The Attorney

by Steve Martini

  “You can try to sell that to the jury,” I tell him. “I’m not buying.”

  “We will. The evidence is solid.”

  I give him a questioning look.

  “You don’t deny he made threats a few hours before Suade was killed?”

  “Half the people in town were sticking pins in dolls with Suade’s name on them.”

  “He has no alibi. He can’t account for where he was at the time. And the cigar. The one from the scene. It matched the one Brower gave us. Said he got it from your client. Hale was handing these out at your office?”

  “A lot of other people smoke cigars.”

  “Not this kind,” says Avery. “Very rare. A Cuban blend. Contraband,” he says. “Sold only on the black market. Your client, when he won the lottery, should have formed cheaper habits. We found a box of these cigars in his house, on the desk in his study, and a receipt from the shop where he bought them. We’ve been talkin’ to the owner. He seems real nervous. Doesn’t want any trouble with customs. Mr. Hale was the only one who ordered that particular brand,” says Avery. “When the analysts at the lab get through, we’ll be able to tell you which field in Cuba they grew the tobacco in.” He gives me a satisfied grin, like Morgan Freeman in a scene where he has the last word.

  “You want more?” He’s having fun ruining my day.

  “Trace evidence,” he says, “found blood and some other stuff on your client’s clothes, in his car. Matches what we found on the victim. You want some advice?” He doesn’t wait for me to say yes or no.

  “You should cut a deal, fast as you can. He’s a likeable old man,” says Avery. “I wouldn’t want to see him spend the rest of his life behind bars—or worse.”

  TWELVE

  * * *

  “I feel like I’ve been violated.”

  “Not by me, I hope.”

  “Don’t get cute.” Susan’s fishing in the drawer of the bureau in her bedroom, second one down, the one she keeps her panties and bras in. She’s wearing my white dress shirt, tails halfway down her thighs, morning attire when the kids are asleep in the other room and the door is closed.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “My camera. The little thirty-five millimeter with the pop-out zoom.”

  “I’ve got a pop-out zoom,” I tell her. I point down in the direction of my midsection with the sheet pulled up to my chin. “Maybe I could be of service? Much more fun than a camera.”

  She laughs. “I want to take a picture. The girls are piled in there like cordwood. All in one bed. Laid out so cute I wanted to get a quick shot before they wake up. All you can see is long hair and pillows.”

  “If you’re worried about Sarah, you can relax. She won’t stir till noon. Not unless we go shake her out. And then it’ll take her four hours to wake up. Walk around like a zombie waiting for breakfast to magically appear on the table and the room fairies to make her bed.”

  “Damn it.” Susan’s talking to herself, under her breath, ignoring me as she pushes things to one side, then the other in the drawer.

  “You remember the one? Little Olympus with the lens cover that looked like chrome. Case looked like leather?”

  “I remember seeing it.”

  “It looks as though they got that, too,” she says.

  Susan has been filling out insurance forms for what seems like forever. An item here, an item there. Going through tax records and old credit card bills, finding receipts to prove she owned things that are now missing. It’s the stuff you don’t use all the time, she can’t find. In a fire or a flood you do it all in one fell swoop. Try to remember what was there and write it down, close your eyes and do a mental walk through every room, psychically rifling drawers in your mind’s eye. But a burglary, unless they back a truck up to your front door, it’s different.

  One afternoon she went in her closet looking for something to wear. A formal dinner we’d been invited to attend. She had her black sequined gown laid out on the bed. Ten minutes later she came out spitting vinegar, angry as a March hare. A black lace-fringed teddy, not something she wore every day, the only thing she could wear underneath the dress, except skin, was gone.

  “It’s got to be kids. Who else steals something like that?” She half expected to see it show up hanging from a street sign in the neighborhood. She was too embarrassed to claim it on insurance. Give the adjuster a thrill.

  Susan gives up on the camera.

  “Guess you’ll just have to draw a picture,” I tell her.

  “That’s what I like about you. You’re so sympathetic.” The thing about Susan. She has a knack for misdirected anger.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to throw that sheet off.” Her dark eyes flashing toward the sheet at the bottom of the bed, she telegraphs it just an instant before she moves. My hands are a half second too quick as I grip the top and she can’t pull it off. Still she is tugging.

  “You want a drawing, you gotta take off the sheet.” She’s laughing at me. Giggling like a schoolgirl. “What’s the matter?” she says. “Never did any posing in college for the art classes? I thought all the good-looking studs did that.”

  “You must have gone to a different school,” I tell her.

  “Either that, or you weren’t one of the studs.”

  “Complaining, are you?”

  “No.” She gives up on the sheet. I find my boxers.

  “About time you got your bones out of the sack,” she says. “Talk about your daughter.”

  “What time was it we crashed?” I ask her.

  “I don’t know. Twelve-thirty?”

  “That’s the earliest I hit the sheets in a week.”

  “What, you want me to feel sorry for you?” She makes with her thumb and forefinger like a miniature violin, then before I can react, she’s back to the sheet, and rips it off the bed.

