Shadow of A Doubt Read online

  Shadow of a Doubt

  William J. Coughlin

  © William J. Coughlin 1991

  William J. Coughlin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1991 by St. Martin’s Press, New York.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For Ruth Bridget

  Table of Contents

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  1

  THE DAY BEGAN WITH A FUNERAL.

  It wasn’t much of a funeral, just a dozen assorted men and women, all looking uncomfortable, assembled at the third-rate funeral home selected by the family of the deceased, the deceased being Jimmy Ryan and the family being a nephew who wouldn’t have done anything, except that a small funeral policy paid for Jimmy’s sending off as well as for the grave.

  It was unseasonably warm for the first week in June, but air conditioning had made the place uncomfortably — if appropriately — chilly.

  The friends, myself included, were members of what we liked to call the Club, the Thursday-night meeting of A. A. held in the basement of St. Jude’s.

  St. Jude, the Catholics say, is the patron saint of impossible causes. Some of us were that, some of us weren’t. Jimmy was.

  He had, during his brief lifetime, managed to ingest a river of cheap whiskey. That liquid had boiled his blood vessels and reduced his heart muscle to mush, which was the reason he expired like a drowning swimmer, sucking for a breath that would not come, despite his having been off the stuff for over a year.

  Jimmy, although he’d been Irish, had left the church, except for the weekly meetings in the St. Jude basement, so the funeral director did the honors, mouthing Bible blended with a kind of preppy psychology. Jimmy would have thought it hilarious.

  In other years, other times, other places, we would have assembled to drink his memory in the whiskey that had killed him. But after the brief service, the body being shipped out for cremation, we gathered in a small Greek place, sopping up doughnuts with oversugared java. Coffee is the drug of choice for recovering alcoholics.

  Which I am. At least I hope I am. Every day the struggle begins anew. At least it does for me, and, I’m told, each of the other members of the Club.

  So, in toasts of pungent coffee, Jimmy had his memory celebrated by a strange variety of people — a doctor, a board-certified psychiatrist, a bank vice president who had been clean without a drop for thirty years but who was still only one drink away from destruction. Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy; male, female, and some who weren’t quite sure — every kind of person and calling was represented by the members of the Club.

  Even a lawyer.

  I am that lawyer, but only by the grace of God and the benevolence of friends of influence with the bar association. Oh, I admit I was suspended — not disbarred, there is a difference — for a year. I sold real estate. But that was after the month-long clinic stay imposed on me by the court.

  Still, some people might be envious. I am forty-seven years old. I figure I have made over three million dollars, although I have lost every damn penny, one way or the other. I have been married three times, each time to a gloriously beautiful woman, and each of my gloriously beautiful wives drank even more than I did. Drunks attract drunks, you see. I have a child, a daughter, nineteen, who I’m told is currently in a drug rehabilitation program somewhere in California. I haven’t seen Lisa in sixteen years. Sometimes I see her in my dreams, not as she is now but as she was then, laughing and small.

  Once, years ago, I had a whole floor in Detroit’s Buhl Building. Five partners, twenty associates, and support troops. First cabin all the way. The money, usually from negligence lawsuits and other courtroom triumphs, seemed to flow in like an eternal river, like the whiskey. And then, for different reasons, both stopped.

  Now, in a distant suburb of Detroit, I have a desk in the office of a friend. His girls take my messages. I can use the conference room and the library but I have to pay for my own phone. Like the famous Blanche, I am dependent upon the kindness of strangers.

  I make a living. Just.

  Of course, the big house in Grosse Pointe Farms is gone, along with the servants. And the red Rolls Royce. I loved that car, I must admit, more passionately than I loved any of my wives, but the car went into the yawning maw of alimony settlements and creditors.

  Now, I have a small studio. Rented furniture. No garage, just a carport. My car is an aging Ford Escort.

  But I’m alive, which is more than anyone can say for Jimmy Ryan. And I have learned not to be bitter. Each day is a new life. That may sound trite to you, but it has become nothing less than the secret of life for me.

  The Club members consumed too many doughnuts and too much coffee, just as we all used to consume too much liquor, and so, stuffed to the gills, we adjourned, Jimmy in our minds like a ghost.

  *

  I DROVE out to the mall parking lot next to my office in the small suburban city of Pickeral Point, located between Mount Clemens and St. Clair, both of them small Michigan cities bordering the St. Clair waterway and lying just north of Detroit, the violent, decaying giant where I made and lost my fortune.

  There are no parking garages in Pickeral Point. Parking garages mean commerce and success. The only paid parking was on the street where meters waited to be fed. People usually parked free at the mall lot and walked. Pickeral Point was not exactly a hub of blossoming commerce. If you had ambition and hope, you soon left Pickeral Point for greener fields. Being somewhat short of both, I had come and I had stayed.

