Silent Witness

by Richard North Patterson

  Idly, Tony traced the rim of his glass with the tip of a finger. “I’m not sure,” he said at last. “Sometimes Sam seems sensitive, even brave—he did go to the cops, after all. At other times he seems callous and self-interested to the point of narcissism: the Marcie Calder he describes to me, the compliant sexual adventurer, doesn’t jibe with what I’m getting from other people. I don’t know whether it’s a lie; an excuse; Sam’s distorted vision of reality; or my own unwillingness to believe him even though I want to. But anytime I find myself appalled by his affair with Marcie, part of me can almost get how it happened, and the shame he feels now. Then I’ll remember myself in the confessional, praying for expiation, and I don’t know whether my compassion—if that’s what it is—is for Sam or for myself. And now that he seems cornered, with the facts getting worse, it’s my instinct to defend him.”

  “Even if Sam killed her.”

  “No. Not then. But I don’t know that.”

  “But you think he might have.”

  Tony folded his hands. “He’d been drinking that night, Sue tells me. A kind of impulsiveness goes with that, a lack of self-control.”

  “To the point of murder?”

  Sitting back, Tony tried to imagine his friend with a rock in his hand, bludgeoning the pretty girl in her parents’ photograph until she crumpled to the grass. Finally, he shook his head. “My memory is from when we were kids, Saul. I can’t know what might have happened to him since.”

  Saul considered him. “Drunkenness is a defense.”

  “Only if Sam admits to killing her. He hasn’t, and I don’t think he will.”

  Saul looked around them. A couple of crew from an ore boat were drinking beer and playing video games; otherwise, the place was quiet. Finally, he asked, “Any guess what Stella’s waiting on?”

  “I’m not sure. The coroner has already opined that the skull fractures were no accident. So maybe it’s something else from the lab, like some high-tech effort to lift Sam’s prints off the rock. That would be no help.”

  Saul shrugged. “You can always find an expert of your own. There are a million ways to attack theirs.”

  Tony drained his Scotch and ordered another. “What I could use,” he said at last, “is another Donald White.”

  Saul gave him a skeptical smile. “They don’t grow them on trees, thank God.” Abruptly, he stopped, looking into Tony’s face.

  Tony met his gaze. “Ernie’s possible, Saul. How many men invest hours in the company of a single teenage girl, unless there’s at least some element of desire. If Sam crossed the line, he could have too. I mean, count the college professors you must have known who went off the deep end.”

  Saul’s smile became a look of bleak amusement. “They fucked them, Tony. They didn’t kill them. For all you know, he was out with friends that night.”

  “For all I know, he was the one Sam saw in the other car.”

  Saul’s smile vanished. “You know what you’re doing here, don’t you?”

  Tony felt stung; in the case of Ernie Nixon, he found, the defense lawyer’s carapace did not numb his feelings. “Of course I know. That’s also an odd remark, coming from you.”

  Slowly, Saul placed the drink down. “I’m beyond cynical, Tony. I don’t need it anymore.”

  “So you drink instead?”

  Saul’s eyes grew hard. “There are a thousand reasons why I drink. You’ll never know me well enough to know them all.”

  Tony drew a breath. “Sorry,” he said at last.

  Saul regarded him for a time. “Don’t mention it. I know how guilty you can feel, and you’ve only just begun.…”

  “Dammit, you know as well as I do what my obligations are, and my feelings can’t get in the way. As long as I’m Sam Robb’s lawyer, my only loyalty is to him. It’s incompetence of counsel not to check out a defense.”

  Saul smiled with the side of his mouth. “A black man in Lake fucking City, the only black in town. Beautiful, Tony. Truly.”

  Tony’s head had begun throbbing. “I know,” he said softly. “Just find me a detective, all right?”

  Saul looked at him hard, shaking his head, and then he glanced toward the pay phone. “Got a quarter?” he asked. “Maybe we can ruin Ernie before I get too drunk to care.”

  TWELVE

  In profile, Sam’s face was set. “Jack Burton called me late last night. My principal.”

