A Plague of Secrets

by John Lescroart

  “And why would I do that?”

  “Two reasons. One, you felt guilty and that you deserved to be punished. And two, you could never tell anybody the truth. Not even your lawyer, because you can’t trust him enough.” Hardy came forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “Okay, so enough. Now it’s time. True or false, Maya. Dylan was blackmailing you because of something to do with your aunt’s death, wasn’t he?”

  Her body gave slightly. No words came.

  “What was it, Maya? Did you know who did the hit-and-run and not tell the police? Did you loan them your car?”

  Now Maya’s mouth went loose, her eyes glassy.

  “You were there, weren’t you, Maya? In the car with them.” Hardy suddenly felt his own head go light as the probable reality hit him. “No,” he said. “No, you were the driver.”

  For a long moment she regarded him as she might her executioner, then all at once a small sound came out of her throat. She hung her head and her shoulders began to heave.

  Tears splashed like raindrops onto the floor between her feet.

  She’d passed through the sobbing, though the blotched and wet effects of it remained on her face. “What matters is that nobody in the family can know. Which means nobody at all, ’cause whoever knew would tell them.” She let out a shuddering, unsteady breath. “How did you find out?”

  “Serendipity,” Hardy said. “My investigator mentioned Tess Granat and you to his girlfriend in the same breath, and there it was. You’ve kept this to yourself all this time?”

  “Of course. I had to.” Then, a hand quickly on his leg. “And you can’t tell anyone either. Ever.”

  “No. I know that. You don’t have to worry about that.” He hesitated. “But maybe you could, after all.”

  Her tortured gaze fell on him. “If you think that,” she said, “you don’t understand my family at all. Or me. Or any of this.”

  “What about your husband?”

  “Tell him I am a murderer? Tell him the mother of his children is a child killer?”

  Hardy straightened, his back stiff up against the cell wall. “You’re being too hard on yourself, Maya. It was a long time ago.”

  She shook her head. “It’s yesterday,” she said. “It’s this morning. It’s now, for God’s sake. Don’t you understand? I killed her. My mom’s sister. Kathy’s sister and her unborn child. Everybody’s favorite.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “I was stoned and drunk. Both. Loaded. It was murder.”

  “And you’ll never forgive yourself for it.”

  “Why should I? I did it. Would you?”

  “I don’t know, to tell you the truth. Maybe after all this time I’d be tempted to start trying.”

  “Time hasn’t made it go away.”

  “It might if you shared the burden of it. If you told somebody. Maybe you need absolution.”

  “I pray for it every day.”

  “It’s not going to come without some kind of confession.”

  “What? Now you’re a priest?”

  “Not even close,” Hardy said. “Just a fellow sinner like yourself. But I was raised a good Catholic. Believe me, I know how the forgiveness thing works.”

  “You ever kill anybody?”

  Hardy nodded. “I was in Vietnam. I killed a lot of people.” Including not just in Vietnam, he thought, but also the victims of the horrific gunfight he’d been part of here in San Francisco, the aftermath of which had dominated his emotional stability and career for the next three or four years. So, yes, he’d killed his share of people. And kept his share of secrets too. A plague of them, he sometimes felt. But Frannie, his children, Glitsky, Roake—they all knew what he’d done, had worked through the consequences together, and that had helped.

  Maya shook her head. “Vietnam was killing in a war.”

  “What? Like that doesn’t count? It felt like it counted, trust me. I know it did to the families of my victims. I know it did to me.” He drew in a breath. “My only point is I think maybe keeping this secret has hurt you enough. Look at the power it gave Dylan Vogler.”

  “I hated that man.”

  “I’d imagine so. He was in the car with you?”

  She nodded. “It was his car. No connection to me. He just washed it up and never told anybody. The bastard.”

  “When did the blackmail start?”

  “Not until he was out of prison, but right after that. He couldn’t get any other work, not that he really tried, I don’t think. He looked me up and reminded me how much I owed him for his silence.”

