The Ex

by Alafair Burke

  CHARLOTTE DOUBLE-TAPPED THE horn of her Porsche, but I remained planted in Sharon Lawson’s driveway, trying to convince Jan Myers to sit on the story.

  I was having such a hard time controlling the tone of my voice that I couldn’t even process the information Jan had given me. According to this Francis Thomas person, he found the basket “by the water” on the same day Malcolm Neeley was shot, though he wasn’t sure where. If he even noticed the gun inside, he wasn’t able to explain that to the police.

  “I can promise you a good exclusive down the road, Jan.”

  “Down the road?”

  “You know I’m good for it.” Even as I was trying to negotiate this one reporter’s silence, I was thinking through the possibilities. If Jack was framed, whoever did it knew he was bringing a picnic basket. Jack claimed to have left it just outside the football field. The shooter could have dropped it inside. The theory still worked.

  Nevertheless, the basket’s discovery was a game changer. Until now, arguing that Jack was framed was just one of many potential options for our defense. There were far safer bets. I had a good chance of getting the GSR evidence suppressed as the fruits of an illegal arrest. Without the GSR, the prosecution was toast. But even if I got the GSR evidence suppressed, the discovery of the murder weapon in a picnic basket that I had a feeling would look just like the one Jack was carrying before the shooting meant that our only option was to argue that he was framed.

  “Sorry, no can do,” Jan said. “Besides, the word’s out. I’m not the only one who’s got the story.”

  “Supposedly we have a gag order.” As I paced behind Sharon Lawson’s Lexus SUV, I noticed the curtains part on the aspiring actress’s front window. Something about her was bothering me, but I had to deal with Jan first. “Who’s your source? Just a hint: the police or the DA?”

  “I was only calling for a comment, Olivia.”

  “Is it Max Neeley?” I didn’t really think Scott Temple would intentionally leak information, but as a victim’s family member, Max could very well be getting inside information from the police. “Did it ever dawn on any of these reporters he’s courting to ask him why he pushed his father’s will into probate only two days after he died?”

  There was a long pause at the other end of the line. “You’re always interesting to talk to, Ms. Randall. Sounds like you’d have a lot to tell me if you weren’t so damn ethical.”

  I hit End and then snapped a picture of Sharon Lawson’s license plate. The frame around the plate was one of those freebies from the dealer, a place called New York Universal Auto World, which, according to the print on the bottom half of this rickety piece of plastic, catered to “good people, bad credit.”

  When I looked back at Sharon Lawson’s house, the curtains were closed. I had no idea if she was a good person or not, but I was certain she knew more than she was letting on.

  CHARLOTTE TURNED THE STEREO VOLUME from stadium blast down to regular-person loud when I got into the car. “You know she’s lying, right?”

  I reached over and hit the Power button. “I need to figure out how to prove it.”

  For the next ten minutes, I did my best to block out Charlotte’s chatter about all her plans—more money for Emin to wear a wire, blanketing the waterfront with minions armed with photographs in search of witnesses, bribing or blackmailing Sharon for the truth.

  She was right: we needed Sharon to come clean. Even if she didn’t know who hired her, we’d finally have a narrative: dream woman in the grass, missed-moment post, the “meet me at the football field” e-mail, the shooting. Beginning, middle, and end. It was a complicated, fascinating story—the kind that jurors love. How many times had I heard jurors say after an acquittal that the defendant’s version sounded too bizarre to make up? “Did you notice that?” Charlotte was saying.

  “Huh?” I had tuned her out.

  “I said she looked like you. Sharon-slash-Helen. She looked like a younger, thinner, hotter you.”

  “Love you, too, Charlotte.”

  “No, I’m serious. Kind of interesting that Jack’s dream woman looks like you, not Molly.”

  “And the other day, you said Tracy Frankel looked like a younger, more strung-out me. I’m pretty sure you think every straight girl with black hair looks like some version of me.”

