Филипп Марголин - The Perfect Alibi

“You do know that someone murdered Mr. and Mrs. Voss and burned down their house?”

Gorski kept smiling but said nothing.

“Take a good look at the date and time of this picture. It was shot from a traffic camera on the date that Mr. and Mrs. Voss were murdered and minutes after a neighbor saw flames coming from their house.”

Gorski looked at the screen, then back at Anders.

“We know you were hired by Norcross to follow Leonard Voss in connection with his lawsuit. We know that Norcross wanted to bury the suit to avoid adverse publicity about its product. We also know that Tyler Harrison, the attorney who represented Norcross, and Frank Nylander, Mr. Voss’s attorney, were both murdered.”

Gorski smiled. He looked perfectly relaxed. “I couldn’t have murdered Tyler Harrison,” he said. “I was in Oregon when he was killed.”

“Oh, so you know when Mr. Harrison was killed?”

Gorski stopped smiling. He realized he’d made a mistake.

Carrie waited a beat. Then she said, “You’re probably thinking that this picture isn’t enough to get a conviction, and you may be right. But it is enough to get an indictment, after which the Multnomah County district attorney will hold a press conference during which she will lay out everything she knows about the motive for the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Voss. That means that all your hard work to keep the public ignorant of the side effects of Norcross’s drug will be for naught. If you have an alibi for Harrison, I guess we’ll only be able to indict you for killing Mr. and Mrs. Voss. Either way, Norcross and you lose.”

Gorski shrugged. “Do what you have to do.”

“We will. But there is a way out for you. Even if you’re acquitted, the publicity will ruin your reputation.”

“You’ve taken up enough of my time,” Gorski said. “Please leave. If you want to contact me again, do it through my attorney.”

“No problem,” Anders said. “Once we’re gone, you can call Norcross and tell them what we have in store for them. But, if you do that, there’s something you should think about. If someone at Norcross did order you to kill Leonard Voss to keep him quiet, don’t you think they might hire someone to eliminate the only person who can incriminate the company? If you didn’t kill Harrison, someone else on Norcross’s payroll did.”

Carrie paused to let what she’d said sink in.

“We know Norcross is behind the murders of Leonard and Rita Voss. Tell us who gave you your orders, and we might be able to deal.”

“This is getting tedious, Detective.” Gorski smiled. “If you don’t leave, I’ll have to call the police.”

Anders laughed. “I’m glad to see you have a sense of humor. I wonder if your buddies at Norcross will be laughing when we tell them about our visit.”

Anders and Jacobs stood up.

“See you around,” Carrie said before she and Jacobs left.

“What do you think?” Jacobs asked when they were walking toward his car.

“I think that Ivar Gorski is one tough customer.”

“Do you think he’ll deal?”

“Honestly, no, but I intend to turn up the heat anyway.”

Private practice was often feast or famine. A few new cases had come in the door in the past few weeks, but none of them were very complex, so Robin had a lot of time on her hands. One afternoon she decided to organize the files in Doug Armstrong’s case so they could be put in storage.

Around six, Robin’s stomach began to growl and she decided to call it a day. She’d been going through the files Detective Jacobs had sent her from New York when he’d sent the questions he wanted Doug Armstrong to answer. She’d put the photographs of Tyler Harrison’s law office in a neat stack and started to put a rubber band around them when something in the photograph on the top of the pile caught her eye. The photo showed Harrison’s desk and the college and law school diplomas on the wall behind it.

Robin picked up the photo and studied it. Harrison had graduated from Columbia University, a prestigious Ivy League school, but he had continued his legal education at the Warren E. Burger School of Law at Sheffield University in Arkansas.

Robin frowned. Something about Sheffield University rang a bell, but she couldn’t remember where she’d heard about the school before. Robin conducted a web search and learned that Sheffield was a small Christian college in a rural area of Arkansas.

Sheffield’s law school was definitely third tier, and Robin couldn’t understand why Harrison had gone there. A graduate of Columbia would be able to go to a better law school than the one at Sheffield even if he had terrible grades. And why Arkansas? And how had a graduate of Sheffield’s law school landed a position at a prestigious New York firm that would do most of its hiring at top ten law schools?

Then Robin remembered where Sheffield had come up before. She felt light-headed. After taking a few deep breaths, Robin mulled over the implications of her discovery. When she was calm, Robin found the phone number for Greta Harrison, Tyler’s widow.

It was nine at night in New York, still early enough to call.

“Mrs. Harrison?” Robin asked when a woman answered the phone.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to call this late. My name is Robin Lockwood. I’m an attorney in Portland, Oregon.”

“What is this about?” Greta asked in the tone Robin often used when she suspected that a caller was a solicitor.

“You know Detective Herschel Jacobs?”

“Yes,” Greta answered warily.

“Frank Nylander was an attorney in Portland. He met with your husband in New York to negotiate a case during the week your husband was killed. Detective Jacobs called me a while ago to ask me to help him with your husband’s case because I was representing an attorney in Oregon who was the partner of Frank Nylander.”

“I still don’t understand why you’re calling.”

“I ran across something odd that might help Detective Jacobs, and I have a strange question to ask you.”

“What is it?”

“I was going through a file and I noticed a photograph of Mr. Harrison’s diplomas. I saw that he graduated from Columbia, which is a very prestigious university, but he went to a small law school in Arkansas. Can you tell me why your husband went to law school at Sheffield instead of a more prestigious institution?”

“How could that possibly be relevant to finding my husband’s killer?”

“It may not be. I may be way off base.”

There was dead air for a moment. Robin waited.

“The answer to your question is very simple. Tyler and I met at Columbia. Although I was in medical school and he was a freshman, we were almost the same age because Tyler had been in the army for several years before he went to college.

“The year Tyler graduated from Columbia, I decided to go to a rural county in Arkansas that was in dire need of a physician. Tyler had excellent grades and could have gone to law school anywhere, but we were in love and he insisted on applying to Sheffield’s law school so we could be together. Tyler graduated number one in his class and edited the law review. Several people at his law firm knew him from Columbia. They told the partners about him when he applied. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Thank you. That’s very helpful. I have one more question: What year did your husband graduate from Sheffield?”

Mrs. Harrison told Robin. The sick feeling she’d experienced when she saw the photograph of Harrison’s diploma returned.

“I still don’t understand what this has to do with finding the person who murdered Tyler,” Mrs. Harrison said.