Nelson presses a button on the ancient wooden intercom that seems to take up a quarter of his desk.
“Marsha, could you come in for a second?”
A young secretary enters, blond and bubbly, maybe three years out of high school. She has the body of an angel, all swept up in an hourglass silk dress that clings like plastic wrap. From appearances, Marsha does light typing and heavy gofer duty. Lama’s all eyes, but careful in his looks, something less than his lecherous self. He’s new, unsure of where he stands yet with Nelson.
“Would anyone like coffee?” Nelson’s offering.
Harry and Lama place orders and Marsha leaves.
“Guess it’s my party,” says Nelson. “Well, no mystery. I thought it would be wise to see if we can identify any common ground, see if there’s any way we can save the county the cost of an expensive trial.”
“Civic of you,” I say.
Nelson laughs a little and opens a file on his desk.
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard yet?” he says. “The judge assigned to the case?”
I look at him, all eyes.
“Armando Acosta,” he says.
The Coconut. The chief prosecutor in a county such as this possesses many advantages of office, not the least of which is an intelligence system with pipelines to every police precinct and courtroom in the city.
“You should get notice this afternoon,” he says. I can tell from Nelson’s tone this news is supposed to concern me. I have drawn a judge, a man anxious to flash a message of law and order to the voters before the law forces him to run for election in a year.
Actually I’m surprised. With a shortage of Latino candidates, and affirmative action being what it is, the grapevine is full of rumors that Acosta is headed to the court of appeals.
Nelson wastes no time, launching into the evidence, the strength of their case, the overwhelming circumstances, all of which he says point to my client as part of a conspiracy to kill her husband. He’s not giving anything away. It’s a rerun of the evidence trotted out in the preliminary hearing, no indications that they’ve altered the theory of their case. If you believe him, the cops are making little headway on identifying Talia’s co-defendant. But it’s only a matter of time, according to Nelson. I think this is a little bob-and-weave for our benefit. By now they must know about Tod. He’s done everything but light himself in neon.
Lama chimes in, as if to advance the company line a little. “The lady had so many lovers it’s hard to get a fix,” he says.
“Spare me,” I tell him.
“We’ll get him,” says Lama. Like most of what Jimmy Lama has to say, this comes off sounding like the cheap threat it is.
“We have a carefully constructed case here,” Nelson cuts in. “We take no short cuts,” he says. “I’m not interested in that. I want the people who did the crime.”
While these words are delivered to me, Lama sits quietly looking at his boss, a little rebuked.
“If you ask me,” he says, “I will tell you the truth. I believe that your client did it. Otherwise I would never have charged her. I’m not interested in political points, but convictions. Only convictions.” He pauses, making a little angle with pointed fingers under his chin. Then a slight tilt of the head, a little expression of concession.
“Still, I can accept your position. You believe your client is innocent. It’s always more difficult to settle a case when a lawyer believes in his client,” he says. “I can accept that.”
“No,” I tell him. “It’s always more difficult to cut a deal when a client knows she’s innocent.”
His eyebrows go up a bit. “So you don’t think you can sell it to her?”
I make a face, like “Maybe.” “Depends on what I have to sell.”
“What would you like?”
“What is this, buyer’s day?” I ask him.
“Give me a wish list.”
I screw up my face a little, like a market merchant about to kibitz with a customer.
“Manslaughter, second degree.” This means that if Talia did it, if she killed Ben, it was the merest of accidents. I am only one step above simple battery, and only professional shame and the fact that any plea bargain must be approved by the court prevents me from asking for that.
For a thin man Nelson has a hearty laugh, with a range of control that traverses two octaves. Halfway to a high C Lama kicks in with his own chortle, a cheap chorus to show the boss he’s on board.
“That’s rich,” says Nelson. He’s catching his breath, his face a little red. “But I guess I asked for it. I had something a little more realistic in mind,” he says. His voice now takes on the sobriety of a pitchman.
“Listen, this could be very hard on both of us. We can make it easy, and do your client a service in the process. You’ve got a problem. The evidence is stacked in spades against Mrs. Potter. She’s not someone a jury is likely to take sympathy on,” he says. “A wife with wayward tendencies-who kills for money.” He arches an eyebrow as if to show me how he will make Talia out the villain. “All we want is her help, her cooperation. To put this thing behind us. She identifies her accomplice, I’ll drop the special circumstances. No death penalty. She cops a plea to first- degree murder. She gets twenty-five to life. With a kind word from me I’d bet she’d do no more than twelve years. Still be a young woman when she comes out.”
“Otherwise?” I ask.
“Otherwise I go for the whole nine yards, first-degree murder with special circumstances. I’ll push hard for the death penalty,” he says, “and I’ll get it.”
From the corner of my eye I can see Harry swallow a little saliva as he sits in the chair next to me.
“You’re being more than a little myopic,” I tell him. I convince him to humor me, to play along with my reasoning for a moment.
“Let’s assume, just for purposes of discussion, that she didn’t do it. That the lady’s completely innocent. You’ve offered her a deal she could not in good conscience accept. It may be terribly tempting, a certain result in an uncertain world. How can she deliver up an accomplice who doesn’t exist?”
