by Al Macy
She rocked her head like Stevie Wonder.
“What does that mean?”
“It was a private conversation. How was I to know it would be recorded?”
“This is serious! I can’t defend you properly if you don’t tell me everything. Let me be the judge of what’s important.”
“If you’d known ahead of time, would things be different?”
“Yes!” I signed “yes” twice to put an exclamation mark on it. “We could have researched the case law, presented a convincing argument, and perhaps the judge never would have seen the recording. Then maybe she wouldn’t have held you to answer, and you would be free right now. This whole nightmare would be over.”
That hit home more strongly than I intended. Tears welled in her eyes. Perhaps through our twin bond, I felt her pain. The terrible dagger to the heart of the words “if only.” I sat beside her and took her hand. I hadn’t seen her cry since that day in third grade when some boys at the park teased her and threw rocks. I got some pleasure out of beating the crap out of the ringleader, but all she got was the message: You are different. No wonder many deaf individuals end up with a prejudice against the hearing world.
After we sat that way for ten minutes, I moved back to my chair, facing her. “Why did you say you would throw Angelo off a cliff?”
“I said, ‘push.’”
“Okay.” Push was worse, of course, since it was more feasible. Angelo was a big guy. “Why that expression? So specific?”
“We lived so close to the cliffs over the ocean. On Scenic Drive. It seemed more real to say that. If I said I was going to throw him out of a helicopter, it wouldn’t feel real, since I don’t have one. I recall that I was going to say, ‘I’m going to fucking strangle him,’ but then a picture of me pushing him off Wedding Rock jumped into my head. So I said what I said.”
I leaned forward and patted her on the knee. “It was just bad luck. We’ll get through this, I’m not worried.” Was I lying? “Now you need to tell me why you were so angry with Angelo, even though you’ve been separated for—what?”
“A year.”
“Right.”
She took her time organizing her thoughts. “Angelo was a bad person. A bad human being.”
She didn’t have to tell me that. Before they were married, Carly seemed to be the only person who didn’t see it. Or maybe she didn’t care.
“But he had a special attraction for me, like a spider attracting a fly,” she said. “Everyone told me to stay away from him. Maybe that was the problem.”
“You don’t like being told what to do.”
“Correct. Surprisingly, the marriage went well for many years. At first, he was gung ho about learning ASL. He lost his enthusiasm for that, but he was easy to speech-read, and we communicated well. When I was pregnant, I had this feeling that he was cheating on me. I couldn’t believe it, though, and I ignored the signs.”
“Is that why you separated?”
“Don’t get ahead of me. No. That was after Patricia … died. Do I have to explain?”
I shook my head. A great tragedy can pull a marriage together or break it apart. For them, apparently, it was the latter.
She explained anyway. “I needed him after that, and he could have made things better. He could have … comforted me. We could have comforted each other. But he was distant. It was bad.”
I’d wanted to comfort her, but she wouldn’t let me close.
“Around Thanksgiving, I got an email,” Carly said. “Wait, I’ll show you. Give me the laptop.”
On the MacBook—the clone of the one the police had—she brought up Gmail.
Dear Carly Romero:
You dont know me. I am loosing my hearing and I no you from the news etc. Im not good with english. It is not my first language. I wasn’t going to tell this you but i herd that you are now divorcing from your husband and I think this information may be important for you.
I don’t know if you know but your husband was having an affair. I saw him doing that in 2014, when you were having a baby. I was at a hotel in Fortuna and I was in the lobby and I thought I saw you and Angelo checking in. I was going to come and introduce myself. I thought it was you that he was with then I got closer and then I saw that she wasn’t pregnant. So I stayed back.
Any way, they were kissing, and I saw them go to a room together.
I’m sorry if I’m not minding my own business. Maybe this will help you with the animony or something.
“I’m sorry, Carly. I had no idea.”
“That opened my eyes. I discussed it with my friends. He was having this affair all along. Right up until …”
“I can understand how that makes you feel.”
A blush spread up from her neck and onto her cheeks. “Can you? I don’t think so. The whole time that Patricia was alive and then when she died. No wonder he wasn’t there for me. How could he have possibly done that? You know what I wish?” Her jaw muscles stood out.
“What?”
“I wish he was still alive so I could kill him.”
At least she didn’t say “kill him again.”
“Carly, you are not to say anything like that. Not to me, not to anyone.”
“Are you saying I was wrong to have that conversation with Bridget?”
I thought about it. “No. A lot of people say they want to kill someone even though they don’t really mean it.” I would have added “You didn’t really mean it, did you?” but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like the answer.
“I meant it.” Carly always could read my mind.
“It was just bad luck that you said it the way you did and worse luck that the conversation was recorded. Now, there’s something else we need to discuss. Finn called and offered a plea deal. It—”
Carly signed, “No.”
“I have to present it to you. If you were to plead to second-degree murder, she would recommend a sentence of fifteen years.”
“I would rather die than be in prison for fifteen years. You don’t think I should take that plea, do you?”