  They were driving to the gym. It was roughly six-thirty in the morning; the sky was cloud-streaked, and dim yellow light seeped through the gray. To their right, its shapes emerging from the darkness, Taylor Park went unremarked.

  “I remember him,” Tony answered. “He refused to give me a recommendation for Harvard. I always thought John Taylor had gotten to him.”

  “Well, he probably has again.”

  “How so?”

  “They’re petitioning the school board—Marcie’s parents and the Taylors. To have me fired outright.”

  Tony turned to him in surprise. “The Taylors? I thought they pretty much kept to themselves now.”

  “Not entirely.” Sam’s voice was muted. “I guess I’m a cause worth coming out for.”

  “Did Burton say what his position will be?”

  Sam was quiet for a moment. “He won’t support me, Tony. ‘Sometimes appearances are the reality,’ he said.”

  Gazing out the windshield, Tony recalled the last spring morning he had seen Lake City this early; driving Sue to her parents’ house, her hand resting lightly on his leg, to find Sam Robb waiting on her front steps. “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  “We need the money.” Sam did not wish to look at him, Tony realized, and his voice bled self-disgust. “My folks left me the house, but not much else, and we’ve borrowed against it to pay for the kids’ college—both of them went to Denison, and it’s not cheap. There’s not a lot left for Sue and me if I don’t have a paycheck.”

  Tony tried to imagine how Sam felt this morning, facing the chain of consequences his own actions had caused. “Sooner or later, Sam, you’ll have to deal with the job problem.”

  Sam drew a breath. “Can we at least buy time? I don’t want to put Sue through this now. I know how that sounds, but…”

  He did not have to finish; Tony could hear his shame and desperation. Gazing out at the passing houses, Tony saw that many of the old lakefront houses—rambling wooden structures or vacation cottages once built by the wealth of Steelton—had been torn down; in their place were larger structures, quasi-Tudors or mock-Colonials, someone’s derivative notion of the good life. For some reason it made Tony think of how long it had been since that game against Riverwood.

  “It’s not my area of the law, Sam. But I don’t think they can fire you without a hearing.”

  Sam bit his lips. “I can’t testify at a hearing. Not about Marcie.”

  “I can try to stall it. In time, maybe we could work out some sort of deal—a voluntary resignation, severance pay, keeping your benefits.” Pausing, Tony added quietly, “As you once pointed out to me, Marcie’s dead. As long as you’re not talking, they don’t have an admission of a sexual relationship.”

  Sam stared straight ahead. “People tell you the worst,” he said at last, “and then you try to help them. Does it make you feel like God, or a creep?”

  The question went to some truths of a lawyer’s life: the client’s helplessness; the lawyer’s sense of power; the uneasy mix of sympathy and contempt Tony so often felt; the way that the duties of advocate must take precedence over the private conscience of the human being. “Sometimes I feel like God,” Tony answered, “and sometimes like a sleazebag. At most times I feel like neither one. And when I find myself questioning what I do, I remind myself what happened to me. Not to mention a lot of other people who, one way or the other, don’t deserve what happens to them.”

  “And now? Defending me?”

  Tony turned to him. “You don’t get the benefit of my professional detachment, I’m afraid. But for what
it’s worth to you, I don’t believe that your involvement with a sixteen-year-old girl, however wrong, makes you irredeemable. That would be a very inconvenient belief for a lawyer, especially one who has regrets of his own.” Tony tried to lighten this. “To start, I’m twenty-eight years overdue on my last act of contrition. I think it’s like a library fine—after a while, you don’t even want to know what the tab is.”

  Sam watched his face. “What do you regret, Tony?”

  “Beyond wanting Alison to come out that night?” Pausing, Tony wondered whether to treat Sam as the friend he once had been, and then decided that it would be a kindness. “I cheated on my first wife, for one. There were the usual extenuating circumstances—our marriage was rocky, I was in the middle of the Carson case, and it seemed this woman was always there. But I made a choice, and it cost me the marriage and, for a good while, Christopher. It’s been twelve years now, and I still cringe whenever I think about it. But an attack of conscience after the fact never undoes the harm you’ve already done. At most it’s a warning against the next time.”

