by Jim Kohlberg
Chapter 7
Guthrie’s voice was still ringing in my ears, so around eight I drove down Broadway to Columbus, passed the Purple Onion, and found half a parking space that I jammed into near Lewman’s office building. It was a two-story brick affair in a gentrified section a couple of blocks from the frayed sleaze of the Condor Club on lower Broadway. On the empty sidewalk outside the slick lobby, I pressed buttons on the steel intercom set into the thick, creep-proof glass.
A crisp voice said “Yes?” into the phone and waited. I leaned forward and said, “Arthur Lewman, please. It’s Max Smoller.” There was another pause.
“Your appointment’s at nine,” the voice said. “I don’t suppose you can wait till then.” It was not a question.
“Who are you?”
“Arthur Lewman.” Then a buzzer sounded and the lock in the door clicked. I stabbed my hand at the door just quick enough to get it open. After searching the lobby’s directory, I stepped onto the elevator and got off on the second floor. Arthur Lewman, Esquire, greeted me at the entrance, all gleaming shoes and red suspenders, with an expression on his face like I had left dirty dishes in the kitchen sink.
I stopped in front of him. “I’m in a hurry,” I said.
“Four messages last night? That much was obvious.”
“Christina needs a trial lawyer. And she’s not your client yet.”
There was a brief silence as he considered my opening move, but one that still made me nervous.
“I’d be happy to refer several very experienced lawyers.”
“I called you.”
“So your messages indicated.”
“Look, Mr. Lewman. I know you used to get all the high-profile cases out here. Then you did the Washington thing.”
“Deputy attorney general.”
“Right. I mean no disrespect, sir, but here’s my concern. You’ve got a big practice. Lots of high-profile cases.”
“Your facts are correct.”
“This is just a case for you. It’s Christina’s life. Do you have time to represent her?”
“You mean: Will I do it personally? As well or better than anyone else?”
“It’s a murder charge.”
“A capital crime,” he said. I didn’t need reminding. He turned and led the way down the corridor to what looked like a second lobby, except it was paneled in wood, had travertine flooring with Asian rugs, and four desks facing each other. He walked right through them to another door, already open, and disappeared from view. His voice floated out at me. “Come in,” he said.
I walked in and took a dimpled leather chair. He was already parked behind a huge partners desk with inlaid leather, his briefcase in the unused kneehole.
“The papers this morning said she was taken into custody right away,” he continued. “Is that correct?”
“As far as I know.”
“Then she needs help. There must be good evidentiary reasons why they booked her so fast.”
“I know she needs help. That’s why I called four times.”
“We need to stay calm, Mr. Smoller.”
“My name is Max. And I am calm.”
“I see,” he said, as I heard my own breathing whistle through my nose.
“Look, I’m sorry. This is a lot of stress.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why is it a lot of stress?”
“Don’t you think a murder is stressful?” I asked.
“Not for me. Why is it for you? Do you know Christina?”
“Of course. Why do you think I called you?”
“How well?”
I heard my own breathing again. “I used to know her. We dated at one time. Does that matter?” I wasn’t going into the whole roiled history with him.
“And when did you first become acquainted with her?”
“Mr. Lewman, we’re not in a courtroom.”
“Forgive me,” he said. “I have a bad habit of lapsing into interrogation-speak.”
“Arthur,” I said, but stopped. There really wasn’t anywhere to go with this. If I kept asking, he’d just back off or, worse, say no.
“Mr. Smoller, I . . .”
“Max.”
“Max. I will take the case. But first, I must know something.”
“What?” I said into his second abrupt silence, as if he had stopped an unpleasant truth from flying out of his mouth. It was hard to finish sentences for a man you hardly knew.
“What’s your connection to Christina?”
“Christina’s my connection to Christina. And Joe. Joe’s a connection to Christina.”
“You seem a little involved to me.”
“Involved? What does that mean?”
“Emotionally involved.”
“I am not emotionally involved with Christina. I haven’t seen her for five years. Yes, we dated. But I was Joe’s friend longer than I knew Christina. Much longer.”
“I see.” More silence. This time I let it sit. It was a hard sit.
After we listened to each other’s breathing for a while, he finally continued. “Okay, I’ll defend her. But what about you?”
“What about me?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m doing it. I got Christina out, signed a guarantee for her bail. I got you. What else is there to do?”
“Many things. Prepare her defense. Corroborate the police investigation. Interviews. Searches”—he stopped, then added—“of financial records.”
“You must have worked with dozens of people who do all that.”
“Yes and no. I can get someone to cover the police side if we need it. But the financial records, knowledge of Joe’s business? It seems to me you’re in the best position to do that.”
“Me? No way.”
“Who else? That’s the best thing in these cases. When you’re in front of a jury, someone must pay. A murder trial is an exercise in collective revenge. If you don’t understand that, you make the jury choose between unsatisfied justice and personal innocence. A terrible choice.”
“Innocence is a bad choice?”
“Are you going to stay with the case?” He asked.
“Do I have a choice?”
“Of a kind,” he said.
