Follow the Money
Page 5
“So what do they do?” My father’s eyebrows furrowed. The notion of lawyers who made a living without ever even going to court seemed inherently suspicious.
“Well, you know, when one company buys another or they sell stock, there are a lot of documents that have to be drafted. They draft all that. It’s a lot of paperwork.”
“Sounds boring,” he said. My mother nodded her head in the background.
“Yeah, I haven’t been doing much of that. I’ve been doing mostly litigation.”
“Cool. What kind of cases?” We’d finally found some common ground. I took my feet off the stool and placed them flat on the floor. My mother took some meat from the refrigerator, placed it in a pan on the stove, and began chopping an onion.
I described the Steele case. I was getting used to employing generic terms: Steele became a “powerful executive,” his wife was a “wealthy woman from back east,” I described the evidence loosely — the 911 calls, the missing murder weapon, the blood samples, the lack of intrusion. It sounded cagey, but I knew I couldn’t say too much. Although I knew how silly the secrecy was. I realized that confidentiality had real meaning in the supper clubs, yacht clubs, and racquet clubs of America where the guy sitting next to you really could be a lawyer for the other side or a business competitor of your client, but standing in the kitchen at 1436 Hilldale Street, Riverside, California, there was a zero percent chance of anyone doing anything with this information.
When I was finished, the sound of ground beef frying filled the kitchen along with the smell of chopped onion and garlic. The electric can opener hummed as it sliced the lids from cans of tomato sauce, and my father had opened the fridge again, retrieving two beers and handing one to me. I watched him gripping the can as he opened it. The muscles on his forearms rippled each time his thick fingers moved.
They were the arms that worked for a living in a way I never would: lifting boxes of tile onto a truck; strapping them down; driving the truck to a job site where they would unload it and haul it and cut it with large steel saws; and then spread it out on floors, mixing mortar and grout and installing the tile in fancy homes and offices that my father would never live or work in. They were arms that got scratched and cut and bruised as a matter of course. They were also arms that folded across a chest at the end of the day when my father could step back and look at what he’d done that day, seeing it there right in front of him — progression toward something real, tangible, finite, and immediately recognizable by everyone as something accomplished through a man’s labor and skill. What did I have at the end of each day? Nothing but abstractions.
I opened my beer and took a sip.
My father shook his head as he spoke. “I don’t get it. I mean, they convicted the guy. He appealed and lost. What more is there to say?”
My feet were back up on the stool. I was unsure what to say. I rotated the seat from side to side and took another drink. “Yeah, well, it doesn’t look like his lawyer investigated everything he should have.” Even I didn’t believe that. “And that’s just it, everyone’s entitled to a proper defense or else you can’t be sure that the system is working right.”
“Yeah, but doesn’t sound like there’s any other evidence. Hell, it seems like this guy got his shot and now he’s trying to get another.” My father took another swallow. “Figures, rich executives like that, they think they can buy their way out of everything. Then he’ll get off and it’ll be Double Jeopardy if they go after him again.”
“Well, that’s not exactly right,” I countered. “If we win, it only means the process that convicted him was faulty, not that he was innocent. So it’s not the same as an acquittal.” I could hear Carver’s words echoing in my head, and I tried to mimic them, to capture their self-assured authority. It was only much later that I realized how petty and pretentious I sounded. “Double Jeopardy only comes into play if you’re actually acquitted of the crime.”
Before anyone could point out what an ass I was being, my seventeen year old brother, Rick, walked into the kitchen. He paused for a second to observe his father and older brother drinking beers at the kitchen counter while his mother cooked in the background. He only managed to utter a “Hey” before grabbing a sack of potato chips from the pantry. He stuffed a handful of Ruffles into his mouth, studied us all for a second more and, realizing nothing of interest was going to happen, quietly turned and disappeared back down the hall to his room and the incessant chatter of his television.
“Kid eats almost nothing but pizza,” my father mumbled and shook his head, smiling at me. “He makes ‘em, delivers ‘em, and eats ‘em.” He finished his beer and squeezed the empty can, crushing it in his powerful hands. “It’s amazing he doesn’t weigh five hundred pounds. Ten thousand calories a day and he stays skinny as a rail.”
My old man looked at me as if we should obviously share the same bewilderment. Then he turned and reached into the fridge for two more and handed one to me. I remained on my stool, my feet up and rotating the seat from side to side, occupying some strange generational space between Rick and my old man. Not quite either of them, and unsure of myself, I took the beer as my father walked by me back toward the sliding glass door and the backyard beyond.
“C’mon,” he said, “help me out with this damned boat.” I slid from the stool and followed him through the door, caught in some netherworld between childhood and manhood.
There was a detached two-car garage at the rear of the backyard. Next to the garage was a paved parking space where the boat sat on its trailer, and had sat almost without interruption for the last nine of ten years since he’d bought it. The purchase was a hard won concession from my mother, who swore, correctly, that it would never get used. But my father was determined to buy it and convinced her that it would permit them to do more family things together. I always imagined the boat represented something more to him. Though it was small and used, it showed in some minor way that he was a success in the world, that through his hard work he’d been able to buy a home, raise his children, and still have enough left over for what amounted to an expensive and frivolous toy.
