Compelling Evidence

CHAPTER 22

“I knew it,” she says. “I knew this would happen.” Nikki is I seething.

I’ve come to her over dinner, my invitation, at Zeek’s, to get her signature. The house is in joint tenancy, and I need Nikki’s name on the line for a loan, money to finance Talia’s case. More and more often, I get flashbacks of the morning I witnessed Brian Danley’s execution, but in my mind’s eye it is Talia’s face I see looking out at me from inside the death chamber. It is the only thing that drives me to ask for Nikki’s help.

I’ve selected this place carefully; it is crowded but subdued, like eating in a church. The waiters are all wearing vestments, starched white linen with colored broadcloth around their middle like cummerbunds. The melodic sound of a balalaika drifts from the next room, where a man in classic Russian garb plays to a table of patrons.

But I am not certain that even the serene ambience of this place will quell Nikki’s rage. Beads of perspiration the size of raindrops trickle under my shirt. Courage sits in front of me in a glass tumbler, Johnnie Walker, a double on the rocks.

“Are you sure you don’t want a drink?” I ask her.

“You’ve got gall to ask,” she says. But Nikki’s not talking about a cocktail. She’s piping me aboard the good ship wrath, for a cruise in heavy seas. She’s pissed that I can even ask for her release on the house. Her right hand claws the linen tablecloth at the side of her plate. Her piercing gray eyes are penetrating my soul.

“I suppose she’s asked you to do this?”

The “she” in Nikki’s question is Talia, but I play obtuse.

“Who?” I am innocence, with questioning eyes.

“The bitch-the bimbo-your client.” She drops these like napalm between clenched teeth.

An older woman in a fox stole, molting tails locked in needle-sharp teeth about her shoulders, is now looking at us from the next table.

“No,” I say. “Nobody asked me to do this. I’m doing it because it’s good business. The case is worth some money.”

“Well excuse me, Lee Iacocca,” she says. She pauses for a moment to pick up her fork, to play with her salad. “What if I say no?”

This is not what I want to hear.

“I can’t refinance without your signature.”

“Ah.” The answer she wanted. “Well, then, you can’t have it.”

Now she is eating, enjoying her salad. Like this little bit of spite was just the seasoning it needed.

I explain that I will advance the costs of defense, but in doing so, I will take a note secured by Talia’s interest in the firm. “This isn’t personal, Nikki, it’s business,” I tell her.

“Business? Well, that covers a multitude of sins, doesn’t it.”

“You think I lied to you”-my tone is level and low-“that I deceived you when I got into the case. I told you I was invited in. That was true. I didn’t ask for it. I said I wasn’t lead counsel. I wasn’t. Everything I told you was true.”

I play upon Cheetam as the disaster, as if Nikki cares. “He’s pulled out-thank God,” I say. “But now I’ve got more into the case than anyone else. It would take another lawyer six months to come up to speed.”

“I see. Nobody else can do it like you. I suppose she’s counting on you too.”

“I suppose,” I say. “Like any other client faced with the gas chamber.”

This puts a sober expression on Nikki’s face. She has never considered the stakes before. Even in her current state of spite, death by cyanide gas is wholly disproportionate to her sense of revenge.

“Listen,” I say, “you don’t want to help out, I understand. I’ll just have to get it someplace else.” I’m chumming the waters now.

This thing with Talia is hard on Nikki. I would not do it if I had any other choice. She sees this, my plea for money to defend a former lover, as if I am purposefully pouring salt into an open wound-rubbing her nose in my earlier affair.

There’s a long, painful pause, awkward for Nikki as she shifts gears a little. “How much would you need,” she asks, “for this defense of yours?”

“A hundred-maybe seventy-five thousand if I watch it. It would carry the defense to the end of the case.” I tell her that Harry and I are taking only partial fees until it’s over.

The truth is, I haven’t talked to Harry about this. I figure I’ll catch him with his head in a bottle one night and get an ironclad commitment that he’ll be my Keenan counsel.

“I can collect the balance when it’s over, out of the partnership interest. I’ll pay off the second. Believe me,” I say, “I’ll take a premium on the case.”

“You’ll take a premium?”

“I will.”

“And you think that makes a difference to me? You bring me here, to this place.” Her arms are rising in a gesture to the surroundings, along with the volume of her voice. Hairy little beasts are bristling at me again, from around the neck pocked with age spots. Its owner is turning to look at Nikki.

My eyes are pleading with her: “Not so loud.”

“You take me here to this cavern of intrigue.” She is dripping with sarcasm. “You bring me here not to talk about us, about our situation, but to discuss-business.” She makes it sound like a bad word, like it ought to have four letters.

“That wasn’t the only reason. I wanted to talk about us too.”

“Yes, but first things first, huh?”

I’m only digging myself in deeper.

“Did you ever bring her here?” she asks.

