Compelling Evidence

CHAPTER 41

There is a bridge, 900 feet high, over the American River. Some people use it to get to Sutter’s Mill, the place where James Marshall discovered gold. Some people take it to eternity. George Cooper did that on a Tuesday morning in late October.

His house is in utter disarray. I’ve not been here in more than a year. Had I come and seen the bedlam of this place, perhaps I would have known how far over the edge of reality Coop had truly gone.

I’ve brought Nikki to help me. Parts of this task require a woman’s touch. There are personal belongings and mementos everywhere. Things from a lifetime spent in public service. She will carefully package some of the more delicate items, things we don’t want to trust to the movers. Relatives from the East have come for Coop’s funeral and have asked us to oversee the packing and shipping of his belongings to the next of kin.

Harry has come along today, if for no other reason than to satisfy his curiosity.

It is what I have sworn I would never do again, another probate for a friend, this time Coop’s own. I am making no mistakes. Peggie Conrad is doing her magic with Coop’s probate file.

Coop had written to me an epistle of some length, in a scarcely legible scrawl, and mailed it the day he dove from the bridge. In it he apologized profusely for the trial he had put me through, for the torment and agony of Eli Walker’s column, which he had never intended. But as Coop had told me that morning at my house, he never thought I would take Talia’s case.

“Jeez,” says Harry. “The smell.” Harry’s wandering through the rooms of the single-story farmhouse that Coop and his wife had bought in the early fifties, a place that had seen many happy times when the three of them were together as a family.

There’s a stench about it now, something I have smelled only a few times before, like the odor of death. In the time of Coop’s marriage this house was spotless. Jessica Cooper was a meticulous housekeeper.

Now the rooms are cluttered with trash, discarded food containers, aluminum trays of half-eaten TV dinners. This place, I think, is a mirror of the chaos that was George Cooper’s life in those final months of grief, and ultimate revenge.

There are newspaper clippings everywhere, yellowing strips of newsprint from the local and national press, all with a common thread, Ben’s death, the murder investigation, Talia’s arrest and indictment. The clippings are strewn on tables, on the floor; they rest under dishes of rotting cat food, the pet nowhere to be seen. There are little piles of feline feces littering the carpet. Some of these have begun to breed curious white molds.

In one corner of the room, propped against the wall, is a metal frame on wheels, a furniture dolly, and a large piece of discarded carpet. Here in this setting, Coop’s story to Nelson, the theories on how to move a body no longer appear so implausible.

“When did you know,” says Nikki, “about Cooper?” She has been trying to put the pieces together for a week now. I’ve not given her all the parts.

“Not until the day of the verdict,” I tell her. “Though I should have seen it long before.” I cannot believe how obtuse I have been.

“The receipt?” says Harry.

I nod.

“If it hadn’t been for Peggie Conrad, the work on Sharon’s probate, Cooper’s actions would have gone unseen,” I tell them.

“He was a sick man,” says Harry.

“He was lost,” I say.

Harry’s dropping little pieces of garbage, mostly old food, into some large trash bags he’s found in the kitchen.

“Looks like Skarpellos told a lot of truth,” he says.

I nod. It is troubling that much of what Tony Skarpellos attested to in open court-his story of Ben’s plans for divorce, the assertion that Ben had designs on another woman, the items I had ridiculed to the jury as false-I can see now were in fact gospel.

“Who was the mystery lady?” says Harry. “Potter’s love interest?”

“Sharon Cooper,” I say.

This settles on him slowly; a soulful expression tells me he is beginning to fit all the pieces together.

“Did you suspect during the trial?” he asks.

“Never. The Greek was right about a lot of things,” I say. “My estimation of Ben blinded me.” It is not that I view their affair, Sharon and Ben’s, as great sin, it is that I credited Ben with more discretion, and as things unfolded, a far greater measure of character.

In his suicide missive, the one he sent me in the mail, Coop has told me little bits and pieces. I have been left to fill in the rest, but this is not difficult. It seems Ben did intend to divorce Talia, but not until after senate confirmation hearings on his high court nomination were concluded. This is why Talia didn’t know. She wasn’t meant to, not yet.

“How do you figure a guy in his sixties, and a girl twenty-six?” says Harry.

“Sharon was infatuated, dazzled by the money, the power,” I say. “Ben.” I make a face, like this is the wildest of guesses. “Maybe Ben was in love. Who knows?”

“But what would draw her to an old man?” he says.

“The mix of her dreams,” I tell him, “her desire to be a lawyer, and the doting attention of the managing partner in the city’s most powerful law firm. That’s heady stuff when you’re twenty-six and in law school.”

Nikki’s nodding like she agrees with this chemistry. “A lot of young women go for power,” she says. The way Nikki says this, I can tell it is not an option she has ever considered for herself.

“You don’t think about geriatrics when you’re being courted over muscovy duck and Dom Perignon in crystal, on broad linen,” I tell Harry.

“Coop argued with his daughter when she came to him and told him of their plans for marriage. This was no May-December romance. This was folly, and Coop knew it.”

There is much of this moralizing in his letter to me. He and Sharon had fought, like only parents and children can, with a venom that leaves a long-lasting trail of pain. It was the last time Coop would see her alive.

“When it was over,” I tell them, “she’d gone to Ben, against her father’s bitter admonitions. They drove along the river road. The rest is surmise. But I think perhaps they argued. Maybe Sharon wanted to go public with their plans. Ben resisted, adamant that it not disturb his long-awaited nomination. He had been months, the better part of a year, trekking to Washington to lay the groundwork. A retirement from the court was imminent. In some way Sharon distracted him, and Ben went off the road, head-on, into the trees.”