  “That sounds like you.” Sam’s voice was strangely gentle. “Especially the conscience part.”

  For a moment, Tony wondered if his friend’s thoughts included Sue. Then they arrived at the gym, a modern building with a corrugated roof, resembling an airplane hangar, which sat where an old farmhouse once had been. Sam made no move to get out.

  “This school board meeting, Tony. Do you think you can handle it?”

  “I can try. But Jack Burton could be critical.” Tony paused a moment. “Do you have any other problems that Burton could hang his hat on? Anything that could be construed as sexual harassment, mistreatment, or intimidation of a student?”

  Sam’s eyes went cold. “There’s nothing. I don’t even have to think about that one.”

  Tony examined his face. “Then tell me about the school board,” he said finally.

  A certain bleak amusement flashed in Sam’s eyes. “For openers, your old friend Doug Barker is president of the board now. Remember the night you told him he was the biggest asshole in the room?”

  It was the night that he and Sam had fought. “That was just before,” Tony answered, “you asked me if I’d murdered Alison.”

  Sam’s eyes glinted. “I just didn’t know how it would feel, Tony. Now I do. But Doug Barker’s still an asshole.”

  Tony smiled a little. “Why do you think I moved away?”

  Quiet, they walked to the gym together.

  * * *

  At two o’clock, Tony appeared unannounced at Lake City High School. For a few minutes, he wandered the halls, once more feeling like a ghost. He passed his old locker, then paused at Alison’s. Time had not been kind to the school, and twenty-eight years—two rows of names beneath Sam Robb’s on the banner in the gym—had intensified the institutional grimness of the place. But it did not account for Tony’s sense of being trapped in the past; all at once, he wanted to do his business as quickly as he could.

  From her desk in front of the principal’s office, Jane Moore looked up in surprise.

  “Tony Lord,” she managed.

  “Hello, Jane.” Tony walked past her and opened up Jack Burton’s door.

  Burton started. Tony watched the first signs of recognition, a widening of the eyes, then a stillness. Burton’s hair was thin and white now, and his face more gaunt, but the liquid brown eyes contained the same untrustworthy caution that Tony had learned to read there.

  “What can I do for you, Tony?”

  “I was kind of hoping you’d filled out that recommendation form.”

  Burton blinked. “Those were difficult circumstances. I’ve always regretted them.”

  “Then you should start trying to do better.” Pausing, Tony looked around him. “You know, Jack, the last time I was in this office, George Marks tried to get me to leave school.”

  Burton sat back. “You’re here for Sam Robb, of course.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Burton folded his hands. “Sam,” he said, “admits to being with a female student, at night, under circumstances which led to her death—”

  “And ‘sometimes appearances are the reality,’ right?”

  Burton’s back stiffened. “Precisely. Certainly for a responsible adult—a teacher and administrator—who knows that his behavior is improper.”

  As a parent, Tony knew, he would not quarrel with this man. Evenly, he said, “But is being alone with a student automatic grounds for suspension? I wouldn’t think so.”

  “You know perfectly well he shouldn’t have been there—”

  “And you don’t know a thing about what really happened. Just like you didn’t know with me.”

  There was something cornered in Jack Burton’s eyes. “What do you want, Tony?”

  “To talk about what you do know. Sam’s been assistant principal for nine years now, right?”

  “Roughly.”

  “Ever had any student complain about his conduct?”

  Burton frowned. “Not until now. But this is something an assistant principal doesn’t have to do twice.”

  “You don’t know Sam did it once. Tell me, did you evaluate him over that time?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what kind of reports did you give him?”

  Burton’s pale skin betrayed a first, faint reddening. “Sam Robb has been a decent assistant principal. Sometimes he scares students, sometimes he charms them—generally, he keeps them in line. But he can drink too much, and he has a temper.”

  “Ever mention that in your reports?”

  Burton hesitated. “No.”

  “How did Sam come to be your assistant? Surely not over your objections.”

  “No, but I didn’t recommend him, either. He has friends on the school board.”

  For the first time, Tony smiled. “And how did you come to be the assistant principal, before Sam?”

