by Jim Kohlberg
“No,” I said.
“You’re sure? I thought you did his tax work,” Guthrie said, a crease forming at his mouth where he seemed to taste something sour.
“I did. But no estate work. I could have done some tax planning. Once his will was settled.”
“So who did this?”
“Joe did it. Probably.”
“He’s not a lawyer.”
“He passed the bar.”
“But he didn’t practice?”
“No. Never even applied to law school. He passed the bar exam on his first try, but he never bothered to get admitted.”
“Why in the world did he start as an accountant?”
I smiled. I had asked him the very same thing. We had been down in that shithole of offices that Arthur Andersen had on Market, where the cubicles were tilting at asymmetric angles and the walls wobbled whenever Joe or I tacked a piece of paper on them. He had silently passed over the wall between us the congratulatory letter from the State Bar.
“So. You gonna be a big tax lawyer now?” I asked.
“Nah, you got to be able to do the numbers yourself,” he said.
“That’s what people hire us for.”
“You ever talk to rich people?” he asked.
“Sure, Joe. I walk up to them all the time. They love talking about how they made their money. How rich they are.”
“You noticed that, too?”
I snorted. “I wasn’t serious.”
“Oh.” His face split in a grin that had no sheepishness in it at all. “They do, you know. If you ask them, they’ll talk about it for hours. Tell you all their secrets.”
“That right?” I asked.
“Every one.”
“So what’s the secret?” I said.
“To what?” he asked.
“Getting rich, dummy.”
He lost his tiny smile, the one that held his face most of the time, that most people took for a smirk. He loved thinking, wondering where he was going to end up. He was pretty sure it was going to be somewhere good.
“I don’t think there is a secret. Some of these rich guys are dumb as posts. Some are lights-out smart. Some are lucky. Some are workaholics. I don’t think there’s a special sauce.”
“So if there’s no secret, how are you so sure it’ll happen to you?”
He spread his hands wide. He pointed his thumbs at himself, as his suit jacket parted revealing his shiny belt and suspenders, a street carnie hawking his wares to customers wishing for magic.
“If not me, then who?” he had said.
Everything seemed to break his way. His contacts at the corporations, the CFOs, loved him. The partners at Andersen wouldn’t dump him because they couldn’t believe they were holding on to a guy who should’ve been a managing director at Goldman Sachs or the youngest mergers and acquisitions partner at Wachtell, Lipton. The accounting partners were watching their business leaching away, their margins plummeting, their liabilities skyrocketing, their lawsuits multiplying, as their best people deserted accounting. Accountants have a major inferiority complex, with good reason.
Joe just thought his own path led through accounting, not law or banking like every other schmuck from Harvard Business School did. He was going to make it big, and he knew the ticket was his own company.
“So Joe did this will?” asked Guthrie, back in the room, quiet with the techs gone now and the dark splotch hovering in the middle of the room, a repulsive magnet. I turned back to the desk.
“It seems like Joe’s drafting. It’s really simple anyway. If you know what you want to do with it. The hard part is getting trustees you trust.”
“And you’re a trustee?”
“I was, but Joe and I haven’t been close for a few years. If it’s new, he probably did the trusts, but it’s really simple, like I told you.”
“Joe didn’t know estate law or taxes?”
“It wasn’t his specialty. He was more focused on financial accounting and reporting, SEC stuff.”
“And his mother was the beneficiary?”
“On the first one I did for him, but now it’s probably Christina. Just look for yourself,” I said.
“We did.”
I grabbed the will out of Guthrie’s hand. “The signature of the notary and witnesses are right here,” I said, turning to the last page. I saw the spiky hand, Christina Ethel Lawson.
“You see this new one and these papers?” Guthrie asked, the muscles on the side of his jaw working and popping, giving his head an even squarer look, if that was possible.
“Letters of Administration,” I said. “Papers you file with the court if someone dies.”
“I know what those are. Maybe I didn’t pass the bar without law school, but I am the DA. In this state that still means a law degree. I want to know why they’re here. And why this new will doesn’t mention Christina.”
“Okay,” I said.
I took another breath and said, “I don’t have a clue. Joe liked—he felt better with all the cards facing him. He didn’t like secrets exactly. He just didn’t like giving out personal information. He wouldn’t have told me all this stuff.”
Guthrie nodded and, taking the will, riffled back a few pages. “Take a look at this then.” He flipped to the second paragraph and stopped at a familiar name, mine. I was listed as sole trustee.
He handed back the document. I held it for a second. I flipped again to the last page. Ms. Christina Ethel Lawson, currently residing at 2305 Divisadero, had signed. There was a scrawled notary’s signature and a date, March 15, 2001. Two years ago. The new one was undated. Joe hadn’t said exactly when they separated; another hidden cost.
Guthrie said, “You know her? Christina Lawson?”
I nodded, still holding the will in my hand. “A bit.”
There was a slight breeze in the room. One of the techs had opened the double doors to air out the smell of chemicals and the copper smell of blood and the heat from the camera lights. The breeze rustled at the papers in my hand.
“She was living here,” he said.
I looked at Guthrie. “With Joe?” I stared. “They weren’t separated?”
