A Criminal Defense

by William L. Myers Jr.

  David smiles. “Most of the credit belongs to Marcie. She’s quite the strategist, it turns out.”

  “Jesus, David. Don’t you realize if the reporters dig deep enough, they’ll eventually find something that leads them to the truth? If it comes out that the brownstone was originally a fuck pad after all, and that your three musicians are merely part of a massive cover-up, you might as well go ahead and stick the needle in your own arm.”

  David’s no longer smiling. “That’s why it’s important to get that apology from the Inquirer and close out the defamation suit as soon as possible. Once the threat of a lawsuit is removed, the paper will lose its will to dig up new information to defend itself.”

  “You’ve thought this all out, have you?”

  “Figuring out how to extricate myself from this clusterfuck is pretty much all I think about.”

  David and I face off for a long moment, before I say, “No more tricks. Not without running it by me first.”

  Fury flashes across David’s eyes. But he quells it quickly and blesses me with a broad smile. Then he crosses his heart, winks, and walks away.

  An hour later, I’m back in the office. It’s just after noon, and the details of the hearing are all over the midday news shows. The TV reporters, happy to feast on their own, cap their recounts with the fact that I have brought a civil defamation suit against the Inquirer and reporter Patti Cassidy, who is shown fast-walking away from the Criminal Justice Center after the hearing.

  “Now she knows how it feels,” Vaughn says as we watch the story on the big flat screen in my office. “Where’s Susan?”

  Angie and I share a glance. “Lunch.”

  When I originally told Susan about the plan to bring in the phony witnesses, she fought me on the petition. After I decided to move ahead with it anyway, she refused to accompany me to the hearing. When I told her afterward that Marcie and David had leaked the story themselves, she blew up.

  “This isn’t ethical! You’re helping David and Marcie perpetrate a fraud on the public. Worse yet, you personally misled the court.”

  “I didn’t say anything that was untrue,” I argued. “I simply filed a petition stating that a story averse to my client’s right to a fair trial had been leaked and asked for a gag order. I made no representations myself.”

  Before she left my office, Susan stopped and told me, “For some reason, you’ve decided to let David and Marcie lead you down the primrose path. You can do whatever you want. Just understand, I will not walk that road with you. I’m not going to cochair this case unless you agree to play it straight. I’m not losing my ticket for anyone, let alone David Hanson and that scheming wife of his.” Susan pivoted back toward the doorway and saw Angie standing there. “I’m taking an early lunch,” she said as she stormed out of the office.

  Now, watching the news with Vaughn and Angie, my discomfort over Susan’s rebuke and my anger at David have dissipated. I am flush with victory and feeling grand.

  “How about the three of us go to lunch?” I ask. “Celebrate the win.”

  Two hours later, Vaughn, Angie, and I return to the office, stuffed from our meals and lightheaded from our drinks. I putter around my office, open my snail mail, respond to congratulatory e-mails from some fellow defense attorneys who happened to catch the midday news.

  It’s just before five, and I’m about to log off my computer when Angie walks in and hands me a padded envelope.

  “I forgot to give you this,” she says. “Katrina gave it to me when we came back from lunch. She said an old lady dropped it off, claimed it was personal and confidential, for your eyes only.”

  “Let me guess,” I say. “My son’s in jail, and here’s the evidence that proves he didn’t do it.”

  “See you tomorrow,” Angie says, and walks out.

  I hold the envelope in my hand for a minute, wondering whether I should toss it in the trash or go through the pointless step of watching it first. I’m about to leave anyway, so I think, Why not? I tear open the envelope. Inside are an envelope and a DVD. I put the DVD into my computer, and a video appears on the screen. I recognize the scene. It’s Jennifer Yamura’s backyard and the back of her house. There’s a date on the video screen: May 31 of this year. The day of Jennifer Yamura’s murder.

  Oh, Christ.

