Chapter 7
The Witness
Gerald Pruett kept his front room the way some men keep a boat: everything within reach, nothing wasted, and a clear line of sight to the horizon.
He was seventy-four, a retired land surveyor with a shock of white hair, large pale hands, and a hearing aid that whistled when he turned his head. His house at 22 Cranmoor Lane was a narrow brick cottage that had been there before the big stone places on either side were built, and which the developers had never managed to buy. He sat in a green armchair by the front window with a blanket over his knees, and on a small table at his elbow stood a thermos, a pair of binoculars, a crossword, and a spiral notebook in which, I would discover, he had been writing down the license plates of passing cars for eleven years.
"I don't sleep," he told me. "Haven't since my wife died. I sleep from about four to eight in the morning, like an infant. The rest of the night I sit here and watch the road." He said it without self-pity, as a man reports a fact about weather. "You'd be surprised what goes by."
It was the sixth of December, a cold, gray, windless Saturday. I had come with Hollis, who was standing by the door with his hands in his raincoat, pretending to examine a barometer. Mr. Pruett had agreed to see us by telephone, in a high, clear, courteous voice, on the condition that we not stay past noon, because he did his shopping at one. He had a daughter, a retired schoolteacher, who lived in the next county and who telephoned every evening at six. She had told him he did not have to talk to me.
"I told her I'd talk to the Devil himself, if he asked nicely." He peered up with pale blue eyes. "You don't look like him."
"I'm told he's taller."
"Hm." He seemed satisfied. "Sit down. Not there, that's Mildred's. The straight one."
I will say at once that I liked him. It is a hazard of my profession that I tend to like the witnesses I intend to destroy. I do not know why. Perhaps it is that people, when they are most certain, are at their most vulnerable, and there is something touching in vulnerability. Perhaps it is nothing so complicated, and I simply prefer an honest man who is mistaken to a dishonest one who is right.
He took me through it with a surveyor's care. It was a Tuesday. He remembered because Tuesday was when the neighbors' recycling went out, and there had been a truck at about seven. It had rained earlier, on and off, and the road was wet and black and shining. He had had a light supper, a tin of soup. At nine he had made tea. At about a quarter to ten he had been sitting where we were now, in the green chair, with the lamp off, because he liked to see out.
"Why off?"
"If you leave it on, all you see is yourself." He tapped the window. "Glass is a mirror when it's lit behind you."
"And what could you see?"
He gestured, with his big pale hand, at the lane. "There. Cranmoor goes up the hill, about two hundred yards, to the corner. The Hales' gate's the third on the right." He pointed. I leaned and looked. The window gave on a sloping stretch of road, bordered on both sides by hedges, high ones, privet and holly, clipped square, with black iron gates set into them at intervals. A single street lamp stood at the foot of the lane, thirty yards down from the cottage. Another at the corner, far off. Between the two, in the gap where the Hales' drive entered, the road was shadowed by an old plane tree.
It was perhaps a hundred and eighty feet from the window to the gate.
"A car came up from the bottom," Mr. Pruett said. "A silver Bentley. The big ones. Low, with the round lights at the front, you know, the two pairs. I've watched that car go by a thousand times. It doesn't sound like anything else." He closed his eyes. "It slowed at the gate. The gate was open. It turned in, and the headlamps swung across the hedge, and I saw him."
"Saw whom?"
"The driver."
"Describe him."
"A tall man. Gray hair." He opened his eyes. "In a dark suit. He had the dome light on, you see, he'd put it on for some reason. For a second I saw the whole of his head and shoulders. He turned his face this way."
I sat very still. I did not look at Hollis, though I felt him look at me.
"The dome light was on."
"For a second or two. Then it went off, and the car went up the drive and I couldn't see it any more." He frowned. "I wrote it down. Nine forty-eight. I have a watch with luminous hands."
"Did you tell the police about the light?"
"They didn't ask."
"Did you tell them you saw his face?"