I had hoped Carly would say she wasn’t going to plead guilty to something she didn’t do. In any case, it was too early to consider a plea like that.
“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t. We’re going to try to exclude the recording of the conversation as well as the eyewitness testimony. Do not get your hopes up, but if we can do that, they might drop the charges.”
* * *
It was Louella’s first day on the job, and she was getting DialUSA’s orientation tour, led by a Mr. Kim. He was tall and frightfully thin—maybe he was from North Korea?—and his accent made it seem as if he weren’t even speaking English.
She looked over the sea of call stations, whose dividers consisted of unpainted plywood. Four across and six deep. Twenty-four stations. She only saw a few who were old enough to have ever actually “dialed” a phone. A haze of smoke drifted near the buzzing lights. Since the building sat on tribal land, it was exempt from no-smoking laws, like many of the casinos.
“Is those computers broken?” Am I overdoing it? Louella was playing the part of a down-and-out old lady, living in her car, desperate for even the worst kind of job. Given Kim’s accent, he probably couldn’t hear the difference between ghetto Ebonics and Oxford English.
“No. Need more workers. Is lucky for you.”
“And the company is doing good?”
“Yes. Very good.” Kim spoke with a rapid staccato, like a machine gun.
Louella lit a cigarette and thought about her research. Call centers like this in the Philippines survived on the backs of low-wage employees. The slaves started at 13,000 pesos a month. Twenty-one cents an hour. So how could this company survive? It couldn’t. Her working theory was that what she was seeing was just a front.
“Here your station.” Kim stopped at a computer and headset in the last row. It couldn’t be called a cubicle since it had plywood on only three sides. He booted up the computer. “Computer do all the wo
rk. Call people; wait for answer. When scrip come here, you read. Okay?”
“Script,” she said without thinking, emphasizing the T.
“Yes, scrip. Understand? Lunch at twelve. Go home at six. Come to me if have questions.” He pointed to a corner of the room with a real desk.
So much for worker training. More proof that their real business lay elsewhere. Louella got comfortable and started working. Perhaps it was her smoker’s baritone that did the trick, but by midafternoon, she’d closed the sale of two whole life insurance policies.
When the poor schmuck on the other end of the line asked a question, the computer interpreted it and displayed a response for Louella to read. Won’t be long before they don’t need humans at all. There were only a few times when the computer’s suggested reply was inappropriate, and for those, Louella composed her own answer. This is why I earn the big bucks.
She did only minor snooping on that first day, talking with coworkers in the bathroom—no help there—checking for locked doors, watching for activity that didn’t fit.
At the end of the second day, she hid in a closet when it was quitting time. No one worked late. She spent an hour in the closet until her bladder demanded a trip to the bathroom. Am I getting too old for this? She cracked the door and listened. No sign of a night watchman yet.
After answering the call of nature, she headed to the locked door that held the most promise. She pulled the Kronos Electropik from her purse. It resembled an electric toothbrush with a thin blade in place of a brush head. It actually functioned a lot like a toothbrush, but instead of flushing plaque out from between your teeth, it flushed a lock’s pins out of the keyway. To turn a lock, all of the pins need to line up. The Electropik bounces the pins up and down while the tension tool, nothing more than a bent piece of metal, gently urges the cylinder to turn. On a cheap lock, like the one in front of Louella, it takes only seconds until the pins line up.
Sure enough, ten seconds of buzzing did the trick, and she was in. She closed the door, locked it, and switched on the light.
The size of a double garage, the place had none of the third-world unpainted plywood feel of the main room. High-tech office chairs sat at several workstations with keyboards and curved computer screens. The highlight, however, was the electronics equipment stacked on four racks against one wall.
Louella started snapping photos and recording video as she scanned her phone down each rack, getting closeups of the unfamiliar electronics. Someone would know what this stuff did. She also got footage of the manuals on the shelves.
She recognized a Mac Mini below one of the monitors and was tempted to slip it into her purse. No. This was a stealth operation and might not even be relevant to Romero’s death. All she had was the coincidence of Rozetti and Romero working for the same small company, the crabber’s contention that he didn’t know Romero, and the strangeness of the company. There was something funky going on, but it could be unrelated to Angelo.
She walked to the door, her work done. No more telemarketing for me. She froze. Voices. Plural! Unlikely they’d have two night watchmen. Whoever it was might come into the room. Crap.
If she could get out of the room before they arrived, she could say she fell asleep or something. That wouldn’t work. She could point her gun at them—not ideal. She looked around the room. No closets but—
The voices came closer, arguing.
She switched off the light and shook her phone to activate the flashlight. The electronics racks were far enough from the wall to allow rear access to the wiring. She slid in sideways then squatted slightly, her back against the wall and her arthritic knees pushed into the recess of one of the racks.
The door slammed open and the lights flashed on.
“—because we’re losing a fucking ten thousand dollars a day, that’s why.” The man’s voice was gruff with a New York City accent.
“On average.”
“What?”
The other man’s voice suggested a smaller person, no detectable accent. “You’re losing ten thousand a day on average. Some days—”
“Hey! You know what? It’s none of your fucking business. They told me it’s got to be fixed tonight, and that’s what you’re going to do. I’ll show you the problem.”
