Degree of Guilt

by Unknown

  Chris was shut in his office, trying to adjust his thoughts to the testimony of Dr Bass, refusing all calls from the press so that he could outline his final argument to Caroline Masters. Later, Terri would listen and offer advice. There was just one more thing she needed to do.

  This would come to nothing, she believed. But if the tapes had not been destroyed – and while Mary had motive to destroy them, she lacked the means – Chris and Carlo were still at risk. If Terri could not find the tapes, at least she would know that.

  Getting out of the car, Terri felt the breeze on her face, took in the vehicles that passed, the people in the crosswalk, the sound of engines and car horns, the random buildings – some tall, some low, their irregular height like the rooftops of a toy city, built by a child. After she saw Chris, perhaps she would pick up Elena early from day care, drive her to the beach. They both needed that.

  Terri walked into the post office.

  It was dim, musty-smelling. Ten or twelve people waited with sullen detachment for three postal clerks to process their mail or retrieve a package. The bearded man in front of her hummed tunelessly, passing time to his own inner voice.

  The beach was a good idea, Terri thought. Once the hearing was over, she would be free to spend time with Elena and deal with Richie.

  She checked her watch. One-fifteen.

  What was Caroline doing now? she wondered. Calmly nibbling on her usual salad, having made up her mind? No, Terri thought: Caroline might already have decided how to rule, but she would not be serene about it. The hearing, and the people it touched, seemed to weigh on her now. She would be thinking of those people as much as her career or even Mary; she could cause the machinery of justice to release them by freeing Mary Carelli or, with Mary, send them all to trial.

  Terri would not, she decided, wish to be Caroline Masters.

  She shuffled forward, imagining the moment when Caroline announced her decision. The thought led her to another: even less would she like to be Christopher Paget.

  They had lost, Terri believed. Lost with the final witness.

  ‘Next,’ a man’s voice called.

  Terri looked up in surprise. There was no one in front of her; a pleasant-faced Japanese postal clerk looked at her expectantly.

  She walked up to the window. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Absentminded.’

  ‘Sure.’ He was looking at Terri with an intelligent, curious expression; for the first time, it struck Terri that her face might be recognizable to strangers. ‘I’m looking for a lost package. Something with an incomplete address, or the address missing. It got mailed from Nob Hill, we think.’

  Perhaps, Terri thought, she only imagined that he looked curious. ‘You didn’t mail it yourself?’ he asked.

  Terri shook her head. ‘No, a friend. We think she stuck it in the mail by accident.’ Feeling awkward, Terri joked, ‘She’s absentminded too.’

  The man seemed to study her face. Then he smiled. ‘You’d be amazed,’ he said. ‘What was in there?’

  What had she told the woman in Dead Letters? ‘Cassette tapes,’ she answered. ‘Like for a stereo.’

  He looked thoughtful. ‘I might have noticed that. We get some good stuff back there, and I play music all the time in my car. Offhand, I don’t remember tapes.’

  Didn’t you already call about tapes, the woman had asked, a few weeks back?

  ‘Can I take a look?’ Terri asked.

  He hesitated. ‘There’s no one back there now.’

  Terri smiled. ‘I promise not to take anything that’s not mine. All I’m looking for are cassette tapes, really. Maybe in an envelope marked “Hotel Flood.”’

  He thought for another moment, and then shrugged. ‘We have a lot of things. I might have missed it.’ He motioned her around the counter. ‘Come on back – you’ve got an honest face.’

  Terri followed him down a hallway to an open room with metal shelves full of packages and a three-foot stepladder next to the door. ‘This is it,’ he said cheerfully. ‘If you find what you’re looking for, come get me.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Terri said. Somehow, being in the room made her quest seem real. Her skin tingled; she did not dare look around her until the clerk had left.

  She should have told Chris she was coming.

  It was all right, she told herself. Chris was distracted enough. He did not want the tapes found by anyone else; if they were anywhere Sharpe or the media could get them, he would choose to have them first. And if Mary lost, and went to trial, it was all the more important that Terri find them.