  “Too late.” I’ve got my boxers on.

  “That can be remedied,” she says.

  “Another time.” I look at my watch on the bedside stand. “I didn’t realize it was this late.” In two seconds I’m rummaging around in her closet searching out a pair of jeans I left hanging on a hook the last time I was over, and a plaid flannel shirt sharing the same spot. We see enough of each other that we have now assembled a casual wardrobe at the other’s house. I gather up a pair of running shoes on the floor of the closet, each with a white cotton sock tucked inside. It is Saturday morning.

  “I’ve got to go downtown,” I tell her.

  “What, the office?”

  “The jail. I have to talk to Jonah.”

  “Are you sure?” She’s starting to do a dance for me, hoochie-coochie at the foot of the bed, toying with the top button as she sways her hips and sashays. “You want your shirt back?”

  “Sooner or later, but I don’t need it right now.”

  Her shoulders droop and her head cocks at a forty-five. “You know how to kill a girl’s act,” she says. “I thought we were going to spend the day together.”

  “I’ll only take an hour or so. I’ve got to talk to Jonah.”

  “Maybe you should move in with him,” she says. “He certainly sees more of you than I do.”

  “I don’t think they’d let us double-bunk,” I tell her. “Besides, my shirts wouldn’t look nearly as good on him.”

  She gathers up her bra and a pair of pants, a slipover top and heads for the master bath. “How is he holding up?” she asks. The door is half closed, so our voices go up a few decibels.

  “All right, I suppose. His wife’s worried about his health.”

  “Is he sick?”

  “Bad ticker,” I tell her. “High blood pressure.”

  “On top of everything else,” she says. “Must be tough for both of them.”

 
; “It is.”

  “Sorry about the cigar with Brower,” she says. “If I’d known he was going to volunteer, turn it over like that, I would have at least given you a heads-up.”

  “Doesn’t much matter,” I tell her. “They found a box of them on Jonah’s desk at the house. He wasn’t exactly looking to hide ’em.”

  “I should never have brought him that day,” she says. “At your office. Now he’s a witness. I mean, if he hadn’t heard Jonah say the things he did . . .”

  “You heard him,” I say.

  She steps out from behind the door. “Yes, but I’m me.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You wouldn’t testify if you were subpoenaed?”

  “If Brower hadn’t been there, nobody would have known I was there, except you, your partner, and the defendant. They can’t make the defendant testify, and unless I misunderstand the rules,” she says, “a lawyer can’t be forced to provide evidence against his client. So who’s to tell them I was there, except Brower?”

  Susan has it all figured out. As it is now, she is likely to draw a summons to appear, to testify as to what she heard.

  “Have the investigators talked to you yet?”

  She shakes her head, running a brush through her hair, standing in front of the vanity. “But I’ve been expecting them any day. Sooner or later,” she says, “they’re gonna come knocking. Especially the way Brower’s been looking at me. He’s been very nervous, keeping his distance. He knows I’m angry at him.”

  “You shouldn’t take it so personally,” I tell her.

  “He should have asked me first before running to the cops with the cigar. He was only at the meeting because I invited him.”

  “And what would you have told him, to smoke it? The cigar, I mean.”

  “No.” She lays the brush down, turns and looks at me. “I would have told him to turn it over. But I would have been the one telling him. Now it looks like I might have been trying to cover things up.”

  “Not on my account, I hope.”

  “People downtown know about us. They talk. I have enough problems in the department right now,” she says. “Attorney general breathing down our neck. Newspapers claiming we’re fabricating evidence, suggesting horror stories to little children. God knows, they don’t need us to invent them. Brower should have been more sensitive to the bigger picture.”

  “Sensitive is not a word that comes to mind when thinking of Brower.”

  “Exactly,” she says.

  I am thinking that the man’s future is now limited. She returns to the brush and the mirror, rapid strokes through hair of thick silk.

  “Maybe I should have been more sensitive,” I tell her. “Maybe I was the one who shouldn’t have asked you to come to the office that morning.”

  “I was there for a legitimate reason,” she says. “After all, you had reason to believe Suade took Jonah’s granddaughter.”

  “Yeah. Talk about a motive for murder.”

  “Tell me,” she says, “what happened to the theory it was a drive-by?”

  It was the story, printed early in the papers, when the cops threw a blanket over things, before there was anything else to report.

  “Shooting in an alley. That’s the obvious assumption,” I tell her. “I don’t think the cops ever bought into it. Doesn’t square with the physical evidence.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the fact that they found two cigarettes belonging to Suade dumped out on her body. One of ’em actually burned part of her outfit. They’re thinking remnants from the killer’s ashtray.”

  “Like the cigar?”

  “Right.”

  “So she smoked? So what?”

  “If Suade had time to smoke two cigarettes and stub them out in the car’s ashtray, she and whoever shot her spent some time talking in the car. It’s the kind of evidence causes the reconstruction experts to think it’s a more calculated act.”

