The Suspect

_Twelve

Stuart and Gina had made it down nearly to the Golden Gate Bridge, for the last couple of hundred yards walking in silence. But it was a more comfortable silence than they'd shared up until then. And Gina finally broke it. "So. Your book," she said, "Healed by Water."

"Note the awkward silence," Stuart said, "while the author decides whether he should ask the reader for an opinion or not."

"I've already told you I liked it a lot. But it was more than that. When I finished it-it really touched me. I was just so… relieved, I guess is the word."

"About what?"

"About taking on a client who was intelligent and innocent. I can't tell you how good that felt. That I'd finally be able to put my legal talents to the service of someone who might actually deserve them." She kept walking, eyes forward, hands in her pockets. "I said something yesterday about losing my fiance a few years ago. Well, since then, not that it matters to you, but…"

"Why wouldn't it matter to me?"

"I mean to your defense. In any event, since David, I've been having some trouble committing to things, to getting involved. And then suddenly, last night, I finished your book and was just so glad that I was going to get to do this. I mean, defend an innocent man. Do you know how many innocent clients I've had in twenty-some years as a lawyer?"

"I don't know. Ten? Fifteen?"

"Zero."

Stuart stopped walking, turned to face her. "You've got to be kidding me."

"No. You think that's unusual?"

"No innocent clients ever? Yeah, I'd say so."

"You'd be wrong. It's the norm, believe me. Public defenders, which is how I started, they get assigned cases out of the courtroom, and roughly a hundred percent of these people, they don't even pretend they didn't do what they're charged with. It's all just revolving doors, into and out of jail. They just want to cut a deal to lessen their time, or snitch out somebody to get back on the street, or convince a jury that whatever they did, yeah, they did it all right, but they can't be guilty of doing whatever it was because it just wasn't their fault. They were victims."

"Of what?"

"Anything you can think of, and probably a bunch you can't. Prejudice, bad childhood, Republicans, abusive spouses, drugs and alcohol, addictive personality disorder, sexual dysfunction, dumbshit syndrome, you name it. But whatever, the main thing is it wasn't their fault." Gina came to a full stop. "So anyway, last night the thought of getting to defend a righteously innocent client, it kind of filled me up with… I don't know-motivation. Hope, maybe. Something to try for."

An hour later, as they got back to the Marina, Gina had more to work with. Although Juhle, in his zeal to connect Stuart to his wife's murder, to date hadn't seemed too aware of the maelstrom of drama that apparently swirled in all corners of the life of Caryn Dryden, Stuart had lived inside of it for years. Once he'd gotten his arms around the fact that Caryn had probably been murdered, he amplified quite a lot of the information that they discussed the day before, reinforcing Gina's impression that at least two other people might have had a motive to kill her. Besides those definite two, Stuart told her that he thought it possible that his wife had been having an affair, or maybe serial affairs. Which opened up another whole world of possibilities.

In Stuart's opinion, the most likely suspect to have killed his wife-and for all he knew, to have been sleeping with her too-was her main business partner, Robert McAfee, with whom she had been trying to open her new practice. As Stuart had intimated yesterday, Caryn was trying to bring in a third partner, Michael Pinkert-a mediocre though very rich surgeon. This was infuriating McAfee, who didn't want to work with Pinkert any more than he wanted to split their potential profits three ways. The selling point of the deal for McAfee had always been the efficiency and professionalism and synergy of him and Caryn working together. But Pinkert could bridge the money gap that was threatening their start-up. Caryn and McAfee had taken out insurance policies against their business startup loans, and now with Caryn's death, McAfee would likely be able to open his own clinic and reap all the profits himself.

But even half of her own private clinic was nothing compared to Caryn's other major endeavor. She'd not just been your average, run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen orthopedic surgeon. Instead, she was a total joint surgeon, specializing in total hip replacement, or arthroplasty. Beyond that (as if that weren't enough, Stuart had said), she'd done her undergraduate work, and then a couple of years of graduate school before she transferred to med school, in polymer chemistry. Evidently in her spare time, Caryn had invented a new plastic cup-side for the hip joint that marked a significant improvement in the plastic's unfortunate tendency to degrade in the body over time. PII, the company in whose lab she worked, had even named the thing the Dryden Socket, and after FDA approval, which was pending, it looked to become the worldwide gold standard hip joint. As such, projected sales would make it worth millions every year. But, as evidently was almost always the case when the FDA got near giving its final stamp of approval, some problems had surfaced.

Lately Caryn had been far more upset about "her" socket and her dealings with PII and the project's point man with the venture capital crowd-a Palo Alto investment banker named Frederick Furth, who'd arranged the mezzanine loan-than with anything about

Bob McAfee.

As Gina had discovered last night, the mezzanine loan had left her cash-poor on her new practice offices when there were the inevitable and unavoidable delays in construction and start-up. And the Dryden Socket apparently remained in limbo.

