A Plague of Secrets

by John Lescroart

  “Right. But not really recently.”

  “Do you remember the last time she mentioned Mr. Preslee?”

  “About eight years ago, just after he got out of jail.”

  “And by jail, Mrs. Biehl, don’t you really mean state prison?”

  “Yes. Right. I thought prison and jail were the same, I guess. But, yes, it was just after he got out of prison.”

  “And what were Defendant’s comments on Mr. Preslee at that time?”

  “Just that he’d gotten in touch with her through Dylan. He wanted her to fix him up with a job or something.”

  “What was her reaction to this request?”

  “It really frustrated her.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Because she said so. She said she was never going to get out from under these guys.”

  “She was never going to get out from under these guys. Did she offer any explanation of what she meant by get out from under?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Biehl. Now, turning to Dylan Vogler, he was her manager at Bay Beans West, was he not?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And in these conversations you had with her, how did she characterize her relationship with Mr. Vogler?”

  Biehl hesitated for a long moment before replying, “Unpleasant.”

  “Was she more specific?”

  “Well, a couple of times she told me she just wanted him out of her life and she’d offered to buy him out, but he refused.”

  Stier, eyebrows raised, flagged the significance of this testimony to the jury. “She used the phrase, to buy him out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you find that strange?”

  “A little bit, yes.”

  “And why was that?”

  “Well, because he worked for her, I wondered why she just didn’t fire him.”

  “Did you ask her about that, why she didn’t simply terminate him?”

  “Yes. We talked about it a couple of times.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said she couldn’t. Couldn’t fire him, I mean.”

  “And why was that?”

  “She wouldn’t say specifically.”

  “Did she tell you in a general way?”

  Another look over at Maya, then Biehl let out a wistful sigh. “She said she could never fire him because he owned her.”

  “He owned her. Those were her exact words?”

  “Yes. She said them more than once.”

  Stier, to all appearances sobered by the enormity and surprise of this testimony—although he’d guided her directly to it—nodded to the witness, then over to the jury. “Mrs. Biehl, in the few months prior to Defendant’s arrest, did you two have lunch together again?”

  “Yes, at the end of last summer.”

  “And did Mr. Vogler come up again in your conversation?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I brought him up. I told her I’d been worrying about her situation with him. I’d heard somewhere that he was selling marijuana out of the store, and I told her that whatever it was she was hiding, it would be better just to get him out of there and get it behind her. Otherwise, it was just going to go from bad to worse.”

  “And what did she say to that?”

  “She just kind of shrugged it off and said I shouldn’t worry about it. I was right. It wasn’t a good situation, but she was going to take care of it pretty soon.”

  A final repetitious riff to the jury. “She was going to take care of it pretty soon.” And then Stier was turning to Hardy. “Your witness.”

  30

  Biehl’s direct testimony got them to lunchtime, so there wouldn’t be any cross-examination until the afternoon session, and this suited Hardy fine. He didn’t have much of an idea of what, if anything, he was going to ask her. Her testimony had been true and probably accurate. Vogler had no doubt been blackmailing Maya. He and Preslee probably both had had their claws into her, so that she wanted to get out from under their control. The strategy he’d decided to adopt called for a steady drumbeat about the lack of physical evidence tying Maya to either of the crimes, but Biehl hadn’t offered anything he felt he could refute.

  He had a voice mail from Wyatt Hunt on his cell phone, telling him that he’d be having lunch at Lou the Greek’s if Hardy wanted a report on what he’d been doing out at BBW, and suddenly—if for no other reason than he was perpetually somewhat morbidly curious about the Special—that seemed like a good idea.

  So he hung back until his client and Stier and most of the crowd had dispersed from the courtroom, then snuck out, walked the two flights down to the throbbing lobby where it was too crowded for anyone to notice him. Outside, trench-coat collar up and head down in an overcast chill, he jaywalked across to Lou’s, stepped over the sleeping or dead body in the outer doorway, then descended the half-dozen ammonia-tinged steps that took him to the restaurant’s entrance proper, swinging double doors covered in red leather.

