IT WAS AFTER SEVEN when I got to Susie’s. The patrons at the bar had achieved a high degree of merriment. I didn’t recognize the plinky tune the steel band was playing, but it was all about sun and the sparkly Caribbean Sea.
Made me want to move to Jamaica and open a dive shop with Joe. Drink passion fruit mai tais and grill fish on the beach.
I reached our table in the back room as Lorraine was clearing away a plate of chicken bones. She took my order for a Corona and dropped off the menu. Claire was taking up one side of our booth, what she called “sitting for two,” while Cindy and Yuki sat across from her — Yuki pressed up against the wall as if she’d been smushed there like a bug.
It looked like she’d lost a fight.
I dragged up a chair, said, “What’d I miss?”
“Yuki gave a great closing argument,” Cindy said, and then Yuki broke in.
“But Davis obliterated it!”
“You are nuts. You got the final damned word, Yuki,” Cindy said. “You nailed it.”
I didn’t have to beg. As soon as we ordered dinner, Yuki launched into her impeccable L. Diana Davis impression, screaming, “Where’s the beef? Where’s the beef?”
When Yuki paused for breath, Cindy said, “Do your rebuttal, Yuki. Do it like you mean it.”
Yuki laughed a little hysterically, wiped tears from her eyes with a napkin, downed her margarita — a drink she could barely handle on a good day. And then she belched.
“I hate waiting for a verdict,” she said.
We all laughed, Cindy egging Yuki on until she said, “Okay.” And then she was into it, eyes glistening, hands gesturing, the whole Yuki deal.
“I said, ‘Was a crime committed? Well, ladies and gentlemen, there’s a reason the defendant is here. She was indicted by a grand jury and not because of her relative social standing to the deceased. The police didn’t throw a dart at a phone book.
“ ‘Junie Moon didn’t call the police and make a false confession.
“ ‘The police developed information that led them to the last person to see Michael Campion. That person was Junie Moon — and she admitted it.’ ”
“That’s gooood, sugar,” Claire murmured.
Yuki smiled, continued on. “ ‘We don’t have Michael Campion’s body, but in all the months since he saw Ms. Moon, he has never called home, never used his credit card, his cell phone, or sent an e-mail to his parents or friends to say he’s all right.
“ ‘Michael wouldn’t do that. That’s not the kind of boy he was. So where is Michael Campion? Junie Moon told us. He died. He was dismembered. And his body was dumped in the garbage. She did it.
“ ‘Period.’ ”
“See?” Cindy said, grinning. “She totally nailed it.”
Chapter 89
CLAIRE AND I were sitting up in her bed that night after our outing at Susie’s, having a two-girl pajama party. Edmund was on tour with the San Francisco Symphony, and Claire had said, “I really, really don’t want to go into labor here all by myself alone, girlfriend.”
I looked over at her, lying in the huge divot she’d made in her memory-foam mattress with her rotund 260 pounds.
“I can’t get any bigger,” she said. “It’s not possible. I wasn’t this big with two boys, so how can this little girl-child turn me into the blimp that ate the planet?”
I laughed, thinking it was possible that when she’d had her first baby twenty years ago, she was a few sizes smaller than when she’d conceived Ruby Rose, but I didn’t say so.
“What can I get you?” I asked.
“Anything in the freezer compartment,” Claire said.
“Copy that,” I said, grinning at her. I returned with a carton of Chunky Monkey and two spoons, climbed back into the bed, saying, “It’s cruel to call an ice cream Chunky Monkey when that’s what it turns you into.”
Claire cackled, pried off the lid, and as we took turns dipping our spoons in, she said to me, “So how’s it going with you and Joe?”
“What do you mean?”
“Living together, you idiot. Are you thinking of getting seriously hooked up? As in married?”
“I like the way you kind of edge into a subject.”
“Hell. You’re not such a subtle creature yourself.”
I tipped my spoon in her direction — touché, my friend — then I started talking. Claire knew most of it: about my failed marriage, about my love affair with Chris, who’d been shot dead in the line of duty. And I talked about my sister, Cat, divorced with two young kids, holding down a big job, and having a bitter relationship with her ex.
