The Murder List

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  CHAPTER NINE

  I swallow my gum as I click my car door locked. Huff a breath into my open palm to see if I can detect the wine. Peppermint, whew, not Chardonnay. I’m not sure drinking with the assistant district attorney is as easily rationalizable as working with her. Even though the gathering at Alden & Harlow was all perfectly professional. Maybe, I decide as I unlock the front door, I should avoid the whole topic.

  “Hey,” Jack calls out from the den.

  I can hear the Red Sox game on TV back there. His big passion. I had hoped that as long as the game was on, Jack would be so distracted he wouldn’t notice the time. Which was pushing 8:30.

  “Hey you,” I answer as we always do. I love that we have an always. Although he only said “Hey,” I knew what he meant. On the way to Jack, I plop my briefcase on the dining room table, walk through the kitchen, then lean down to kiss him on the cheek. He’s in jeans and his faded Big Papi T-shirt, his sock feet propped on the hunter-green suede ottoman in front of his favorite leather chair. “My” chair, in matching cordovan, is on the other side of a marble-topped antique table. Jack had the furniture before I moved in. A bit men’s-club for me, but comfy nonetheless. Plus, it was his house before it was mine, and no reason to change the entire decor along with everything else. A plate of cheddar and crackers is beside him, and Jack’s wineglass, a goblet of red, is safe on a raffia coaster. Once I get my own wine, that’ll resolve my incriminating-breath situation. “What’s the score?”

  A cheer goes up from the TV crowd, but he clicks the sound to mute. Blinks at me. “Prosecution one, defense zero, from what I hear,” he says.

  “Good one,” I say. I’m not taking any bait from him. And the murder-list lawyers have a buzzing email list, so as soon as one gets a tidbit or juicy case or wants to vent about a judge or prosecutor, they all pile on. But I’m unsure of what’s legally appropriate between Jack and me, so I’m struggling to decide how much to say. “I’m gonna change clothes. Get rid of these shoes. Get some wine. You need anything?”

  I turn to go back to the kitchen.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I need an explanation.”

  I turn back. Face him. Try to keep my expression innocently curious. “Of what?”

  “What do you think?” It looks like he’s doing the same expression thing. “It’s almost eight thirty.”

  Well, yeah. I worked late. And it was working. And I admit that when he works late, he calls to let me know. I actively didn’t do that. And right now, caught in my own omission, I somehow can’t retrieve the explanation I’d given myself for it.

  “I’m so sorry, honey.” I decide to surrender. I mean, tell the truth. I walk toward him, plop down in my chair, swivel it a fraction so I can reach over and rest a peacemaking hand on his knee. “It was a crazy day.”

  Jack recrosses his legs, as if he’s simply getting comfortable. But I worry it’s to dump off my hand. He pulls out his cell phone from where it’s tucked next to him on the chair, holds it up between two fingers. “Here’s my cell phone,” he says. The light from the flickering muted television plays across his glasses, the baseball game in mirror image. “Did you lose yours?”

  “Oh, honey. Don’t be mad, okay?” I say again. And even though I am honestly sorry and feel a little guilty, a lot guilty, I had my reasons for not telling him the entire reason I was late. I was trying to avoid making him unhappy. At which I have totally failed. “My total bad, absolutely. I lost track of time. We had a big day, which, apparently, you know.”

  “They don’t have clocks in the DA’s office?” He’s holding up that phone between two fingers, now tick-tocking it back and forth.

  “Hey.” I put up both palms. “Objection. Listen. You want me to go stand in the corner? Take a time-out? I said I’m sorry. And I honestly am sorry, honey. I should have called. Next time I will.”

  “Next time?” He’s still holding up the phone, but thankfully he’s stopped the phony-dramatic ticking thing.

  “Jack!” I can’t help it, this is so unfair. I stand, hands outstretched, entreating. Blocking his view of the sixth inning. “Don’t let’s fight, okay? Yeah, I have a new job. You hate it. But it’s only for the summer, right? So it means we have stuff to work out. But in the long run, it’s gonna be worth it. It’s all so we can work together. Kirkland and North. Defenders of the downtrodden, saviors of the innocent?”