  “I get it,” Hardy said.

  “I don’t know if you do. I don’t know if anybody can.” Her chin fell, a puppet’s string cut. “It never ends. It’s just a constant weight.”

  “I don’t want to beat a dead horse, Maya, so I’m only going to say it one more time. You could let it go. Let Joel in, at least. He’s stuck by you through all this, and here maybe thinking you killed somebody too. He loves you. He could handle it.”

  She had her arms crossed over her chest, hunched over now, rocking on the hard concrete ledge. “God God God.”

  “It’s all right, Maya. It’s all right.”

  “No. No, it’s so not all right.” Seconds passed and she slowed herself down in her movements, finally became still. “You’d think I would have been on guard against it. I mean, it was the great myth I was raised with.”

  “What was that?”

  “Eve. The Garden of Eden. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That’s what it all was to me back when I met Dylan. He was the serpent, just so attractive, so much wiser, I thought. Willing to try anything, you know, for the experience of it. ‘Here, try some of this.’ And I was this kid who’d never done anything, who was just—just so simple, and stupid. And you know what the real stupidity was?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I really was happy.” She looked over at Hardy, searching his face to see if he understood at all. “I mean, before Dylan. I was a happy person, a good person. But then he’d started challenging and questioning me about everything, about who I was. ‘How can you know you’re as happy as you can be when you haven’t even tried to experience anything outside of your well-ordered little life? Maybe you’re just afraid to find out what real life is about. And if that’s the case, then all your so-called happiness is just cowardice and sham, isn’t it?’ ” Her eyes pleaded with Hardy. “How could I not see what he was doing?”

  “It’s seductive, that’s why,” Hardy said. “If it’s any help, I doubt Eve saw it either. She just wanted the knowledge, to taste the forbidden fruit.”

  “One little taste. That’s all I wanted. Just to see.”

  “Original sin,” Hardy said. “And so you’re not the first to commit it, are you? It goes back a ways, that fall from grace. Some would say it’s the human condition.”

  “But it wasn’t who I was ever supposed to be.”

  “No,” Hardy said heavily. “No, I don’t suppose it was.”

  “That’s the horrible thing. And then Tess.” Her voice broke again. “If I could just have those days back. That day.”

  John Greenleaf Whittier’s phrase hovered in Hardy’s consciousness—“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’ ” But he merely draped his arm over his client’s shoulder and drew her in for a moment next to him. “You’ve still got lots of days ahead of you, Maya. Better ones. I promise you.”

  Suddenly, the bailiff knocked from the courtroom side and swung the connecting door open. Recognizing the not unfamiliar tableau—a suspect wrung out with emotion, a face nearly disfigured, swollen and red from crying—he stepped into the doorway and leaned over toward Hardy, asking with an unexpected solicitousness, “Everything okay here, sir?”

  “If we could get a couple more minutes, I’d appreciate it,” Hardy said. “And maybe some Kleenex.”

  31

  Stier stood looking down onto Seventh Street from the third
-floor window in Clarence Jackman’s office. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  Jackman, obsidian black, stood six feet five inches tall and this morning had grunted in satisfaction when his bathroom scale failed to clear the two-hundred-seventy-pound marker. As always, he was dressed in a well-tailored dark suit and white shirt, today with a maroon-and-dark-blue rep tie. Ignoring Stier’s profanity, Jackman spoke in his low-registered, powerful, quiet voice. “You needed to be told right away. Get it in front of Marian, put the woman on your witness list.”

  Stier turned. “Of course. Nothing else to do, really.” He shook his head in disgust. “This was Schiff?”

  “Apparently, although Bracco says he’s just as responsible.”

  Another dismissive head shake. “Cops. What was she thinking?”

  “I really believe she’d convinced herself it was immaterial. The woman seemed senile. Schiff didn’t think you’d want some probably untrue random detail screwing up your story.”

