The Attorney (43 page)

The other night I sat with them for an hour and told them of the last moments in their daughter's life, the final glimpse of an existence that seemed so wasted. I watched Jonah's face as the tears washed down his cheeks, and explained to him that in the end it was an act of love that had cost his daughter her life.

The world may judge her for the thousand missteps of her youth, but that night in the disco she ran for a reason more primal than mere survival; she ran to put distance between death and her daughter. Jessica may have taken the child for reasons of spite, but in the end she surrendered her, and her own life, out of love.

The local papers are filled with the news of Ontaveroz. Jonah may be free as the result of a mistrial, but there is no way the state will ever retry him. The press has connected all the dots in its own inimitable fashion, some of them in the wrong places--the accepted assumption being that the Mexican not only killed Suade, but Murphy and Jason Crow as well. The cigar on the body of the gunman in the disco was the clincher--the cigar Susan dropped on him on the way out.

It took me a while to piece it together. A rare brand, the same cigar, it was too much of a coincidence, until I realized that the cops had never collected the one Jonah had given to her. I suspect that it was in the bottom of her purse, still in its little metal container, the way Jonah had handed it to her that day in my office.

In the urgency of the moment I had seen her fall over the smoldering body. I was wrong. Susan saw the opportunity to torpedo Ryan and his case, and she took it.

It is not something that, even if I wished to, I could prove.

With all the fingers that have now handled the cigar container, Lopez, God knows how many Mexican cops, and Peltro, the chances of collecting anything that even resembles one of Susan's clear fingerprints would be on the order of a miracle.

What I do know is that without that cigar I might not have been able to convince Peltro to admit the evidence, or open the gate for a mistrial.

The cigar was Susan's way of giving Amanda her life back, removing the cloud from Jonah's head. She was playing God. Jonah had given it to her, and now she was giving it back, in her own way.

It was her path to redemption, because it was Susan in the car with Suade the night she was killed.

It has been a week since Peltro declared the mistrial. That afternoon, Ryan stood on the steps of the courthouse and announced that his office would not be recharging Jonah, that the interests of justice had been served.

It is perhaps the one point on which we agree. I am certain that Suade's death was a deed of preservation, an act of self-defense.

It wasn't until this evening that I finally pieced it all together.

Changing to come here, I was going through the hamper, putting up a load of wash, when my fingers brushed against it: the hard, flat surface through the pocket of a soiled pair of Bermuda shorts. They were the ones I had worn that night in Cabo, still smelling of smoke.

In the back pocket I found the checkbook I had picked up from Jessica's kitchen floor, the one she'd thrown at me. In all the confusion I had slipped it into my pocket and forgotten it.

I opened it. The check, made out and signed in Jessica's hand, the one she had intended to mail to the movers, was still inside, connected at the perforations. The name on the signature was the same as the one printed at the top of the checks: the name of Susan It came flooding back. The television set in the kitchen didn't just look like Susan's; it was Susan's. I'd wondered how Susan found them in Cabo when no one else could. The checkbook contained the answer. Jessica had used several identities in Mexico, writing checks from other people's accounts, and using stolen credit cards.

She had written one other check from Susan's account. It was dated a week earlier. The carbon set was still in the book. It was a check for the last month's rent, written to Las Ventanas de Cabo.

I suspect that Jessica figured no one would have time to trace it.

She was already on a fixed timetable, one that she and Suade had established when she first went south. She would be gone, hustled by Suade back into the States with a new identity and a new life. That's what she thought. What she didn't know was that Suade was dead.

Jessica and Jason Crow had broken into Susan's house, but it was no random act. They had taken her checkbook, credit cards, her television, the small camera, and one other item: the little laptop computer, the one Susan used for work. I am guessing that this is what Suade wanted, the reason she sent them to Susan's house in the first place, the quid pro quo for Suade's help in snatching Amanda.

Whatever information was in that computer, coupled with the words of scandal in Suade's press release, it was sufficiently potent to send Susan to Suade's office that afternoon.

I see her coming across the courtyard, a broad smile, and a swirling summer dress. I get up. She takes my hand and leans across the table. I give her a peck on the cheek.

"Have you been waiting long?" she asks. Settles into her chair.

"Just a few minutes," I tell her.

She looks at my drink. "I'll have to catch up," she says.

The waiter comes and she tells him, "I'll have one of those." Before he can even leave our table, her expression suddenly turns more somber.

There is something she has to talk to me about. She tells me it is serious, that it affects us.

In this moment, the flash of an eye, I glimpse honesty, that Susan, after all that has gone before, is going to finally unburden herself: all the mysteries of that evening when Suade died.

Instead she says, "I've taken a job in another city." I look at her, mystified, for the first time clearly confused by the woman I thought I had come to know.

