Degree of Guilt Read online

  ‘Admissible?’ Paget turned to Sharpe. ‘We’re not at trial yet. What we’re discussing is an issue of fairness.’

  Sharpe’s face closed against him, and her tone became didactic. ‘The issue I’m raising is relevance, which also happens to govern admissibility. You’re suggesting that her story involves a prior similiar act. But Melissa Rappaport consented to this particular practice. That is not a rape and therefore does not suggest that what your client says happened was part of a pattern of nonconsensual sex. The reason a judge wouldn’t let it in later is the reason it doesn’t satisfy us now.’

  The ‘us’, Paget thought, was an assertion of authority. He paused to ensure that he responded with sufficient tact. ‘That’s far too literal, Marnie. There is such a thing as psychological truth. Two different women, five years apart, confronted something in Ransom that is very particular. The reason to believe Mary Carelli is the same reason I get this into evidence at trial – because it makes what Mary told you feel right. Which is exactly what you’d argue if this were a rape prosecution.’

  Sharpe gave him a thoughtful look. As Brooks watched her, silent, Paget realized that Sharpe had started to invest in the case and that Brooks had moved from prosecutor to referee, carefully weighing his own interests.

  ‘Will she testify?’ Brooks asked.

  Paget turned. ‘I don’t know, Mac. I hope never to ask. It would be fairly uncomfortable, and not just for Rappaport.’

  Brooks considered him. ‘If you mean would we enjoy that,’ he said finally, ‘of course not.’

  Brooks, Paget saw, had followed him perfectly; his pretense of opacity was meant to force Paget to speak their understanding aloud.

  ‘Actually, I was thinking of James Colt.’

  Brooks’s mirthless smile came and went. ‘The one who’s dead,’ he asked, ‘or the one who’s running for governor?’

  ‘Both,’ Paget answered, ‘and all the people who admired the father and support his son. Including the widow Colt and her very wealthy family. None of whom, as you’ve already conceded, will be eager to watch you add Laura Chase’s less than glowing memories to the family annals.’

  ‘That tape,’ Sharpe cut in, ‘will be in the public domain as soon as Ransom’s publisher gets someone to finish the book. Whatever your client’s motives, she has virtually guaranteed that the Laura Chase biography will sell a million copies. The damage to the Colt family will already be done, and it won’t be the fault of this office.’

  That was right, Paget knew. And if Mary was indicted, her story could merge with Laura Chase’s, creating a media event that would lead them straight to Carlo. Once again, he felt the trap in which Mary had placed him: his best chance to protect Carlo was to prevent an indictment.

  Slowly, Paget turned to Brooks. ‘You have listened to the tape, I assume.’

  Brooks nodded. ‘I have.’

  ‘Then speaking strictly as a human being,’ Paget continued, ‘how did you feel hearing Laura Chase’s voice when she describes James Colt watching as his two friends had her?’

  Brooks was quiet for a moment. Shelton turned toward a window with no view; Paget guessed that she, too, had listened to the tape.

  ‘Speaking strictly as a human being,’ Brooks answered slowly, ‘what I was – God help me – was fascinated and repelled.’

  ‘And do you think simply reading about it would be quite the same experience as listening to it?’

  Brooks’s eyes narrowed. ‘No. I don’t.’

  ‘Nor do I. And while we’re about the business of calculating audience shares in the millions, how many million people watched the Willie Smith trial?’

  ‘On Court TV,’ Brooks said flatly.

  Paget nodded. ‘On Court TV. Because I would absolutely do that, Mac. If this case goes to trial, I’d insist that the judge let them show it nationwide. Then, like any defense lawyer in his right mind, I’d ask to play that tape. I don’t know about your standing in the polls, but your Nielsen ratings will go right through the roof.’

  Brooks folded his hands in his lap. ‘And James Colt’s family?’

  ‘I’ve never been interested in politics.’ Paget paused, then finished softly. ‘That family means nothing to me. As I mentioned the last time, I have my own.’

  Paget heard Sharpe’s curt intake of breath. Brooks looked from Paget to Sharpe and back again.

  ‘There are problems, Chris. New ones.’

  Brooks’s reluctant tone troubled Paget more than bluster. ‘Such as?’

  Brooks looked to Sharpe. ‘More discrepancies,’ she said. ‘At least one seems quite serious.’

