Steve Martini - Double Tap

“Ah. You’re right.”

“No. She was dead within minutes after she got home. Think about it. She’s going out to dinner, has to be there at eight. She’s going to want to change, and probably shower first. With most women that’s going to take at least an hour, and that’s if they’re speedy.”

“I wouldn’t know,” says Harry.

“Trust me, I’m an expert, having once been married,” I tell him.

“Go on.”

“By the time she selects and lays out her wardrobe, showers, puts on new makeup, fixes her hair, gets dressed, and selects her jewelry, you’re looking at a minimum of an hour. If she bathes, figure anywhere from ninety minutes to two hours. It’s going to take her at least a half hour to get wherever she’s going for dinner. Friday night south on Five to the city. She’d be lucky to get there and park in that time.”

Harry nods in agreement.

“She’d be getting ready by six-fifteen, six-thirty at the latest. But here she is”-I point to the picture-“still wearing the same outfit she wore to the office that day. She never even had time to get upstairs. Look”-I point at the victim’s feet-“she’s still wearing her high heels.”

Actually, one of Madelyn Chapman’s shoes came off of her foot as she twisted and went down, part of it still visible in the photo, pointing in the opposite direction as if she’d been walking in it backward. “No woman I know wears four-inch heels around the house after she gets home from work. She hadn’t taken them off yet because she hadn’t finished what she was doing when she came in the door.”

I turn the other photograph toward Harry. This one is less graphic, a shot of the kitchen, pieces of plastic bubble wrap and shipping tape strewn across the granite countertop and on the floor. Next to the sink is a small-wheeled cart of some kind. An empty cardboard box sits on the counter; the two corners facing toward the camera are slit from top to bottom, its side facing the lens, laid down like an open drawbridge. The knife is still on the countertop next to the box.

“The pictures tell the tale,” I tell him. “She came in from the garage and unwrapped it in the kitchen. We know that because her purse was found by Forensics on the floor in the garage where she dropped it while wrestling the box in. Uncrating it couldn’t have taken her more than two, maybe three minutes. Where the art glass went from there I can’t say. But when she was finished, she walked from the kitchen toward the front of the house, probably headed for the stairs to go up to her bedroom and bath to get ready for dinner. She would have been in a hurry. Her purse. Most women don’t go anywhere without it. If they’re home, they usually keep it in one place where they can find it. But hers was on the floor in the garage where she dropped it.”

“Maybe they tussled out in the garage,” says Harry. “Could be that’s where he first confronted her. Why she dropped her purse. The cops found some plastic bottles, cleaning fluid spilled on the floor in the garage. Indication is there could have been some kind of a struggle there.”

“If that’s the case, why was she shot in the entryway?”

Harry shakes his head. He has no answer for this.

“The answer is the cleaning cart,” I tell him. “In the photograph of the kitchen.”

Harry looks at the photo.

“I’m guessing she used it to roll the box containing the glass into the kitchen from the garage. It would have been easier than carrying it and safer if she didn’t want to drop it. If she was in a hurry, she probably just swept the bottles off the top of the cart in the garage onto the floor. Figured that hired help could clean it up later. The bottles on the floor are not a sign of struggle. It’s a woman in a hurry.”

“Which is why she forgot to go back out and get her purse,” Harry adds.

I nod. “One thing is clear: she never got any further into that house than the front entry. Otherwise her high heels wouldn’t be on her feet. Most women would kick them off at the first chance, but she had her hands full, first opening the box and then running upstairs to get ready. Only she never got there.”

Harry mulls this over for a few seconds, looking at the two photos. “So whoever killed her had to know where the gun was.”

“Yes. And he didn’t kill her over a piece of glass,” I tell him. “Oh, he probably took it, but that’s not the reason he went to her house. I could be wrong, but if I had to guess, whoever killed her really wanted to take only one thing: her life.”

Some years ago I came to the conclusion that of all my death-house clients, the worst are the talkers. The unavoidable impulse to chatter is usually egged on by a little absolution and some cheering from the cops who have collared the suspects, who will rattle on, talking with one hand while signing Miranda waivers with the other, conversing on every topic imaginable except the need for a lawyer.

All of this will generally result in enough lurid details to earn your client a ticket on a gurney ride to the gas chamber before you ever arrive at the police station.

There are those who will tell you that such people are simply stupid. Having seen enough of them over the years, I can tell you that this is not the case. Most criminal defendants who hang themselves do it because they want to, or because they have to. Call it an irresistible impulse, a death wish. They do it for the same reason that some fleeing felons commit suicide by cop. In their minds, and in the absence of a good exorcism, they see it as the only avenue of escape for whatever good remains inside of them.

Fortunately for Harry and me, Ruiz feels no such compulsion. Whether you can equate this to a total absence of guilt or a dark spot on his soul that has swallowed the human emotion of remorse, it is becoming clear that when all is said and done, the only person who will ever know with certainty whether he did the crime or not is likely to be Mr. Ruiz. He is tight-lipped, not only with the cops and the jailhouse crowd, but with his own lawyers.

“Let’s talk about this gap in your résumé.” Harry presses this issue with some vengeance. We are back at the jail, confronted by what appears to be a seven-year gap in Ruiz’s life, an apparent blank in his military records.

“All I can tell you is what I told Kendal. There is no gap. I don’t know what to say.”

Harry paws through the papers. “Says here your last posting was Fort Bragg.”

“That’s right.”

“Then there’s nothing, no activity until three years ago.” Harry puts the papers down in front of Ruiz and points at the dates and the brief blocks of print with his finger, some orders where Ruiz’s name is listed with three or four other military types traveling from one base to another.

“So we have a period of more than seven years where your name doesn’t show up anywhere. How is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were at Fort Bragg that entire period?”

“Correct.”

“Doing what?”

“Like I say, I was training. Mostly weapons and tactics.”

“You never traveled anywhere? Because if you traveled, they’d have to cut orders. Your name would show up somewhere.”

“Guess I didn’t,” he says. “It was late in my career. Once they post you like that, sometimes they don’t move you around much. It wasn’t like now. We weren’t at war.”

Harry isn’t buying it. “There are no pages missing,” he says. “They’re numbered and dated at the top.”

Ruiz looks at them. Concedes the point. He doesn’t have an answer.

“Tell us what you were doing.”

“I told you: training.”

“I assume this involved some shooting?”