Degree of Guilt Read online

  ‘Miss Carelli?’

  ‘Could you stop the tape a moment? Please.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’ Monk said calmly. ‘It’s regulation.’

  The tape turned again, recording silence.

  Mary reached out to push a button. The tape clicked off.

  ‘I want to see a lawyer,’ she said ‘Now.’

  Chapter 4

  They took Paget to the witness room, opened the door, and closed it again, leaving them alone.

  The way she looked startled him.

  The fluorescent light captured with pitiless clarity the change since the previous day: puffy eyelids; a yellow pallor to her skin; the slack beneath her face. Slumped in the chair, her slender frame looked drained of energy, much older and too thin.

  He gazed at the bruise next to her eye, then at her eyes themselves. They had a haunted, fearful look she would hate if she could see it.

  It was that – the sense that some essence had been taken from her – which made Paget want to touch her. And then feel, in the next moment, that this was the last thing he should do.

  ‘I’m sorry this happened,’ he said.

  She studied him. ‘Don’t feel sorry, Chris. It happened, and it’s done. I just want to get out of here.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. Please, just help me.’

  Paget nodded. ‘The first thing is to persuade the D.A. he doesn’t have a case.’

  ‘How do I do that?’

  ‘I’ll help you find a first-rate criminal lawyer – someone who’s tried these cases a lot and whom the D.A respects. He or she can sit down with the prosecution and tell them why they should drop this.’

  Mary gazed through him, as if she had not heard.

  ‘If you want,’ he said, ‘I can probably get someone here to see you within an hour. Get them started.’

  Slowly, she shook her head.

  Paget sat across from her. ‘I know you’re tired . . .’

  ‘You don’t understand, Chris. You have to do this.’

  Paget felt a kind of dull surprise. It was as if, he thought, her own shock was a contagion.

  ‘Look,’ he said at length, ‘I know you can’t believe what happened, that it doesn’t seem real. But it is. You need a real lawyer.’

  ‘And you’re not one?’

  ‘Not for this. I don’t do homicides anymore.’

  ‘Do this one.’

  Paget stared at her. Were it not for what she wanted, her new animation would have made him feel better; some life was back in her face.

  ‘If I were going to resume an old career, Mary, yours would be the last case I’d choose. You don’t try cases for someone you know.’

  ‘Is that what I am?’ she said with irony. ‘Someone you know?’

  Paget leaned back. ‘I would have a very hard time defining,’ he said at length, ‘all the things you are to me. You know as well as I do the reasons I can’t take this.’

  Mary seemed to gauge his strength of will. ‘They’re the very same reasons,’ she said finally, ‘that you have no choice.’

  Paget felt a rush of anger. ‘You’re in no position –’

  ‘No choice at all,’ she interrupted. ‘As you know all too well.’ The irony stole back into her voice. ‘After all, there is so very much that binds us.’

  Paget fought for self-control. In a lower key, he said, ‘Carlo, you mean.’

  She looked away. ‘Choose whatever reason you like, Chris. The one that makes you feel best. Just do this.’

  ‘Damn you,’ Paget snapped. ‘Think. Think of him for once. Even if you walk tomorrow, Ransom’s death will be news for months. Whatever else you and I may have done, we’ve at least kept Carlo’s life to himself. But “The Return of Chris and Mary” will be the stuff of TV movies. You’re not just asking me to do something for you. You’re asking me to risk changing Carlo’s world forever.’

  Mary looked up again, her gaze level. ‘How do you know,’ she finally said, ‘that I’m not thinking about Carlo?’

  ‘Because you couldn’t be.’

  ‘You are so very good at believing the worst of me.’

  ‘It’s hardly a natural gift, Mary. I came by these feelings the old-fashioned way – you taught me.’

  Her face closed against him, as if she were withdrawing all feeling. Then she shrugged. ‘Have it your way, then. I am, as usual, a cold-blooded bitch. I’m forcing you to put our son through publicity hell to spare me the minor inconvenience of a trial – or, at most, life imprisonment. Because I know how hard you’ll work to spare Carlo the further trauma of having a murderess for a mother.’

  Paget watched her face. ‘Why?’ he asked softly. ‘Why force me to do this? Just tell me that much.’

