Claim of Innocence

by Laura Caldwell

  Sam laughed and put his hand over his face. “I knew that wrecked you! And I really didn’t want to move. Someone at work said there was this house in Winnetka that someone had to sell fast, and so I brought it up to you, but I really didn’t want to move, I swear.” He laughed again, then stopped abruptly.

  Sam’s hand slipped into mine. Sam’s warm hand. That hand. I knew that hand.

  “Iz, I just wanted to marry you. That’s it. I loved you so much, I wanted to tell everyone. But I didn’t need to do the big wedding. I just needed you.” His other hand went on top of mine. “That’s all I still need.”

  I didn’t reply. He didn’t seem to mind.

  We sat in wonder at the make-you-gasp recognition that we were at a crossroad. A big one.

  “There’s so much to think about,” I said to Sam, letting my head loll on the back of the couch.

  “I know. But we don’t have to do it now.”

  I took a big breath, looked at him. “That’s not what you used to say.”

  “I know. I always wanted to nail things down. But that was only about me needing something to hold on to.”

  “Don’t you still need that?”

  “No.” He picked up his glass. He handed me mine. “I only need you. But I don’t need any big discussions. We don’t need to define this.” He paused, looking at me, as if he were soaking up every feature. “Let’s just have some fun.”

  I clinked my glass against his. “Here’s to fun.”

  And then we dropped the topic of us. Instead, we talked about college football, which was about to start. We talked about his family and mine. We ordered more Blue Moons. I told him about how strange it was to have my father back in my life. We ordered more Blue Moons. We told stories to each other that we’d heard before. Sometimes often. But our new status as…well, as people who just want to have fun, that made those stories fresh again. We howled with laugher. Remember, we said between laughs. Remember when… We ordered more Blue Moons.

  Somewhere in there everything slowed, as if the universe, kindly, wanted to give us a bit of a break.

  As Sam spoke about the rugby team he’d been coaching, the golden bar lights shined through his blond hair, making it look like a halo.

  I looked at Sam. I looked at his eyes, his ears, his nose, his chin. Finally, I looked at his mouth. That sweet mouth I used to kiss, wanted to kiss forever. As a man, Theo was sex on a stick, no doubt about it, no competing with him on sheer, animalistic hotness. But suddenly I could remember Sam’s bottom lip on mine, then his whole mouth, gently sucking.

  So the next moment, when Sam leaned toward me, I didn’t lean back. When Sam put a gentle finger on my chin and coaxed me toward him, I didn’t resist. When he kissed me, I forgot where I was. When his tongue went inside my mouth, I groaned.

  When he said, Let’s get a room, I said… “Yes.”

  46

  “Jesus,” Sam said in my ear, his voice hoarse, heavy. “Jesus Christ.”

  The door banged shut as we moved, like one clutching mass, into the room. We stood, our mouths together, rough and gentle at the same time. A relief, a release.

  Sam nudged me until I fell on my back on the bed. His compact weight fell on top of me, and I cried out. I couldn’t help it. That weight felt like a part of me that had been excised and had now returned. I squeezed him around the back, kissed him harder. We started groping then—thrilling, exhilarating and yet so, so familiar.

  You’re back, I kept thinking. You’re back.

  For an hour, it felt, we went on like this, the room’s temperature rising, the air between us crackling and living.

  I tugged at Sam’s belt.

  “Yes,” he said. “Fuck, yes.”

  The curse word sent an excited jolt through me. I made my fingers move faster, opening his belt, the quick zzzzzzzzzzzzzz of the zipper, tug-tugging at his jeans, shoving off his jacket, unbuttoning his shirt.

  And soon Sam was standing before me, naked. He didn’t look ashamed that I was still fully dressed. In fact, he squared his shoulders, let his arms fall back, faced me, as if to say, I’m here. All of me.

  I fell to my knees, some force compelling me there, one hand reaching for his hip bone, the other reaching for him. I put my mouth over him.

