Mary, Mary (Matthew Hope), page 21
“I remember it quite well, though.”
Getting nervous. Whenever people who don’t ordinarily use the word “quite” in their everyday speech suddenly start putting on airs, you know they’re uncomfortable.
“Anything distinctive about that dress, other than the stains?”
“No, but—”
“Just an ordinary blue denim dress, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Kind you could pick up at Penney’s or—”
“Objection, Your Honor.”
“Overruled.”
“—or any department store, any clothing store, just an ordinary dress, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Any tears or rips on it?”
“No.”
“No monogram on it, is there?”
“No.”
“No letters ‘M.J.,’ for example.”
“No.”
“And certainly no letters ‘M.B.’”
“No.”
“So—aside from the stains—there’s nothing really remarkable about this simple blue denim dress, is there?”
“No, but—”
“Then what makes you think it’s the same dress you saw almost three months ago?”
“The stains are distinctive.”
“Ah. These stains that you said look exactly like ink stains—”
“No, I said they were bloodstains.”
“Well, excuse me, sir, but didn’t you say...well, let me look at my notes here...I can have this read back to you if you like...didn’t you say that if we were to take one of those old-fashioned fountain pens...well, here are your exact words, please correct me if I’m wrong...‘if you flipped the nib at a piece of fabric,’ is what you said, ‘the drops that would spatter on it would look like blood. The shape of the drops and the color. That’s what a bloodstain five, six days old looks like. Exactly like a black ink stain.’ Isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes.”
“Then these stains did look like ink stains?”
“Yes. But they were unmistakably bloodstains.”
“So you’ve said. And it was these stains that caused you to recognize the dress almost three months later.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t all bloodstains look pretty much alike, Mr. Callahan?”
“Not all of them.”
“Well, bloodstains spattered on a dress, like ink from a pen...wouldn’t these look pretty much alike?”
“More or less.”
“Yet you say these particular bloodstains, or ink stains, or whatever they—”
“Objection, Your Honor.”
“Sustained. Cut it out, Mr. Hope.”
“These stains were sufficiently distinctive for you to know that the dress you were shown in court today is the very same dress Mary Jones brought into your shop on the first of September.”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” I said.
With a totally incredulous lilt of the voice and a look of disbelief to the jury, both of which Atkins caught, but decided to let pass without objection. He knew that Callahan was not only sympathetic but very strong as well and probably felt that reining me in might lead the jury to believe he was overprotecting a witness who needed no help.
“Mary Jones,” I said, and paused. “Is that the name she gave you?”
“Yes.”
“Positive about that, are you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you wrote it down yourself, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So you must’ve been certain the name she gave you was Mary Jones. No mistake about that, was there?”
“She told me she was Mary Jones.”
“You asked her for her name...”
“Yes.”
“So you could write it on the receipt...”
“Yes.”
“And she said ‘Mary Jones.’”
“Yes.”
“Any hesitation when she gave you her name?”
“No.”
“Just Mary Jones flat out.”
“Well...no. Not flat out.”
“What I’m asking, Mr. Callahan...did you have any reason to believe, at the time, that this might not be the woman’s name?”
“Well...Jones,” Callahan said, and grimaced, and rolled his eyes at the jury.
“Jones, yes. Is there anything wrong with that name?”
“No. But when people are using a false name, they’ll use the name Jones, you know,” he said, directly to the jury again.
“I see. Then you thought she was using a false name, is that it?”
“No.”
“You thought it was her real name?”
“I don’t know what I thought at the time. I asked her what her name was and she stood there looking at me, kind of puzzled, as if she hadn’t heard what I—”
“But you didn’t think the name was a false name, did you?”
“No. What happened was—”
“You’ve answered the question, thank you.”
“May he finish, Your Honor?”
“You may conclude what you were saying.”
“I was only going to say that I had to ask her again what her name was. ’Cause she didn’t seem to understand. I said, ‘Your name, your name’ and she just kept staring at me, so finally I said, ‘Whose dress is this, ma’am?’ and that’s when she gave me her name, Mary Jones, and that’s when I wrote Mary Jones on the receipt.”
“When she gave you her name, you didn’t say, ‘Gee, that sounds like a phony name,’ anything like that, did you?”
“No.”
“You accepted it as her name, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“But today, here in court, you identified the woman as Mary Barton.”
“Yes.”
“No doubt in your mind, is there, that Mary Jones and Mary Barton are one and the same person?”
“No doubt at all.”
“They look alike, do they?”
“Exactly alike.”
“As much alike as blood spots and ink spots?”
“Well...laboratory tests would show that blood spots aren’t ink spots.”
“But you said earlier, didn’t you, that to the naked eye, a blood spot looks exactly like an ink spot?”
“Yes, I said that.”
“Just as to the naked eye, Mary Barton looks exactly like Mary Jones.”
“I never said that.”
“Well, does Mary Barton look exactly like Mary Jones, or doesn’t she?”
