About forty-five minutes later, I’m walking east on Walnut Street, Rittenhouse Square behind me to the west. Overhead, the sky is a brilliant blue, the temperature an even eighty degrees with low humidity and a light breeze. The people I pass on the sidewalk seem upbeat, happy. I wish I could say the same for myself.
That’s when I see her. Half a block down Walnut, walking toward me. My wife. Piper is five foot six with a lithe runner’s body and well-toned calves. Even carrying a large shopping bag, she glides almost weightlessly on the pavement. A blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty turning men’s heads on the street.
Piper spots me and her eyes flash with surprise, then flatten as she forces a smile. We approach each other and stop. Despite the weather, the air between us feels frigid.
“What are you doing in town?” I ask. “I thought you were going to spend the day at the mall, have lunch with one of your girlfriends.” That’s what she’d told me this morning.
“It’s too nice to spend the day inside a mall. So I thought I’d drive into Center City, check out the shops.” Piper nods to the stuffed Lululemon bag.
“I wish I’d have bought stock in that company,” I say.
“My parents have Gabby for the night,” she says, referring to our six-year-old daughter. “She loves the new car, by the way.”
Over the weekend, Piper bought a BMW convertible without telling me.
“Did you set up the automatic pay thing through the bank account? The first payment’s due the middle of next month, I think.”
Livid with Piper, I pause before answering. I’m an expert at masking my emotions, but it’s all I can do to restrain myself. I smile, jaw tight. “It’s all arranged.”
A moment later, Piper and I part ways. I turn to watch her, my heart rent with fury and sorrow.
Back in the office, I sit at my desk and try to will the day’s difficulties into their own compartments. I’m a savant when it comes to compartmentalizing. I can store something away in my mind for hours, days, weeks. Sometimes forever.
I start checking my e-mails but quit halfway through. I pick up the phone to return an important call but hang up after it rings once on the other end. There’s a draft of an appellate brief on my desk, and I pick it up, start to edit it, but toss it aside after a page or two. I’m just too distracted to work. My insides are roiling.
I close my eyes, open them, take five deep breaths, then five more. It doesn’t help, so I decide to go for a run. I rip off my work clothes, throw them onto my desk in a heap, and put on the running clothes I always bring with me to work. I’m flying the instant I leave the building.
My normal run is a ten-mile loop along the Schuylkill River. Today, I take it way too fast and am wiped out when I get back to the office. I dry myself off with paper towels in the bathroom, change back into my work clothes, and try to get some work done.
My mind is still spinning, and I realize it’s hopeless. I leave the office, get my car, and head home. Passing 30th Street Station, I call Piper. I can’t reach her at home, so I call her on her cell. She says she decided to go to the mall after all and that she’ll get home about the same time I do. I tell her I’ll pick up something for dinner at Whole Foods . . . not that I’ll be able to eat anything.
Piper and I live with our daughter, Gabrielle, about fifteen miles west of Philadelphia. Our house is a sixty-year-old stone Cape Cod on three-quarters of an acre on a quiet, tree-lined street. Piper fell in love with the house instantly when she first laid eyes on it four years ago. “It’s absolutely perfect,” she told me when we put in our bid. Then, the minute we took possession, she set out to change everything about it. In order of attack, Piper replaced all the wallpaper and lighting, tore up the carpeting and laid new hardwood floors, put in a new kitchen and upstairs and downstairs bathrooms, and finished the basement. The only things she hasn’t replaced are the windows and roof.
I pull my car up to the three-car garage built into our house and walk in the back door. I’m immediately set upon by Franklin, our two-hundred-pound Bernese mountain dog, the Main Line beast du jour. I place the Whole Foods bag on the granite counter and give Franklin the hugs and treats he’s come to expect when I get home from work. Turning back to the counter and the grocery bag, I notice a business card stapled to an invoice of some sort. I pick it up and see that it’s an estimate for a new cedar-shake roof: $30,000.
Jesus Christ.
Piper enters the kitchen. Her face is drawn, her eyes and nose are red. “I don’t feel well,” she says. “I’m not going to eat.” With that she passes by me, walks down the hall, and goes up the stairs.