“Not a very comfortable kind.”
“No,” he said.
I looked around the office for a glass; my throat had suddenly become as dry as a tax return. “Do you have any water?” I asked. He looked at me as if I were eight and had confused subtraction with addition in math class. He turned around without taking his eyes off me, opened a small refrigerator, and grasped a plastic bottle. When he came out with it, he saw the liquid was light brown. “Green tea, I’m afraid. An enthusiasm of mine,” he said. I grabbed it and drank.
When the bottle was half empty, I took a deep breath through my nose. The air jetted out of my mouth as if a balloon had ruptured.
“All right, what is it you need me to do?”
“First, find out about the intricacies of Joe’s business. Not just what he told you. Then find his partners, his clients, his competitors, his will; most of all—find the dirt. Whether it’s women or a Swiss bank account.”
“The DA showed me his will, witnessed by Christina. There were Letters of Administration in the file.”
“Letters of Administration? Why would they be in Joe’s file? If he had a will already?”
“Not sure. Maybe he was going to sign another. He told me they were separated.”
“The DA won’t care. They’ll use the current one. Establish motive. They’ve got her at the scene?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “I haven’t really talked to her yet.”
“Now you understand why you must help? If you are sincere in your statements of motive.”
“Christina didn’t do it. And Joe was my friend. An old friend. A lot of blood spilled between us. But an old friend. He didn’t deserve to die like that.”
“Nobody does,” said Art
hur.
“Yes,” I said. But it happens all the time. One minute people are thinking about what’s for dinner, and the next day they’re trying to put the world back in place. Happens all the time.
Chapter 8
When I got to the office the next morning, the paperwork for Lewman’s engagement was on Irene’s desk. I wanted to ask her about it when her expression stopped me.
“You look like shit, Max.”
“Good morning to you, too,” I said. But it didn’t deflect her. The black eyes kept looking at me. “I didn’t sleep well last night,” I added. I felt my shoulders hunch as I walked wearily into my office, trying to shut the door behind me with a flick of my hand. When there was no noise, I turned around. A couple of long steps got Irene over to my desk. She grabbed my arm.
“Look in the mirror, will you?”
She dragged me over to my exposed, postmodern sink, which had a mirror, a toothbrush hanging next to it, and a shaver outlet, for mornings like this. I admit it was not a pretty sight. My hair was standing straight. The cowlick in back would make Alfalfa run from the room in red-faced shame. I looked at my face for a long moment, studying it for once, a course I always cut when I could.
I smoothed the cowlick in back with the same furtive pat I used to get before school from my mother, who managed to appear hopeful and worried at the same time. If it was truly ungovernable, she’d smooth it down with a tongue-wetted palm, her lipstick breath overpowering me as she slicked my hair. I searched my face in the mirror.
My eyes, a shade not quite green, not quite gray, looked back at me over sags of flesh on top of broad cheekbones. My face and chin seemed in good shape, no lines around the mouth, a few laugh lines at the eyes and only a touch of gray in the hair. It was the eyes that scared me. Close up, the laugh lines turned to fissures and moats, with cracks and mesas of pouty bunched skin on the eyelid and above the bags of the cheekbones. The irises looked like miles of spring ice, glassy smooth on top, shot through with tiny fractures, ready to shatter at the slightest jolt, holding on by a fingernail for the warmth of spring. I was closer to forty than I liked, but these were thousand-yard eyes, a veteran of twenty-two with a sixty-year-old gaze.
When the hell had I acquired them?
“So?” said Irene, her hands on her hips. I patted the back of my head in hopes the cowlick was tamed. “Did you get any sleep?”
“A little.”
“How little?”
“None, okay? Leave me alone.”
“Did you get out of your clothes?”
“Who elected you mother?”
“What did you do then, when you were not shaving and not changing and not sleeping?”
“I drove around.”
“You mean you slept in your car.”
“Maybe.”
“Did you or did you not spend the night in your car?”
I did. I really did. But I’d be damned if Irene was going to bully it out of me.
She took my arm and guided me over to the single club chair I used for required office reading. She pushed me down until my butt met the cushions. She lowered a thigh onto an arm and looked down at me.
“I know you got Christina out.”
“So then what are you bothering me for?”
“Where did you sleep?”
“I parked out by Sea Cliff. I wanted to hear the waves. Usually it soothes me.”
She nodded and got up. At my desk she turned around, rumbled out to her desk, and returned with a brush in her hand. She slapped it in her palm, like a cop wielding a nightstick in front of a bunch of gangbangers.
“I left her at the Ritz,” I said.
“It’s an awfully expensive hotel.”
“She just got out of jail,” I said. “She’s the chief suspect.”
“You wanted to bring her home?”
“She’s alone. Joe’s dead. Her family’s not here. Most of her friends were Joe’s.”
“So you’re supposed to take in your best friend’s accused murderer? Do you have any idea what that looks like?”
“There’s no way she did it. He was killed with a bat. She’s maybe ninety-five pounds. She thinks getting messy is wearing jeans and a silk blouse.”
