“I need to speak with you—both of you,” I say. Then I lead them to an unoccupied corner of the foyer. “What the hell are you two doing at a gala? Tuxedo and ball gown? An emerald necklace that costs more than most people’s houses? Diamond cuff links? Seriously, what the hell?”
David and Marcie look at each other, smile. “There’s nothing to worry about,” Marcie says.
“We have a plan,” David pipes in.
“A plan? You have a plan? Hey, guys, I’m your lawyer. The show is run according to my plan.”
David casts me a cool look. “Once we’re in court, Mick, it’s all you. Your speeches. Your questions. Your choice of witnesses. Your strategy. But we’re not in court yet. We’re still out here, in the real world. And Marcie and I are taking measures of our own to win the proverbial hearts and minds.”
“But you’re not winning over anyone. Didn’t you see how everyone reacted to your donation? Your speech? They couldn’t have turned their noses away any faster if they’d walked into a room full of dead skunks.”
“The donation and speech weren’t for the people at this party,” David answers. “They were for my jurors. The people who will actually decide whether I spend the rest of my life in prison. The Philadelphians who live in shithole neighborhoods, whose kids have the highest drop-out rates in the country. The people whose kids I’ve just given a million dollars to help.”
Now I’m steamed. “First of all, most Philadelphians do not live in ‘shithole’ neighborhoods. They live in working-class neighborhoods, with decent schools. Second, even the truly poor in the city will see your gesture as transparent. People will feel like you’re trying to buy them off. Tomorrow morning there’s going to be a big story in the Inquirer portraying this gambit of yours as nothing more than a bribe. How do you think the jury pool will feel about you then?”
“We’ve taken care of the Inquirer,” Marcie says. And with that, she takes David by the arm and leads him away.
Seeing them leave, Susan joins me. “That looked like it got pretty heated. You better ratchet yourself down a little. This place is full of photographers. You don’t want to see some nasty picture in the paper tomorrow of you arguing with our clients.”
Piper approaches Susan and me at the bar, and I excuse myself to go to the men’s room. As I’m walking, Devlin Walker comes up next to me, asks me how my brother’s doing. My hackles go up instantly.
“Speaking of Tommy,” Devlin say, “how’s his buddy Lawrence Washington? I hear they’re close.”
“How would Tommy even know Lawrence?”
“You think if we brought Tommy in, he could give us some insight as to where Lawrence is holed up?”
“You’re not bringing Tommy in,” I say. “Ever.”
Devlin shrugs. “Well, he could just come in voluntarily. Answer a few questions.”
“Back off, Devlin,” I say, then turn to leave. Walking away, I make up my mind that of all the people who will have to pay to save my family from the Jennifer Yamura fiasco, Devlin Fucking Walker is going to suffer the most.
Later, in the hotel room after Piper falls asleep, I toss and turn. At four, I sit up in a cold sweat. I get off the bed, walk to the bathroom, close the door. I turn on the cold water, cup it in my hands, and splash my face. For a long time, I stare at myself in the mirror.
“Mick?” It’s Piper calling me from the bed. “Are you all right?”
I tell her I’m fine, that something I ate must have disagreed with me.
I climb back into bed. I lie on my back, and Piper puts her arm around me, her face on my chest. We’re both quiet but awake.
After a while, Piper says, “Marcie looked great. Didn’t she?”
“Stunning.”
Another minute passes, then I hear Piper’s voice, small and hesitant. “What’s going to happen, Mick?”
The question hangs in the darkness until I answer. “It’ll work out. I promise. It’ll all work out.”
Piper hugs me tighter. She doesn’t believe me.
Later that morning, Sunday, Piper and I enjoy breakfast in the restaurant on the top floor of the hotel. The restaurant is a grand space, composed of two large rotundas with thirty-six-foot domes and floor-to-ceiling windows. We sit at a table for two next to one of the windows, drink mimosas, and gorge ourselves on Sunday brunch. We start with smoked Scottish salmon, cheeses, and salads from the café table. Then Piper has a Belgian waffle and I have the crab-cake Benedict. We finish off with mini cakes and parfaits. All the while, we gossip like schoolgirls about the dramas of the night before.
