Fox is Framed

by Lachlan Smith

  “Russell Bell was shot to death today in San Francisco. The police have arrested your father.”

  For a moment, I couldn’t say anything. Then I told her that I needed to get home and shower, and after that I’d be at her office as soon as I could.

  ~ ~ ~

  That evening, everyone except my father, who remained in custody, met in Nina’s office. She’d been to the jail to see him and now had just returned. Before Dot showed up, Nina had taken the opportunity to give a lecture, with me and Teddy sitting there like a pair of kids being reprimanded. “All I can say is that it’s unfortunate now that we identified Bell in open court as the snitch. If we hadn’t tipped our hand, the police would have no clue that your father knew Bell’s plans. Now, everything lines up to suggest that your father had him murdered.”

  “What can I say?” Under different circumstances, it might have been me behind her desk, handling a high-profile case like this one. I knew that I’d made the mistakes I’d made precisely because I wasn’t in charge. I’d wanted to show Nina I was every bit the lawyer she was, and, in doing so, I’d screwed up. “You’re right, but obviously I didn’t anticipate this development.”

  Nina glanced at my face, then Teddy’s. “Well, somebody did.”

  I heard the edge in her voice, and could only partly blame her. She’d just been slapped in the face with the most deflating news a criminal lawyer can receive, that a client with an upcoming trial has been arrested for another serious crime. Dot arrived, and Nina stepped out to let her in the street door. When the two of them returned, Car quickly filled us in on what he’d learned of the murdered man. “Eric Gainer hired Russell Bell to drive for him two years ago, a month or so after his reelection, right after Bell got out of prison. Thanks to your father for that. No one seems to know about their previous connection. Bell was shot in Gainer’s car this morning on a dead-end street outside a warehouse down near Mission Bay. No witnesses.” Car closed his notebook. “For the record, I was sitting at home with my dick in my hand.”

  Nina stood at the window, arms clasped to her chest. She wore tight charcoal jeans and a sleeveless pale-green blouse that showed off her slender, toned arms. A pendant and matching silver earrings contrasted with the darkness of her loose-braided hair. She gave an impression of fatigue tempered by discipline. “I think they’ll have to release him by Monday,” she told us.

  Car said, “I’d been following Bell, just like Leo wanted. Dogging his every step. They start questioning witnesses they’re bound to find someone who recognizes me. Not from the scene, but still . . .”

  Ignoring him, I spoke to Nina. “So we wait. We don’t do anything.”

  “I don’t see what other option we have.” Her eyes went to Car. He was a compact, muscular man with a shaved head, dressed in jeans and a blazer, tattoos showing at his wrists and neck. He’d worked for Teddy a long time but, with me, was always his own boss.

  “He was with me all day,” Dot broke in. “I don’t see why they’re still holding him. I don’t see what you all are so worried about.”

  Nina turned from the window. “It’s clear that the police don’t believe you.”

  “Well, that’s what I told them, and that’s what I’m telling you. We went for a ride down the coast, bought lunch in Half Moon Bay, then came back via the Peninsula.”

  “Someone must have seen you eat lunch. The waiter, other diners at the restaurant.”

  “We bought sandwiches, then took them to the beach. When I went in to get the sandwiches, Lawrence stayed outside with the bikes.”

  No one said anything for a moment, and then Teddy spoke. “Like Nina says, they’ll hold him over the weekend. Then on Monday they’ll have to cut him free.”

  Nina’s tone was neutral as she went on speaking to Dot, the voice of a defense lawyer closing down her critical instinct. “You’ll testify to everything you just told me, that he was with you the whole morning.”

  Dot returned her stare. “That’s right. We weren’t anywhere near the city when the shooting went down.”

  “What about the two of you?” Nina asked, turning to Teddy and me.

  “I was on my bike at Mount Diablo. Alone,” I said. “I’m sure Teddy was at home.”