  Look systematically, she told herself. Don’t become frenzied, glancing from shelf to shelf, and don’t leave anything to chance. Then you can forget this.

  There were shelves on three walls.

  The first row of shelves took a half hour. She spent the time bending, stretching, using the stepladder, until her back hurt. She found a baseball glove, foreign currency, several watches, a box full of religious tracts, a cookbook with handwritten recipes stuffed in several pages. The scraps of lives, but no tape.

  Once more she climbed the stepladder, peering over the top of a new shelf.

  ‘Find anything?’

  She turned atop the ladder. The clerk stood in the doorway.

  ‘Not my stuff,’ she said. ‘But a couple of nice watches.’

  The clerk laughed. ‘You must really want those tapes. This room reminds me of the army. It’s depressing.’

  Terri smiled. ‘If I start to need air, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Okay.’ He paused. ‘These tapes, they’re not the Grateful Dead, are they?’

  Terri shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Too bad. I really love the Dead.’ He went back to his customers.

  She turned, resting on her arms, and glanced at the top of the next shelf over.

  There was a ripped letter-size envelope, Terri saw, with a rubber band around the middle. Inside the envelope was the outline of a small rectangular object.

  At least it was the right size, Terri thought. She paused, debating whether to break her discipline of a systematic search, and then climbed down the stepladder.

  She slid the ladder sideways across the floor, then climbed it again, peering at each shelf as she went.

  She got to the top, gazing down at the envelope. Finally, she picked it up.

  It was light in her hand. When she turned it over, she saw the logo of the Hotel Flood with a line drawn through it.

  Her hands began shaking. As she removed the rubber band, it fell to the floor.

  She reached inside the envelope.

  There was not one rectangle, her fingers told her, but two. She pulled them out.

  Tapes.

  Staring at them, Terri saw the Roman numerals. But it was a moment before she could accept what she was holding.

  The first tape, she knew from Steinhardt’s code, was of Laura Chase. Which meant that the second was Mary Carelli.

  She stood there clutching the tapes, wishing that she had not come. Then she slowly climbed down the stepladder with the tapes and the envelope.

  The rubber band was by the ladder. She picked it up, put the tapes in the envelope, and wound the rubber band tight around it.

  The clerk was serving a customer. Terri walked behind him. ‘I found it,’ she said quietly.

  He turned, smiling, and took the envelope from her hand. He glanced at it and looked up again. ‘Amazing,’ he said. ‘Goes to show what they say about perseverance.’

  He might not have noticed how strange she had sounded, Terri thought. She saw his customer watching them. ‘I guess so,’ she said. ‘Thanks for your help.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll have to sign for it. We can’t just let stuff go.’

  He left for a moment, returning with a sheet filled with descriptions of parcels, a column for signatures and addresses. His index finger rested on a line headed ‘Tapes, Flood.’ ‘Here,’ he said.

  Carefully, Terri signed the index, the tapes held in her right hand. ‘Than
ks,’ she repeated.

  ‘Sure.’ He looked at her again. ‘Don’t I recognize you from somewhere?’

  Terri managed a smile. ‘I have that kind of face,’ she answered, and left.

  Chapter 2

  Christopher Paget found it hard to concentrate.

  He walked to his window, gazing out at the panorama of the city – the green rise of Telegraph Hill, houses and apartments seeming to climb up its side; the sweep of piers with their luxury liners and tour boats; the blue expanse of bay. Since he was a child, Paget had loved this city, counted himself fortunate to live here; as an adult, he had taught Carlo to love it too, exploring its vistas and its nooks and crannies – a neighborhood Italian restaurant in North Beach, pocket parks with swings and slides, places to walk on Sunday morning for croissants or blueberry muffins.

  On a normal day, these thoughts brought him contentment. Being part of a place that Carlo now wished to be part of made him feel that his life had added up to something, was not just about himself and how he had made his way. He no longer saw his decision to raise Carlo as something done for a lonely child: it had created a depth of happiness and pleasure that would have been beyond him on his own. Whatever else the accident of Mary Carelli had brought him, their careless weekend in Washington had brought him Carlo. Christopher Paget was lucky to be Carlo’s father; looking at the city, defined by the days they had spent together, reminded him of that.