When we’re finished, I pick up an Inquirer from the front desk and carry it back to the room. While Piper packs, I open the paper and look for the article reporting David and Marcie Hanson’s extravagant gift to the American Way. It doesn’t take long to find it; the article is on page two, above the fold. The reporter, a name unfamiliar to me, gushes even more about the Hansons than Candace Stengel had the night before. And not just about last night’s gift. To the contrary, the article laundry-lists a dozen other sizable donations David and Marcie have made in the last decade to organizations as diverse as breastcancer.org, the Jewish Defense League, the United Negro College Fund, the Human Rights Campaign, Catholic Charities USA, Planned Parenthood, the Police Athletic League, Greenpeace, and the SPCA.
“What are you reading?” Piper asks me as she packs away her gown.
“The biographies of Saints David and Marcie,” I answer. Then I return to the article and the photographs of the Hansons. The editors have chosen two plain head shots. The pictures taken last night of David and Marcie in their formal wear and jewels have been deep-sixed.
I sit back and wonder what they’re planning next. And worry.
24
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24
It’s the Wednesday after the gala, just before five o’clock. I’m sitting in my office in front of my computer. Jury selection in the Hanson trial begins in three weeks, and I’m working around the clock getting the case ready. I’ve begun writing cross-examinations of the prosecution’s likely witnesses and direct examinations of my own witnesses. I’m satisfied that I can poke some serious holes in the prosecution’s case. Not enough to guarantee reasonable doubt, but that won’t matter if everything goes as I’m hoping and the jury never gets the chance to reach a verdict.
A loud knock at the door, and Vaughn rushes in.
“You’re not going to believe this.” He hands me what appears to be a legal brief, then drops into a visitor’s chair.
“What is it?”
“Devlin’s filed a motion seeking to disqualify you as David’s lawyer.”
“You’re fucking kidding me. On what grounds?”
“The phone calls from Jennifer Yamura’s cell phone to our office. Walker is claiming that they were from David, that they prove he was at Yamura’s house, using her cell, within the time period of her death.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “Those calls were from Jennifer herself. And even if they had been from David, they’d be privileged as attorney-client communications.”
Vaughn shakes his head. “Not if they were part of an effort to conceal a crime.”
“You’re not telling me—”
Vaughn answers before I can complete my question. “Walker’s posturing to set you up as an accessory after the fact.”
“I don’t believe this,” I say, bolting from my chair. “Wait a minute.” I move over to my phone and hit “0” for Angie. “The day Jennifer Yamura was killed,” I tell my secretary, “do you remember her calling here and asking for me? And you put her through?” Angie says of course she does. “There!” I say to Vaughn. “Devlin’s motion is bullshit, and we can prove it.”
But Vaughn, who has read Devlin’s motion, leans into the speaker and asks, “Both times?”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “Both times what?” Angie asks. “She called here once. I put her through to you, Mick, and you took the call. Tommy was in y
our office with you; he knows, too.”
“Shit,” I say. “Angie was at lunch the second time she called. I picked up the line myself. And Tommy had left by then.”
Vaughn frowns.
“When is the hearing set for?”
“Two days.”
I exhale. “I can’t believe Devlin is pulling this kind of crap. He knows Judge Henry isn’t going to buy into this. He’s up to something.”
I work with Vaughn for several hours on our answer to the prosecution’s motion to disqualify me. Once Vaughn’s gone, I start in on a mound of other work and don’t lift my head until the City Hall clock outside my window strikes midnight. On the way home, I stop at a Wawa. Piper had called me around ten, saying we had no skim milk for her coffee in the morning. An Inquirer deliveryman drops off the next day’s papers as I enter the store, and I take a look at the front page to find that David and Marcie continue to move full steam ahead on the PR campaign. The new article is just below the fold on the right-hand side. It’s a one-column article that carries over to the business section, where it takes up half the page. Its headline reads, “Hanson’s Quest for Philly Jobs,” and it tells how David’s singular focus at HWI has been to leverage the company’s burgeoning relationships in Asia to build Philadelphia’s own manufacturing base.
