Sandra Brown - Low Pressure

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.”