  ‘Because I know you’ll do whatever it takes to win whatever you decide to win.’ Her voice was quiet, bitter. ‘Isn’t that what every client wants?’

  Paget found himself looking at the scratches on her neck, then at the table. ‘No,’ he finally said, ‘there’s something else. I need to know what’s really happening here.’

  For a moment, Mary was silent. Paget could not tell whether she was considering what he had said. Then she sat straighter, looked him in the face.

  ‘What’s really happening here,’ she answered crisply, ‘is that Mark Ransom was a pervert and a swine, who at the moment that I shot him was especially deserving. Or, as I put it more neutrally to the police, at the moment that the gun went off.’

  Paget stared at her. ‘The police,’ he repeated. ‘Why did you stop answering Monk’s questions?’

  ‘Because I was tired, half in shock. Because, however good my reasons, I’d killed someone. You can’t know how that feels – you don’t believe it, and yet you’re scared to death nothing will ever be the same.’ She paused. ‘For the first time in my life, I stopped coping, that’s all. I think I have a decent excuse.’

  ‘That’s a reason not to talk to them at all, not tonight anyhow. But once you’ve started . . .’

  ‘I wanted to persuade them, don’t you see. Wanted all this over with – to get out of this building without ever needing you or anyone.’ She paused, exhaling, head bent forward. ‘The questions became confusing. I couldn’t recall things clearly, couldn’t follow him anymore. I was afraid of making a mistake.’

  ‘How can the truth,’ Paget asked quietly, ‘be a mistake?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Mary shook her head, as if to clear it. ‘You feel like someone in a Kafka novel. Like they’re going to misunderstand something you said, or did or didn’t do, or something you didn’t remember quite right. That tape . . .’ She paused, touching her face with the fingers of one hand. ‘I was dislocated. I just had to stop talking, that’s all.’

  Paget folded his hands. ‘Do you have the wherewithal to talk to me? Monk told me only a little, on the elevator up.’

  Mary gazed at him. ‘You’ll do it, then?’

  She seemed unsure again; it was as if she were too vulnerable to be sure that she had won.

  ‘What I’m agreeing to do,’ Paget said, ‘is find out what the D.A.’s thinking. For that I’ll need to know precisely what it is you told them.’

  Mary nodded. ‘All right,’ she said.

  She seemed to reach within herself. When she spoke again, it was in a monotone – repeating her litany of a dead actress; a squalid weekend in Palm Springs; the dark side of a famous senator; a celebrated but perverted writer; a brutal attempted rape; the gun firing; a spreading bloodstain – as if she were dictating a recorded message. When it ended, an hour had passed, and Paget felt exhausted.

  He was quiet for a time, organizing his thoughts. It was odd, he realized; one of the things that slowed him was a recurring image of the day James Colt had died. Paget had told the story to Carlo more than once. He had gone to cash a check and heard the news from a bank teller; tears had begun running down her face as she tried to count out money. He pushed the memory aside.

  ‘Do I know,’ he fin
ally asked, ‘everything the police know?’

  Mary gave him a look of quiet understanding; he had not asked her about the events themselves. ‘What you know,’ she answered, ‘is everything I told them.’

  He watched her. ‘Would you like to finish up with Monk – once you’re rested?’

  ‘No.’ Her voice was clear and cool. ‘I used to be a lawyer, you may recall. Any tape I give is evidence at trial, mistakes and all. I want you to talk for me. Persuade them there should be no trial.’

  Paget’s eyes met hers. Let her know, he thought, that I’m studying her face. ‘What about a lie detector test? Those aren’t admissible, and they’ll likely want one, if only to cover themselves if they drop the case.’

  ‘I don’t believe in them.’ Mary’s gaze remained steady. ‘I don’t believe they can measure guilt.’

  ‘We can do it in my office. If we don’t like the results, the D.A. never sees it.’

  ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘He abused me, and I killed him. I told them that. The only question they’re facing is the degree of guilt. I want you to persuade them that they already have the answer.’

  Paget watched her. A minute, perhaps more, waiting for his silence to work on her. She said nothing.

  ‘Tell me about the medical examiner,’ he finally said, ‘Everything she did.’

