If Harry can find this, so can the cops. I’m becoming increasingly concerned by Tod’s indiscretions. The fact that he posted a king’s ransom in bail for Talia’s release now lights him up like neon for Nelson. With no alibi for the night of the murder, he is becoming too convenient.
“You think she’s lying to you?” Harry’s concerned about Talia, her relationship with Tod. He’s wondering if the cops may not be right.
“Wouldn’t be the first time that a client lied to me.” Harry’s sitting there looking at me, like maybe, just maybe we’re on the side of the devil in this one. It’s not an unusual position for Harry, or one that bothers him much. But, I tell him, she didn’t kill Ben, with Hamilton or anybody else. Whether she’s lying … I make a face, like “Who knows?”
“Tell me you’re not thinkin’ with your pecker,” he says.
I give Harry an exasperated look.
He takes umbrage at this. “Save it for the jury.” Harry’s irked. “You want me to keep you honest,” he says. “So humor me.”
I wave him on, like go ahead, play your best mind game with me.
“Think about it,” he says. “You go over to her house and this guy Tod is living there. He bails her outta jail. Sure, maybe it’s just that his dick’s run away with his head. That’s one possibility. The other is, maybe he considers this a good investment.” Harry gives me a severe look, like this is not so far-fetched. “If you popped the old man, and Talia knew about it, how secure would you feel knowing she’s in the can, locked up with a case of the screaming meemies? Mmm? How long before she says something to somebody? Wouldn’t you want to get her out of there, like now?”
I’m looking at him soberly, listening to this line.
“And the little handgun,” he says. “You did everything but carve instructions on his forehead, telling him not to handle the thing if they found it. And what does Tod do?” Harry brings one index finger to his temple to show the calculating thought process that went into Tod’s fingering this gun and smudging all the prints.
“Now we find out he has no alibi. What is worse, he lied to you about it.”
“What are you saying-they killed Ben together?”
“It’s a possibility,” he says. But there’s another theory that Harry thinks may be closer to the mark. “Maybe the boyfriend gets infatuated. He wants Talia to leave the old man. Suppose she won’t do it. Maybe she can’t give up the good life-the prenuptial thing and all. So Tod fixes it for her. Suppose, just suppose, she doesn’t know this until after it’s all over, until after Hamilton has killed Potter.”
I think about this while Harry watches me. I have my doubts about Tod. But for Talia, I have a hard time believing she would keep this from me. With the travail she has been through, I don’t buy it.
“She would have talked,” I tell him. “I know her. She would have broken. She would have told me by now.” Talia, with all of her whimsy, would never come this far, staring death or a long prison term in the face without telling me if this were so.
“Maybe,” he says. “But think about it. Now she’s in a box. What good does it do to tell you? So you know the truth. Is it likely to help her?”
I follow him on this. Harry’s right. This is not a story we could lay on a jury with much success. The fact that Talia, a married woman, had a serious love interest that could motivate murder would be enough to hang her. The best we could hope for is that they would view her as an accessory after the fact. Even this would be a long shot of sizable proportions.
“So what are you saying?” I ask him.
“That maybe the lady knows more than she says. Maybe she can meet Nelson’s terms for a plea bargain after all.”
Harry’s suggesting that we might have Talia roll over on Tod, offer him up to the prosecution as her shadowy accomplice.
“It’s too convenient,” I tell him. “There’s not a shred of evidence linking him to the crime. The fact that he paid her bail money? That’s not evidence of murder. The fact that he has no alibi? Where were you that night?” I ask him.
Harry shrugs, like “Take your best guess.”
“Like half the rest of the city,” I say. “No, it won’t wash. Unless there was hard evidence. Unless Talia could testify that Tod made admissions to her, Nelson would never bite.” This leaves me with the thought of how I would ever approach her on this, to ask Talia about Tod.
“For now,” I say, “let’s concentrate on the Greek.” It’s only a feeling, but something in my bones tells me that Skarpellos is the key.
