Knife Edge (A Dead Cold Mystery Book 27) Page 8

  “Next thing Shevron kind of snapped out of it and ran at them. She started hitting and kicking Earl, telling him to leave her mom alone. He lashed out at her with his hand, grabbed her, but she wouldn’t stop. It all happened so fast. Suddenly he had her—Shevron—in an arm lock around her neck. I could see she was turning blue. I ran at him, but in that moment Cherise just kind of punched his back. That was what I thought. That she had punched him in the back, and I was surprised that it seemed to hurt him so much, because Cherise was not that strong. He staggered, and…”

  She trailed off and started looking this way and that, as if she’d lost the thread of the story and couldn’t find it again. I waited. She bit her lip and looked down at the table.

  “What happened then, Sonia?”

  She shook her head and shrugged. “What the detectives said. Cherise pulled the knife out and…”

  “That’s not true.” She looked up at me. I repeated, “It’s not true, is it?”

  She faltered and looked away. “It’s what the detectives said, and the medical examiner…”

  “I know the medical examiner. I know him very well. Frank is a good man. He very rarely makes a mistake. But on this occasion he made one. He didn’t know there was another person there. None of them did. So they came up with the only explanation they could. Frank knew it couldn’t be right, but the only alternative was impossible. So he went with it and said that Earl had had some kind of berserker attack. But the fact is, Sonia, that when Cherise stabbed Earl she cut his pulmonary artery, and when she removed the knife, when she pulled it out of his back, he would have bled out and died in a matter of seconds. There was no way he could have turned on her, disarmed her and stabbed her repeatedly in the belly. He would have collapsed before he’d even grasped her wrist.”

  Her skin had gone pasty and her eyes were moist, staring at me, defiant. When she spoke her voice was little more than a rasp.

  “What are you saying? Are you going to try and pin this on me?”

  “No, Sonia. You know I’m not.”

  Her lower lip curled in. She bit it hard and tears welled in her eyes. She whispered, “You can’t. You can’t, please, don’t…”

  “Cherise never pulled the knife from his back, did she?” She shook her head. “He fell to the floor, and, what happened? Leroy ran at her. He pulled the knife from his father’s back and attacked his mother…”

  She took a handkerchief from her bag and blew her nose, then wiped it, speaking as she did so. “He was hysterical. He just kept screaming, ‘Daddy, Daddy…’ He pulled the knife from his back and stood staring down at him. We were all just paralyzed. There was Shevron, and Earl, and it was kind of unreal. Then he started screaming, like he’d gone crazy, ‘You killed my daddy, you killed my daddy…’ He didn’t say anything about Shevron.”

  She stopped, staring at nothing, staring at the horror movie that was playing in her head. She said again, very quietly, “He didn’t say anything about his sister, only his father, and then he ran at his mother and…”

  She covered her mouth with her fingers and the tears finally spilled from her eyes and ran down her cheeks, shiny tracks of grief and pain, to the corner of her mouth. Now she turned to Dehan.

  “How?” she said, in a strange echo of her first question. “How can a child do that? How can a boy… His own mother?”

  Dehan reached across the table and placed her hand over Sonia’s. I leaned forward.

  “Sonia, we are going to need you to sign a statement. Technically, you suppressed evidence to protect your nephew. I am going to recommend to the DA that there should be no prosecution. I can’t guarantee that she won’t, but it is unlikely. Frankly, I think it would be a waste of public money, and an unpopular case.”

  “Thank you, Detective Stone. Honestly, this has been weighing on my conscience since it happened. I…” She shrugged. “I just did it without thinking, like I was in a trance. I took the knife from him, made him sit down, wiped the prints from the handle and squeezed it into Earl’s hand. When I heard the sirens, I just ran. I have never told anybody what happened that day. But I have dreamed about it so many times, had so many nightmares.”

  I nodded, and after a moment said, “But I’m afraid we’re not done.”

