Compelling Evidence m-1 Page 5

  “Any chance they’d let me go up?”

  “None,” he says. “DA’s handling this one himself.”

  “Nelson?”

  Coop nods. “The take-charge kid himself.”

  “Why all the attention if it’s a suicide?”

  He ignores me like he hasn’t heard the question. When he turns he looks directly at me. Cooper knows more than he’s saying.

  “I was supposed to meet him tonight for dinner.”

  “Potter?” he says.

  I nod. “He wanted to talk to me.”

  “What about?”

  “Business,” I say. It’s a little white lie. I have no desire to dredge up memories of Sharon, not here, not now. I’ll tell Coop later, when we’re alone.

  “He was headed back to Washington. I was going to take him to the airport.”

  “When did you talk with him?”

  “Last night,” I say.

  Coop looks over my shoulder at Walker.

  There is movement in the lobby of the Emerald Tower, a rush of television cameras to the glass doors. Four cops running interference exit ahead of the chrome gurney, a strapped-down sheet covering the black body bag. Two of Coop’s assistants set a brisk pace wheeling the gurney down the walkway, the minicam crews in pursuit. The guy behind us with his camera loses interest and joins the pack. There’s the precision click of metal as the collapsible legs go out from under the gurney and the load slides easily into the back of the dark coroner’s wagon.

  Walker’s distracted.

  Coop pulls me away several feet toward the front of the van.

  “Can you keep it to yourself?” he says. I nod. “The feds are up there with Nelson, two FBI agents. What’s going on?”

  “Ben was in line for an appointment,” I say.

  Coop’s stare is intense, the kind that says, “What else?”

  I fulfill his wish. “Supreme Court,” I say.

  He whistles, low and slow, the tune dying on his lips, as this news settles on him. I can tell that Coop will perform this autopsy himself-and carefully.

  ‘Talia-Ben’s wife-is she up there?” I ask.

  “They’re looking for her now. Tryin’ to notify her. There was no answer at the house when the cops called. They sent a patrol car by but there was nobody there.”

  “I wonder how she’ll take it.”

  Coop’s looking at me. I can’t tell if I detect just the slightest wrinkle of disapproval, like maybe he’s heard something-about Talia and me. But then he breaks his stare. My own guilt overreacting. I’m wearing this thing like some psychic scarlet letter. It died with Ben. I wonder how Talia will react-no doubt with more poise than I. Grace under pressure is her special gift.

  “They’ll probably want to talk to you.”

  “Who?” I ask.

  “The cops.”

  “Why?”

  “You talked to Potter last night. You had a meeting scheduled with him tonight. Potter’s calendar,” he says. “Likely as not, your name’s in it.”

  He’s right. I can expect a visit from the police.

  Coop’s gaze fixes on the minicam crews, one of which closes on us as we speak. In the inert atmosphere of a city beginning to sleep, the attention of these scavengers of electronic gossip is drawn to anything that moves. Ben’s body is in the van, and at the moment my conversation with Cooper is the only visual drama available. As if we are dancing a slow tango, I maneuver my back to the lens.

  “Was there a note?” I ask.

  “Hmm?” He stares at me blankly.

  “Did Ben leave a suicide note?”

  “Not that I know of,” he says.

  There was no note. Of this I can be sure. A suicide note is not something the cops withhold from their medical examiner.

  “I assume there’ll be an autopsy.”

  “Oh yes.” He says it with the seriousness of a village pastor asked if the damned go to hell. He looks at his watch. “It’s gonna be a long night.”

  He moves around the front of the van. One of his assistants is in the driver’s seat. The other’s playing tailgunner, keeping the cameras away from the back of the vehicle.

  “Coop.” He looks at me. “Thanks.”

  He waves a hand in the air, like it’s nothing, just a little information to a friend.

  “Eli. I’ll take you back now.”

  A camera light flashes on. The wrinkled back of my suit coat is memorialized. It will fill at least a few seconds of Eye on Five-that grafting of entertainment and journalism that passes for news on the tube.

