Defending the Truth, page 6
“Get him off and bring the other one,” he said to the attendant. The attendant zipped up the body bag, and he and Roy laid it on the stretcher. The attendant wheeled it out of the room. Stan Wolfe pulled off the rubber gloves, dropped them in a wastebasket, and washed his hands and forearms in the sink in the corner.
“My guess is he died of a heroin overdose,” Stan said, still scrubbing. “I’ll know for sure when I do the tox screen on the blood and get some slides of the liver. It’ll take a couple of hours. The point of insertion was the radial artery just below the antecubital fossa.” He pointed to the inside of his elbow. “Damn odd place for a hype to stick the needle. I’ve never seen that before.”
“Solomon says he wasn’t a user,” Joshua said.
“Well, he may be right. I couldn’t find any other pinprick sites or tracks. This might well have been his first time. And he sure as hell didn’t know what he was doing. It would’ve had to hurt pretty bad sticking that needle into the radial artery. Anyone who knew what he was doing would use the ulnar.”
“Maybe he didn’t do it himself,” Joshua said.
Roy shrugged. “That’s also possible. There’s ecchymosis on his anterior biceps and obvious extravasation under the skin on the left temple. Could have been someone punched him, held him by the arms. I can’t be sure.”
The attendant returned with the smaller body bag. He and Roy lifted it onto the table, and Stan unzipped it and laid the flaps back. He once again took the magnifying glass and examined her closely. He opened her blood-clogged nostrils with forceps and examined the insides. Then he took a vaginal smear with a long cotton swab and placed it in a test tube. He probed between her legs and examined her intently through the magnifying glass.
“Forced sexual intercourse, incomplete penetration. There’s extensive bruising around the labia majora caused by inter vivos bleeding. The man raped her while she was alive, and he ejaculated, but most of the discharge is around the vulva and the outer lips.”
He took a clean scalpel and incised the inside of her forearm from wrist to elbow. He dissected the ulnar artery, extracted an ampule of blood, and made scrapings for a slide.
“She didn’t die from the heroin,” he said, straightening up. He took off the rubber gloves and dropped them in the basket. “The heroin isn’t broken down and didn’t circulate farther from the injection site than the pressure of the injection itself would distribute it. This means that there was no blood pressure at the time of injection. In other words, she was already dead.”
Joshua nodded. “They were both murdered.”
Stan shrugged. “Well, gents, I’m not a soothsayer or a magician, and I can’t make that determination for a certainty. But it sure as hell looks that way.”
“Maybe she struggled with Moraga, bruised his arms and the side of his head, and then he raped her,” Roy said.
“Certainly a possibility,” Stan said.
Joshua shook his head. “He didn’t rape her.”
“It could have happened,” said Roy.
“Sure, it could have, but it didn’t. I knew Julio pretty well.”
The coroner shrugged. “Well, I’ll try to type the semen in her against Moraga’s semen. I’ll have some more results for you later this afternoon.”
Roy and Joshua left. Solomon was waiting in the pickup truck.
“They were both murdered,” Joshua said to Roy, standing by his car door.
“Why the hell would anyone murder them? It makes no sense.”
“Why would he murder her? She’d already done the worst she could to him. He knew that killing her wouldn’t resolve that.”
“It would keep her from testifying.”
Joshua shook his head. “She’s just an investigator. In this case, most of her testimony would have been inadmissible hearsay.”
“Maybe, but did Julio know that?”
Joshua shrugged. “I think it’s something else. I think some crazy people are trying to expand a little flap over a cowtown university group of pacifist professors into a bombshell national news story.”
“Who the hell would do that?” Roy looked at him oddly.
Joshua shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t start getting paranoid.”
“Paranoid? Shit! Two bodies aren’t paranoia.” Roy frowned and nodded. “Okay, hold your horses. Let’s wait to hear what Stan says before you get carried away.”
“I just heard from Dr. Wolfe,” Roy Collins said.
It was almost nine o’clock. Joshua straightened up in his chair at his desk at home. He had been studying the McCarran Act for over two hours by the meager light of the banker’s lamp. He rubbed his burning eyes. The translucent green shade of the lamp painted his face eerily.
