Monk gave her an ironic smile. "Not in San Francisco," he answered flatly. "That took some doing of its own. Payton's work, mostly. Maybe with a little help from the lawyer."
ELEVEN
IT WAS KIT'S BIRTHDAY.
Christopher Peralta Paget, officially age seven, sat at the head of the Pagets' candlelit dining table, his piece of chocolate angel food cake now reduced to rubble. To his left sat his parents, to his right his thirteen-year-old sister, Elena—dark and slight like Terri, with round, expressive eyes—and his brother, Carlo, Kit's hero. With an expression of deep well-being, Kit contemplated the cake sitting on its pedestal, the familiar faces in the candlelit glow.
"I love my birthday," he announced to his parents. "Thank you for creating me."
Briefly, Chris smiled at Terri. "No trouble," he informed his younger son. "Just another day at the salt mines."
As Kit looked from one face to the other, seven-year-old merriment crept into his eyes; without being sure why, Terri saw, Kit knew that the exchange was funny. Except, perhaps, to Elena, who rolled her eyes in disgust.
"I know," Terri said to her with gentle wryness. "Unthinkable." But, though she could not acknowledge it, Terri knew too well that this involved far more than teenage squeamishness. Terri had once done these embarrassing things with Elena's father, before she discovered the unspeakable things Ricardo Arias had forced on his own daughter. Some trace of that would stay with Elena forever, as everyone present knew but Kit. Once more, cringing inside, Terri imagined Thuy Sen with Rennell Price, her client.
With the grace that characterized him, Carlo draped his arm around Elena's shoulders as though nothing notable had happened. "It's like earthquakes," he advised her. "You just put it out of your mind."
Terri wished she could.
* * *
Afterward the two Paget men sat in the living room amidst the bright modern paintings, drinking coffee.
"Nice birthday party," Carlo said. "Kit's pretty funny."
"He is." Still pensive about Elena, Chris glanced up the stairs. "I should put him to bed pretty soon. It's getting to be story time."
This was Chris's nightly task: Kit was the only one of the children he had helped raise from the beginning, and he savored the rituals of parenting in a way a younger man might not.
"What are you reading him?" Carlo asked. "I still remember James and the Giant Peach."
"Not violent enough. His current favorite is Greek Myths for Children. Incest, fratricide, and beheadings—in cartoon form, with funny captions."
"You're serious."
"Completely. Sorry you missed out on it."
Terri entered the room. "Kit's ready," she told her husband with exaggerated weariness. "At last." Turning to Carlo, she asked, "Did you hate having your hair washed?"
"Always," he answered with a smile. "Still do."
Terri sat beside her husband. "Sorry to interrupt," she told him, "but there hasn't been time to ask Carlo about Rennell's grandmother."
At once Carlo was somber. "Waiting for God to call her home. She's not got much to show for her last two decades on earth."
Surprised, Chris turned to his son. "She's still alive?"
"Barely," Carlo answered.
* * *
Eula Price was morbidly obese now, and plagued with diabetes. She lay in her bed, a massive form beneath white sheets with, Carlo was certain, legs too swollen to move. The gaunt, elderly friend in a straight black wig who had ushered Carlo in retreated to the tiny living room.
Eula lived in public housing in the Bayview: three cramped rooms in a complex largely inhabited by welfare recipients and crack dealers, families which formed and dissipated, seemingly at random. The remnant of Eula Price's own family was three framed photographs beside her bed—solemn school photos of Payton and Rennell, plus one of a thin woman with coal black eyes who grimaced for the camera, as if she were too crazy or too dull to know that she should smile.
"That's their mother," Eula explained after a few moments of small talk. "She's still in the psychiatric ward."
Not much to say to that, Carlo thought. "I guess you couldn't keep up the house by yourself."
Eula gazed at the ceiling. "Couldn't keep the house, period. Went to that lawyer, like everything else."
Carlo sat beside the bed. "How did you find him?"
"He found me." She turned her head to him on the pillow, her expression mournful. "That year, seemed like trouble just kept knocking on my door."