  Teddy nodded to confirm this. “That’s the point,” Car broke in. “You weren’t alone, but I was. I’m not going to be hung out to dry by you or any other defense lawyer.” He rose and walked out.

  Teddy got up with an apologetic glance at Nina and followed him. Nina nodded, as if Teddy’s going after the investigator only confirmed her suspicions. Dot glanced between Nina and me. After a moment of silence, she rose. “You’ll call me with any updates,” she said. Nina nodded and Dot went out.

  “You’re misjudging Teddy and my father if you think either of them could have been involved,” I said to Nina when we were alone.

  “Am I? I look at Teddy and I see a mind working, scheming. Lying in wait.”

  Ever since Teddy’s shooting I’d nurtured the fantasy that my brother’s old personality, his skill and guile, had somehow survived intact behind the shell of his diminished self. But the truth was his disposition had changed. All his ruthless instincts had drained away. Her vision of him conniving behind the scenes awakened a certain longing in me, even if it was murder she was accusing him of. I had to wonder if that’s what I wanted, if I would trade my brother’s new gentleness for his former duplicitous strength.

  “None of us had anything to do with this, Nina,” I told her. “You must know me well enough now to realize that.”

  She sat behind her desk, arms folded. “I’m supposed to be the captain of the ship—and I’m not. It’s becoming clear to me that someone else has his hand on the tiller. You say it isn’t you. Well, I’d like to know whose hand it is.”

  “If what you say is true, if they’ve got no evidence, then this whole thing could be over before it starts. I think you’re right. There’s nothing to do but wait.”

  She nodded, and it appeared for a moment that the conversation was over. Then, seeming to change her mind, she went on in a rush, holding out a hand to stop me from interrupting. “Listen, people say things about your brother and this investigator of his that concern me. We don’t need to get into specifics. I’m sure much of it is overblown. I just want you to know that such rumors make me very uncomfortable with the situation that’s developing. I shouldn’t need to tell you this, but I’m your father’s lawyer, and a damn good one. I don’t represent your brother. Or you.”

  I didn’t trust myself to speak. “You’re way off base,” I said at last.

  “I don’t care how off base I am as long as we understand each other.”

  I dropped onto the sofa in her office, tipped my head back and simply looked at her, more pained by this accusation than I ought to have been. She faced me across the room. She’d just let me know that if she could pin anything on me or on my brother, she would. I didn’t think Lawrence would permit that, but still, the prospect sobered me. She kept on staring at me, not flinching.

  I rose to leave.

  Chapter 8

  At the Monday morning calendar call Nina didn’t have to say a word. The assistant DA working felony arraignments cut Lawrence loose without explanation. Without grounds for revoking his bail, and without any evidence that he was involved in Bell’s murder, the law had no power to hold him. That wasn’t the end of it, of course. They could still pick him up and charge him at any time. For now, however, I gave him a ride back to Dot’s place in San Rafael.

  During the ride, I told him what Dot had told us about his alibi. “She’s not lying, is she?”

  “How do you expect me to respond?” He glanced at me forlornly across the cab. “We didn’t have a chance to discuss what she’d tell the police, or if she’d tell them anything. We didn’t know they were coming until the moment they knocked on the door.”

 
I knew better than to ask him too much more. He was in an impossible position. Dot was possibly lying to give him an alibi, and if so, she hadn’t cleared the lie with him in advance. “Where were you really?”

  He just sighed, shook his head. “Nowhere near Bell. About that, she’s telling the truth.”

  I parked my truck and walked inside with him. Dot had been at the hearing, but she’d had her bike and Lawrence hadn’t, and she’d gone home ahead of us. While Lawrence went to shower, I sat with her in her kitchen. She looked wan.

  “They arrested him here,” she told me. “There must have been a dozen police cars. If anyone in this building didn’t already know who I’m living with, they know now. I didn’t sign on for this, Leo. I was just getting used to having him out. I don’t know what I’ll do if they put him back in. I don’t know what he’ll do.”

