Obstruction of Justice Read online

  Paul’s eyebrows were raised practically to his hairline, and even Joe and Mrs. Lauria were watching her with puzzled expressions, but all she could think was: Leo, for the company; Sarah, for the final freedom from control by the de Beers men.

  Or give them the benefit of not committing a cold-blooded murder. Quentin was digging up his son’s body, the backhoe still warm and dropping bits of dirt from the grave, the hard breath as he shoveled with gloved hands... and Leo and Sarah following. A fight...

  She thought coldly, if Sarah left the Vuarnets to frame Jason and picked me to find them, she must be furious that I haven’t turned them over to the police.

  "I have a copy of the statement you gave the police," Paul went on when Nina didn’t continue. "You say you were at home when—"

  "Yeah, with my boy."

  "Any other witnesses?"

  Joe started to laugh. He ruffled the little boy’s hair, and said, "Why would I kill the old man?"

  "Have you deposited any large sums of money in any bank account in the last couple of months?" Joe thought about this, but Mrs. Lauria understood first.

  "Joe is not a killer!" she cried.

  "Now, hold on," Joe said. "You think we’d be eating beans and rice every day like we do if I had money stashed away? You think I’d be out there busting my butt mowing lawns for you rich Anglos if I could stay home and live off my bank account? You must be desperate, man. You have anything else to say before little Lucy here kicks you out the door?"

  "I’m looking for the owner of a ’59 Pontiac Catalina, white or cream-colored, license number JOK6SSG. Ever owned anything like that?"

  Joe’s smile faded. Mrs. Lauria looked pretty unhappy all of a sudden too. Nina, who had been lost in her own thoughts for the past few minutes, started paying attention again.

  "I had a car like that, a long time ago. I don’t remember the license plate," Joe answered cautiously.

  "How long ago?"

  "Years."

  "Three years?"

  "Maybe."

  "Where is it now?"

  "It got stolen. I was working at the de Beers house that day. I left my keys in the car, parked in the driveway. When I went there after work, the car was gone."

  "Did you report the theft?"

  "It was just an old clunker. I mean, that car was almost thirty years old, falling apart. It wasn’t worth reporting. I didn’t have insurance on it either. I would have just bought a lot of headaches reporting it."

  "You have to do better than that, Joe," Paul said.

  "It’s the truth! It would just get me in trouble somehow. I don’t mix with the government."

  "Don’t talk to him like that," Mrs. Lauria commanded. "I thought you were a nice person, a smart one. Now I see you’re just out to screw the Latinos too."

  "Hold your horses, Lucy," Joe said, picking up the little boy again. "Why are you asking about that old clunker?" he asked Paul.

  "That old clunker killed Anna Meade."

  A long silence followed, broken only by the children’s various queries and activities and the sound of the trees dripping onto the roof The fire had burned down and the room had grown chilly. Mrs. Lauria picked up a pine log and threw it onto the coals. Then she picked up her daughter, who had begun to complain.

  Joe pushed the recliner up, and sat forward in the chair, wincing, handing her the younger child as soon as she finished getting the fire going again. Mrs. Lauria was so diminutive herself that Nina could hardly believe she could hold both of the chubby little bodies, but she didn’t even seem to notice she had them. She held one on each hip, her face hostile.

  "Don’t talk to them anymore, Joe," she said.

  "I didn’t do it," Joe said. "It doesn’t make sense. How could my car kill Ruben’s probation officer?"

  "If you weren’t driving, someone else was," said Paul.

  "Could Ruben have taken the car, Lucy?" asked Joe. "I brought him over to the de Beers place that one time to try to help him get some work. He knew where to find it. I remember asking you at the time—"

  "Do you hear what you’re saying? That Ruben ran that woman down! But it’s impossible! He killed himself not two hours before she died!"

  "That’s right," Joe said, reassured. "Ruben was in bad trouble, but he would never do anything like that." He stretched in the chair and closed his eyes, wincing again.

  Mrs. Lauria said, "Listen, Jose. In case you are having some doubts, I didn’t take the car. I borrowed it a few times, yes, I see in your eyes that you remember that. But I never took it. Why would I harm Anna anyway? Ruben said—remember what he said about her? He said she had a heart. My God, it’s enough to make you cry, all this mistrust and bad feeling in here."