“Then I look at you, Butterfly,” I said. “In your grown-up four-bedroom house. And you have your darling husband, two great kids off into the world, and now you have the guts and love enough to make another baby.”
“So where are you in all this, sugar?” Claire said. “You going to let Joe make the decision you don’t love him enough to marry him? Let some other girl make off with Joe, the perfect man?”
I threw myself back against the pillows and stared at the ceiling. I thought about the Job, about working with Rich seventeen hours a day and loving that. How little time I had for anything but work; hadn’t done Tai Chi in ages, stopped playing the guitar, even turned the nightly run with Martha over to Joe.
I put my mind on how different it would all be if I were married and had a baby, if there were people who worried about me every time I left the house. And damn — what if I got shot?
And then I considered the alternative.
Did I really want to be alone?
I was about to run all this by Claire, but I’d been quiet for so long, my best friend picked that moment to jump in.
“You’ll figure it out, sweetheart,” she said, capping the empty ice-cream container, resting her spoon in a Limoges saucer on the nightstand. “You’ll work on it and then, snap. You’ll just know what’s right for you.”
Would I?
How could Claire be so sure, when I was without a clue in the world?
Chapter 90
ONLY THREE BLOCKS from the Hall, Le Fleur du Jour is a popular morning hangout for cops. At 6:30 a.m. the smell of freshly baked bread made noses quiver up and down the flower market. Joe, Conklin, and I were at one of the little tables on the patio with a view of the flower stalls in the alley. Having never been with Joe and Conklin together, I felt an uneasiness I would have hated to explain.
Joe was telling Conklin some of his thoughts about the arson-homicide cases, saying he agreed with us, that one person couldn’t have subdued the victims alone.
“These kids are show-offy smart,” Joe said. “Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.”
“And that means what?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. Did everyone know Latin but me?
Joe flashed me a grin. “It means, ‘Anything said in Latin sounds profound.’ ”
Conklin nodded, his brown eyes sober this morning. I’d seen this precise look when he interrogated a suspect. He was taking in everything about Joe, and maybe hoping that my boyfriend with his high-level career in law enforcement might actually have a theory.
Or better yet, Joe might turn out to be a jerk.
No doubt, Joe was appraising Richie, too.
“They’re definitely smart,” Conklin said, “maybe a little smarter than we are.”
“You know about Leopold and Loeb?” Joe asked, sitting back as the waiter put strawberry pancakes in front of him. The waiter walked around the table distributing eggs Benedict to me and to Conklin.
“I’ve heard their names,” Conklin said.
“Well, in 1924,” Joe said, “two smart and show-offy kids who were also privileged and sociopathic decided to kill someone as an intellectual exercise. Just to see if they could get away with it.”
Joe had our attention.
“Leopold had an IQ that went off the charts at around 200,” Joe said, “and Loeb’s IQ was at least 160. They picked out a schoolboy at random and murdered him. But with
all their brilliance they made some dumb mistakes.”
“So you’re thinking our guys could have a similar motive. Just to see if they could get away with it?”
“Has the same kind of feel.”
“Crime TV has been educational for this generation of bad guys,” Conklin said. “They pick up their cigarette butts and shell casings. . . . Our guys have been pretty careful. The clues we’re finding are the ones they’re leaving on purpose.”
Right about then, I stopped listening and just watched body language. Joe, directing everything to Conklin, coming on a little too strong. Conklin, deferring without being deferential. I was so attached to them both, I turned my head from one to another as if I were courtside at Wimbledon.
Blue eyes. Brown eyes. My lover. My partner.
I pushed my eggs to the side of my plate.
For probably the first time in my life, I had nothing to say.
Chapter 91
YUKI SAT AT the prosecution table between Nicky Gaines and Len Parisi, waiting for court to convene. It was Friday. The jurors had deliberated for three days, and word had come down late last night that they’d arrived at their verdict. Yuki wondered if the jurors had rushed their decision so they could have a weekend free of responsibility and tension. And if so, would that be good or bad for the People?