“Yes?” he said into the telephone receiver.
“The rapist is a non-secretor. Moraga is a secretor.”
Joshua nodded, relieved. “Then Moraga couldn’t have raped her. Anything else?”
“Julio died from the heroin overdose, but the liver tests showed that he wasn’t a regular user. The woman died of a brain hemorrhage. Someone shoved a long needle up her right nostril and pierced her brain.”
“My God,” Joshua breathed.
“She had a point two one blood alcohol, so she was pretty far drunk. It must have happened very fast, that’s why there aren’t any signs of defensive wounds around her head and neck. She didn’t have time to fight back. He must have got her drunk, raped her, and put her lights out.”
“Now what?” Joshua said.
“I went back to the Res and checked out Julio’s truck. There’s blood all over the right side of the seat. I don’t think they were killed in the house. I think they were brought there in the truck after they were killed. There are blood spots all over the porch in front of the door.”
“That means at least two people, one to drive Julio’s truck, the second one in another vehicle.”
“Right,” Roy said.
“Did you talk to Julio’s family? He’s got about ten brothers and sisters who all live in those shacks by the watering pond.”
“Solomon did. None of them saw or heard anything. It doesn’t get light until about seven in the morning, and they don’t get up until it’s light. So it had to happen before seven.”
“Well, what’s next?”
“I’ll check out where she was living,” Roy said. “I think she had a room at the Cattlemen’s Hotel. Maybe I’ll get a lead there.”
“Okay. Would you keep me informed?”
“Sure.”
Chapter 6
The next morning Joshua parked in the small lot behind the Valley National Bank. The lot was next to the federal building and was almost empty at a quarter to eight in the morning. Mischa Livinsky hadn’t arrived yet. Joshua settled back in the seat, turned the car radio on, and hoped that a few minutes of music wouldn’t burn out the battery.
A moment later an old Model T Ford truck parked on Broadway Boulevard across from the entrance to the federal building. The bed of the pickup was filled with young men and women, late teens to early twenties. They jumped down from the bed, and several of them picked up signs from the floor of the bed, crudely painted squares of cardboard held up by long flat sticks. Joshua glimpsed a couple of them idly. One read, FREE LIVINSKY, FREE MORAGA, FREE SPEECH. The other had red letters on a white background, KEEP MCCARTHY OUT OF TUCSON.
Poor Julio, Joshua thought, too bad he can’t see this.
Two cars parked along Broadway behind the pickup, and a dozen more young adults joined those from the Model T. A Dodge stake truck parked in the Valley National Bank lot thirty feet from Joshua’s car. It looked as though it had just been recruited from a muddy vegetable field in the town of Marana, rotting lettuce leaves caught in the cross joints of its wooden staves. At least twenty more young men and women got out of the bed, and several placards were handed out to them. Hanna Rabb took a sign that read KOREA IS WRONG, BRING OUR BOYS HOME.
Joshua gasped and jerked straight up in the car seat. He shook his head slowly as he watched his daughter.
“Oh, my God,” he whispered.
There were forty or more kids, some of whom he recognized, gathered on the sidewalk by the federal building. Hanna’s roommate from Maricopa dormitory was with her. Some other girls were there whom Hanna had brought home from time to time. But most of them Joshua hadn’t seen before, just average-looking, clean-cut kids probably from the University of Arizona.
Mischa Livinsky drove into the bank parking lot and parked next to Joshua. He got out of the car, looked toward the group of students, and waved. A chant now arose from the group: “Free Livinsky, free Moraga, free speech.”
Joshua walked over to Livinsky. “Did you organize this?” he asked, trying to mask his shock and anger.
“No, but my students obviously did.”
“Why did you let them? It’s illegal to picket a courthouse.”
“Illegal?”
“Yes, damn it! It’s a provision of the McCarran Act. I thought you read it.”
“I read it, Mr. Rabb.” Livinsky was calm, almost aloof. “That provision is as unconstitutional as the rest.”