  “She’s such a strident bitch.” Jack has put down his phone. He takes a slug of wine, then picks up the remote, turns on the baseball sound again.

  I stand my ground in front of him. “Agreed? Partners?”

  He makes a face, rolling his eyes. “Fine. Right. Move over.”

  “Not until you apologize.” This is pushing it, I admit, but I try to make it clear I’m joking. Kind of. I’m in the marital wrong here, but I was only trying to help. And “bitch” is unfair. Martha’s tough, sure. But isn’t that a good thing? She does exactly the same things Jack does. And he knows it. “So?”

  “I’m sorry you screwed up,” he says.

  “That’s my darling Jack,” I say. “Touché. Give me five minutes.”

  By the time I’m back, in jeans and T of my own, wine in hand, barely an inning has gone by. Maybe he’s forgotten about this whole being-late thing. His cheese and crackers are gone, only a few salty crumbs remaining. His wineglass is still full. Or, maybe, full again.

  “Are you hungry? Should I order Chinese for us?” Top of the seventh, the timing is perfect. “Uber can deliver.”

  “Are you?” He’s looking at the screen, not at me. “Hungry?”

  Which I’m not, given the truffle fries and, later, the irresistible calamari, then bacon-speckled brussels sprouts, but reality is not the best answer here. “Starving,” I say.

  “From all your work at the office, I take it,” Jack says.

  This is—well, I recognize the technique. Trial Proc. 101, formally entitled Elements of Trial Procedure, teaches us how to lead unsuspecting witnesses incrementally down the path of minor admissions, one by one, and then pull the evidentiary rug out from under them. I’d fallen for this method, certainly, some years ago. But not since I started law school.

  “Sweetheart? Is there something you’re getting at here? Martha’s only doing her job.” I say it, I can’t help it. Even though I don’t want to fight. “Like you do. But you’re being kind of nasty.”

  “Nasty.” He repeats my word, savoring it. “Is there something you’d like to tell me, Rachel?”

  The TV is a blur, the announcers’ chit-chatty conversation mudded into a babbling underscore.

  I stay silent. The only responses I can think of would make this situation worse.

  “I called your office.” Jack barely waits a beat before he goes on. “That receptionist? Leon? Told me you were at Alden & Harlow. With Gardiner. And you were…” He clears his throat. “‘Celebrating,’ I believe, was the word Leon used.”

  I silently curse Leon, Mr. Passive-Aggressive. But now I understand why Jack’s angry. He’s picturing some kind of wine-soaked BFF’ing between Gardiner and me. As if that would ever happen. “It was all of us, honey, all her interns. Did Leon tell you that? Obviously not. And celebrating? Yeah, exactly. Because of the arrest. It’s a tradition.”

  Jack raises an eyebrow. “They celebrate? They call it that?”

  “Yeah.” I take a sip of wine. “So I’m told.”

  “After an arrest.”

  “Yeah,” I say again. I’m irritable and confused and, mostly, feeling guilty. And, as seems to be my constant state of being these days, trying to decide whose side I’m on. If one’s job is to assess the evidence, track down the bad guy, and hold him accountable before our system of justice, then yeah. That side would celebrate. They’d say it was another killer off the street. And that’s a bad thing? Although I see how it could be.

  “I know it’s the other side of your personal legal equation,” I say. “But the fact that there are two sides is why it works. And I’m lea
rning about the other side. It’s my responsibility. It’s my assignment.”

  “And you’re assigned to celebrate the confinement of a person who’s innocent until proven guilty.” Jack nods, as if this illustrates a significant paradox. “That’s pitiful.”

  “What’s your goal, here, honey?” I really want to know. “To make me feel bad? For some dumb tradition? I know you’re angry with me for not letting you know where I was, and, yes, I know, I might have been hit by a bus or something, and you worried. I love you for that.”

  He hadn’t said anything about being hit by a bus, hadn’t even said he was worried, but I’ll give him credit for the unstated concern. That’s got to be why he called the office.

  He’s staring at the screen now, silently, which proves it.

  “Come on, Jack.” I prod his shin, gently, with one toe. “You celebrate when you get someone off who you know is guilty. When you know they did it. It’s the same thing. From the other point of view.”

