Designer Crimes

by Lia Matera

  I nodded. It’s what I would have done. It made sense to me.

  “When did you leave town?”

  “After I saw the plane. Went all the way up to Klamath to fill my tank in case they were after me.” A hundred miles north. “Then I backtracked south off the highway, came down here. The only plan I could think of was to drive here and talk to you and ask you what to do next. You weren’t around, so I got lost and waited for you to come back.”

  “I’ve been back all day. Did you try calling earlier?”

  “I saw you were home, but I thought I’d better wait a little longer—in case they were watching you or whatever.” He looked away, making me wonder if there wasn’t more to it. “But then I just couldn’t take any more waiting. I haven’t been sleeping much, and tonight I thought, If I don’t do it right now, I’ll go crazy.” His eyes were locked on mine. This, at least, rang true. He seemed on the brink.

  I swallowed my frustration. No use chastising him for keeping me waiting an extra day. My anxiety wasn’t the issue.

  “There’s only one thing you can do, Brad. The court revoked your bail—the police’ll arrest you as soon as they spot your truck. We’ve got to go surrender before they find you. Tell them everything you’ve told me, give them a chance to clear you. No one else has the resources and the pooled information to make sense of your story.” I felt almost traitorous saying so. Why should he entrust his freedom to anyone, after so many inexplicable and horrific events? “We’ll try to get the charges dropped as soon as—”

  “I knew you’d say that.” His voice was petulant, almost childish. “I won’t go.”

  I glanced out my window, hoping to see Sandy’s light. Why hadn’t he reached his office? Had he discovered it was being watched?

  “You’ve got no other option, Brad, not really. You can’t keep hiding. Plus, the police need to know Piatti called you. They need to know she was alive. You withhold a piece of information like that and you could screw up the whole investigation, get them off on the wrong foot entirely.” I wondered if the coroner could tell from her charred remains that she hadn’t been dead when the fireball hit.

  “I’ve been thinking about all this. You can imagine.” His voice was unusually deep, almost a whisper. “You can’t imagine how hard I’ve been thinking.” He hunched forward. In the close car, his sweat and fear became an pungent presence. “I try to step outside the situation, pretend like it’s happening to someone else. Because it really doesn’t have anything to do with me—I’m just a regular working man. It has to do with other people’s strange trips that I got sucked into.”

  “What exactly did Cathy Piatti say to you on the phone?”

  “Strange trips that have to do with other people,” he repeated, his tone suddenly hostile. “Like you. I was thinking how this started when you came back to Hillsdale.”

  They’d executed the warrant to search Brad’s boat the day of my father’s death. An obituary in the local paper alerted Brad to the fact that I was in town. My Aunt Diana had called me a “hard little number” for taking a case “at such a time.” She chose not to understand that aiding an old friend helped me deal with the loss. The opportunity to assist Brad had been a tiny sluice, relieving the pressure.

  But after a weekend of tormented fretting, Brad was imagining a more sinister relationship between my presence then and his problems now.

  “This started weeks earlier,” I pointed out, “when Cathy Piatti bled into that bucket.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But your dad was already sick then. You were in town off and on all month.”

  I pushed away memories of that month, still too painful to contemplate. And I braced myself, knowing what he was going to say next. Knowing it because I’d heard it from Sandy.

  “I think this is about you, Laura. I think somebody talked Cathy into giving blood, maybe over days or whatever to get the volume where it needed to be. Or maybe giving her a transfusion to get her level back up. His voice had a sing-song quality, as if he repeated something he’d memorized. Had he spent the weekend litanizing his denial? “I think someone talked Cathy into it so I’d get arrested. So you’d be my lawyer. I mean, you were in town. We were friends. I’d go to you, right? This whole thing could be about you.”

  “I didn’t even know Cathy Piatti. She has nothing to do with me.” The suggestion made me angrier than it should have.