Nelson has poker eyes, for if this scenario concerns him, the prospect of some innocent man’s being victimized by my client, he doesn’t show it.
“Why are you so insistent that she did it?” I ask.
“You have another candidate?”
I purse my lips as if to say maybe. But I have no one to deliver to him. If I hand him Tod, he will want to know what evidence I have. If I deliver up the Greek, Lama would spend his days until the trial searching out facts to exonerate him. Given the personalities involved, Skarpellos and Lama, I would suddenly discover that Tony was playing cribbage with a dozen elderly matrons the night Ben was killed.
“Suspects are your job,” I tell Nelson.
“I think we’re satisfied with the defendant we have. All we need to know is who helped her. Who carried the body, used the shotgun,” he says.
“It’s an offer made to fail. Even if she were willing to enter a plea to a crime she didn’t commit in order to save her life, she can’t fulfill the terms.”
He looks at me, like “Nice story, but it won’t wash.”
Lama kicks in. “Have you heard,” he says, “we got a photo ID party goin’ down at the office? Seems the lady was a creature of habit. Ended up at the same place every night. A motel clerk from hell says she brought her entire stable of studs to his front door. We got him lookin’ at pictures of all her friends. Only a matter of time. Then the deal’s off.”
Harry meets this with some logic.
“To listen to you, our client already had all the freedom she could ask for. Lovers on every corner, and a cozy home to come home to when she got tired,” says Harry. “Why would she want to kill the meal ticket?”
“Seems the victim was getting a little tired of her indiscretions. He was considering a divorce,” says Nelson. “You have read the prenuptial agreement? A divorce, and it was back to work for your clien
t.”
Harry and I look at one another.
“Who told you Ben was considering a divorce?” I ask.
“We have a witness,” says Nelson.
He is not the kind to gloat over bad news delivered to an adversary.
“You haven’t disclosed him to us.”
“True,” he says. “We discovered him after the prelim. We’re still checking it out. When we have everything we’ll pass it along. But I will tell you, it sounds like gospel.”
Lama’s expression is Cheshire cat-like, beaming from the corner of the couch. I sense that this is his doing.
“I think you should talk to your client. I’m sure she’ll see reason,” says Nelson. “If you move, I think I can convince the judge to go along with the deal.”
“I’ll have to talk to her,” I tell him, “but I can’t hold out much hope.”
“Talk,” he says. “But let me know your answer soon. If we’re going to trial, I intend to ask for an early date.”
CHAPTER 25
Sarah is crawling all over me like I’m some kind of jungle gym.
“It sounds,” says Nikki, “like it’s not going well.” She’s talking about the preparation for Talia’s trial. There has been an uneasy truce between us since our dinner at Zeek’s.
Nikki is beginning to take an interest in Talia’s case. She claims this is merely commercial, just watching her investment and the way I am handling the defense. But I sense something more here. There is a certain softening of her attitude toward me now that I have openly acknowledged my earlier affair with Talia. I am beginning to wonder if in this there may not be the seeds of a new start for us. I do not push it.
“It would be easier if Talia told me everything,” I say. “Last week I find out from the DA that Ben was planning a divorce. Like a bombshell, they dropped it on us during plea negotiations. I don’t even get a hint from my own client.”
Nikki is seated at the kitchen table in front of a small portable computer, a project for work. She hits the keys, and white symbols crawl across a black screen like worms burrowing in loam.
“What did she say, about a divorce?” Nikki’s curious.
“She says it’s garbage, that Ben never said anything to her about any divorce.”
“What do you think?”
“I think I believe her.”
“Intuition?” she says.
“Logic,” I say. “It’s possible Ben might keep his plans for a divorce from Talia, at least until after the senate confirmation of his appointment. But if it’s that big a secret, why would he tell somebody else?” That the DA claims to have a witness, someone so intimate that they had Ben’s confidence on this, doesn’t wash, not to me.
“And this is pivotal,” she says, “his plans for a divorce?”
I look at her and make a face, like “You can believe it.”
The nuance of this latest twist in our case is not lost on Nikki, this despite the fact that I’ve never told her about the prenuptial agreement. It fleshes out the motive. If Ben intended to shed Talia after confirmation, once lifetime tenure on the court was assured, and if she knew this, it could be seen as a prime motive for murder. If she waited, she could lose everything. If he can make out all the elements, Nelson can use this to build a strong case.
“Lately she’s compounding things by little lies and half-truths,” I tell Nikki.
“Like what?”
“Things I can’t talk about without violating privilege,” I say.
Nikki understands this. It was an unwritten rule during our marriage, a limit as to how much I could tell her about the cases I was working on. In Talia’s situation, I can’t talk about the alibi, the story she fabricated for the cops about her trip to Vacaville, or the fact that the police are closing in on Tod and that the two of them were supposedly together the night Ben was killed.
“But you really believe that she’s innocent of Ben’s murder, don’t you?” Nikki is looking me straight in the eye now.
“I do,” I tell her.
“Maybe she has a reason to lie.”