  But as I listened to her continue to rail about her certainty that Sharon Lawson was lying, I leaned back in my seat, closed my eyes, and pictured myself barefoot, drinking champagne on the waterfront at the crack of dawn, flirting with some nice-looking, harmless jogger. His dream woman did seem more like me than Molly.

  By the time I returned to Jack’s apartment, I was exhausted. As soon as Jack saw my face, he said, “I’m afraid to ask.”

  As I delivered the news about Sharon Lawson, Jack fell into the sofa and stared up at the ceiling. I launched into my usual spiel—all the time left before trial, we were only just beginning to investigate, etcetera—but Jack cut me off.

  “I gave a writing class at a prison a few years ago. One of the inmates wrote an essay about why, after fifteen years of maintaining his innocence, he planned on telling the parole board how remorseful he was about his crimes. Turns out you don’t get parole if you don’t accept responsibility, so if he needed to be contrite for something he never did, that’s what he was going to do. He said to me, In is in, and out is out. I just want to be out. I want this to be over, Olivia. I can’t go to prison. I was only in jail for a few days, and I thought I was losing my mind again. I won’t be able to make it. Promise me you’ll do whatever you can to help me.”

  “Of course,” I said quietly. This conversation wasn’t making it easy to break the other piece of news. I told him about the call from Jan Myers with Eyewitness News. When I mentioned the gun inside the picnic basket, his eyes flickered with confusion.

  “They’re waiting for ballistics,” I said.

  “That’s insane. How is that possible?”

  I walked him through the explanation I’d been selling to myself since the reporter’s phone call. Madeline’s e-mails had instructed Jack to bring the picnic basket to their meet-up. For all we knew, the shooter had been expecting Jack to stick around longer than he had. Maybe the plan was to shoot Neeley and then shoot Jack, too, making it look like a murder-suicide. But when the downpour started, Jack had left. The shooter may have figured it was now or never. When he left, he saw Jack’s picnic basket and slipped the gun inside.

  As I laid out my theory for Jack, I realized what had been bothering me about Sharon Lawson. Charlotte had told Sharon that we knew about the gig at the waterfront with the champagne and the basket. But when Sharon denied being the woman in the video, she said she knew nothing about a “stupid picnic basket.”

  Were there other kinds of baskets? Maybe not, but it seemed like a strange detail for her to add. Or maybe I was grasping at straws.

  As I left Jack’s building, I pulled out my cell phone and looked at the most recent photograph: a snapshot of Sharon Lawson’s license plate, complete with the name of her car dealer. I called information and asked for the phone number for New York Universal Auto World.

  And then I got really, really lucky.

  AT EXACTLY NINE O’CLOCK THE next night, my cell phone rang. It was the doorman; Helen was coming up. I had no idea what Sharon Lawson’s skills were as a hooker, but so far she earned five stars for promptness.

  I rose from the sofa and straightened Don’s tie on instinct.

  Einer swatted my hands away. “Jesus, Olivia, he’s a grown-ass man talking to a prostitute, not some kid going to the prom.”

  Don pulled the tie off and threw it on the coffee table. “I’m not even a real john, and you two still have me feeling like a letchy old man. Are you sure we couldn’t have figured out some other way?”

  I was sure. Charlotte and I had spooked Sharon when we’d shown up at her house unannounced. She’d never answer her door for us a second time. I reassured Don that we weren’t doing anythin
g wrong: We were paying her more than her going rate for sex in exchange for a simple conversation. We had already agreed that we wouldn’t stop her from leaving, not physically at least. And all three of us were here to witness the interaction, just in case she was tempted to level any false allegations against us.

  Einer and I ducked into my kitchen. We couldn’t see Sharon-slash-Helen but could hear the conversation in the living room clearly. The initial introductions were as innocuous as a housecleaning visit: Hi, I’m Helen. I’m Don. How are you doing tonight? I’m fine, how are you? And then things got X-rated quickly.

  “I think you know how I’m doing,” she said. “I’m horny. Isn’t that why you asked me here?”

  I would have thought that a thousand dollar a night whore would bring hotter dialogue than a late-night Skinemax flick, but poor Don was clearly mortified. “Um, actually—I think we should talk for a little while.”