I turn away from her. Given how I feel right now, it suits me that we’re not having dinner. I wander into the family room and sit numbly in front of the television. Reruns of Law and Order play themselves out on the tube, but I can barely see the images on the screen through the fog that envelops my mind. The eleven o’clock news comes on, then Jimmy Fallon, then Late Night with Seth Meyers. I sit zombielike on the couch until Carson Daly comes on at 1:30, then will myself off the sofa and make my way upstairs.
I pause and stand at the doorway of Gabrielle’s room. Her empty bed evokes a hollow ache inside me. I can feel her absence outside myself as well, an unnatural stillness that pervades the air, the walls, the floors—as though the whole house misses her. One of my favorite things is to read Gabby to sleep at night, then sit and watch her breathe. A Sick Day for Amos McGee is one of Gabby’s current favorites, as is The Day the Crayons Quit. The book I most enjoy reading to her is one I saved from my own childhood, the Dr. Seuss classic Green Eggs and Ham. Too often, I come home from work so late that Gabby is already asleep. When that’s the case, I read to her anyway. Piper’s always thought it odd, but I like to think that, even asleep, some part of Gabby’s mind can hear me and knows I’m with her.
I feel a presence at my side and look down to see Franklin standing next to me. He stares through the doorway to Gabby’s bed, then looks up at me. I lean down and pat his head. “Don’t worry, boy. She’ll be back tomorrow.”
Unlike some parents’ daughters.
Franklin and I turn and walk down the hall to the master bedroom. I follow him in and watch him curl up on the faux-fur rug at the foot of our bed. I brush my teeth, then undress in front of the bed, watching Piper the whole time. She’s curled up in a fetal position on her side of the California king she bought a few months earlier. She’s covered from head to toe, so I cannot see her face.
For the next hour and a half, I toss restlessly in a futile attempt to fall asleep. Across the bed, Piper shifts position as often as I do. She doesn’t answer when I ask if she’s awake, but I know the rhythms of her breathing and can tell she’s no more asleep than I.
Then the phone rings. The neon-blue light of the alarm clock reads 3:15.
Gabby! is all I can think.
I snatch up the phone and listen to the panicked voice on the other end of the line. “Slow down,” I tell the caller. But he can’t. After a few minutes, I interrupt. “All right, listen. I’ll be there as fast as I can. Just don’t say anything to the police. Anything at all.”
I hang up the phone and sit up on the edge of the bed, trying to process what I’ve just learned. Through the darkness, I hear Piper ask me who it was.
“It was David Hanson,” I say. “He’s been arrested for murder.”
I feel Piper stiffen. I turn to face her. She stares at me, her mouth open. I wait for her to ask the obvious question, and when she doesn’t, I answer anyway. “The victim is Jennifer Yamura. The reporter.”
2
FRIDAY, JUNE 1
It’s 5:15 a.m. when I walk into the police’s department’s Ninth District headquarters on the corner of Twenty-First and Hamilton Streets. The building is a squat three-story structure with a tan brick facade and a concrete fascia just below the roof line.
“Hey, Mick. Heard you were coming.” It’s Ted Brennan. He was a rookie officer when I left the district attorney�
�s office. Good kid. His dad, also a cop, out of the Sixth District, has about five years until retirement.
“How’s my guy?”
“Hanson? Sweating bullets.” He shrugs almost apologetically. “We got him dead to rights.”
Ted proceeds to tell me the circumstances of David’s arrest. “The 911 operator gets a call about 11:30. The caller says there’s shouting and loud noises in a house on the seventeen hundred block of Addison Street, near Rittenhouse Square. Dispatch sends a squad car with two officers to the scene. The lights are on so they know someone’s at home. They knock, but no one answers. They keep on knocking and ringing the bell. Still no answer, so one of the patrolmen stays at the front door while the second runs around back to Waverly, which is the alley between the houses on Addison and Pine. He finds your man running out the back of the house, tackles him, cuffs him. Partner comes around and walks into the house, where he finds—ta da!—one dead reporter.”
I inhale. “Weapon?”
“Basement stairs. Your client pushed her down, and she bashed her head in.”
