I’m not sure how long we stood there, facing each other, but I’m sure Piper could see how I was looking at her.
“Have you ever stayed at a bed-and-breakfast?” she asked then, smiling in a very different way than before.
A couple of hours later, we lay beneath the sheets on a thick mattress on a creaky brass bed on the wood-plank second floor of a bed-and-breakfast on Gurney Street. Our lovemaking had been gentle, sweet, almost ethereal—until the passion had overtaken us. Now, in the afterglow, the pace of the world had slowed down again. Piper’s head was nestled under my arm as we both lay still. In the distance, I heard the calm sea waves roll in to caress the sand. Inside, the only sounds were the rhythms of our breathing.
“And all the pressures of my world melt away,” I said. But Piper didn’t hear me. She was asleep. So I kissed the top of her head and told her I loved her.
Now I’m back in my office on a Friday, reading a brief on my computer. Tommy walks in and says he’s gotten word that Devlin Walker is going to have Jennifer Yamura’s house gone over again.
“My friend tells me they’re going to search every nook and cranny of the place for hair, prints, lint—breath molecules—everything. Walker thinks that whoever was Yamura’s source about the grand-jury investigation was probably at her house at least once, so maybe he left a DNA calling card.”
I lean back in my chair and consider this. I’m about to make a suggestion when Tommy beats me to the punch. “I think we should get into that house first.”
“Good idea.” I call Vaughn into my office and tell him to draw up a motion for a scene inspection. I explain that the ADA is planning to scour the house soon and that I want to see it once before then.
“Should I call Hanson, tell him to be there with us when we search?”
“I don’t think we’ll need him there.” I hang up with Vaughn and look over at Tommy. “Want to grab lunch?”
“Nah, can’t today,” he says, getting up.
“Gotta see a man about a horse?” I smile, but Tommy’s eyes darken.
“What’s the matter?”
“Lot on my mind. No big deal.”
“Going tent camping again?”
“Maybe.” Tommy turns and walks out of my office.
I watch him go, the visual of Tommy roughing it under the stars taking me back to when we were teenagers. By the time he was in tenth grade, my brother had his life all mapped out. After graduation he was going to enlist in the military, Special Forces. He would serve our country on the most dangerous assignments. When he was discharged, he would go into law enforcement. “Big-city cop,” he told me. “The front line. Down and dirty.” I had no trouble even then envisioning my brother as a hard-ass cop in Philly, New York, Chicago, even Detroit.
When Tommy was in eighth grade, he began pumping iron in our basement. Then he bought a punching bag and started taking boxing lessons in a gym downtown. After a year of lifting, Tommy had gained thirty pounds and was ripped. The boxing lessons made him quick with his hands and feet. He once conned me into going a few rounds with him out in the backyard. Two minutes after we started, I was bent over, sucking wind.
In tenth grade, Tommy joined the wrestling team. Most of his teammates had already been wrestling for years, and Tommy was way behind them on technique. But he was a quick study, and it didn’t take long for him to catch up. What impressed his coaches, however, wasn’t the sharpness of Tommy’s learning curve but his brute strength. Tommy’s teammates called him “The Slab” because he was as hard as marble. Tommy was strong enough that, unlike his teammates, he didn’t starve and sweat himself to wrestle in a class below his normal weight. He wrestled at 185, going up against guys who normally walked around ten to fifteen pounds heavier. And he beat them.
The summer after tenth grade, Tommy worked in the lumberyard. It was grueling, bull work under the hot sun. He loved it. Every morning, he would leave our house at six armed with two thermoses of grape Kool-Aid and a paper bag carrying his five sandwiches, chips, and carrots. He’d walk to the bus stop and catch the bus into town. Twelve hours later, he’d walk back in the door, filthy with sweat and sawdust, his hair matted, his shirt torn more often than not. And he’d be in the best mood—more energized than I was, even though I’d only put in eight hours doing light work at the local farmer’s market.