* * *
He stood on the porch, big and gentle-seeming, wide-brimmed brown hat already held in both hands. "Mrs. Price?" he asked in a respectful tone.
Eula barely nodded; since her encounter with the towering black detective, strangers scared her.
"I'm Lawyer James," he said. "Yancey James. I heard about your grandsons' troubles, and thought maybe I could help."
Eula hesitated. For the last two sleepless days and nights, she had been sickened and confused, praying while clinging blindly to her belief in the boys' innocence, not knowing what else to do.
"May I come in?" James asked softly. "If I'm not intruding . . ."
Slowly, Eula nodded. Remembering her courtesies, she opened the door and graciously motioned him inside.
"Would you like some iced tea?" she asked.
"No, ma'am, thank you—I don't want to presume too much on your time."
Eula felt too numb to insist. As she directed him to the couch, he stopped to stare down at the rectangular hole in the carpet that the police had cut out and taken away.
Softly, he said, "I'm sorry for your difficulties, ma'am."
Once more, Eula could only nod.
James settled back on the opposite side of the couch, beneath her painting of Jesus, the lawyer's sloping, prosperous-looking stomach straining the vest of his brown, three-piece suit. "Do your boys have counsel, ma'am? Experienced counsel, I mean."
To Eula, his voice was heavy with implied concern. "There's been talk about the public defender," she ventured.
He nodded gravely, as if this were the very problem he'd anticipated. "That so often happens," he commiserated. "The defenders' office gets anyone who can't afford a proper defense. When you're drowning in cases, like those poor lawyers are, you start grinding 'em out like Spam. It's just not possible to take your client's interests to heart.
"For petty charges, maybe they can't do much harm. But in cases like this, with two lives at stake . . ."
Eula felt the specter of her grandsons' execution enter the room and sit on the couch beside him. She found herself unable to speak.
"I have an office over on Third Street," Lawyer James continued. "I know people who go to your church—like Patricia Yarnell, whose boy I personally saved from execution." He leaned toward her a little, eyes seeking trust. "All in all, I've defended sixteen cases of capital murder, with good results."
Eula fidgeted with her dress. "I just don't know what to do," she answered miserably.
Nodding his sympathy, James fell into a respectful quiet. After a time, Eula asked, "Would you be helping both of them out?"
"I'd have to see them, ma'am. But I believe we could mount a u-nited defense." James paused, seeming to reflect. "A big advantage of that is it saves you money. No point in paying for two experienced private lawyers when all you need is one."
A fresh wave of helplessness overtook her. In the silence, the lawyer fished a handkerchief out of his inside breast pocket and, head politely turned from her, sneezed softly into the white cloth. "I'm sorry, ma'am," he apologized. "Allergies."
Eula acknowledged this with a nod, her thoughts elsewhere.
"You look perplexed," he ventured quietly. "Tell me how I can help."
"Even if you can help both boys, Lawyer James, the good Lord Himself would have to pay you."
James smiled at this. "I could never presume on His bounty." His eyes perused the room and its contents. "I appreciate that this is a burden, ma'am. But Mrs. Yarnell tells me your l
ate husband bought this house quite some time ago, when he was working in the yards. By now it's surely worth some modest amount."
A visceral fear gripped Eula's heart—the house, almost all that Joe had left her, was all she had. "Maybe something."
"You have a mortgage?"
"A small one. It's nearly paid up."
Lawyer James nodded his approval. "That's a blessing," he told her. "It would allow you to take out a second."
Eula felt herself suspended between the two young men she still loved—the incomprehensible human remnants of the scared boys she had inherited—and the house which they had appropriated: which now, she acknowledged despite a rush of shame at her selfishness, might become truly hers again. "Don't even know a bank would do that . . ."
"It's not a problem," James assured her. "I have a notary public who works with me. We can do the paperwork ourselves."
Eula felt the last vestiges of the life she had known slipping through her hands. But surely God would send no more than she could bear.