  “Yeah? Is that what you like? Talk? What do you want me to talk about?”

  I heard steps and a thud, then couldn’t resist any longer. I had to peek. Don was scurrying across my sofa while Helen tried to straddle him.

  “You know what I like?” Don asked, standing up and folding his hands protectively in front of his nether regions. “I like cars.”

  “Yeah, baby?” Helen was twirling her long brown hair, kicking one leg back and forth flirtatiously. “What kinds of things do you like to do when you’re behind the wheel?”

  “I don’t like driving cars as much as knowing about them. Or the business of them.” Don was no longer acting like an embarrassed gentleman. “Like the kind of business that would sell cars to good people with bad credit. The kind of place that would call itself New York Universal Auto World. The type of business, Sharon, that would lease a luxury SUV to a single mother of two with no steady documented source of income only on the condition that she have a GPS installed in case the car needed to be repo’d.”

  She started backing up toward the door. “How do you know my name? What do you know about my kids?” Her face fell when I stepped from the kitchen. “How many times do I have to say it? I don’t know anything.”

  “You told me you were at the Essex House for that all-night date I asked about. But your car dealer’s GPS tracker says otherwise. You were at the Quik Park on Bleecker and Washington.” It was the closest discount lot to Christopher Street Pier. “You arrived just before six thirty in the morning and left a little after seven, not long after a man named Jack Harris completed his usual loop around the pier.”

  “I don’t want anything to do with this.”

  “It’s too late for that, Sharon. You can either talk to us now, or I can issue a subpoena to the escort service.” No, I couldn’t subpoena the escort service, but hookers and actresses don’t know that. “If you cooperate with us, I can at least try to keep the fact of your side gigs as quiet as possible. How someone found you for the job doesn’t matter. What we need to know is how you wound up at the pier that morning. Who hired you?”

  “I have no idea. It was all by e-mail. The guy said it was a prank he wanted to play on a coworker. I didn’t ask any questions. He told me to wear something fancy. The basket was there waiting for me. I was supposed to read a book. When the guy ran past me, I was supposed to look interested—a little flirty.” She slumped down into my sofa and ran her fingers through her hair. “And that’s all I know, I promise.”

  Einer stepped from the kitchen, but I shot him a look that sent him ducking back out of sight. I didn’t want to scare Sharon off again. “You said the guy hired you. What do you know about him?”

  “Nothing. I mean, I guess I don’t even know it was a guy. It was all by e-mail. They left cash in the basket for me—enough to cover the whole night—under a bench a little south of the pier.” I already knew that cameras didn’t cover that spot, and we hadn’t seen anyone carrying a picnic basket in any of the footage. “I wasn’t happy about the arrangement but I figured I could check easily enough when I arrived and leave if it didn’t pan out. I got paid two grand for an hour’s work.”

  “And you really thought that was someone’s version of a practical joke?”

  “Do you know the kind of dough weird people have in this city? I have a friend who got paid ten thousand dollars to clean some dude’s condo in her underwear. It’s like Monopoly money for perverts.”

  “What about after the shooting?”

  “Why do you think I was so freaked out when you came to my house? Right after I heard about the shooting, I was thinking, wow, I was just there a couple of weeks ago—you know? But then when I read about the shooter carrying a picnic basket, I e-mailed the person who hired me, like: what the fuck’s going on? All I got back was an error message saying the account was closed. I don’t know anything else, and I’m terrified.”

  “What was the e-mail account?”

  She fumbled through her black patent leather clutch purse and pulled out an iPhone. The e-mail address she read aloud was the same one Madeline had used to tell Jack to meet at the waterfront the morning of the shooting.

  Chapter 17

  THE MARCH TOWARD a criminal trial is slow but never steady—fast and frenetic at the beginning, followed by a long period that would feel almost normal if not for the pending charges, followed by the ramp-up toward trial.

