“All right,” I say before Susan has a chance to attack again. “I know you’re under a great deal of stress right now,” I begin. I pour a cup of coffee for David and then one for myself from the silver coffee service that Angie has set up on the conference table. Vaughn grabs a couple of croissants. Susan broods. “It’s not our intent to add to it. We just want to make sure there will be no more surprises. We can deal with things, if we know about them. Put our own spin on the facts. But if the first time your legal team finds out about something that’s potentially damaging is when we read it in the newspapers or see it on TV, then it’s too late.”
David looks at me. “All right. I get it.”
“Is there anything else?” I ask. “Anything that might look bad if it comes out?”
David looks up at the ceiling and inhales. He’s thinking. It looks like he’s about to shrug his shoulders when Vaughn says, “The kimonos.” David looks over at Vaughn, who continues. “You said there were seven of them. The first one, the one Jennifer already had and wore as a joke. And the other six you purchased when you went to Japan?”
“Yes?”
“How often did you go to Japan?” This is Susan, who has apparently figured out where Vaughn is going.
A light goes off in David’s eyes, and he stiffens. I can see that he, too, gets it. “I go to Asia, including Japan, about twice a year.” He directs his next comment to me. “I’d actually been seeing Jennifer for almost three years. Not just a handful of times, like I told you.”
“And the house?” I asked. “When did you buy it?”
“I already owned it by then. I’d bought it for . . . someone else. Then she relocated and the house was sitting empty. After a while, I started seeing Jennifer, and eventually, I told her she could move in.”
So Tommy was right when he speculated that David hadn’t purchased the house for Jennifer, but the other way around. I look from Susan to David, who stares down at the table.
“So,” says Susan, “playing devil’s advocate here, when your case goes to trial, the prosecutor will be able to say that you purchased the house to keep one woman, and then after you broke up, you went out and acquired another woman to keep in the same house. Even before your wife got sick and things became stressful between the two of you.”
David says nothing, still averting his eyes.
I take a deep breath, forge ahead. “Your alibi for when Jennifer Yamura was killed. Is there anything you want to add to what you already told us?”
“Anything different?” clarifies Susan.
David ignores Susan and looks directly at me. “I didn’t go to the house the day Jennifer was killed. I only went there that night.”
“Where—” Vaughn gets the one word out before David stands abruptly.
“We’re done here,” he says, then turns to leave.
“Sooner or later, you’re going to want to tell us where you really were, what you were doing,” Susan says to David’s back.
David turns. “Am I, Susan? Am I going to want to tell you? Are you really going to want to know where I was and what I was doing?” This last remark he directs at me. Then he’s gone.
Vaughn is the first to speak. “Did he just tell us he did it? Did he just say that we really don’t want to know where he was when Jennifer was murdered because the answer is he was right there, tossing her down the stairs?”
“That’s not what I heard,” I say. “And it’s not what you heard, either. Got it?” I turn to Susan. “You seem to have quite a hard-on for the man.”
Susan gets her back up, starts to say something, but cuts herself off.
“Look,” I say, “I don’t much like David right now, either. But I don’t want to lose him as a client. We can’t afford to lose him.”
Susan looks away for a long minute, then turns to face me again. “I don’t get it. David went to law school with you at Penn, an Ivy League school. And wasn’t he on the Law Review? He has to be a smart guy. A lot smarter than he’s looking right now.”
David is smart, but maybe not in the sense Susan means. And David did get himself on the Law Review. But it wasn’t due to his grades. Instead, he had to write his way on. No easy task even for the best legal writers and research wonks—for David it would have been impossible, because of his lack of patience. David never could have planted himself in the law library long enough to lose himself in the research necessary to author a paper of sufficient depth to win a spot on the Law Review.
But David had a secret weapon, a carefully cultivated asset that none of his competitors possessed. He had our roommate, Kevin Kratz, the smartest guy in our class. During our first year of law school, David invited Kevin to every ball game and concert and party he went to. David made sure that Kevin was never left standing alone in the middle of a crowd, that his beer mug was always full. And David was the one who persuaded Allen Davis and me to let Kevin live with us in the apartment we rented during our second year . . . when David would have to write his paper to win a place with that publication.