  As usual at lunchtime patrons stood three deep at the bar. Each of the twenty-odd tables was taken as well. Hardy recognized several cops, Harlen Fisk at a small table alone with Cheryl Biehl, five or six of his fellow attorneys, and a couple of members of his own jury at one of the side tables; and somewhat to his surprise, at the largest table in the house, Glitsky and Treya and Debra Schiff and Darrel Bracco along with District Attorney Clarence Jackman himself, scowling and listening intently to whatever Bracco was saying. Nobody at that table looked happy enough to interrupt, and besides, Hunt was holding up a hand flagging him from one of the booths, so Hardy picked his way through the mob and the cacophonous din and slid in across from his investigator.

  “Souvlaki lo mein,” Hunt said by way of greeting.

  “That actually sounds edible.”

  “It does, I know. But I predict a secret ingredient. Octopus, something like that. All those little legs and the noodles mixed up together so you can’t tell which is which.”

  “Octopus legs and noodles? I could tell the difference.”

  “You could? How?”

  “The legs are probably going to be thicker. And have those little suction cups on ’em. That’s the giveaway.”

  Just at that moment the proprietor stopped at their table. Lou was mid-fifties or so, with thick black hair, short legs, a solid round stomach under his starched white shirt. “Hey, Diz, Wyatt. Lunch or just drinks?”

  “We’ll have the octopus,” Hardy said, “if you can cut the suction cups off the legs for Wyatt here. He thinks suction cups suck.”

  Lou’s face clouded over in something like real pain. “No octopus. Noodles and lamb, maybe some hummus and hoisin. Delicious.”

  “Can Chiu put some octopus in mine?” Hunt asked.

  “Come on, guys, can’t you see I’m hoppin’ here? We don’t do substitutions, you know that. How long you been comin’ here? You eatin’ or not?”

  “Two Specials,” Hardy said.

  “There you go. Water, tea, beer, what?”

  Both men chose water, and Lou was gone, on to the next order. Hardy jerked his head a little out toward the room. “Check out the summit meeting.”

  “I know. They got here a few minutes after me. I don’t think it’s a birthday.”

  Hardy looked over and again noted the tension around the table. “Maybe they just aren’t as enthusiastic as we are about the Special.”

  “Those are our guys, aren’t they? I mean our case.”

  “Schiff and Bracco, yeah.”

  “Maybe they screwed up.”

  “They’ve probably got ten other cases, but we can always hope.” The water arrived—pint jars with ice chips—and Hardy took a drink. “So how you doin’ on our list?”

  “Slow,” Hunt said. “But we were right about all the staff being in on it. They really, really don’t want to talk to the actual police.”

  “Are they still dealing out of there?�
�

  “It wouldn’t shock me. Though not at the level Dylan was. At least not yet.”

  “So who? The new manager?”

  “Ruiz. Sharp guy. But he says there’s a guy, he thinks called Paco, who got in a beef with Dylan while Levon was there maybe a couple of weeks before he got killed.”

  Hardy sat up. “They were both there together, Dylan and Levon?”

  “Oh yeah. Pretty frequently, at least every time Levon came for his pickup.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “Except there’s no Paco on the list. I’ve got Ruiz watching for him if he comes in again, but he says he hasn’t seen him since the big day. And, of course, he could be making it all up.”

  “Of course.” Hardy threw another quick glance at Glitsky’s table—just as cheerful as last time. “I had a chat with your man Craig this morning, you know.”

  “Yeah. He called in. Can he do anything for you?”

  “Well, so far he puts Maya at Levon’s, but he doesn’t put her inside. So if I need him for something on the stand, he won’t do too much damage with that.”

  “Actually, it might be a little better than that. The way it sounds to me, she’d just got there and couldn’t get in, as opposed to she was just coming out.”

