Indefensible (41 page)

There's a knock on the door.

“I'm busy, go away,” I say. I hear the door open.

“Nick,” Tina says, “it's important.”

I take the towel off my face. Tina's eyes are full and red. She looks from me to Upton. She says, “Captain Dorsey just called. They got a tip on the Scud Illman murder.” She walks to the couch, bends down, and takes my hand between hers. “It sounds authoritative,
Nick. They claim that our own Kenny was the shooter. Apparently it was a drug transaction of some kind, and it went bad.”

“An anonymous caller?”

“Yes.”

I sit up. “Are there inidit . . . indy . . . innoc . . .” This word I know so well, this word I use daily in my job, has fled my mind.

“Indicia,” Tina says. “Yes, there are indicia of reliability. The caller gave motive—the drug deal—and he described where to find the gun, and he told them how he knows about it. It was a pretty complete narrative. Captain Dorsey's people are getting the warrant.”

I know that what I'm being told is true, that the case against Kenny will be tight, and that he will be convicted. I squeeze the hands that are so warm in mine. “I might as well go over to the apartment. Maybe there's something I can do.”

“What about Kenny?” Tina asks.

“He's still here?”

“Yes.”

“Glue yourself to him this second,” I say. “He's impulsive. Make sure nobody talks to him till I get back.” It feels good to be giving orders, taking some responsibility. We leave Tina to keep an eye on Kenny. Upton drives me over to the apartment. The police are just arriving. They have the signed search warrant. I stand outside and watch. It's very quick. They have the gun in minutes. It is a small, deadly looking thing that, I have no doubt, will test out as the gun that shot Scud Illman, which means it is the same gun that killed Seth Coen.

F
riday afternoon. Spring has returned. From my office window, I see the highways leading out of town. Already they are clogged with urbanites making an early break on this Memorial Day weekend. They will go to lakes and mountains and rivers. They will fish and drink and boat and make love and fight; some will commit crimes or cause accidents, and others will be the victims of crimes or accidents. And on Monday evening, the survivors will stream back into town to resume the pace of life in this struggling urban utopia.

I'm in my office, but in a few hours, Tina and I will join the throng. We're going to the lake for the long weekend, and on Sunday we're having a barbecue there, and we're hoping many people will come to enjoy the day with us. Flora and Chip will be there, and they're bringing Lizzy and her friend Homa. Upton says he'll be there with his family; Kendall and his wife are coming with Kaylee.

From here I can see the highways, and far on the horizon the mountains, and just across the river Rokeby and the other decrepit redbrick mill buildings built here because of the river, which provided cheap power and easy transportation. The mills are the womb from which this city grew, and those jobs were the teats on which it suckled and from which, when money dried up and jobs went overseas, it was rudely weaned.

It was a rough quarter century.

I will soon have a better view than I used to. Leslie Herstgood, facing a bitter confirmation battle in the U.S. Senate, withdrew her name as nominee for the seat on the appeals court. I didn't appreciate the irony until Tina pointed it out: Leslie, former U.S. attorney from this city of shuttered textile mills, met her downfall as a lawyer
for the overseas child-exploiting, worker-killing sweatshops that put our city on the economic skids. Good riddance, Leslie Herstgood. She remains employed at her old law firm, but Herstgood has been removed from the firm's name.

This time, the president selected me for the vacant seat on the circuit court. Assuming I make it through the confirmation process—and why shouldn't I?—I'll be moving to the office three floors above this one. Below me will be Two Rivers; below him, Pleasant Holly, who has been designated the acting U.S. attorney following TMU's resignation for health reasons two months ago. A floor below Pleasant, I expect, will be my good friend Upton Cruthers, whom Holly has selected to replace me as head of the criminal division.