  “I don’t care about my story, Clarence. I build the case out of whatever story I’ve got to work with. If it’s got inconsistencies . . . but, hell, you know this. And it would have been nothing if I laid it out up front. Now it looks like we buried it.”

  “I know that.”

  Stier slammed his hand on the windowsill. “Shit!”

  “Right. But I’m afraid there’s something maybe worse, if you’d like to sit down.”

  The request clearly surprised Stier, but this was his boss, so he went where Jackman indicated and sat on the front couple of inches of one of the leather couches. “Shoot,” he said.

  “Well, let me start out by admitting a personal bias, which I do try to leave out of my professional duties. Nevertheless, I think you may know, Paul, that Kathy West and I go back quite a way. When I first came on here, she walked me through quite a few minefields on the political side, actually was one of my informal advisers.”

  “Well, I—”

  Jackman forged his smile of steel and held up a hand, cutting off the interruption. “If I may. My point is that I’ve watched this case develop over the past few months with a lot of interest and a bit of a sense of discomfort, not only because of the inherent weaknesses in the evidence, but because of the media blitz that’s accompanied all of Jerry Glass’s side of things with the mayor and Harlen Fisk and your defendant’s husband.

  “But I never felt I had to discuss this with you because, as I say, I generally like to stay out of battles where I have a personal stake, but also because you won at the PX, so there was nothing for me to say. The court had ruled.”

  Jackman slid his haunch off the edge of his desk and went to sit across from Stier in his leather wing chair. “But now, suddenly,” he continued, “this new wrinkle—maybe there were two shots and not just one—seems to undermine your basic theory of the case. This is important to me, first because it’s no longer personal, and second because, contrary to popular opinion, my job—our jobs, yours and mine—that job is not only to prosecute. It’s to serve justice. It’s to find the truth of what happened. If we find exculpatory evidence, it’s our duty to put it in the record, not hide it so we can go ahead and get our conviction.”

  “I’m not hiding anything, Clarence. I didn’t know about this until twenty minutes ago.”

  “No, I know that. I guess my real question is how does this make you feel about this case, and about your defendant? Does it change anything for you, and if so, what?”

  Stier’s body language—hunched shoulders, flushed complexion—belied the control he exerted over his confident tone. “Strategically, I’d admit it’s a pain in the ass. It’s going to give more credence to this testimony than it deserves. But as to the actual facts, first, they probably don’t change a lick. You tell me the woman’s apparently senile, so she may or may not have heard two shots, and in any event she didn’t get to Schiff and Bracco until a couple of days later. Hell, what she heard might not even have been on the morning of the murder. So do I have an issue with my basic theory? No. None. Nothing’s changed.”

  Jackman, hands relaxed and linked in front of him, nodded. “And Mr. Glass?”

  “Regardless of what the media’s doing with the mayor and all that, Jerry’s helping me make the dope case, Clarence, and that’s the motive here. I know it’s unusual for the feds to get involved in one of our murders, but to me the financial stuff he’s got already proves the money laundering, which in turn proves her complicity with Vogler. As for the mayor . . .” Stier met Jackman’s gaze. “She’s no part of my case. Neither’s Fisk. That said, their financial dealings with Joel Townshend are complicated and wide-ranging, and I don’t think Jerry’s out of line looking into them.”

  “Well”—Jackman stole a peek at his watch—“thanks for making the time. I see you’ve got to be back in court in ten minutes.”

  This was a dismissal.

  “Certainly.” Stier got up and made it to the office door before he turned. “Thanks for the heads-up on Schiff’s witness, Clarence, although I don’t think she’s going to make any difference in the verdict. And on the other stuff, I appreciate the candor.”

  Cheryl Biehl considered herself a close friend of Maya’s. She’d visited her twice in jail, and Hardy knew that for a nonfamily member to brave the bureaucracy, indifference, cultural challenges, disorganization, noise, and crowds of the jail’s visiting room showed a rare and true commitment and friendship. And to do so twice! Biehl’s affection for Maya must be genuine. So he was happy that he wasn’t going to be grilling her on her earlier testimony to Stier, testimony that had effectively painted her friend as a long-standing user and seller of drugs.