  But today the view gave Paget little pleasure, and less peace.

  From the beginning, he had believed Mary guilty of something, in some degree or another. Everything he knew about her, and every twist in her story, told him she was hiding something deeper and more obscure than what had happened on the day Mark Ransom died. But Paget had forced himself to focus simply on what the prosecution could prove. If he put Sharpe’s case to an early test, he had reasoned, perhaps he could extract Mary from danger before the prosecutor learned what Paget himself did not know – by finding the tape or otherwise. And Marcy Linton had made a difference; there were times, despite himself, when Paget gave Mary’s account some credence.

  Now George Bass had shaken him to the core.

  It wasn’t merely the damage to Mary’s defense – though Paget could see that in the faces of the media people as he had left the courthouse, hear it in the shouted questions he had ignored. Nor was it that Johnny Moore’s failures now made sense, or even that Sharpe had transformed Marcy Linton – at least in some sense – into a prosecution witness. What was so painful was the realization that in spite of his best professional efforts and all that he knew about her, Paget had still wanted to believe in Mary Carelli.

  Why blame Mary? he thought. She is who she is; only a fool invests in believing his client. Even when the client is the mother of your much-loved son.

  Especially then.

  Now there would be a trial, he believed, another ordeal for Carlo to bear. Searching for motive, Sharpe might find the tape: even if it was inadmissible, sooner or later someone from the media would ferret it out. There was no chance that the lucky reporter would conclude that hurt to Carlo Paget outweighed the boost to his or her career, piously cloaked in the public’s right to know. And in the meanwhile, Carlo would be besieged by questions from all sides, and worst of all his own: whether his mother had killed Mark Ransom not because of rape but to save her own career, and then coolly lied about it until the lies entangled her.

  There was a soft knock behind him.

  As Paget turned, Teresa Peralta appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Do you want to talk,’ she asked, ‘or should I come back?’

  She looked as troubled as he was, Paget thought. ‘Stay,’ he answered. ‘I’m not functioning very well. Perhaps you can help.’

  Just her being there would help. But Paget could not tell her that. Too much of what he felt was no longer about Terri the lawyer, as good as she was, but about Terri the woman.

  ‘Is it Bass?’ she asked.

  Paget nodded. ‘He seems to have set off a chain reaction. In the past hour, I’ve covered Mary, Carlo, the tapes, and my own monumental foolishness. I haven’t come up with a line of argument.’

  She closed the door, stood leaning against it with her black purse clasped in front of her. ‘Tell me the worst part,’ she said.

  Paget was silent for a moment. Then he asked, ‘Did you ever love someone so much it hurts?’

  Terri nodded. ‘Elena.’

  ‘For me, it’s Carlo. It’s the only time I’ve let myself feel like that – perhaps I thought that loving a child was safe.’ He shrugged. ‘Loving someone is never safe. There’s too much that can happen.’

  ‘And you’re worried about what will happen to Carlo.’

  ‘To Carlo, yes. Perhaps, more selfishly, to Carlo and me.’ He paused. ‘I don’t want this to go on for him. And I keep worrying about that tape. What on earth could have moved Mary Carelli, of all people, to bare her soul for a tape recorder?’

  Terri watched him. ‘You’re still afraid they’ll find it, then.’

  ‘If they have a reason to keep looking. An ongoing prosecution will do nicely.’

  Terri’s shoulders drew in. Softly, she said, ‘They won’t ever find it, Chris.’

  Her tone was very subdued and very certain. ‘Because Mary destroyed it?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Because I have it.’

  Something in her voice kept Paget from saying anything. Slowly, Terri took an envelope from her purse.

  She walked across the room and placed it in his hands. ‘There are two tapes inside,’ she told him. ‘One is Laura Chase, talking about Lindsay Caldwell. The second is Mary.’

  He stared down at the envelope. ‘How long have you had these?’

