Designer Crimes

by Lia Matera

  I still wore the cement shoes of an older technology—telephone calls, paper files, handwritten notes on yellow pads. But working for Perry Verhoeven had forced me to learn the basics of electronic communication.

  I watched Sandy make the call, admiring his undertailored length. He looked terrific, maybe looked better dressed than not. Being too slender worked for him in a suit.

  He muttered into the mouthpiece. “You heard me, Ozzy. However you need to.”

  Sandy usually reigned his newest employee in, reminding him they could get their information by legal means, if they were patient enough. Certainly their lawyer clients preferred admissible evidence to the ill-gotten lowdown. “Especially look for anything around the phrase ‘designer crimes.’ Doesn’t have to be those words, but anything that could fit under that umbrella.”

  When he hung up, I commented, “You’re picking a hell of a time to break into their computer system. You leave a trace and the police will nail you to the wall.”

  He turned back to face me. “Could be someone’s after you.” As if that justified any risk.

  “No.” I resumed rocking. “I’d have some clue or worry. There’d be some area of my life it could come out of. I’d know what it was about, even if I didn’t know who.”

  I reviewed the months since my return to San Francisco. I’d angered a few people, certainly—I was a lawyer, it went with the territory. But I could think of nothing likely to generate an attempt on my life. Not down here, anyway.

  “I’ve got the Rommel thing up in Hillsdale.” I’d returned to my hometown to help my Uncle Henry with the sad business of probating my father’s will. I’d ended up agreeing to defend my high school friend Brad Rommel against a murder charge. “But there’s nothing in that case to send someone gunning for me.”

  “Connie Gold.” Sandy offered the name jokingly.

  Hillsdale’s DA had written a teleplay based on her prosecution of the county’s only serial rapist. She’d spent months winning the victims’ trust and eliciting confidences no one else could have. Then she’d put them on the witness stand, dragging out humiliating details arguably irrelevant to the case but necessary for a teleplay. There were ethical rules prohibiting defense lawyers from doing that. But prosecutors could cash in on the public’s hatred of criminals even if it meant revictimizing the victims.

  I’d handled some very high profile cases, too. As near as I could figure, Gold hated me for being as famous as she was. She’d cast a lot of aspersions on me, equating me with past clients.

  I’d been forced to retaliate: Brad Rommel deserved a fair fight. If I was going to enter the arena spattered with mud, Gold would have to appear soiled, too. It made extra work for me—depressingly cynical work—but the jury couldn’t be allowed to see Gold as the better person.

  I’d gone to the State Bar and the news media to block in advance Gold’s sale of rights to the Rommel story—though as far as I knew, she wasn’t planning a sale. I’d made a public stink about the commercial exploitation of victims and the DA’s obligation to provide closure rather than seek personal enrichment. What if victims stopped revealing “embarrassing” details to DAs because they didn’t want them featured in a movie of the week?

  My statements convinced two of the serial rapist’s victims to sue Gold. I hadn’t intended that to happen.

  “I’m not so sure I’m kidding,” Sandy added.

  “No,” I repeated, “it’s crazy, Sandy. The whole idea of someone being after me is crazy.” I said it with such authority.

  “When do you go back up to Hillsdale?”

  “I’ve got a Motion to Exclude Evidence tomorrow. Win or lose, I’m back here the day after. If I do lose, I’ll go up again on the weekend. Can you come?” One of Brad’s better qualities was his affluence. He owned a fishing boat, an airplane, and a mountain cabin. He could afford an out-of-town investigator. And Sandy was worth the extra money.

  His grin told me he planned to stick close to me for a while. “Looking forward to the sunshine,” he replied.

  Again I glanced out his window. Sometimes I found myself fantasizing about the savage chill and smothering wetness of the Pacific north coast. There was an animal sensuality to being battered by wind and flogged by rain. Maybe I’d spent too much of my adulthood in the temperate city.