“So what do you want me to do, subpoena the bank records for the firm’s trust account?”
“No, we’ll wait. We get ’em with enough time to study them and confirm our defense, to see if we can prove somebody was dipping into the trust. But as soon as we go after the bank records, Skarpellos will know what we’re up to. He’ll start squeezing witnesses. Subtly,” I say. “No overt tampering.” The Greek is a master of intimidation.
Harry nods, as if this is his inclination as well. He sees where I’m going, the old SODDI defense-“Some Other Dude Did It.”
Five days after Harry’s mission to the club I am again in Talia’s living room confronting her with the facts on Tod, his lack of an alibi, his generosity concerning her bail.
“You’re doing yourself a disservice,” I tell her. “I can’t defend you without the truth.”
Talia sits in one corner of the couch, looking at me as if I’ve whacked her with a two-by-four brandishing a nail in the business end. Her legs are curled under her, arms folded over her chest, the classic female defensive posture.
She doesn’t answer my questions, but instead looks at me forlorn, accusing, that I too should whip her at a time like this.
“Tomorrow,” I say, “we go to see Nelson. You can be sure he’ll offer us some kind of a deal. I’ve got to know whether we should take it. If you’re hiding things from me, critical facts that may come out during the trial, then you’re hobbling me-crucifying yourself,” I tell her.
She’s in a daze. It is often said that you can key the loss of mental faculties to a singular traumatic event, a fall, an accident, a change of habitat. With Talia, since her incarceration, there has been a conspicuous loss in the powers of concentration, a restless anxiety that is not characteristic. She is slowly unraveling.
I move to the couch and shake her a little, not with my hands, but with the tone of my voice, up close in her ear.
“Do you hear me?” I say. “It becomes more difficult the farther we go. If there’s something you haven’t told me, now is the time.” I can’t afford to coddle her.
Suddenly she turns on me, coils, and strikes. “You think I did it,” she says.
“Did you?” To this point I have never asked her this question. Not overtly. We have done little probing cotillions around it, Harry and I, but never head-on, squarely presenting the question to Talia.
“How can you believe I could do a thing like that, that I could kill Ben?” she says.
“What’s Tod’s part in all of this?” I say.
“He’s a friend.” There’s derision in her tone, as if to say “Unlike you.”
“Good friend.” I say. “A million-dollar bond. I could use a few like that myself.”
She gives me the once-over, up and down, scrambling with her eyes, surprised that I have discovered her little secret, the deep pocket behind her release.
I tell her that Nelson too will know this by now, and that at some point we are likely to be confronted with Tod’s lack of an alibi and the fact of their relationship.
From the look on her face I can tell that the significance of these facts has suddenly dawned on her.
“It looks bad,” I explain to her. “You’re living together, he pays for your bail, he has no alibi for the night of the murder, the cops are looking for an accomplice. Some might think that his contribution to your bail is a little investment to ensure your silence, to keep you from fingering him as your helper.”
“Still,” I tell her, “it could be a persuasive argument to a jury.”
“It was his mother’s money,” she says.
“What?”
“The money for the bail-it came from his mother. Tod doesn’t have that kind of money,” she says. “But his family is wealthy.”
“Whatever,” I say, as if these details don’t really matter. “His name is on the guarantee with the bondsman; that’s all Nelson needs to know. That’s all he’ll care about.”
She tells me that the collateral posted for her bail is part of a family trust, Tod’s inheritance.
“Can’t we keep him out of it?” she says. “He was only trying to help me.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, “but it’s what happens when you withhold things from your lawyer. If you’d told me that Tod was willing to guarantee your bail I would have advised against it.”
“And I would still be rotting in the county jail.” Her eyes are now ablaze, glazed a little by the start of tears. “Tod was the only one who cared,” she says. In her own way, Talia is telling me that I am no better than Cheetam, that I too welshed on my promise to spring her from jail. Maybe she is right.