  I quickly stop the video, get up, close the door to my office, then sit back down and restart it. A figure appears on the screen at time stamp 11:50 a.m. A man. He appears in the alley on the left of the screen, from the east. He walks directly to Jennifer Yamura’s kitchen door, knocks. Jennifer appears after a few seconds, opens the door for him. Before the man enters, he looks back, and I see his face.

  I am thunderstruck.

  By the time the video finishes, I am shaking. It’s all I can do to keep from throwing up. I get off my chair, pace the office. This is a disaster. The atomic bomb.

  What the fuck am I going to do?

  “Think,” I tell myself. Then I spy the envelope on my desk and reach for it. There’s a piece of paper inside. A single sentence is scrawled:

  I will contact you soon.

  I realize it instantly: blackmail. That’s how this is going to play out. I sit down at my desk and replay the video. I understand now. A lot of things that didn’t add up before about Yamura’s death now make perfect sense.

  I secure the DVD in my office safe. I move to my desk, stand beside it. I lean over, my hand clutching the corner of the desk. I take deep breaths until my heart slows. Then I sit down, pull my wastebasket out from under my desk, and throw up. When I’m finished, I turn my chair around and face the window. I think back to my mother’s death in our kitchen, how I envisioned myself flying out the window to escape the grief that had dragged my father to the floor. I recall my father’s funeral, and how I mentally sequestered myself by fleeing to another burial, a stranger’s casket on the other side of the graveyard. The two most horrific episodes of my life, and I found a way to remove myself from the pain that racked everyone else. Looking out my twentieth-floor window now, I see City Hall and, past it, the streets and buildings below Broad, leading eastward to the Delaware. I wish more than anything that I could fly where my eyes and my mind are taking me now—into New Jersey and across it, to the Atlantic Ocean beyond.

  Instead, I stay at the office late into the night, mentally navigating the maze, trying to figure a way out of this for David Hanson, for everyone who matters to me. When I’m finished, I realize there is only one path to safety, a perilous route where the decisions to take the final, essential turns will have to be left up to others. A journey whose first step must be taken by someone else: David Hanson. Whatever amount the blackmailer demands, David Hanson must—absolutely must—pay it. Or all is lost.

  I wonder what David will say to me when I show him the video. Will he invent some story to exonerate himself? Or will he break and admit the truth?

  16

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

  An awful night. I don’t get home until after midnight. The house is dark, Piper and Gabby both long in bed. I sit behind my office desk in the dark for close to an hour, the only sounds my own breathing and the rhythmic ticking of the antique grandfather clock in the living room. I mentally relive the day, amazed and horrified at how the world can turn on a dime. I ponder the plan I’ve constructed to save everyone from the fallout of Jennifer Yamura’s death. I analyze it, tear apart and rebuild it, over and over. What could go wrong? How can I guarantee nothing will? The answers are always the same: a million things. Or nothing.

  Wearily, I make my way up the stairs, take off my clothes, climb into bed beside Piper. I toss and turn and count the hours on the alarm clock, minute by minute by minute. Sometime after 4:30, I fall asleep.

  The alarm sounds at six. I grumble, reach over, and push the buttons on the top of the clock until the noise stops. I turn away and pull the covers over my head, but it’s no use—I can’t fall back to sleep. Moping my way to the bathroom, I relieve myself and cli
mb directly into the shower, stand under the hot water for a long time, head bent, eyes closed.

  It’s close to seven when I walk into the kitchen. Piper is standing by the counter, pouring herself a cup of coffee. Gabby is sitting at the table, eating Froot Loops.

  “I suppose I should say congratulations,” Piper says.

  I look at her, not comprehending for a moment. Then I realize she’s congratulating me about my victory at the gag-order hearing—now the farthest thing from my mind.

  “Thanks,” I say halfheartedly, changing places with Piper at the coffee machine.

  “Jeez, what’s wrong with you? And why were you so late?”

  I sigh. “I was at the office. I had to get something finished.”

  “Why didn’t you just finish it here?”

  My hackles go up instantly. The home-versus-office battle has been bitter ground for Piper and me for years. It’s the main reason Piper built out my home office for me, insisted I have remote computer access to my work server. It was a birthday gift and, in fairness, quite a grand one. The problem, as I explained to Piper more than once, is that, as one of the owners of the firm, I have to be physically present at my office downtown to lead my troops.

