The Last Dead Girl Page 8

  He didn’t look like a man who would make rough passes at his students and rip the buttons from their blouses and slap them around, but looks didn’t mean anything. And he was a law professor, which meant he was a lawyer, which meant he was trained to speak persuasively. It was his job to be convincing.

  So it was too soon to decide if he was telling the truth. In any case, I had more questions.

  “You said that night was the first time Jana came to your house.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What was she doing here?”

  Tolliver turned away from me, looked down at the dog at his feet.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s a long story.”

  • • •

  Have you heard of the Innocence Project?” Roger Tolliver asked me.

  “It sounds familiar,” I said.

  We were sitting in white plastic chairs on his deck. Roger the dog was trotting from one end of the dog run to the other, watching us, trying to decide how he felt about being left behind.

  “It’s an organization that tries to help people who’ve been wrongly convicted, tries to get their sentences overturned,” Tolliver said. “That’s something lawyers have been doing for a long time, of course. And you don’t have to be part of an official organization to do it.” He paused, looked away shyly. “Well, for the past few years I’ve been running my own small-scale Innocence Project at the university.”

  A big flowerpot sat on the deck by his feet. Nothing growing in it but some clover. I watched him brace one of his boots against the rim.

  “We’ve had some success,” he said. “There was a case from the late seventies in Syracuse: a string of sexual assaults against college students by a young Hispanic man. A twenty-year-old named Hector Delgado was convicted after some of the women picked his image out of a photo array. There was DNA recovered at the time—semen and saliva from the perpetrator—but it was never tested. The technology wasn’t sophisticated enough back then. We won an appeal two years ago, after the DNA finally got tested and the tests proved it didn’t match Hector Delgado. He was released from prison after serving sixteen years.

  “The Syracuse Herald ran the story, and it got picked up by the Associated Press. Newsweek did a feature. They sent a photographer to take my picture. My colleagues at the university still tease me about that. But that kind of publicity helps draw students to the law school—students who want to make a difference.”

  “Like Jana,” I said.

  “Exactly,” said Tolliver. “I usually don’t work with first-year students, but Jana was eager. She joined the project when the new term started, in January. I rely on students to take care of a lot of routine work: basic research on cases, responding to inquiries from prisoners and their family members—people looking for help.”

  He clasped his hands over his stomach, interlacing his fingers. “The truth is,” he said, “we have requests coming in all the time, by phone or letter or e-mail, far more than we can possibly take on. The number of criminal convictions that wind up being overturned in this country is remarkably small, and each appeal takes a huge commitment of time and resources, so you have to be very selective. Some of the students have a hard time understanding that.

  “Jana was one of those. She felt drawn to one case in particular, a local case—Gary Dean Pruett. He was convicted of murdering his wife. The evidence was thin, but Pruett made a lousy defendant. He was a high school teacher and he’d been having an affair with one of his former students, which was enough to make him unsympathetic to a jury. His wife, Cathy, had found out about the affair, and he admitted that they had argued about it. But according to him, she just disappeared one Saturday afternoon—drove away and never came back.

  “Cathy Pruett was a teacher too, and when the police started looking for her they found her car parked on a street near her school. They found her body three weeks later, dumped in a field on the outskirts of the city. She’d been stabbed and then smothered. Their suspicions fell on Gary Pruett early on, and when they searched his car they discovered strands of his wife’s hair in the trunk. But that was the only physical evidence they ever found to link him to her death. And it was far from conclusive. Pruett’s lawyer argued that the hair had come from a blanket that was also found in the trunk, one that Pruett and his wife had used on a picnic.”

  “If that was all the evidence they had, how did they convict him?” I asked.

  An unexpected smile wrinkled the corners of Tolliver’s eyes. “It wasn’t all they had,” he said. “They had Napoleon.”

  “Napoleon?”

  “Napoleon Washburn, believe it or not. Goes by the nickname Poe.” Tolliver looked off westward, where the sun was lowering toward the tops of the trees. “Poe Washburn was a small-time crook,” he said. “Shoplifting, petty theft. He was known for stealing bicycles. Then he got picked up for something more serious: he stole a car. He was facing real prison time. He was in the county jail awaiting sentencing—at the same time Gary Pruett was awaiting trial. They were locked up in adjacent cells. Washburn claimed they got to talking one day and Pruett confessed to killing his wife.”

  “Do you think Washburn was telling the truth?”

  “It’s hard to say. But the lesson is, if you’re suspected of a crime, you should talk to your lawyer and nobody else. Not your best friend, not the police, not some guy you meet in jail. It’s a commonsense rule, but people ignore it all the time.”

  He spread his hands, inviting me to agree. I nodded. I didn’t mention that I’d talked to a detective for hours the night before.

  “So Washburn testified at the trial about this alleged confession,” Tolliver said. “And the jury voted to convict. Now Gary Dean Pruett’s serving a life sentence.”

  “Do you think he’s innocent?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. He claims to be.”

  “And he turned to you for help—he contacted your Innocence Project?”

  The smile came back to Tolliver’s eyes. He shook his head. “That’s the strange thing,” he said. “The bicycle thief called us.”