They said nothing as switches clicked, fans began whirring, and LEDs flashed on the equipment. Louella looked down. Her foot lay on a power cable to a heavy-duty power strip, and the plug had pulled halfway out of the socket. She inched her arm down to push it in but couldn’t reach. Already her right knee was sending flashes of pain up her body. She pictured the equipment snapping off and the bad guys investigating—finding an elderly black woman hunched over between the racks and the wall. Surprise!
The two men said nothing, but clicks from a keyboard reached her ears.
A new voice rang out. “I am totally stuck here, and I’m out of money. I know I was stupid, but if you wire the money, I can pay you back.” This voice sounded like someone imitating a robot. The words were totally monotonic. No intonation up or down.
“There. See?” New York said. “That’s gonna work about as good as Godzilla in a whorehouse.”
“Well, shit. You could have told me that over the phone.”
A slap sounded.
“Hey, what’d you do that for?”
“’Cause you don’t fuckin’ talk to me like that. Can you fix it or not?”
“Some dipshit didn’t patch in the modulator. Like this.”
A sharp snap sounded and a new fan whirred into life. Heat was already flowing back over Louella’s body, and sweat tickled its way down her sides.
“Now listen,” the smaller man said.
“I am totally stuck here, and I’m out of money. I know I was stupid, but if you wire the money, I can pay you back.” That time, the voice was perfect. After the fix, the woman’s voice sounded natural, filled with fear and frustration.
Little Man said, “See? Next time, you give me a call and tell me what’s wrong. I had to drive up here all the way from Ferndale. There was no need for me to come here.”
“We don’t talk about this stuff over the fucking phone.”
“Sheesh. When you call my phone, no one can listen in. Trust me.” Someone started powering down the equipment. “Besides, you don’t need to give away the whole store. For this, if you’d just said, ‘The voices are monotonic,’ I could have told you which switch to throw. Yeah, maybe you don’t know the word ‘monotonic’ but—ow! Hey look, you need me a lot more than I need you.”
The lights switched off and the door closed. The angry voices receded.
“Aaah!” Louella straightened up. She switched on her flashlight. The power cord had fallen out of the socket. She sidled out from behind the racks then got on her knees, reached in, and plugged the cord back into the wall.
Louella left the room and the building, locking the doors behind her.
Chapter Ten
Mid-January, Jen and I were talking strategy when someone entered the empty reception area. Nicole had gone back to law school, and I hadn’t yet hired someone to take her place.
A voice reached us. “Hello?”
I stepped out of my office to find none other than Isabel Sheridan standing there. She was the California state senator for our district and perhaps the most popular politician on the West Coast.
She took off her coat and draped it over her arm. “You’re Garrett Goodlove.”
“I am.” I shook her hand. “Let me take your coat.”
“I’ve seen you on the news, and I’ve come to you because I have a problem.”
On the few occasions I’ve encountered women who are famous for their beauty, seeing them in person far outstripped the TV or silver screen experience. I’ve never understood that.
Ms. Sheridan had a perpetual tan that I’m sure came from genetics rather than sun exposure, concave cheeks that had nothing to do with food deprivation, and a bearing that suggested royalty. Her hair was the color of almonds,
short, with a wave that came low over one eye and swept back toward her ear. Her nose was exceptionally long and narrow, adding to her aristocratic aura.
I brought her into my office and introduced her to Jen. I put another log on the fire and asked her how we might help.
“Are you taking on any new clients?”
I said, “It depends on the case. As you saw on the news, we’re busy with the murder trial, but before the trial begins there’s a lot of waiting involved. So, if it’s a short case … Is this a divorce matter? A custody dispute?”
She hesitated, as if she thought she should ask for her coat back. “Oh, no, nothing like that. Something criminal, I’m afraid.”
At that moment I realized that preparing Carly’s defense had awakened my old passion for criminal defense. Perhaps it was an indication that my recovery from depression was close to completion.
She settled into the visitor chair and sighed. “When I was young and idealistic, I did something very foolish, and now it’s come to light. I’m afraid it will be the end of my career in politics, which is maybe a good thing, but I’d rather retire on my own terms.”
I gave her the same speech about what she should and shouldn’t tell me, but she shook her head. “No, I did it, and I don’t want to cover it up.”
I was about to tell her to start from the beginning, when she did just that.
“When I was nineteen, I was a bit of a radical, as you probably know. I was out to save the world, whatever the cost. I was a member of a group that was violently opposed to big business. We started out as a watchdog group that had as its goal exposing the misdeeds of corporations in an anonymous way. It was a lot like WikiLeaks for corporations.”
Jen asked. “Why anonymous?”
“Because we did things that crossed the line.”
“For example?” I said.
“Everything I say here is confidential, right?”
“Yes.”
“Our schtick involved hacking into a corporation’s network and finding incriminating documents. We were very good at it.” Although she’d been totally poised up to that point, she began clasping and unclasping her handbag. Anxious.