  “And everybody knows the Southshore Mall was your uncle’s Frankenstein.” His eyes burned with a furious light. He’d been dragged into something he might not ever get out of, and he was choosing to believe it had to do with me, not him. Scared and sleepless, he was determined to find an out, a scapegoat.

  “No one would have any reason to go that much trouble and hurt that many people on my account, Brad. I have no idea what all this is really about. But what you’re thinking doesn’t make sense.”

  A low rumble started in his chest and climbed to his lips. At such close quarters, windows obscured with claustrophobic moisture, Brad Rommel was scaring me.

  He was in a fury of panic and bad choices with no outlet except me. His mouth opened to a silent roar, eyes pressed beneath a thousand-pound brow.

  I erupted from the driver’s door, driven by pure instinct. He was like a bomb of seething emotion, and right then, I wanted to put some distance between us.

  I took four paces out in the street, the driver’s door still open. I stood shaking with the chill my sudden flight response. I tried to see what Brad was doing, tried to hear something besides the pounding of my own heart. I backed toward modest warehouses and studios, all closed, all unlighted.

  Maybe I missed some tip-off sound, a motor engaging, wheels spinning on damp concrete. But I saw the approaching car at the same moment I heard the engine. It was large and dark. That was all that registered. It’s headlights were off.

  That scared me. That and the car’s speed. And the fact that it was bearing down on me.

  I ran, not back toward my car, not back inside it. I ran across the street. I ran to the curb, that traditional area of pedestrian safety.

  Maybe I was still fearing Brad. Maybe I thought I’d get clipped against the open car door.

  I didn’t think. I just ran to the sidewalk.

  Evidently that was not what the driver of the dark car expected. It had already begun to swerve into the wrong lane.

  I heard the crunch of my car door being ripped from its hinges, then flying off the hood of the other car to bounce down the concrete in a scraping, rolling lightshow of sparks.

  The black car continued on, zipping around a corner.

  For a moment, all I could do was stare at my door, lying up the street like discarded junk.

  The next thing I knew, Brad Rommel had bolted from the passenger side, running in the opposite direction the car had taken.

  He was gone around a corner before I had a chance to shout his name.

  I knew I’d better get the hell out of there myself. I did a staggering reel, looking between buildings toward Sandy’s office. Still no light.

  I considered dashing there anyway, if only because it was a destination, a place I’d always felt confident and secure.

  But the no-headlights car might be close by. And I couldn’t let Brad slip away. However furious he might be, however wild in his notions, my obligation toward him was as firm as ever. I needed to get him to the cops before explanation became hopeless.

  I ran back across the street to my car. The keys were still in the ignition. As far as I knew, only the door and body were damaged.

  I twisted the key, pumped the gas. The engine whined. I turned it again. Again it whined.

  But the third try got me going. This time I decided I needed the lights. I needed to be able to find Brad and see the dark car coming, see who was inside.

  Though the engine sounded wrong to me (maybe just my imaginati
on), I covered every inch of the neighborhood, searching. Searching, worrying, freezing to death with the damp bay air buffeting me through the hole where my door should have been.

  My arms and hands began to shake. It was five in the morning, the darkest, coldest hour of the day, and I’d been wakened and confused and scared and almost hit by a car. And now I couldn’t find my client, Sandy hadn’t shown up (my god, why not?), and I knew danger could strike with force enough to rip a metal door from its hinges and bounce it down the concrete.

  There wasn’t a drop of adrenalin left in my system. Frazzled nerves jerked me like a puppet.

  I pulled up in front of Sandy’s office just long enough to be sure he wasn’t inside. Long enough to burst into tired, frustrated tears.

  Then I went home, feeling frozen and exposed without the car door I’d left lying in the street.

  24

  I found Sandy waiting in my apartment. A phone message at his office, supposedly from me—and apparently sounding enough like me—had sent him there.

  It took me a while to soothe him, and it took him a while to soothe me. But now I was nearly recovered from my fright, and he’d managed to master his thwarted protectiveness.