“It’s very sage of you to make that pronouncement, Professor Livinsky,” Joshua said hotly. “But this isn’t a college classroom and you’re not the judge or the U.S. marshal. They just may think this kind of demonstration injures the administration of the court and arrest these kids.”
Livinsky swallowed, and his look of certainty melted. “I didn’t ask them to do this, Mr. Rabb. But some of my students take the words of the United States Constitution to heart. They think that free speech is precisely that.”
Joshua gritted his teeth and breathed deeply to suppress his anger. “This isn’t the way I practice law. I practice it inside the courtroom with respect toward the judge and without any picketers chanting outside his chambers window. One of whom happens to be my daughter.”
The professor suddenly appeared apologetic. He looked at the demonstrators, now milling noisily about in the street and halting traffic on Broadway.
“Hanna was in my Comparative Political Systems class last semester,” he said. “A lovely and bright girl, Mr. Rabb. You must be very proud.”
“Right now I’m not proud,” Joshua muttered. He looked at his pocket watch. “It’s eight o’clock. Better get up to the grand jury room. It’s on the second floor. I’ll be up in a minute. I’m going to try to get Hanna and her roommate to go back to the dorm.”
“Where’s Julio?” Livinsky asked.
Joshua looked hard at him. “You didn’t hear?”
“Hear what?”
“It was on the radio this morning.”
“What?”
Joshua swallowed. “He was murdered last night.”
Livinsky’s face screwed up in shock. “Murdered?”
Joshua nodded. “Somebody forced an overdose of heroin into his arm.” He paused. “He was with a woman, also murdered. Anne Marie Hauser.”
Livinsky’s eyes narrowed and he looked oddly at Joshua. “Du machts mi spass, neh? [You’re kidding me, right?]”
Joshua shook his head. There was no mirth in his face. “Emmiss.”
A veil of total bewilderment clouded Livinsky’s eyes. “Hauser?” he said weakly. “The investigator for the Subversives Board?”
Joshua nodded.
“Vay iz mir,” the professor gasped. “Vay iz mir.” He looked at Joshua with grave fear beginning to show in his face. “Doss iz a catastrophe.”
He walked slowly down the sidewalk to the entrance of the federal building at the corner of Scott Street. The demonstrators cheered and hoisted high their placards, and the chant increased in volume. The noise was worsened by the blaring of horns by angry motorists caught unwittingly in the demonstration and being made late for work by the traffic impasse at one of Tucson’s busiest morning intersections.
Joshua caught Hanna’s eye and gestured for her to come over to him. She glared at him defiantly and looked sharply away. Her placard got higher, and he thought that he could hear her voice above all of the others. He saw Assistant United States Attorney Tim Essert come out of his office door on the corner of Broadway and Scott Street, directly across from the federal building. Four men were with him.
Three of them appeared to bear the stamp of the eastern FBI types: gray suits, starched white shirts, black or dark blue ties, “high and tight” crew cuts or butch haircuts, and black wing-tip shoes. They looked like military officers in civvies, one of them in his early fifties, gray and lean, the other two twenty years younger.
The fourth man was Roy Collins. He looked decidedly different from the other three. Almost five years being stationed in Tucson, ten years prior to that stationed in El Paso, Texas, had sanded off the regimented conformity of the FBI Academy in Virginia. He was a bit stout and shorter than the others, with graying, thinning blond hair worn slightly shaggy over his ears, a baggy off-white seersucker suit, a light yellow cotton shirt, and a bolo tie cinched up with a silver coyote with turquoise eyes, handmade by a Papago silversmith and given to him in gratitude by the chief of the Papago tribe, Francisco Romero, for the many favors he had done for the Indians.
Joshua watched Essert and his entourage enter the federal building. He walked down the sidewalk, glowered paternally at his daughter, who looked quickly away and steadfastly ignored him, and entered the federal building. He climbed the stairs to the second floor, and his footsteps echoed down the murkily lit hallway toward the grand jury room around the corner from Judge Buchanan’s chambers.
