Saturday after April 15.
The Watts home was a 3,500-square-foot log building, sitting on fifteen acres with six hundred feet of shoreline on Muscongus Bay in Maine. It was built in the 1920s by a New York City physician who wanted to combine the New England experiences of a log home and a view of Maine’s rocky coast. So he ordered a spruce log palace, appropriate for snow country in the northern woods and mountains, to be built overlooking the coastline, where it fit in like a Shinto temple along the Thames. The Watts family had bought it in the fifties, when Maine real estate was dirt cheap by their Baltimore standards and the Spruce Goose, as the locals called it, was even cheaper. Watts and his two sisters inherited it when their mother died in 1971; he bought them out soon thereafter and moved into it when he relocated to Maine from Maryland to practice law. A lifelong bachelor, Watts had the place to himself.
An eclectic group of the judge’s friends had shown up, including other judges, lawyers, assorted court personnel, lobstermen, the proprietor of the local convenience store, and the chief of the Maine State Police (a former client). Those expecting tax refunds received happy face stickers to wear. Those experiencing “taxectomy” received tin cups with which to solicit charitable donations.
Boothby was filling his tin cup with cashews at the dining room table, and I was at the sideboard sampling the shrimp, when I heard someone rip off a couple of arpeggios on the piano across the hall. A semiskilled pianist, I knew great technique when I heard it. When the pianist started in on Chopin’s D-flat nocturne I headed into the living room. The reprise section has a filigree that’s beyond my skill, and I wanted to see it done up close.
I recognized the pianist as Julia Austrian, a Juilliard-trained concert pianist who had a home in nearby Damariscotta. I pulled up a chair behind her just as she approached the difficult passage: her right hand glided gracefully over the keyboard, her fingers touching the keys with an astonishing combination of speed, precision, and apparent ease.
“How do you
She turned around and smiled. “Four hundred thousand hours of practice.” We both laughed, and she added, “Are you a pianist?”
“I’m a
She shook it. “Julia Austrian, Artie. Since you’re a pianist, let me ask you: did you notice anything in the left hand?”
I hesitated, unsure of what to say. “It was as smooth as maple syrup. I’d give my right arm if it made my left hand that silky.”
“Thanks! That means I carried it off.”
“Carried it off?”
“Before starting I noticed that a couple of the low notes were off key,” she explained. “Probably brand-new strings—new strings stretch out of tune—so I had to substitute notes.”
“You improvised on the fly?”
Austrian nodded. My jaw dropped in awe.
She shrugged and smiled. “The best thing I learned at Juilliard was how to fake it.”
“
“Sure. What do you do when you have a memory lapse? You can’t just stop.”
“That was wonderful, Julia.” Judge Watts appeared beside us, smiling broadly, and handed her a glass of white wine. “Better than any concert we ever get around here.”
Watts was a tall, wiry man with wide shoulders, a full head of curly gray hair, and a profile like Basil Rathbone’s. He looked as if he’d been a basketball player—small forward, perhaps—and he was astonishingly smart. When he’d come onto the trial bench a year or so earlier nobody expected him to stay at that level for long. He had an almost magical intuition for law that enabled him to resolve legal issues as quickly as lawyers could state them. Other judges sought him out for help with difficult cases, and he came to be known as the Sherlock Holmes of the judiciary for more than his silhouette. It was said that if the entire Maine Supreme Court bench of seven justices died in a plane crash the governor could replace them all with Gibson Watts.
“Thanks, Judge.” She pointed to the nine-foot Steinway grand. “I rarely find an instrument this superb in a private home. I had to try it.”
“Glad you did!” Taciturn, even dour, around the courthouse—thinking too deeply to be bothered with civility —he was the opposite here, an enthusiastic and warm host.
“Do you play?” she asked him.
He chuckled. “Dumb fingers. I keep the piano tuned because it’s too beautiful to ignore.” He lifted his glass toward me. “Alas, Mr. Morey, I’d have brought you some wine too, but the King of Reversible Error is looking for you and prefers you not slur your words.”
“Thanks, Judge,” I replied. “A pleasure, Ms. Austrian.”
“Thanks, Artie.”
I crossed the hall and found King Boothby in the dining room at the salmon.
I approached semireverently. “Judge Watts delivered your summons.”
He looked up as he was shoving the last of his salmon sandwich into his mouth. Holding his index finger in the air, he chewed for a moment and then gulped it down. “Emmy Holcrofts arrived a few minutes ago. She’s agitated about her niece and wants to talk right away. I asked her to wait in the library. Would you like to join us?”
I followed Boothby to a small, book-lined room. A wood fire in the modest fieldstone fireplace made it cozy —an atmosphere to calm the nerves.
Emmy started to stand, but Boothby waved her back into her seat. “What’s the matter, Emmy?”
He and I took chairs.
“I’ve been going through Ina’s steno tapes to find her notes of the Doak case—the one you asked me to transcribe?” When he nodded, she continued. “I found them and was preparing a transcript when I got a visit from a federal drug enforcement investigator. She asked if I had information about Ina’s relationship with Harold Doak—the same man. Doak had named Ina as a customer.”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Ina was the court reporter who took notes of a plea bargain, for her very own supplier?”
“And the Feds wanted to keep the plea bargain secret,” Boothby added, “so neither Doak’s suppliers nor his customers would know. Christ. Ina had to realize DEA agents would be on her doorstep soon. Maybe that explains her suicide.”
“No, I think you’re wrong,” said Emmy. “I read her diary again. That’s where she put her emotional entries— happy, sad, angry, all kinds of feelings. What the police are calling her ‘suicide note’ was on the tape in her steno machine. Why there and not in her diary? I spent the last two days reviewing all the tapes of all the hearings she attended for the last year. The only personal entry is that single note the police found.”
“So that was unusual for her—but so is suicide,” Boothby said. “She must have been distraught.”
“I brought the police report.” She reached into her large handbag, pulled out a document. “Here’s her note. It says, ‘I can’t face my family anymore. They believed in me, and I betrayed them.’ Ina wouldn’t have said that. I was the only person she considered family, the only family member she’d mentioned in her journal for the past year. I’m one person, not ‘them.’ The only time she referred to family plural was this single entry on the steno tape—where she would never have put it.”
“What about the brothers?” I asked.
“She wasn’t close to them. They were lucky: the law designates them her heirs.”
Boothby’s eyebrows descended in a frown. “So you think someone else wrote the suicide note.”
I scroonched forward on the couch. “Maybe it was written after Ina died, to make it look like a suicide?”
Eyebrows up, then down again, thinking.
“Someone who knew steno machines,” I continued, “and felt safer typing the note than faking Ina’s handwriting.”
Boothby picked up the thread: “Assuming Ina’d been selling the stuff she got from Doak and told a customer about Doak’s plea agreement, that customer wouldn’t want Ina doing to him—or her—what Doak would likely do to Ina. Killing Ina prevents her from revealing anyone to the cops.”
All this theorizing ignited my suspicion: “What else about Ina’s death, Emmy, suggests murder?”