The first summer he had it, he was determined to demonstrate that the boat was a great idea. He would pack everyone up in the Suburban and tow the boat up to Lake Arrowhead or Big Bear, where he would drag us kids around the lake on inner tubes and try to get my mother up on skis. At least a dozen times that summer I saw my father standing at the wheel, shouting directions to an unfortunate child being dragged behind, all the while steering and drinking beer and slowly turning red and pink in the afternoon sun.
For my father, and men like him — men who worked and still lived a pseudo-1950s life with a wife who stayed home and raised the children — this was how they knew they were making it. This was the good life. In the evenings they would trek back to the house — sometimes a two and a half hour drive on busy weekend nights — and collapse with exhaustion, hunger, and mild sun stroke.
But after the first summer the boat was used less and less frequently until sometimes in the late autumn I would hear my father mention to a friend how he hadn’t been able to “get the boat out” that summer. Now, every other summer or so, he would try to start it, become upset when the engine failed to even turn over, and begin repairs, swearing that he was going to “get it back in shape” and “hit the water again” that summer. This was apparently one of those years.
Oily parts were scattered across the concrete. The massive outboard, with its sheet metal skin removed, looked like a bionic seahorse mounted face first to the back of the boat. Among the parts were wrenches and screw drivers, sockets and tiny piles of bolts and screws placed carefully, out of the way, in an effort to avoid loss.
“At first I thought it was a fuel problem, but I checked the line, and I’m getting plenty,” my father said as he stared at the boat and raised his eyebrows. “I dunno. It’s just not working.” He got down on one knee and immediately began to play with the linkage to the carburetor.
“Well, you’re not the first one to say that.”
“Do you like that kind of work?”
“Well, yeah, it can be a lot of fun. I mean, there’s a lot of investigation, and I’ll probably get to write a draft of the motion.”
“Yeah, but when you’re done, I mean, does it make you happy? You’ve got to do what you feel good doing. I mean, you’ve always got to stop and ask yourself what you’re working for. What your work is doing for you.” He pointed with his index finger and went back to turning his wrench on the nut while I held the top of the bolt, keeping it from spinning.
“Look, someday you’ll be old like me and all you’ll have to look back on is what you’ve done over the years. You hope it adds up to something you feel good about.” The wrench slipped and he caught his knuckle on the motor frame. “Shit!” He stuck his oily knuckle in his mouth. “Damnit, that hurt.” He shook his hand with the fingers loose and then opened and closed his fist several times, his forearms rippling with each flex.
“Anyway,” he continued, “like I said, you gotta do something you’re proud of. If you’re not, why do it at all?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. What choice did I have? I had to have a job. I was lucky to get the one I got. I had student loans, rent. I had always wanted to do other things, but now I was just doing what I was being paid to do. It wasn’t like I went out looking for Steele. I just stood there and smiled at my old man. He smiled back and said, “Why don’t you jump up in there and crank this thing over a couple times? See what we’ve got.”
I climbed into the boat and turned the key. Nothing. I turned it again. Still nothing. My father gave me a ready-when-you-are look. “I’m turning it.” I said.
“Really? Shit.”
My father bent back over the motor and removed the distributor cap. “Turn it again,” he hollered. I did and nothing happened. It was completely dead. I peered down at my father, waiting for instructions. He stood among the tools and parts, his clothes stained with the oil and gas that had dripped from the motor. He looked up at me with a puzzled look.
“I’m just not getting any spark.” He said, holding the distributor cap up with a greasy hand, as though it might mean something to me. “I mean, I’ve got power, just no spark.” He lamented, looking to the side at the worn and discolored hull and then down at his callused, dirty hands. I stood there, my hand on the key, waiting for directions, feeling the exact opposite.
6
Mostly, I stayed away from the other summers. A lot of them knew each other from school, since most of them came from the same few places. I made small talk with them, but little else. I figured I was there to get a job, not to bide time until I collected my inheritance.
Which made it all the more intriguing a few days later when I was alone in the firm library and heard her voice beside me. She said, “I always thought the library would be more fun when they were paying me to be in one. Turns out I was wrong.”
It was Morgan Stapleton, the hottie from Yale that I’d heard people whispering about, the one I’d studied at the rooftop party. Some guy’s buddy used to date her in college, also at Yale. I looked over, unsure if she was talking to me. She smiled and raised her eyebrows. I said, deadpan, “Can I tell you a secret? I don’t know how to read.”
She laughed and then covered her mouth, looking around, “Oh my God, that was loud. Do you think we have to be quiet in here like a real library?”
“Isn’t this a real library?” I studied the cover of the treatise in my hand. “Someone told me these were books. Have I been misled?”
“I thought you couldn’t read, so what do you care?”