"I know you're surprised," she says. "But I've thought about it for a long time. My career here is finished. There are people downtown who are never going to forget what I did."

"What was that?"

"You know," she says. "Telling you about Suade's gun. Siding with you in the trial. Our escapade to Cabo."

"They are saying good things about you in the paper. Calling you a hero," I tell her.

She shakes her head. "Publicly some of them are being forced to say that. But they have long memories for those who are not team players,"

she says. She means politics being the low life-form that it is.

Her drink comes: tequila in a punch bowl. She takes the straw in her teeth.

I think she is waiting for me to ask the location of this new job, but I don't. Instead I reach into my coat pocket, take it out and place it gently on the table between us, blue plastic cover, just like a million others that the banks give out every year.

She looks at it sort of cockeyed, straw still between her teeth, before it dawns on her.

"Aw, God." The expression on Susan's face is one of pain crossed with fear. She doesn't look up immediately, as if she can't bear to make eye contact.

"How long have you known?" The words seem to float from her as if from a daze.

"I found it this evening." A sigh escapes her, suddenly sapped, she sits and looks at me as if perhaps she is not sure what I am going to do now.

"I wanted to tell you," she says. "If you only knew how much I wanted to tell you."

"Why didn't you?"

"My kids," she says. "I couldn't. They would have separated me from my children. I would have faced trial. They would have jailed me. It would have been easier," she says, "to take my own life." She says it as if this thought has occurred to her more than once. "I know what you're thinking. I let Jonah face it." It is the one thing for which I cannot forgive her.

"That's why I tried," she says, "to lead you in the right directions.

Why I told you about Suade's gun."

"What did you do with it?"

"That night, after it happened ..." Her gaze trails off. "I was scared, confused. I didn't even realize the gun was still in my car. I drove. I headed back toward Imperial Beach. When I saw it on the floor, on the passenger side, I didn't know what to do. So I parked in town and took a walk on the pier." Susan dropped the pistol off the end of the pier in Imperial Beach.

"When did you write the serial number down?"

"I didn't." She looks hurt that I could even think that at such a moment of panic she would have the presence of mind. "Obviously, I knew she had the pistol. I didn't know Jonah would be arrested.

Afterward," she says, "I sent one of my investigators to check the federal sales registration records. I knew he would find it."

"How did she die?"

"It was an accident," she says.

"She pulled the gun on you?" Susan nods, looks at me quizzically, not certain how I would know this. I've never told her about the business with Suade's hand in the bottom of her purse the day I visited her.

"You have to believe me," she says.

"I do. Why did you go to see her?"

"She had information."

"Your computer?" She nods, tears beginning to form in her eyes. "I'd helped her.

I gave her information, on Davidson." The unbending marine had been beating his boy, and Susan knew it, but she was helpless to do anything about it. Even an out of-county judge wasn't going to call a brother of the cloth an abuser, take away his joint custody. Susan's only recourse was Suade.

Susan provided critical information, stuff that wasn't public, from the messy divorce, so that Suade could help Davidson's former wife unload securities and clean out his bank accounts, gaining enough financial resources to go into hiding.

"Suade assumed she had an ally for life," says Susan. "When I told her I wouldn't help her on other cases, she sent Jessica to my house. She knew I wouldn't keep stuff like that, the information on Davidson's financial records, in my office."

"Your laptop computer." I say it matter of fact.

She nods. "I downloaded information from court records," she says. "I had access." For a moment we just sit there. She looks at me, and then she says it. "What are you going to do now?" For the first time since broaching the issue, I smile at her. "You should take your checkbook and put it back in your purse--before somebody steals it." The relief is written in her eyes. "The job is in Colorado," she tells me.

"You should like that." I make no reference to myself. Somehow she knows that I will not be following her.

Martini was born in San Francisco and grew up in the Bay area and southern California. He was an honors graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz, and sought his first career in journalism; he worked as a newspaper reporter in Los Angeles and as a correspondent at the state capitol in Sacramento, specializing in legal affairs. In 1974, after receiving a law degree from the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law, entered private practice in California, where he appeared in both state and federal courts. During his legal career he was a legislative representative for the state bar, a special counsel to the California Victims of Violent Crimes Program, and an administrative law judge and supervising hearing officer.

In 1984, turned his talents to fiction. Compelling Evidence, the novel that introduced attorney Paul Madriani, was published by Putnam in 1992.

A national bestseller, it earned a critical and popular following. New York Times bestsellers Prime Witness (1993), Undue Influence (1994), and The judge (1996) featured Martini's lawyer alter ego, while The Simeon Chamber (1987), The List (1997), and Critical Mass (1998) were departures from the legal-thriller genre. makes his home with his family in the Pacific Northwest.