  As Walker heads for the car, I stand alone on the sidewalk gazing after the coroner’s wagon, its amber lights receding into the night. In my mind I begin to conjure what possible motive could exist for a man the likes of Ben Potter to take his own life, his career on the ascent. I am left with a single disquieting thought, that despite what Cooper says, this was not a suicide.

  CHAPTER 5

  I’ve been dogging Harry Hinds for a block, and I finally catch him at the light across from the courthouse.

  Harry turns to see me. A grim expression. “I’m sorry,” he says, “about Potter.” Harry’s looking at the large puffed ovals under my eyes. I’ve spent a sleepless night thinking about Ben.

  The papers are filled with it this morning. The vending machines on the street are blaring large pictures of Potter in a happier time-banner headlines and little news. The presses were locked up when it happened. This was the best they could do.

  “You look like shit,” he says. This is Harry Hinds, undiluted, straightforward.

  I give him a shrug.

  “What drags you out at this early hour?” he says.

  “A pretrial with ‘the Coconut,’” I tell him.

  Harry, it seems, is praying for a few dark courtrooms this day, banking on a shortage of judges to avoid a drunk-driving trial, a case in which he has no plausible defense. To Harry it is just another challenge.

  The light changes. We cross the street and sidle up the steps past the modern bronze statue centered in the reflecting pool. Its fountain has long since ceased to work, the funding for its repairs no doubt siphoned by the county’s board of supes for some long-forgotten social program. Some art aficionado has hung a crude cardboard sign, written in Magic Marker, from the twisted sculpture:

  SPEED KILLS

  We make small talk. He tells me about his case, as is the compulsion of every lawyer. He has a sixty-year-old woman, well liked in the community, a school bus driver, the soul of discretion and honesty according to Harry. This paragon blew a.19 on the Breathalyzer-twice the legal limit of alcohol in her bloodstream-when the cops pulled her over late at night in the family car.

  Harry’s bitching about the DA, who won’t reduce the charge to some unrelated offense so she can keep her bus driver’s certificate.

  “A real tight ass,” he says.

  This is Harry’s description of Duane Nelson, the district attorney. Nelson, who was appointed by the supervisors to fill a vacancy following Sam Jennings’s retirement a year ago, has been making serious noise about eliminating all plea bargains.

  “If he has his way,” says Harry, “the county will end up building a dozen new jails and adding a thousand judges to the court. The local economy will collapse,” he says. “Half the working population will be serving perpetual jury duty and the other half will be behind bars.”

  Harry tells me about the jury he’s hoping for if forced to trial-“Just a few open-minded types on the panel,” he says.

  “I know the kind,” I say. “A jury that drinks its lunch.”

  “Never!” He says this with a little mock indignation in his voice. “Just a few philosophers. Deep thinkers,” he tells me.

  To Harry these are people who would stand in the fast lane of the freeway with mirrors to signal the mother ship. People who might buy his bullshit-theory of a defense.

  In all of this there is not a hint of shame in Harry’s voice. He would defend the devil himself in
the squared-off combat of jury trial. It is only the high stakes that he now shies away from.

  He stops for a moment to check the directory by the stairs.

  “Keep movin’ the damn courtrooms on me,” he mumbles. “Can’t even keep the master calendar in one place.”

  “They know you’re comin’, Harry,” I say. “Just tryin’ to hide. Can you blame ’em?”

  “Hell, I don’t know what they’re afraid of.” He laughs.

  “Probably two years of jury selection, if the case is as bad as it sounds.”

  He ignores this.

  I wish him luck. He wanders off down the stairs, his worn bell-shaped briefcase-weighted down with reference books and frayed pages filled with familiar case citations-bouncing off his knee. It is the nice thing about specializing in the way of Harry Hinds. You can carry your library in a box.