  “The whole thing’s as phony as a three-dollar bill,” he repeated. “And that includes your client’s story. You didn’t get eavesdropped on or followed—or at least, chances are slim compared to the most obvious solution. Which is, Rommel called you, set up the meeting, got an accomplice to get me out of the way—call and imitate your voice—and try to run you over. That’s why you didn’t find Rommel again. Damn black car picked him up and drove his butt out of there.”

  “All I know is, when he was talking to me, I believed him.” I was sprawled on my couch, too tired to be sure what made sense. “His anger at me and all that, I can see it. He can’t understand why this is happening to him. He’s looking for an explanation, and he’s blaming me. If he was guilty, he wouldn’t have to do that. I don’t know how else to say it.”

  “Try this way: crock of shit.” He was pacing my living room, running one hand over his hair, jerking the other elbow. A mass of tired mannerisms and up-too-early crankiness, he’d jettisoned his usual explore-all-alternatives approach. “Brad Rommel is a psycho, that’s what I think. I think he’s behind this whole thing, and furthermore I think that’s the only way this makes sense.”

  The dull light of morning was bringing scant cheer to my seen-better-days furniture and wall paint.

  I tried to stay calm. “We can at least check parts of Brad’s story. Whether Piatti was alive when the mall blew up, whether he got gas in Klamath.” For the tenth time, I cursed myself for not bringing up the bucket of blood in my uncle’s yard. Did Brad know anything about that? “Who the hell’s in the bucket, Sandy? Who can we call this early?”

  His hand was already on my cordless phone. “Bartoli. You’ve got to tell him about Rommel.”

  “No, not yet, I don’t …” I knew I’d have to do it soon. But not now. Not this very minute.

  Sandy paced with the cordless to the window, looking out on the drab neighborhood that became my home after I lost my White, Sayres salary and the Presidio Heights apartment it supported.

  I listened to him ask for Bartoli. His pause made me sit up straight: apparently he’d gotten through, was being connected. He glanced uncertainly over his shoulder at me.

  Tired or not, here I come. I reached out for the phone.

  By the time it was against my ear, Bartoli was saying, “Hello,” impatiently, as if for a second or third time.

  “It’s Laura,” I said. “Calling from San Francisco. What do you have on the contents of that bucket, Jay? Anything?”

  “Laura! I was just going to call and ask you—”

  Hastily, “I’ve been worried about Uncle Henry, all the reporters hanging around there. With everything else he’s got to cope with. And I know they’ll dog him until they’ve got that information. Do you know yet who’s blood it is?”

  “We flew some down to one of your labs in the city. There’s a test’ll tell us if it’s all fresh blood or if some was frozen. Have you heard from—”

  “Frozen? Someone bleeding themselves or getting bled gradually and freezing it? So it looks like they lost so much it killed them.” I hoped my way of briefing Sandy sounded conversational. “What makes you think that’s true?”

  “Just that it couldn’t be ruled out—something about how it looked under the microscope—and we need to rule it out. But listen, have you—?”

  I jumped off the couch and ran into the bathroom, listening to the connection get overwhelmed with static. I could almost say in good conscience that I hadn’t heard the end of Bartoli’s question.

  “Jay?” I said loudly. “Jay? Damn cordless. Let me try another channel.”

  I would have hung up, I think. But I turned to find Sandy framed in the bathroom door. Looking grim, shaking his head.

  Phone at arm’s length, I told him quietly, “They’ve sent the blood down here to check if some of it was frozen.”

  His brows went up. Then, “Tell Bartoli.”

  I wanted to argue. I knew he was right.

  I threaded past him, moving closer to the base unit.

  I didn’t have the energy to think any more about it. I’d lost heart, talking to Brad, watching my car door get ripped off.

  I said, “I just saw Brad Rommel.”

  25

  I spent the morning at the San Francisco Hall of Justice, talking to homicide inspectors and, via phone, every cop in Hillsdale. A small army of men were fired up and ready to capture Brad Rommel should he show himself again. And despite my insistence that someone was after him—I offered the gaping hole where my car door should be as proof—all they seemed to care about was his capture.