I read the paper David submitted under his name to the editorial staff. It was, in a word, brilliant. Exhaustively researched, tightly reasoned. Almost literary. The work would have been a source of pride to any Supreme Court justice’s law clerk. I had little doubt at the time that Kevin was proud of it, and I was certain David praised and thanked Kevin to no end for it.
And yet, at the time—and this may be a sad commentary on my own ability to judge people—I did not question at all the sincerity of David’s friendship with Kevin Kratz. Even when, at the end of our second year, David persuaded Kevin to lobby for him to become editor-in-chief, when Kevin clearly, and by leaps and bounds, was the better man for the position.
I shrug. “He’s definitely a smart man. Very smart.”
9
FRIDAY, AUGUST 10
It’s Friday morning and I’m staring at the face of Stanley Lipinski. Of the three corrupt cops identified by the press in connection with the grand-jury investigation, Lipinski is the one who’d planted himself at the local cop bar, essentially taunting the cops he’d snitched on to come for him. The story of Lipinski’s murder is playing out on the seven o’clock news on the small TV in our kitchen. My daughter and I are sitting on stools at the island in the middle of the kitchen, Gabby eating her Trix while I wait for Piper to finish frying the vegetable omelet we’ll share.
I know a lot of good cops. I could name fifty I’d be shocked to hear accused of corruption. Stanley Lipinski is not one of them. Lipinski viewed himself as the police-department version of a hockey team’s “enforcer.” Some cops get rough with suspects because they truly believe in the good-guys-bad-guys dichotomy and think the bad guys get what they deserve. But that wasn’t Stanley Lipinski. Stanley inflicted pain because he enjoyed it. Everyone—cops, perps, even prosecutors and defense attorneys—gave Stanley a wide berth.
But the bad guys, the real bad guys, will only put up with so much, so I wasn’t surprised when the Thirteenth District’s enforcer ended up dead. He had, after all, not only testified against his cohorts before the grand jury but also all but dared them to come and get him. Apparently, they did. Lipinski had gone down hard in a rapid-fire spray of bullets on the sidewalk just outside McCraven’s Tavern in North Philly. According to eyewitnesses, so many bullets had torn through his torso that Stanley was effectively disemboweled, his guts spilling onto the pavement while he remained upright, shouting, “Fuck you!”
When the story finishes, Piper turns from the TV to me, and I see that all the color has drained from her face. “They’re going after everyone who helped Jennifer Yamura with that story, aren’t they?” Before I can answer, she asks, “Have you heard from Tommy?”
“Not for a few days,” I say.
“Can you give him a call? Make sure he’s all right.”
“Why wouldn’t Tommy be all right?”
Piper turns back to the omelet, which is now overdone.
I stare at her back for a momen
t, wondering whether Tommy and Piper are keeping things from me. After Piper recovered from the shock of her visit to Tommy in prison, the two of them became close. Piper began writing to him. At first he didn’t reply, but Piper persisted, and Tommy eventually sent her a one-paragraph missive thanking her for her letters. He wrote that it made him feel good to know that someone on the outside was thinking about him. The next week, the floodgates opened. I went to the mailbox to find another letter from Tommy. The envelope was thick, and Piper told me it was ten pages long. She wouldn’t tell me what Tommy had written, and I didn’t press; I was overjoyed that Tommy and Piper were developing a relationship. I wanted him to become part of our family once he got out of prison, and Piper was laying the groundwork for that to happen, despite the poison her father had been feeding her about my brother. The day he was finally released, Piper came with me to pick him up at the prison.