I think for a minute. “Who’s been with him?”
“Tredesco and Cook.” Brennan smiles. “I’m sure they’re doing their best to make him feel at home.”
I’ve never met Cook, but I know John Tredesco. He’s cunning. He’d probably gone at David from eight different angles already, trying to catch him in a lie.
“Can I see him now?”
“Sure, but it’ll take a miracle worker to get this guy off.”
Brennan escorts me to the interrogation room. I pause in the hallway, look through the window. David is slouched in a seat behind a gray metal table, rubbing his forehead with his hand. His thick chestnut hair is a tangled mess. He taps his right foot nervously under the table. When the door opens and he sees me, David slowly lifts his athletic six-foot-three frame from the chair. The energy that normally powers his movement has been drained from him. His broad smile is long gone from his face, his blue eyes bloodshot.
“Four hours. That’s how long they made me wait to call you. And another two hours for you to show. I’m going out of my mind!”
I motion for David to sit back down. “Did they offer you a nonwaiver of rights? It’s a form that says you don’t want to speak to the police or waive your right to an attorney.”
“Yes. And I signed it. And I told them you were my lawyer and I wanted to speak to you. And they still made me wait four hours.”
“Did you say anything to them—anything at all?”
“Just that I wanted to call my lawyer. You. And I kept on saying it, and they ignored me and made me sit here in this room. Tried to trick me into answering questions.”
“Who tried to trick you? How did they do that?”
“Two of them. They told me their names, but I don’t remember them. They tried to play nice with me. Ask me how I was feeling. Did I want any coffee? Talked about the Phillies. What am I, some idiot who’s going to fall for that?”
I let David vent some more, then ask him a third time, “Before you signed the nonwaiver of rights, did you say anything else to the police?”
“Nothing. I was at work all afternoon—that’s what I told them. Then I told them I wanted to call you.”
“That’s not nothing.” I give David a hard look. “Were you at work all afternoon? All afternoon?”
David stares at me for a moment, then closes his eyes, lowers his head.
“Great,” I say. “Now you’re on record as having lied to the police.”
His eyes still closed, David says, “Please, just get me out of here.”
I spend an hour with David and then drive to my office, getting in by about seven o’clock. I’m the only one there, and I will be until Susan arrives in an hour or so. My mind is spinning, my heart pounding like a hammer. My thoughts drift back to the times I spent with my law-school classmate and partner in crime, David Hanson. Long hours studying late into the night for finals. Good hours spent at Phillies and Eagles games. Wild hours spent at parties and bars. Mild but happy hours spent in restaurants after graduation. Outings with our wives. I jump forward and think about David now, the David I haven’t seen in a while. David the cheater. The cliché husband who can’t keep his dick in his pants. Finally, I think ahead, to David the accused. I know what’s ahead for my old friend. And I know that I will be the one holding his hand through all of it. It’ll have to be me if this is going to turn out well—for everyone.
David’s preliminary arraignment is scheduled to be held at 11:00 a.m., which is pretty prompt for Philadelphia, where the arrest-to-arraignment time can be as long as twenty-four hours. The arraignment procedure is a two-headed hydra. David would remain at the station house while the assistant district attorney and I appear before the arraignment court magistrate about a mile away in the preliminary arraignment room in the basement of the Criminal Justice Center. We would see David, and he would see us, only via closed-circuit television.
The hearing room is actually a suite of two rooms. The first, a gray waiting room, has the feel of a bunker. Its front is a glass wall through which you can see the goings-on in the courtroom proper. The courtroom rules, posted on a piece of white paper taped to the window, announce that there will be no talking, no children, no eating or drinking, no chewing gum, and no reading of newspapers or books. Cell phones, of course, must be off.
The courtroom itself has just enough room for the judge’s bench and two counsel tables. Each of the counsel tables is crowded with a phone, a flat-screen monitor, and a keyboard. Boxes are junk-stacked in front of the right side of the judge’s bench, which is topped with its own computer screen and vertical file folders jammed with manila envelopes. The courtroom is better lit than the waiting room, which serves only to highlight the clutter.
