Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

Katia gives me a puzzled look, then back to Harry. “I didn’t go near any of the drawers. I didn’t need to. I took only what was on the desk. There were nineteen coins and twelve others in two plastic sheets. I counted them carefully on the bus when no one else was looking, down inside my bag. I am sure. This is not a question. I took no other coins,” she says.

According to the police there was almost half a million dollars in coins missing from Emerson Pike’s study the night he was murdered. “You’re sure you don’t want to think about this?” says Harry. “Where you might have put them?”

“I am sure.” Katia looks at him, indignant. “I know what I took and what I didn’t take.” She looks at me, imploring. “That proves it, don’t you see? Someone else was there. Besides, I didn’t have time to take anything more even if I’d wanted to.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“Emerson was in the shower. I could hear the water running. I knew he would be coming out any moment. I didn’t have time to take anything else. It was all I could do to grab the coins on the desk and write the note. I barely got out the door as it was.”

“What note?” I ask.

She looks at me, puzzled. “I already told the police about it. The note I left for Emerson, the one on his desk. I told him I was taking some coins, but only enough to get back home to Costa Rica, and please not to follow me. I told him that if he did I would go to the police.”

This leaves Harry and me looking at each other. We have a list of items found by investigators at the scene, supplied by the police to the public defender’s office, part of early discovery. Harry flips through the list, running his finger down each page. When he finishes the last page, he looks up at me and shakes his head.

“There was no note, Katia. The police didn’t find any note,” I tell her.

“I don’t understand,” she says.

“Has anyone explained to you what the investigators found at the scene?”

She shakes her head. Katia is in the dark. Even the public defender hasn’t told her everything.

“They found Emerson Pike’s body on the floor in the study. The maid, did you know her?”

Katia nods.

“She was stabbed to death downstairs. They found her body at the foot of the stairs, near the dining room.”

“Poor lady. Emerson called her to come to work that evening,” she says, “to clean up after I cooked. It was late. She didn’t want to be there. You remember?” She looks at me. “The plantains.”

“Yes.”

“I prepared the meal that afternoon. The guests came and left. Only two couples. Emerson wanted her to clean up.” Katia’s talking about the maid. “I told him it could wait until morning. But he refused, said no, and he called her.” She slumps back into the hard metal chair, realizing for the first time the enormity of what has happened.

The police have questioned the guests, but according to the reports, they know nothing.

“There were fourteen drawers of coins.” Harry eases off the subject. “The locks on the drawers were broken, and according to the police all of those coins are missing.”

“I didn’t take them,” she says.

“I know.” Harry is starting to believe her. It’s the problem of there being almost too much evidence, when all the ducks line up too neatly.

“Both Pike and the maid were stabbed with a knife from the kitchen downstairs,” he says. “The police found it. There were no fingerprints on the weapon. Whoever used it washed and dried it, then left it on the sink. There was just a single tiny spot of blood near the handle. What they call a trace. The blood matched that of the maid.”

“I don’t understand,” she says.

“The police are assuming that whoever killed Emerson fled down the stairs and ran into the maid. They may not have wanted to kill her, but they panicked. They had to kill her in order to escape.”

“What does this have to do with me? I didn’t go out that way. I went out through the garage, down the back stairs. I had to use the remote control from Emerson’s car to open the gate.”

“And how do we prove that?” says Harry.

“My fingerprints. They must be on the door to the garage,” she says.

“Unfortunately, your prints are all over the house,” says Harry. “You lived there for several weeks. Even if we found your prints on the back door, there’s no way to prove when they were placed there. It could have been that night, or it could have been two weeks earlier.”

You can see the hope as it dies in Katia’s eyes. Then another spark: “The remote,” she says. “The one for the gate out in front. I threw it into some bushes off the road. We can find it,” she says. “It will prove that I went to the garage, into the car.”

“Even if we could find it, all that proves is that you left by the gate,” says Harry. Harry knows, as I do, that the state’s theory of events following the murders will be highly malleable, sufficiently pliable to embrace a number of different avenues of escape. They will have already identified several problems with the evidence. Not only was the murder weapon, the knife from the kitchen, cleaned and lying on the counter for the world to find, but no fingerprints were found on the front door, just smears of blood around the doorknob. This is in fact not uncommon at bloody crime scenes. In a frantic headlong escape a clear, readable print is more often the exception rather than the rule.

And it gets worse. Emerson Pike’s body was found with two major wounds, one in the back that was by all accounts fatal, causing shock and massive bleeding. The second wound is the problem. Harry tries to explain this to Katia, who seems dazed by the details, all of which seem to drift in a vicious circle ultimately coming back to point at her.

“The second wound,” says Harry, “was postmortem, inflicted, done after Pike was already dead. The police are saying this second wound was the result of anger on the part of the killer.”

“I don’t understand,” she says.

“They have to explain to the jury why anyone would bother to stab a person who is already dead,” I tell her.

“It’s sick,” she says. “A person who would do that es loco, crazy.”

“We can hope but I don’t think the DA will go quite that far,” says Harry. “They might go as far as angry, maybe mad as hell, but crazy is one we’d have to prove ourselves. What is more likely is that their shrink is going to say the killer was trying to send a message to the dead by leaving one of Pike’s expensive toys sticking out of his chest.”

Harry gives her a moment. He stands there watching her, waiting to see, if given this mental image, she might suddenly crack and come clean.

She shakes her head, shrugs a shoulder. “ Cómo se dice ‘shrink’?” she says.

“A psychiatrist,” I tell her.

“Ah.”

“Head doctor,” says Harry. “You understand that the police will put one on the stand to testify?”

“I see. Yes.”

“Well. He may tell the jury that in his opinion the second wound was intended as an angry message to Emerson Pike after he was dead that he had too much money. That perhaps he wasn’t sharing enough of it with his killer.”

She sits there, eyebrows furrowed and a puzzled expression. If Harry is touching any sensitive nerves, you wouldn’t know it.

“There is nothing you want to tell us?” says Harry.

She shakes her head, looks at me.

“Okay.” Harry expels a big sigh. “The weapon the police found sticking out of Emerson Pike’s chest was a very expensive dagger,” says Harry. “Word is, he used it as a letter opener.”

With this Katia’s face lights up like a lantern. “Yes, I remember it,” she says. “It was on his desk.”