“Oh, she has a reason. She says she was protecting a friend.”
Nikki stops her work and looks at me.
“A lover?”
I’m noncommittal on this. A kind of response that has always been transparent to Nikki.
“Another man.” She declares this with confidence. Nikki hasn’t lost her touch, her ability to read my mind.
“Your client is caught between you and her commitment to another man. If I know her, and I think I do, you’ve got a real problem.” Nikki shares the female perspective with me. “In the war for information,” she says, “you won’t win. Not if she cares about this guy, and if what you’re asking may put him in jeopardy.”
“It sounds like some kind of female jihad” I say. “A holy war that only members of your gender know about.”
Nikki smiles over at me, silent, intuitive, her eyes saying only “Remember my warning.”
“It may cost her her life,” I explain.
Nikki’s attention is back to her work. She’s talking now through the distraction of computer logic.
“Maybe she can’t see the danger as well as you can.”
“I’m sure of that.”
Nikki is busy now, knocking out some characters on the computer, her mind submerged for the moment in her work. Then, for no particular reason, she shifts away from the trial and Talia.
“By the way,” she says, “how is Coop these days? I miss seeing him.” Coop had been a regular at the house every Tuesday night, with Nikki making sandwiches for our weekly poker soirees. I assume she has not seen him since she moved out of the house. Nikki has one of those tender spots common to many of her sex. She had taken a special interest in Coop since the double loss, his wife’s passing and the death of Sharon.
“Had lunch with him last week. I see him in court,” I say; “beyond that neither of us has much time for poker these days.” I have been wondering myself about Coop of late. I had always believed that George Cooper was a man of unlimited resilience. The tandem tragedies visited on his life have now proven me to be wrong. He puts a face on it in court, a professional veneer that weathers even the most blistering assaults by hostile lawyers and imperious judges. But outside of the courtroom he is a different man, subdued in ways I have never seen before, a shadow of the expansive and gregarious man I once knew.
Sarah’s up in my lap again, this time in a cotton pajama. We call them “rabbit suits,” the things that little kids sleep in, complete with feet and the embroidery of a hot air balloon on her tummy. She’s hugging and kissing me good night, big hugs with her arms full around my neck, and little kisses so delicate they would not disturb the petals on a rose.
Nikki takes her, and the two of them head for the back of the apartment to read about bears and trolls, castles and elves, the stories that lull little minds to sleep.
I am left alone to think, and as always my thoughts return to the trial now rapidly approaching.
This thing with Tod, it bothers me. Almost as much as it does Talia. He is different from her other friends. He’s continued to support her, stand by her even now when the risks are plain. The others, her social set, shed Talia like a flea-infested blanket shortly after the preliminary hearing. Now they follow her fate daily from the safety of their clubs or the security of their homes. They read about it in the sanitized columns of their morning newspaper, or watch as her life unravels on the tube at night.
I’ve heard this morning from Talia that Tod has been called by the police to appear in a lineup. According to the cops it’s all routine. But I know better. My letter to Nelson-the one accompanying the little handgun and identifying Tod as having touched it, to exclude his prints-has singled him out. He’s to go tomorrow with a number of other men, all acquaintances of the defendant, to stand before the white wall with the horizontal lines. Lama’s keeping his witness, the motel clerk, busy.
I’ve told Talia of my concern,
that in the end I think Tod will be the enemy. She scoffs at this. But if he is charged, the dynamics of conflict will set in. Represented by other counsel, he will be sequestered from Talia by his own lawyer. This imposed silence, this quarantine, will fire suspicion. Nelson will bleed it like the fatted calf, with alternative offers, deals to each of them, if they will only roll over on the other. I have wondered many times how much perjured testimony these tactics breed in our courts. Though I have used them myself many times, in that former life, when I worked for the DA’s office.
Nelson is true to his word. Twenty-four hours after I informed him of Talia’s rejection, her refusal to plead, we are headed for court. He has asked Acosta to set a trial date.
Talia and I run the gauntlet of cameras and microphones down the broad corridor leading to the courtroom. In her lust for news one of the radio jocks, a woman with a mike trailing a long cord to the recorder strapped over her shoulder, has managed to hook six feet of cable in the jangling bracelet on Talia’s wrist. The two of them do an awkward dance down the hall to my chorus of “No comment … maybe we’ll have a statement later.” Finally, at the courtroom door they disengage, Talia unclipping and abandoning her bracelet with a dozen dangling colored stones. The price of freedom.
In the sanctuary of the Coconut’s courtroom a sea of heads whip around to see us as we open the door. The pencil-wielding press is waiting for the main event.
Acosta is on the bench taking a plea in another matter. I usher Talia to the back row of chairs and take a seat beside her. The defense attorney and the deputy DA are haranguing each other over some detail that hasn’t been worked out. Acosta’s lost interest in this duel. He’s tracking us with his eyes at the back of the courtroom. Then he returns to the business at hand.
“Maybe you want to use my chambers to work this thing out.” It’s not a question. Acosta is pointing like the deity on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, toward the opening at the side of the bench, the hall that leads to his chambers.
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