  “Is it?” Jack points the remote through me, snaps off the television. He stands so quickly I’m forced to take two steps backward, almost sloshing wine on my white T-shirt.

  “When people get a fair shake, when some power-crazed DA can’t prove their case? You better believe I’ll celebrate,” Jack says. “That’s why we do what we do. We stand up for the little guy. But that woman is teaching you how she can push him down. Which side are you on?”

  “But you know which.”

  “Rachel? Honey?” Jack punches the ball game back on and eases into his chair, crossing his legs and leaning back. He looks at the screen, not at me. “Be careful what you choose.”

  BEFORE

  My coat is there where I left it on the Comm room rack, but I don’t move to grab it. I stand, motionless, my hand poised midair. Listening as hard as I can. I remember in high school, before cell phones and texting, we had these things called truth books. We used old-fashioned spiral-on-the-top notebooks with a red line down the center of the page. Each page had a heading, like “Best Dressed” or “Most Popular” or “Weirdest” and you were supposed to fill in your votes, page by page, with a person’s name. Then pass it on to the next person. The truth books, brutally vicious, were expressly forbidden, but that was part of the attraction. The cool kids would pass them around surreptitiously, between classes, trying to stay under Principal Gutierrez’s radar.

  What I felt now, knowing if I stayed still and silent I would hear what Logan Concannon was saying about me, was exactly what I’d felt that day a truth book got handed to me. My name would be in it, I feared, listed by someone on the page that sought the geekiest sophomore or teacher’s pet. I knew I could simply hand the book off to someone else without looking inside. Or I could take it home and read each and every venomous or flattering entry, assessing and comparing and knowing, with each turn of the page, my name might show up. Biggest nerd, biggest dork. Biggest loser.

  I’d stood there in the beige-brick hallway under a blue-and-gold banner for the Bethesda Barons, in my almost-right Jordache jeans and almost-right platform wedges and my completely wrong butterfly-clipped hair. Staring at the cover of the notebook I’d found tucked in the slats of my locker. Trying to decide what to do. It was two minutes before the bell. I could trash it. Or pass it on.

  But I wanted to look inside. Even better, take it home. Hide in my bedroom, then open the book and, channeling my inner masochist, devour every page. Revel in the nasty words that were certain to be there about me, proof of my misfit status.

  I had to see it. I needed to. As I’d mustered the courage to open it, the contraband notebook was snatched from my hands.

  “I’m surprised at you, Rachel.” Principal Gutierrez, in his usual knit tie and droopy suit, sallow-faced in the hallways’ fluorescent glare, had never looked at me like that. Disappointed. Judgmental. “Handing around these hurtful, bullying things.”

  “But it’s not—” I’d tried to defend myself. “Not mine. Someone gave it to me.”

  “I see.”

  His tone telegraphed that what he “saw” was that he thought I was lying.

  “But you knew what it was, didn’t you?” the principal went on. “And yet, you accepted it. Who gave it to you, Rachel? Who? Or was it yours to begin with?”

  I’d always looked up to Mr. Gutierrez, respected him. I’d always been the best of students—prompt, reliable, diligent. But did it matter, at that moment, what the truth was? It clearly did not.

  “What do you think?” The voice, Logan’s, from the darkness in the adjacent office, brought me back from Bethesda High.

  I’d learned my lesson in that locker-lined hallway. People believe what they want to believe. And information is power. Now, all those years later, I lowered my hand, left my coat behind, and took one silent step closer to Logan’s door. Then another. I’d know when the phone conversation was over—I hadn’t heard anyone else’s voice, so I figured that’s what it had to be—and by the time she got to the bye in goodbye, I’d be back at the office front door and make an innocently noisy reentrance.

  “If Nina finds out, she’ll go ballistic, you know that,” Logan was saying. I heard what sounded like a cabinet slamming shut, or a closet door. “Not to mention the damn media.”

  My heart was … I don’t even know what it was doing. Pounding didn’t seem intense enough. It would be better for me, I knew it, to leave soundlessly and pretend this whole thing never happened. But problem was, it had happened, was happening, and pretending it wasn’t merely delayed the inevitable. Whatever the inevitable was.

