Bonnie had asked me to locate the wife of her client, presumed dead. If the abusive spouse had done the deed, he was staring at life in Walpole. If he didn’t, and Bonnie could prove that she was hiding, he walked.
I read a copy of his jacket. His sheet with the police was two inches of He Said, She Said. Charlie Costa was a loudmouth, hand-happy, between-jobs loser. As a beat cop, I answered domestic disturbances and disliked them. I’ve seen my share of Dennis turned into the menace after a few drinks on a Friday night or, on rare occasions, Lucy’s taking a skillet to Ricky Ricardo’s head after a Saturday night of drumming a cocktail waitress.
The law was thin as wax paper on domestic situations, and cops were instructed to tell the two parties to handle the matter between themselves, which was as useless as telling teenagers not to have sex. Violence between man and wife was legally ‘a private matter.’ It was handcuffs off unless there was a body on the floor or a spouse pressed charges, and there lay the Catch-22, the Bermuda Triangle for the battered wife. If the charges didn’t stick and her abuser walked, she’d earn another beating.
Divorce offered a protracted and costly process few women could afford. It was like the catchy slogan for the TV commercial, ‘You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby. But It’s Still a Man’s Game.’
Bonnie was right, though. Something didn’t add up. Charlie looked good for violence, but not the type with the brains to plan her demise and dispose of the body. If he had murdered Tammy, there would’ve been a mess, something called forensics, but there was no such evidence. Blood isn’t as easy to wash away as people think. There’s no ‘Calgon, take me away’ when it came to splatter. A good prosecutor could build a case from one drop of blood.
I revisited the reports and photographs. The Costa household displayed no sign of foul play or forced entry. Without forensics, without Charlie’s confession, or a jailhouse snitch who could say Charlie bragged about killing his wife and took a deal to help the state make its case, the prosecutor had nothing but circumstantial evidence.
Bonnie told me the name of the prosecutor assigned to the case. I knew him from my past skirmishes with the DA’s Office. The man’s card was made of premium cardstock. The WASP last name included a Roman numeral. He staged his career like kids played with Legos, one block at a time. For education, it was either Andover or Choate before Harvard for undergrad and law school. Instead of a cushy job at daddy’s firm, he’d slum and do a stint at the DA’s Office, after which he’d put on judicial robes for a few years, and then climb like an inchworm up the ladder of local politics. He’d stack connections, favors, and the money in his investment portfolio so he could expand the family mansion in South Slope and buy the latest summer home on the Cape.
I discussed motive with Bonnie. Other than rage, spite, and orneriness, Charlie had none to speak of. He didn’t stand to inherit insurance money. Tammy had none coming into the marriage. I posed the possibility of a third party, a contractor to off her, but the amount of money in Charlie’s bank account indicated he couldn’t afford a flophouse for the In and Out of an affair.
Bonnie suggested the opposite scenario: ‘the other man.’ It was a novel take on what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. I said it was possible. I told her a man serious about a married woman in a bad marriage would try a simple remedy before an extreme one. He’d hire a thug to motivate Charlie to sign the divorce papers first. Charlie wasn’t sitting in Holding with bruises.
A woman with an abusive husband, in my experience, had more of a motive for murder because spurned exes were obsessive. Tammy’s disappearance suggested to me that she believed Charlie would not give up on her. Her only remedy was to get him behind bars while she made her escape. I doubt she wanted the man dead. No children in their marriage made the fugitive route easier. She could disappear into the morning fog over the Charles River.
While we were discussing the case in bed, I asked Bonnie two questions. The first one was, “Is it possible to get a murder conviction without a body?”
She hugged the pillow to her chest and rolled onto her back. “It’s difficult but not impossible. It all comes down to corpus delicti versus habeas corpus.”
I knew my Latin, but I suspected that what men in togas in ancient Rome meant with those words differed from what our Founding Fathers in powdered wigs intended for our adversarial legal system, and I was right.
“Corpus in corpus delicti means the body of evidence to prove a crime.”
I said, “Habeas corpus in Latin can also be a question, as in, Do you have the body?”
“True, but in legal terms, habeas corpus pertains to procedure. It was written into the Constitution as a safeguard against unlawful or prolonged imprisonment.”