“Give yourself a break.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. And she walked back to her desk, sat down, and began banging things around like a chef angry at the help and taking it out on the pots and pans. I launched out of the chair.
“I do not know what you are talking about,” I said, looking down at her now.
“Really?” she said, a scornful tilt to her head and downward curl in her lips.
“Really.”
“Let’s see. She dumped you for your best friend. Your rich best friend. Then best friend gives you all his business, gets your name in all the papers and your practice goes bananas and ya-ya and you’re a sort of a gimcracking celebrity for the superrich, a lapdog who plays cute tricks and jokes, besides all the money you save them with generation-skipping trusts and estate tax gimmicks. And for the ten years since I started, you think you owe your buddy one, a big one. No matter what he did. And suddenly he turns up dead with your old girl in jail, and like the schmuck you are, you get her out, without a blue-sky thought what the cops will think or whether they’ll ever find out you and Christina there were a number, a hot little ticket as they say. And you, you sorry-ass excuse for a man, thinking like a dick, feel guilty that you didn’t let Christina sleep at your house last night!”
We stood looking at each other, she out of breath, me too stunned to suck air. Two prizefighters too weary to throw the next punch.
“Well” is all I could manage.
She got up again and walked over to me. I had to fight the urge to back up. She took my hand and opened it to the palm and slapped her hairbrush into it. I would have said “ouch” if I hadn’t been so shocked already.
“It’s because you cut it yourself,” she said, nodding at the back of my head.
“It’s fine.” I passed my hand over my head again.
“No, it’s not. Go to a barber.”
“And pay twenty-five bucks?”
“I pay a hundred.”
“My point exactly.”
“Get it fixed. Give him your first nickel. You’re a rich guy.”
“I am not rich.”
“You save everything. Plus you get family money.”
“My old man was rich.”
“So. There you go. Just wait,” she said. I paused a minute and looked at her. I kept my voice level, my face soft.
“He’s been dead five years.”
“I knew that. I did,” she said.
“I know. There was no money left.”
“Oh,” she said, and then brightened. “Still, you make plenty. You’re richer than me.”
“I should be. I pay your salary,” I said. “And I am not cheap.”
“I know,” she said. “Just thrifty.” She went over to her desk and pulled out some old envelopes and personal stationery. They were yellowed and pale with an old address fading on the back flap. There was a post office forwarding symbol stamped on all of them.
“See, the post office forwards it,” I said.
“Only because I pay them to. They only do it for free for the first year.”
“Your loss then.”
“Yours. I pay with an office check.”
I took the brush and attacked the back of my head. The cowlick surrendered under the onslaught.
“Go get a haircut. I’ll take care of Lewman’s paperwork.”
“I don’t need one.”
“Go,” she said. “See what Mata Hari does.”
Chapter 9
I didn’t go to the barber, but I did go home for a shower and a shave and then drove back out to the bottom of Market and the wharf on the quiet bay. I bought a huge cu
p of coffee, made campfire style in a large aluminum pot at a wooden shack serving homemade sugar donuts. This side of the bay was still, with Oakland shining across the water and morning ferries heading for their downtown berths. Finally I got back in my car, twisted the key, and headed up California Street two blocks to collect Christina from the hotel.
The closer I got, the more I wanted to turn around. The more my resistance grew, the more my mood darkened. By the time I pulled up at the Ritz-Carlton’s circle, carved out of an alleyway between huge office buildings and lined with niches of glass displaying jewelry and ten-thousand-dollar alligator purses, I wanted to grab someone’s larynx and squeeze. The morning checkout crunch had departed, and the bellboys stood around having a cigarette break. When I pulled into the circle in my Audi, they kept smoking.
I turned off the car, pocketed the keys, and made for the huge revolving doors, manned by another bellman inside whose job was to punch a button that ignited the motorized doors.
“Hey, you can’t leave that there,” said a bellman, detaching himself from his cigarette and stepping away from his smoking buddies.
“I’ll only be a minute. I’m just picking up a guest.”
“Still,” he said, kicking a toe at the ground and looking at me with a blank pained expression. I took a step toward him, eyeing his throat.
“I don’t want it moved.”
“The city won’t let us leave cars there.”
“Tell them you didn’t, I did.”
“I need the keys,” he said.
“So do I,” I said, jingling them in my jacket pocket and walking inside.
When I stepped into the elevator, it accelerated so sharply that a hollow pit grew in my stomach where none was before. Reaching the fifty-sixth floor, nosebleed territory for an apartment or a hotel room, a sense of relief jettisoned me from the elegant box. It faded as I walked down the carpeted hallway toward Christina’s room, caught in a swirl of black uneasiness, jangling nerves from too much coffee and a bubble of slow purple sadness, as if I were pallbearer at a friend’s funeral and had not had time to say goodbye. At the door, I stood for a moment, waiting for it to subside, this strange, untidy cauldron, and prayed for my return to normalcy; my energy, my skeptical optimism, my ability to retain facts and numbers and above all to see clearly, objectively, factually. I waited for all this to return, but the door opened.