Livinsky was sitting on the oak bench opposite the grand jury room. He appeared dazed. Roy Collins and the other three men stood silently down the hallway. Roy and Joshua nodded almost imperceptibly to each other. Joshua sat down on the bench next to his client.
Joshua was dressed in his usual “closing argument costume”—Hanna and Adam called it. Black wool suit and vest, white shirt and black wool tie, and a gold watch in his vest pocket linked by a long heavy gold chain to the top button of his vest. The watch had been his grandfather’s, a jeweler in Kiev, given as a going-away present to Joshua’s father when he left the Ukraine after the Cossack pogroms in 1905. Joshua’s Hebrew name, Jehoshua ben Aryeh-Lev, was engraved in Hebrew script on the inside of the hunting case, along with the date in English, June 8, 1935, the day that Joshua had received his law degree from Columbia University.
Tim Essert came out of the grand jury room and closed the door behind him. He was about Joshua’s age, thin and medium height, brown eyes and brown hair pomaded straight back on his head, and a deep tennis court tan. Usually Joshua would have described him as an attractive man, even handsome, but now his face was distorted and hateful.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
“Representing my client,” Joshua said blandly.
“The hell you are,” Essert hissed. “You can’t represent this Commie.”
“Since when does the assistant U.S. attorney tell me who I can represent?”
“Since you’re a goddamn government employee. The McCarran Act forbids a government employee from doing work for members of a Communist front organization.”
“First of all it doesn’t say that.” Joshua stared acidly at him. “And second, your case against this man and his organization is total bullshit, and you know it. I don’t have any respect for you because you’re a dishonest scumbag, but stupid you’re not.”
The chant of the demonstrators became louder and more discernible. They must have come around the building to the rear, where the grand jury room was located. Two of the apparent FBI agents walked down the hallway and looked out the window.
“Assholes are right down there in the alley,” one of them said.
Essert nodded and looked threateningly at Joshua. “You set up the demonstration?”
Joshua shook his head.
“They’re all committing a felony. You know that.”
Joshua tried to mask his face, to keep it unrevealing. He was suddenly fearful for Hanna and her friends. This vicious bastard could have them all arrested.
“They’re simply exercising their freedom of speech,” Professor Livinsky said in his thick Ukrainian accent.
Essert turned to him as though he had noticed him for the first time, and his lips curled into a sneer. His lips were twisted sourly, as though he had bitten into an unripe persimmon.
“Shut up!” Joshua snapped at Livinsky. “I’ll do the talking with the U.S. attorney.”
“Good advice from your lawyer,” Essert said, fixing the professor with an accusatory stare. “Where were you last night, Commie?”
“Come on, knock off the crap!” said Roy Collins, stepping in front of the U.S. attorney. “If you’re going ahead with the grand jury, get on with it. Otherwise, let’s get the hell out of here.”
Essert gaped at Collins and bristled with rage. “You stay here and keep an eye on your pinko pals,” he said hoarsely. “Come on, you guys,” he called out to the other three men. “Let’s go back to my office for a few minutes.” He walked abruptly down the hall, followed by the men.
Roy Collins stood in front of the oak bench and shook his head solemnly at Joshua. “Are you crazy, letting your daughter be in that demonstration?” His eyes were harsh. “If Essert knew who she was, he’d throw her into the marshal’s holding cell and charge her with picketing and parading, just to fuck you.”
Joshua nodded, very subdued. “I know. I didn’t have anything to do with it. Neither of us did. It’s just a bunch of university kids feeling their oats.”
“Hell of a bad time for it,” Collins said. “Why don’t you both go down there and tell them to get the hell out of here. Go picket at the university or the dorms, but not in front of the federal courthouse.”
“They have a constitutional right to picket here,” Livinsky said.
“We’re not talking rights here, Mr. Professor,” Collins snarled. “We’re talking a low-life U.S. attorney arresting a bunch of kids for a goddamn felony and throwing their asses in prison. Maybe in two or three years some appeals court says it was unconstitutional to arrest them, but the couple years they spend in the joint isn’t going to be any less real or painful.”