“Do you think they’ll arrest him?” she asks.
“It wouldn’t surprise me.”
More tears extinguish the fire in her eyes. There’s real pathos here, the kind of anguished expression that often precedes truth.
“Oh God,” she says. “How did I get into this? How did I get him into this?”
I think for a moment that she’s talking about her general plight, the fact that she’s charged with murder. Then I realize her words have another meaning, some more specific dilemma.
She looks up at me with big, round, pleading eyes.
“He was with me the night Ben was killed,” she says.
My heart thumps, like someone has slammed me into a concrete wall. I’m speechless, allowing my expression to say it all. Like “What are you telling me?”
“The night Ben was killed,” she says. “We were together.” She pauses only slightly, taken aback a little as disbelief is replaced by emerging anger in my eyes.
“I wasn’t in Vacaville. I didn’t leave town. I was at Tod’s apartment.” Then quickly, as if to dispel what she knows is running through my mind, she says: “But I didn’t kill him. I didn’t murder Ben.”
I am walking away from her now, shaking my head as much in frustration as in fury. Angry with the cosmos of criminal defendants who tell unending lies to their lawyers. Little white ones that shade the truth, or whoppers like this one that plunge a spear through the heart of your case.
We have wasted untold hours scouring Talia’s credit card records in hopes of producing some verification of her alibi. Harry’s worn a rut in the highway between this city and Vacaville looking for anyone who might have seen her at the property she was supposedly viewing; he’s been talking to neighbors, the postman, kids on the street.
“Sonofabitch.” I say it to the wall, before I turn and look at her again. “What else?” I say. “What other little surprises do you have?” I wonder if this is only a first crack in the dam, a little leak of real fact, to be followed by a flood of contradictions, a story gone awry, a tale that flies like some wounded duck, conflicted by truth and lies. How many variations on this theme will I hear now that she tells me that her alibi is Tod. A story that, both of us know, even if true will not work.
“We were together until I left his apartment just before ten,” she says. “The police were there when I got home. Ben was already dead.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell the police?”
“What could I say? The police told me that my husband had just shot himself. I couldn’t very well tell them that I was off with another man, alone in his apartment.”
“Observing the social proprieties?” I say.
“I didn’t want to get Tod involved.”
I am wondering more about Harry’s theory. Whether perhaps this infatuation, Hamilton’s and Talia’s, is not mutual, and whether Tod may have acted as Harry suspects, as a lone agent in the interests of love.
“I see. So you spun a little yarn for the cops?”
“I figured they couldn’t check it out-the trip to Vacaville,” she says.
I shake my head again, this time looking straight at her. The wonder of it all. Talia fabricating a story the cops couldn’t verify to protect Tod, and at the same time destroying any hope of an alibi.
“Later I couldn’t tell anyone,” she says.
Caught in a web of her own deceit, Talia was confronted with the unshakable theory of a male accomplice. To reveal her whereabouts was to serve Tod up on a platter to the cops.
“It’s what we argued about the night you came here asking about the gun,” she says. “Remember, when you left the room. Tod wanted to tell you. I wouldn’t let him.”
“Hurray for Tod,” I say. “Too bad you didn’t take his advice.”
She’s back to studying the loops in the carpet, her eyes downcast, arms folded, forming a kind of revetment around her breasts.
“How did you come by the story, the trip to Vacaville?” I ask her.
It was typical of Talia. This, it seems, was a cover story designed for Ben, in case he called looking for her at the office. According to Talia, the county administrator charged with selling the estate for taxes had called her. Someone, an unidentified source, had given the administrator Talia’s name and phone number as a potential buyer. She was scheduled to go that day, alone, and use the realtor’s lockbox key to view the property. Talia decided she had better things to do.
“Instead you went over to Tod’s.”