  I pushed open the double doors to the office. They were the first leather-covered doors in the city of Pickeral Point, and they impressed the working-class clients who came through them, their mouths talking of justice but their eyes glittering with greedy dreams. The receptionist, a girl with very large breasts and a very small intellect, looked up as if seeing me for the first time. Then a smile of recognition lit her dull but pretty features.

  “Hey, Mr. Sloan,” she said, smiling. “You got a client. At least I think she’s a client. I gave her some coffee and had her wait in your office. Jeez, she must’ve been in there an hour or more already.”

  “As usual, I was delayed in church,” I said as I passed. It was meant as a joke but it was wasted on the dull young woman, who nodded reverently.

  *

  SHE was waiting all right, standing in my small office and staring out the window at downtown Pickeral Point, all two blocks of it.

  A dusty blonde, she had the compact build of a woman who has taken excellent care of herself. Strong legs like a runner’s, a firm back and buttocks. The black suit she wore was expensive, well cut with a commanding style that reeked money.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” I said as I entered the office.

  She turned slowly and looked me over as if I were a piece of art, or meat, up for sale.

  She exuded a quality like old wine and other precious things that grow more valuable with passing years. She wasn’t young but she was an absolute beauty.

  “You don’t recognize me, do you, Charley?”

  She was right, although there was something familiar about her, like the
refrain of a half-remembered song, or an old, unidentified photo you might come across in a picture album.

  “You look familiar,” I responded weakly.

  “Christ, I should. You used to make love to me almost every Saturday night. Have I changed that much?”

  Memory is a mystery, they say: no one knows exactly how it works. I think it was her eyes that opened the rusted lock. They were green and dark, a bit like emeralds. I had known only one pair of eyes like that, ever.

  “Robin?”

  She grinned, displaying perfect teeth, and came over, putting her arms on my shoulders.

  “Who else?” She gently kissed my lips, just a quick soft touch, but warm and unexpectedly exciting. Thirty years vanished and it was as if we were still teenagers.

  “Surprised, Charley?”

  I reached out and put my hands on her waist. I touched a strong, athletic body. “I don’t know what to say.”

  Those eyes danced with amusement as she stepped back and looked me up and down again. “You look great, Charley. You even got rid of the pimples.”

  I laughed. “A triumph of modern medicine and maturity. What brings you back to your home state after all these years?” Without responding, she turned and walked to one of my two office chairs. She sat, crossed her very good legs, and fixed those remembered eyes on me. There was a tension in that glance, as if we were strangers once again.

  “It’s all over the television and radio this morning,” she said without emotion. “My husband was killed last night.”

  “Oh, Jesus! I’m sorry to hear that, Robin. What happened?”

  “They say he was murdered, Charley,” she replied coolly. “They’ve arrested our daughter. That’s why I’m here. I want you to represent her.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Here, Pickeral Point. They have her at the sheriff’s office. I just came from there.”

  I sat behind my desk and pulled out a legal pad. “Okay, I’ll get right over there. First, Robin, I don’t even know your married name.”

  “Harwell. Mrs. Harrison Harwell.”

  I looked up. “Like in Harwell Boats?”

  She nodded.

  Harwell Boats was the county’s largest employer. Harwell manufactured small, fast speedboats, cheap but well made. Harwell was the Henry Ford of pleasure boating. It was a national company. The plant in Pickeral Point was one of five around the country.

  “Charley, we don’t have much time for histories so I’ll make this brief. I was Harrison’s secretary, then his mistress, and since ten years ago, his wife.”

  “How old is your daughter?”

  “Twenty-one.” She smiled slightly as she saw my reaction. “Stepdaughter. Her mother, Harrison’s second wife, died. Our daughter’s name is Angel.” She paused. “I consider her my daughter. I raised her, Charley. I couldn’t love her more if she were my own blood.” The declaration was made mechanically, without any corresponding emotion.

  “What happened, Robin, if you know? Was he shot?”

  “Stabbed,” she said calmly, but there was a tension in her now that I hadn’t seen before. “One of our servants found him in his study. They called me and I called the police. He was dead, a mess, blood all over everything. The police found my daughter hiding in her bedroom; her hands and clothing were covered with his blood.”

  “Jesus.”

  She nodded slowly. “Charley, if we had more time I’d be able to put this a little more diplomatically. Angel has mental and emotional problems. She was always high-strung, but the real scary stuff started a couple of years ago when she turned eighteen. She got out of the last place just a few months ago. She’s been hospitalized several times.”

  “Schizophrenia? I’m told it often hits in the late teens.”

  Robin spoke slowly, as though she wanted to make sure I understood each word. “That’s what the doctors thought at first, but since then they’ve changed their minds and their diagnosis.” Her slow smile was forced and sad. “With each new doctor we got a new diagnosis.”

  “What you’re saying is, she killed him.”

  “They wouldn’t let me talk to her, but they told me she admitted doing it.”

  “Did she give them a reason?”

  She looked away. “I don’t know. They didn’t say.” The last few words trembled, as did her lips, but for just a moment, and then she looked back at me, in control once more. “If she did do it, she was insane.”

