“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
“You would know,” Betty said, “because those two are pristine. Sarajean was before the situation got completely out of hand, and Marlee we cleaned up ourselves when things got crazy. And then things got crazier.”
“Actually,” Martha said carefully, “they’re not all completely messed up. I did try to straighten out the file on Elyse Martineau. And the one on Conchita Estevez, too. I mean, in the early days, we tried and tried. We tried to make them make sense, and when they wouldn’t do that we tried to fix things ourselves. But there’s a lot of work here, Mr. Demarkian. We’re not detectives. We’re not supposed to go rooting around in the evidence and putting it in order. Most of the time, we’d just make a mess of things.”
Gregor nodded. “So how is it supposed to work? The detectives bring you evidence—”
“Evidence samples and files,” Betty said. “They’re supposed to have them all in order and ready to file, and then we’ve got big cabinets in the back where we can arrange things. Physical evidence in the drawers; transcripts and notes and that sort of thing in big loose-leaf notebooks that go on the shelves over-head. They’re supposed to put everything in order, and we’re supposed to take the finished product and just place it where it goes, where it can be found again. If you see what I mean.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, “but these weren’t put in order. How did you get them? Did they come in boxes like that? And who exactly gave them to you?”
“Oh, they both came down and gave us things,” Martha said. “Both Marty and Cord, you know, over the last few months. And they did sometimes bring boxes, just like those. But as often as not they’d just have things in their pockets, or in their hands, or in big brown paper bags.”
“I unloaded at least half a dozen brown paper bags,” Betty said. “You see all these things, you know, about gay men.”
“Will and Grace,” Martha said.
“And Lord only knows I know enough gay men to choke on,” Betty said.
“Betty just came out a few months ago,” Martha said. “We had a party for her at Danny O’Brien’s Pub.”
“And they’re supposed to be so neat,” Betty said, “but you couldn’t prove that one with Cord Leehan. His stuff was in just as much of a mess as Marty’s was. We’d come in here and pour the contents of the bags out on the table and try to sort them out.”
“But we really didn’t have that kind of time,” Martha said. “This is the one evidence room in the city We have hundreds of cases we’re actively handling at any one time. And then we’ve got things we’re keeping because of appeals or because the case has gone cold or because the department just wants to keep the stuff. We keep a lot of it, all of it in most felony cases because there are so many appeals. And just in case.”
“Just in case somebody makes a mistake,” Betty said.
Gregor nodded. He did not say what everybody had to be thinking, and that was that given the utter chaos of the evidence here, the chances that some-body would “make a mistake” were damned nearly 100 percent.
“Okay,” he said. “What about other people? Did anybody ever bring down evidence on one of these cases besides Marty Gayle and Cord Leehan?”
Martha nodded. “Sometimes. That isn’t the way it’s supposed to work, of course. Marty and Cord are supposed to be coordinating things. But every once in a while we got one of the uniformed patrolmen with items for us to file. Those weren’t too bad. I mean, they came labeled, and that kind of thing.”
“Mr. Leehan and Mr. Gayle didn’t label the evidence they submitted to you?”
“Well,” Betty said. “You saw it. That’s how it came in. It wasn’t labeled. It wasn’t in any kind of order. We’re not even sure how much of it is relevant and how much is just stuff that was hanging around that got thrown into the mix.”
“We think they were trying to confuse each other,” Martha said. “They weren’t submitting evidence for the record the way they should have been because they were each trying to trick the other one into thinking they had less than they did. Or does that make sense? We think—”
“We think they both thought it would be better if nobody ever solved that case than if the other one of them did,” Betty said. “Hell, I made a mess of it, too.”
“That’s all right,” Gregor said. “I got the gist of it. Just tell me you didn’t send over anything that could be labeled physical evidence—”