

  I consider this. “I do think Armen was murdered,” I say, hearing it out loud; it sounds right and horrible, at the same time.

  “Do you really?” She blinks back her tears.

  “You know Susan, right? If she came in from Washington and he told her about me, could she have killed him, in a jealous rage? A crime of passion?”

  “Never. Never in a million years. She’s not like that, emotional like that.” She shakes her head.

  “I want to talk to her.”

  “She’s leaving for a fact-finding mission.”

  “Fact-finding? When?”

  “Any day now, she’s not sure.”

  “Where?”

  “Eastern Europe, Bosnia. Investigating the genocide there.”

  A regular genocide hobbyist, that woman. “Don’t you think it’s odd for her to leave the country right now?”

  “No. I think it’s good for her. She needs to get away.”

  Suddenly I hear Bernice barking loudly, a fierce, threatening bark, one I haven’t heard before. Someone shouts in the hallway; then a louder voice, Eletha’s, screams, “No! No!”

  “What’s that?” Sarah says, alarmed.

  “Trouble.” I scramble to my feet. Sarah’s right behind me as we tear toward chambers.

  11

  “Bernice, no!” I shout, but she pays even less attention than usual. Driven by instinct, her brown eyes lock onto her quarry, whose pin-striped back is quite literally against the wall.

  “Somebody get this animal!” Galanter bellows, jowls flapping, arms splayed out like the Antichrist. A half cigar smolders between his fingers.

  “Bernice, no!” I shout again, but her glistening black lips retract to display a lethal set of canines, only three feet from Galanter’s belt buckle. She growls, and I feel a bolt of fear inside. She has the power to tear him to pieces and, apparently, good cause.

  “Rossi, control this animal! Now!” Galanter sputters, his face a hot red.

  “Just relax, Judge,” I say, approaching Bernice slowly from behind. I have no idea if she’ll bite me if I try to stop her.