  I reached my office in the early afternoon feeling scoured by their questions. I was lucky to leave so soon. They could have made more of the fact that I’d delayed calling until after meeting Brad. Either they believed I’d meant to lead him in for surrender, or they hoped to tap my phone and follow me to him next time.

  I paced and worried, wondering whether to remain in San Francisco, on the theory that Brad would contact me here again, or go up to Hillsdale and check on my uncle, check in with Jay Bartoli. Irresolute, I shuffled papers on my desk, looked out the window at traffic creeping past warehouses toward the freeway, considered calling Perry Verhoeven.

  I was underoccupied, with a crackling charge of nervous energy. I tried to find or make work for myself. Never before in my entire career had I needed to do that.

  For fun, I imagined what kind of day Steve Sayres was having. Sandy was tied up with him now, beginning investigations that would clear his clients. That meant I would no longer get news from him about Sayres. It would be unprofessional of him to discuss it.

  Finally, driven by restlessness to do something business-related, I phoned Perry Verhoeven.

  His tone was guarded. “Laura. Is there some loose end you’d like to discuss?”

  “Actually, Perry, I was hoping we could set up a meeting. I feel that perhaps I contributed to a false impression on your part, and I’d appreciate the opportunity to mention a few things I neglected to bring up earlier.” I’d said it all, and we both knew it. But it might be a foot in the door if he was having second thoughts about switching to Sayres.

  “My schedule’s a little tight, Laura. Maybe we could have lunch next week or early the week after.” Don’t call me, I’ll call you.

  “I have some information that would interest you, Perry.” If he took the bait, I’d think of something. He had to be a little nervous about Sayres now. He had to have a few qualms about having acted on Sayres’ slanders. If he’d meet with me, I could at least stress my relative cheapness. I knew his business better than Sayres did, and I billed at a lower rate.

  There was a c
hill silence. “What information?”

  “Something I’ve learned.” I’d bring up the RICO stuff, as if perhaps he didn’t know yet. Sayres didn’t have a lock on disingenuous insinuations.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s take a few minutes now.”

  Not on the phone. “Have you had lunch?”

  “Yes. What’s on your mind?”

  “Let’s talk face to face.” I needed time to think, to devise a strategy to charm him. “Why don’t I drop by? I could be there in an hour.” I’d rather sound underemployed, even desperate, than allow his window of availability to slam. He was big-ticket, worth the loss of face.

  And meeting him was something to do, something besides worry.

  He’d barely finished saying, “All right,” before he hung up.

  I replaced the receiver, feeling deflated. I’d talked him into a meeting he didn’t want, to discuss nothing he didn’t already know. I’d have to say it awfully persuasively.

  Again Maryanne More’s offer crossed my mind. If it should turn out there was no ulterior motive (as far as Sandy was concerned, a very big if), maybe I should consider it. Even if I could sweet-talk Verhoeven back onto my client list, all I had was Verhoeven’s work, the usual corporate protection, stock offerings, litigation. It paid well, it was complicated enough to be interesting, it had a certain status in a town with more corporate counsel than corporations. But it was hardly what anyone would consider “meaningful.” It was just commerce.

  Labor law would take me places I hadn’t been. It would put my skills at the service of people facing losses as dramatic as livelihood and reputation. And I could continue doing criminal defense without disdainful corporate clients jumping ship.

  I rose with a sigh. All of that was beside the point right now. More’s offer might be window dressing. She might be a felon, even a murderer. But assuming she was sincere, I couldn’t “choose” unless I had an alternative. I had to try to get Verhoeven back.

  I drove to his plant, a two-story cement and glass building in the middle of huge parking lot east of San Francisco. Bracketing Walnut Creek’s leafy Stepford-yuppie neighborhoods were endless drives of new concrete plants and corporate offices. Twice I mistakenly pulled into places that looked just like Perry’s. Finally, I saw his logo: VerTechs. (His employees, I heard, called it VerTigo.)