Tommy was set to return to the lumberyard following eleventh grade. Then one of his friends at school told Tommy about his own job with a sporting outfit that hosted whitewater rafting tours in Jim Thorpe. Tommy accompanied his friend to the Poconos the weekend after school let out and was instantly hooked. When he got back that Monday morning, Tommy got our father’s permission to leave for Jim Thorpe for the summer.
At the end of the summer, Tommy came home with a dark tan and dozens of pictures of him camping, in the raft, and with various groups. He looked like a bronze god of the river.
A wave of sadness sweeps across my chest as I sit in my office, thinking of Tommy back then. Confident, strong, tough. My brother was ready to meet the future on his own terms. Little did he know the future that was steamrolling toward him didn’t look anything like he expected.
Our motion to inspect Jennifer Yamura’s house is granted the week after we file it, and Tommy and I find ourselves walking from the office toward Addison Street. It’s Thursday, July 26. The morning rain is gone, and the clouds are clearing, but the eighty-five-degree air is heavy with humidity, making it feel more like a hundred. Tommy carries a camera in case we want to take pictures. As we walk west on Addison, we come to the house near the end of the block. It’s a three-story brick row home. The shutters are trimmed in green, as is the door. A piece of yellow crime-scene tape hangs broken in the doorway.
As Tommy and I reach the front door, it opens. A uniformed cop exits the house and descends three worn, white-marble steps to the street. Behind him, John Tredesco appears in the doorway. He isn’t wearing his jacket; his sweat stains show.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. “The court’s order was clear: a uniformed officer can watch us enter and leave, but we inspect the house by ourselves.”
Tredesco smiles. “You know, it’s funny. We all refer to this place as Yamura’s house. But she didn’t own it at all.”
I don’t know where Tredesco is going with this, but it makes me uneasy.
“Cut to the chase, John. I don’t have all day.”
“It wasn’t easy to unravel it,” Tredesco answers. “The recorder of deeds lists the owner as HD Holdings, some corporation out of Delaware. But that corporation is owned by another corporation, HDD Holdings, also of Delaware, which is owned by yet another corporation, HWD Holdings, in the Virgin Islands, which—guess what—is owned by yet another company. A huge conglomerate registered to do business in Delaware but operating almost everywhere in the world. You know, sometimes I wonder whether, when you get to the bottom of it, the whole fucking country isn’t owned by a single company.”
I pull out my cell phone and click a picture of Tredesco. “Unless you get out of my way in the next two seconds, I’m going to call the judge and tell him that you’re interfering with a court-ordered view of the crime scene.”
The detective ignores me. “When I contacted the company that owns this place, they forwarded me to their legal department. I left messages, but no one returned my calls. I figure that’s because the company’s legal department is shorthanded, seeing as how its general counsel is away on leave pending the results of his upcoming murder trial.”
Fuck. It takes everything I have not to say it out loud. I turn abruptly and walk to the end of the street. I’m seething as I dial David’s number.
“What the hell?” I say as soon as he answers. “You own Yamura’s house?”
There’s a long pause at the other end, then David tells me he doesn’t own the house, the company does. “How’d you find out?” he asks. “And why does it matter?”
Through gritted teeth, I explain my scene inspection and
all the shit that Tredesco’s dishing out to me. “It matters,” I say, “because with HWI owning the property—and I assume the purchase of the house was your doing—the prosecution has a much stronger link between you and Jennifer than they had before. It matters because you told me you only saw her a handful of times, that it was just a casual thing, when, plainly, she was more to you than a mere fling.” I now know why David had referred to his relationship with Jennifer as a deal. “It matters because you weren’t honest with me.”
“Oh, grow up,” David snaps. “I didn’t give a fuck about her. And I promise you, Jennifer wasn’t the least bit emotionally involved with me. It was a business deal. I had the company buy the house and let Jennifer live there. In return, she would fuck me whenever I wanted. And I wasn’t the only one she was seeing, either. Neither of us cared.”
