In the Company of Liars

TWO DAYS EARLIER
THURSDAY, APRIL 8

There’s a guy, but you probably wouldn’t approve.” Jessica’s evasive comment to Allison, last December, over dinner.

“Tell me,” Allison prodded.

“You’ll just tell me no.”

Allison drew back. It was true, she had never failed to give her opinion on her daughter’s choice of boyfriends. But she had never forbade her daughter from acting on her own instincts, and certainly had no place doing so now, when Jessica was twenty and living at her college dorm.

She knew Jess, however distant they had grown. Jessica could have avoided the subject, or lied about it. She did neither. She had broached the topic and left it dangling. Jessica wanted her to inquire, Allison figured.

“Tell me,” Allison said again.

Paul Riley shows Allison in to his office. It has a gorgeous view, this corner office, and Paul has plenty of memorabilia to decorate the two walls without windows. Artists’ etchings of his trial work, photos of Paul with prominent officials. Paul Riley, after all, is the lawyer who prosecuted Terry Burgos, the man who killed six girls on a college campus about twenty years ago. Paul was the guy Allison wanted, when suspicion first gathered around her after Sam’s death. Since he begged off representing her, she persuaded him to represent Jessica.

“How are you holding up?” he asks her, and he knows the question is loaded.

“I’m fine, Paul, thanks. You?”

Paul defers as he always does. “Twenty balls in the air,” he says.

“I’m concerned with one particular ball.”

“Sure.” Paul plays with a cufflink on his starched shirt. His shirt is soft blue, matching his eyes.

“She needs to understand the importance of not straying from her testimony, Paul.”

“She knows that, Allison. I know that. There’s only so much I can share with you now, obviously.” He smiles. His loyalty, of course, is now to his client, Jessica.

“She came to my house about eight-thirty that night, the night Sam was killed,” Allison says. “She had been at school all day. I got home close to two in the morning. Jess was asleep on the couch.”

Paul nods but doesn’t speak. He will not share his conversations with Jessica to anyone, not even Jessica’s mother.

“My worry is that she’ll try to protect me,” Allison explains. “That she might say something crazy.”

Paul’s eyes narrow, divert from Allison. She knows he will not elaborate. For all she knows, Jessica has spoken poorly of her mother to Paul. Paul might be thinking,Oh, Allison, I don’t think you have to worry about Jessica trying to protect you.

But she cannot take the chance. Perjury, obstruction of justice, and perhaps worse could await her daughter. This case is all over the press. If the prosecutors are embarrassed in so public a forum, they might look wherever necessary, including at Jessica, to make things right.

“Was there something in particular you had in mind?” Paul asks. He has chosen this question carefully. Nothing from his end, but if Allison has something to say, this is the way.

“What I have in mind,” Allison answers, “is that Jessica might say she was at Sam’s house that night.”

Paul Riley’s unflappable expression shows the first sign of a break.

“She might say that she killed Sam,” Allison predicts.

Allison remembers it well, that cocktail party two days before Sam was murdered, Thursday, the fifth of February. The Look, she calls it. She remembers Sam, standing across the room, a cocktail in his hand, the look of pure longing as his eyes passed over her, an utter lust that temporarily took hold of him, captivated him as if there were no other person in the room but her.

“Tell me, Jess,” Allison had requested of her daughter, six weeks before that time, last December over lunch. “Tell me about this guy I ‘wouldn’t approve of.’ ”

Paul Riley stares intently at Allison. “And, if I may ask hypothetically,” he tries, “what would be the reason for Jessica being at Sam’s house on that Saturday night?”

“It’s someone at work, Mother, okay? And I’m not going to discuss this.”

She remembers the primitive look in Sam’s eyes at the cocktail party.

She remembers her own position by the bar, having just gotten a drink, seeing the expression on Sam’s face and stopping short, following Sam’s line of vision to a young intern at Dillon & Becker by the name of Jessica Pagone.

Allison takes Paul’s hand. “I’m counting on you to protect her, Paul,” she tells him.