  “Ooooh,” Sam said, then, “Wait.” He was groaning, half chuckling. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but wait for a sec. This is not romantic, but I’ve needed to go to the bathroom for, like, two hours.”

  I fell back against the side of the bed. Laughed. This, too, felt familiar. Sex, I remembered, when you had it with someone often, wasn’t always scripted and perfect. There were moments of absurdity—how could there not be? And there were matters of timing and reality, like this.

  “Go,” I said, laughing again, waving a hand.

  Sam closed the door and I sat. Panting.

  When I caught my breath, I looked around. How surreal, how insane, I thought. This is the person I used to live with at this time last year. And now we are half strangers, half soul mates in a hotel room. Through my eyes, I took everything in. The moment felt…well, momentous. Why, I didn’t know. I was getting better about not caring.

  One of Sam’s socks was next to me. I picked it up. I used to wash these socks. I picked up his jeans next. They were my favorite pair of his, he knew. We’d bought them at a store on Halsted near Webster. They make your ass look great, I’d said. Sam had worn them out of the store. We’d gone to the Athenian Room for Greek salads and saganaki.

  I lifted the jeans, remembering how the saganaki was lit, how the flame shot to the sky, and we had looked at each other smiling, feeling the same thing.

  I was about to put the jeans down, when I noticed the corner of a white piece of paper sticking from a pocket.

  I heard Mayburn’s voice. An investigation is like a puzzle. You have to put the pieces together. And often you don’t know when you can pick up a piece until you see it. Keep your eyes open. And when you see a puzzle piece…

  “Pick it up,” I said.

  I glanced at the bathroom door. I heard the toilet flush and water running.

  No time to think or debate. I pulled the paper from the pockets. It had been folded a number of times; its creases were soft.

  I opened it. Read it. A thousand thoughts like arrows stung my head.

  Still, the water ran in the bathroom. I read it again.

  It was a document from the Panamanian Registry. The information there indicated that a corporation owned a piece of property in Panama.

  The name of the corporation was Pickett Enterprises. Forester’s corporation. The one I used to represent.

  Names of two attorneys were listed at the bottom left. Panamanian lawyers, it appeared. That didn’t surprise me. Forester used local counsel for any international business he had. I read the address of the property and got a jolt of recognition.

  But it was the information on the bottom right that really surprised me. No, shocked. That’s a better word.

  Owner of the corporation, it said.

  And below that?

  Samuel Hollings.

  Silence filled the room as the sound of water from the bathroom stopped. In a minute, the door would open. Sam would step out.

  But I wouldn’t be there for that.

  I stood, snatched my purse off the floor. And with the paper still in my hand, I left.

  47

  A trial is a tornado. Thousands of pieces of information—such flotsam—whirl around and around and around. They spin and twist. The tornado grows with each day, with each new bit of information you put into the jury’s consciousness.

  All a trial lawyer can do is reach out into the swirl, and grasp one piece of information here, another one there, and try to put them together into a cohesive line of questioning for a witness, a thorough argument for a judge, a satisfying closing for the jury.

  The real trick, though, is that the trial lawyer has to pretend the swirl doesn’t exist. Because the truth is,
that swirl can overwhelm. It can wrap you in its clutches and spirit you far away. Even in sleep, it spins and spins, sometimes even faster.

  It was the swirl that woke me up that Tuesday night and would not let me fall back to sleep. The document I had taken from Sam made it all so, so, so much worse.

  Over and over I went through what that Panamian document could mean. When Sam disappeared last year, it was at the request of Forester, who had received death threats, likely from someone in his family or his camp. If he died suddenly, he told Sam, he had a last request—he wanted Sam go to Panama, where they’d been buying a number of properties, and liquidate them. The Panamian system of ownership of property via “bearer shares” made sales simple to arrange and difficult to trace. That way, a large portion of his estate would be held up and the estate could not be dispersed, which would give time to determine if someone had intentionally harmed Forester, and if so, who.