  Or maybe I’d finally noticed that San Francisco was changing. Mission neighborhoods that a few years ago enjoyed a colorful renaissance now cowered in fear of gang violence. AIDS lent a plague-year leer to the Castro Street carnivals. Everywhere, stunned throw-aways shivered in doorways. On a gray day, without bay sparkle or views, the city could be downright ugly.

  And somehow it was gray days I missed most.

  4

  Only one restaurant in Hillsdale made a pretense of city elegance. I shared a table with my client, Brad Rommel. The aroma of roasted garlic and olive oil wafted over us. He looked around as if wanting me to look, too. But I was used to sponge-painted walls and huge abstract canvases. I couldn’t muster the requisite appreciation. And the view—a downtown blighted with soaped windows and For Lease signs—was depressing.

  It appeared I’d taken losing the Motion to Exclude Evidence harder than Brad Rommel had. But then, some clients harbored the misconception they could prove their innocence at trial; that failure to go to trial would blemish their reputations. Unfortunately, few reputations could survive the negative publicity of those days or weeks in court. A mere arrest, on the other hand, might eventually be forgotten.

  “Hillsdale’s changed a lot, hasn’t it?” Brad asked, as if we hadn’t already had this conversation.

  “Mmm.” Every acquaintance I saw seemed to need my reassurance that Hillsdale had improved in the last two decades. Considering it once offered only a roaring highway of drive-in burger joints and bad coffee shops for entertainment, of course the restored waterfront and Victorian bed and breakfasts helped. On the other hand, downtown, paltry as it had been, was dying like a gangrenous limb. And the renovated Old Town district looked like an untrafficked stage set.

  “Even the weather’s better,” he continued.

  Everyone I encountered made a point of telling me so. It seemed to disturb them that I’d left—or maybe that they’d stayed.

  I looked out the window at the cold white sky. The watersheds of my youth—losing my mother, battling the matriarchal relative who’d “taken her place,” making a disastrous teenage marriage and having an even more disastrous love affair—were mere memories now, without the power to torment me. I’d been forced to relive them on previous visits, and I’d found them surprisingly life-sized. Only my youth had made them huge. Perspective—and physical distance—had shortened their shadows. I could finally see Hillsdale for what it was, not what it had done to me.

  “I like it here, Brad,” I reassured him. “I like how green and overgrown it is, I like the old Victorians, I love the wild, empty beaches and woods.” But the new shops and restaurants couldn’t hold a candle to city life, not even close. The things people bragged about were the things that mattered least about Hillsdale, as far as I was concerned.

  “It’d be a great town if the mall hadn’t cut the heart out of it.”

  To roaring fanfare, a mere eight years ago, Hillsdale got its first real mall, as plastic and predictable as any other, with the same stores and multiplex theater. I’d nixed several invitations to eat in its “food court.” No chance Brad would suggest going there.

  His long-time lover, the woman he was accused of killing, had been driven out of business by it. A sign reading Fixtures For Sale was all that remained of her downtown boutique.

  “So let’s talk about the next step, Brad.”

  He looked chagrined, whether at the return to matters at hand or my reluctance to discuss the mall, I didn’t know.

  “We’ll have to go trial, unless we can find some exculpating evidence.�
� In this case more than any other I’d tried, it seemed a possibility. “Next time I come to town, I’d like to bring the detective I generally use. You need someone really good.”

  “What’s wrong with our local guys?” His face reddened beneath white-gold hair, setting off the blue of his eyes. There was a high-intensity virility in his coloring, his burliness, the way he sat too far forward and talked too loudly, as if demanding agreement.

  If I could understand the Hillsdale inferiority complex, maybe I could move Brad beyond silly boosterism. “This isn’t a buy-local situation, Brad. You need someone that I trust and know how to work with. Not a pig in a poke.”

  He scowled, his Nordic brows several shades paler than his fisherman’s skin. “I don’t see the good in taking bread out of a local person’s mouth, not with the area hurting like it is. Bad enough the chain stores at the mall killed the local guys downtown.” His eyes brimmed. “Bad enough its restaurants buy frozen from Mexico when they could get hours-old fish from their own bay.”

