Phillip Margolin - Heartstone

“I see,” Heider said skeptically. “And what evidence did Mr. Toller offer you to substantiate his story?”

“None, except…Just his word. But I believe him. It was the way the man talked. He was upset when he described the girl. His fear communicated. I don’t think he could have faked the way he was talking.”

Shindler laughed.

“Al, I’m surprised at you. You’ve been a cop. I suppose you’ve never been conned before.”

Al blushed.

“A million times. I just don’t think this guy is conning me.”

“Maybe not. Maybe he is telling the truth as he sees it. But it could have been another girl,” Heider said.

“No. He was positive. He saw her picture only a day or two later and his description matches the description of the clothes Murray was wearing when she was found and her hair color.”

“You have to admit that brown hair, slacks and a blouse is not exactly unusual. Besides, he could have gotten that out of the papers. They’re rehashing this whole thing all over the front pages every day,” Shindler said.

“And you’re forgetting one very important point,” Heider said smugly.

“What’s that?”

“When was it that Toller is supposed to have seen this girl alive?”

“The second week in January, a few days before her body was found.”

“Al, according to Dr. Beauchamp’s autopsy report, Elaine Murray was killed four to six weeks before she was found. How could she be alive during the second week in January?”

Caproni looked confused for a moment. Then he remembered something.

“The body. The girl’s body. It didn’t appear to have deteriorated the way you would expect if it had been outside all that time. That was in one of your reports, Roy. Maybe Beauchamp made a mistake. If I remember, his report theorized that the cold weather had kept the corpse preserved.”

Heider shook his head.

“No go, Al. This Toller is just another con trying to make a deal.”

Al shook his head vigorously.

“I just don’t believe that. You had to be there. That man was actually scared when he was retelling that story. I think it should be checked out.”

“Okay, Al. You get back to those transcripts and I’ll have Roy get on it.”

Caproni seemed mollified by Heider’s assurances. They discussed a few other matters and he left. When the door closed behind him, Heider spoke.

“What do you think?”

“Bullshit. Another con with a story.”

“You better hope so. I’ve got my ass on the line with this one and I can’t afford any screw-ups. Go out to the jail. Talk to Toller. If there are any problems, get back to me. They can be taken care of.”

Roger Hessey was doing okay. He had married a real sweet girl, fathered two great kids and gotten in on the ground floor when his father-in-law purchased a franchise in a chain that sold fried chicken. No one expected the restaurant to do as well as it had and Roger earned enough money to set his family up in a comfortable suburban tract home a few minutes’ drive from a shopping center, a golf course and a neighborhood school.

“Some change for me from those high school days,” he said, wagging his head. “We did some crazy things then. Say, can I get you a beer or something?”

“No thanks, Mr. Hessey,” Mark Shaeffer said. They were seated in lawn chairs on Roger’s patio and his two daughters were running and yelling in the backyard. Roger smiled nostalgically and nodded his head again.

“I’ll tell you, I was shocked when I read that Billy and Bobby had been arrested, but I wasn’t surprised.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, you’re Bob’s lawyer, so I can tell you, but they were pretty wild kids. I mean we all were in those days. Always fighting. Billy was one of the worst of the lot. He was even into dealing a little narcotics. Pot mostly, but don’t forget this was back in 1960. Everyone thought that stuff was worse than heroin back then.”

“I notice you didn’t mention Bobby just now.”

“Well, Bobby was a wild kid, but he wasn’t mean like his brother. I mean I was wild too. We broke into warehouses and had gang fights. Nothing I’m proud of now. But it was, I don’t know how to put it, oh, all in the spirit of good fun, most of the time.

“I mean, most of us, we’d fight a guy and you’d try to whip him good, but you wouldn’t try to cripple him or really hurt him permanently. It’s hard to explain the line most of us drew, but there was one.

“Then there were kids like Billy. He didn’t draw any lines. That’s why most of us were a bit afraid of him.”

“You knew Esther Freemont, too, didn’t you?”

Roger threw back his head and brayed. The little girls stopped playing, startled by the loud noise. When they saw it was only their father laughing, they went back to their games.

“What’s so funny?” Mark asked.

“Oh, nothin’, I guess. It’s just that thinking of Esther brings back some mighty fine memories. She had the biggest set of tits…”

Roger shook his head in wonder and Mark shifted uneasily on the plastic netting of his aluminum chair. Roger was reclining. He had on an aloha shirt, dark glasses and a pair of checked bermuda shorts. From time to time, he would pat his beer belly with satisfaction or sip from an open can of Coors. The weekend sun was strong and Mark wished that he was swimming instead of working.

“What can you remember about the night that Elaine and Richie were killed?”

“Not very much, I’m afraid. I told this to the cops a few times. We went over to Bob’s. That’s a hamburger joint we used to go to. I don’t think it’s even in business anymore. Then Bobby or Billy, one of them got this idea to crash Alice Faye’s party. I knew there was gonna be trouble so I said I wouldn’t go, but I didn’t want to be called chicken so I went along. Then I changed my mind and left the party before the trouble started. I really didn’t see anything.”

“Tell me a little about Esther.”

Roger leaned over and dropped his voice.

“Not a bad lay, but nothin’ between the ears, if you know what I mean. She was what you’d call a loose girl in those days. ’Course that was before the ‘sex revolution’ and any girl that wasn’t a virgin when she got married…Well, you know what I mean.

“She used to hang around the Cobras. There was two kinds of girls that did that. Steady girlfriends and girls that just hung around the gang, but didn’t go with one guy in particular. Esther was sort of in between. She was good lookin’ enough to take out more than a few times, but everyone would get tired of her pretty fast.”

“Why is that?”

“Ah, she’d want ya to be in love with her. She’d always be askin’ you if you were in love with her. Then there would always be a scene.” Hessey shrugged. “You can see what I mean.”

Mark made some notes. This was leading nowhere. Mark asked a few more questions, then thanked Hessey and prepared to leave.

“How come they waited so long to arrest Bob?” Hessey asked as they walked toward the backyard gate.

“From what the D.A. tells me, Esther had amnesia all this time. Now she claims to remember the killings.”

“What made them think she was involved in the first place?”

“They found her glasses at the scene of the Walters murder.”

“You mean Lookout Park?”

“Yes.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“I guess they figure she lost her glasses on the night of the murder.”

“She didn’t lose them then.”

“What?”

“I slapped those glasses off her, up in the park, about a week before those murders.”

Sarah glanced at her watch and hoped that Bobby had not seen her. In twenty minutes, visiting hour would be over. She felt as if she would never last.