Move to Strike (16 page)

‘I just wanted to get your take on this – on what I should
do
, I mean,' Harrison began, his weight shifting slowly from one awkwardly placed foot to the other. ‘It's about the Logans, or Stephanie Tyler to be exact. It seems when I was on vacation last week, she called and left a message – last Friday, the morning of the day that she died and well, she said that, ah . . . that she needed to see me urgently . . . that she wanted to change her will.'

And that was when the twinge turned into a pang – both professional and personal.

‘What did she want to change?' asked Tony, maintaining his composure as he moved around his desk to walk towards the nervous young attorney before him. ‘Specifically, I mean,' he added, knowing Harrison was not one to cut to the chase.

‘Well, she wanted to remove him as a beneficiary,' Harrison said quickly, a ‘cut' if ever there was one.

‘Remove who?' asked Tony.

‘Her husband,' Harrison returned. ‘But the police have the original. They requested it as a matter of procedure early yesterday – the old one where her entire estate goes to Doctor Logan, the one before the changes.'

‘But you said there were no changes,' said Tony.

‘No,' said Harrison, half-nodding, half-shaking his balding, pointed head. ‘What I mean to say is, I didn't make the changes physically because I was away. But I have her instructions on my voice mail. And they are
very
clear.'

Tony nodded, his brain now ticking over at a million miles a minute.

‘You still have the message?'

‘Yes.'

‘And the husband, Jeffrey Logan, he is your client too. Am I right?'

‘Yes,' said Harrison. ‘I represent the family's interests and our media division looks after the doctor's business interests.'

Tony's firm, Williams, Coolidge and Harrison, had many divisions, including a growing Media Department. Tony worked in corporate under Gareth Coolidge; the media division was litigation/defamation expert Henry Williams' domain; and Charles Harrison covered the family division, which was probably why his ‘thick as a brick', prematurely balding nephew was currently standing in front of Tony.

‘Jesus,' said Tony, thinking aloud.

‘Yes, sir,' said Harrison.

‘Have you told anyone else about this, Harry?' asked Tony after a beat.

‘My uncle is still in the Berkshires,' he said. ‘In fact, you are the most senior attorney here at present, Tony, with Mr Williams in Los Angeles and Mr Coolidge still recovering from his knee replacement surgery.' It was true, Tony was king of the castle right now – a position he had been savouring just moments ago – but one that now felt decidedly . . .

‘So, no,' finished Harrison, interrupting Tony's thoughts, his back foot sliding an inch or two backwards, towards his intended route of escape. ‘I haven't told anybody but you.'

‘Okay,' said Tony, after a pause, seeking some solace in the fact that, in the very least, the information was ‘contained', which would allow him some much-needed time to think. Tony was totally aware of all that was going down in the Logan case – a case he had a fourfold interest in considering his past relationship with Stephanie, the fact that the family were long-term clients, the complication that his best friend was now defending her murderer, and Tony's girlfriend was head prosecutor for the Commonwealth.

And despite his personal feelings, he knew that above all else, this new information created a conflict of interest of the highest order, considering their first client – Stephanie, the one who gave Harrison the instructions – was dead, and their second client – Logan – was the subject of Stephanie's ‘evidentially significant' request. Even though Stephanie was gone, both she and her husband deserved the respect and confidentiality guaranteed by the firm's legal and professional responsibility. And the fact that she used to be his girlfriend, the fact that Tony once believed he could well spend the rest of his life with her, was well . . .

‘Tony?' said Harry Harrison, obviously eager for a response.

‘Leave it with me,' said Tony, moving quickly behind his desk, knowing Harrison would be out the door faster than the roadrunner in one of those old Wile E. Coyote cartoons. But Harrison did not move, and in that moment, as Tony collapsed onto his smooth leather chair, he knew that the worst was yet to come.

Harrison told him the rest of it and Tony felt that nasty little pang become a stab, starting somewhere near his breastbone and finishing way back in his chest. And when Harrison finally made like the roadrunner, Tony closed his eyes as he asked himself,
What to do?
He took a long slow breath and wished for some magical solution that would both satisfy him professionally and personally and avoid offending any of the myriad of personalities involved.

