Tim Green: The Letter Of The Law

Bolinger lit a Winston of his own and looked candidly at Sales through the smoke.

"You want to sit down?" the sergeant asked.

Sales jangled his chains and snorted disdainfully but sat down anyway on the cell's concrete floor. Bolinger sat on the bench against the wall. Beside him, he put down a tape recorder whose rectangular red light glared accusingly at Sales.

"What brought you to your daughter's apartment?" he asked quietly.

"Ha!" Sales barked. His face crumpled in pain, and tears began to stream freely down his face. He shook his head from side to side as if trying to make everything go away. "Ha! My daughter! Oh God! Oh my God!"

Bolinger waited. In ten minutes, the big man's crying subsided enough for him to take a deep breath and say, "We were supposed to have dinner together. I was taking her to dinner…

"We did that," he explained sadly, looking directly into Bolinger's eyes. "I promised her that if she went to law school at UT I wouldn't be around all the time. I only live an hour up the road. But I told her I wouldn't always be checking up on her. When she was at San Angelo State, I used to drop in on her a lot…"

Here Sales looked at Bolinger to see if he understood. Bolinger didn't have kids, but his brother did, so he nodded with commiseration.

"Yeah, so I stopped doing it, but we'd still see each other pretty regular. We were going to dinner- Oh God!"

Sales started to shake and cry again. When he was quiet, Bolinger said, "Where were you before?"

"Home," Sales said dully. "I finished a job after lunch and took the rest of the day off to work around the house."

"Anyone with you?"

Sales shook his head.

"Anyone see you?"

"My house is out in the middle of nowhere," Sales said. "No one ever sees me."

"Would you sign a consent that allows us to search your house and your truck?" Bolinger asked.

Sales looked at him, mystified. "Why?"

Bolinger shrugged and held out a consent form with a pen.

"Ha!" Sales erupted. "Ha! You think I… Ha! I told you who did it! It was Lipton. Her professor, he was after her. I told her I'd talk to him, but she didn't want that. He gave her the creeps.

"Give me that," he said in disgust. "I'll sign anything. You can look anywhere you want for anything you want, but you better have someone go get this guy!"

Bolinger talked with the father for over an hour, pumping him for every bit of information from every angle he could think of. At the end of that time, he excused himself and reported to his lieutenant.

"I'm letting him go," he said.

The lieutenant raised an eyebrow. The father was all they had. They could book him and hold him on charges of assaulting an officer and resisting arrest. They didn't need to let him go anywhere. They could sit on him for another day if they wanted, unless he started barking for a lawyer. But Bolinger cut through all that. He was a man who'd built his reputation on instinct.

"He didn't do it," Bolinger said. "He's calmed down now, and if he blows his brains out, then he does. But I don't think he will. I think he just lost it. If I book him, then I'll have to deal with some lawyer, and I'd rather be able to talk to this guy straight. He may be able to help us, I don't know."

The lieutenant nodded and said, "You going to go home and get some rest?" It was after ten, and Bolinger had gone on duty that morning at seven.

"No."

"Didn't think so. What next?"

"The professor. According to Farnhorst, the girl's criminal law professor is a guy by the name of Eric Lipton, a well-known academic. Besides teaching at UT, he travels all around the country giving seminars on defendants' rights. He's the one the father thinks did it."

"Holy shit," the lieutenant moaned, "a law professor. That'll be fun. Anything prior on him?"

Bolinger shook his head. "Clean as a whistle."

The lieutenant paused for a moment before asking, "You ever look at the crap that builds up on the inside of someone's whistle?" He'd spent the first two years of his career in the traffic division.

"No," Bolinger said, "but I'll take your word for it."

Professor Eric Lipton lived in the fashionable neighborhood of Terrytown. It was where a lot of the old money lived, expensive real estate directly adjacent to the wide, placid stretch of the Colorado River running through the center of Austin. Lipton's place was a big white contemporary speckled with GlassBlock cubes that allowed light without compromising privacy. A wrought-iron fence surrounded the property. Although it was night, landscape lights illuminated the house and the lawn that sprawled under carefully manicured trees cut into geometric designs. It was a big-money place, and Bolinger could tell by the shape it was in that Lipton was the kind of person who squeezed his toothpaste out of the tube from the bottom up. White gravel crunched under Bolinger's tires as he pulled into a semicircular drive and underneath a tall, flat-roofed portico supported by a cluster of narrow white columns.

Lipton came to the door in a white satin sweat suit and expensive Polo leather slippers. His glare was hostile. He was a tall, angular man whose figure suggested that of a swimmer. He had none of the usual stoop for someone of his height and age. His hair was a wavy faded blond, flowing back from his face as if he'd just come out of the wind. His skin was tan, but its orange tint told Bolinger he was the kind of person who'd spent time under an ultraviolet light. His high, rugged cheekbones, perfect teeth, and the weathered skin around his bright blue eyes reminded Bolinger of the tennis pro who had tried to teach him how to serve on his last vacation in Fort Lauderdale.

"Can I help you?" the professor asked with a disinterested sniff.

Bolinger knew that was not what he meant. The last thing on earth he wanted to do was help. Something about the professor didn't smell right.

"Professor Lipton? I'm Sergeant Bolinger," the detective said. "One of your students has been killed, and I wanted to ask you some questions about her. Would you mind coming downtown with me?"

Lipton looked him up and down. A light, airy laugh spilled from his mouth.

"Do you know my area of expertise, Sergeant?" he asked snidely.

"Yes, sir. I do"

"Then you shouldn't have even asked if I would go with you. This is my world, Sergeant. My view of the police is a… an adversarial one…

"However," he continued as if he were lecturing a class, "I don't wish to imply that mine is a hostile or secretive nature. You can come in, Sergeant. You can ask me whatever you like. I'm a reasonable man… I'll give you five minutes."

Lipton looked down at his watch, marking the time, then said simply to Bolinger, "Anything more would be a waste of my time and yours. My knowledge of Ms. Sales is quite limited."

"How did you know it was Marcia Sales?" Bolinger said, his blood racing and his eyes narrowing at the sound of her name coming so unexpectedly from the professor's mouth.

Lipton's eyes flickered with panic, for a moment, nothing more. Then he said calmly, "Why, Sergeant, you told me."

"No," Bolinger said with a crooked smile. "No, I didn't."

"Get the hell out of here!" Lipton said, flaring up angrily. "Don't you come here to my home making insinuations! You forget that I know my rights! I'm not some street thug. I don't have anything to say to you! You want to talk? Call my lawyer!"

The door slammed in Bolinger's face, but still he smiled. He had his man.

A slip of the tongue wasn't much. Bolinger knew that getting a warrant based on that alone might not float. But it was enough for him to stake out the house. And he was confident that by the middle of the next day the crime lab would come up with something. When they didn't, Bolinger felt his stomach sink.