  Rachel. Nina. Ballistic. Media. There was no combination of those words that could lead anywhere benign.

  “Fired? That’s up to you.” I could hear the end-of-conversation tone in Logan’s voice. She’d turned over the decision about whatever it was to someone else. And only one person had more authority than she did. “Okay, then. Fine.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  I shouldn’t be thinking about my own problems. I know that. But as I take my seat at the counsel table for Jeffrey Baltrim’s bail hearing, I’m not savoring my first courtroom moment as an almost-lawyer. I’m wondering if my marriage will survive my summer job. Jack’s “Be careful what you choose” crack last night had been so intentionally hurtful that I’d gasped after he said it, almost in physical pain. Then Jack did the last thing I’d expected. He’d started laughing.

  “Kidding,” he’d said. “Sweetheart, I’m kidding.”

  Kidding again. I’d tried to be a good sport about it, even though to me it hadn’t sounded one bit like kidding. But Jack, persuasively conciliatory, went on to insist he’d understood about the so-called celebration and the lateness. Even the wine. Even “my relationship” with “that manipulative” Martha Gardiner. And, as he drew me onto his lap, he admitted he’d simply been worried about me. When he hadn’t heard from me, he’d feared the worst, that I was in a car accident or some disaster.

  “Forgive me, honey,” he’d whispered, his breath in my ear. He’d smoothed back my hair, the way he always does. I felt his chest rise and fall, so familiar and—almost—reassuring. “I know I’m not funny. I’m incredibly sorry. But if something happened to you, Rach, I’d never be happy again.”

  So all in all, I’d spent yesterday morning with a SWAT team, a butterfly-chasing little boy, and a murder suspect. The afternoon with a triumphant prosecutor. And the night with a darling but unpredictable husband. This morning Jack had sent me off with a sweetly promising kiss. “Knock ’em dead, kiddo,” he’d said.

  So, except for my emotional whiplash, I guess everything is fine. Like yesterday morning at the office, today I was the first one to arrive at Newton District Court. The court officer, a battleship in a blue uniform, had unlocked the door to courtroom A when I showed him my Harvard ID.

  “One of Gardiner’s new crop of interns, huh? Rachel?” He’d handed me back the laminated card, then pointed to the plastic name badge on his broad chest. “I’m Morris. Good luck to ya.
You’ll need it.”

  Everybody’s kidding these days, I’d thought. But no one is funny. Maybe it’s me. I pull a yellow legal pad and two pens from my briefcase, and stash the case under the table. I hope the rest of my internship is less complicated.

  The Middlesex County courthouse for Newton is mid-century brick on the outside and pure movie set on the inside. Gutted and renovated a few years ago, the resulting new interior looks like someone’s cost-cutting idea of intimidating. Elaborate velvet curtains, scrolled woodwork moldings, and imposing chandeliers hanging from high ceilings. The audience sits on churchlike wooden pews, designed, it looks like, to keep people uncomfortable. The place doesn’t need to be inviting, I suppose, since many people who come here are hoping to leave as fast as they can. Especially the defendants.

  I hear the courtroom door open.

  “Good morning, ma’am,” Morris is saying. “Your intern’s already here. Your guy’s here too, stashed in the basement. He’s not a happy camper.”

  “They never are, Morris, they never are,” Martha Gardiner says. “And he’ll be even less happy when this hearing’s over.”

  Gardiner almost smiles, almost, when she sees me at the table. The “basement” Morris referred to is two flights of stairs beneath us, the belowground holding cells. I imagine they’re grim. Jeff Baltrim will be escorted into the bright lights of the courtroom by way of a glass-encased stairway, and he’ll face the music sitting by his attorney at the defense-counsel table. I know Jack’s gotten many a client released on bail at these hearings. But it’s rare in a murder case.

  “Ready for this, Ms. North? Your first bail hearing? Or not, correct? Not that there’ll be bail.” Gardiner, in icy green silk today, waves me to my chair, then clicks open her hard-sided leather briefcase. A shiny gold rectangle under the clasp is monogrammed with her initials. Inside it is a stack of manila folders. Gardiner selects the one on top. It has a handwritten label: Baltrim, Jeffrey P.—Murder.