If these facts and alternative suspects did not directly impact the evidence that Juhle was collecting on Stuart, Gina knew that at least they would be useful in muddying the prosecutorial waters. At this stage, that would be its own reward.

Still some long blocks from the Travelodge, and with most of their legal business out of the way for the moment, Gina found herself coming back to Stuart's books, asking him which was his favorite.

"I like them all," he said. "They're all my babies, you know? But it's gratifying that other people like them too. I'm very lucky I get to do what I do."

"You do it very well. I identified with a lot of it, which I guess is what you're going for."

But Stuart shook his head. "No, I'm not really going for effects on the reader. I'm trying to get to something else. Sometimes I'm not so sure of what it is myself. Clarity, maybe." He shrugged, almost swallowed the next word. "Truth. That sounds arrogant, I know. But it's what I'm trying for. Something real."

"Well, you got that. You really did."

Shrugging that off, he cocked his chin at her. "If you don't mind my asking, what did you identify with?"

"Really, quite a bit of it. The analogy-you were talking about being in the moment, the step after step after step of, say, getting to the top; you had it from Guitar Lake to Whitney. I've made that exact climb three times now. How it's really not about getting to the top. It's about the thin air, the pain in your legs, the keeping on when you don't think you can…" Suddenly, she stopped. "I've done it, is my point," she said in a huskier voice, "but I haven't analyzed it very much, or expressed it the way you did. It was just something I needed to do. To get healed."

"Your fiance who died?"

She nodded.

Stuart nodded back at her. "With me, it was the family. My family. What I had to get healed from." "I picked that up."

"Not that I didn't find the experience of being married to a workaholic genius and raising an impossibly difficult child totally fulfilling. This is my great failing. And I'm not the kind of guy who can just ignore it, or have affairs, or be emotionally absent, or however else we're supposed to cope. But sometimes I just had to get away for a few days to find myself again, to hear some silence, to get the strength to recommit to coming back to it, when so much of it didn't seem that it would ever be worth it."

"For me," Gina said, "it was this whole… I guess it was the whole question of what life's about. And I couldn't get an answer here in the city. It was just too loud, too in-your-face. You know?" Then, "Of course you know."

"It's not particularly profound," he said. "We're all too much in it all the time. We've got to slow down, but we don't. But I didn't write it to try to teach anything. My goal was just to figure out for myself what worked and why it worked. That's what the writing's about- not the magazine articles so much, but the books. Figuring stuff out."

"Taking other people there too."

"Maybe, hopefully, that happens in the process if I write it right. Which I suppose is why the books sell. And that just shows that there must be a lot of us in the same boat. Maybe most of us."

"So." Gina hesitated, then figured what the hell. She wanted to know. "What about writer's block? Do you ever get that?"

"No. I don't."

"Never?"

Now Stuart broke one of his first true smiles. "I'm talking to a writer, aren't I?"

Gina lifted her shoulders, let them down. "Halfway through a bad legal thriller. Wondering how you get all the way to the end." "Just keep going."

"Ha."

"Well, it's what I do. I suppose I get times where the ideas don't exactly flow, but the best definition of writer's block I ever heard was that it was a failure of nerve. It's not something outside of you, trying to stop you. It's your own fear that you won't say it right, or get it right, or won't be smart or clever enough. But once you acknowledge it's just fear, you decide you're not going to let it beat you, and you keep pushing on. Kind of like climbing Whitney. Except that if it's never any fun, then maybe it's something inside trying to tell you that you probably don't want to be a writer. You're not having fun with your book?"

"Not too much. Some. At the beginning. Then I got all hung up on whether anyone would want to read it and if they'd care about my characters and I started writing for them, those imaginary, in-the-future readers, whoever they might be."

"Well, yeah, but that's not why you write. You write to see where you're gonna go. At least I do. And in your case, nobody's paying you for your stuff yet, are they?"

"No. Hardly."

"Well, then just do it for yourself and have some fun with it. Or start another story that you like better. Or take up cooking instead. Or get up to the mountains more. But if you want to write, write. A page a day, and in a year you've got a book. And anybody who can't write a page a day… well, there's a clue that maybe you're not a writer."

"A page a day…"

"Cake," Stuart said.

They'd gotten to within sight of the Travelodge, and Gina recognized three of the local news channel vans double-parked in a row on Lombard Street. She put a hand on Stuart's forearm, stopping him in his tracks. "Looks like they've found you," she said.

"You really think they're here for me?"

"I think that's a safe assumption, yes."

"So what do we do?"

"You say nothing. I say 'no comment.' We get inside your room and close the door behind us and hope they go away. You ready?" "I guess so. As I'll ever be." "All right. Nice and relaxed. Let's go."