  “I know.” And he knew the mall had been my Uncle Henry’s pet project, Hillsdale’s “ticket to modern times.” But the mall wasn’t the issue.

  Brad could end up on death row. Surely that was sufficient reason to import the best. Or did he think mere innocence was enough?

  “All I’m saying, Brad: this is a factually complicated case. We’re talking about a woman disappearing. She has to have left some trace somewhere. The police and sheriff have already done their best to find her”—her body, anyway—“and now we need to do ours.”

  A bucket of her blood had been discovered beside a trail near Dungeness Head, not far from Brad Rommel’s fishing boat. A fisherman’s bucket, still contaminated with traces of fish guts, a bucket like the ones on his vessel. “I wouldn’t tell you how to fish. Please let me do the best job for you that I can.”

  He rubbed a rough hand over his brows as if massaging a headache. He seemed reluctant to speak. As if on cue, a chipper waitress brought long twists of bread and launched into a recitation of the day’s specials, most involving deep sea fish. She looked back over her shoulder at him when she left.

  “We’ll be checking more places Cathy Piatti might have gone,” I told him, as if it were settled I’d bring Sandy along. “I know the police have looked everywhere she said she was going. But”—he always hated this suggestion—“it is possible she lied. Faked her death and ran off.”

  “Why would she do that to me?”

  “Maybe not to you. We don’t know what she running from, Brad. If she was.”

  All we knew was that one and a half liters of her DNA-matched blood, partly decomposed, was frozen in the Sheriff’s evidence locker. A woman losing a third of her blood would be disoriented, possibly in shock, but probably not dead. But this wasn’t necessarily all the blood Piatti had lost, merely all that had been captured in a bucket.

  Because she’d been missing for weeks, Piatti was presumed dead by misadventure. And the misadventure was easily blamed on the boyfriend she’d been ready to abandon after a seven-year affair.

  “We’ll also need to concentrate on how and where she might have died. We’ve struck out so far on motive, on finding out who her enemies were. But where the blood was drawn will tell us a lot. We’ll check mortuaries. They’re set up to pump blood out of bodies. Maybe some employee played Igor. And we’ll talk to people at local hospitals. Any paramedic, nurse or doctor would know how to bleed someone. We’ll also get a list of places that slaughter animals.”

  I watched Brad shudder. It was repulsive to imagine a person hung upside down, blood pouring from her jugular into a bucket. Worse than imagining her with catheters in her veins. But there was simply no way to bleed into a bucket from some accidental wound—not one point five liters worth. Whoever put the bucket beside the trail collected the blood in a systematic way, perhaps to make some point.

  Brad buffed his checked flannel shirt as if his chest ached. He’d wanted to put on a suit and listen to me argue his motion, but I’d discouraged him. I knew he’d get hung up on the “mere technicality” aspect of my argument—that the Sheriff hadn’t had sufficient grounds for the warrant to search his boat and cabin. I was afraid Brad would simmer to a verbal boil if he heard me making statements that seemed to assume his guilt.

  But it was essential to throw out as much physical evidence as possible. They’d found buckets on Brad’s boat. They’d found a skirt caught in truck tires lashed to the boat to keep it from smacking into the dock.

  It was known Piatti had had enough of Hillsdale. Her business had failed, and, to hear her neighbors tell it, she’d grown tired of Brad. They’d quarreled frequently. He’d grown furious when she packed her things, made a blustering scene her neighbors kept embellishing. Then Piatti surprised everyone by leaving without saying good-bye.

  No one had heard from her for almost three weeks when the Sheriff was persuaded to investigate. Because Brad had grown belligerent when questioned, the Sheriff had gotten a warrant to search his boat and cabin.

  En route to the boat, a deputy discovered a bucket containing a congealed, moldy, insect-infested substance resembling old liver. It had turned out to be nineteen-day-old blood. Cathy Piatti’s blood, one and a half liters worth, once it was reconstituted.