  “Sounds that way.”

  “I want everything done for her, Charley. I don’t care what it costs.”

  Years ago I would have taken words like that as an invitation to pry the lid off the family fortune. But things change.

  “I’ll get over to the jail and start the ball rolling, Robin, but I think you’ll want to bring in real high-powered counsel on this case. I’ll give you the names of some of the leading criminal lawyers around and you can take your pick.”

  “Why not you?”

  What was I going to tell her? That I was hanging on to the earth by my sober fingernails and didn’t want the emotional risk of a major case? That I didn’t know if I had the grit needed for a major trial anymore and if I didn’t, it was something I didn’t want to find out?

  Instead, I said, “I’m sort of semiretired, Robin.” I gestured at my tiny, bleak office. “I handle some small matters here and there, just enough to keep my hand in. I sort of play at it now. I think you need a heavy hitter, not someone like me.”

  Those eyes, just like old times, could turn into two laser beams. “I have plenty of money, Charley. Enough to bring anyone out of retirement. And you’re the one I want to handle my daughter’s case.”

  I smiled. In fact, I damn near laughed. A few short years ago, the thought of turning away money would have seemed like something from a drunken nightmare. But it was natural enough now. “Well, as I say, I’ll run over there, file my appearance, and get things started. But unless you’re her legal guardian, she may want a lawyer she selects.”

  “Angel should have had a guardian appointed but my husband was against anything like that. He always thought she might get better and that having had a guardian appointed could be a stigma down the road.”

  Robin took up a small, expensive purse and extracted a checkbook, quickly scribbling out a check. “She is insane, Charley. Oh, she looks all right, but if you talk to her for a while, you can see she’s quite ill.” She handed me the check.

  It was for twenty thousand dollars. I almost didn’t hear the next words she spoke so confidently. “I’m sure you can get her off on a plea of insanity.”

  I looked up from the check. “Insanity never was an easy defense, Robin. The Michigan law was changed a few years back. No one is ever found not guilty by reason of insanity anymore. If the crime was committed and the defendant is crazy, juries will find the defendant guilty but mentally ill. It’s a compromise verdict — it means the same prison term — but jurors seem to feel better about bringing it in.”

  Her lips parted and her eyes widened slightly. “What do you mean?”

  “Someone like your daughter, someone sick and accused of a felony, unless she’s baying at the moon, a jury will accept the illness but they’ll use it to reach the compromise verdict, which is really the same as guilty. The prisoner is supposed to get treatment, but as a practical matter, that generally doesn’t happen.

  “Theoretically,” I said, “they could still bring in a not guilty by reason of insanity, but they never do.”

  She was silent for a moment. I thought she had paled. “Do what you can for her, Charley.”

  *

  THE city of Pickeral Point isn’t very big, just a slice of land ending in a long picturesque boardwalk along the St. Clair River. Once our little city was the home of prosperous farmers who built large Victorian homes along the river’s edge. Now, with everyone trying to get the hell out of Detroit, it’s become a refuge for the rich, who buy the river homes, and the poor, who cluster in little frame houses on
dirt streets, well back from the tourist-oriented main street along the riverfront.

  Directly across, on the other shore of the wide St. Clair River, the connecting link in the Great Lakes, are miles of enormous Canadian chemical plants. They look like a giant set for a science fiction movie, with stainless steel forests of industrial chimneys and huge metal pipes winding around ugly expanses of long, low windowless labs and factories. This is Canada, but the shoreline looks more like a part of another planet. When the wind is right, you can smell the powerful acid odor exuded by the bubbling chemicals they brew over there.

  But on the American side, at least at Pickeral Point, the shoreline resembles a calender photo. One side of the river road is occupied by an upscale shopping mall with acres of parking for patrons of its many pricey shops. Across the road is the impressive wooden river boardwalk, and beyond that are the stately Victorian mansions, sitting like fat matrons, one after another, on long wooded lots that slope down toward the busy river. Enormous ocean-going freighters bringing the world’s cargo to the Great Lakes glide past, almost close enough to touch.

  In the summer, when all the tourist and day visitors from Detroit flock up to enjoy the mall and the boardwalk, Pickeral Point looks prosperous. But that bustling activity is ephemeral. When winter threatens, the tourists stay home and the town’s prosperity collapses like a deflating balloon.

  Pickeral Point is also the county seat for Michigan’s Kerry County, small in comparison with its neighboring counties and oddly shaped, like an axe head, cut that way originally to give the county farmers legal access to the river. Kerry has a sheriff, a prosecutor, a probate judge, other county officers, and three circuit judges. All occupy a cluster of new buildings set in a square just back from the river, called Feathers tone Square after a dead state senator. The residents, however, call it Featherhead Square — cynical perhaps, but accurate. Featherhead Square consists of three new buildings: the county building, the court building, and the jail.

  I went to the court building and filed the legal appearance form showing that I was the lawyer representing Angel Harwell, then I walked across the square to the two-story jail.