  “Washburn?”

  Tolliver nodded. “Jana was the one who answered the call—around the middle of February. Apparently, Poe Washburn suffered an attack of conscience. He told her there was no jailhouse confession—he made it up. She did some research on the Pruett case and saw how flimsy it was, and she brought it to me. I told her we’d have to pass.”

  “Why?”

  Tolliver ran a palm over his hair. “Because there are certain realities you have to accept. You can’t save everybody. You have to weigh the odds. In most of these cases, when a conviction is overturned, it’s because of DNA evidence. It’s hard to argue with DNA. If it doesn’t match, you’ve got the wrong guy. But there was no DNA from the perpetrator in the Pruett case. Pruett’s wife wasn’t sexually assaulted.

  “So it comes down to the confession. Suppose Washburn made it up. You have to convince a judge that he lied about it before, but he’s telling the truth now. Then you have to prove that without the confession, the jury wouldn’t have convicted Gary Pruett. That’s not a sure thing. But even if you can prove it, Pruett doesn’t walk free, not yet. At best you get him a new trial.

  “On top of all that, there’s the element of time. Pruett’s wife was killed less than two years ago. Pruett was convicted last spring. If he didn’t do it, then he’s been suffering a terrible injustice. But there are others who’ve been suffering the same kind of injustice for decades. Time shouldn’t matter, but it does. If you can’t help everybody, you try to help the ones who’ve been waiting the longest.”

  Tolliver took his foot down off the flowerpot and leaned toward me. “I made all these arguments for Jana, back in February,” he said. “She wasn’t happy. I couldn’t blame her. I’m not happy about it either.”

  “But she didn’t let it go,” I said.


  “No. That’s why she came here, the Sunday before last. To try again to convince me.” He frowned. “And she got a black eye for her trouble, because Roger wanted to play.”

  “But you didn’t change your mind?”

  “Yes and no,” he said, looking down at the deck. “I didn’t commit to anything, but I said I’d talk to Poe Washburn. I thought it was the least I could do.”

  “So you talked to him?”

  “On the phone, yes. It didn’t go well. When I asked him if he was prepared to swear out an affidavit—to say that he lied about Pruett’s confession—he wouldn’t give me a straight answer. ‘I want to do the right thing,’ he told me, ‘but it’s hard to know what’s right. And I need to be sure you’re going to look out for me.’”

  “What did he mean?” I asked. “Was he afraid of what would happen if he told the truth?”

  Tolliver looked up at me. “That was the implication: that there were people who wouldn’t like it if he changed his story. But it was also about money. He talked about making a new start. ‘I’d have to get out of this city,’ he said, ‘and that won’t come cheap.’ Finally I put the question to him bluntly: Did Pruett confess to him or not? ‘I’ll say what you need me to say,’ he told me. ‘As long as you’re ready to take care of me.’”

  Tolliver shrugged. “That was the end of it. I knew he didn’t care about helping Gary Pruett. He had called us because he hoped to get something out of it, and he’d be useless as a witness.”

  I watched Tolliver reach down to the flowerpot and pluck a leaf of clover.

  “What did Jana say when you told her?” I asked him.

  “I never told her,” he said. “I saw her the day before yesterday, and I meant to tell her. But I knew she’d be disappointed. And she was different; she seemed happier than I’d seen her before. When I asked her what happened, she said she met someone. ‘What’s his name?’ I asked. ‘David,’ she told me. So when I saw your name on the truck outside today, I knew who you were.” He rubbed the clover between his fingers, flicked it away. “So here we are, and Jana’s gone. Do the police have any leads?”

  I thought about how to answer. The only lead I’d been able to give Frank Moretti was a popsicle stick in the woods.

  “I don’t really know,” I said.

  Tolliver got up from his chair. Out in the yard, Roger the dog was getting restless. He pawed at the dirt beneath the chain-link fence.

  “You should be careful,” Tolliver said to me. “The boyfriend’s always a suspect.”

  I might have said the same about the college professor.

  He brought out his wallet and handed me a card. “You’ll want to steer clear of the police,” he said. “Call me if you need anything.”

  I got up and took the card and wondered about Roger Tolliver. Because he was right: I was a suspect. Yet he seemed not at all suspicious of me. Maybe it was a code among defense lawyers: everyone is presumed innocent. Maybe he trusted Jana’s judgment and assumed she wouldn’t get involved with someone who would murder her. Or maybe he knew I was innocent because he knew exactly what happened to Jana, because he was the one who put his hands around her throat.

  Impossible to tell as we stood on his deck in the sunset light.

  “Who do you think killed her?” I asked him.

  The question seemed to take him by surprise. “I couldn’t begin to guess,” he said. “It might have been a random crime. The neighborhood where she was living . . .” He trailed off, as if nothing more needed to be said.

  “What about Poe Washburn?” I asked.

  He furrowed his brow. “Washburn has no violence in his record. I don’t know what his motive would be.”

  I pressed on. “What about the people Washburn was afraid of?”

  “Why would they kill Jana?”

  “They wanted Washburn to keep his mouth shut. Jana wanted him to talk.”