  Joe shook his head. "I never thought of you, Lucy. Never."

  "Tell me about Ruben’s trouble," Nina said, anticipating the question she could tell was fermenting in Paul’s mind.

  "Well, I don’t get what this is about," Joe said. "I can’t see how I am involved at all. Lucy and I haven’t done anything wrong, so I’m glad to tell you what I know.

  "Ruben and I were sophomores in high school when he started taking things, just little things. Everybody all around us had so much more, you know. I didn’t let it bother me, but Ruben watched the commercials on television like those people who had all those expensive things were real people like us. He knew what was the right shoes, the right jacket, all that. He got caught lifting a watch at Mervyn’s and was sent to a youth detention camp for six months.

  "After that he changed. One night a few months later, he stabbed a guy outside a bar. He was lucky they tried him as a juvenile. He went to a detention center for a year that time.

  "Right after he was released, we all moved up to Tahoe. My dad had a job with the forest service. Ruben wanted to get on with them more than anything. He had just gotten married to Lucy on a trip to Mexico and he wanted to better himself, but he had this record by then for this and that. There was no way the U.S. of A. was about to hire him. So he started hanging out with the wrong people again, drinking and partying. He was caught purse snatching and put in jail."

  Mrs. Lauria said, "He cleaned up in jail. He wanted to take better care of us, but when he got out, nobody would hire him because of his record and because he had a history of being unreliable, of drinking. He lost heart. Jose was just getting started with the gardening and trying to help him, but Ruben... he never showed up for the jobs. I’ll never forget you stopping by with dinner all the time like you did," she went on, turning to Joe. She was perched on the arm of his chair, and she leaned into him, joining her body to his as if to complete herself.

  He smiled back and their smiles met somewhere between them in a hopeful splash, or so it seemed to Nina. She saw how much in love they were, and marveled at the connection between man and woman she was witnessing.

  "Ruben was a good man," Mrs. Lauria said. "Don’t think anything else. Unhappy, yes, drinking, yes. That changes you. You do foolish things you would never have done. But he was young, and he was not someone to give up on. He went to Mass once a week with me. He did everything Mrs. Meade told him to do. He praised her. He listened to her advice."

  "I think we should tell them, Lucy," Joe said. "In case it would help Mrs. Meade."

  "Fine," she said. "If you think it will help."

  Paul asked, "Tell us what?"

  "Right before he died Ruben told me he had come into some money," Joe said. "He never said where he got it. He had had a few beers and he was talking big. The last time I saw him was the morning he died—"

  "The same day Mrs. Meade died," Mrs. Lauria put in.

  "He was down, very far down. He said he was in trouble and he was going to see Mrs. Meade and ask her what to do. That’s all he would say. I told him, ’Cousin, whatever it is, I’m your family, you can talk to me, or talk to Lucy, come on,’ but he acted—he acted like he was either too big a man to tell us or he was too ashamed. The two feelings looked the same on him, you know? Then afte
r he died, the next day, Lucy was folding up his jacket and she finds this big wad of cash."

  Paul said, "How much?"

  "Ten thousand dollars," he said sadly.

  That had to be a fortune to Ruben Lauria.

  "I kept it," Mrs. Lauria said, "for the funeral expenses. And his father was sick. My second pregnancy went very hard. I couldn’t work. The rest of Ruben’s money kept us going for six months after he died." Keeping her eyes on the burning logs, she said, "I would have given anything just to talk to him for five minutes before he— I could have stopped him.

  "That was Ruben’s money," she went on. "He paid for it with his life. I’m not ashamed for taking it, however he got it."

  "Who found his body?" Paul asked.

  "Some kids from the neighborhood. He wasn’t far off the path at Zephyr Cove, near the beach. It’s a busy place sometimes."

  "What did he use, rope?"

  Nina remembered Molly gasping at the end of a rope at the de Beers house, the awful sound of her voice.

  "Cable, like from a stereo."

  "Was there an autopsy?"

  "What difference does it make?" Joe asked, tightening the arm he had laced around Mrs. Lauria a little tighter.