•  •  •

Five murders. The killing of the innocent and lovely Cassandra Randall has been officially attributed to Seth Coen. The Bureau's investigation of the white rental car has turned up a renter who, on further investigation, is revealed to have died in Iraq twenty years ago. It's an alias that Seth probably acquired while he was in Iraq, probably lifting identification papers from a dead compatriot. The name has followed him around for years; it shows up on some miscellaneous documents taken from the apartment where Seth was found in the freezer. Seth, as a hunter and an army sharpshooter, had the skill to make the shot that killed Cassandra. His motive was that he and Scud believed Cassandra had seen them burying Zander Phippin.

It was determined almost immediately that Lizzy's ill-advised blab on the day we found Zander's body was innocuous. She never spoke Cassandra's name, and everything that she told my staff dead-ended at the office doors. There must have been a more malevolent snitch. Someone revealed Cassandra's identity from within one of the agencies, someone who was present at the reservoir, or who had access to proprietary information. The identity of the snitch has not been officially determined.

Another murder, the killing of Seth, is attributed solely to Scud.
What I alone know is that Scud's accomplice in concealing the murder and destroying the evidence was his wife. I've decided that for this unintentional felon, time served as Scud's wife is sentence enough. Her debt is paid. Case dismissed.

The disappearance and presumed murder of Brittany Tesoro, and the similar disappearance of two other kids from Rivertown, also remain unsolved. Carrion-sniffing dogs have been working the area where Zander Phippin was buried, but we haven't found anything, and we found no trace of these kids in Seth's boat. Though we know Scud was involved, we don't know whether he worked alone.

Regarding Zander Phippin, the Bureau believes that the new drug boss in the city had him abducted. He was interrogated and tortured, held for a few days without food or water—probably in a storage closet of some kind—and in his efforts to escape, he got oil paints all over his hands. Scud was given the body for disposal. This new drug boss is Percy Mashburn, whose ascent has been meteoric. He is thirty-five but looks younger. He has spiky hair and black-frame-glasses, and he is said to read new-age poetry and to dabble in painting landscapes. He has a penchant for buying art prints. Those who have been inside his house say he especially likes the surreal and oddly sentimental work of the early-twentieth-century artist named Maxfield Parrish; it appears Percy Mashburn occasionally used that name as an alias. But Percy has disappeared.

As for the murder of Scud Illman, my friend and foster son Kenny has confessed. To be precise, I shouldn't call it a murder, because what Kenny pleaded to (twenty years in prison, eligible for parole in twelve) is involuntary manslaughter.

Kenny was arrested in the law library downstairs. It was very formal; Tina and I stood on either side of him as the young trooper with cuffs dangling from one hand nervously read Kenny his rights, as Kenny sat staring in bewilderment.

“You should probably stand up, Kenny,” I said.

The trooper cuffed him behind his back.

“I never killed anybody,” Kenny said.

I walked with them into the hallway. “Remember,” I told him before the elevator door closed, “the only words you speak are ‘I want my lawyer.' ”

He stared at me in terror and confusion. I stared back, but who knows what he saw in my one unbandaged eye in those last seconds before the elevator door closed.

Kendall refused to have anything to do with the case, so five weeks after Kenny's arrest, I convinced him to fire his public defender and I breached propriety by representing him myself at one informal plea negotiation. I caught up with the assistant DA in a hallway of the state court building. He is a sullen young guy I recognized from bar functions. He takes himself way too seriously.

“You don't want to try this case, David,” I said, “it's full of holes. What are you offering?”

“I don't see any holes,” he said. “Best I can do is second-degree murder with a recommendation of thirty years.”

I knew he'd be this kind: the kind who starts off with the absolute most he can possibly charge, and he offers it up like it's a great deal. I know this lawyer. I've seen him a thousand times in a thousand cases over the thousand years of my career. He is a workman but one without passion or creativity. He is unmoved by my relationship with Kenny, as he is always unmoved by any defendant. In court, he might harp on and on about the horror visited upon a victim, but he's probably inured to that as well. I've read a thousand résumés he's written and turned him down for jobs a thousand times. Have I been him?

I think I have.