  There have been a good number of disappointments since my hasty departure from Potter, Skarpellos. But my return to the general practice of criminal law is, I am glad to say, not among them. While for three years I denied it roundly to those who were sufficiently intimate to make the suggestion, I had in fact grown bored with the stuff of which corporate business law is made, even the white-collar-crime variety to which the firm turned my talents. Though my solo practice may have limited horizons, given the world and its vices, mere is no shortage of clients. The secret, as always, is to ferret out those with the ability to pay, and to get it, as they say, “up front.”

  The Capitol County courthouse isn’t old, but in recent years institutional changes have transformed it into a dour place. The broad marble pavilion leading from the main entrance on Ninth Street has been narrowed by a series of portable stanchions connected by neoprene-covered ropes, all designed to funnel the public through a maze of metal detectors and conveyor-fed security checks. The blond oak panels forming the facade of the public counters has taken on the worn look of years of indiscriminate public use.

  A long line has formed under the scarred wooden sign reading MUNICIPAL COURT-TRAFFIC DIVISION. The queue undulates like some writhing snake as agitated motorists fume and fidget at the inefficiency of it all. Behind the counter the clerks move with a telegraphed indifference, like furless beasts awakening from a deep hibernation. In all, the place has the charm of a bus depot at rush hour.

  I press past a briefcase-toting lawyer scurrying from the building. He is pursued by his casually clad client, a young black man sporting a gold necklace and gaudy pinkie ring. The youth is trying desperately to buttonhole his counsel before the attorney slips from the building and into the abyss of unretumed telephone calls.

  To the casual eye seeing her beside me on the hard wooden bench outside department 13, she is stunning. Her raven hair flows like cascades of billowing dark water around the soft features of her face. Large round eyes sparkle with an azure incandescence. She wears a silk dress that clings to the contours of a body that would shame a cover girl. Tasteful gold earrings and a matching bracelet provide a touch of elegance. And always the saucy pursed lips of an enigmatic smile, as if she is privy to the ultimate inside joke on the human condition-a leel of self-reliance surprising in one who has attained the mere age of twenty-six years.

  Even in her language, here in the confidence of her lawyer, in her choice of words and diction, the carefully erected veil of sophistication is preserved-the mock accent, not quite the queen’s English, but close. It’s an affectation to attract an upper-crust clientele.

  “And what can we expect today?” she asks. You might think we’re on some social outing, as if I’m part of the tea-and-toast set about to introduce her to Lady Di.

  Susan Hawley is a call girl-not a mere hooker, a streetwalker, the kind of woman who looks like death on a soda cracker, with needle tracks on her arms and puncture wounds between each toe. She is better read than I, at least when it comes to the local papers, part of her stock-in-trade, the ability to talk intelligently and nod knowingly as prominent names are dropped during upper-crust parties. Susan Hawley, I suspect, is a woman much in demand in the rarefied zone of political nightlife in this city. She is the ultimate ornament to be hung from the arm of important political figures or captains of industry during quiet dinner meetings. In her commercial dealings, hundred-dollar bills appear in considerable quantity in her purse the morning after, like fishes and loaves in the basket after the Sermon on the Mount.

  She’s waiting for an answer to her question.

  “I go in and talk to the judge. Find out what the DA has to offer. Whether they’re willing to deal.”

  I will keep Hawley outside the courtroom as long as possible, away from the prying eyes and off-color jokes of the lawyers who are lined up waiting to have their cases heard by the Coconut in pretrial. It is a kind of Turkish bazaar where prosecutors and defense attorneys convene before the local pasha, in this case a judge of the superior court, to haggle over the price and value of justice-to settle their cases short of a trial, if it is possible.

  “I may be in there awhile. I think it’ll be better if you wait out here in the corridor. I’ll call you if we need to talk.”

  Her look suddenly turns hard, businesslike.

  “I’m not going down on this thing. You do understand? Tell them to dismiss it.” Her words are clipped and cool, unemotional. Her voice carries the resolve of a bank president. It’s an absurd request. Still, she’s serious.