  Paul seemed to consider his next words. Outside, the rain had briefly resumed its beating on the roof.

  Nina watched him frame an answer and discard it. Finally, Paul said simply, "Did you ever consider the possibility that Ruben was murdered?"

  "He hung himself," said Mrs. Lauria firmly, as the words alone ought to be convincing enough.

  "Sometimes, rarely, I’ll admit it, but sometimes murder is disguised as suicide."

  She put her hands on her hips and smiled, a hurt, frozen smile that didn’t fit her age. "So. You think my husband might have been murdered. And all this time his murderer might have been walking around loose while I cried like a fool for Ruben’s immortal soul that I thought was burning in hell. If that’s true, I can’t believe my own stupidity."

  "Lucy," Joe said, warning her.

  "You better go now," she said to Nina and Paul. "But let me tell you this. If anyone killed Ruben, I am going to find out, and I’m going to kill them. Not just for Ruben. For me and the children. For the hungry nights, and all the crying." Her mouth trembled, but her eyes were like chips of ice.

  In those glittering eyes Nina saw the key to her character. The past three years must have been a living hell for her. She had survived, but only by living in the place in which men make war and women make inhuman sacrifices for their children, a place so cold and merciless it had left freezer burns on her soul.

  Outside on the road, the shower was ending as rapidly as it had begun. A luminous vapor enveloped the street and trees. The asphalt steamed where the hidden sun’s rays managed to slip through, adding an unreal aspect to the misty scene. At the turnout down the street where they had parked, Nina and Paul leaned on the wet hood of the Bronco. Paul said, "It was time to regroup anyway. I was concerned about alerting him, but..."

  "He’s got too much to stick around for. I don’t think he would run."

  "He must have done something. He’s close to everything. I’m going to try to find out if Joe had any reason to kill Quentin. Motive is the problem."

  "What about Lucy?" Nina said. "She’s formidable. She wouldn’t hesitate to kill anybody who threatened her kids, for instance."

  "They didn’t have the marks of people lying," Paul said. "No blinking or body language or stumbles or hesitations. But I really want to make Joe for the killing. Or killings."

  Nina said, "Let’s step back. How many deaths have we got here?"

  "Where’s ’here’?"

  "Floating around. You know." She drew out her yellow pad from the briefcase, which she had propped gingerly on the wet hood, and drew four circles, one in each quadrant of the page. Holding the pen cap in her teeth, she labeled them Anna, Ruben, Ray, and Quentin.

  "Oh, no," groaned Paul. "Not another one of your metaphysical diagrams."

  "Sorry, but I think best with a pen in my hand." She began writing names radiating out from each circle, ignoring Paul, who had turned his back and was conspicuously taking in the view.

  "Paul, take a look; it won’t kill you. See? Anna is connected to Ruben, who is connected to Mrs. Lauria and Joe Marquez. She’s also connected to Kim Voss, who is connected to Quentin."

  "The problem is that word connected. Kim saw her die, but so what? It’s a random connection."

  "A random connection?"

  "Accidental! A coincidence!"

  "Ah. Coincidence. Now, Quentin is connected to Joe and Kim, on the Anna side. But he’s also connected to Sarah, Molly, Jason, and Ray. Now, get this. If you just follow the lines, the deaths all connect."

  "Wait. I got lost before that, at the place you decided to make Ray and Ruben part of this thing."

  "They’re dead," Nina said simply. "That’s a connection. And the deaths came in pairs. Ruben died the same day as Anna, three years ago. Ray died just a few days before Quentin, and Ray’s body disappeared that night."

  "But they all died different ways! Ray was struck by lightning, Quentin was killed by a shovel, Ruben killed himself, and Anna was hit by a car!"

  "So?" Nina said. "The way they died isn’t connected. I admit that. The question is, Why did they die? Why? What is at the center of this page?"

  Nina stuck out her lower lip, pondering her piece of paper, which was rapidly wilting in the damp.

  "It’s not your fault," Paul said. "It’s the New Age Celestine Prophecy trendoid way of thinking. You have to be very strong-minded to not sink into it. This idea that everything that happens is somehow related."

  Nina said softly. "The ancient Greek concept of fate. Synchronicity. The Buddhist idea of auspicious coincidence."