  “Not,” she averted her gaze, “no, I guess not.”

  “There is the blackmail.” She didn’t say anything. Dehan said, “The photograph, Sonia, it was laughable. Why didn’t you laugh? Why didn’t you go straight to the Mitchells and discuss it with them?”

  She shook her head but didn’t say anything. I pressed her.

  “I need to know, Sonia. I need to know exactly what happened with the blackmail. Because I have to tell you that right now, it doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  A couple of times she seemed about to stand, but hesitated. She pulled her cell from her bag and looked at it, like she might be about to call somebody, then put it away. Eventually she said, “I was very confused. Unless you have been in a situation like that, you cannot begin to understand what it is like.” She looked me in the eye. “I watched him murder my sister, but he was a child. He was my nephew. I wanted, God knows I wanted to forgive him. I wanted to wash away the past and see him become a happy, healthy young man.” She looked down at her hands on the table. “Instead I saw his father’s criminality, and weakness, creeping into his behavior, the lies, the deceit, the complete lack of any kind of moral compass.” A look of disgust twisted her face. “The willingness to steal from the people who had willingly given him a home, safety, security…”

  Dehan said, “You saw Earl in him.”

  “Yes, I saw more of Earl than of my sister. He had killed my sister in more ways than one. He had killed that part of her which he should have carried inside.” She took a deep breath and let it out slow. “But even so, he was my nephew, my sister’s little boy, and I had to do what I could to help him. So when he sent me the photograph,” she turned bitter eyes on Dehan, “I didn’t really feel much like laughing. I was gutted, horrified. My first thought was to go and talk to Brad and Emma, but it’s different for us. A white boy admits to blackmail when he is a child and everybody laughs. A black boy admits such a thing and he has the natural criminal propensity of his race. That wasn’t something I was willing to burden Leroy with, so I tried to deal with it myself.”

  I sighed and rubbed my face. “Sonia, when you came to me it was because you had seen in the paper that Dr. Wagner had been made director of Brad Mitchell’s clinic. Now, stay with me here: The photograph Leroy sent you by WhatsApp was not, in any way, incriminating. It simply showed Brad Mitchell talking to a colleague. So there would be nothing odd at all about that colleague becoming director of the clinic.” I sat back, watching her. She looked sick. “If that news article sparked a suspicion in you, it is because there was more to Leroy’s allegations than you have told me.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Just that he was always saying that Brad was having an affair.”

  “Based on what?”

  “I told you, he overheard things.”

  “And the best he could do was a photograph of two colleagues talking? What made him think it was Dr. Wagner? He must have spoken to dozens of women each day. Surely one of his pupils would have been a better candidate.”

  She was beginning to look harassed. “I don’t know! I don’t know what you want me to say! Those were the…” She stopped. Then, “Those were the things he told me.”

  I leaned forward and looked hard into her face. She avoided my eyes. “I need to see those other photographs, Sonia.”

  “There are no other photographs. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I drew breath to answer, but she glanced out of the window and said, suddenly, “Am I under arrest for anything, Detective?”

  “No, Sonia, you’re not under arrest, but we do need you to sign a statement.”

  “Then I am going to leave now. I have a job to get back to. A job I might well lose if you keep harassing me at
work.”

  The door opened and I glanced over and saw Garrido coming into the restaurant. Sonia stood. “I’ll pass by the station after work and sign the statement.”

  She didn’t say goodbye. She crossed the floor with quick steps and met Garrido halfway. She took his arm in a way the looked more matrimonial than professional and they left the restaurant together. When they’d gone, Dehan turned to me and scowled.

  “Where the hell did that come from?”

  I shrugged. “I saw an inconsistency and I picked at it. Something came out.”

  “Are you kidding me? An inconsistency? Seriously? She just confessed that she was present and saw Leroy kill his father!”

  “I know. But it actually doesn’t get us very far. The blackmail is still a problem.”