  Forester had been Sam’s father figure, and he did as Forester asked. He did so two months before our wedding. Once I learned he was okay, once I learned why he had done what he’d done, we tried to put it back together. That hadn’t been successful, but always, always I felt Sam was an honorable man. I never doubted that—not before and not after.

  But now this document indicating that he owned a property in Panama. I’d checked the document when I’d gotten home, and it was recent. Why would Sam own property in Panama now? I could have asked him. He’d called at least ten times and texted as many since I’d taken off—Where are you? What happened? And then, likely when he realized the document was missing, Let me explain. But I didn’t know if I trusted the answer he would give.

  I turned and looked at Theo’s sleeping form. He was faced away from me and curved into himself, his broad back slowly rising and falling with his breath. I heard a soft rattle, a tiny snore at the back of his throat. I thought of waking him. But his sleep seemed so deep, and really what would I talk about? Sam? Panamanian property? The trial? What did I expect Theo to do with those random mental shards?

  I thought of Maggie. Although she hated to be woken up, she had always made it clear that she would do so for me, and the truth was Maggie had seen me through many a sleepless night. But I couldn’t shake Maggie from the under covers of her sleek bed and ask her to listen to my rants about Sam or hear me meander through an upcoming cross-examination, feeling my way down one path, then another, waiting for her murmur, Oh, that’s good or I’d leave that alone. That was what Maggie and I always did for each other when we were on trial. But we’d never been on trial together. I needed Maggie to get her sleep—if not her beauty sleep, then surely her brain sleep.

  I got up and wandered through my condo. I felt the need for some fresh air, some space for all the information and thoughts about the trial and Sam and Theo that were cramming the confines of my brain. I thought about my roof deck. It was one of the best things about my place—it was all mine, while the other tenants had a balcony or a patio. The problem with the roof deck, however, was that you couldn’t simply stroll outside, sit down and enjoy the weather. You had to make the trek upstairs. You had to be serious about spending some time there.

  But on that deck, life was a little quieter, it was all a little more simple. And that was exactly what I sought.

  I went up the back stairs with my roof keys. I pushed open the door up there and stuck a brick in it to keep it open. I stood, taking in the sky, which was a queer yellow. There was an ominous light from somewhere in the city.

  An iron table and chairs were on my deck. I took a seat on one of the chairs and thought of all the time Sam and I had spent on that roof. Often, he had his guitar, and he would play songs he’d written, or songs he loved, while I lazed through a magazine or just gazed at him. Sometimes the sounds from the street below would be minimal. Other times, during a street fair or a busy weekend, a packet of indistinguishable voices would drift up, joined by the sound of music from someone else’s apartment, the honks of cabs.

  I looked up at the sky, thinking how strange a color it was—that soupy yellow making me wonder if it were real or if I were asleep and dreaming that I was bathed in that weird light.

  I forced my thoughts away from Sam and returned them to Valerie and Zavy and Amanda. As a litigator, when you were on trial, that trial had to take the number one spot in your life, no matter what else was going on.

  I tried to imagine what it was like to live in the Gold Coast, as Valerie had, and then be forced to leave that wealthy enclave and move west of the city after your husband died. Had she been jealous of Amanda, who still had her house in the Gold Coast and her handsome husband? Valerie had been clear today—she had hit on Zavy. She said she’d apologized to him and to Amanda. They’d forgiven her. Was that true? Even if it was, what if she hadn’t forgiven Amanda for being the one who had everything? Valerie had talked about being mentally unstable when Brian was dying. Had she stayed that way? Had she removed Amanda from the world so she could try to regain a husband and that Gold Coast life?

  “How are you, girl?”

  I jumped and spun around. Theo. I hadn’t heard him coming up the stairs. “What are you doing up?”

  “I’d ask you the same thing. I woke up and you were gone.” He wore jeans but he was shirtless, as he was so often in my dreams, and thankfully, in my reality.

