helpful, I tell Donnie, “I've seen her do it a number of times. It only takes a few seconds.”
Donnie has enough sense to be nervous and respectful. “Hey, I didn't mean no offense.”
Laurie gives him her sweetest smile. “None taken.”
It's now incumbent upon me to get Donnie thinking about the night of the murder, rather than the prospect of swallowing his testicles. It's not an easy job, but I give it a try. “So Denise gets up to make a phone call. The phone is in the ladies’ room.”
“Right. The ladies’ room … the ladies’ room.” Laurie has him unnerved.
“And that's the last time you saw her?”
“Well, I saw her in the alley afterward. You know … her body. The woman's body.”
Laurie and I go to the ladies’ room to check it out, and Donnie is really happy to see us go. The door has a faded drawing of Cleopatra on it, which identifies it as being for ladies. I start to push the door open, but Laurie grabs my arm.
“Where do you think you're going?”
“To check out the room, see where the phone is, solve the crime, whatever.”
“Let me make sure it's empty,” she says.
I shake my head in mock disgust. “Come on, this is business. Why do you have to turn everything into a sex thing?”
At that moment, even before Laurie has time to tell me what a pig I am, the bathroom door opens. A person comes out; I think it's a woman but I'm just guessing. She's at least two hundred fifty pounds, with tattoos all over her shoulders and arms. If she played for Dinky, we could kick Florida State's ass.
I take a deep breath and wait for my life to stop flashing in front of my eyes. In this case, if Laurie hadn't stopped me, I would have been alone in a bathroom with Queen Kong.
I'm nothing if not a quick learner. “Laurie, maybe you should go see if there's anyone else inside.”
“Maybe I should.”
Laurie goes inside and comes back out moments later.
“The coast is clear, macho man.”
I nod and enter. Except for possibly with my mother when I was too young to remember, this is the first time I have ever been in a ladies’ room. It turns out I haven't missed that much.
This particular ladies’ room is as unenlightening as it is unimpressive. There had been specks of blood near the telephone, and the police version of the crime was that Denise was struck over the head, and then dragged outside into the alley. Since there was no evidence of sexual molestation, I'm not sure why the assailant didn't kill her right there, but he clearly did not. The blood would have been everywhere.
Laurie and I go out into the alley where the body was found, which is no more than fifteen feet down a hall from the bathroom door. The hall cannot be seen from the main area of the restaurant, so if Denise were unconscious and unable to scream, it makes sense that she and her assailant would not have been noticed. She most likely was unconscious, both because of the blood in the bathroom and the fact that there were marks on the back of her shoes indicating that she was dragged down the hall.
While there is obviously no good place to be brutally murdered, this alley is particularly without dignity. Various establishments throw out their garbage in and around a group of Dumpsters against the far wall, and there are so many stray animals picking at it that they must be required to make a reservation. “Two rottweiler mixes, table for two? Yes, we're running a little behind. Care to have a drink from the gutter while you wait?”
One of the more puzzling aspects of this is what the eyewitness was doing here in the middle of the night. Willie's lawyer, Hinton, barely touched on this at trial, but then again, he barely touched on anything. He seemed to have no strategy, no coherent focus, and no desire to probe until he found weaknesses in the prosecution's case.
We hang out at the scene for a little while, not saying much, each of us lost in our own thoughts about how horrible that night must have been for Denise McGregor. I try to picture Willie Miller committing this crime, but I can't. I try to picture anybody committing this crime, but I still can't.
I drive Laurie back to the office, since that is where she left her car. She