"I'll pray on it, Lawyer James. I surely will."
"And you should." Decorously, he dabbed at his nose. "But don't take too long, ma'am—please. In matters like this, every day is another strike against your boys."
* * *
"Allergies," Terri said to Carlo. "What you're going to find out is that 'Lawyer James' discounted the second mortgage, then sold it for cash." Glancing at her husband, she added mordantly, "I can't wait to read the trial transcript. 'Allergies' can really screw up your defense."
Smiling faintly, Chris remarked, "I keep thinking about the old white lady—the neighbor. Cross-racial identifications are the least reliable."
She nodded. "Monk and Mauriani thought of that. They ran two lineups—six-packs for each brother."
"What about Fleet?"
"Oh, they thought of that, too."
* * *
Flora Lewis peered through the one-way glass, flanked by Monk, Ainsworth, Mauriani, and the brothers' lawyer, Yancey James.
Mauriani, Monk noted with approval, was taking no chances. As with the first lineup, the second contained six young black men of roughly similar size. Standing beside Eddie Fleet, Rennell Price stared straight ahead.
Flora Lewis pointed a long finger toward the glass. "That's him," she said decisively, "The third man from the left, Rennell Price."
As if he had heard her, the big man in the black sweatshirt shifted his weight. Then he resumed his menacing stare toward the woman he could not see.
"You're sure?" Monk prodded.
"Absolutely."
"And that's also the man you saw forcing Thuy Sen inside the house."
"That's right."
"Okay," Monk continued. "Now I want you to look at the man standing next to him, the one in the red windbreaker. Ever seen that man before?"
As the woman regarded Eddie Fleet, one corner of his mouth moved fractionally, as though his presence were a macabre joke.
"Take your time, Mrs. Lewis."
Lewis squinted through her glasses. "Maybe," she allowed. "It seems like maybe I have. But so many people come to that house—all the time, at all hours."
Her tone was puzzled, as though she were disappointed in her gifts of recall. "But the one thing I do know," she added firmly. "I know Rennell Price when I see him. And that man in the black sweatshirt is Rennell, the man I saw with Payton and the Asian girl those two murdered. You always see them together."
Still impassive, Rennell Price stared through the glass. "Thank you," his lawyer said politely, dabbing at his nose again.
TWELVE
"MAYBE PROSECUTORS PICK THE DEFENDANTS," LOU MAURIANI remarked to Terri. "But we don't get to pick their lawyers."
Sun bathed the deck of Mauriani's retirement home, a modest A-frame in the foothills of the Sierra. His vista of rolling hillocks and pine trees and twisting roads was, Mauriani acknowledged, as different from the cramped urban neighborhood of his youth as he could afford. The crisp fall air was scented with pine needles.
"Lawyer," Terri amended. "Singular. You were clearly conscious of that problem."
Mauriani sipped his lunchtime glass of cabernet, blue eyes glinting with good humor. "And you, Ms. Paget, have clearly read the transcript of the prelim."
* * *
As Mauriani saw it, his biggest problem was Yancey James.
Otherwise, the prosecutor knew, the preliminary hearing should be simple. The sole obvious pitfall concerned a possible defense motion for a change of venue; in this courtroom, the brothers' only friend was Eula Price.
She sat to one corner, overwhelmed by the reporters crammed into the wooden benches or standing at the rear. On the other side, at Mauriani's gentle urging, Chou Sen waited with her husband, Meng, a silent portrait of suffering and incomprehension, reminding the media and the Court of the terrible reason for this hearing. And presiding was Mauriani's ex-colleague from the D.A.'s office, Municipal Court Judge John Francis Warner, a man not about to make headlines by setting these defendants loose—even if their grandmother could scrape up enough security to satisfy a bail bondsman.
Certainly there was no risk of their escape: handcuffed and dressed in the orange jumpsuits of county prisoners, Payton and Rennell sat with their ankles bound by the shackles which had hobbled their entry into Johnny Warner's domain. The sole danger to Mauriani and the judge sat between the two brothers in a three-piece suit, silently ticking like a bomb.