“There’s been too much foreign outsourcing of jobs,” David is quoted as saying. “My mission at HWI was, and will be again, to reverse that tide and bring jobs back home.”
The article’s author explains a convoluted business deal David had been working on before he began his “temporary leave of absence” to “address his present personal difficulties.” The deal involved Kimozuma Unryu, a Japanese shipping company, along with Yokahama Tokai, a Japanese manufacturer of sophisticated navigation equipment, and the Chinese steel giant Angong Steel. The way David had negotiated it, HWI would purchase navigation equipment from Yokahama Tokai and steel from Angong Steel and use both in the building of a fleet of container ships that HWI would assemble in Philadelphia, in partnership with the Aker Philadelphia Shipyard. Yokahama would buy the ships. It was to have been a two-decade, multi-billion-dollar deal that, in David’s words, “would have added three thousand jobs in Philadelphia, forever.” Continuing, the article outlines two other similarly complicated deals that would have added thousands more jobs to the local community.
“The linchpin of all of these deals,” the article concludes, “was David Hanson himself. Although technically employed in HWI’s legal department as general counsel, Mr. Hanson was the executive within the company who had forged the personal relationships on which all the Asian deals were built. According to sources at HWI, until Mr. Hanson returns, these deals will remain on hold. ‘Which is why,’ Mr. Hanson says, ‘I have pushed so hard for a quick trial date on my own matter, to ensure these deals are consummated and the jobs are brought to Philadelphia.’”
I drop the paper back onto the pile. How many more stories have David and Marcie Hanson planted to appear between now and the time of David’s trial? Will their plotting be limited to stories in the news, or will it involve more grandiose gestures as we get closer to the courthouse steps?
Of course, the Hansons’ plans are not the only thing I have to contend with. Now Devlin Walker is trying to get me booted from the case. And nothing could be worse for anyone on our side than that.
25
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26
At 1:00 p.m. sharp, Angie buzzes me in my office to tell me that David and Marcie Hanson are here to discuss Devlin’s attempt to cut me out of the case. I ask Angie to bring them back. The first thing David says to me when Angie leads them into my office is, “Did you see the article?” I wait for him and Marcie to sit before I respond.
“Yes,” I answer coolly. “And it was a bad idea. If it ever comes out that you were the one behind the story, that you planted it to prejudice the jury pool, the press itself will hang you.”
“Nothing’s going to come out,” Marcie says. “There’s no way to trace the story to David, or to me.”
“There’s always a way,” I say. “But we really don’t have time to be arguing this. Right now we have to get ready for this hearing.”
“Hey, just put me on the stand,” David says, “and I’ll deny I was the one who called you. With your testimony that should be enough, shouldn’t it?”
“But I can’t put you on the stand, David, because that would subject you to cross-examination. And the first thing Devlin Walker will ask is where you were at the time of the murders. You’d have to disclose your alibi, tell the court where you really were.”
David leans into my desk. “I don’t need an alibi to create reasonable doubt. I’ve reviewed the so-called evidence over and over in my mind. They don’t have enough to convict. There’s no evidence of motive. None whatsoever. Because I had no motive to kill Jennifer,” he adds quickly. “And with that video safely tucked away, they have no evidence that I was at the house anywhere near the time she was killed.”
“And your attempt to clean up the murder scene?” I ask. “And running away when the cops showed up?”
“I did all that out of panic,” he says. “I was worried that my affair with Jennifer would be revealed and that the scandal would derail HWI’s deals with Japan and China.”
“The deals that would have created so many jobs here,” Marcie adds, smiling. “At least, that’s what I read in the paper.”
I sigh. There’s no getting through to these two. All the initial terror David had displayed when he was first arraigned has vanished. He is now fully—and foolishly—confident that he will be acquitted at trial.