  Don’t seem anxious, Paget thought. Turning to her, he assumed an expression of polite inquiry. Her lips tightened, as if she was nettled.

  ‘To begin with,’ she said finally, ‘Mary Carelli told Inspector Monk that the blinds were drawn when she came to Ransom’s room. Monk thought that sounded peculiar. So he asked the waiter who brought the champagne from room service. The blinds were open – he’s quite sure of that.’

  Paget tried looking puzzled. ‘From which you extract what, exactly?’

  ‘We’re not sure, obviously. But it raises the possibility that Ms Carelli closed the blinds for reasons of her own.’

  ‘Can you suggest a reason that makes her indictable?’

  Sharpe looked at him closely. ‘We don’t indict people,’ she said in cold tones, ‘for closing their blinds. But people sometimes close blinds so other people can’t see what they’re doing.’

  ‘Which,’ Paget answered, ‘raises the possibility that Ransom closed the blinds because he was planning to rape Mary Carelli and that she didn’t notice or didn’t recall. Assuming, that is, that the waiter remembers the precise status of each individual window shade in each of the many rooms he no doubt visited that day – a question you might care to ask him before making too much of this.’

  Behind Sharpe, Elizabeth Shelton smiled faintly. ‘I did,’ Sharpe retorted. ‘He distinctly remembers Ms Carelli. He thought Mr Ransom was a lucky man.’

  ‘He certainly tried,’ Paget said. ‘But then, as Somerset Maugham once observed, “luck is a talent.”’

  Sharpe flushed; Shelton’s smile was replaced by a closer scrutiny of Sharpe. In quick succession, Paget had two impressions: that Shelton did not care for Sharpe, and that something was troubling Shelton that Paget did not know.

  ‘Forgive the levity,’ he said to Sharpe. ‘I’ll ask Mary about the blinds, of course. Is there something else?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sharpe looked distinctly unmollified. ‘Ms Carelli says that she never left the suite. But another guest believes that he saw her enter the suite as he got off the elevator. I should say reenter, the guest was returning from lunch at about one o’clock, well after Ms Carelli says she arrived.’

  For the first time, Shelton spoke. ‘One o’clock,’ she said carefully, ‘is the approximate time of death.’

  Paget turned back to Sharpe. ‘Is this guest certain it was Mary?’

  ‘He only saw her from behind. But it was a dark-haired woman, around five feet eight or so, who carried herself like Mary Carelli.’

  Paget considered her. ‘Assuming that it was Mary, I expect what he saw was Mary arriving, perhaps earlier than he thinks.’

  A brief triumphant expression crossed Sharpe’s face. ‘She wasn’t arriving,’ she answered. ‘No one came to the door. The woman let herself in.’

  Sharpe had gained confidence, Paget realized. It was as if she knew that the same calculation which had caused Brooks to stick her with Mary Carelli gave her much more leeway than usual. He decided to speak for Brooks’s benefit.

  ‘But what does it mean?’ he asked. ‘Ransom’s rape fantasies and the Laura Chase tape mean something.’

  Without responding, Sharpe turned to Shelton. Her look was a curious admixture of deference and command; Paget perceived that Shelton had been summoned to speak on cue.

  ‘There’s one more thing,’ Shelton said slowly.

>   ‘What is it?’

  Shelton turned from Sharpe, speaking to Paget as if they were alone. ‘Do you remember that night, on the elevator, when you asked me about the scratches on Ransom’s buttocks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve gone back over them, thought about it quite a bit more.’ She paused, then added quickly, ‘I don’t think they were made until after Ransom died.’

  Paget stared at her. ‘After?’

  ‘Yes. Not seconds after, or even a couple of minutes. Appreciably after.’

  Paget tried to organize his thoughts, found none. ‘On what do you base that?’

  ‘The scratches themselves.’ Shelton’s gaze held his. ‘The normal scratch, such as those you saw on Mary, are like a red welt. The red color comes from bleeding under the skin, broken capillaries. But Random’s scratches are white.’

  Paget noticed that Brooks had gotten up and was standing behind Shelton. Reluctantly, Paget asked, ‘What does that tell you?’