“Mary Barton is Mary Jones.”
“Ah. You know that for a fact, do you?”
“No, but I saw the woman who called herself Mary Jones and I can see Mary Barton—”
“What was Mary Jones wearing when she came into your shop?”
“A long dress.”
“What kind of long dress?”
“Sort of a long granny dress. The kind you can find at Laura Ashley’s. With a flower design on it.”
“Was she wearing shoes?”
“I think so.”
“What kind?”
“I didn’t look at her feet.”
“Then how do you know she was wearing shoes?”
“I don’t know for sure.”
“Any stockings or panty hose?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were her fingernails painted?”
“I didn’t look at them.”
“What color was her hair?”
“Gray.”
“Light gray, dark gray—”
“Same gray as the woman sitting there.”
“And her eyes?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Was she wearing lipstick?”
“I don’t know.”
“Any jewelry?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Well, now, take a look at Mary Barton. What’s she wearing, can you tell me?”
“A blue suit. I can’t tell the fabric from here, but it looks like linen.”
“A blue linen suit, okay. Is she wearing a blouse?”
“Yes.”
“What color is the blouse?”
“White. With a stock tie.”
“Stockings? Panty hose?”
“I don’t know what they are. Blue leg coverings, anyway.”
“Shoes?”
“Yes. Black with French heels.”
“Is she wearing lipstick?”
“No.”
“Can you see what color her eyes are?”
“Blue.”
“Is she wearing jewelry?”
“There’s a ring on her right hand.”
“Can you see what kind of ring it is from where you’re sitting?”
“No.”
“Was Mary Jones wearing such a ring?”
“No.”
“So, in many respects Mary Jones did not on that day in September look exactly like Mary Barton, did she?”
“You know what I mean,” Callahan said, and narrowed his eyes.
“No, I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “Please tell the court what you mean.”
“Their faces look exactly the same.”
“But not their bodies?”
“I didn’t study her body. Or Mary Barton’s either.”
“Or their manner?”
“Same answer. I didn’t make a point of—”
“Or their bearing?”
“I can only keep saying the same thing,” he said, and then hammered out each word. “They look exactly the same.”
“How about their voices? Have you ever heard Mary Barton’s voice?”
“On television.”
“Well, did she sound like Mary Jones?”
“I can’t remember what Mary Jones sounded like.”
“So—you don’t know if their bodies are exactly the same, or their manner, or their bearing, or their eyes, or their voices, or the way they dress, but you can only keep saying the same thing, as you pointed out, you can keep saying over and over again that they look exactly the same.”
“They do.”
“Who does, Mr. Callahan?”
“Mary Jones and Mary Barton.”
“You sound as if you’re talking about two different people.”
“No, they’re one and the same person.”
“So you keep telling us. But isn’t it true, Mr. Callahan, that you don’t really remember a great many details about the woman you saw in your store that day?”
“I remember her quite well. And she’s sitting right there,” he said, and pointed at Mary again.
“Yes, so you keep saying, over and over again. But you’ve testified that you think she was wearing shoes even though you didn’t look at her feet, and you don’t know if she was wearing panty hose or stockings, and you don’t know if her fingernails were painted, or whether or not she was wearing lipstick or jewelry, isn’t that so? Didn’t you say all those things?”
“Yes.”
“In fact, Mr. Callahan, isn’t it true that the only real similarity you can point out between Mary Jones and Mary Barton is the color of their hair?”
“They look exactly the same,” Callahan insisted.
“Thank you,” I said, “no further questions.”
“I have nothing more,” Atkins said.
“We’ll recess till two this afternoon,” Rutherford said.
We had sent out for sandwiches and coffee and we were sitting around the desk in Frank’s corner office, trying to work our way past our misidentification dead end. Toots was talking around a Swiss and ham on rye. Warren was eating a hamburger he’d drenched with ketchup. Frank had his back to the window fronting Heron Street, where a huge Santa Claus on a sleigh was strung on cables and flying over the oblivious traffic below. He was eating a bacon, lettuce, and tomato on toast; Frank, not Santa Claus. I was eating a sausage and pepper wedge, the sweet kind that Mike Santangelo liked so much.
Toots’s right hand was bandaged. She was holding the sandwich in her left hand, biting into it, chewing and talking at the same time.
“I hit every car rental place at the airport,” she said. “Sixteen of them in all, including a few you had to take a five-minute bus ride to get to. Hertz, Avis, Budget, Thrifty, Enterprise, Alamo, National...you name it, I talked to them. What I could gather, they rent different cars all the time, depending on the deals they get from the manufacturers. Right now, for example, Hertz is renting Sables, Tauruses, and Volvos, don’t ask me how the Swede sneaked in. Enterprise is renting only GM cars, same with Avis, same with Alamo, must’ve been a fire sale. Budget is renting Fords, Mercurys, and Lincolns, and so on down the line, no luck with a Chrysler LeBaron by ten o’clock last night. But perseverance is its own reward,” she said, and bit into the sandwich again. Chewing, she said, “Oh, I forgot, an outfit named Used Car Rentals rents everything under the sun, but the cars are all three, four years old.”