  Turning, Burton stared out the window. “There was a search committee. Several candidates were considered, including four outside the school district. The board committee recommended me to the board, and I was hired.”

  Tony let that hang there for a moment. “Which Taylor was on the search committee?” he asked. “John or Katherine?”

  Burton turned to face him. “Katherine was, as I recall. But that was twenty years ago, and it’s hard to remember—”

  “It was only eight years after you shafted me—I’m sure the Taylors remembered that quite well.” Tony’s voice turned cold. “Please, don’t even try to tell me you didn’t discuss that with them. Or that you haven’t discussed Sam Robb with the Taylors now.”

  With a certain detachment, Tony watched Burton absorb the fear that Tony had intended to implant: that he had given Burton’s vulnerabilities great thought and disliked him enough to act on them with pleasure. “If it’s filed,” Tony went on, “Sam has a lawsuit against you for conspiring with the Taylors, and the school board, to violate various of his rights without due process. I’ve read the insurance policy that covers you as principal, and it excludes deliberately unlawful acts. That should entitle Sam Robb to go after your house, savings, pension—the exact assets Sam and Sue would be forced to exhaust once he’s terminated. Which has a certain symmetry, I thought.”

  Burton opened his palms; the gesture seemed puzzled, precatory. “What would you have me do?”

  “I want you to say in public exactly what you’ve told me here: that Sam Robb’s evaluations have been excellent, that in all his years as teacher or administrator there have been no complaints of misconduct, and that nothing in your association suggests that—in fact, as opposed to appearance—his relationship with Marcie Calder was improper.” Tony paused. “And that you believe Sam Robb should stay on paid administrative leave until the legal process determines whether he has committed any crime.”

  “And if I sincerely feel that’s not the right thing to do?”

  “Then I’ll be obliged to advance my client’s interests, by
whatever legitimate means occur to me. Just like you once tried to ruin me to advance yours.” Tony’s voice became soft, ironic. “Whatever your motives, Jack, it’s not too late to learn the true value of loyalty.”

  Burton looked down. “There are others, you know, who feel even more strongly than I do.”

  Tony smiled again. “It’s your salvation we’re concerned with now. So when you call the school’s lawyers for advice, ask whether they’ll issue you a guarantee.”

  “I’ll call them, of course.”

  “Good.” Abruptly, Tony stood. “Because if you help take down Sam Robb, you’re going with him. Which would provide me with at least some sense that justice has been served.”

  But it would not, Tony thought as he left. Except for sparing Sue, there could be little satisfaction in frightening this sanctimonious and self-serving man to protect Sam Robb. Especially when Tony knew that—whatever his motives and however arbitrary his actions—this time Jack Burton was acting on the truth.

  THIRTEEN

  Despite their rasp, John Taylor’s first words echoed through the meeting room. “Nearly thirty years ago, in this same room, I spoke to the murder of our daughter Alison. Now, to my sorrow, I speak to the death of another.”

  The school board sat above him on the stage, three men and two women, facing a cramped room crowded to capacity by townspeople, reporters, cameras. Outside, a large crowd kept vigil, carrying placards, with photographs of Marcie Calder, which implored the board to “Remember Our Children.” For Tony, the night was as surreal as it must be for John Taylor.

  But the town had changed, and so had the political calculus. Three members were up for reelection in November, Sam had informed him—the bare majority that protected a superintendent whose message was that the Lake City schools, like the town, required no improvement. The two remaining members had moved to Lake City in the last ten years, as it became more of a bedroom community for Steelton, and represented a growing belief that its schools were smug and ossified. For Tony, the leaders of the warring factions personified the divide: Doug Barker, jowly now, wore tortoiseshell glasses, a Kiwanis pin, and the weighty gravitas of a provincial worthy; the leader of the insurgents, Kay Marston, had artificially bright blond hair, dangling gold earrings, and a sharp expression that suggested that her cross to bear in the service of progress was listening to the unctuous drivel that issued from the mouth, if not the mind, of Doug Barker. Tonight all that both factions shared, Tony suspected, was the fear that not terminating Sam Robb would jeopardize their agenda. Tony’s job was to make them fear him more.