"I told them what I saw. A tall man with gray hair." His chin lifted. "I know it was Victor Hale. I've lived on this road for thirty-one years, young man. I know the man's car and I know the man's shoulders."
"You've seen him driving it before?"
"A hundred times."
"At night?"
"Every kind of time."
"Mr. Pruett," I said, gently, "a tall man with gray hair in a dark suit might describe a good many people."
"It might." He was not offended. He nodded as if I had put a hand on a drawing and corrected a line. "It might. But it was his car."
"Did you see the plate?"
"Of course not. It was dark."
"But you're sure it was his car."
"Silver Bentley," said Mr. Pruett. "Round lamps." He shrugged, a small, dignified movement of the shoulders. "I don't see what else it could be."
It was, I thought, an honest sentence. It was the most honest sentence in the whole matter, in its way, and I wrote it down in full: "I don't see what else it could be." I underlined see.
We walked the lane afterward, Hollis and I, in the thin gray cold, counting steps.
It was a fine street in the careless, discreet way of old money: wide, quiet, very clean. The hedges were taller than I was. From the sidewalk in front of Mr. Pruett's cottage, I could see the Hales' gate as a slice of dark iron between two towers of privet, and the drive beyond it as a pale curve that vanished behind a screen of laurels. A hundred and eighty feet. I had measured it with a roller wheel.
"You can't see a face from here," I said.
"Not at night."
"Not unless there's a light."
"He said a dome light." Hollis was looking at the Hales' gate. "A dome light inside a car with tinted glass, at a hundred and eighty feet, through a gap in a hedge, in the rain. And he sees the gray hair." He squinted. "I'd say he'd see the idea of gray hair. I'd say the brain does the rest."
"A jury might like him."
"Everybody likes him. He's got a thermos and a daughter." Hollis kicked a pebble. "That's why you've got to be careful, counselor. You can take that man to pieces without laying a hand on him. You do it wrong, they'll hate you for a year."
"I know."
"I know you know. I'm saying it anyway." He turned his gray face toward me. "Because you've got the look again. The one you get when you see a way in."
I did not answer. I was thinking about a silver Bentley with round lights, and about how many of them there were in the city of Port Meridian. I had looked it up. Four hundred and seven registered. It was not an unusual car, for the people who lived on Cranmoor Lane. But the particular Bentley, with the particular grille, was a model that had been sold in this state in very limited numbers over the last six years. I had a number in my head, a small one, and I did not yet know what to do with it.
Maribel Santos was harder to find.
She had moved. The Hales' house, she had told the police, was too sad to go on living in, and after the two weeks of paid leave she had returned briefly to collect her things and gone to her sister's, in an apartment block in Eastgate, a gray concrete tower with a laundry room in the basement and a corridor that smelled of frying onions. It took Hollis nine days to learn the address. He did it by waiting outside a church.
She was fifty-eight. She had a small, rounded, dignified body and a face that had been handsome and had worked, and she opened the door on its chain and looked at me through the gap with large, dark, frightened eyes.
"I was told not to talk to you," she said.
"By whom?"
"The company." Her English was careful and a little formal. "A lawyer. Mr. Hale's company lawyer. He said that anyone who talked would be, that it would make it worse for Mr. Victor."
"Which lawyer was that?"
"I don't know his name. A man in a gray suit. Very polite." She wet her lips. "He gave me an envelope. For the two weeks. And he said, if anyone comes."
"I'm Mr. Hale's lawyer, Mrs. Santos."
"Yes. I know." She hesitated. "The man from the company said you would come. He said you would be very, how do you say, persuasive."
Behind me, Hollis said, mildly, "That's a nice compliment."
I did not smile. I was looking at her hands, which were on the edge of the door. They were red from work and the knuckles were swollen, and the right thumb was moving in a slow circle against the wood. I have learned to watch for that. Not a nervous movement, exactly. The movement of someone rubbing a spot where a coin has been.