“Well, I’ll just put it that way to the jury. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, don’t you believe for one second that my client had a motive to kill the decedent. There was no jealousy here, no motive to kill. You see, my client, my married client, the guy with a cancer-stricken wife, simply hired Ms. Yamura to be his concubine.’”
I hang up on David and return to the house. “You could have called me about this ahead of time,” I tell Tredesco. “Instead of waiting until I was at the front door.”
Tredesco smiles again. “Yeah. I know.” He turns to the uniformed officer and tells him to stay outside while Tommy and I inspect the house. “Don’t let them leave with anything,” he adds, winking at me.
Tommy and I watch Tredesco get in his unmarked car and drive down the street. I tell Tommy what David said about not giving a damn about Jennifer, that they both saw other people. Tommy seems to accept this with as much equanimity as he did the news about David owning the house. He turns and leads me up the front steps.
The front door opens into a large living room. It’s expensively outfitted with crown molding, cherrywood floors, and built-in bookshelves on either side of a black-marble fireplace. The walls are painted a muted gray. A small chandelier hangs in the center of the room. Over the fireplace is a pastel watercolor painting of two swans—very feminine. The sofa and love seat are of white fabric and sit around a chrome-and-glass coffee table. A vase with wilted flowers sits in the middle of it. Jennifer Yamura clearly had expensive tastes—good thing her keeper could afford to indulge them.
“Nice place,” says Tommy. “Don’t you think?”
“Yeah, nice,” I say. “Let’s see the back.”
Tommy leads me through the living room to the kitchen, the only other room on the first floor other than the powder room. The kitchen cabinetry is all white, with light-gray marble countertops and brushed chrome hardware. The doors of the upper cabinets are faced with glass to reveal the crystal stemware and china inside. Lights mounted under the cabinets shine down on the counters. The ceiling is fitted with recessed lighting. The refrigerator is a Sub-Zero. The dishwasher is a Bosch. The oven is a six-burner gas Viking. All spanking new.
Tommy and I retrace our steps, enter the short hallway that encloses the door to the powder room and, across from it, the doorway to the basement stairs. A curtain of brightly colored glass beads covers the cellar doorway. “Her hippie side,” Tommy says. He pushes aside the beads, and we both look down the steps. There are twelve—wooden, uncarpeted, old, and splintered. Obviously not part of the remodel. The bottom step rests on a concrete block about four inches high. The last four or five steps are stained with blood, and a large brown stain discolors the concrete block and the floor near it where Yamura’s blood drained and pooled.
Tommy descends the steps, and I follow him. The basement is small, and the walls are cheaply paneled over rough cement. There is no finished ceiling, so I can see the wooden beams, ductwork, and wiring. Tommy walks over to a large plastic basin, turns the water on and off. I nod to the floor behind him.
“This must be where she crawled, tried to get away from her killer,” I say. Tommy looks at me, nods, but says nothing. We dawdle for a few more minutes, looking around, then walk back upstairs.
“I’ll check out back,” I say. I walk through the kitchen and open the back door, step down onto the cement parking area behind the house. It’s just big enough for one car; there’s barely room beside it to get out and walk to the back door. The back wall of the house is stucco, smooth, and freshly painted in a French yellow. The glass-paned back door has a fresh coat of white paint as well.
Waverly Street, the alley that runs behind the houses on Addison, is just wide enough for a single car. Across Waverly, the houses on Pine Street come right up to the sidewalk, leaving no room for parking. Directly across from Jennifer Yamura’s place there’s a courtyard between the back extensions of two large homes. Empty but for trash cans, it’s protected by an eight-foot, iron-barred security gate with a “No Trespassing” sign.
I stand in the alley and look up at the windows on the second and third floors of Jennifer Yamura’s house. After a minute, Tommy appears in the second-floor window just above the kitchen. He looks down at me and I up at him. We hold each other’s gaze for a long moment, and I see something undefinable in Tommy’s eyes. He nods at me and turns away.