  I laugh, not mocking her, but in amusement. Hawley has been netted by an undercover officer posing as a wealthy out-of-town business mogul; he used a wire to tape-record their negotiations. The case contains not even the remotest hint of entrapment in the sparse dialogue captured on the vice detail’s tape. In an unmistakable voice, she quotes a $1,000 fee for an array of professional services unheralded in the Kama Sutra. She was arrested two minutes later.

  “Susan. I’ve told you before, I’m an attorney not a magician. There are no guarantees or quick fixes in this business.”

  “Talk to the judge,” she says. “He will understand. I’m not entering a plea.” She turns away from me as if it is her final word on the subject.

  “Listen to me.” I muster authority in my tone, a little exercise in client control. “I think we can get the felony charges dropped, if not today, then later before trial. But they’re not going to let you walk. You may as well get that out of your mind right now.”

  It’s the first rule of law practice, never oversell a client. Rising expectations have a habit of feeding upon themselves.

  She snaps her head back toward me. “No way. I mean it. I’m not taking the fall on this thing. Talk to the judge.” She bites these last words off. For the first time the polite veneer and polish are gone. This is how it would be, I sense, if a client were to demand a refund from this lady of business. She composes herself. “Tell him”-she clears her throat and looks me straight in the eye-“tell him mat you want it dismissed, that I want it dismissed. Do you understand? It’s very simple.” Her eyes are filled with fire. These aren’t words of idle expectation. Still, I have no legal basis for such a demand.

  I assure her that no deal can be cut without her final approval. We haggle for several minutes and finally she accepts this. Though she warns me that she will go to trial on anything less man an outright dismissal. We will see. I rise and begin to move toward the courtroom.

  A scruffy character with a three-day growth of beard, wearing frayed blue jeans and a tanktop, shuffles down the corridor behind his lawyer. The man’s attorney pauses to check the calendar pinned on the bulletin board outside the courtroom. His client studies Hawley with a sleepy, lustful gaze as he scratches the head of a blue dragon emblazoned by tattoo on his upper arm. If it were physically possible, I would attest to the fact that I can see waves of rancorous odor rising from his body. His finger slides from his arm to reach the latest itch through a hole in the rear of his jeans.

  As for Hawley, she is oblivious to the man’s wandering eyes. I wonder if she is merely desensitized to years
of male leering or if it is simply that the favors of Susan Hawley are without question beyond the price of this scurvy soul.

  Armando Acosta, judge of the superior court, studies the open file on his desk. The premature bald circle on the back of his head shines through threads of fine straight black hair like the tonsure of some medieval monk. He looks up, peering over half-frame spectacles. For the first time since taking this case, I’m becoming convinced that I’ll have to go to trial to defend Susan Hawley. I’m confronted not only by the intransigence of my client but by the presence of Jimmy Lama in the judge’s chambers. He has joined Al Gibbs, the young deputy DA assigned to the case.

  Lama is a thirty-year veteran of the police force, though his rank as a sergeant doesn’t indicate this. He represents everything objectionable in the overbearing, badge-heavy cop. He’s been successfully defended three times, though only Providence knows how, on charges of excessive force and brutality. The last time his collar earned forty-three stitches performing acrobatics through a plate-glass display window. According to Lama, the fifty-six-year-old wino dove through the glass, unaided, in an effort to escape.

  Acosta looks up, impatience written in his eyes. “Please, gentlemen, don’t all speak at once.” The insistent tone in Acosta’s voice is scrupulously refined by years of practiced judicial arrogance.

  I talk before Gibbs can open his mouth. “It’s a case of overcharging, Your Honor. The DA’s trying to bootstrap this thing into a felony on some thin theory of pimping and pandering.”

  Under the law, a prostitute offering her services on the street is chargeable with a misdemeanor, but her pimp can be sentenced to state prison on felony charges. They are trying to nail Hawley on a half-baked assumption that she not only sold herself, but pimped for another woman.

  Gibbs sits fidgeting in his chair, waiting politely for his turn, as if he’s at high tea. I know him; he has a good mind, but no fire in the belly.