She nods. There’s just a touch of shame in this gesture. “He took the day off. We were going to play tennis.” She’s picking lint off her slacks with long, delicate fingernails. “We did other things,” she says.
It’s her way of telling me that they rolled between the sheets all day, round-eyed lust in the afternoon.
I’m at the window, staring out at the yard, my back to her.
“What do we do now?” she asks.
I give a little shrug. “We go and listen to what Nelson has to offer. If it’s good, maybe we take it.”
“No,” she says. “I won’t do it. I won’t confess to a murder I didn’t commit.”
“Noble,” I say. “But it may be preferable to the alternative.” I don’t have to draw Talia a picture. I have spoken to her already, in graphic terms, about how executions are carried out in this state. This conversation, which took place in the county jail, had a purpose: to impress upon her the risk she is running if she continues to insist on a trial, to reject the DA’s overtures of a deal.
“I can’t do it,” she says.
“I can’t put you on the stand any longer.”
“Why not?”
“So you can tell them you went to Vacaville?” I look at her like a child robbed of its innocence. “I can’t suborn perjury. On the stand you would be asked where you were that day. You would be confronted with your statements to the police at the house.”
I can tell by her expression that Talia has finally come to understand her dilemma. If I put her on the stand she cannot lie. If she tells the truth she plays into Nelson’s hands, she produces her accomplice. Moreover, she admits that she lied to the police concerning her whereabouts the night of the murder. I can hear Nelson to the jury: “A woman who would lie to avoid a mere social stigma, the embarrassment of an affair with another man, might also weave tales to cover up murder.”
If I am to represent her, Talia can no longer take the stand in her own defense. She will have to live with her story never given under oath, of a trip to Vacaville that no one can prove, a lie to be buried under the cloak of constitutional privilege and the right of silence.
His name is etched deep in gold on the oak
plaque next to his office door. Duane Nelson has the corner slot, Sam Jennings’s old office, with a view to the courthouse across the street. Harry and I are ushered in. I’ve left Talia at home. I can’t trust her judgment. Loose lips, a slip of the tongue, some untimely emotion-at this stage, each can be fatal. I will call her if we need to confer, in the event that Nelson makes us a deal too good to decline.
He rises from behind the desk as we enter and extends a hand; a broad smile spans his lean face. He’s haggard. The duties of this place are wearing on Duane Nelson.
I greet him by surname and he corrects me.
“Duane,” he says. “Let’s dispense with the formalities.”
He’s not alone.
“I think you know Detective Lama.”
Jimmy Lama keeps turning up, like a bad penny. His hand starts to move out from his side to take mine in greeting. This is a show of professionalism for Nelson’s benefit.
“We’re acquainted,” I tell Nelson. I make no effort to shake Lama’s hand, but leave it drifting in space. He pulls it in and wipes it on his coat like a dirty knife.
“Harry Hinds, my Keenan counsel,” I tell them.
Harry shakes hands with Nelson and gives a little nod toward Lama. He uses me like a blocking back, as if I’m in his way, preventing him from being more cordial. From twenty years of criminal practice Harry’s formed his own sense of Lama, the sting of salt in an open wound.
“Yes, well,” Nelson fills the awkward silence, “Lieutenant Lama has recently joined our office. He’s been appointed to head up the DA’s division of investigation. So I thought he should sit in.”
“Lieutenant?” I say. My voice has gone up an octave in obvious surprise. “I guess congratulations are in order.”
Lama’s not sure whether to smile. He’s considering the source.
“Maybe we should get started.” Nelson’s trying to put a face on it, this thing between Lama and me.
“Please,” he says, “have a seat.”
Lama settles back onto the couch against the wall, to the right of Nelson’s immense cherry-wood desk. The DA drops into the wine-colored leather executive chair, button heaven, huge with a rolled and tufted headrest, something from a cattle baron’s bordello. Harry and I take what’s left, the two client chairs across from Nelson. They’ve arranged everything but bright lights in our eyes.
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