No
, he reasoned with himself,
there is no perfect solution. Someone is going to get burned
.

He opened his eyes and reached across his desk top, lifting the hand piece of his modern, metallic, multifunctional office phone before he had a chance to change his mind. And then he began punching in the direct line which he had committed to memory a mere few months ago.

‘Hi,' he said, just as the woman picked up and answered the call promptly and abruptly, giving only her last name in greeting.

‘I'm sorry, Tony, but I'm really busy. I am going to have to call you . . .'

‘No,
I'm
sorry, Amanda, but this is urgent. Whatever you are doing you need to drop it – because we need to talk.'

N
ot long after a relieved Harry Harrison had hightailed it from Tony Bishop's office, leaving Bishop with an almighty minefield to negotiate, David Cavanaugh was doing some serious mental navigation of his own. He waited for his good friend Joe Mannix to arrive at a greasy Roxbury Diner known as Lenny's and wondered what in the hell he was going to say.

Joe wasn't the problem – David trusted him 100 per cent – but their respective jobs were a different matter altogether. For while David had a professional responsibility to his fourteen-year-old client, Joe had similar obligations to the District Attorney's Office, or more specifically, to an ambitious ADA by the name of Amanda Carmichael.

‘Hey,' said Joe, prompting a deep-in-thought David to look up and half-stand so that he might shake his good friend's hand.

‘Hey. I didn't hear you come in,' replied David, as Joe took a seat on the red vinyl bench across from him.

‘It's broken,' said Joe.

‘What?'

‘The bell over Lenny's door.'

‘Lenny has a bell?'

‘Doesn't every dodgy corner diner in this country have a bell over its gingham-curtained door?'

David smiled. ‘You know that that checked material over the door is called gingham?'

‘McKay told me,' said Joe.

‘Well that explains it.'

A few minutes of chitchat, a double order of Lenny's too-salty bacon and eggs, and two bottomless mugs of hot black coffee later, Joe was the one who cut to the chase.

‘You didn't have to do this, you know,' he said as he signalled for a refill from a white-haired waitress named Pearl.

‘Do what?' asked a genuinely confused David.

‘Meet me here – at my end of town, at this shit hole excuse for a restaurant just to explain.'

Now David was completely confused. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Come on, David. You hate this joint. You normally want to catch up at Myrtle's where, in the very least, we know the eggs come from chickens and the meat comes from a pig.

‘You're dropping the kid,' Joe continued when David didn't respond. ‘And I get it. You were friends with his mom and no matter what went down, you've made the decision that it's best for all concerned that you step down.'

‘You think I'm bailing on the kid?' asked David. ‘You think I came down here to explain why I . . .'

‘Well, didn't you?' interrupted Joe.

‘No, Joe. No, I didn't.'

‘So you're still on board then?' said Joe, and David could not help but hear the relief in his detective friend's voice. ‘Because when Frank called Nora yesterday, and when he got the message you didn't want to come down to see the Logan boy after he was processed, and considering the boy is kinda lost right now, well . . .' Joe hesitated, it was not his place as head of Boston Homicide to offer opinions on who defended who, but in this case David sensed Joe was feeling more than a little angry at how the kid had been railroaded.

‘It's okay, Joe. I'm still in,' said David.

Joe nodded.

‘But there's a but,' said David, after a pause.

‘Isn't there always?'

David could not help but smile. ‘It's just that, before you go championing my decision to help the kid, I have to warn you that my motives for asking you here are not entirely selfless.'

Joe looked up from his breakfast. ‘So the indigestion I am about to suffer won't be put down purely to the eggs.'

‘I'm afraid not.'

‘And why am I not surprised?'

David began at the beginning – with Logan's hole-a-minute story, Katherine de Castro's accusations, the contents of that all-revealing video tape and the doctor's confirmation of his wife's ‘relentless emotional abuse'. He took Joe through the tape in detail, describing the dialogue and movements minute by minute, before stepping back from the obvious to explain what he had
read between the lines
and deducted from, as Sara had called it, the ‘family home movie from hell'.

