“Oh, she was. Except she wasn’t really my mother. My real mother went away somewhere. Why didn’t you tell them about the eyes?”
“The eyes?”
“Yeah, you know. When somebody gets murdered, the picture of the murderer stays in their eyes, and all you have to do is look. But my picture didn’t stay in any of their eyes. So I couldn’t have murdered them.”
“It was a case of multiple serial suicides.”
“Suicides,” Chuckie said firmly. “That’s the ticket.”
“There’s Sergeant Devere,” Fred said. “If you’re going to the john, you’d better do it now.”
“I still say you should have told them about the eyes,” Chuckie said. “That would have cleared up everything.”
Fred stood up and waved to Sergeant Devere, who nodded and began to come across the front of the courtroom to them. Sergeant Devere didn’t like Chuckie any more than Fred did, but Sergeant Devere was a professional. In fact, as far as Fred was concerned, Sergeant Devere was awesome. If Devere ever started to play poker for serious, he’d get rich.
“Chuckie wants to go to the bathroom,” Fred told Sergeant Devere. “I’d like to go for a walk, if you get what I mean.”
“Of course,” Sergeant Devere said. “I’ll take Mr. Bickerson out back for a while.”
“I don’t see why I always have to be out back whenever you take a walk,” Chuckie said. “I’ve seen trials on television. The accused guy doesn’t always have to go out back.”
“Judge’s orders,” Sergeant Devere said.
“Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the first day here, you grabbed a paperweight during recess and tried to take a policewoman hostage.”
“Self-defense,” Chuckie said sullenly. “You can’t blame a guy for what he does in self-defense. I’m being railroaded here.”
“Right,”
“Mr. Bickerson?” Sergeant Devere said.
Fred moved away from the table, giving Devere room to work with Chuckie’s shackles. Chuckie was wearing shackles because on their second day in court, he’d tried to kick the bailiff in the groin. Fortunately for the bailiff, Chuckie had seen karate kicks only in the movies. He’d never before actually tried to do one.
Fred left the courtroom, looked around the corridor outside—newspeople everywhere; more cameras than a store that was going out of business on Broadway—and then made his way to the stairs. He went down the single flight to the basement and along the corridor there to the cafeteria. He found Sydney Mellerstein, his junior partner, sitting alone at a table against the wall, drinking coffee. Fred got a cup of coffee for himself, paid for it, and went over to join Sid.
“Jury’s still out.” He sat down.
Sid sighed. “They must be staging an orgy. They couldn’t be having trouble coming to a decision. How’s Chuckie?”
“Chuckie’s Chuckie.”
“That’s too bad. I picked up our messages before I came down here. You got a call from Caroline Hazzard.”
The coffee the cafeteria served in this courthouse was terrible. In Fred’s experience, the coffee the cafeterias served in all courthouses was always terrible. The coffee served in the cafeterias in state legislative buildings was worse. Fred doctored his cup with enough milk and sugar to produce something on the order of a mocha egg cream, and put Chuckie Bickerson firmly out of his mind.
“Caroline Hazzard,” he said. “Now, there’s a blast from the past—the recent past, but the past. I wonder why it was Caroline who called instead of Paul.”
“Maybe because Paul has sense enough not to bother you with hysterical phone messages when you’re right in the middle of a murder trial.”
“Hysterical. That’s right. Caroline is the hysterical one. Always talking about her inner child and how hard she’s working to heal her addictions. What did she want?”
Sydney took a long swig of his coffee. He grimaced. “She wants to hire you. She wants you to work for free. You owe it to the family. You can’t let that woman get away with this.”
“Let what woman get away with what?”
“Let Candida DeWitt get away with publishing her memoirs,” Sid said. “That’s what this flap is all about. Candida DeWitt is publishing her memoirs. I refrained from telling Ms. Hazzard that I intend to camp out all night in front of the door to my local bookstore when the time comes, just so I can have the first copy I can get my hands on. Whew. This is going to be a pip.”
“I wonder how graphic she’ll get,” Fred mused. “ ‘Mr. Fortune Five Hundred Empire Builder may look self-possessed in public, but in private he likes to be dressed up in diapers and fed a bottle of baby formula.’ ”