I wonder whether to play stupid one more time, to give her a quick “Who?” at least for appearances. I look at the little foxes and think better of it.

“No,” I say.

“That’s something, I suppose.”

I’m chugging Johnnie Walker now and flagging the waitress for more.

“I don’t know why I’m surprised,” she says. “It’s all you ever discussed through eleven years of marriage, your career, your business.” There it is, the “B-word” again, bursting from her lips like a little bomb. “It’s all that ever mattered.”

“It’s not true, Nikki. You mattered, Sarah mattered. But some-where we got off the track.” I am never good at this. This verbal intimacy that women seem to get off on.

I consider for a moment offering her money, a return on her investment in the house, from my take in the case. But I am afraid that she will be offended. I try putting a face on it.

“We will treat my earnings from this case as community property. It’s only fair. We’re using community property to finance the case, our joint interest in the house.”

“Ever the lawyer,” she says. “It’s always another deal. If you were half the husband you are a lawyer we’d be living together. Hell, we’d be in love.”

Nikki has a way of capturing the truth and dumping it on your head like a pail of Arctic Ocean water.

There’s a long, sober silence while she pokes around her salad with her fork. Then she looks up at me. “I won’t take any money. If you want my signature, I will give it to you-because you want it,” she says, “and for no other reason than that.”

I sit there looking at her, the shame written in my eyes. I have gotten what I have come for, but she has taken everything else-a large measure of self-respect.

“How is she paying you?” she asks.

“By the hour,” I say. “But I may put a cap on it.”

“Generous,” she says.

“OK, no cap.”

“Do what you think is right.”

“If I did that, I wouldn’t be here, asking you for this,” I say.

She seems taken aback by this. Surprised, perhaps, that I should realize it.

“I will hold the costs down,” I tell her. I’ve already dispensed with thoughts of an investigator, except for Bowman. Harry and I will do most of the gumshoe ourselves. In the months before the trial we will chase loose leads and go after the facts that Cheetam ran from.

“Do you have an agreement with her on fees yet?”

“We haven’t nailed it down.”

“Were you waiting for my signature?” she asks. This is more rhetorical than real, but before I realize this I make a little face of concession.

She’s laughing at me now, inside, behind the mask that is her expression. I can see it in the little wrinkles around her eyes. She figures Talia’s playing me for a fool. Maybe she wants to be there to laugh when it’s over. I don’t know. I am having a hard time reading this woman I lived with for eleven years, the mother of my child.

Our dinner has come, braised rack of lamb. The waiter is removing our salad plates.

“I’m famished,” I say, searching for something, anything other than Talia and her case, to talk about. “It looks delicious,” I tell her.

Nikki is not even interested in her plate, but instead is staring at me, with searching eyes, an expression brimming with immense pain and a single tear on her cheek. I look away. The little foxes are now gone.

“You’ve got a guest,” Harry tells me deadpan. “In your office.” He’s in the reception area leaning over the desk talking with Dee. She’s finally learned to use the computer, when it suits her. The two of them are doodling with a crossword puzzle, a computer game Dee’s boyfriend bought for her birthday. Harry’s giving her words to fill the blanks. “Irish Gaelic, four letters, starts with an E. Erse,” says Harry. He can afford this. He’s not paying her salary.

I look at him from under arched eyebrows, scanning my telephone messages plucked from the holder on Dee’s desk.

“Did you make contact with the money changers?” I’ve left Harry in charge of getting the paperwork rolling on Talia’s mortgage, cash for the premium on her bond.

He nods. “Took the loan application over to the jail this morning. Could’ve saved myself the trip,” he says.

“Why?”

Harry reaches over with one hand, still distracted, looking over Dee’s shoulder, and swings the door to my office open, enough for me to look inside. There, in one of the client chairs across from my desk, she sits reading a magazine, Talia sans the bars and the wire mesh. She’s wearing a fresh print dress. Her hair, still lacking a fresh perm, is softer than the jail ringlets I had seen the day before, this no doubt the result of some pricey Ph-balanced shampoo and an hour soaking in the tub at her house.

“That was quick,” I say. Her exodus from the county jail.

She turns and looks at me, her fingers clutching a small handbag. “Couldn’t be fast enough for me.”

I move into the room, now heading for my chair behind the desk.

“How did you manage it?” I ask her.

“Friends,” she says.

“They posted your bond?”

“I owe them a lot.”

At least a hundred thousand-and some change, I think to myself.

“Who was it?” I ask.

“I can’t tell you that. They want to remain anonymous.”

“From your own lawyer?”

“I’m sorry, Paul. I promised them I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“I see.”

Harry finally gives up the game and follows me into the office.

He shuts the door, and we sit, ready to talk to Talia.