  Three weeks after we confirmed that someone had hired Sharon Lawson to pose as “Madeline,” the frantic stage was coming to a close. The July Fourth holiday had come and gone, and we had spent the weekend at the office, hoping to come up with some theory that might persuade or cajole or embarrass the district attorney into dismissing the case against Jack before we all hunkered down for what would be a long, slow fight.

  The larger of the two conference rooms in the Ellison & Randall law firm was devoted completely to Jack’s defense. The entire table, the sideboard, and half of the chairs were blanketed by boxes, files, and documents. Two mobile whiteboards were covered with multiple colors of ink.

  I could not hear myself over all of the competing voices.

  “We have to pare this down. We need a clear narrative.” That was Don. Don was all about narrative.

  “Seriously, Olivia. I’ve looked at this shit fifty times and have no idea what we’re missing.” Einer, sitting on the floor, surrounded by documents.

  Jack—conferencing in via speakerphone—was saying, “I don’t know if I’m comfortable dragging the other victims into this.”

  “Fuck Gothamist.” That was Charlotte, who was obsessed with online coverage of the case. “They’re accusing me of using the Room to spread pro-Jack propaganda. It’s not propaganda if it’s true.”

  Einer held up a high five for Charlotte, which she returned. “You tell ’em, Martina Navratilova.” A month of antagonistic banter, and somehow Charlotte was fonder of Einer than she’d ever been of me.

  “Quiet, I can’t think.” I was determined to send everyone home in the next hour. Charlotte, unaccustomed to being shushed, shot me a glare. I turned to her first. “Can you back off a little on the Room posts? The last thing Jack needs is a backlash from other media sites.”

  She didn’t look happy, but she didn’t argue, either.

  “Einer, I promise you, there is something in those boxes that’s worth finding.” I had been pushing Scott Temple to provide discovery earlier than was technically required. In response, he had shipped over seventeen large boxes of documents to our offices two days earlier. We had quickly figured out that six of them were duplicates of documents the police had seized from Jack’s home office, including all of his materials regarding the civil case against Malcolm Neeley. But the others went well beyond the obvious discovery I would typically expect. In addition to the usual witness statements, the medical examiner’s findings, and crime scene photographs, the prosecution had included hundreds of pages of records like phone logs, credit card and banking statements, and other documents with no clear connection to the case.

  Chances are, Temple was fuck
ing with me for nagging him for early discovery. But my gut told me there was another side to the story.

  If I had to guess, there was Brady material there—evidence that would help our case, which he was required to turn over—but he’d buried it among several boxes of paper to make me work for it. I told Einer to keep digging.

  “Olivia, I swear to you, I’ve looked at everything. My eyes can’t make something magically appear if it’s not there.”

  “Yes, actually, they can. Get some index cards and put the name of every document on a separate card. Rearrange them in different patterns—first by type of document. Then by the people the documents connect to—Jack, Neeley, the other victims. Look at everything in a new way. Now, on to narrative: Jack and Don, you seem to be arguing about the message I should be sending to the DA’s office.”

  “Our story is too complicated.” Don gestured toward the ink-covered whiteboards. “Keep it simple: tee up Sharon Lawson and the Madeline e-mails to show that the same person hired Sharon for the missed moment and then sent Jack to the waterfront that morning as a sacrificial lamb. That’s all you need to do. It’s intriguing. It plants the seed that there’s another side to the story, and shifts the burden back to the state to figure out who’s behind that e-mail address. Everything else—it might be Max, it might be another co-plaintiff, it might be related to Malcolm’s hedge fund, maybe the other victims had enemies—it’s all speculative, and way too complicated.”

  Through the speakerphone, Jack was saying, “Hello?” And “Can you hear me?” like a sheepish schoolboy at the back of the classroom, fighting to be heard over the gunner in the front row. “Plus I’m really not comfortable pointing the finger at these other people. I mean, they can’t all be guilty. Some of those co-plaintiffs have been totally on my side since all this happened. And then dragging the other two victims through the mud—”

  “No one’s dragging anyone through the mud,” I said.

  “Well, okay, but pointing out that one of them was homeless and one had a drug conviction—it’s just . . . so unseemly.”