The assistant district attorney sitting in the waiting area looks young enough to be carded at bars. He stands when I walk in. We introduce ourselves, and I ask him for a copy of the complaint. He shifts on his feet and tells me he’s going to have to delay the arraignment for a couple of hours while the complaint is tinkered with.
“Tinkered with?” The DA’s charging unit, which works all night, should have finalized the complaint long before the arraignment. “What are the charges going to be?”
“Third-degree murder, obstruction of justice, and tampering with evidence, the last I saw.”
I expected the low-level homicide charge. It would be too early in the investigation to charge anything higher. The obstruction and tampering charges pique my interest, but I don’t press the ADA for details, knowing it’s better to wait for the complaint. I tell the young prosecutor I’ll see him shortly and walk back to the office.
I told our staff about David’s arrest before heading to court, saying I didn’t know much, only that the police had caught David Hanson running from Jennifer Yamura’s house late the night before. And that Yamura herself was found dead inside the house, apparently from wounds to the back of her head caused by a fall down the basement steps.
“This’ll be an important case for our firm,” I told them. “A headline grabber, and I want everyone steeled for battle from the get-go.”
When I enter our lobby, my secretary, Angie, looks up at me. “No news,” I tell her. “The DA is massaging the charges, so I’ll have to go back.”
I head for my office, where Susan joins me a few minutes later. “You okay?” she asks. “You don’t seem yourself.”
“Yeah, yeah. This one’s close to home, that’s all.”
Susan considers this. “Given your friendship with David, maybe I should handle the case. Or maybe we should steer him to another firm.”
I tell Susan I’ll consider it.
But there is no way I’m letting this case out of my hands.
I call Tommy as I walk back to the courthouse. My call goes to voice mail, so I leave him a message to call me right away. On the bench this morning is Delia Smick, who was a bail commissioner until her title was changed to
arraignment court magistrate. A tough cookie in her midforties, Delia has graying black hair and the raspy cigarette voice of a Melrose Diner waitress. She’s wearing a black shirt with white polka dots that goes well with her hair and the black-framed glasses perched at the end of her nose.
The magistrate recognizes me and sighs when I walk into the courtroom. That’s because my presence means the perp in her next case will be represented by private counsel rather than a public defender. Private attorneys, especially those hired by wealthy clients, can be pesky. The judge lowers her gaze to the computer and begins to read the complaint. Her eyes widen when she sees who the defendant is. Once or twice while reading she looks up at me, then back down at her screen.
A couple of minutes pass. The young ADA who was there that morning is nowhere to be seen. Her Honor asks me if I know where he is, but before I answer, I see her eyes grow wide again, and she says to someone behind me, “To what do we owe the honor?”
Turning around to follow the magistrate’s gaze, I am shocked when I see Devlin Walker, the first assistant district attorney. Only in the rarest cases would a senior DA show up at a preliminary arraignment. That the first assistant himself would appear is unheard of.
Walker is wearing a double-breasted black suit with a silver-and-black striped tie over a blazing-white, crisply starched shirt with French cuffs held shut by gleaming onyx cuff links. Devlin walks directly over to me and extends his hand. I can see he’s measuring the level of my surprise—one small factor to add to the calculus that will become our contest in this case.
Devlin Walker is an imposing presence. A former star basketball player for Central High, he stands six four and weighs an easy 215, not an ounce of which is fat. Devlin has a large head, square jaw, and wide-set eyes. His forty-four years have just begun to salt his hair, which he keeps short and perfectly combed. Devlin composes his face as a study in seriousness—an acknowledgment of the enormous responsibility the people have placed on him, and his pledge that he will not let them down. The same sense of responsibility carries over to Devlin’s role as a pillar of the African American community. City employees are required to live within city limits, so, unlike many prominent black officials who reside in Chestnut Hill or some other upscale section of the city, Devlin keeps his home on the Penn campus in West Philadelphia, just a mile from the row houses in which he was raised. Within his neighborhood, Devlin is an icon. He’s a deacon in the Rock of Ages Baptist Church, a Big Brother, and a Boy Scout leader. It is accepted wisdom in the DA’s office that Devlin will succeed his boss as district attorney.
A Criminal Defense Page 2