She felt overcaffeinated because she was. She’d been swigging coffee since six this morning and hadn’t slept more than two hours the night before.
“You okay?” she asked her second chair. Nicky was breathing through his mouth, the odor of VapoRub coming off him in waves.
“I’m good,” he said. “You?”
“Peachy.”
To Yuki’s right, Red Dog was writing a memo on a legal pad. He appeared blasé, carefree, a mountain of calm. It was an act. In fact, Parisi was a volcano resting between explosions. Across the aisle, L. Diana Davis looked fresh, powdered, and coiffed. She put a mothering arm around her client’s frail shoulders.
And then, at nine on the dot, the bailiff, a sinewy man in a green uniform, called out, “All rise.” Yuki stood, then sat back down as the judge took the bench. Nicky coughed into his handkerchief. Parisi capped his pen and put it in his breast pocket. Yuki clasped her hands in front of her, swung her head to the right as the door to the jury room opened and the jurors entered the courtroom.
The twelve men and women were wearing church clothes today, hair combed and sprayed into place, men in jacket and tie, the women sparkling with jewelry.
The foreperson, a woman named Maria Martinez, was about thirty, Yuki’s age, a sociology teacher and mother of two. Yuki couldn’t see Martinez coming out in favor of a prostitute who would let a boy die, then cover up the fact with a body dump.
Martinez put her handbag on the floor next to her chair.
Yuki felt a prickling sensation on the back of her neck and her arms as Judge Bendinger opened his laptop, made a joke to the court reporter that Yuki couldn’t hear. Then he swiveled his chair face-forward and said, “Order, please.”
The room quieted, and Bendinger asked if the jury had a verdict.
Martinez said, “We do, Your Honor.”
The verdict form moved from Martinez to the judge and back again to Martinez. Nicky Gaines coughed again, and Parisi reached behind Yuki and flicked Gaines on the back of his head, frowned a rebuke.
“Will the foreman please read the verdict?” Bendinger asked. Martinez stood, looking small in her charcoal-gray suit. She cleared her throat.
“We, the jury, find the defendant, Junie Moon, not guilty in the charge of murder in the second degree.
“We find the defendant, Junie Moon, not guilty in the charge of tampering with evidence . . .”
The packed courtroom erupted in loud exclamations punctuated by the sharp slams of Bendinger’s gavel.
“What did she say? What did she say?” Gaines asked Yuki, even as the judge thanked the jury and dismissed them.
Yuki felt sick, physically ill. She’d lost. She’d lost, and she’d let everyone down — the police, the DA’s office, the Campions, and even Michael. Her job and her passion had been to get justice for the dead boy, and she’d failed.
“I shouldn’t be doing this kind of work,” Yuki said to herself. She stood abruptly.
Without speaking to Parisi or Gaines, she turned around and said to the Campions, “I’m very sorry.”
Lowering her eyes, Yuki pushed her way into the crowded aisle and left the courtroom.
Chapter 92
YUKI SAW TWILLY RISE from his seat in the gallery and move to follow her out of the courtroom and into the hallway, that bastard. She worked her way through the knots of people in the corridor, shoved open the door to the ladies’ room, found an empty stall, and locked it. She sat with her head in her hands for long minutes, then went to a sink, washed her face, and slipped on her sunglasses.
Once back in the hallway, she headed for the fire exit, heart still knocking inside her chest as she walked quickly down the staircase, her mind circling the verdict, still shocked that the jury had found Junie Moon not guilty. The public would go berserk when they learned that Junie Moon was going to get out of jail free. They’d blame the verdict on her, and they’d be right to do it.
It was her case and she’d lost.
Yuki opened the door into the lobby and, with her head down, walked out of the gray cubical building into the equally gray morning. Len Parisi was on the top step of the courthouse, standing like a red-haired sequoia inside a clump of journalists who were reaching their mics and cameras forward, shouting questions.