  “Big difference,” Hardy said.

  “No shit.” Wyatt hesitated for a second. “But how did he seem?”

  “Who, Craig? Fine. Why?”

  Hunt shrugged. “He and Tamara broke up. I think he’s having some problems. But he was okay?”

  “He seemed fine.”

  “Good. Just checking on the puppies.” Hunt turned his glass around in its condensation ring. “I did get something else, maybe. Actually, Gina got the hunch from something else I was saying. If it’s anything.”

  “You think you got enough qualifiers in there?”

  “I don’t want to get your hopes up.”

  “I’ll be on diligent guard. Meanwhile, at this point,” Hardy said, “I don’t care if Daffy Duck is your source. I’ll take it.”

  “Okay. What do you know about Tess Granat?”

  Hardy felt he’d be nothing without his memory, and he had his answer in a second. “Movie star. Falling Leaves, Death by Starlight. Died here in the city, didn’t she? Hit by a car when she was pregnant, if I remember.”

  Hunt nodded. “Hit-and-run. Mom and unborn kid both died. Driver never found.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. Did you know she was Kathy West’s sister?”

  With his water halfway to his mouth Hardy stopped cold and slowly replaced the jar on the table. The words unborn kid went jangling around in his brain. As did the details of his interview with Maya in the attorney visiting room at the jail—when she had talked about the innocence of the unborn but had denied ever having had an abortion. Her words came back at him with a visceral force.

  Lou had a lunch staff of two white women and two Filipino men—all middle-aged—that delivered food from the kitchen and never slowed down, and one of the women showed up and plopped their Specials down without fanfare between them, then threw after them their utensils wrapped in paper napkins.

  Hardy finally found his voice again. “When did this happen, the hit-and-run?”

  “March of ninety-seven,” Hunt said. “Maya was a junior that year. It’s when things seemed to go south for her.”

  “How’d you get this?” Hardy asked. “Or Gina?”

  “We were just talking about how I got started on all this, and I mentioned running into an article about Tess Granat being Maya’s aunt in USF’s newspaper. And I ask Gina what was it that happened to her. So Gina, being senior to me, which I never let her forget, remembers the hit-and-run, the whole story, and then it hits us both at the same time.”

  “There’s a connection?”

  “Maybe worth asking about.”

  “So you’re thinking the blackmail might not have been about a robbery?”

  “I’m not thinking anything. I’m just wondering. Granat’s death was a big deal at the time. A huge deal.”

  A muscle worked in Hardy’s jaw.

  “They were an item back then, too, you know? Maya and Dylan.” Hunt stopped to let that fact settle, then continued. “Although by senior year, or maybe sooner, they broke up, and she goes back to being Junior League and finds religion again.”

  “It would explain a lot.” Hardy getting into it. “If she knew anything about the hit-and-run with Granat and didn’t go to the cops at the time, and then her family found out about it later, she’s fucked. The family would never forgive her, and she can’t forgive herself. Which is why she thinks she deserves whatever happens to her. It’s God working in biblical time, just paying her back now for what she did then.”

  “It’s a damn compelling theory,” Hunt said, “but the bad news is that it doesn’t actually change all that much. Dylan’s blackmailing her about that, the bottom line is he’s still blackmailing her, so she’s got the same motive.”

  “Not exactly.” Hardy was already thinking about how he could get any of this in front of the jury. “If it’s not about something she and Dylan did with Levon around dope in college, it takes Levon out of the picture, at least out of her picture. She’s got no reason at all to kill him.”

  “Except if maybe Dylan told him.”

  “Never. Knowledge being power and all, if Dylan’s the only one who knows, and my money says he is, then he doesn’t dilute it by telling anybody else.”

  “You’re right.”