“Wet toothbrush. Fancy pumps. Full makeup drawers. It would be hard to call that ‘separated.’ Did you think they were?”
I nodded, but I did not know how to speak. I was watching Christina’s letter flutter airily down to my desk, her throaty imagined voice in my ear. And Joe’s flowing charm. There was an icy flush creeping up from my navel. I nodded again.
“He implied they were separated,” I said.
Guthrie pursed his lips, the calmness coming over his face again. This time there was a light, a sharpness in them I didn’t like too much. I handed him back the document. He looked down at it, breaking his gaze.
“You’re going to have to go down to the city lockup if you want to talk to her.”
“What?”
“Jail,” he said. “Fifth Street and Bryant, off Market.”
“Why?”
“Her prints were all over the place.”
“She lived here!”
“I thought you only knew her ‘a bit’?”
“You said she lived here,” I said, my voice came out low and controlled, like a big cat before it growls.
“Her prints were all over the bat. She was covered with blood.”
“She probably just found the body, for God’s sake.”
“Good guess. We had to book her.”
“You had to throw her in jail?” I shook my head and looked down at the carpet. “Jesus Christ.” I turned and marched down the steps, then turned around at the first landing. “What the hell’d you do that for?” My heels thudded on every step going down and I could feel the fear build with each progression. Guthrie called back from the top of the stairs.
“You can get her bail, if she hasn’t got it already, and she’ll be out by dinnertime,” he said. “But you better find her a good lawyer.”
I started for the door.
“And maybe one for yourself,” he said, watching my eyes from above as I looked up. I held his gaze and wiped all fear from my face, because it was a bluff.
I knew she could use a lawyer. If he asked for my alibi, I would call a lawyer. He knew it too. A cop would root around for how long and how well I knew Christina, that was normal. Though I knew where to find lawyers, all kinds, his words hung in the air like smoke from a guilty cigarette. I turned away from him and went through Joe’s front door and down his steps to the street. The black-and-whites were all gone. My Audi wagon nosed close to the rear of Guthrie’s beaten-up Chevy, until I got in and reversed it away.
I remember thinking to myself, I have to work this out. No way could Christina do this. She was . . . she was not someone who could. Do what? I asked myself. What? But driving in the car up and down the hills didn’t clear my mind. My thoughts chorused up and down while the Audi dropped and rolled down California Street and Nob Hill back to my office on Sutter, where there was a phone I could work and an attorney I could call.
Chapter 6
I went down to the Fifth Street station, a redbrick building on the city’s dulled edge, torn between Moscone Center and the gentrified district around the ballpark. The cop at the desk pointed me mutely to a glass-walled room with benches around the side and a desk with a painfully gaunt woman in a cop uniform, gray streaks in her black hair. Behind was a steel door with a glass pane. She looked up at me with eyes so black I couldn’t distinguish between iris and pupil and gave me no room or quarter. She waited. I shoved her the slip of paper the cop at the front had given me, which I pushed through a grate in the glass wall.
Through the wire-stitched glass I could see barred holding rooms. Against one back wall I could see Christina curled on a bench, her legs drawn up under her and her blond hair matted and twisted into haphazard braids that made it dark. Her face pointed away from me to the wall, and I watched an errant hand come up and twirl the ends of her hair into more tangles. She kept twirling her hair around an index finger, staring at the wall.
The cop at the table rapped her knuckles on the metal and read out loud from the paper into a microphone. “Lawson,” she said.
Christina’s hand stopped, and for a moment she was still. Then her neck muscles roped under the skin, and her head picked up and twisted. She saw us then but put her head back down on her hand. She looked at the woman, then at me, then at the woman again.
“You’re out,” the woman said, pressing a button on the wall. A buzzer sounded and Christina’s door clunked open.
Christina rolled herself up and pushed at her legs. She walked up to the door and then came through it.
“Max,” she said, working her tongue over her lips. “You’re here.”
“Let’s get you out of here, Christina,” I said, my voice croaking as if I hadn’t used it in months.
“I can go?” she asked the cop.
“What I said,” she replied, then softened. “You can pick up your stuff at the window. Right turn at the end of the hall.”
Christina shuffled over to me, her jail slippers sliding across the concrete. I looked down at her.
“My shoes,” she said, grimacing. Even here, her beauty hit me again, hit me with a thunk square in the chest, right on the breastbone, an inch or so under my sternum. It spread like a red tide outward until I could feel it flush my skin, setting up a pleasant tingle and then a hollow in the pit of my stomach. I swallowed a couple of times to make it go away. But her green eyes were surrounded by gold with flecks of emerald in them, and they looked at me, and my faint blushing spread. I grabbed her arm for something to hold on to.
“C’mon, let’s get you out of here.”
“I just need my shoes,” she said. “And my belt. They took my belt.” She blinked several times. One side of her face was dimpled, from resting on her knee, I thought. There was a bulge to her left eye that betrayed exhaustion.
“Like the airlines,” I said. “They treat you okay?”
“They took my watch too. Even the airlines don’t do that.”
The cop looked up and said, “Only a few hours. Coulda been worse.”