She saw star TV reporters, Anderson Cooper and Rita Cosby, Diane Dimond and Beth Karas. Cameras rolled as Parisi told the press whatever politically correct blah-di-blah a public servant with a coronary in his history and probably another one in his future would say.
Fifty feet away from Parisi, three steps down, Maria Martinez and several of the jurors were also surrounded by reporters.
Yuki heard Martinez say, “We were overwhelmed with reasonable doubt.” And then the video cameras shifted as L. Diana Davis exited the big steel-and-glass double doors with her arm still sheltering Junie Moon.
Yuki ran down the remaining steps to the street. She saw Connor Campion and his wife at the curb, Campion’s driver holding open the door to a Lincoln sedan. Jason Twilly was standing beside Campion, the two men deep in conversation as Yuki passed.
Yuki crossed Bryant against the light, eyes focused on the All Day parking lot, glad to be invisible in the morning crush of pedestrians, especially relieved that Twilly was busy with a bigger fish than she. Keys in hand, she found her Acura toward the back of the lot.
She heard someone call her name. She turned with a scowl, saw that Jason Twilly was coming toward her, his dark jacket flying open like the wings of a vulture.
“Yuki! Hang on.”
Jason Twilly was following her again!
Chapter 93
YUKI JAMMED THE CAR KEY into the key slot, heard the soft thwick as the locks opened.
“Yuki, wait.”
She turned again, one hand clutching the strap of her handbag, the other clenched around the handle of her briefcase.
“I’ve got nothing to say to you, Jason. Go away.”
Twilly scowled, his expression murderous, the look of a man who could go violently out of control.
“You listen to me, little girl,” Twilly said. “Be glad that you lost, because Junie Moon didn’t kill Michael Campion. But I know who did.”
What? What had he said?
“Look at me, Yuki. Look at me. Maybe it was me.”
Yuki got behind the wheel and yanked the door shut in Twilly’s face. Twilly bent down, rapped on her window, bap-bap-bap, losing it, desperate, yelling through the glass, “We’ve got unfinished business, Yuki. Don’t drive away!”
Yuki threw the car into gear, jammed down the accelerator, and with tires squealing, she left the lot. She called Lindsay from the car, her voice shrill ov
er the sound of traffic.
“Jason Twilly just told me he knows who killed Michael Campion, Lindsay, but he wants me to think that he did it. That he killed Michael. Lindsay! Maybe he did.”
Twilly’s rented Mercedes was in her rearview mirror as Yuki circled the block. She ran a red light, took a sudden turn into an alley — and when she was sure she was no longer being followed, she parked in a fire zone outside the Hall.
She flashed her ID at the security guard, ran through the metal detectors, then took the stairs to the squad room on the third floor. She was panting when she found Lindsay waiting for her at the gate.
“Don’t worry,” Lindsay told her. “I’ve got your back.”
Chapter 94
TWO HOURS after leaving the Hall of Justice, Yuki packed an overnight bag and headed out of town. She tried to shake the echo of Twilly’s voice as she drove over the Golden Gate Bridge toward Point Reyes.
Could Twilly really have killed Michael Campion? If so, why would he do it?
And why would he tell her?
She turned on the radio, found a classical station, dialed it up loud, and the music filled the car and her mind. It was a beautiful afternoon. She was going to Rose Cottage, to walk in the surf and remember that she wasn’t a quitter.
That she wouldn’t quit on this.
As she got onto Highway 1, she let the incomparable beauty of the place take her over. She switched off the radio, buzzed down all the car windows so she could hear the thundering waves break over the huge rocks below her. Moist ocean air whipped her hair away from her eyes and brought blood into her cheeks. She looked out over the blue, blue sea that stretched out to the horizon — no, out to Japan — and she breathed in the fresh air, consciously exhaled, letting the tension go.
In the small town of Olema, she turned off Highway 1, passed the little shops at the intersection, and from there negotiated the back roads by memory. She glanced down at her new wristwatch. It was only two thirty in the afternoon, plenty of sunlight left in the day.
Women's Murder Club [07] 7th Heaven Page 17