  “Mick. Did you hear me? I need you to take Gabby to school this morning. I’m meeting Julie for an early yoga class.”

  “Huh? Yeah, I heard. That’s fine. I’d love to take Gabby to school,” I say, mustering enthusiasm that I don’t actually feel for anything right now. I wink at Gabby as I say it. She smiles perfunctorily, the regent acknowledging her serf, then returns to her cereal.

  Two hours later I walk into the firm’s reception area. Tommy’s there, talking to Angela. I interrupt them, tell Tommy, “We have a problem. Come on.” I pass Tommy and lead him into my office. “Close the door,” I say. A minute later I’m sitting behind my desk, and Tommy is across from me in one of the guest chairs.

  “What’s up?”

  I take a breath. “There’s a tape.” Tommy looks at me, not understanding. “Yesterday, someone—an old woman, according to Katrina—dropped off a videotape for my eyes only. It shows the back of Jennifer Yamura’s house on the day of her murder. It shows who went in and out that day.”

  Tommy’s mouth opens, and I see his hands tighten on the arms of the chair. He looks at me, stone-faced. He waits a beat, then asks, “Is there something you want to say to me?”

  “No.” I’m nowhere near ready to talk about what’s on the tape.

  Tommy glances out the window behind me, then looks back at me. “So. Now what?”

  “Now? I make damn sure David Hanson pays whoever delivered that tape whatever they want to make sure the video never sees the light of day.”

  “It’s blackmail?”

  “What else?”

  Tommy doesn’t answer, and we stare at each other. “I guess that’s it, then.” He slaps the arms of the chair, stands, and leaves without looking back.

  “Close the door,” I say. Tommy hesitates, then closes the door a little too hard.

  I stare at the door, resigned to a fact I’d come to terms with a long time ago: that I no longer understand my brother and probably never will again.

  When Tommy came home after his stint in prison for beating up the cop in Florida, he didn’t seem as restless as he’d been. It was almost as though going to jail had calmed him in some way.

  He’d settled back into the lumberyard job of his youth, making decent money and even dating Rachel, a nice young woman from Lancaster. For two years everything went smoothly. There was even talk of a wedding.

  Then one day I was sitting behind my desk at the DA’s office when I got a phone call from her. She asked if Tommy was visiting me in Philadelphia. She hadn’t seen him in almost two weeks. Neither had his bosses at the lumberyard.

  I drove to Lancaster, got into Tommy’s apartment, and quickly determined he hadn’t been home in a long while. There was little I could do but wait. Finally, Tommy turned up in jail in Camden, New Jersey. It turned out he’d painted a strip club’s parking lot with the blood of two other patrons. One of the victims was the nephew of the town’s mayor.

  As I would only learn years later, the guys Tommy pulverized had been in the process of raping a woman in their van. Tommy passed by, heard what was going on, opened the van’s side door—the creeps hadn’t even bothered to lock it—and gone to town on the assailants.

  Things turned out worse than they had to for Tommy. In sentencing him, the judge never took into account that Tommy had prevented a rape because Tommy never said a word about it. The rape victim ran before the police arrived and never came forward about what happened. Tommy himself never explained why he attacked the two men. He wouldn’t even talk to the lawyer the court appointed to represent him. Or me, for that matter. He just sat back and let it all come crashing down on his head.

  The sentence was five years. Tommy took the first plea the prosecutor shat on him. He left the courtroom as he’d entered that day, in an orange jumpsuit, leg manacles, and handcuffs. He glanced back at me only once, just before they took him out the door. It took me the whole drive back to Philadelphia to figure out the look in his eyes, but I eventually realized what it was: relief. Like he’d gotten what he deserved. I paced my apartment the rest of the day, alternately crying and raging at my brother.

  “For what?” I’d shouted. “What do you think you did that you deserve this?”