  Or what he’d already done, her tone seemed to imply. “We’re going to do everything in our power to make sure that doesn’t happen. But Dot, you’ve got to trust his lawyer. You shouldn’t have talked to the police. All it takes is for them to be able to poke one hole . . .”

  “I’m no idiot,” she said. “Don’t speak to me like I’m some dumb kid. Can’t he make a deal, take a plea? I know he has his heart set on winning the case, getting a big payout in a civil suit, but the risk . . . We’re not going to be rich, but I can make enough for two.”

  I knew that money was foremost on my father’s mind, but it hadn’t occurred to me that he might be rolling the dice in the retrial in the hope that the city would have to pay him a settlement if he won. With a guilty plea, of course, such an outcome would be foreclosed.

  My father came out dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt and microwaved a cup of instant ramen. After initially indulging his taste for foods he’d long been denied, it seemed that he’d returned to a diet of items that might have been purchased from the prison commissary. With both of them in the room, no further conversation on this subject was possible. I left him to his breakfast and drove back to Oakland.

  I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon catching up on my e-mail and getting out letters I’d meant to write weeks ago. Then I went online and accessed the billing records for my home and office phones, both of which my father had been using since his release. If the police were looking for a link between my father and Russell Bell’s murder, then the phone records were one of the first places they’d search. I needed to know what they were going to find.

  I made printouts showing outgoing and incoming calls and began crossing off numbers I recognized and calls I knew I’d taken or made. I pulled up my calendar, and with its help I highlighted the calls that I couldn’t have made or received. Between the office and home phones, I identified a dozen calls to two different San Francisco numbers, none of which appeared in the billing records prior to the date of my father’s release. The earliest one had been placed from my home phone that first afternoon. It took me half a minute on the Internet to determine that the number was a landline listed as Russell Bell’s.

  Based on what my father had told me, I knew that they’d been in contact. Still, I felt a rush of anger and had to stand and pace with my hands behind my head for several minutes before I could think. Lawrence had called Bell a total of six times, three from my apartment and three from the office, a call every two or three days right up until the day before the probable cause hearing. Two of the incoming calls were from the same number. One of the other outgoing calls was to city hall.

  After anger came a gnawing, cold fear I couldn’t make go away. The police were going to get these records, and they were going to use them to spin a motive for my father. There was nothing I could do about that. These calls were now part of the net that was closing around us. Dot was right, I thought. He ought to try to take a plea. I would advise any client of mine in Lawrence’s position to do so. But with Lawrence, I couldn’t take that step.

  Throwing myself back on my only refuge, I worked diligently on my other cases for the next three days. There was always plenty to keep me busy. Then the Chronicle put us on the front page.

  The reporter had evidently been thoroughly briefed by someone in the DA’s office or the police department. The story, which ran to nearly three thousand words, must already have been in the works before Bell’s shooting. Headlined betrayal and revenge, it opened with several paragraphs describing my mother’s murder, my father’s conviction, and his subsequent imprisonment. The article went on to describe my father’s activities as a jailhouse lawyer, culminating in what the article ironically labeled his greatest success, the freeing of Russell Bell.

  The article told me something I should have remembered on my own: the DA who’d prosecuted that highly publicized case was Gary Coles, the same one who’d prosecuted my father seven years before that. However, instead of emphasizing Coles’s repeated misconduct, or the DA’s decision not to retry him, the piece placed the blame for Bell’s freedom squarely on my father’s shoulders. Also, it made no mention of Gainer’s inexplicable decision to employ Bell after the state had dropped the charges. Instead of probing for the truth, the writer was interested only in implying a cause-and-effect relationship between Bell’s decision to testify against Lawrence and his murder after Lawrence had learned of this plan.