  Mary did that, eyes narrow with concentration. When she finished, he asked, ‘Were there powder marks?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On Ransom’s shirt.’

  She leaned back in her chair. ‘Is that important?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet.’

  She studied him. ‘They’ll tell you, right?’

  Paget let that hang a moment, unanswered. ‘I expect so,’ he said finally. ‘I suppose I’d better go see them.’

  ‘They’ll be in now?’

  ‘For this – yes. The D.A. himself will be in.’ Paget stood. ‘They hate cases like this, you know. Ninety-nine percent of what they get in, nobody gives a damn about. But there are too many ways that something like this, with well-known people, can go bad on them.’

  ‘What does that mean for me?’

  ‘Politics, for openers. You have a dead Pulitzer Prize winner, accused of attempted rape by the celebrity who shot him. There isn’t a voter with a pulse who won’t have some reaction to this, no matter what the facts are or what the D.A. does. It means they’re going to be very careful, and that nothing will happen very fast.’

  It seemed to deaden her; he could watch her imagine days, or even weeks, without an answer. In any other context, Paget would have felt too much compassion to press his advantage. ‘Which,’ he told her, ‘brings us once again to Carlo.’

  She looked up at him. ‘Forget,’ he said coldly, ‘that you’re going to have to tolerate publicity that would make Liz Taylor vomit, or that Court TV will fight to televise your testimony in all its intimate details. You’re going to have to want that. Because it’s not just about who you are, or who Ransom was, or even the terrible stuff about Laura Chase and our late and sainted senator. Your defense lays out as a feminist cause – a fight for justice for all the powerless victims of date rape. No competent defense lawyer would try to win this case at trial without first trying to win it in the media. Including me.

  ‘There’s only one difference. Any other lawyer would love that. I’ll hate you for it. Because of the son I’ll be living with every day. You should think very hard about having that kind of lawyer defend this kind of case.’

  When he finished, Mary was gripping the table.

  ‘You were always good,’ she finally said, ‘on television.’

  Paget simply stared at her. In a softer voice, she added, ‘I’ll try to make things right with Carlo.’

  Paget did not answer her. Instead he opened the door, said briskly to the matron, ‘We’re through here,’ and let them take Mary to her cell without saying anything more.

  The district attorney occupied the corner office of a bleak green maze that housed two lawyers in cubicles that a rabbit would resent. Paget’s guide, a wiry woman in her mid thirties who had introduced herself as Marnie Sharpe but said little else, steered him through the door. Her air of humorless containment suggested to Paget that she was a lawyer, not the D.A.’s secretary, and that she was already feeling the weight of some responsibility for Ransom.

  The D.A. had claimed one of the few decent spaces in the building. There was nothing one could do about the three small windows – neo-Stalinist architecture, Paget thought – but McKinley Brooks had twice as much room and no roommates. There was an Afghan rug, a leather chair, one potted palm, and a wall big enough to house the usual photo collection of a public man: Brooks with several judges, two mayors and, of all people, Luciano Pavarotti. His leather briefcase sat unopened on his desk, as if Brooks had returned hastily from home.

  Brooks rose from his chair with a professionally amiable smile and the fluid grace of an ex-athlete still in his early forties and only now running to fat. The carefully trimmed gray Afro, slight double chin, and liquid eyes made him look, at first glance, like the slicker black version of a pleasant Rotarian.

  ‘Christopher,’ he said in a gravelly voice that managed to make every word sound like a performance as Othello. ‘What are you doing here, nice uptown lawyer that you are?’

  ‘Visiting a sick friend,’ Paget said easily. ‘Anyone seen Mark Ransom lately?’

  From the corner of his eye, Paget saw Marnie Sharpe’s mouth tighten.

  ‘The medical examiner,’ Brooks answered. ‘Even as we speak. And you’ve met Marnie, I assume.’

  Paget nodded. ‘Just now.’

  ‘Please sit down, both of you. Marnie will be handling this for the office.’ Brooks looked over at Sharpe, adding, ‘Chris and I are old friends.’