  ‘Ransom’s skin was damaged, just as Mary Carelli’s was. But there was no bleeding, no burst capillaries. Because, in my opinion, his heart had stopped pumping blood.’ Shelton leaned forward, hands clasped in her lap. ‘It’s really just a matter of gravity. A dead person’s blood ends up in the lowest extremity, like a garden hose after you turn off the spigot. By the time the buttocks were scratched, most of Mark Ransom’s blood had gone to his chest.’

  Paget touched the bridge of his nose. ‘Are you certain of that?’

  ‘Not certain. No.’

  ‘But it is your opinion,’ Sharpe interjected.

  Shelton gave a reticent nod. ‘What I would testify, if asked, is that what I have just told you is more probable than not.’

  ‘Which means,’ Sharpe said to Paget, ‘that Ms Carelli waited at least thirty minutes to call 911. Before which she left several scratches on the buttocks of a corpse, quite possibly to make Ransom’s death look different than it really was.’

  Paget gave her an incredulous look. ‘That’s bizarre. This is San Francisco, not Transylvania.’

  ‘That may be.’ Brooks stepped between them, as if he had heard enough. ‘And it may be too little to indict on. But it’s too much to ignore. For now, we’re going on with this.’

  Chapter 4

  Teresa Peralta opened the door of Mark Ransom’s suite.

  She hesitated; for a moment, Terri felt that if she did not enter, nothing would happen to Mary, and Ransom would still be alive. Then she stepped inside and saw the bloodstain on the carpet.

  She was still staring at it when Paget and Johnny Moore came in behind her.

  It was a moment before she turned. ‘Could you see me from the elevator?’ she asked.

  Paget nodded. ‘Clearly enough.’

  It was a little after eleven-thirty in the morning, roughly the time that Mary had arrived, four days prior. The door bore a sign that read: CRIME SCENE – CITY AND COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO. KEEP OUT. A policeman had broken the tape sealing the door; he waited for them by the elevator.

  Terri looked around the room. The furniture was unremarkable – two end tables, a bookshelf, a small desk. The two windows of the sitting room faced east, across the city and toward Berkeley; there was enough morning sun left to make the room somewhat bright.

  ‘You couldn’t have seen my face, though,’ Terri said.

  ‘No, the angle’s wrong, and there’s also the distance. Johnny and I paced it off at about sixty feet. But even three or four seconds would be enough to describe height, weight, and hair color.’ Paget looked down at the bloodstain. ‘Put it this way,’ he finished slowly. ‘I could tell the difference between you and Mary Carelli.’

  A sudden shadow fell across the bloodstain.

  Terri and Paget looked up. Johnny Moore had pulled down a blind and was walking toward the second window. ‘Makes a difference,’ he said, and yanked down the other blind.

  It was like instant dusk: a bright room, suddenly dark enough to sleep in. Johnny Moore’s ruddy face and white beard had turned gray.

  ‘It’s depressing,’ Terri said to him.

  ‘Unless you’re Edgar Allan Poe.’ Moore walked to the end table by the far side of the couch and switched on a lamp. The effect was dim and unnatural, like a lamp in one corner of a windowless cell. ‘Maybe it was Ransom’s idea of romance.’

  ‘Ransom’s idea of romance,’ Paget answered, ‘was “Mutant Cheerleaders in Bondage.”’

  Terri shook her head. ‘There’s no way,’ she said slowly, ‘that I’d have felt comfortable in this room.’

  Paget gazed at the stain and then at Terri. His look was curious, reflective. ‘Of course,’ he observed, ‘you know what happened here.’

  ‘That’s not it.’ She looked around the room. ‘This just doesn’t feel right. If it had been me, and Ransom had pulled down the blinds . . .’

  She stopped there. ‘You’d have left?’ Paget asked.

  She folded her arms. ‘I don’t know.’

  Paget regarded her another moment. ‘In any event, it seems that it would have made an impression on Mary.’

  Moore walked to the middle of the room. ‘Probably so, before she shot him. After, telling it to the cops, what happened might have gotten pretty confused. Like reading Ulysses for the first time.’

  Paget smiled faintly. ‘You like the Irish writers, don’t you?’

  ‘The Irish who stayed.’ As he glanced down at the stain, Moore’s Irish lilt became slightly more pronounced. ‘Personally, I always thought Mark Ransom’s work would gag a vulture.’

  Paget ceased to smile. ‘Not unlike Marnie Sharpe’s theory of this case.’