  The idea seemed to bother him. I could see it in his posture, in his eyes. I suppose it might have been an act, but if it was, it was a good one.

  “I assumed Washburn was making them up,” Tolliver said. “He wanted to justify asking me for money. I didn’t believe there was a real threat.” The furrows worked their way into his brow again. “Do you think I was wrong?”

  12

  I drove east on Quaker Hill Road in the last light of the day, past the spot where I met Jana Fletcher on the roadside. I’d left Tolliver without answering his question, but I’d asked him one last question of my own. I wanted to know about the file Jana had with her the night she visited him, the night we met. Tolliver confirmed what I had already guessed: that it held the notes from her research on the Pruett case.

  The file had been on my mind since the night before. I remembered it in the white-tile room with Frank Moretti, and even then I thought it might be important. I pictured it: a thick green folder in the drawer of her desk.

  I didn’t tell Moretti about it.

  I knew if I told him he would take it. It would probably be logged into evidence, and I would never have a chance to see what was inside. But if I didn’t bring it to his attention, it might be overlooked. It might stay in the drawer, and eventually I might be able to get at it.

  Now it seemed more important than ever.

  When I turned onto Jana’s street, the sky was a darkening gray. I pulled in under the oak and the branches swayed in the wind. Jana’s front window floated in space, a black rectangle, a window into a void.

  The police had put a seal on her door: CRIME SCENE, NO ENTRY. They seemed to have repaired the damage to the frame as well. They hadn’t changed the lock and I still had my key, and it would be easy to tear through the seal. But maybe there was another way.

  I walked around to the back, hoping I might find an open window. There was no second floor, so I had no chance of getting in with the ladder the way I’d done at Tolliver’s house.

  The windows were all locked. There was no seal on the back door, but it didn’t do me any good. The door took a different key; mine wouldn’t fit.

  I went around front again to the landlady’s side of the duplex. Her car was in the driveway, a big Mercury sedan alongside Jana’s Plymouth. I knocked on her door. No answer. I could see lights behind the curtains of her front window. I knocked again and the lights went out.

  I waited, listening for movement behind the door. I thought I heard footsteps.

  “I’ll just keep knocking,” I said.

  No answer. I knocked again, to show her I was serious.

  The lights came back on. I heard a dead bolt turn and the door opened a few inches, until a chain-lock stopped it. The landlady’s face appeared in the opening, scarf around her hair, eyes a bottomless black.

  She spoke with a thick accent, like the loyal retainer in a vampire’s castle.

  “I don’t like you, young man,” she said.

  I took it in stride. “Roger doesn’t either. Hardly anybody does.”

  “Go avay,” she said, “or I call the police.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “I vill.”

  “I don’t like the police.”

  “Who can blame you?” she said. “They are idiots.” She snorted to demonstrate her disapproval. “Who is Roger?”

  “He’s a dog,” I said. “Or a lawyer. But the dog’s the one that doesn’t like me.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “This is a joke? I don’t like jokes.”

  “It’s not much of a joke.”

  “It is not a time for jokes. The girl is dead.”

  The breath went out of me. All at once I felt very tired.

  “You’re right,” I said. “No jokes. I need to get into her apartment.”

  “You can’t get in.”

  “I know it’s sealed.”

  “No one gets in. That is what they tell me.”


  “There’s no seal on the back door. If you could loan me your key—”

  “What for?”

  “It’s personal,” I said. “There are things in there I need.”

  “There is nothing in there anymore, nothing anybody needs.”

  “It won’t take long. The police will never know.”

  She scowled, and somehow, for a moment, the scowl made her ancient face look young.

  “Don’t talk to me about the police,” she said. “The police are fools. Are you a killer?”

  The question came from left field, and when I didn’t answer at once, she got impatient.

  “Did you kill the girl?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Good. Then stay avay from the police. Stay avay from this house. You have a family?”

  “Not around here.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Go to them. Knock on their door. Leave me alone.”

  She didn’t wait for me to answer. She closed the door and I didn’t try to stop her. I heard the dead bolt slide into place and stood for a moment on her steps, listening to the wind.

  A path of paving stones led from her steps to the driveway. I walked down it, climbed into my truck, and sat looking at Jana’s front door with its police seal: just a piece of paper, NO ENTRY, nothing really. I could walk up and use my key and tear the paper and I’d be inside, and what good would it do me? The old woman was right. There was nothing in there anymore.

  She was full of good advice. Stay avay from the police. Take away the accent and it was the same message I’d heard from Roger Tolliver. Maybe I should listen to them. And if I wanted to stay away from the police, the first step was not breaking the seal on Jana’s door.

  I sat in the truck and started the engine, but I didn’t leave. I looked at Jana’s door and the black rectangle of her front window and watched the wind sway the branches of the oak, and the police came to me.

  It was a black sedan, a Chevrolet, a stereotypical detective’s car. It pulled into the driveway and I watched its lights go dark in my rearview mirror. Frank Moretti got out of it unhurriedly. He wore a gray suit like the one he’d worn the night before, this one a shade lighter. He crossed behind my truck, opened the passenger door, and climbed in.