  What that was intended to convey, Paget suspected, was that he should be accorded the respect due someone who had given money to Brooks’s campaign. The good-humored civility was routine: even in a city as liberal as this one, it had taken a black man as smart and supple as Brooks to win election to a law-and-order post. What was not routine was Marnie Sharpe. Paget knew enough to know that Sharpe was not on the D.A.’s homicide team; it had taken Brooks a few short hours to think through the politics of dealing with Mary Carelli and to decide that it played best with a woman prosecutor.

  As if reading Paget’s mind, Brooks said, ‘Mamie’s from our rape unit. She’s ideally suited to be attuned to all the aspects of this matter.’

  That, Paget thought, was a particularly neat touch: a prosecutor who could reasonably claim to identify with Mary as possible victim, or could deflect charges of callousness if they decided to prosecute. Paget said evenly, ‘I appreciate your sensitivity.’

  Brooks smiled a moment, as if acknowledging the subtlety of the compliment. Something in the smile reminded Paget that, beneath his geniality, Brooks was as sentimental as a Venus’s-flytrap. Paget, Mary, and even the pressures on Marnie Sharpe would get as much or as little consideration as Brooks’s circumstances required.

  Brooks’s smile faded. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Paget shrugged. ‘Miss Carelli is a friend of mine.’

  ‘The Lasko case.’ Brooks nodded. ‘Of course.’

  Paget felt Sharpe watching from the side, her wary, suspicious look seeming somehow to include both men. ‘I don’t suppose,’ Paget said, ‘that either of you doubts this is traumatic for her. Even without all the publicity, stretching it out will make things that much worse.’

  ‘It’s just a mess,’ Brooks agreed. ‘I’m sure you’ve already told her how little we enjoy things like this.’

  ‘Of course. But she’s a little beyond the standard consolations. She’s been beaten, forced to kill a man to keep from being raped, and thrown in a jail because she wanted to see me. The first two things you can’t do anything about. The last one, you can.’

  Brooks held up a hand. ‘Please understand. We’re not going to shove her in some cell
with a bunch of drunks. She’ll be as comfortable as we can make her here.’

  ‘That’s the key word: “here.”’ Paget appraised him. ‘Right now she’s under arrest. Within forty-eight hours, you’ve got to file a complaint charging her with something, or let her go. You can rearrest and charge her anytime you want. But nothing that happens in the next forty-eight hours is going to turn this into a case. And making someone like Mary Carelli wait two days for you to spring her is bad practice and worse politics.’

  Brooks spread both hands. ‘We had to be cautious, Chris. We’ve got a corpse on the first floor who was America’s most famous living writer when he checked into the Flood this morning.’

  Paget turned to take in Sharpe. ‘How much of Ransom’s work have either of you read?’

  Sharpe stared at him in silence. ‘A few of his books,’ Brooks answered.

  Paget kept looking at Sharpe. ‘Then is either of you really surprised that Ransom tried to rape someone? Because a lot of literate women in this country won’t be.’

  Sharpe seemed to tense; there was, Paget thought, something brittle about her. It would make her harder to deal with, and the only place it might ever work for him was if they went to trial. ‘We have to go on the evidence,’ she said. ‘Not on what he may have written. Or was planning to write.’

  ‘Which brings us,’ Brooks said quietly, ‘to this nasty tape about Laura Chase and Senator Colt.’ He paused. ‘Millions of people still love the man. Including me.’

  Paget nodded. ‘You met him, as I recall.’

  ‘I campaigned for him.’ Brooks shook his head. ‘When his plane crashed, two friends and I drove three thousand miles across the country in a state of shock to see them bury him. It was like we couldn’t let go.’ He gazed at Paget. ‘The country,’ he added softly, ‘has never quite let go.’

  That was right, Paget thought. Perhaps it was that Colt’s plane crash at night in the California desert, three months after Laura Chase had died, had seemed so arbitrary and irrational. With his blond hair and grace of movement, his smile and quick wit, James Colt had seemed at forty impossibly young to be President; yet there had been something bracing in the thought, as if only a country whose best moments lay ahead would choose him. One had not thought of James Colt and thought of death; perhaps that was why the shock of it remained imprinted on the mind like the images of his memorial service: his ash-blond widow, painfully stoic; the unformed face of his teenage son, transformed by the wishes of those watching into an eerie replica of the father.