"I won't ask you about anything you're not comfortable discussing," I said. "I'd like to understand what you heard on the Sunday. That's all. The State's going to ask you about it in court, and I'd like you to be prepared for what they'll say."
"I heard them shouting." She spoke very low. "Mr. Victor and Madam. In the study. It was after dinner. I was in the kitchen. I heard him say, you will leave with nothing. I am sure of it. And Madam said something I did not hear. Then there was a noise." She swallowed. "A glass, I think. Broken. And then the door, and Madam came out and went up the stairs."
"Was it the first time you'd heard them quarrel?"
"No." She looked away. "Not the first. But the first with that voice."
"Which voice?"
"Loud." She hesitated. "Mr. Victor does not shout. Not ever. Fourteen years, seventeen with the old house, I have never heard him raise his voice to a person. Not to me, not to the staff. That night he did. I thought, this is bad." Her mouth worked. "Then Tuesday I was not there. I finish at four on Tuesday. I went home on the bus. I came back on the Wednesday at seven, and there were police."
I looked at her. There was something in the shape of that sentence, in the way she had said it, evenly, carefully, like a thing rehearsed, that made me want to ask the next question. I asked it.
"Was anyone else in the house on Tuesday afternoon? Before you left?"
The thumb stopped moving.
It was only for a second. Then it began again, a little faster. She looked at me directly, and her eyes were very bright, and I thought she was about to say something, and I saw her decide not to.
"Madam was in the studio. Mr. Victor came home at six, I think, after I was gone. The cook doesn't come on Tuesdays." She said it in one breath. "I told the police."
"I know. I read the statement."
"Then you know everything."
"I hope so."
She nodded. She began to close the door, slowly, on its chain, and I put out a hand, not touching, simply there, and said, "Mrs. Santos. Did Mrs. Hale ever talk to you about leaving?"
She stopped.
It was a long moment. I could hear a television somewhere in the apartment, a woman's voice, laughing, and the faint drip of a tap. A child was running along the corridor behind us. And Maribel Santos, who had worked for the Hales for seventeen years, stood with one eye in the gap of the door and said, in a voice so quiet I had to lean to hear it:
"She asked me, three weeks ago, if I had a cousin in Houston."
"A cousin."
"For a place to stay. In case." Her eyes were full. "She said, it's only for a little while, Maribel. Just so I know where to send a letter."
She closed the door.
I stood in the corridor with my hand in the air. The fluorescent light over the stairwell buzzed. Hollis put a hand on my shoulder, lightly, and I let it stay there, and neither of us said anything for some time, and I thought: There. That is the first thing I have been told about her that nobody wrote down.
We drove back through the early dark. The windshield wipers squeaked. The sky over the river had gone the color of a bruise, and the lights of the harbor swam in it, red and white and green. Hollis was quiet. He drove with his long hands very light on the wheel, as he always did, and I watched the streets go by.
"She's lying," he said, finally.
"About what?"
"I don't know." He turned onto the bridge. "But she's lying about something. A woman doesn't say I told the police three times in a minute because she's got nothing to hide. She says it because she's been told to say it."
"She's afraid."
"Of whom?"
I thought about it. The gray-suited lawyer. The envelope. The company that had known I would come.
"I think," I said slowly, "that she's afraid of whoever sent the man in the gray suit."
"That's Hale Meridian."
"Yes."
"That's your client."
"I know whose client it is, Hollis."
We crossed the bridge. Below us the black river moved under the lights. The tide was going out. A tug pushed a barge toward the sea, with a single lamp at the bow, and its wake spread behind it in two long white lines that closed up, behind, as if nothing had passed.
"I didn't send anyone to her," I said.
"I know you didn't."
"Then who did?"
Hollis did not answer. He drove on, into the lit city, with the wipers going. And I took out my pen, in the dark of the car, and held it, and for once did not click it, because I had a feeling that it would be too loud.