The following week, I introduced Tommy to my now-retired partner and founder of my law firm, Lou Mastardi, who agreed to hire Tommy as our firm’s investigator. Tommy lived with us for the next six weeks—Gabby was two at the time—while he reintroduced himself to freedom. The adjustment was not an easy one. He seemed to be on edge all the time, always looking over his shoulder. He would wake up in the middle of the night and walk outside to our patio. More than once I woke to find Piper gone from our bed, and spied her through the window sitting next to Tommy, talking quietly. It warmed my heart to see Piper helping my brother make his return to society. I believed that she played a critical role, both then and throughout the ensuing years, in bringing back the brother I’d last seen before our father’s illness and death.
Sometimes, though, and I hate to admit this, I felt a pang of jealousy. Tommy bared his soul to Piper. I got that, to a point. Piper is a nurturer and I—Lord knows—am not. But I am Tommy’s brother, and I would have thought that, even if he couldn’t bring himself to open himself up fully to me, he could have shared more than he did. What came to irk me even more was my suspicion that Piper herself shared things with Tommy that she didn’t tell me, her husband. Call me a dinosaur, but I think I should be her main sounding board and soul mate. I pressed Piper about this a few times, but she always shrugged it off or threw it back at me, complaining that I spent my weekends on the golf course rather than out in our garden, like Tommy often did. Needless to say, this type of response did not reassure me. But I did my best to push down my angst, securing it in one of my many mental lockboxes.
“Are you going to call Tommy or not?” Piper says, her back to me as she scrapes the omelet out of the frying pan.
“I’ll call him from the car,” I answer. “I’m sure he’s fine.”
Half an hour later, on the way to the office, I do call Tommy’s cell phone. I get the usual message, and I leave my own, asking him to call me back.
Angie is on the phone when I arrive at the firm. She flags me down and tells the person on the other end to hold on because I’d just arrived. “It’s Patti Cassidy,” Angie says. “She wants to know if you have a comment on that dead cop.” I nod and tell Angie to put the reporter through to my office.
“Patti, how are you?” I begin, using my sweetest voice.
“Sorry, Mick, but if we could just cut to the chase, I have to get my part of the article together ASAP for the website. Or someone else’s name is going on it.”
“Okay, here’s my quote: Officer Lipinski’s murder only underscores that some very bad actors are as unhappy with the people involved in the grand-jury investigation as they were with Jennifer Yamura for reporting it.”
There’s a pause at the other end of the line. “Is that going to be your defense in the Hanson case? That Jennifer Yamura was murdered by people connected with the police drug ring? Are you going on record with that?”
“Not a chance,” I say. “You—and everyone else—will learn at trial why David Hanson couldn’t have murdered Yamura.”
I click off and speed-dial Tommy. Again, I get his voice mail. I hang up without leaving a message.
Stressed, I decide to go for a run. My ten-mile routine run along the Schuylkill River usually relaxes me. But today it’s no help. I just can’t clear my mind of the widening rift between Piper and me, and the canyon separating me from my brother.
Halfway through my run, I cross the Falls Bridge to head back to town on West River Drive. The minute I turn the corner, I see the darkness enveloping the sky to the east. The clouds already cover Center City and are heading my way. Before I get a mile down the drive, I can hear it coming. A wall of rain pounds the ground a hundred yards from me. Then fifty, then the rain is upon me. Instantly, I’m soaked. It’s so thick I can barely make out the headlights of the cars approaching to my right.
When I arrive at the lobby of my building, the guard at the front desk, with whom I’ve exchanged greetings a hundred times, casts me a suspicious look, wondering who this street person is trespassing in his gleaming marble-and-chrome environment. I show him my access card. It’s soaked, so it doesn’t scan, and he has to key in the elevator for me.
In the men’s room, I use paper towels in a futile effort to dry off. Eventually, I give up and return to my office.
I try again to reach Tommy and curse when I hear his voice mail. I call home. Piper tells me that she still hasn’t heard from Tommy, either. I tell Piper I’m going to drive up to his trailer in Jim Thorpe. She says to be careful. I think about that. Tommy is definitely sharing things with Piper that he hasn’t with me.
