“I second that emotion,” Judy said quietly, and Mary heard the sadness in her tone.
Lou must have too, because his victorious smile faded as he rolled out a chair and sat down, with a characteristic grunt. “I found a camera and I got some video. It’s right on the money. Wait’ll you see.”
“Get out.” Mary rolled her chair closer to him. “Does it show Machiavelli? We think he killed John, or had him killed.”
“Oh Jeez, why?” Lou recoiled, his hooded eyes flaring.
“We found out that he owns the defendant in the London Technologies case and we think he murdered John to get him out of the case.”
“That’s terrible. I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“So what does the film show? Does it show him?”
“It could, you’ll see for yourself.”
“Oh my, really?” Judy grimaced. “I don’t know if I want to see it. Okay, maybe I do.”
Anne asked, “How did you get it, Lou?”
“And where was the camera?” Bennie leaned over the table, as did Roger and Isaac, while Lou pulled his phone out of his back pocket, and started scrolling, then handed it to Mary in exasperation.
“Mare, do it for me, will ya? I left my reading glasses in the car. Damn it!”
“What am I looking for?” Mary took the phone, not surprised to see the icons on the home screen magnified to the max.
“Go to my email. I got a video clip I sent to myself. You’ll see the angle ain’t great. The only camera I could find, and believe me, I knocked on the door of every bar, restaurant, gallery, and tattoo place in the area.”
“Hang on.” Mary scrolled to Lou’s email, opened the most recent one, and clicked the video attachment, waiting for it to upload.
Lou leaned over. “You can’t see much, especially not on the phone. We gotta send this to our guy, the one that does the trial exhibits for us. He prolly can blow it up and give us more detail.”
“I’m sure he can,” Anne said, leaning over the table.
Bennie interjected, “Lou, I asked you where the camera was. Where was the camera?”
“Okay, the angle is on a diagonal across the street from the little street that goes behind the apartments like John’s, where the yards are and the residents park.” Lou motioned with his hands, but that didn’t help explain anything. “And the angle is good but it’s, like, very sharp, like acute because the camera was underneath a little roof that had a light above the front door.”
“The front door of what?” Bennie asked, exasperated.
“A massage parlor.”
Bennie recoiled. “Really?”
Roger smiled. “Did you go in, Lou?”
“Only to ask about the camera,” Lou answered, mock-huffy. “I’d rather fish.”
“Okay, gang, showtime.” Mary held the phone up so everybody could see it, and the video began to play.
They all fell silent as a grainy, black-and-white picture came onto the screen, showing tiny, shadowy silhouettes walking back and forth in front of the backstreet behind John’s apartment. The bottom of the screen read ENTRANCE MAIN and under that was the date and 21:03:00, a military clock changing numbers, in seconds.
Mary squinted at the video, feeling a bolt of excitement. “So that’s the relevant time period, right? That means three minutes after nine o’clock?”
“Yes,” Lou answered, pursing his lips.
Mary stayed glued to the video, and she could see lights on in several of the apartments if only because they were gray rectangles set lengthwise.
Bennie asked, “Which apartment is John’s?”
“This one.” Lou pointed at the window in the middle.
“Let me see if I can enlarge that.” Mary swiped over the middle window on the phone screen, and the view enlarged. The focus worsened, but the outline of a fire escape appeared, its heavy iron elements thin and spidery. “That’s John’s fire escape.”
“Right.” Lou’s tone turned tense, and everyone fell silent again.
Mary held her breath, watching the video and realizing that what they were about to see was Machiavelli, or his thug, after having killed John. The very thought made her sick to her stomach, and she glanced at Judy.
“I’m fine,” Judy said, anticipating Mary’s question.
Mary watched as in the next moment, a small, shadowy silhouette appeared in John’s office window, backlit by the lights in John’s apartment. “Is that him?”
“Yes,” Lou pointed at the darkness. “By the way, there’s no motion-detector lights out back. I checked again today.”
Mary and the others lapsed into a tense silence as in the next few moments, the silhouette got large, closer to the window, clearly visible in outline. The killer’s face was in the camera’s view, but it was completely obscured by darkness, and Mary prayed for better detail, but it was too grainy. Together, they all watched as the shadow did something at the window, presumably opened it, lifting one arm up while the other held something the same size as a laptop, and then climbed outside, lowered the window, and vanished into the darkness around the fire escape. A few moments later the shadow reappeared on the backstreet behind the row of houses, then took a right turn and left the camera view.
Mary groaned. “Ugh, you can’t tell if it’s him or whoever he sent. It’s not enough proof, is it?”
Bennie shook her head. “No, not unless we can get it enlarged or enhance the image. It’s not enough to charge him or even question him.”
“This is awful, this is just so awful.” Judy’s voice sounded choked, and Mary reached for her hand and held it tight. The numbers changed at the bottom of the video screen, and Mary realized this was when John lay on his living room floor, bleeding to death. She felt tears come to her eyes, wishing she could turn the numbers back, make them rewind to zero so that John was still alive, William and the Hodges were happy again, and Judy had a future with a man she had finally found, after so long.
Bennie broke the silence. “Lou, when does he come in the apartment?”
“He doesn’t, according to this video. I watched the whole video. He doesn’t enter by the window, he only leaves by it. He musta entered by the front door.”
“So what does that tell us?” Bennie asked, thinking aloud. “It tells us that John knew who he was and let him in, or at least John wasn’t afraid of him. But after the killer kills John, he leaves by the back.”
“It doesn’t tell us much.” Mary hit Stop, and the screen froze in grainy stillness. “You could say that it tells us that the act was impulsive, that he’s panicky and he leaves by the back. But it doesn’t really tell us that, logically. There could’ve been a lot of people on the street and he wanted to avoid detection. He knew he’d just killed John, so he leaves by the back. Even a professional would’ve done that. If he’d put on a suit, John would’ve let him in. He could’ve even said he’d been sent by Machiavelli to talk about the reverse-discrimination case, for that matter. Because the killer knew he would kill John, so John wouldn’t be alive to testify.”
“Poor John.” Judy withdrew her hand from Mary’s, wiping her eyes.
Bennie sighed, and everyone went stone silent, their expressions uniformly grave as Mary looked around the table. Judy dabbed at her eyes with a napkin and straightened her shoulders, turning to Lou.
“Lou, that was good work. Thank you.”
“I’m happy to help, honey.” Lou patted her hand, and something about seeing his lined wrinkled hand, with its age spots, resting on top of Judy’s small girlish hand with its funky pink nails, touched Mary’s heart.
She sighed. “I wish the focus could have been better.”
“It’s okay.” Bennie shrugged. “It establishes that the killer left on the fire escape. It corroborates what we already know, and it does fix the time of the murder.”
Mary looked over. “Bennie, don’t you think it exonerates Judy somewhat? In terms of timing, she was gone, and why would she leave by the fire escape? That makes no sense. She had a key and she could go back and forth out the front door.”