  It was a lurid and maddening piece of reporting, and it would quickly be picked up by local TV and radio. In a city as small as San Francisco, the effect would be to convict my father in the court of public opinion before a jury ever even saw him. By the time of his trial, we’d be hard-pressed to find twelve jurors who didn’t already know he’d confessed to Bell in prison, and then had him killed to keep him from testifying. The question was whether potential jurors would admit to having watched these news reports and having been swayed by them.

  With an idea of learning more on my own, on Thursday evening I decided to drop in on Russell’s visitation to see who cared about his death enough to show up. I thought there was a chance Eric Gainer might be there to pay his last respects to someone who, despite his background, had evidently become a valued employee. If he was there, I wanted to talk to him.

  The funeral home was an ugly long building a block or so from McLaren Park. In the foyer, a signboard behind glass told me that Russell Bell’s visitation was in the Violet Room. There, four rows of folding chairs stood empty. The casket stood flanked by two meager floral arrangements. Standing over the casket, I took out my flip phone and snapped a shot.

  Russell Bell’s head on the velvet cushions seemed small. His hairline was receded, his jaw narrow and somehow misshapen. I couldn’t tell how tall he’d been. He had a look on his face like he knew the answers to all my questions, even the ones I hadn’t thought of yet. Behind me someone coughed. I turned and saw a giantlike figure standing near the wall just inside the door, wearing a navy pinstripe suit that sat on him like armor. I recognized Jackson Gainer, the older brother of City Supervisor Eric Gainer and a lawyer at one of the city’s white-shoe firms.

  I was taken aback to find him there instead of Eric. But, saying my name, I extended my hand.

  He didn’t seem to remember who I was, which was in line with his reputation for showing utter disregard for those outside of the city’s highest sphere of power and influence. He just didn’t give a fuck about you if you couldn’t do anything for him. In that regard, he couldn’t have been more different from his brother.

  Jackson and Eric Gainer: everyone knew their story. Two white kids from the neighborhood, their background not so different from mine, a year apart in school and both standout basketball players. Jackson had landed a scholarship to St. Ignatius High and had spent three years as a power forward. Eric, though smaller, had filled the same role for Balboa, the public school he and I attended.

  In Jackson’s senior year, when Eric and I were juniors, the teams met in the first round of the Division I Boys Basketball California State Championship, played at Keza
r Pavilion here in the city. Five minutes into the fourth quarter, Eric had been driving to the basket and Jackson floored him with a flagrant foul.

  The whistle blew, and Eric, without so much as a glance at his brother, went to the sideline for a towel to staunch the blood pumping from his nose. He made both free throws and remained in the game. On the strength of those shots, the Balboa Buccaneers, who’d been down by three at the time of the foul, pulled ahead and ended up winning by seven points. No one who’d been in the bleachers would ever forget Eric’s performance, the utter disregard he showed when Jackson’s palm went into his face.

  We shook hands, his huge one swallowing and crushing mine. Seen together these days, Eric, despite his similar size, looked more intellectual than Jackson, owing to his receding hairline and rimless glasses. There were those who said that the older Gainer brother was the moving force behind the younger’s career, that he’d installed Eric on the board of supervisors and kept him there by arm-twisting and willpower. On his own, people said, Eric would never have risen so far. But I only had to remember Eric with bloody wads of cotton jammed up his nose, calmly sinking shots over Jackson, to know that he’d done what he wanted with his life.

  Just as I started to say something, Jackson Gainer revealed he knew exactly who I was. “Look, Leo, let’s cut to the chase. I can’t tell you anything. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it, to see what we have on your father? You’re not going to get anything out of me. And let me just say now’s hardly the time to be playing Perry Mason. The body’s still warm. Everyone’s in shock. Although, considering Russell’s background, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Don’t play stupid. He was a con. And it sounds like he was asking for what he got. If it wasn’t your dad who killed him, then it was someone else he crossed. Someone like Bo Wilder. From what I hear, the DA’s office thinks that Bo and your father were pretty tight while your father was inside. And Bo has plenty of muscle on the outside.”