  “Only sometimes. But it would be nice if this was one of those times.” Hardy pulled his Special over in front of him and poked at it with his fork. “Hmm. Looks a little like Yeanling Clay Bowl.” This, probably Lou’s most famous and mysterious Special—it didn’t come in a clay bowl and no one had any idea what a yeanling was—showed up on the menu about half a dozen times a year.

  “You think maybe yeanling could mean ‘octopus’?” Hunt asked.

  But before Hardy could do anything about his latest information, he had to be sure that it was true.

  He stood in the wide hallway behind Department 25 and waited, depressed as always by the sight of the shackled prisoners belching from the elevators coming down from the jail above him. Maya, over in the new jail behind the Hall of Justice, would be coming in through the back door in her personal little chain gang.

  Her saw her now and walked down to meet her. The months of incarceration hadn’t been good to her. She’d asked for a short haircut to minimize the lack of luster brought about by the caustic soap they had in the showers, but the result was just an unkempt, vaguely butch, mop—and now it was even showing signs of gray. Her skin, too, had the familiar jail pallor, although ironically she’d gained perhaps fifteen pounds with the huge servings of high-calorie jail food. And no one would ever mistake the deep creases around her eyes for laugh lines.

  He accompanied her into the four-by-eight-foot cage built into the wall and connected to the back entrance to the courtroom, and the metal door clanged as the bailiff closed it behind them. This was where she waited every day, usually all alone, until court was called into session, and this is where they now both sat on the cold concrete ledge that served as a kind of bench.

  Braun walked by them, coming back from her lunch, in conversation with one of her judicial colleagues, and she didn’t even glance in their direction.

  “She’s an awful person,” Maya said.

  “Yes, she is.”

  “How does somebody like that get to be a judge?”

  “Usually the governor appoints them first. Then they just keep getting elected.”

  “So the qualification is they know a governor?”

  “And probably either gave him money or helped him get it. Assuming a male governor, of course.”

  “And why wouldn’t we?” She plucked at her jail suit. “I’m sorry, I’m just a total bitch today. I shouldn’t be so judgmental. I’m sure she’s trying her best.” She sighed. “And to think th
at’s so much the life Joel and I bought into before all this began.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know. Fund-raising. Benefits. Helping people like her get appointed. I’m beginning to think it’s really not about justice at all. I wonder what we were doing, what we were thinking, all that time.”

  “Protecting your interests,” Hardy said. “Your assets. And you wind up with people like Braun, and Glass, for that matter, as your gatekeepers. And they take it damn seriously. Problem is, once you’re perceived of as outside the loop, you’re the enemy. You’re the threat.”

  “Joel’s not a threat.” Finally, some color came into her face. “He’s never done a dishonest or illegal thing in his life. And they’re all over him.”

  “He’s going to beat it,” Hardy said. “But he’s going to need you beating this thing too.”

  She turned her head toward him. “I thought that’s what we were paying you for.”

  Hardy had heard this kind of thing before, from both husband and wife, even from Harlen, and he showed some of his growing impatience with it. “As we’ve just been discussing, sometimes money doesn’t get you what you think it should. Sometimes you’ve got to change your vision. Your idea of what you’re all about. Like, for example, are you inside that big wall, protecting your assets, or are you going to just let these people take them?”

  “Me! Am I just going to just let these people take them? Like I’ve got any choice in what’s happening here? Or out there?”

  Hardy put his back against the wall and turned to meet her eyes. There was no warmth in his expression. “You’ve got all the choice in the world, Maya.”

  She just stared over at him, shaking her head. “What are you talking about? I’ve got no choice about anything. Are you out of your mind?”

  “Maybe I am, trying to defend you with the wrong theory, the wrong motive, and you sitting there day in and day out watching me do it, letting me do it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “Yes, you do, Maya. I’m talking about the basic fact of this case. Dylan wasn’t blackmailing you because you guys sold drugs in college and, gosh, maybe people would find out. That wasn’t it, was it? Although that’s what you let me build our whole case on.”