An hour later, I’m driving down a rough path called Lizard Creek Road. I turn into Tommy’s campground and pass some big-ass RVs that cost more than most people’s homes, and continue until I find the turnoff for Tommy’s campsite. I see the weathered picnic table sitting next to his trailer, covered with a canvas tarp. As I pull up, a man sits down at the table, gnawing on a corncob. But that man is not Tommy. Neither Tommy nor his pickup is anywhere to be seen.
I step out of the car. The air is sweet with the smell of freshly barbequed chicken. The man sitting at the picnic table puts down the cob, wipes his hands on a paper towel, and stands. He walks toward me as I park my car and get out.
“Hello, Mick,” he says, extending his hand.
“Hey, Lawrence,” I say, extending my own hand. “Long time no see.”
Lieutenant Lawrence Washington smiles. “Long time nobody see.”
Lawrence is a tall, proud-shouldered African American. His hair, now almost fully gray, is cut short. He is neither light-skinned nor dark-skinned. His reserved and mannerly demeanor has always shone in sharp contrast to his chosen line of work. Let’s just say I have never heard someone address Lawrence as Larry.
“Where’s Tommy?”
Lawrence takes a seat, rests his arms on the table, and folds his hands. “Oh, he’s around. Had to go down to the store, get some supplies.”
“In the middle of dinner?”
Lawrence smiles again but doesn’t answer. Tommy knew I was coming. Piper must have gotten through to him on his phone. Maybe she’d been in contact with him this whole time. Maybe she just wanted me to come up here to see him. Or, as it turns out, not see him until after Lawrence and I have had a little sit-down. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I’m starting to feel that this whole thing has been orchestrated.
“So what is it we’re supposed to talk about?” I ask Lawrence.
“You’re a sharp one, Mick. You always were.”
I’m running out of patience. “Come on, man. What are you doing here? Or, if you want, we can talk about Stanley Lipinski.”
“Stanley Lipinski is what I’m doing here. I do not want to end up like him, which I surely would if I’d have stuck around.”
“There’s witness protection,” I say. “Like Terrance Johnson.”
Lawrence smirks. “Provided by the police. Police protecting you from the police. Not a good formula, by my math. I don’t hold out much hope for young Terrance.”
I nod, take a seat, and look at the big pap
er plate of barbequed chicken on the table. Lawrence tells me to help myself. He picks up his corn on the cob, and we eat together in silence until he’s finished.
“It was because of Cecilia,” he says suddenly.
“Your wife,” I say. “I heard. I’m sorry.” Cecilia Washington had been Lawrence’s high school sweetheart. Each was a refugee from a fractured household. Coming from a war-zone neighborhood, Lawrence and Cecilia had recognized in each other the same “I am better than this” spark of self-determination and pride. They married the month Lawrence graduated from the police academy, raised three daughters, sent them all to college, and saw them all married. This was common knowledge on the force and in the DA’s office, at least among those of us who worked cases with Lawrence. Also common knowledge was that Cecilia had developed a neurological condition that slowly robbed her of her health, then her mobility, then her life. It was an awful way for someone to die. And awfully expensive as well.
“I took her to every doctor I could find,” Lawrence says. “Every specialist, and everyone who claimed to be a specialist. We tried all the known therapies and drugs. Tried the experimental ones. I even flew Cecilia down to Mexico. Twice. About halfway through it all, I just plain ran out of money. Our savings were gone. Retirement account empty. Every cent of equity in the house used up. I had to find the money to go on. It was that simple. Guys I worked with knew all about it. One day, one of them came up to me. Said he knew of a way to help me out. Now, I knew that guy, and I knew that whatever he was serving up was gonna be rotten. But I didn’t even blink. I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘Where do I sign?’”
When Lawrence pauses, I get up and walk a few steps to a plastic Igloo cooler, pull out two bottles of beer, and bring them back to the table. Lawrence and I take turns throwing them back in the hot night air. The sun has set, and we’re surrounded by the constant sounds of the crickets and cicadas. Every now and then, a twig snaps nearby, a groundhog or maybe a fox making its presence known. When Lawrence and I finish our beers, I retrieve two more.
A Criminal Defense Page 9