“The guarantee of due process, then.”
Bonnie rolled onto her side. “The DA has to put up or shut up.”
“Which circles back to my question. Is it possible to convict without a body?”
She flopped onto her back again. Her eyes searched the ceiling for case law and precedent. She rolled back onto her side. “I know of two cases.”
“I’m listening, Counselor.”
“People v. Scott in 1959 was the first case in the nation to secure a murder conviction based on circumstantial evidence. Wife and her money had vanished.”
“Money is motive. What did Scott have to say about his wife’s disappearance?”
“He claimed that she was down in Mexico, and he told the authorities they’d find her there. He said she liked to party down there and had, in fact, been arrested for a DUI there.”
“Did they look for her in Mexico?”
“No, but they confirmed the DUI. There was nothing to the case until the wife’s brother alerted the lead detective that his brother-in-law was seeing another woman within months of her death. Your thoughts on that?”
“Brother-in-law could’ve had a score to settle,” I said. “You’d have to prove he knew the girlfriend before the wife died. How did they reel Scott into court?”
“Forgery. The jury convicted him on forgery but not murder. He probably would’ve gotten away with it, but he made a mistake.”
“They always do,” I said. “What did Mr. Scott do?”
“While out on bail, he fled to Canada.”
“Everywhere I turn, it’s Canada.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Never mind. What did they have for evidence?”
“Her dentures and eyeglasses were found in a pile of ashes on the couple’s property in Bel Air next to their incinerator.”
“Upscale neighborhood and damning evidence. Sentence?”
“Life. He appealed on the grounds that the original trial failed to prove a crime had been committed. Corpus delicti. The court upheld his conviction.”
“And Mr. Scott rots in San Quentin, I presume.”
“There’s a twist,” Bonnie said.
“This I have to hear.”
“Scott was offered parole a few years ago, and he did the unexpected.”
“He’s in the can for life, and he’d already lost his appeal. What can he do?”
“He refused parole.”
I said, “Did he give a reason?”
“He said to accept parole would’ve required his signature, and that would’ve amounted to an admission of guilt.”
“You said you had two cases. What’s the second one?”
“People v. Archibald and William Trailor, 1841.”
“Wipe away the cobwebs, will ya? Only lawyers must know that case.”
“People know the lawyer who defended the Trailor Brothers, though.”
I looked at her and didn’t say anything until she told me.
“Abraham Lincoln.”
Three brothers and a friend had gone out for a night on the town. The next morning, the friend was missing, and the brothers searched all of Springfield but didn’t find him. A rumor bubbled to the surface that the missing man named Fisher had come into money. The authorities subjected one of the brothers to a prolonged interrogation until he broke and said his two brothers had killed Fisher, but that he’d had no part in the crime. He intimated that William and Archibald Trailor had concealed the body near a pond. Townspeople searched the area, found tracks near the water’s edge, some hair, but no body. The two Trailor Brothers were charged with murder and faced the hangman’s noose, on account of their brother’s confession and circumstantial evidence. The attorney general pushed to expedite the trial because the good citizens of Springfield wanted to lynch the Trailor brothers.
Lincoln called a respected physician, a Dr. Gilmore, to the stand. The doctor testified that the alleged victim was subject to bouts of amnesia and wandering off because of a head wound from years before. Gilmore was so respected, his testimony so measured that nobody dared to question his integrity. He’d held the court in rapt attention until Lincoln delivered the fatal blow to the prosecutor’s case. He asked Gilmore whether his recent statements were predicated on his acquaintance of the patient’s past medical history. Gilmore said his diagnosis was recent because the victim was alive and convalescing in his home.
Lincoln took the remaining wheels off the case. The tracks found near the pond were the result of children attempting to build a swing. The hair discovered in the vicinity belonged to a cow. Fisher was sent for and appeared in court. Lincoln won the case and wrote a short story about the incident.
“Didn’t know Honest Abe was an author,” I said.
Bonnie’s forehead wrinkled as if she’d remembered something, “You said earlier you had two questions. Your first question was about case law. What’s your second question?”
“Charlie Costa.”
“What about him?”
“Is Costa Spanish or Italian?”