“It’s one thing you two won’t have to worry about,” she says, “getting me out. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

I am wondering who, in Talia’s set, would have sufficient interest to post the hundred-thousand-dollar premium, and the personal guarantee required for a million-dollar bond. Regardless, it is good news.

“It frees up your mortgage money,” I tell her. “We can use it for the defense. Let’s pursue the application anyway.”

Harry nods.

She smiles at this prospect of paying a little more of her own way.

“Oh, before I forget,” she says. She is into the small handbag lying in her lap and pulls out a wrinkled brown paper bag, folded over itself a dozen times.

‘Tod found this at the house yesterday.” She’s undoing the bag and finally reaches in. When her hand comes out it’s holding a shiny semi-automatic, so small mat it is nearly lost in her palm.

“Here,” she says. Talia reaches across the desk to hand it to me.

“There,” I say, gesturing for her to put it on the desk, in the center of my paper-strewn blotter. I’m hissing under my breath. “I told you to call me if you found it. Not to touch it.” I’m looking at Harry, who’s rolling his eyes toward the ceiling.

“I guess you did. He was so excited when he found it that he must have forgotten.” She’s talking about Tod. “Me too,” she says, crumpling the paper bag and pushing it back into her handbag.

“Great. I suppose his prints are all over it too.”

She looks at me, a little whipped dog, and nods, like she assumes this is now the case. Without ballistics to match this weapon with or distinguish it from the jacket fragment found in Potter’s skull, the cops are free to draw inferences that this is the murder weapon, this little gun covered with the fingerprints of my client and her latest flame. Beyond this it is difficult for me to fathom the lack of basic prudence that should cause Talia, less than a day out of jail, to carry this thing concealed in her purse into my office.

I study it closely. It is small, about five inches in length. The safety is engaged. There’s heavy tooling on the shiny chrome barrel, scrolling around the numerals and letters 25 ACP just under the ejection port, and the image of two cards engraved farther out near the end of the barrel, double deuces laid one over the other in a fanned hand.

I’m anxious to know if it’s been fired, to pull the magazine and eject any round from the breech so I can look down the barrel for residue. But to do it I would either smudge prints or put my own next to Talia’s and Tod’s.

What to do with the gun-this is a problem. Harry wants to take it to a lab, have it screened for prints, shot for ballistic comparisons. But then Nelson will hint that perhaps we have destroyed evidence. What will be left will be our own lab report, confirming at a minimum Talia’s prints on the gun.

“No,” I say. “We’ll turn it over to Nelson. We’ll demand that we see a full print analysis and ballistics report as soon as they’re available. We give him the names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers of everybody we know who touched the gun, Talia, Tod, and probably Ben. We tell them that Tod found it and without thinking picked it up and handed it to Talia. They didn’t realize the significance of any prints. They brought it to me. That takes the sting out of their findings. Any other prints they find”-I wink at Harry-“only serve to exonerate.”

It is almost too neat. Harry’s on board quickly, all nods. My first impression might be that much of this has sailed beyond Talia. But as I look at her she is smiling, like the cat who got the canary. She seems to have a greater facility with this scenario than I would have expected, and perhaps it is exactly what she would have done herself.

They have left me alone in the office. Talia’s gone home to wash a little more hell out of her hair. Harry’s calling Nelson about the gun, confirming everything in writing. Then he will deliver the piece to one of the DA’s investigators. Against his better judgment, Harry has agreed to be my Keenan counsel for this case.

I pick up the phone receiver and dial Judy Zumwalt. She is three hundred pounds of pleasure, with a voice that is halfway into a laugh when she answers, “County clerk’s office.”

“Judy, Paul Madriani here. Wanted to ask you if you could do a little favor.”

“You can ask,” she says, “but I’m already booked tonight.” Then she laughs, big and bawdy, with waves of rolling flesh that undulate through Ma Bell.

“Bail was posted on a client this morning. I’d like to know who paid the premium. Also who signed as a guarantor for the balance.”

“Sure,” she says. “It’ll take a couple of minutes.”

I give her the file number on Talia’s case, and she vanishes from the other end of the line. Talia’s friends may cloak themselves in confidence, but those who post premium on a bond make their interest in the defendant a matter of public record. It is not something likely to go unnoticed by Nelson and his minions.

Judy is back to the phone. She is whistling, a rush of air between spaced teeth. “Don’t see many this big,” she says of Talia’s bond. “Bad lady?” she asks.

“Case of mistaken identity,” I tell her.

“Oh.” She laughs again, like “Tell me another.”

“Defendant posted the premium for her own bail,” she says.

All this means is that Talia and her friends did a little private banking, probably a quick deposit, cashier’s check to ensure ready acceptance by her bank before Talia wrote the check and paid the premium.

“And who guaranteed the balance?” I ask.

“Let’s see,” she says, searching the file. “Here it is, guy by the name of Tod Hamilton.”