“Hey,” I shrugged, “I may be illiterate, but I don’t want to look stupid.”
She smirked and cocked her hip to one side, “You want to talk about looking stupid? I once sat through a lunch interview with a piece of lettuce stuck to my front teeth. Size of a nickel. It was sweet.”
“You gotta love that.”
“Of course, but you know the best part? I didn’t notice it until about two hours after lunch.” She smiled and nodded her head, raising those eyebrows again.
“Nice,” I nodded back. “But that only reminds me of the time I was at an interview and I walked into a parking meter.”
“What?” She laughed again, throwing her head back and shaking her hair. She was killing me. Something tugged inside me. What was I thinking?
I laughed along with her and nodded. “Yeah, we were walking to lunch and I was talking, y’know, with my head turned, and I plowed right into it. Full bore. Whack! It stopped me cold.”
“Oh my God, what did the people you were with do?”
“What could they do? They were horrified.” I pointed at my chest. “It left a smudge right here on my tie. I had to sit though lunch with a big splotch of dirt on me like a bull’s eye.”
“That’s pretty good,” she nodded, her body swaying back and forth. I glanced down at the muscles in her legs, flexing with her shifting weight. She caught my glance on her and she moved a little slower. Playful, athletic, clever. She grinned through the silence and then slapped the book in her palm. “Well, as much as I hate it, I guess I actually do have to write this memo.”
“Yeah,” I held my book up and grinned back, “and I have to learn how to read.”
She smirked and walked past me down the aisle. “See you Ollie,” she said, without looking back. I was surprised she knew my name. I watched the back of her legs as she walked away. My face felt hot and I turned to look out the window.
***
I’d had enough of looking through the file and milling around the library. I figured if there were anything worthwhile in either place, Steele would already be out. It was time to poke around and see what else might be out there.
Sergeant Wilson of the LAPD had been the first one to Steele’s house on the night of the murder. His signature was on the initial police report. He was now Detective Wilson, and although I doubted he’d have anything to say to me, I decided to track him down. It couldn’t hurt to ask. He seemed amused by the phone call. Fortunately, he was kind enough to let me buy him lunch.
He met me in a crowded place in Chinatown where most people get take out. Detective Wilson had a salt and pepper buzz cut and a stern expression — vaguely military — and I knew he was a cop the minute I saw him. He was lean and fit, and walked into the room like he owned it. I was sitting at one of the small tables by the windows and Wilson picked me out immediately. I guess that made him a good detective.
“I don’t have much use for lawyers,” he said, as soon as he sat down. “But I figure we can both do each other a favor. I’ll try to keep you from wasting your time so you don’t waste any of mine.”
“Pardon?”
“You want to talk about Steele, I’ll tell you everything about him. But you need to understand something, son, that guy’s as guilty as they come. I’ll bet I’ve been a cop longer than you’ve been alive. I know what I’m talking about.” He leaned back and waved to a guy behind the counter, who immediately came over to take our order. Wilson was obviously a regular. He was also used to people paying attention to him.
I ordered the chow mein and wondered where to start. I was beginning to regret calling him. I was also wondering why he’d agreed to meet with me. I said, “I’ve read your report, so I think I’ve got a good sense of what you saw that night. I guess I’m interested in why you’re so sure
it was Steele.”
“Son, when you do this as long as I have, you can just tell when people are lying. When you walk into a house and find a dead woman and a man covered with blood, you don’t have to be a genius to put the pieces together.”
“But he moved the body.”
“Sure he did. You don’t think she just sat still while he stabbed her, do you? Come on. I’ve seen hard cases in my time, but this wasn’t one of them. What mystifies me is why so many people have such a hard time believing this guy killed his wife.” Wilson shook and scratched his head at the same time, grinning with disbelief.
“But what was the motive?” I heard a pleading quality in my voice, and I didn’t like it. I sounded desperate. Probably because I was.
“Sometimes people just get pissed off and get carried away. It wasn’t like these two had a perfect relationship. They’d separated before.”
“And gotten back together.”
“Yeah,” Wilson grinned, “that was her biggest mistake.”
The waiter brought our food and we ate quietly for a few minutes. There was an arrogance to Wilson’s conviction that galled me. It was as though he could not accept even the suggestion that the world was not exactly as he saw it. I watched Wilson mow through half his plate of food. Something seemed to be simmering inside him, and he struggled to contain it for a moment, then he finally leaned in and spoke with a voice as unwavering as any I’d ever heard.
“Look, kid, you weren’t there that night. You didn’t see it. It was indescribable. His wife’s blood was everywhere, all over the walls, sprayed up across the ceiling. I mean everywhere. And that son of a bitch Steele, he sat there in that bathroom, with the water running in the tub, and scrubbed the blood off the kitchen knife he used while his wife lay there dying. Don’t forget, he’s a politician, he made his living pretending to be a good guy. Don’t be fooled. He’s a cold blooded killer if there ever was one. I knew it the minute I met him.”