I nodded while Christina shuffled out the door and we turned down the hall. At the cage I showed the slip of paper again, and they brought her shoes and belt and purse and watch in a plastic tray, the kind you put your wallet in at airport security. She signed the piece of paper they pushed at her and bent over to put on her cork-soled sandals, then shoved the paper slippers into a garbage can waiting at the side of the cage.
Another woman behind the cage took the paper and pulled out a pair of reading glasses that she perched on a petite but red-rimmed nose. Her eyes looked over the paper.
“Your court date is set. Twenty-first of next month. Until then you’re on your own recognizance. You understand that?” Christina nodded.
“That means you don’t show and they’ll get you and then won’t set bail.” She looked back at the paper. “Bond’s already a hundred grand; that your sugar here putting it up?” she said, grinning at me, the slack skin on her face jiggling.
I elbowed Christina aside and stuck my face into the cage. “At least she’s got one,” I said.
Then I took Christina’s arm and led her down the hall and out into the sunshine. Away from the narrow halls, from the glass cage, from the smell of sweat, disinfectant, and urine, and from the baked-in smell of fear. Outside, a hedge of star jasmine refreshed the street, and the white flowers dripped on the sidewalk.
There was noise in the street, too, more than cars and horns. Vague shouts from megaphones and bullhorns wafted through the alleys between buildings, and when we drove across Market we could see demonstrators congregating for an antiwar march. White banners of “Down with War,” “Down with Bush,” “No WMDs,” and a raft of other slogans were strung across the street. A couple of hundred people milled about, listening intermittently to a woman standing on a garbage can shouting instructions through a megaphone.
We drove in my car through the press of people, and through my open window I heard an organizer coaching people on how to get released, insist on a lawyer, have someone ready with bail money.
I headed the car through them as they parted for us, touching the car’s windows and flanks. Then we were free, in the relative emptiness of Market Street traffic on a quiet Saturday morning. I turned up Divisadero toward Joe’s house.
“Where should we go?” I asked.
Christina sat silently, a black-holed aura sucking light and energy through the windshield, oblivious to everything around her. I tried again. “Christina, where do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “Take me anywhere.” I pulled the car out into traffic.
“Do you need clothes?”
There was no answer. Christina looked at a street sign and turned to me for the first time. I tried to meet her eyes. They were dull and wandering, her right eye unconnected with her left. She never had a lazy eye, did she? I thought. “Not Joe’s,” she said.
Maybe I should have paid more attention to that wandering eye. But I knew she needed rest and thought she was just exhausted.
“Right,” I said. What an idiot. I was going to take her back to Joe’s for clothes? There were barely any left after being impounded as evidence, the rest filthy with fingerprint powder or just the ugly paws of techs and assorted men rifling through Joe’s house, Joe’s old life. Christina’s too.
I turned the car back, away from Pacific Heights, and fled downhill and downtown to our unknown destination.
“Where should we go?” No answer again. “Where would you like to sleep? Do you need stuff?”
She kept looking ahead.
She asked, “Do you still have that parakeet? Captain Black? The ugly one?”
“Captain Flag. And his nose was broken was all.”
She nodded. No smile that I could see. Rare for her. “No, he died a year ago or so. Do you need clothes, Christina?”
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br /> She shrugged, an adolescent who withholds an obvious and direct answer from an obtuse parent.
“Should I take you to a friend’s house? What about Leslie? That girl who you were pals—friends with?”
“I haven’t seen her in a while. We’re still friends. Her family’s big here in town. They’ll know.” She paused. “They knew Joe.”
“I see.”
“If you don’t know anyplace,” she said, and stopped, turning to look at me. She waited. The silence built. I held my breath. “Then I’ll try a hotel tonight,” she said. We tilted at an ominous angle, going down the spine of the Heights, and I had the crazy sense we would fall off the planet, all bearings lost.
I let a deep breath out through my nose and lips quietly as I turned onto California. The street flattened out, we passed the Pacific Union Club on top of Nob Hill, the hood of the car crested the hill, and all I could see was sky. Then it nosed over and we were rolling downward, and I rode the brakes the whole way.
At the bottom I said, “Let’s get you some overnight clothes first.”
Christina nodded again and sat back against the leather seat. I almost opened my mouth to say something, but I kept it clamped tight. It was better this way, much better. So I turned the car back again and went up Sutter, navigating the hills, heading for Union Square.
We stopped at Union Square, and the pitching and falling of the car’s nose eased, a ship finally making port, and I drove her to the Ritz-Carlton, her favorite and the most expensive aerie in the city, with a full minibar of liquor and obsequious service, perfect for a person of her standing in the community. She would quickly dial the concierge for overnight clothes from Neiman’s, and CVS for toiletries.
But what was she now? Half a power couple? A divorcée? A suspect? I watched her small figure retreat into the cavernous lobby, my questions about her hanging in the air. Questions I wasn’t sure I wanted answers to.
My mind chose the route back to the office while I fingered Guthrie’s card in my pocket and his admonition echoed in my head: “Get your friend a good lawyer.” I called Arthur Lewman’s office and made an appointment for 9 a.m.