  Paul opened his mouth and jabbed his forefinger toward it, making a gagging sound. "Hot tub philosophy."

  "It has its points, like hot tub sex," Nina said dryly.

  "No. This situation is more like that game they play on the Internet—the Kevin Bacon game. The object is to relate everyone to Kevin Bacon within a certain number of connections, or degrees. See, Kevin Bacon was in this movie with Leslie Nielsen, who was in a movie with Kirk Douglas, who was married to, I don’t know, Bette Davis in 1940. Presto, Kevin Bacon is related to Bette Davis. I’d call it specious coincidence, not auspicious coincidence."

  Nina folded up her paper. "Kirk Douglas never married Bette Davis," she said. "I have to get back to the office. I’ll be working at home for the rest of the afternoon. I’ll be working through the weekend. I’ll be working when the human race dies out and the ants take over. Stop by the office tomorrow and let me know what’s new."

  "Do you know what you’re doing, Nina?" Paul said, so seriously that she looked at him in surprise.

  "Of course. I’m filling my head with information, and I’m waiting for it to gel. Bob made this fabulous science project at the end of last year. He had this plastic mold of a brain, and he filled it with raspberry gelatin and some extra ingredients. It looked wonderful unmolded on a platter."

  "Your head quivering on a platter," Paul said. "That’s where it’s gonna be, all right, once the cops figure out what you’ve been up to."

  "Paul? Do me a favor. Get hold of a copy of the police report on Ruben Lauria for me."

  24

  BY SATURDAY NIGHT, NINA HAD A NEW RECORD for materials amassed after ten days of hard work. One box of pleadings and legal research on her chest of drawers; two boxes of reports, statements, evidence lists, and desiderata regarding Quentin’s death in the bathroom; another box of her copies of case opinions, pertinent statutes, and legal summaries on every aspect of evidence and criminal law that might come up at the prelim on the floor by the bed; and an impromptu law and medical library stacked next to the nightstand.

  She sat on the bed in her aquamarine silk night-gown, making notes and looking for angles among the papers scattered everywhere. The phone rang and s
he grabbed it fast, as though she had been waiting for it. "Paul?" she said.

  "Sorry to disappoint you. It’s me, Ginger."

  "Well, hi."

  "Saturday night is my favorite time to get work done too," Ginger said in her deep, jovial voice. "The one night of the week with no pressure. The rest of the world runs out to pollute their brains with one thing and another, while we the cognoscenti sit in our austere garrets and think great thoughts."

  "I take it that you have a great thought that you want to share with me."

  "Oh yes," Ginger said. "Listen up, Nina: This makes your case."

  "I’m listening, Ginger."

  "The primary cause of death, in my opinion, was the aneurysm. Quentin de Beers died of natural causes. In my opinion, the aneurysm was bleeding before he came into contact with the head of the shovel, not after."

  "What? Are you sure? How can you tell that?"

  "I did a lot of follow-up research on the findings in the autopsy report. The location of the aneurysm and the type of aneurysm are the crucial findings. It’s called a berry aneurysm, from its shape. This type of aneurysm occurs, sometimes in clusters, in a structure at the base of the brain called the circle of Willis, and is very resistant to trauma. From my research, I’m able to testify that those berries are highly unlikely to burst in connection with any outside trauma. Other aneurysms, maybe, but not berries."

  "Wait. Let me try to assimilate this. Quentin had a stroke—"

  "That’s not the right word. He suffered a ruptured aneurysm."

  "Which made him dizzy?"

  "Sure. Or unconscious."

  "He was hit by the shovel after becoming unconscious?"

  "Doesn’t prove anybody hit him. He came into contact with it. That’s all that anyone can say. That’s my opinion as an officer and a gentleman. And a pathologist."

  "What about the fingerprints on the shovel?"

  "To be finessed."

  "If it’s so all-fired simple, I ought to be able to go in there Monday morning and get the case dismissed, then."

  "Not so fast. Great minds may differ. Doc Clauson and I, for instance. Doc Clauson is of the opinion that the aneurysm burst as a result of the trauma. Medical opinion in the literature is somewhat divided. Of course, all the second-raters are on the other side."