  He took a few steps toward me and sank into a chair. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Ah, nothing. Just the trial.” I waved one hand, as if to dismiss the whole thing. I thought about Sam then—Sam today, Sam up here on my deck in days of yore. If it had been Sam sitting in front of me now, I would have told him about my warring thoughts about Valerie.

  But then something dawned on me. Maybe it had come time to see if Theo could handle such a discussion.

  Half an hour later, the swirl had slowed, seemed more manageable somehow, the bits of information grouped closer together, more clear. Theo had not only listened, he had asked great questions. Not legal or professional questions, like those I might have heard from Sam or Grady, my friend from Baltimore & Brown, but commonsense questions, questions that made it clear where the story I was trying to tell had gaped or faltered.

  I sat back in the iron chair, settling back into the warm, August night air, as well, and I looked at Theo, smiling. “Thank you.”

  “Sure.”

  We went downstairs, and as we entered my apartment, our arms were around each other, hands already groping. I heard the tinny sound of my cell phone ringing in my bedroom. Sam, probably. I ignored it. It rang again. I went to find it, thinking maybe Maggie couldn’t sleep, either. But it was a number I didn’t recognize. Yet when you’re on trial, every call could be important.

  I answered it.

  “Izzy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, hi, Izzy. It’s Valerie. Is there any way you can come over?”

  48

  The address Valerie had given me was farther west of the city than I had imagined. I drove through quiet Logan Square to get there. Logan Boulevard was a wide avenue with trees down the middle. On either side stood old Victorian mansions with turrets and wraparound porches next to sturdy brick homes that had been turned into apartments.

  I kept moving until I found Valerie’s street. The street itself was nice with well-tended bungalows, but I worried for Valerie and Layla in terms of the rather rough-and-tumble avenues that surrounded it.

  I got off my Vespa and nervously looked around, hoping the bike would be there when I returned. Just to be safe, I got out my lock, squeezed the brake lever and clamped the lock over it.

  I hurried toward Valerie’s address, a bland, four-story building with tan aluminum siding. The entryway was a dim, sallow-looking place with meager orange light. According to the buzzer, only two apartments were in the building, which probably meant each occupant had an upstairs and a downstairs.

  Valerie buzzed me in. The hallway inside matched the foyer, lit low and with an eerie bulb. But then Val
erie opened her door, and I stepped into a small kitchen. A table was set with two bamboo placemats across from each other, a few flowers in a lime-green vase in the center. The flowers looked like those that grew in an errant manner on city streets, weeds technically, but somehow in this cozy apartment they were perfect additions to her table.

  The rest of the kitchen was constructed inexpensively with plain, older yellow appliances and linoleum countertops, but it was pleasing—low lit, with jars of oatmeal, flour, chilies, sugar, candies and other assorted items along one wall.

  Valerie wore jeans cuffed at the bottom and a white T-shirt. The shirt was fitted and I could see she had a trim body beneath the dresses she’d worn to court every week. Her dark hair was loose, no makeup adorning her face. She looked beautiful. And very, very sad.

  Valerie gestured at one countertop, where she had placed a pot of coffee and a few cookies on a plate. “Would you like something? It’s not exactly the spread that your mother was so gracious to put out.”

  I laughed. “No one does a spread like my mother or Spence. I’ll have a cookie, and just some water if you have it.” As she poured me a glass, I looked at my watch. Three in the morning. “What are you doing up?” I asked.

  She took her coffee and my water to the table and gestured at me to sit. “I’m so sorry to wake you. I was just going to leave you a message.” She brought the plate of cookies to the table and sat down, too.

  “Don’t be sorry. Like I said earlier, I was awake. I was actually sitting on my rooftop, thinking about the trial.”

  At the mention of the trial, Valerie looked pensively at the table, saying nothing.

  I wondered why I was there. “Where’s Layla?”

  Valerie’s eyes flashed with something—what?—but when she looked up at me, they dimmed. She glanced around. “She’s still out.”