  ‘For less than an hour.’ Her voice was still quiet. ‘I found them at the post office.’

  Paget looked up. ‘Mary told you?’

  Terri shook her head. ‘I figured it out. After Mary shot Ransom, she put them in a blank envelope and slid them down the mail slot. That’s what she was doing in the hallway.’

  ‘Then she lied about that too.’ Paget touched his eyes, slowly shaking his head. ‘If she was cool enough to do that, God knows what else she did. And lied about.’

  Terri walked away from him, sat in a chair, looking out. ‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ she said. ‘Not today.’

  Paget shrugged. ‘You didn’t want me worrying anymore – at least about the tapes. And you reasoned, correctly, that any decent defense lawyer wouldn’t let this keep him from arguing the evidence before the court.’

  She looked up at him. ‘Do you want me to do the argument?’

  ‘No. You’ve done far too much already.’ Paget’s brain was sluggish, he realized; it was only as he spoke that it came to him that Terri was at risk. ‘You got these tapes yourself?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. There’s a storeroom for mail without postage.’

  Paget looked from Terri to the envelope and to Terri again. ‘They made you sign for them, I imagine.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then they can trace this to you.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Her voice and eyes were steady. ‘Better me than you. Or Mary.’

  Paget sat next to her. Quietly, he asked, ‘Why did you do this?’

  She was silent a moment. ‘Because I like Carlo,’ she answered. ‘And I like what you’ve done with him. He’s been hurt already, and I didn’t want him hurt anymore. Now, perhaps, he won’t be.’

  ‘But you’ve got your own life, Terri, your own career. I didn’t want you involved. Not like this.’

  Terri looked down. ‘I have trouble drawing lines sometimes. I know that. But if it were Elena, and me, wouldn’t you have done the same thing?’

  Paget gazed at her; the still, silent profile, the face he had learned to trust. ‘Then leave it at this,’ he said. ‘You gave me the tapes, and your responsibility ended. You didn’t know what I’d do about them, and I never said. But you assumed I’d keep them safe.’
r />   Terri smiled faintly. ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes, you did. And that’s what you’ll say if you’re ever asked. For my own peace of mind.’

  Her smile faded. ‘All right. If that’s what you want.’

  ‘It’s very much what I want.’

  They sat next to each other for a time, Terri staring out the window, Paget at the envelope. At length, she asked, ‘Can I help with your argument?’

  ‘In a while.’ It was only when he spoke again that he was certain. ‘After I listen to this tape.’

  She looked over at him. ‘You want to do that? Now?’

  ‘I can’t not do it. Tomorrow, the next day – I’d have to listen to it, Mary’s feelings aside.’ He paused. ‘I don’t like this. But she’s lied to me about too many things for far too long for me to worry about her feelings. And who’s to say that Steinhardt was the only other person who knows what’s on the tapes? If it concerns me, and what we did in Washington, I have to know.’

  ‘But why today?’

  ‘Because until I hear it, I can’t think about anything else.’

  Terri touched his shoulder. ‘I’ll leave, then. Call me when you need me.’

  He gazed at her. Softly, Paget asked, ‘And what if that’s now?’

  Her eyes filled with confusion. As if sparring, she said, ‘You don’t want me to know what you’ll do with them.’

  ‘True.’ He looked away. ‘But you can know that I listened.’

  Terri’s eyes did not move from him. In a quiet tone, she asked, ‘Why do you want me here?’

  ‘As I said, I feel squeamish about Mary. But I just don’t want to be alone with this.’ Suddenly Paget felt embarrassed. ‘All my life, I’ve never leaned on anyone. Tomorrow I’ll go back to that. I suppose, for a day, I’m borrowing you.’

  She nodded, silent. After a time, she reached into the envelope, pulled out a tape. ‘It’s this one.’

  Paget stood, walking to the credenza behind his desk, and produced a portable tape player. He put it in front of them. Inserting the tape, he briefly looked at Terri. Then he pushed the button.

  As Paget sat next to Terri, Steinhardt asked, ‘Did Chris know about your involvement with this man Jack Woods?’