This is a mixed blessing. He'll be able to describe to us what happened, but he'll also look credible in front of the jury. When a crime has happened this long ago, one of the things the defense hopes for are faded memories by the key witnesses. This guy thinks it happened yesterday, which is not quite faded enough for our purposes.
I ask him to tell us about that night, and he jumps right into it. “Not much to tell. A preppie guy and a good- looking broad come in … didn't look much like they belonged here, but who knows, you know? This place was classier then. Anyway, the broad gets up and goes to the john. I was real busy 'cause Willie, that's the guy that killed her, had taken off an hour before.”
“Did you hear a struggle?”
“Nah,” he says. “In fact, I didn't even know what happened until the boyfriend told me. Then this older guy showed up. Turns out the preppie called his old man and the cops when he found the broad's body. When the cops showed, the place turned into a zoo.”
Laurie leans over to talk to him, as if she had a secret they were about to share. “Listen, Donnie, don't take this the wrong way, but if you call Denise McGregor a broad again, I'm going to cut off your testicles and shove them down your throat.”
Ever helpful, I tell Donnie, “I've seen her do it a number of times. It only takes a few seconds.”
Donnie has enough sense to be nervous and respectful. “Hey, I didn't mean no offense.”
Laurie gives him her sweetest smile. “None taken.”
It's now incumbent upon me to get Donnie thinking about the night of the murder, rather than the prospect of swallowing his testicles. It's not an easy job, but I give it a try. “So Denise gets up to make a phone call. The phone is in the ladies’ room.”
“Right. The ladies’ room … the ladies’ room.” Laurie has him unnerved.
“And that's the last time you saw her?”
“Well, I saw her in the alley afterward. You know … her body. The woman's body.”
Laurie and I go to the ladies’ room to check it out, and Donnie is really happy to see us go. The door has a faded drawing of Cleopatra on it, which identifies it as being for ladies. I start to push the door open, but Laurie grabs my arm.
“Where do you think you're going?”
“To check out the room, see where the phone is, solve the crime, whatever.”
“Let me make sure it's empty,” she says.
I shake my head in mock disgust. “Come on, this is business. Why do you have to turn everything into a sex thing?”
At that moment, even before Laurie has time to tell me what a pig I am, the bathroom door opens. A person comes out; I think it's a woman but I'm just guessing. She's at least two hundred fifty pounds, with tattoos all over her shoulders and arms. If she played for Dinky, we could kick Florida State's ass.
I take a deep breath and wait for my life to stop flashing in front of my eyes. In this case, if Laurie hadn't stopped me, I would have been alone in a bathroom with Queen Kong.
I'm nothing if not a quick learner. “Laurie, maybe you should go see if there's anyone else inside.”
“Maybe I should.”
Laurie goes inside and comes back out moments later.
“The coast is clear, macho man.”
I nod and enter. Except for possibly with my mother when I was too young to remember, this is the first time I have ever been in a ladies’ room. It turns out I haven't missed that much.
This particular ladies’ room is as unenlightening as it is unimpressive. There had been specks of blood near the telephone, and the police version of the crime was that Denise was struck over the head, and then dragged outside into the alley. Since there was no evidence of sexual molestation, I'm not sure why the assailant didn't kill her right there, but he clearly did not. The blood would have been everywhere.
Laurie and I go out into the alley where the body was found, which is no more than fifteen feet down a hall from the bathroom door. The hall cannot be seen from the main area of the restaurant, so if Denise were unconscious and unable to scream, it makes sense that she and her assailant would not have been noticed. She most likely was unconscious, both because of the blood in the bathroom and the fact that there were marks on the back of her shoes indicating that she was dragged down the hall.
While there is obviously no good place to be brutally murdered, this alley is particularly without dignity. Various establishments throw out their garbage in and around a group of Dumpsters against the far wall, and there are so many stray animals picking at it that they must be required to make a reservation. “Two rottweiler mixes, table for two? Yes, we're running a little behind. Care to have a drink from the gutter while you wait?”
One of the more puzzling aspects of this is what the eyewitness was doing here in the middle of the night. Willie's lawyer, Hinton, barely touched on this at trial, but then again, he barely touched on anything. He seemed to have no strategy, no coherent focus, and no desire to probe until he found weaknesses in the prosecution's case.
We hang out at the scene for a little while, not saying much, each of us lost in our own thoughts about how horrible that night must have been for Denise McGregor. I try to picture Willie Miller committing this crime, but I can't. I try to picture anybody committing this crime, but I still can't.
I drive Laurie back to the office, since that is where she left her car. She mentions the photograph, and I realize I haven't thought about it all day. I'm having lunch the next day at Philip Gant's club. He had called and invited me, saying that he wanted to “catch up,” but really wanting to know how things are between Nicole and me. I'll take advantage of the situation to ask him about the photograph. I'll do this because I need to find out information about rich people, and Philip is the proverbial horse's mouth.
Nicole is asleep when I get home, and I realize with a flash of guilt that I'm glad about that. I need to get the upcoming days straightened out in my mind, so that events don't just whiz past me. I want to be alone with a glass of wine and Tara, not necessarily in that order.
As I sit sipping the wine, I reflect for the fifty millionth time on the fact that I discovered Tara in an animal shelter. She was two years old and had been abandoned there by an owner who was moving and had no room for her. She was going to be killed-“put down” is the term shelters use-and I adopted her on her last day.
I don't care if those people were moving to a phone booth; they should have made room for Tara. What they deserve for almost causing her death is to be put in a cell next to Willie Miller. But, of course, I'm glad they didn't keep her, since if they had I wouldn't be sipping wine and petting her. Life for Tara is extraordinarily simple; she wants to be with me and have me pet her head and scratch her stomach. Experiencing that simplicity helps me right now.
I plan my strategy, legal and personal, for about an hour, and then I fall asleep in mid-scratch. I'm in the same position two hours later when the phone rings. It's the warden's office at the prison, informing me that Willie Miller has been attacked by two knife-wielding inmates and is in the prison hospital.
I briefly consider whether to call Laurie and tell her what's going on, but decide against it. It would not serve any useful function other than to provide company and a slight easing of my discomfort at having to drive to the prison at three o'clock in the morning. I'm going to be a big boy and do this on my own.
A guard meets me at the main gate and takes me to the prison hospital. He does not know Willie's condition, and unless I am a terrible judge of human behavior, he couldn't care less.
He brings me to Willie's room and leaves me there to fend for myself. The room is darkened and Willie is asleep, so I find myself standing there, unsure what to do. I don't want to wake him; he might be badly injured and very weak. On the other hand, I don't want to spend the entire night waiting for him to wake up.
“What the hell you looking at?” It's Willie's voice, but in the darkness I can't see his lips move.
“Willie?” I ask. It's a short, dumb question, followed by another. “Are you awake?”
“Shit, yeah. You think you can sneak up on me in the dark? 'Cause there's two guys down the hall that thought they could sneak up on me too.”
“Are you hurt badly?” I ask.
“Nah, just a few slices on the arm.”
He proceeds to tell me that two men approached him in the rec room and attacked him with sharpened kitchen utensils. They were unaware, as I was as well, that Willie is a black belt in karate. Within moments they were unconscious, and Willie had only a few minor cuts to show for his troubles.
I'm upset that Willie had to go through this, which makes me the only one in the room who feels that way.