  Today I’d argued that Brad’s belligerence—if it could be characterized as such—hadn’t been sufficient grounds for the search warrant, and that the empty buckets and skirt must therefore be excluded as evidence. The skirt might not matter—it be could be anyone’s, washed in anytime; it had yet to be identified as Piatti’s. It didn’t support the DA’s contention that Brad, after inexplicably bleeding Piatti to death, sailed out to sea and dumped her body and belongings overboard. Without the buckets, the DA didn’t have much of a case.

  Though Connie Gold seriously botched her defense of my motion, she prevailed nonetheless. Judicial bias in favor of a local girl had certainly been a factor. None of the state’s evidence was excluded.

  Now I’d have to argue that the bucket might have come from any boat, and that, besides, other people had access to Brad’s. I’d have to argue that the trapped debris of strangers, including clothing, proved nothing; or, if the skirt was Piatti’s, that it had fallen overboard during some recent date. If the case went to trial, that is.

  With luck, I’d be able to clear Rommel long before then—either by finding Piatti or figuring out what had happened to her.

  I’d known Brad since high school. He’d been an earnest, nose-to-the-grindstone kid who didn’t trust shortcuts and didn’t shirk blame. From what I could see, he hadn’t changed. He’d grown into a forthright, hard-working man willing to fish all day and spend his evenings helping staff his girlfriend’s boutique. He was no killer. And the evidence against him didn’t amount to a hill of beans.

  That didn’t mean the DA couldn’t make life hell for him. Not knowing what had happened to Cathy Piatti seemed torture enough.

  “The other thing, Brad? I think Connie Gold might get in touch with the cable network people who produced her teleplay last year.”

  He shook his head, shrugging slightly.

  “Two years ago, Gold prosecuted a serial rapist …” I cut my explanation short, seeing from his curt nod that he recalled the case. “She signed the contract with the production company before the rapist’s trial. She sold ‘her,’ quote-unquote, story. It was on television a few months ago.”

  “I knew there was a TV movie about the DA here.” His tone said, What does it have to do with the price of fish?

  “The point is, she approached that trial with the idea of turning it into a good movie.” I couldn’t prove it, but how could it not become a major consideration? “She stage-managed her witnesses. Two of them are suing her now.” After I insisted on an investigation by the State Bar. “To keep her from doing the same thing in this case, I’ve made a preemptive stink.”


  I’d contacted reporters from California Lawyer, the ABA Journal, and the Recorder. Articles dissecting Gold’s ethics in the rape case had appeared in each. Entertainment Weekly had picked up the story. And Hillsdale’s media had taken a gratifying interest.

  I’d had to do it. Gold had hinted—on camera—that I’d condoned the politics of Wallace Bean, my craziest client, assassin of two conservative U.S. Senators. She’d implied I had no commitment to justice, only to enhancing my reputation by freeing dangerous criminals. In a society that worshipped fame, however achieved, it seemed useless to bemoan the wearisome onslaught of bad publicity. It seemed useless to canonize privacy when the man on the street longed for attention.

  But I couldn’t let Gold tarnish my reputation, not before a trial. I had to make sure her pot looked as black as my kettle. I’d shown her how it felt to have the press on her heels instead of in her corner.

  “I think I’ve stopped her, Brad.”

  “I don’t know why you bothered,” he said through tight lips.” It sounds like a lot of trouble for no reason.” His chest heaved as if it were difficult to breathe. “It won’t make much of a movie when I get acquitted.”

  “That’s true.” If an unconvicted man were presented as guilty, he could sue. And without suggesting guilt, the story would lack interest. “They won’t make a movie unless there’s a conviction.”

  “Then I don’t see what difference it makes.” He broke a breadstick. “I don’t see why you’re making trouble.”

  “It won’t hurt your case,” I assured him. Did he think Gold would come down harder if she was angered? She’d try to get him executed regardless. “It affects how the DA’s case is structured,” I insisted. “As defense counsel, I’m prohibited from selling your story. That’s so I’ll focus on doing what’s best for you instead of heightening the drama to get a better movie or book deal out of it. The DA should have to play by the same rules.”