I cross the yard, walk up the back steps, and enter the kitchen. I meet Tommy in the living room.
“David spent a lot of money buying this house for her, fixing it up,” I say. “Maybe he cared for her more than he let on.”
“Or maybe he didn’t buy the house for the girl,” Tommy says. “Maybe he bought the girl for the house.”
The following Wednesday, I’m sitting in my office at eight in the morning. David is coming in at ten to discuss his case. I’d called him again following the house inspection. Neither one of us was in a better mood during the second call that day than we had been during the first. I expect our meeting today to be stormy. Then Vaughn rushes in with news that makes me think the meeting will go even worse than I expect.
“Did you read the Daily News this morning?” He hands me the tabloid.
I gape at the headline above the front-page color photo of Jennifer Yamura’s house. It reads: “Addison Street Geisha House?”
“My God.” Someone from the police or DA’s office has leaked to the newspaper the fact that David, through Hanson World Industries, owns the house in which Jennifer had been living. The theme of the article was that David had been keeping Jennifer in the house as his mistress, “like an old-fashioned geisha girl.”
“This is so wrong,” Vaughn says as I read. “The fact that Jennifer’s ancestry was Japanese? That geisha thing? It’s racist.”
I sigh and look up at Vaughn. “More to the point is the fact that it makes David look like he’s also a racist. And an elitist.”
“And a pig,” adds Susan, walking into my office, her own copy of the Daily News under her arm.
“Why didn’t he tell us this?” Vaughn asks.
“Maybe for the same reason he won’t tell us where he really was when Yamura was murdered,” says Susan.
“You think he’s guilty?” Vaughn asks.
“I think he has a lot to answer for,” she says. “Like why he’s out chasing other women while the mother of his two children is fighting cancer.”
Susan and Vaughn leave me to read the article, which details the juicy family scandal from which David Hanson sprang. When Edwin was eighteen, their father divorced Edwin’s mother to marry his secretary, who was then pregnant with David. It was a bitter and public divorce and caused Edwin to hate both his father and his younger half brother.
The phone on my desk buzzes behind me. It’s Angie, telling me that David has arrived. I ask her to have Susan and Vaughn meet me in the conference room, and I walk down the hall to meet David in our foyer. We shake hands perfunctorily, and I lead David into the conference room, where we both sit down.
As livid as I am with David, I promise myself not to lose my cool. David is, after all, a client. And for things to work out, it is imperative that he remain so.
The last thing I want is for David to fire me in a fit of anger because I can’t hold my tongue.
I take a deep breath, then begin. “David, the reason I’ve asked you to come and meet with us today—”
David cuts me off midsentence. He, apparently, has not resolved to keep his cool with me. “I know why I’m here, Mick. Okay? You’re pissed about the house thing. I should have told you about it. I fucked up. I get it.”
It’s Susan’s turn to interrupt. “Did you see the story in the Daily News this morning?”
David whips his head toward Susan. “Yeah, I did. And so did my brother, who spent forty-five minutes reaming me out over the phone as I drove here this morning. He’s already taken away my job. Had my security card revoked so I can’t even get into the fucking building. Now he’s demanding that I give him my proxy to vote my shares so I won’t have any voice whatsoever in how the company is run. What’s he going to ask for next? My balls on a silver platter?”
I pause a moment to let David see that I’m hearing him. I’m about to say something to calm him down, but Susan just can’t hold back. “What’s with the kimonos?” she demands. One of the things mentioned in the news article was that the police found seven silk Japanese kimonos in Jennifer Yamura’s closet, a fact the reporter used to play up the geisha angle.
“Jesus fuck,” David says. “It was a joke between the two of us. I came in one time and Jennifer was dressed in a kimono, and she pretended, pretended, like she was a geisha and I was her lord, or something. It was role-playing. That’s all. After that, whenever I went to Japan on a business trip, I would come back with a kimono and give it to her. But she never wore them. That one time was the only time.” David shakes his head, plainly both exasperated and exhausted.
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