  “Ah.” I can see Susan’s head nodding slowly in the mirror as she takes it in, the evidence and where it leads.

  “Have they found the gun?”

  “Not yet. At least if they have, they haven’t disclosed it to us.”

  “Did Jonah own one?”

  “He says he didn’t.”

  “But you don’t believe him.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got a man trying to check it out. It’s the difficult thing when you’re outside the loop,” I tell her. “Agencies that record such things, like who owns guns, aren’t falling all over themselves to share this with you when they find out you’re defending a homicide. It’s against their religion.”

  “What kind of bullet was it? What caliber?”

  “What is this? Some sudden morbid interest in ballistics?”

  “Humor me.”

  “She was shot twice. Three-eighty caliber. It would be a little semiautomatic.”

  “The kind of gun a woman would use,” she says. “Might keep in her handbag.”

  “Yes.”

  “She owned one.”

  “Who?”

  “Suade.” She looks at me. Inscrutable reflections.

  “What can I say? Some of us are inside the loop,” says Susan. She can’t keep from smiling. “I had somebody check. Not Brower,” she says. “Somebody I can trust.”

  I am thinking Brower’s replacement. Tiberius has a new Sejanus.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything unless the caliber was the same,” she says. “Why get your hopes up? But Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco . . .”

  “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,” I say. “ATF.”

  “That’s what I said. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. They show that Suade owned a pistol. And I think it was the same kind.”

  She can tell she has caught me flat-footed, staring at her in the glass. She gets up and walks across the room to her purse that is hanging over one of the head posts of the bed. She pulls out a note and reads a serial number.

  “Yes. It says a Walther three-eight-oh. PPK. I don’t know what that is.”

  “The model,” I tell her.

  She hands me the scrap of paper.

  “That is it, isn’t it? The same caliber?”

  I look at the note. “That’s it.”

  “Maybe she was shot with her own gun,” says Susan. “Could be a case of self-defense. Even an accident. Just do me a favor,” she says. “Don’t tell anybody where you got that.”

  I nod. “I wonder where it is?”

  “What?”

  “Suade’s gun,” I say.

  Susan shrugs, as if to say, “Who knows?”

  THIRTEEN

  * * *

  It is a popular myth that courts of law are immune to politics. In this state, judges run for reelection and generally break out in a cold sweat every six years wondering whether they’ll draw opposition on the ballot.

  Judges on television have become a growth industry, an army of ambition in robes looking for face time on the tube: the next Judge Judy or Joe Wapner. In a notorious trial, they can become celebrities overnight with a new career in the offing: dishing out justice for ratings.

  For a number of reasons, some of them perhaps even logical, Jonah has been denied bail. The prosecutors have prevailed in their argument that a man with the kind of financial resources my client has may suddenly develop a yen for the balmy beaches of Mexico, or maybe Rio, where the word extradition isn’t even in the dictionary, rather than face charges on a capital crime.

  Jonah is now reconciled to spending time behind bars pending trial. I can only pray that this is all he does.

  Each day it seems the mountain to be climbed is steeper. Women’s groups have gotten their hands on damaging evidence, the press release that Suade never had time to send out, the one c
harging Jonah with the sexual assault of his daughter and granddaughter. They have been making the most of it on the airwaves, effectively poisoning the jury pool. Jonah is rapidly becoming the poster boy for abuse of women, even though Mary has faced down the cameras in her front yard telling the press that the charges are untrue.

  Two days ago she was forced to come forward, with Harry at her side on the front lawn. “My husband has never laid a hand on me in anger. He has never sexually assaulted our daughter.” When she was not quick enough making similar disclaimers for her granddaughter, they pounced on it like an admission, drowning out her repeated denials with a million innuendo-laden questions until Harry was forced to step forward, hands raised to quell the mob, explaining: “Mrs. Hale’s statement goes for her granddaughter, as well.” As expected, the oversight became the lead on every newscast that carried the story. They are now calling it the Lotto Lust Case, and getting smirks and winks from their twenty-mil-a-year anchormen who offer this up as a teaser on the nightly news.

  It is the reason I am here this morning, at the DA’s office in an attempt to put out the fire, before it turns into a barn burning. The DA’s office has called. I think they are worried; the publicity, the kind that can lead to appeals, is getting out of control.

  Ruben Ryan sits behind his desk, fingers interlocked, hands clasped behind his head as he sways in the black leather high-back chair. Ryan is a career prosecutor, one of three in the DA’s office who try the high-profile murders in this county. He has twenty years with the office, the grim countenance that goes with the experience, and a bottle of antacid tablets the size of a mayonnaise jar to prove it.

  “You expect me to believe your office had nothing to do with the release?”

  “I don’t care what you believe,” he says. “I’m telling you what I know. We’re investigating,” says Ryan.

  “Who else besides you and your investigators had access to those press releases Suade printed?” I ask him.

  “I understand you had one.” Which begs the question of how I got it, though he doesn’t get into this.