“David,” I said, “I can see you're a shrewd bargainer. But we both know you haven't got a chance in hell of convicting on first degree, so second degree is no offer at all, it's your baseline, and I'm insulted by it because I'm not some snot-nosed public defender coming in here with hat in hand begging for a bit of slack. You want to go, we'll go. But consider that, right from the start, we've got a strong argument for insufficient probable cause on the warrant, and a pretty strong case for acquittal because nothing in the world besides that gun ties our guy to this murder.”

“Untrue,” David said in a voice of singsongy petulance. “We can show that Kenny Teague and Avery Illman knew each other. They had
dealings
.” The word comes out the way a twelve-year-old says “sex.”

“Knowing someone and killing him aren't synonymous, counselor,” I said. “The only thing you have is a weapon. Consider how easily someone could have planted that gun in Kenny's apartment, then called in the tip.”

“Juries don't buy that Machiavellian shit,” David said with an angry curl of his top lip. He's the kind of prosecutor who hates defense lawyers, and the fact that I've prosecuted for twenty-five years earns me no cred.

“And the victim was killed with his own gun,” I said. “Doesn't that kind of scream self-defense, especially seeing as your vic was a very bad motherfucker and my defendant was an employee of the U.S. attorney's office with no adult record at all?”

“No, counselor, it doesn't scream self-defense.”

“David,” I said, “you take this to trial and you'll be flogging a losing case against me, with the city's best defense lawyer, Kendall Vance, advising me. Win or lose, we'll tie this up for months and miss no chance at making you look like an asshole. Or else you can get realistic. Save us all some grief. I have a proposal.”

He looked at me warily. No doubt he knew of me and wanted to make a good impression, but at the same time, the idea of going up against me and winning was delicious for him to contemplate. It was a career game of chicken. I didn't wait for him to answer. “Here it is,” I said. “I can get Kenny to plead to involuntary manslaughter. Twenty years, eligible for parole at twelve.”

David tried to conceal his surprise. He wasn't expecting anything even close to twenty. It was a good offer; it would give him bragging rights that he had squeezed so harsh a plea out of the former assistant U.S. attorney on a loser of a case.

“Twenty-five and fifteen,” he said.

“This isn't a negotiation, David. Twenty and twelve. Take it or leave it.”

He didn't want to seem too eager. It was a gift to him, but he was wary. He checked his watch as if it might have an answer for him. He cleared his throat. David is a young guy with a few extra pounds that he's probably had all his life; he wears a wedding band and a frown. I had the strange inclination to ask Upton to hire him; to play Henry Higgins, molding him into a less obtuse, less adversarial version of himself. “Twenty and twelve,” I repeated.

He accepted.

Kendall would have gotten it lower, shaving years off the plea. Or maybe he would have taken it to trial and kicked some ass, getting it thrown out for insufficient probable cause on the warrant, or winning acquittal on the weakness of the case. Kendall would have done better, but he wanted nothing to do with the whole mess. Besides, Kenny deserves every day of those twelve years.

David and I shook on the agreement. He turned and hurried toward his next case in a courtroom down the hall. I watched him go. His suit jacket was short in the cuffs, but otherwise, he could disappear flawlessly into any crowd of young lawyers. A few seconds before he reached his doorway, in a baffling surge of
something—
call it desperation to mark the momentousness of our brief exchange, or call it hope, or call it sorrow—I yelled for him to stop, and I ran after him. People turned to see what was going on.

“Listen,” I said, “why don't you come over to the U.S. attorney's office for a visit sometime. Bring your résumé.”

M
y nomination to the U.S. Circuit Court is stalled. Midterm elections are coming up in the fall. The Senate and the White House are controlled by different parties; partisanship is out of control. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee has made it clear that he has no intention of moving on judicial nominations until November at the soonest. Depending on the outcome of the elections, the standoff could easily go another two years.

I hope I do get confirmed someday. As a judge of the circuit court, it would be my job to determine, with perfect objectivity, how laws and legal precedents apply to every twist of every sorry set of facts.