  Moore considered him and then nodded toward the couch. ‘Why don’t we three rest awhile,’ he said, ‘on the Mark Ransom memorial love seat. You can explain why Miss Carelli defaced the poor man’s arse after she shot him.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ Paget said. ‘Because then he couldn’t complain, of course.’

  Terri realized that she was hugging her shoulders. ‘Would you two mind,’ she asked quietly, ‘if I pulled up the blinds?’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Moore said. He opened the blinds and looked back to Terri. ‘It was becoming a bit like a séance, wasn’t it?’

  Paget stood to the side, watching her face. ‘Johnny’s spent far too much time among the dead,’ he said finally, ‘and I spent too much time with Ms Sharpe this morning. I’m a little off my feed.’

  Staring at the coffee table, Terri imagined the tape of Laura Chase. After a moment, she asked, ‘What’s Sharpe thinking?’

  The two men sat on each side of Terri. Paget was quiet, ordering his thoughts. Resting his feet on the coffee table, Moore gazed slowly around the room.

  ‘It’s pretty simple,’ Paget said. ‘Sharpe’s been arranging and rearranging the facts – or the absence of facts – until Mary comes out a liar.

  ‘First, Mary says Ransom tried to rape her. To which Sharpe, or Shelton, says that there is no sign of seminal fluid and hence no evidence of sexual arousal. And as we know, there was no penetration.’

  Terri felt cold. ‘Mary kept making mistakes. She should have let Ransom deposit the evidence.’

  ‘You’re beginning to sound like me,’ Moore told her. ‘That is, of course, the irony of Sharpe’s scenario.’

  ‘Granted,’ Paget said. ‘But fact two, according to Shelton, is that Mary’s statement that she shot Ransom from two or three inches isn’t even close.’

  Moore nodded. ‘I ran that one past my forensics guy at Berkeley. Take a Walther .380, and the absence of gunshot residue, and he says Shelton has to be right. Liz Shelton’s a professional; to get someone to testify against her on this point, you’ll have to find a whore.’

  Paget shook his head. ‘If I put on some hired gun, Shelton would kill him. I’ll have to find another way around it.’

  ‘In other words,’ Moore said carefully, ‘things happened much too fast for Mary to be sure.’

  ‘Of course.’ Paget paused.
‘But there’s also the lack of gunshot residue on Ransom’s hands. Mary says they struggled and the gun went off. Residue would help confirm that. There wasn’t any.’

  ‘And needn’t be,’ Moore answered. ‘Depends on how it happened.’

  Paget shrugged. ‘The next thing is the blinds. Mary says they were drawn when she got here. But the room service waiter, who has no ax to grind, says they were open. It’s hard to miss the difference. From which Sharpe no doubt posits that Mary drew the blinds, presumably after she shot him, and presumably because she didn’t want to be seen.’

  Moore got up from the couch without responding, looked through one window, then another. Arriving, Terri had seen that the Flood was not a perfect rectangle but a courtyard surrounded by two wings that faced each other. Ransom’s suite was near the center of the top floor; through the window, the city and the bay were framed by wings on either side.

  Moore pointed to the right. ‘I’ll have to check it out,’ he said. ‘But from here it looks like the last couple of windows on that wing could see into this room. At least it’s something you’d think about if you were standing here, wanting privacy.’

  Paget considered that. ‘It works best,’ he said, ‘if this waiter isn’t sure. That way, the blinds are drawn when she gets here, which makes better sense for us than Mary or Ransom pulling them down.’

  Moore sat again. ‘I’ll find the waiter.’

  Watching them, Terri was struck by their total absence of sentiment. Moore did not ask if Mary was telling the truth; Paget’s focus was on what the prosecutor could prove. Neither showed passion or outrage. Which, Terri thought, was more to be expected in Johnny than in Paget: Mary Carelli was the mother of his son.

  ‘That gets us,’ Paget continued, ‘to Mary’s fingernails as compared to Ransom’s. There are scratches on both Mary and Ransom, but Shelton was only able to find traces of skin under Mary’s fingernails, not Ransom’s. To Sharpe, the least that means is that Ransom didn’t scratch her.’

  Moore leaned back on the couch. ‘Interesting,’ he said, ‘but not very compelling. It’s kind of like listening to someone’s theory about life on other planets. Maybe, you think, but you can argue it a thousand different ways, and who knows?’