  I looked at my watch and raised a hand. She scowled harder. “Now what are you doing?”

  “We’re done for today. Now we need a roast chicken and a bottle of good wine. We need to talk this whole thing through.”

  She grunted and sat back in her chair with the look of someone who was relenting but didn’t want to.

  “OK,” she said, “but you are not to start cutting me out, Stone, or I swear I will kick your ass from here to Morris Park!”

  I smiled at her. “Yeah, yeah, promises, promises…”

  Ten

  We started with a couple of dry martinis while we waited for the smoked salmon and avocado salad and half a bottle of Alsace Gewurztraminer. Dehan scorned the roast chicken in favor of an Argentine steak seared over hot coals and I went with half a chicken roasted in a terracotta dish with baby onions, carrots and potatoes. With that we shared a bottle of 2016 Domaine Jeannin-Naltet, Les Nagues Premier Cru. It was rich and bold enough for Dehan’s steak, but had enough dark fruits for my chicken.

  We didn’t talk much while we were eating, beyond making appreciative noises about the food. When we were done we ordered a cheese board, black coffee and a couple of old Bushmills, no ice. Dehan sipped her coffee and took a pull on her whiskey, then sat savoring it and watching me.

  “How long,” she said, “have you known or suspected that Leroy killed his mother. Because I have to tell you, Stone, it never crossed my mind.”

  I made a face that was somewhere between apologetic and pensive. “Pretty much since I read the report. We’ll never know, and I am not about to call Frank out, but I think he dreamed up the whole berserker story to protect the kid. A black kid from a broken family in the Bronx, accused of killing his own mother, is going to have a tough time of it, whether he did it or not. Not only that, such an accusation could have seriously jeopardized his chances of adoption, even by the Mitchells.”

  “So, when you read the ME’s report on Earl’s wound?”

  I smiled and shrugged again. “Yeah, the wound was pretty conclusive, but also, I mean, last man standing, right? There was nobody else left alive, so it had to be him.”

  She frowned. “OK, that makes me feel pretty stupid. I should have seen that.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up. You hadn’t had time to read the report.”

  “OK, but, what about Sonia? How the hell could you have known Sonia was there?”

  “I didn’t, but it seemed likely.” I cut a piece of Stilton and put it on a cracker, chewed it and sipped some whiskey. “If you look at the report, which you simply haven’t had time to do yet, you’ll see that the only clear prints on the knife were Earl’s, even though Cherise had stabbed him with it just seconds before he is supposed to have taken it from her. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Taken with the severity of his wound, and ignoring Frank’s berserker theory, what we have is a situation where she stabs him in the back and he collapses and dies. Now, either she has removed the knife, or it is still in his back, but either way her prints should be on it, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Next, Leroy either takes the knife from his mother, or he takes it from Earl’s back. Whichever it is, now his prints and his mother’s should both be on the knife, but they’re not. Only Earl’s are. So we have to ask, how were Cherise’s and Leroy’s prints removed, and how did Earl’s get there?”

  I sipped a little more whiskey. Dehan watched me without speaking. I went on.

  “At first glance, Leroy must have wiped the prints and pressed the knife into his father’s hand, but I just can’t see a kid of his age, in the emotional state he must have been in, driven to such a rage over his father’s murder by his mother, thinking that coldly. Neither does it make a lot of sense that he would try to frame his father, when he has just avenged him by killing his own mother. That being the case, there must have been a fifth person there, a person working to protect the boy.”

  “That makes sense,” she said a little gloomily.

  “When I saw how close Sonia lived to her sister, and how close their jobs were, it just seemed very likely that that other person was Sonia. I applied a little pressure and she came through.”

  “You say it like that and it sounds simple.” She ate some Brie on a cracker and sat swirling the amber liquid around in her glass. “So how does this affect the Mitchells? You probably disagree, but I don’t see how it clarifies the Mitchell case in any way? If Leroy killed his mother, who killed Leroy?”