I was wondering when she’d get to it. I hated masters of suspense or even mistresses. I was also wondering how she’d hurt her hand.
“Make a long story short,” she said, “there were three companies renting Chrysler products this past August...Dynastys, Spirits, Fifth Avenues, New Yorkers, and—bingo!—Chrysler LeBarons. I talked to the people at General, Dollar, and Thrifty, their rates are all about the same, around a hundred and ten for the week, twenty-seven for the day. The sedan comes with power seats and windows, cruise control, AM/FM radio, air-conditioning, and so on, when would I like the car? In each place, I asked to speak to the manager—”
“What’d you get?” Warren asked impatiently. I noticed he was noticing the hand, too, and didn’t like what he was seeing. Too many dope users were accident-prone. He was scowling; I guessed he was wondering if Toots had fallen off the wagon and onto her hand.
“I asked them to check their records for the weekend of August twenty-eighth, see if they’d rented a white Chrysler LeBaron sedan to anyone. Only one of them asked me why should he, so I introduced him to Mr. Green.”
“How much?” Warren asked.
“A C-note,” Toots said.
“What’d it buy?”
“Something wrong with you?” she snapped.
“How’d you hurt your hand?” he said.
“On the job,” she said.
Warren nodded.
“Okay?” she said.
“Sure, fine.”
“Also, it’s none of your business.”
“I said fine, didn’t I?”
Toots nodded, too. Curtly, sharply. She glared at him a moment and then pointedly turned her attention to me. “Thrifty had six LeBarons for rent that weekend, two of them out-of-state drop-offs—”
“This was a Florida plate,” Frank said.
“Y-A-M, I know,” she said. “The other four were from their own franchise. One was a coupe, two were convertibles—their most popular model, by the way—and one of them was a white sedan, with Y-A-M plates.”
“Did you get a name?” Warren asked.
“I got a name. And an address.”
“Please,” I said, “don’t let it be Mary.”
“No, it wasn’t Mary.”
We waited.
“The Thrifty car was rented to a man named Charles Ruggiero from New York City, he was staying at the Hyatt that weekend. I called him early this morning, and he told me he was the only person who drove that car all the while he was down here—which was for a week, by the way.”
“How about Dollar and General?” Frank said.
“Cut to the chase,” Warren said impatiently.
“Okay. White LeBaron sedan, Y-A-M plate. The only other one that went out that weekend was from Dollar, to a man named Oliver Diaz, who rented it on the twenty-seventh, and reported it stolen—”
“Uh-oh.”
“There’s more,” Toots said.
“Please, not Mary,” I said.
“Who knows?” Toots said. “The car disappeared from outside his motel sometime that same night.”
“The twenty-seventh.”
“Well, technically the twenty-eighth. He got back from a movie around midnight. When he woke up in the morning, the car was gone.”
“Has it been recovered yet?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Here in Calusa. Abandoned behind the Rhodes Stadium.”
“When?”
“September second. But it’s been rented a hundred times since, you won’t get anything from it.”
“Did you actually see the car?”
“I did. Clean as a whistle.”
“Any bloodstains when it was recovered? Did you ask?”
“I asked. Nothing they could see.”
“Forensics can squeeze blood from a stone,” Frank said, apropos of nothing.
“Point is, the cops weren’t looking for anything,” Toots said.
“You talked to the police? Or just the car rent—”
“The police, too. This morning. Officer David Links. Fremont Substation.”
“We can always apply for a court order to have the car examined,” Frank said. “Get our own forensic team in there—”
“Why?” I said.
“Why? Look for bloodstains, hair samples, fiber samples—”
“Yeah? And suppose we find a gray hair that matches Mary’s?”
“Discovery cuts both ways, Frank.”
“I know, Warren, but—”
“Suppose we find her fingerprints all over the goddamn steering wheel?”
“I doubt there’ll be prints,” Toots said. “They clean these cars pretty good.”
“I just don’t see what we can find that’ll help us.”
“Find bloodstains that match any of the dead girls’,” Frank said, “we’ve at least got the car the murderer used.”
“How will that prove Mary didn’t steal it?”
“Well, it won’t. But—”
“What motel was this guy staying at?”
“The Star-Way. On the South Trail,” Toots said.
“Anybody see anything?”
“Nothing. Total dead end.”
“What’d you learn at Crescent Cove?”
Warren told us what he’d learned. He told us he had Nick Alston working right this minute to see if any complaints had been filed about Mary’s...
“Who’s Nick Alston?” Frank asked.
“Calusa PD dick, worked with us on the Parrish case.”
“Oh yeah, right.”
“What statute are we dealing with, anyway?” Warren asked.