  He was also marginally cheered, if slightly perplexed, by Stier’s addition of a new witness, Lori Bradford, at this stage in the proceeding. Calling for a sidebar, and admitting as soon as the court had come back into session that he had only been informed of the existence of this witness during the lunch recess, Stier acknowledged that he would in all probability not actually call her. But he told Hardy and the court that a perusal of police procedures during the investigation had revealed that this woman’s testimony had not made it into the inspectors’ reports, and hence not into Hardy’s discovery documents. Painting the oversight as little more than an unimportant technicality, Stier just wanted to preserve the sanctity of the record.

  Hardy accepted this for the time being. He would have time to find out everything he might want to know about Lori Bradford and her testimony. And in the meanwhile he had what he hoped would be the simple cross-examination of Cheryl Biehl, where he might elicit some facts about her continuing friendship with his client that might help the jury view her in a better light in the here and now.

  “Ms. Biehl,” he began, “in the past eight years, have you ever witnessed Maya using or selling marijuana?”

  “No.”

  “When you told her that you’d heard about Dylan Vogler selling marijuana out of Bay Beans West, what did she say to you about that?”

  “She said she was sure that wasn’t happening. Dylan didn’t need to do that.”

  “And about her statement regarding Levon Preslee, that ‘she was never going to get out from under them.’ In spite of that comment, to the best of your recollection, did she ever mention Levon Preslee to you again?”

  “No.”

  “So it was just that once, right after he got out of prison?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And how long ago was that?”

  “I don’t know exactly. It must have been seven or eight years.”

  Hardy took a beat, walking back to his table. Maya, her eyes still puffy from the crying jag, nevertheless seemed to be more engaged, less burdened somehow. He gave her a subtle nod of encouragement. And, in fact, Hardy felt he had cause for a renewed sense of hope. After all, he had two brand-new and unexpected facts with which to conjure—Lori Bradford and Tess Granat—and in his experience facts had always had a way of expanding concentrically, although he
couldn’t identify as yet the exact territory they were expanding into.

  Now he paused.

  He’d been considering trying to use Cheryl Biehl’s cross-examination as a way to give the jury some kind of a sense of the real reason that Dylan had been blackmailing Maya. Of course, this would be a very tricky strategy on a couple of levels, not the least of which because it left Maya with essentially the same motive—blackmail—to have killed her manager. But these, he considered, might both be mitigated by other considerations. In the first case, blackmail over the hit-and-run took Maya’s purported selling of dope and its attendant moral turpitude out of the equation, and this also removed any motive for her having killed Levon. Also, in the real world, and absent Maya’s confession—which would never be forthcoming—there was no chance of building a case for the hit-and-run, so that issue was moot.

  But somehow the risk of pursuing any of this seemed suddenly too great. Hardy had his own responsibility under the attorney-client privilege to keep any hint of what he’d just learned to himself. He didn’t want to play any morally ambiguous games with his fragile client on this score. He was now finally her confidant and confessor, and he couldn’t betray her by not-so-subtle implications of other motivations. So all in all, though Hardy thought that getting the fundamental truth about Maya and Dylan before the jury might have its advantages, in the end he decided it was not something he could do.

  He turned back to his witness. “Thank you, Mrs. Biehl,” he said. “No further questions.”

  As far as witnesses went, Jansey Ticknor had opened up after they’d charged Maya back in October. In her first interviews with Bracco and Schiff she had been unforthcoming, but during the course of Paul Stier’s preparations for the preliminary hearing back in November, she had come to remember quite a bit of what she couldn’t seem to initially recall about Maya Townshend and her relationship to Dylan. Now Stier was seeing to it that she was laying as much of it as she could out for the jury. “So Mr. Vogler told you about their earlier relationship?”