  I grinned. “Karma?”

  “Yeah? Karma? That’s about as helpful as a paper frying pan. Are you being facetious, or is there actually a thought in there somewhere?”

  I cut another slice of Stilton, balanced it on a cracker and inserted it in my mouth, then sat swirling the Bushmills. Outside the street had grown dark and silent lights were sliding past, amber and red.

  “What I mean is that—” I sighed and took a little longer to think it through. “That his own death, his own murder, may have been inescapably woven into his actions when he chose to kill his mother.”

  “Is that your brain talking, Stone, or the Irish whiskey?”

  “A bit of both, perhaps.”

  “You’re going to have to lay it out a lot clearer for me, big guy. At the moment it sounds like a Greek tragedy played out by black Vikings in the Bronx.”

  I laughed, then shook my head. “I don’t know, Dehan. I haven’t got anything you could call a theory. The possibilities are there, as plain for you as they are for me. All we can do is explore them.” She stared at me, waiting, her eyebrows arched into a question that said, “So…?”

  I spread my hands. “OK, so let me ask you this: what did Leroy take with him from his home with Cherise and Earl?”

  “What did he take with him? I assume you mean something other that his pajamas. Uh…” She looked out at the quickening night and shrugged. “The first thing that springs to mind is his aunt.”

  “OK.” I nodded. “So run with that. How does his aunt lead to a kind of repetition…”

  She sat forward, “Holy…!” I paused and waited. She said, “Did you see this? Is this what you have been driving at?”

  “I don’t know, Dehan. You’ll have to tell me what it is first.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Are you suggesting that Sonia killed her own nephew?”

  I sighed and sank back in my chair. “Well, that is one of the possibilities, isn’t it?”

  “She said herself that she was struggling emotionally between guilt, the desire to protect her nephew and her anger at the fact that he’d killed her sister. When you think about it, it must have been driving her crazy.”

  “It must have…”

  “But what would trigger something like that, Stone? Out of the blue like that.”

  I took another sip of whiskey. “But it wasn’t out of the blue, was it?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t. She had made that huge sacrifice, allowed her sister’s murder to go unpunished, saved him from the consequences of what he had done, and he shows his gratitude by trying to blackmail Brad Mitchell. She is suddenly overwhelmed by grief and regret and decides to set things right.”

  I thought about it. “Couldn’t she
have simply gone to the cops, as she did later?”

  “Not without risking a prison sentence herself. She helped a murderer escape justice.” She picked up her glass and set it down again. “Maybe she went there just wanting to talk to him. She arrived at the house and heard the kids playing in the garden. She went to the back, meaning to call him over and talk to him. Perhaps he didn’t hear her, or ignored her, and she went to the shed…”

  I nodded. “Perhaps. It’s a lot of perhaps and maybes, though, Dehan, and it doesn’t explain why she would kill little Lea. Seems to go against the grain if she’s there to avenge her sister.”

  She grunted. “Stone, we have seen enough homicide to know that, unless you’re dealing with a pro, people go a bit crazy when they kill. More precisely, people go a bit crazy just before they kill. We can’t sit here in this restaurant and apply logic to what happened inside that shed when Leroy got killed. If she was there intending to avenge her sister, or seek justice for her sister, there is no telling what emotional state she was in. And if little Lea got in the way, or tried to stop her …”

  She trailed off and shrugged.

  I nodded. “Point taken.”

  “Just like Earl killed his own daughter.”

  I nodded some more. “I get it. It’s plausible, but we still lack proof.”

  “The knife used in the Mitchell killing…?”

  “Lea was killed with a knife that was kept in the shed for cutting twine, pruning, that kind of stuff. It was pretty sharp but had traces of rust, and that rust was found in the wound. That same knife was the one found in Leroy’s back, very much in the same place where his mother had stabbed his father. There were no prints found because the handle had been wiped with paint thinner.”