‘First up, the lighting is totally off,' he began.

‘How do you mean?' asked Joe, the first question he had asked in minutes.

‘It's green, a sort of surreal artificial colour, like someone had lit it that way on purpose.'

‘Come on, David,' said Joe, shaking his head. ‘You and I both know that the lighting doesn't mean jack.'

‘True, at least not on its own. But when you watch this thing, you can tell that Stephanie, J.T. and Chelsea . . . it's as if they are all reciting from a script. Their speech is stilted as if learned, their mannerisms are taut, controlled and jerky, and Logan plays it up big time, his arms sweeping in gestures that verge on melodrama, his intonation rising and falling at all the appropriate moments.'

‘Like I said, David,' said Joe once again, ‘while I need to see this little DIY production for myself, from what you are describing, it is not enough to . . .'

‘Their eyes keep flicking,' said David, needing to push on. ‘As if there are prompt cards set at the other end of the table. J.T. keeps looking up before he says anything, and at one point, where Stephanie appears to have forgotten her lines, she looks back and forward while repeating the same sentence twice.

‘And Chelsea just sits there like a robot. In fact, the only time she
actually reacts is when her father re-takes his seat and reaches for something in the middle of the table.'

‘And what is he reaching for?' asked Joe.

‘A gravy boat.'

‘A gravy boat!' repeated Joe. ‘David . . .'

‘What I mean to say is, it
looks
like a gravy boat but,' David needed Joe to see it, ‘. . . but I don't think it is a gravy boat or any other piece of expensive silver dinnerware. I think it's a gun or some other form of weapon, because when he reaches towards it, Chelsea reacts immediately. It is like a reminder to them all that their lives are in danger every time they overstep the line.'

‘You think this man was terrorising his family to such an extent that he could totally control their behaviour?'

‘I think he was, and still is, trying to portray Stephanie as the tyrant, in order to hide the fact that he is the oppressor himself.'

‘So he can get away with killing her,' said Joe.

‘And setting up his son in his stead. I know all the evidence points to the kid, Joe, but . . .'

‘Not all of it,' said Joe.

And there it was – a small grain of hope. David knew he would be asking Joe to cross the line by discussing any new piece of evidence without consulting with the ADA, unless it was just one of Joe's hunches, which to David, was just as good.

‘You want to explain?' he asked.

‘It's not enough to get excited about, David. It's something small, an inconsistency and nowhere near enough to help you salvage your kid's case in court.'

‘You found something.'

‘More like a lack of something, and it's been bugging me for most of the day.'

Joe explained about J.T.'s ear problems, but his lack of shoulder pain. Early this morning Joe had called the doctor who examined J.T. on his admission to Plymouth and confirmed that while the kid did have some inflammation in both ears and his hearing was slightly off, he had no burn or bruising or pain on or in his right shoulder where he would have rested the rifle – the recoil of which was enough to singe his big white T-shirt without making a mark on his skin.

‘I called a uniform named Schiff,' said Joe. ‘The guy is a gun enthusiast who knows a thing or two about the rifle in question. He said the hearing thing is consistent with the almighty bang that accompanies the .460 magnum's explosion. It's been known to burst eardrums – make them bleed.

‘He also said the .460 will launch a 500 grain bullet at 2700 feet per second from a twenty-six inch barrelled rifle with 8100 foot-pounds of muzzle energy. And that means the recoil is a bastard – issuing over 100 foot-pounds of force. It's been known to dislocate shoulders, David – and that's when fired by a grown man, let alone a scrawny fourteen-year-old boy.'

David said nothing, taking it all in. ‘You don't think J.T. fired that gun.'

‘I'm not saying that, David, because if I did there would be no way to explain the state of his ears and all the other pieces of evidence that will soon confirm him as the shooter – the blood spatter, powder residue, fingerprints . . . It's something, but it's nowhere near enough – at least not on its own.'