Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 9, September 1982
- Автор: Холлидэй Бретт, Moore Arthur
- Год: 1982
- Язык: английский
- Год: Renown Publications
- ISBN: 0026-3621
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 9, September 1982». Краткое содержание книги:
“You think I want to confess?” John Gideon rubbed his forehead in disbelief. “You think that’s why I tried to kill myself? I tried to kill myself because I’m innocent. I’ve lost my job and I’ve lost my girlfriend and the press treats me like I’m Jack the Ripper in his formative years and I’ve just been convicted of first-degree rape! Can you see any possible reason why I would want to live?”
“You still have the appeals process ahead of you. You should be holding out some hope for that.”
“With some judge lurking in the wings and just dying to wield his rubber stamp on me? That’s what I have to look forward to?”
“Look, Mr. Gideon, you still haven’t explained to me why you wanted to see me,” Siderman said. “You ought to be trying to secure yourself a good lawyer, something a little more effective than a public defender.”
“The first thing a good lawyer does, Mr. Siderman, is turn you upside-down and shake you to see what kind of money falls out of your pockets. I was a management trainee with a fast-foods chain at $600-a-month. My savings account looks like a bad joke and I can’t even sell my car for cash because it’s still in police impound. A good lawyer wants me for a client like he wants an old building to fall on him.”
“Well, I don’t practice law on the side, Mr. Gideon, so I’m not Legal Plan B. Suppose you just come to the point with me and tell me why I’m here.”
At perhaps being brushed aside again, the brown eyes winced. But then the young man’s jaw set. “Mr. Siderman, all during the time I was out on bail, before my trial began, I was looking for the guy who actually did this rape. Because I knew it wasn’t me. Okay, so I failed the polygraph test. But any expert in the field will tell you a polygraph isn’t 100 per cent accurate. Just normal nervousness will make that needle jump everywhere but up on the roof.”
Siderman thought to interrupt but he didn’t. It was best to let Gideon run out his string and get it all out of his system. Catharsis would not get him out of jail, but it was good for the soul.
“Those Airport Authority police, the county police, the city cops, the county prosecutor — they pegged me as a possible, suspect and just ignored all the inconsistencies in the case to get a conviction and chalk another win up on the wall.”
Siderman nodded, still thinking essentially about Irish whisky.
“Mr. Siderman, go to my apartment in King’s Heights. Ask my roommate, Dick Rambowe, to give you my files and notes. I compiled them after my arrest and while the trial was in progress. The public defender they dished off on me wouldn’t even look at them. You read it over, Mr. Siderman, all of it and you’ll reach the same conclusion I did. The guy who did this crime is still walking around out there, laughing himself silly and rubbing his hands together and getting all heated up to do it again.”
Well, here was a fresh wrinkle on an old dodge. Not a ranting and raving confession, but just a request to look at a little paperwork. Siderman was getting off easy.
“You just want me to go over your files and notes. Nothing else.”
“Nothing else,” said Gideon. “When you’ve finished reading them, and you’re not convinced there’s reasonable doubt about my guilt, then you can just walk away from it and there’ll be no hard feelings.”
The tortured face beyond the glass was telling Siderman about a young man’s final straw. It looked like the face of the last homely girl at the dance with the music winding down and the lights coming up and no dancing partners in view. But there was something else now that was slowly persuading Siderman that this was just a little bit more than a desperate man’s final weak trick pulled from a rabbitless hat and it was precisely this: a guilty man would not be putting a reporter on a trail of evidence if he knew that trail would lead only to himself. And therefore this was not the time nor the place to simply give a man a cookie and bid him goodbye.
Siderman took out a small notebook and a ballpoint pen. “What’s the address of your apartment complex and your unit number?” he asked.
The king’s heights section was located south of the city, eight miles from the scene of the rape for which John Gideon had been convicted. His former apartment complex was a maze of ultramodern modules of dark cedar, each unit with its individual carport. Siderman guessed the rents began at $400 per month and then ran up and sharply out of sight. Gideon and his roommate likely had tossed in together much in the manner of secretaries and airline stewardesses in an effort to live cheaply and yet in reasonable opulent surroundings.
Like Gideon, Dick Rambowe was also a management trainee with the firm Siderman had learned was Polar Bear Seafoods Corporation, the franchisee for one hundred West Coast Blye’s Bounty Seafood Bars. To show his displeasure at Gideon’s firing even before his trial had begun. Rambowe had taken a thirty-day leave of absence from Polar Bear. Siderman recalled reading an interview of Rambowe by another reporter in which Rambowe had expressed unbridled rage at his company for having judged his roommate and friend guilty even before his jury had been selected and seated. Under those circumstances, Siderman now doubted Rambowe would ever return to Polar Bear Corporation.
John Gideon’s roommate answered the door to Unit 1026 dressed in an Eagles tee-shirt and tennis shorts. It was ten a.m. and he seemed not to have shaved since the conclusion of the trial the afternoon before. Beyond his shoulder Siderman could see a livingroom littered with packing boxes and the debris told a sad story about which Siderman knew he need not even ask.
“I suppose this is the post-mortem interview,” Rambowe said, his malice softened in an attempt to be a gracious host. “You know, how does it feel to lose a roomie to the state penitentiary? Did I know John was a rapist all along? Was I asked to leave by the Sandpiper’s management group before the lease was up? All of that?”
“No, none of that,” Siderman said. “In fact, just the opposite. In fact, I’m halfway convinced John Gideon is innocent.”
“Well, then, mister, you are standing in the shortest line since the opening of Gates of Heaven. The public wasn’t interested in John’s trial, his public defender damn sure wasn’t and you press guys weren’t exactly falling all over each other to get inside that courtroom.”
“I admit to not being as strong an advocate of the accused as I should have been,” Siderman said, and let his apology go at that.
Without having been asked about it, Rambowe now swept his hand around the room to explain the mess. “I’m picking up John’s things and taking them over to his folks’ place. Mine are next. With John’s appeal bond set at $100,000, it isn’t likely he’ll be out pounding the pavement and looking for work. And my quitting at Polar Bear, well, I can afford to stay at the Sandpiper now like I can afford to buy the state of Texas and give half of it away.”
Siderman was only now beginning to understand the collective destruction a criminal conviction could bring.
“I saw John at the county jail last night,” Siderman told Rambowe. “He’d taken some notes on what he thought were discrepancies in the case, the investigation and the trial, and asked me to take a look at them.”
Rambowe nodded. He walked across the livingroom to a board-and-brick bookcase and took down a blue binder notebook.
“John called me this morning to let me know you might stop by for it. I mean, can you beat that Daffy Duck public defender the court dumped out on John? He didn’t call John’s parents to testify, even though John said he made a long-distance phone call from their home on the night of the rape. At seven p.m. exactly. I mean, the phone company has a record of that call. And the victim testified she was picked up by the rapist at 6:30, only on her police statement she said it was 6:45. She moved the time a full fifteen minutes. Either way, John can’t be in two places at the same time.”