In the Company of Liars

ONE DAY EARLIER
FRIDAY, APRIL 16

Have a seat, Allison, please. Get you anything?

” “I’m fine, thanks.”

Ron McGaffrey sets his considerable frame behind his desk and dons his reading glasses. He lifts a document and reads from it.“Best Served Cold?” he asks.

Allison starts. “What-what did you say?”

“Were you writing a new book with that title?”

“Well, yes,” she says, the heat coming to her face. “That was the working title. How do you know about that?”

“Roger Ogren sent it over this morning,” he says. “Seems it was deleted from your computer? Removed from your hard drive?”

“Yes, that’s right, it was.” She crosses her legs. “I didn’t like it.”

“Okay.” McGaffrey slides it across the desk. “Well,they liked it. Especially page fifty-one. They marked the passage.”

She sits at the desk and pulls up his e-mail. She is not entirely sure what to write or to whom she should send it. It could be anything at all and serve her purposes. All that really matters is that an e-mail was sent from his computer at nine o’clock in the evening, while she is believed to be at a party, and long after she visited his home at noon today. An alibi. Proof of life.

“This was in a chapter entitled ‘Alibi,’ by the way,” he adds sourly.

“That’s right.” She throws the document down on the desk. “So?”

“So?” he asks sarcastically. “So? The story’s about a woman who kills the man she was sleeping with. She kills him during the day but she doesn’t have an alibi for that time. So she goes to his house at night-when she does have an alibi; she’s at a party but she’s snuck out-and she sends an e-mail from his computer. To show he was alive and well when she left him that day.”

“Yes. That’s right.” Allison makes no attempt to hide the anger.

“This novel was deleted at”-McGaffrey looks down at another document-“three twenty-one a.m. on the morning after Sam Dillon died. A little over an hour after you got home, found your daughter at your house. With dirt on your hands, according to Jessica.”

“I don’t remember when I deleted it, Ron. I work in the middle of the night all the time.”

Ron opens his hands. “I have a client who isn’t telling me everything.”

“I didn’t mimic my own book, Ron.”

“I don’t care if you did or you didn’t. I need to know these things.”

“Well, I guess it never occurred to me.”

“It never occurred to you.” Now her lawyer is doing the mimicking. “That e-mail was a big help to us, Allison. It put time-of-death in play for us. It leaves room for the possibility that Dillon was still alive past one in the morning. We know, from Jessica, that you were home at two. If Sam Dillon was murdered later that morning, you have an alibi. Jessica spent the night and saw you the next morning. Butnow ”-he points to the page of the novel-“now, everything I just said is what your character did in your book.”

Allison pinches the bridge of her nose, tries to stay even. “Ron, nobody thinks Sam died the next morning. Not even our own pathologist. The partial digestion of his dinner, the broken clock fixed at 7:06. He died around seven on Saturday night. Everyone knows that.”

“Who knew about this-thisBest Served Cold book?”

“Nobody.” She shrugs. “I was notorious at my publisher about keeping my work secret until it was finished.”

“I’m not talking about your publisher. Friends? Neighbors? Your ex-husband?”

“No, no, and no. Nobody.”

“Your daughter?”

“I said nobody. Nobody knew, Ron.”

McGaffrey’s face is crimson. He throws his hands up. “I need time to work with this.”

“If you’re talking about moving the trial date, Ron, we’ve discussed that already. That was the first thing I told you. I’m not moving it.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” He holds out his hands, as if beseeching her. “Give me a couple of months and maybe I can give you the rest of your life.”

Allison leaves the chair and walks to the window. McGaffrey’s law firm shares a floor of a downtown high-rise. McGaffrey got one of the two corner offices. She can see a glimpse of the lake to the east, the rest of downtown and the pricey lakefront housing to the north. Mat had wanted to move into one of those lakefront condos. He cited proximity to work, avoiding the expressway traffic downtown, but she always assumed it was the cachet of near-north housing that Mat coveted. She preferred their home on the northwest side, the quiet neighborhoods. She liked seeing little kids on tricycles; the streets with trimmed lawns; neighbors talking over the fence; the annual block parties. Something like suburbia, but without giving up the coffee shop, a deli, a couple of restaurants within a short walk.

“We can’t say someone framed you if nobody knew about the alibi in that book,” Ron says. “But I can work on time-of-death. Give me some time here-”

“No, Ron.”

“Why in the world-”

“Because we give them time, they might find the murder weapon.” She turns to him. “And we don’t want that. We definitely do not want that. Okay?”

Moments like this must come often in the life of a criminal defense attorney. How often do clients come out and say, Yeah, it was me. Rarely, in his own limited experience. Clients don’t want to tell, lawyers don’t want to ask. It usually happens like this, in some kind of code.We don’t want them to find the murder weapon.

“I see,” McGaffrey says, as if disappointed. Surely, he didn’t think Allison was innocent. If he banks his practice on defending the wrongly accused, he will have no career. Surely, he has adopted the mantra of any defense attorney, the same mode of thinking Allison developed in her few years as a public defender. Put the government to its proof. Make it hard for the government to rob someone of his or her liberty. It’s not about freeing murderers. It’s about keeping the government in check.

It’s more than that, she realizes, for most defense attorneys. It’s more of a game. More about winning. It almost has to be that way.

“We’re not moving the trial,” she says. “And I’d rather not discuss it again.”