As soon as Yancey James entered his appearance, Mauriani stood. "Am I correct," he inquired with calculated bemusement, "that Mr. James is representing both defendants? If so, I suggest some inquiry is in order."
Nodding, Warner turned toward James. "The District Attorney is correct, Mr. James. Payton and Rennell may well have conflicting interests. Should they choose to testify, their accounts of critical events may differ. Or one—indeed both—may claim to be less culpable than the other.
"This creates the risk that you won't be able to adequately represent either. Or that one will suffer from your zealous defense of the other."
Not to mention, Mauriani thought, the risk that the appellate court will reverse both convictions based on your conflict of interest, leaving me the problem of trying them all over again with the evidence grown cold. But Judge Warner was doing all he could to head this off, and the anorexic-looking court reporter was taking down each precious word.
James stood with his hands clasped tightly in front of him, appearing as tense as the two brothers. But perhaps that was appropriate for a lawyer with six clients already waiting on death row. "I've considered that," he answered, a shade too assertively. "I'm confident Payton and Rennell will have the representation they deserve."
You've got that right, Mauriani thought. He could only hope that this glib response would not placate Johnny Warner. "The Court's obligation," Warner persisted, "is to ensure both defendants the fairest possible trial. As well as to make certain that a conviction of one or the other, should that occur, is not reversed."
James glanced about the crowded courtroom, as though absorbing that his performance would receive far more scrutiny than normal. "I fully understand that," he answered with fresh bravado. "But Payton and Rennell Price are not guilty, Your Honor. Their interests are identical."
"Perhaps for now," Warner responded tartly. "Sometimes interests change."
As he listened, Mauriani scrutinized both brothers. While the older one followed the proceedings with keen interest, Rennell appeared as bored as a man forced to watch an Italian art film without subtitles. "Should that happen," James answered smoothly, "we can deal with it. For now, I must remind the Court of the strong bias against interfering with a defendant's freely made choice of counsel—even in the face of a potential conflict, as set forth by the Supreme Court of California in the Smith and Maxwell cases."
Where, Mauriani wondered, had James stumbled across the law books? "Your Honor," he swiftly interjected, "for everyone's sake this case should be tried but once.
I direct Mr. James to the Supreme Court case Cuyler v. Sullivan, wherein Justice Marshall admonished that a trial court should not only warn multiple defendants of the potential conflict but determine whether joint representation is the informed choice of each."
As he finished, Mauriani glimpsed Payton's eyes darting from him to the judge, and then to Yancey James. "Mr. James," the Court admonished, "I must inquire of your clients whether each knowingly consents to your representation of the other."
Seemingly discomfited, James glanced at the two brothers. Firmly, Warner directed, "Will the defendants please rise."
Both did, Payton with a defiant air, Rennell only after prompting by Yancey James. The shackles made him stumble before he righted himself with palpable resentment.
"Defendant Payton Price," Warner intoned for the record, "do you understand that your interests in this case may conflict with those of your brother, Rennell Price?"
Payton stood straighter. It struck Mauriani how handsome he was, especially now that a crack-free stint in the county jail had left him sober and clear of eye. After one more glance at James, he tersely answered, "Yessir."
Turning to Rennell, Warner asked with equal solicitude, "Rennell Price, do you understand that your interests may conflict with those of your brother?"
Rennell turned—not to his lawyer but to Payton. Briefly, their eyes met, and then Rennell spoke in a monotone: "Yessir."
Such responses, Mauriani knew, were the foundation of the record he needed to make a conviction stick. But neither brother seemed to grasp the buried risks of employing Yancey James. Urgently, Mauriani glanced at Warner; the judge's eyes caught his, and then, as though prompted, Warner spoke to Payton.
"Payton Price, do you understand that, by employing Mr. James to represent you both, you assume the risk that he may not represent your individual interests as effectively as separate counsel?"
Payton hesitated, his demeanor less cool. "Yes, sir," he responded softly.
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