“So her clothes were gone,” LaMoia stated. “In the morning, I’m talking about-when you woke up, whatever else she’d been wearing-those clothes were gone?”
“What clothes? How the fuck would I know?” Clearly flus-tered, Neal shook his arms in front of himself as if his hands had gone to sleep. “She wore them to bed, that’s all I’m saying.”
LaMoia reviewed his notes. “A moment ago you said you fell asleep after having sex with Ms. Walker. That you fell asleep after the sex. Now you’re saying she wore panties to bed?
Can you be more precise?”
“She wore them to bed before I took them off her.” He added, “And that would have been after the sports, after the hummer, to be more precise.”
“And what clothes if any, did she leave behind at your apartment that morning?”
“She’s the one picks up, not me.”
LaMoia said irritably, “So you’re saying she cleaned house that morning, before she left for the coffee?”
“Listen, she had clothes at my place, okay? How the fuck do I know what was there and what wasn’t? She lived there with me, don’t forget. Right? Clothes? What? On the floor or something? How the hell would I know?”
Matthews thought the story was getting away from him. The little pauses. The rapid eye movement. She excused herself and left the conference room, returning a few minutes later with autopsy photographs of two different women.
She wasn’t hoping to win a confession, to cause some Perry Mason moment in which Langford Neal hung his head, weeping, and detailed the events of that night. She did, however, intend to run Neal through a litmus test. If she came away with anything, she hoped to at least identify his lies and to make sense of his motivations for telling them. Making a legal case was not her responsibility. All that she wanted was the truth. Until the attorneys were invited in-Neal had yet to request one-she could basically say anything she wanted, could match him lie for lie. She knew how to use her looks against guys like Neal.
Just before reentering the conference room, she tucked in her blouse and squared her shoulders, emphasizing her chest. Let him look all he wanted to. Let him be distracted.
She placed the photos in front of Neal. LaMoia knew they’d made the handoff-Neal now belonged to her. She said, “We had a similar fatality last year. Also a young, attractive woman.
We’re investigating possible connections.”
“The connections being bridges and water,” Neal said.
“And/or the men these women dated.”
“You’re looking at me for some head case that jumped off a bridge a year ago?”
“No, we’re looking at you for Mary-Ann Walker, Mr. Neal.”
She made a stage show of looking over at LaMoia. “Who said anything about Mary-Ann jumping?”
“Not me,” LaMoia answered.
“Nor did I,” Matthews said.
“Try the papers, the television,” Neal protested.
Matthews said, “Mary-Ann Walker did not jump, Mr. Neal.”
“But you just said-”
“She was beaten badly, possibly raped, and subsequently was discovered in water wearing a torn thong underwear and a cotton camisole top-just exactly as you’ve now described for us. How she arrived into that water remains under investigation.”
Neal lost the shit-eating grin.
“You’re clearly a smart man,” she lied. “A man who understands women. You don’t have to tell me that some women get themselves into difficult spots. Make promises and change their minds. Get a little too drunk and ask for it and then beg off the sex with the old headache excuse. They cocktease a guy and then refuse to put out.”
LaMoia did a double take on Matthews.
Neal looked uncertain.
“Right?” Matthews said.
“Yeah, sure. I’d buy that.”
“And sometimes a guy’s got to tune her up a little, let her know who’s boss. Sober her up. There’s a way this works and there’s a way this doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work when she’s in some drunken, willing mood one minute, and then an ice maiden the next.”
Neal saw the trap then. “I … ah … I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No?”
“No.”
“We’ve got a half dozen prior complaints against you, Lanny.
All of them are for taking a heavy hand with your girlfriends.
You logged a thirty-day stint at county. You put a girl named Eileen Rimbauer in the emergency room with a broken collarbone. Are you aware that Mary-Ann Walker had five such emergency room visits in the last six months? Did she happen to tell you about those? Her brother knows, I’ll tell you that. She claimed to have fallen down the stairs of the boat, said her hand got caught in a winch.” She read all this as if it were printed on the page, which it was not. “Pretty lame excuses, you ask me.
She also had some woman problems that make a lot more sense if some guy is playing it a little kinky and rough. So what you need to look at, Mr. Neal, is not the door, not my chest, not the detective, as you have been, but what happened that night. You need to look at the underlying circumstances that started whatever argument resulted between you, the conditions that escalated that particular argument into violence. We’re cops, yes.
But believe it or not we’re human. We’ve heard it all-there’s nothing you can tell us that will surprise us. This being your third strike, with the battered-woman law in effect you’re facing a serious uphill battle, if convicted. You want half a chance?
Convince us that you and Mary-Ann had a disagreement that night, that things got a little out of hand. A disagreement takes two people, Mr. Neal. That’s a whole lot better than some guy pounding on his woman for no reason whatsoever. Can we start there?”
“She was out on the fire escape. Talking on the phone maybe.
I’m not sure about that. Smoking a cigarette, ’cause otherwise no way would she have been out there. I’m telling you, she did not like heights.”
“Not to get away from you?”
“We had sex is all. Maybe I was rough. I don’t remember. I was pretty loaded that night. But I’ll tell you one thing: You never heard Mary-Ann complaining about the sex, believe me.
She liked it rough. She asked for it rough. That night, out there on the fire escape, that’s the last I seen of her.”
“Two twenty-two A.M.,” Matthews repeated.
“The woman hardly slept.”
“You understand that where there are mitigating circumstances in a case-an argument, for instance-the investigating officer is required to take them into consideration. These things come out in trial no matter what. There’s no sense for a detective to push for capital murder if there’s a domestic case where the girlfriend was complicit-say, acting like a drunken slut one minute and going for a carving knife the next. You need to think about that, because a guy beats up a woman, the sides get drawn long before the jury sits down for the first time. Believe it.”
Neal wore shock in his eyes, which Matthews took as a small victory. “Am I getting through, Lanny?” she asked rhetorically.
“She was all fucked up in the head. All bent out of shape over her asshole baby brother. Said she’d let him down, losing the fishing boat and everything. That she owed him big time.
But shit, he was just working her. Mooching. Crying in his beer.
I wanted her taking care of things around home. For us to get something going. But I’m telling you, she was all fucked up.”
“Okay.” Matthews took a deep breath and savored the surprise that he’d begun to open up.
“She’d been drinking a lot that night, got herself all dumb and loopy. We had the sex, you know, just like I said. Her on top, all angry like. Fast and furious and, I don’t know, mean-spirited, you know? Like she didn’t want to