By two o’clock, we’re all in Courtroom 1007 on the tenth floor of the Criminal Justice Center. David sits next to me at the counsel table, Marcie right behind us. At the prosecution table, Devlin is accompanied by ADA Christina Wesley, a short, thick woman whose face remains locked in a perpetual frown. The courtroom is nothing like the vast, grand courtrooms in the movies. It is a small space: spectators’ benches, counsel tables, jury box, court reporter’s box, deputies’ and law clerks’ desks crammed into a sixty-by-forty-foot room. It’s the courthouse equivalent of an office cubicle. A close, cramped space when populated only by parties and lawyers, it’s positively claustrophobic when packed with spectators. Like today.
The Honorable William Henry sits on the bench, his robe hanging loosely over his shoulders. He’s not happy about the prosecution’s motion, and he’s clearly livid about the circus of reporters in his courtroom.
“Mr. Walker,” Henry starts in on Devlin, “are you really serious about this? You really think defense counsel helped Mr. Hanson cover up the crime?”
“If there’s another explanation,” Walker responds, “the people are ready to hear it.”
This is my cue to shoot to my feet.
“The state has already heard it,” I exclaim. “Back at the end of August, Detectives Tredesco and Cook came to my office asking about the calls. I told them then, and I’m telling the court now, that those calls were placed to me by Jennifer Yamura herself. And I have in the courtroom with me Mrs. Angela Toscano, my secretary, who took the first call, and who can testify that it was Jennifer Yamura and not Mr. Hanson on the other end.” At the mention of her name, Angie stands. “I also have present in the courtroom my brother and the firm’s investigator, Mr. Thomas McFarland, who was present when I took the first call and to whom I described the call once it was over.” Tommy is standing now, too. My heart has been breaking for him since his grave-site confession. As soon as the Hanson case is over, I’m going to sit down with him and throw open the floodgates of my guilt and shame at having abandoned him.
Judge Henry looks from Tommy to Angie to Devlin Walker. “If these two witnesses take the stand and testify, as defense counsel has represented they will, will that be enough for you?”
Devlin hesitates, so the judge waves him off and tells me to call my witnesses and be done with this. So I call Angie to the stand
and then Tommy. Devlin’s questioning of each is cursory. With Angie, he simply makes a point of confirming what I’ve already told the judge, that Angie took only the first call. When Tommy takes the stand, he tells the court he was in my office for the first call, and that afterward, I told him it had been Jennifer Yamura on the line. There had been no mention of David Hanson, and I didn’t seem the least bit upset after I’d hung up. Devlin limits his cross-examination to two questions, the first one establishing that Tommy is indeed my own brother, the second one establishing that Tommy is a convicted felon. Judge Henry rolls his eyes at the first question and looks visibly annoyed with Devlin over the second.
“So, Mr. Walker,” the judge says, “you’ve established that, one, Thomas McFarland is biased, and two, he should be ashamed of himself. How much farther do we have to go with this?”
Before Devlin can answer, I hear a commotion behind me. I turn to see that the reporters are all facing the back doors. Detective John Tredesco, Edwin Hanson, and Kevin Kratz, along with two men and two women I’ve never seen before, have entered the courtroom. With them is Caroline Robb, an assistant district attorney with the DA’s financial-crimes unit.
David Hanson leans into me and asks, “What the hell is this?”
I tell him I have no idea, although I now understand what this hearing was really all about. Inwardly, I smile.
Very clever, Devlin.
This is actually what I was hoping for.
“Your Honor,” Devlin Walker addresses the judge, “I apologize and ask the court’s indulgence for one minute. This could be very important.”
Bill Henry is now officially pissed off. “One minute, counselor. And it better be important.”
Devlin and Christina Wesley confer with Caroline Robb, who hands Devlin some papers. Every now and then, Devlin or Christina looks to the back of the courtroom at Edwin, the two men, or the two women. This is an act—the whole thing. Devlin Walker knows exactly who everyone is and what they’re there for.
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