Nikki has found some family photos in a drawer in the dining room. She’s getting teary. I look over her shoulder. She’s holding one, Coop and Jessica, the photo probably twenty years old, before gray had become the dominant shade on their heads. There is a little girl, Sharon, no more than six or seven. The three of them are standing on some unnamed pier, all smiles and happiness. A fingerling of some fish dangles on the line held by Sharon, a gap-toothed grin on her face. No parent could look at this and not feel some pain.

“What do we do with these?” she says.

“Package them all,” I tell her. “The family will take care of them.”

Sharon Cooper died the evening of the accident, alone in her car, the car Potter ran from in panic, shades of a brilliant judicial career fading before his eyes. He saw scandal in the death of a young woman, questions of an untoward affair.

What Ben didn’t know when he fled from the vehicle is that Sharon was not yet dead, only unconscious. She died in the ensuing fire, sparked by engine heat and a burst fuel line. He could have saved her. This fact did not elude George Cooper.

Coop bore his undying enmity, shrouded from the outside world by the visible pain of his lost daughter. It was a hatred that embraced not only Ben but Talia.

The police had been unusually thorough in their investigation of the accident, a favor to a forensic colleague. But even with this, they could not come up with any leads. In part this was due to the fact that Coop was busy misleading them. He had no desire to see Ben Potter prosecuted for merely fleeing the scene of an accident. He wanted more. Even after killing Ben, Coop continued with the charade, the pretense of the purposeless search for the driver of Sharon’s car.

Nikki has found copies of investigative reports among Coop’s private papers. In one of these is a note outlined in yellow marker, a single paragraph. A little after seven on the evening of the accident an attendant at a gas station a mile and a half from the crash said he saw a man alone, wearing a business suit, walk to the pay phone on the corner of his property to make a call. Twenty minutes later he was picked up by a woman driving an expensive sports car, a white Mercedes 500 SL. Talia and her spiffy little car. Theirs indeed was a marriage of convenience. Talia, it seems, whether she would have cared or not, was oblivious to Ben’s own infidelity. She shielded him from authorities for the benefit of his career, and after his death failed to comprehend the significance of these events for her own plight. She was in all ways a victim of circumstance. I have said nothing to authorities about these events. Talia Potter has paid a dear enough price for a bad marriage.

It is not often that one gets a glimpse of ultimate truth following a trial of the proportions of Talia’s ordeal. But with what I know now I have been able to piece together many of the events surrounding Ben’s murder, though I still do not know with certainty where the deed was carried out. If I had my guess I would say here, in Coop’s house. I have not checked the phone records, but I suspect that on the day he died, Ben received a telephone call from George Cooper, a confrontational call in which Coop threatened to go to authorities with what he knew unless Ben came here. He came-and was killed.

I have a new admiration for Mrs. Foster, for now it is clear that the vehicle she saw in the driveway of the Potter residence on the night of the murder was in fact Ben Potter’s. It was driven by Coop, who needed physical evidence linking Talia with more certainty to the crime. Hair from a brush or comb was needed. After calling the home and sensing that no one was there, he used Ben’s keys to enter the house, then left unseen. Given the neighborhood sentry duty performed by Mrs. Foster, this was an act of God.

The shotgun was fortuitous. It was left for repairs by Sharon-an errand no doubt run for Ben-and the receipt fell into Coop’s hands after Sharon’s death. The rest is history. He reclaimed it and used it to mask the shot of his own small-caliber handgun, the murder weapon which no doubt is now long gone.

“What do you think will happen to Skarpellos?” says Harry.

“Who knows? He won’t be prosecuted for murder. Embezzlement-maybe.”

I have shared the letter from Coop with Nelson. With regard to Ben’s death, Skarpellos is now off the hook and so am I, though the Greek has other problems. Nelson has an open and active investigation combing the firm’s client trust account, and word is that the state bar is closing in on Tony’s license. Potter, Skarpellos, it seems, will soon have a new managing partner.

I had lunch with Robert Rath last week, my alpha factor. He called me, so we met to talk about Talia’s trial. It seems that Rath had more intelligence than even I had credited to him, an innate sense for dealing with people. The jury foreman was a pushy, egocentric woman, a person Rath sensed would cause trouble if she lost in a contest to lead the jury. He sensed prospects of a hung jury, grounded on personal pique, if he crossed her. So he bowed out in the first round of balloting. Even with this, it took the woman three ballots to secure a majority of the votes. “Otherwise,” he told me as we left the restaurant, “you would have had your verdict an hour earlier.”

Jimmy Lama has his own problems. Off on a suspension without pay, Lama has all the attention he can handle from internal affairs. Nelson has dropped him from the DA’s unit, and Acosta is demanding a stiff sanction for Lama’s meddling in the trial. It seems the tip to Eli Walker will cost him. And Eli is back, his head firmly wedged in a new bottle, doing exposes on legislative corruption, a topic no one much cares to read about.

Nikki and I are talking about her moving back in with me, at the house. Sarah is throwing little parties over this thought. A four-year-old’s picture of heaven is life with Mommie and Daddy. Nikki and I have a lot to work out. We are trying to put the pieces of our lives back together. When I look at Coop and his misery, I know that as long as there is life there is hope.

Ben once told me that experience had taught him that juries neither convict nor acquit. They merely lend their certitude to a particular version of the facts before them. It is the skill of the lawyer that is the difference, he told me. In this case he was right. The jury did not acquit Talia so much as convict Tony, and they did it for all the wrong reasons. In the end, Ben’s words seem to possess the ring of prophecy. As he said, the law is no instrument for divining the truth.