  I’m pulled from my thoughts by the phone. It’s Angie. “Mr. Ginsberg’s on line one.”

  Alexander Ginsberg is the most respected and feared attorney in the city, if not the state. Fortune 500 corporations, CEOs, mafia bosses, politicians—the rich and powerful of every stripe and calling—scramble to hire Ginsberg when the carpet is pulled out from under them. After the hearing over the leak to the Inquirer about the second geisha house, I’d hired him to sue the paper for libel, telling Ginsberg that David Hanson wasn’t looking for money but for a public apology.

  “I’ve been on the phone all morning with the Inquirer’s lawyer,” Ginsberg tells me. “The paper is ready to print a front page mea culpa, so long as we promise not to file a lawsuit and bankrupt it.”

  “You mean bankrupt it again,” I say. The Inquirer’s financial problems have plagued it for years, even causing the paper to seek bankruptcy protection once before. “How soon will they run the apology?”

  “Their lawyer says tomorrow, if David will sign a release before then. I’ve already drafted something. I’ll send it over, let you look at it.” Ginsberg pauses, then says, “You know, the paper fired Patti Cassidy . . .”

  I thank Ginsberg and do some paperwork, make some calls. After an hour, I leave my office, tell Angie on the way out that I’m heading over to the food court at Liberty Place to pick up a sandwich from Bain’s Deli. “Back in a few,” I say.

  Leaving by the Market Street entrance, I turn right toward Sixteenth Street and see the preacher on the corner. He’s there every day, railing against adultery, alcohol, Congress, the Internet, sexting, and every other form of human folly that makes its way into the media. Today, though, he’s not shouting. He’s engaged in conversation with an older woman. I am about to walk by them when the woman turns and looks at me. She’s about five foot five. Her hair is dyed yellow, her eyes icy blue. Her face has the pallor of someone not used to the sun.

  She steps aside, then walks alongside me to the corner, where we stop. “You should listen to what this man says, Mr. Lawyer,” she says in a distinct accent. Russian or Eastern Bloc, I guess.

  I stop and stare at her.

  How does she know I’m a lawyer?

  “Everybody thinking only of themselves these days. Police selling drugs, husbands cheating on their wives, people killing each other. And everyone wants to get rich,” she says.

  And then it hits me: she’s the older woman who delivered the tape to my office yesterday.

  I open my mouth, but I don’t know what to say.

  “I’ll be
in Rittenhouse Square, the center, in an hour,” she says, then turns and walks across Market Street.

  Half an hour later, I walk past the spot where I happened upon Piper the day of Jennifer Yamura’s murder. A hundred years ago, it seems. The sidewalk is more crowded now than it was that day. I look at the faces of the people passing me in the other direction, hoping I don’t recognize anyone. Entering Rittenhouse Park, I become conscious of the weather for the first time. It’s warm for fall. The leaves are still green and thick on the trees. The sky is bright blue. A gentle, cooling breeze blows from the northwest. It’s beautiful outside, and I think to myself how wrong it is that the weather can be so lovely on such an awful day.

  I walk the diagonal path that crosses the park. The benches on either side of me are filled with people, mostly younger, eating lunch, sandwiches in opened deli paper on their laps. Talking, I suppose, about work or lovers or the latest movie. I see the old woman ahead, sitting on a concrete bench right in the center of the park. Her eyes lock on mine. The faintest trace of a smile forms on her lips. I sit down next to her. We sit silently until she decides to speak.

  “You think he’s crazy?”

  I look at the old woman, confused.

  “The preacher in front of your building—do you think he’s insane? Because he stands there giving speeches that everyone ignores.”

  “Maybe we’re all insane for ignoring him.”

  The old woman smiles.

  “Good point.” Then her smile disappears.

  “The video . . . is very interesting, don’t you think? Yes, I’m sure you do,” she answers for me in her thick Eastern European accent. “A very interesting young woman, my neighbor. Very attractive. Very popular with the men.”

  So apparently the woman lives in one of the buildings across the alley from Yamura’s house, on Pine Street.

  “Is that why you installed the camera?”